The Nightmare Garden

to get her back.”

“I’m not saying forget it,” he said. “Just focus on staying safe until our father comes back and can help us settle things.”

He started walking again, his stiff-shouldered posture evidence that he was dismissing Dean and me—and the straggling Cal and Bethina—so I spoke my last thought to his back: “You know, Archie coming back and saving the day is about as likely as a snowball surviving the heart of the Engine.” It was harsh, but it was true. Conrad was the only one who refused to see that.

Second entry:

What can I say about my father? I knew him as only a story for the first fourteen years of my life, a figure both larger and smaller than any real father could hope to be.

I know that he stayed just long enough to watch Conrad take his first steps and see me born before he returned to the city of Arkham, to Graystone, his family home, and then had nothing more to do with us. Nerissa never mentioned it, but I knew they weren’t married, and that a family like the Graysons didn’t need bastards running around. It made me angry, made me feel small and worthless, like a trinket rather than somebody’s child. Usually I pretended I didn’t have a father at all.

I only saw him once: when the Proctors scooped me up and Grey Draven told me the truth about the necrovirus, that it was a lie and that he planned to use me to lure in the insurgents my father was running with. My father showed up and helped me get out of Ravenhouse, the bastion of the Proctors in Lovecraft, and run to Arkham, back to my brother and into the Mists.

We spoke maybe ten words to each other.

So you can see why I don’t have a lot of faith in Archibald Grayson showing up and saving the day, even though Conrad thinks he’ll solve everything. People relied on the Proctors to solve everything too—to keep them safe from the necrovirus—and look what happened. The world is going to burn. Maybe not all at once, but what happened in Lovecraft is surely worldwide news by now, and who knows what’s already crossed over from the Thorn Land to make a picnic of the human race? I can’t even think about it without feeling like I want to cry, scream, or simply lie down, let the guilt eat me alive and give up.

I don’t know if our father is coming back. I don’t know if he’ll help us if he does.

I don’t know anything except that Conrad’s wrong about me, and about our mother when he says that she’s a lost cause, and that if I want to survive, I have to cast my lot with a father I barely know. If I can go back, if I can at least make sure she’s alive and see what condition the city is in from what I did—if it still exists at all—then I’ll know.

I’ll know exactly what I did and what the damage was, the number of deaths and exactly how many tons of guilt should press on me. I’ll know if there’s anything I can do to make it right, because the plain fact is, innocent people shouldn’t pay for my stupidity. That, nobody had to teach me. That’s just the truth.

And maybe if I know what happened, I can stop dreaming about it.

I’d stopped keeping track of how many miles we’d walked days ago, but not of the day. My birthday had come and gone, and so far, I still had my mind. But I wasn’t cured. Periodically I felt the scratches and whispers of the madness, and I waited for the iron poison to awaken it fully in my blood and plunge me down an endless hole of insanity.

The road disappeared for a time, and we relied on the dim sun to navigate until it came into view again. Well, Conrad did. The rest of us were so tired we mostly just trudged. Cal had barely spoken since we’d come through from Arkham to the Mists, and finally, when I looked back and saw him stumble, I dropped back to walk with him.

“How are you holding up?”

Cal grunted. He was a head taller than me, and I watched his knobby Adam’s apple bob up and down.

Of all of us, Cal was the least what he appeared to be. I should have been afraid of him—after all, the Proctors had filled my mind for years with warnings about the ghouls that lived in the old sewer tunnels below the streets and surged up to hunt when the moon was full.

But they’d also told me my mother was crazy and had to be locked away, and that a bloodborne virus was responsible for my abilities and my madness dreams, so there you were. Cal might have been a monster before he’d come to the Academy, a ghoul who’d hunted people like me, but he’d stuck by me when everything went wrong. Draven had sent him to spy on me, threatened to burn Cal’s family alive if he rebelled, and Cal had still helped me get out of Lovecraft. Cal was loyal. I trusted him a lot more than Conrad at that moment.

Which made me feel lousy, like I was betraying my own blood in favor of someone who wasn’t even human, but the fact remained that Cal had been there for me when Conrad hadn’t. And he didn’t have potential madness lurking in the dark corners of his mind, ready to spring forward and sink its teeth in the moment he got too close to the Iron Land. I loved Conrad, but I’d never forget that in his worst moment, he’d hurt me, and hadn’t hesitated to do it. I had a scar to ensure I’d never forget.

“Cal?” I said when he didn’t answer me.

“How do you think I’m holding up, Aoife?” he snapped, thin face growing a deep frown. “Being in this place isn’t going to get us into any less trouble, and it just might get us into more.”

Regardless of the shape he took, Cal had a nearly endless capacity for worrywarting. I was just glad he’d decided to keep his human shape for the time being, though that was a credit more to Bethina than to me. Cal was sweet on her, and she thought he was a regular boy. I just hoped she wouldn’t try to light him on fire when she figured out the truth. Bethina was bubbly and sometimes flighty, but she wasn’t stupid, and eventually all the strange bits of Cal’s personality would fall into place for her.

I’d decided at the outset that I’d cross that bridge when we came to it. Besides, how was I supposed to pull her aside and tell her the nice boy with the city manners was actually a flesh-eating beast? That was a conversation I couldn’t even fathom how to start. It would come up one way or another—Cal wasn’t always good at hiding his true nature. None of us were, I guessed. Dean snarled when he was angry, and I got blinding headaches when I was too close to iron. Conrad was the only one among us who could appear effortlessly human, and I was really starting to resent him for it. He’d been out of the Iron Land long enough that his madness had largely receded. I hoped it would be the same for me, but sooner or later, I’d have to go back, and if he went with me we’d both be in trouble.

“Fine,” I grumbled.

“If you say so,” Cal said, and I could tell I’d played on his last nerve. He could tell I was wishing I could just leave the lot of them, aside from Dean, in the woods and go home.

Not even that. I wished I could wind time backward until none of this had ever occurred. And if I could live that time over again, I would ignore what was happening to me, go on being a good student, a good girl, good little Aoife Grayson, who adored her brother because he was the strong one, the charming one who could do no wrong. He was a brother she could trust, implicitly. A brother who’d never hurt her.

But then I’d also be insane from the iron of Lovecraft, locked up with my mother, and who knew what would have happened to Conrad. I could never have that little girl’s imaginary version of my brother back, and I was just going to have to live with it. If I’d done it sooner, I might not have been so easily swayed by Tremaine, or so quick to dismiss my mother’s ramblings. If I’d been more willing to accept reality, my mother would be safe and alive, instead of alone in a city overrun with creatures of Thorn.

If she’d survived. I didn’t let myself think that my mother might be dead too often, because the very idea was a physical pang in my chest. Nerissa had managed to survive for seven years in the worst madhouses in Lovecraft. She couldn’t be dead. I kept repeating that, with all the dedication of a fanatic. My mother couldn’t be dead. She had to be waiting for me when I went back.

I became aware that Cal’s skinny shadow no longer loped next to me, and I turned back. Cal was frozen, quivering, his nostrils flared and his chest vibrating like a plucked string.

“Cal?” I said with soft alarm, motioning to the others to stop.

His lips drew back from teeth that razored out of human gums, leaving thin red trails of blood and spittle on his lips. They disappeared just as quickly, when Bethina turned toward him, but the wire-tight tension didn’t leave his skinny frame. “Someone else is here.”

Dean cut his eyes toward the brush and back to me. “Get off the road.”