set upon at any moment by nightjars, ghouls, or worse things that had made it through the cracks from the Thorn Land.
Nothing made a move, which only ratcheted my nerves tighter as we reached the gates of the Asylum. In the distance, I could hear the dull tolling of the bells in St. Oppenheimer’s, as I always used to when I’d visited. Only now they were discordant and hadn’t stopped ringing, as if a giant funeral were going on.
In a way, I supposed it was.
The gates in the fence surrounding the asylum were off their hinges, one bent nearly in half, as if a giant had folded it like a piece of paper. That didn’t bode well, but I tried not to panic. Just because the gates were open didn’t mean anything had breached the asylum itself. Everyone in there could still be fine. Likely agitated, as they wouldn’t have had sedatives in close to a week, but fine. I hoped.
I could see from where we stood that the main doors were shut, yet the massive clockwork locks that kept the place from spilling lunatics into the street were open, and the steps were covered with paper files and office supplies. I looked up. A few papers were still caught in the bars of the upper-floor windows, flapping sadly like dying doves.
“Well?” Dean stood beside me. “We going in?”
I didn’t reply, not able to articulate what I was thinking without sounding as crazy as the patients beyond the walls. I took one step through the wrecked gates, then another, and let that be my answer. I half expected them to slam behind me, even in their ruined state. Going into the asylum never felt like anything other than walking into the jaws of a beast.
“I’ll watch your backs,” Casey said. “I ain’t going in there with the loonies.”
I waved her off, not surprised. Casey was a survivor, and survivors knew when to hide rather than rush ahead. That much I’d learned from Cal.
I stopped on the first step, patients’ charts and photographs crumpling under my boots. I’d waited so long to come back here, and now I could feel myself shaking inside my clothes. The truth about what had become of Nerissa was just beyond the doors, and yet I wanted nothing more than to turn and run. Where, I didn’t know. Just away. I didn’t, though, because Conrad was staring at me, daring me to admit this was a bad idea, and because I didn’t want to show Dean just how scared I was of finding out the truth. Good or bad, I was going to have to own up to my mother about what I’d done when I let Tremaine trick me into breaking the Gates, and I couldn’t imagine her reaction. Just that it would be bad and would probably involve a lot of screaming at me.
If she was even in there.
If she was even alive.
Panic like this hadn’t clutched me since I’d first left the city. My shoulder began to throb again—as it had when the leviathan had appeared.
The shoggoth venom was reacting to something beyond the doors.
I froze in place as the doors yawned open seemingly on their own. A dozen pale white paws, puckered and with a greenish cast like the skin of a corpse, gripped the walls. The ghouls’ snouts were long, longer than Cal’s when he wasn’t wearing his human shape, and their claws were pure black. They were part of another nest. One that was a lot more comfortable in daylight than most ghouls I’d run into who weren’t Cal.
I wanted to swear, or scream, but all that made it out of my mouth was a light squeak, like a mouse’s. I didn’t even dare look to see if Conrad and Dean were still with me. Any movement could provoke a ghoul.
Before I could move, the ghoul tucked its legs and sprang, clearing the steps in one bound. I barely had time to flinch in expectation of its weight on my chest and its teeth in my skin before Dean tackled me, slamming me out of the way.
We landed in the gravel at the foot of the stairs as the rest of the ghouls burst forth from the asylum, howling in anticipation of a meal.
Dean hauled me up. “Run,” he growled in my ear. “For your life.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Conrad and Casey head the other way, toward Uptown. There was no argument from me. I snatched Dean’s hand. In the face of horrors, he’d thrown himself into the line of fire with no regard for his own safety.
I didn’t have time to even hope Conrad would be all right. The ghouls were hot on our heels, their screaming bringing more and more of them out of hiding, spilling out of broken shop windows and shadowed alleys and an open sewer grate in the center of the street.
We ran. We ran until it felt like there was fire and razors in my chest in place of air. Ran so fast that my feet didn’t even catch in the pockmarks left by missing cobblestones.
Dean whipped his head back, then forward again. “Shit” he gasped, and when I looked I saw that the entire street had become a churning, rushing mass of bodies, white and blue and corpse-gray all the way down to rotted, decomposing greenish-black. There were hundreds of the ghouls, fighting and clawing to be at the front of the pack, and their screaming was the only thing I could hear over my own heartbeat.
We hit the top of Dunwich Lane, the center of despicable goings-on back when Lovecraft had been the Lovecraft I knew. Now Dunwich Lane’s red-light district was a smoking, ash-gray ruin. Fire could have started in any one of the dive bars or brothels by the river, and it had chewed on the shabby neighborhood’s bones as surely as the ghouls were going to chew on ours if they caught us.
Still we ran, until I couldn’t feel myself, except for my straining breath, and could barely see except for a tiny tunnel straight ahead.
We weren’t going to make it. I could smell the foul, orchid-sweet stench of the ghouls, and before me I could see the flash of the river. We would have a choice in a moment: jump in and freeze, or stand on the bank and be torn limb from limb, turned into dinner for the horrific and hungry citizens of this new Lovecraft.
The last houses on the street were on pilings out over the river, listing dangerously and plastered with warnings that they were condemned. The street ended at a crumbling wall, and beyond there was nothing but the river. My heart sank.
As Dean and I ran toward the wall, I heard a great whirring from overhead, the sound of a zeppelin’s fans. I looked up, thinking Draven had finally caught up with us. That would be the grand finale to this wretched day.
It wasn’t Draven’s black craft, though—it was a smaller ship, the balloon a dark green and the cabin underneath made of polished wood trimmed with brass that gleamed even in the smoky sunlight. The craft banked sharply over the river and a ladder extended from the cabin hatch.
“You!” bellowed a voice made sharp and metallic by the horn of an aethervox. “You two on Dunwich Lane! Grab the ladder and get on board!”
The ladder drifted into range. I looked to Dean, and he nodded vigorously. Whoever was in the dirigible, he was better than what was closing in on us, no question. I grabbed the ladder’s wooden rungs and leather straps and climbed as best I could while it swayed in the wind. Dean jumped on behind me, and the dirigible rose into the air, away from the ravening horde of ghouls.
“Any others alive in the city?” the voice bellowed at us.
“North!” I shouted, gesturing in the direction Conrad and Casey had run.
Another ladder dropped from the other side of the dirigible, and we swooped over the grounds of Christobel Asylum in a hard turn, toward what had been Uptown and the Academy grounds. From above I could see that the back wing of the asylum had been gutted by fire, and ghouls were scampering across what had once been a garden where the patients could walk in warm weather. Half-chewed bodies in the asylum-issued gray pajamas lay like discarded toys on the flagstones, but from what I could see, my mother wasn’t one of them.
That was it, then. The truth I’d known in the back part of my mind, the black part that only understood logic and odds, fell home with a hammer blow.
My mother wasn’t there. Nobody human was. If she’d managed to survive, she was alone in the city, adrift.
We swooped low across the mazelike streets leading to Banishment Square and Ravenhouse, the Proctors’
