and villages didn’t offer the protection of big cities. Then again, the lack of iron would keep me from getting sick a little longer, so I supposed the mortal danger balanced that.
Though with things like Tremaine around, what good had protection done?
“Thank you,” Archie sighed. “And I meant it—I’m glad you’re all right.”
I felt my first real smile in what seemed like years flicker. Just a spark, but it felt good to know that
“Hey,” Archie said, squeezing my shoulder again, longer and harder this time. “None of that. Your mother isn’t a fool. She will have found a place to hole up. It’s how she survived as long as she did, when the Fae were after her.” He shoved a clean handkerchief into my hands, and I was embarrassed he’d even noticed my tears. “We’ll find her eventually, or she’ll find you. I know you blame yourself, but you’re going to have to stop trying to find her and set things right all by yourself. You’re going to get yourself killed.”
I looked at him, knotting the handkerchief between my fists. The fine linen turned to a wrinkled lump in my grasp. “You don’t seem all that worried about her. About any of this.”
“Of course I am,” Archie said. “But tearing out my hair and running straight into a herd of ghouls isn’t going to help anyone. Not Nerissa, not you.” He opened the hatch. “Nerissa is smart, Aoife. She always was. Smart and a survivor. She’ll be fine. I’m more worried about you.”
I squirmed under his scrutiny. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine,” Archie said. “Aoife, you can’t beat yourself up about what happened with Tremaine. The Fae trick you. It’s what they do. How they survive. You did a terrible thing with the Engine, but your mother—It’s not your fault. You did it, but the blame doesn’t lie with you.”
“He tricked me,” I whispered. I swiped viciously at my face with Archie’s handkerchief, hating that I was showing weakness at all, never mind to my father. “Tremaine tricked me, but I shouldn’t have left her.”
Archie looked as if he was going to reach for me, then drew back when another guttural sob came out. I was glad. We weren’t at the point where we could touch each other like a normal father and daughter. “Listen,” he said. “I guarantee, the minute no one was around to pump her full of sedatives, Nerissa was over that fence,” Archie said. “She’s a firecracker.” He smiled, as quickly as he’d glared before, and I wished that I could add another question to my list, about what Nerissa was like before Conrad and I were born. Before all the badness that came down on us after Archie left. “You’re a lot like her.”
I handed back the handkerchief, now a stained and soaked mess. “I’m going to be as crazy as she is if I stay in the Iron Land, I know that much.” I sighed.
Archie shrugged. “Probably. I don’t know you that well, strange as that is to say about your own flesh and blood, but I hope that changes.” He took a step from the cabin. “I’ve got to get back to the bridge. If you need something before we land, Valentina can get it for you.”
I looked back at the wardrobe. One side was my father’s jackets. The other side held dresses and skirts, rows of shoes lined up neatly on the bottom and hatboxes stacked along the top shelf. Archie knew Nerissa, but there were no signs of her here. Here, it was Valentina’s domain, and I wasn’t sure I could accept that. “How long?” I asked Archie. He blinked at me in surprise.
“Valentina? I … Well. A few years, I guess.”
I looked past his broad shoulder out into the main cabin, where Valentina sat with Bethina and Conrad, sipping tea. Dean paced from one porthole to the next, never sitting still.
“My mother asked for you,” I told Archie. “Over and over, all the time I visited her. She kept talking about you and asking for you.” I stared him down, waiting for something. I wasn’t sure what. Guilt? An admission that I wasn’t the only one who’d left Nerissa behind?
I got nothing except the inscrutable mask once again, the frown lines and the cold glance of my father’s glittering emerald eyes. “Aoife,” he said. His tone was as heavy as an iron door. “I’m sorry, truly, that you feel that way. But what went on between Nerissa and me is complicated, and my being with Valentina is my business. Not to put too fine a point on it.”
He might as well have slapped me. Although he and Nerissa hadn’t even talked since just after I was born, the idea that he’d managed to find himself someone new didn’t sit well with me. Maybe it was a selfish way to think, but whenever I thought about my father and Valentina, my stomach twisted involuntarily. “Are you going to marry her?” I asked bitterly, loudly enough to make Dean look up from where he was examining the antiques and curiosities on the wall.
“I’d like to,” Archie said, pulling back from me a bit and looking surprised at how forward I was. “But Valentina doesn’t believe marriage is necessary.” The
I couldn’t say that if Dean and I were separated, after years and years I wouldn’t move on. Find somebody new, especially if they cared about me as much as my father clearly cared about Valentina. The way his features softened when he talked about her made me almost jealous. They weren’t soft at all when he talked to me, so far.
But I doubted I’d be able to forget Dean. I doubted I’d be able to say our being apart was for the best. And for that, I found my father’s attitude callous. I decided that I wouldn’t ask him any of those questions that were burning me up about him and Nerissa after all. I couldn’t hear him talk about my mother while Valentina was here, safe and alive.
I went into the main cabin and over to a porthole away from the others and stared out at the passing landscape, trying to let the hum of the
The ship, under Archie’s guidance, flew on, over the spindly arm of Cape Cod, past stately white-painted mansions hugging the coastline. The destruction was less here, but I could still see creatures moving among the low scrub, darting and jumping from place to place. An overturned jitney on the side of the road lay smoking, steam wafting from under the crushed hood like spirits escaping into the cold air. No people.
Dean came and stood next to me at the porthole. “So, your old man. He going to chase me with a shotgun?”
I had to smile. All family unpleasantness aside, I
Valentina smiled at me as she got up and began clearing the tea things. It was a forced smile, and it didn’t reach her eyes. Good. I didn’t like her any more than that smile and those fake pleasantries pretended to like me.
“Maybe you should give your old man a break,” Dean said, brushing his thumb over my cheek. “Sixteen years is a long time to be lonely.”
“I know that,” I said grudgingly. But the fact that Archie must have been lonely didn’t make Valentina’s presence—and my mother’s absence—sting any less. “And it’s not like he ever made it legal between them. I guess I just thought he cared more than that.” I felt my mouth twist down, and an answering twist in my guts. “He doesn’t even seem that worried that Nerissa’s missing.”
Dean sighed and pressed his lips against my forehead. “You know, my dad was a decent guy,” he said. “But like I said, he and my mother never would’ve worked out. It was better they went back to their own people. Maybe it’s the same for your folks.”
I had to admit, he had a point. Who was to say they’d still be together? My mother was impossible to get along with on her best days, and on her worst she’d scream and throw things at your head. Still, the fact that Archie had never given us a chance to be a family grated on me. “Maybe my father should stop giving the eye to girls who are closer to my age than his,” I grumbled. Dean snorted.
“Oh, come on. She looks all right to me. Hardly an evil stepmother.”
“Oh, I bet she looks good to you,” I told him before I could bite the words back, acid etching them onto my tongue. Jealousy tasted ugly and bitter, like bile and spoiled fruit, but I couldn’t stop the surge.
Dean shook his head. His dark hair brushed across his pale forehead like an ink stain. He looked inhumanly
