I landed on a patch of burnt earth when my journey ended, and pain stabbed up my right arm as my wrist twisted under my full weight.
“Dammit!” I shouted, cradling my arm. I had just recovered my equilibrium when Dean came flying from the Gate and landed on me, sending me into the dirt again.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, face buried in my hair. “Not much in the way of navigation through that thing.”
“It’s okay,” I managed, looking back at where we’d come from. There was no Gate on this side, nothing physical—just a weak spot that nobody except a Gateminder or a Fae would ever notice.
Dean raised his head and smiled down at me.
“All in one piece?”
I managed a smile in return. It was hard not to smile at Dean when he turned the full force of his eyes and his slow, full grin on you. “More or less.”
“Excuse me,” Conrad said loudly from above. His voice broke into the warm place I was drifting in within Dean’s eyes like a jangling chronometer alarm. “But if it’s not too much trouble for you, please get off of my sister.”
Dean dropped me a wink before he rolled up to his knees and then his feet and offered me a hand. I took it and stood, brushing ash and dirt from my clothes. “Where are we?”
“Somewhere around Nephilheim, looks like,” Conrad said. The slumped gray row houses and treeless vista did look like the factory town attached to the Nephilim Foundry, whose belching smokestacks I’d looked out at my entire life in Lovecraft. Now the sad little houses were shuttered and deserted, and the brick factory buildings in the distance were blackened with long streaks of soot. One of the foundry’s smokestacks had partially collapsed, and reached for the brown-tinged clouds like the jagged end of a broken spoke.
I’d expected it to be bad, but the fact that this much ruin had spread across the river, right into Nephilheim, made my stomach drop. How far had the destruction of the Engine reached? How many people had been in its way?
“Aoife?” Dean said, touching my shoulder. “You want to get moving?”
“Yeah,” I said, blinking back what I told myself were tears from the ash drifting through the thick, acrid air. “The bridge isn’t far past the foundry. We should go that way.”
We walked, keeping in a tight group, Conrad at the head and Dean at the back. I nudged him in front of me— if something jumped out at us, Dean could protect Cal, Bethina and himself. Conrad and I would just have to fend for ourselves. Dean took it with good grace, and winked at me.
“Don’t worry, princess. I’m fine.”
I tried to smile back, but the farther we walked and the more wrecked homes we passed, the sicker to my stomach I felt.
“Where is everyone?” Bethina turned in a wide circle, taking in the dirt street and the empty houses.
No one else was in evidence, and the only movement I saw was a white curtain in an open window at the far end of the block, fluttering in the intermittent breeze. It was November and the beginning of winter in Lovecraft and the surrounding towns, and I tucked my hands under my arms to warm them. I didn’t get the eerie prickle of being watched by live eyes as I had in the Mists, but that didn’t mean nothing was watching. The Proctors had plenty of ways to keep eyes all around Lovecraft without any flesh and blood involved.
“Not here,” Cal said. He sniffed discreetly. “There’s nobody within a mile of this place.”
Which just made me wonder where everyone in Nephilheim had gone. Foundry workers, jitney drivers, their families. There was really no good train of thought running down those tracks. I bit my lip hard, hoping the pain would distract me from my racing thoughts. It was just the iron. Whispering treacherous things to me, that I’d done this, that my stupidity with the Fae had made these people disappear.
Just the iron. Not the truth.
I walked a few steps away from the group and looked down the broad avenue. It ended at the west gates of the foundry. Beyond was the Erebus River, which I’d crossed for the first time a little more than two weeks earlier, fleeing the city where I’d spent my entire life.
Now I was willingly going back, into the jaws of the Proctors and who knew what else, things that had slipped through the tears appearing and disappearing in the Gates.
Reassuring myself that I wasn’t already insane was getting harder and harder. And with every step I took back toward Lovecraft, the iron of the city and the land around me whispered louder in my blood.
On the horizon, across the river, columns of black and silver smoke rose, as if souls were drifting up from the broken cityscape, trying to find a hole in the overcast sky. The clouds were blood-red, and lightning danced between them as the smoke from burning aether formerly trapped in the Lovecraft Engine drifted into the atmosphere.
I could hear sirens faintly, the constant warning of an air raid. Those sirens were supposed to warn us of Crimson Guard attacks, but now they were screaming senselessly, echoing back from the smashed walls of the foundry.
Something crunched under my boots, and I looked down to see what it was. The street, in addition to being covered in ash, was peppered with shards of glass—silvery window glass and also crockery, as if everything had been flung and shifted in the Engine’s great spasm.
As we trudged on, block after block with no human in sight, and as the wreckage grew worse, some of the houses window- and doorless, merely yawning maws covered in smoke marks, I pulled Cal aside. “I think you and Bethina should stay here.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head vigorously. “I need to be with you. I have to stay close.”
“Cal,” I said. “You know what’s over there. You know what the Proctors will do if they catch you.” Never mind Cal’s own clan of ghouls, who regarded siding with humans as an offense serious enough to get you torn limb from limb and cooked in a stew.
I gestured toward Lovecraft. The sirens were louder with every step we took, and I imagined that on the same wind, I could hear the howling of the tribes of ghouls that had populated Lovecraft’s sewers. “You know all that,” I repeated to Cal. “And if you go across that bridge you’re not going to be able to hide what you are from her.”
“It’ll be fine,” Cal insisted.
“Calvin,” I hissed, anger at his stubbornness bubbling up. “It will not be
Cal swallowed, his lumpy Adam’s apple scraping at his pale throat. “A Wild Hunt is what we do when we mean to cleanse a place of all prey. It means that everything not a ghoul is fair game, and ghouls who refuse to hunt become the hunted.”
“Then that includes Bethina,” I said. “And you, by extension. You don’t want to do that to her, Cal. If you insist on lying to her, don’t put her in danger on top of it. Please. I like her, and I don’t want her hurt.”
He sighed, raking a hand through his stiff, oily blond hair. “I hate this, Aoife. I’ve never met anyone like her. I do want to be …” He dropped his hand, ungainly and too big for his wiry frame. “I want to be Cal, sometimes. Cal all the time. If my nest heard me say that …”
“I know,” I murmured. “Trust me, I know the wanting to be something you aren’t. I want it too.” I stopped and faced him, reaching up to put my hands on his shoulders and meet his eyes. Those eyes could be stone cold, animal and vicious, but they’d also provided the only kind gaze I’d known in all my time at the Academy. “The best thing you could do for Bethina right now is not let her come to any more harm. And when this is over, the next best thing you can do is tell her the truth.”
Cal’s shoulders drooped at that, and he opened his mouth, probably to tell me how crazy I was to even suggest that he reveal his true nature, but he straightened again and went quiet when Bethina caught up.
“This place is spooky, huh?” she said, linking her arm with Cal’s. I moved away and let her have the closeness. From having Dean, I knew how important that could be.
“It’s not so bad,” he said, trying to stand and push out his chest to look bigger. “Besides, I’m here with you.”
“Like I was saying to Cal,” I told Bethina. “I think it’s best if the two of you wait here, in Nephilheim. Cover our retreat, sort of.”
Cal nodded now that Bethina was listening, but his jaw was tight. I knew how much Cal lived for adventure,
