else.
“I’ll do my best,” I said to my father. I felt lousier than I admitted about lying to him, even partially. But his falling-out with the Brotherhood wasn’t mine, and I needed a look at the Iron Codex, now more than ever. I needed a way to find the nightmare clock and use it, and Archie couldn’t do that for me.
I was as ready as I was ever going to be, I realized. And I was going to have to disobey my father to do what I needed to do—only, now there was at least the small hope that he’d forgive me after the fact for running off on my own.
Archie pulled me in with one arm and gave me a squeeze. “Thank you,” he said.
I frowned in confusion. “For what, Dad?”
“Trusting me,” he said. “I know it was a lot to ask. All I ask now is that you keep being smart, and strong, and trust yourself.” He held me at arm’s length, and for the first time the expression in his eyes softened when he looked at me. I wouldn’t have called it fatherly, but it was no longer calculating. “Trust yourself, Aoife. And never stop fighting.”
Trusting other people doesn’t come easily to you when you’ve never had someone who trusts you. But I had to tell someone about my dreams of the dark figure and the spinning worlds beyond his glass prison, someone who wouldn’t tell Archie or Valentina in turn. Or let it slip to the girl he was infatuated with.
Dean shook his head when I finished, and lit a cigarette. “Hell of a story, Aoife.”
“They’re not regular dreams,” I said. “I’m sure of that. They
“I’ve had some doozies of dreams,” Dean said. “Bourbon and bad diner food will do it. But not lately.” He slid closer to me and draped his arm around my shoulder. “I sleep nice and tight here, princess.”
“It’s different,” I said, blushing at his reminder of the day before. “If the nightmare clock actually exists, and I think it does, Valentina said it can … change things. Reality.” I swallowed, hoping it didn’t sound insane when I said it aloud. “It could put the world right again. The Engine, the Gates, everything.”
“Right.” Dean exhaled. “You mean back like it was, with Proctors and secret prisons and burnings? Because that was top-notch, I gotta say.” Venom dripped from his words.
“Back to where I know why my mother is sick, and I can help her,” I whispered, feeling tears prick at the corners of my eyes and hating my weakness. “And where the Proctors don’t exist at all.”
Dean ground out his cigarette against a porch post. “You’ve got that look, Aoife. Like all the gears are seized. What crazy thing are you thinking of?”
“Someone who knows more than Archie could be a big help,” I said.
“True, but you’re stuck here with dear old Dad,” Dean said. “He’s got his eye on you, to make sure you don’t …” He trailed off and rubbed his chin, not meeting my eyes.
“Blow up an Engine and break the Gates?” I supplied. It was the truth. It shouldn’t have hurt. But it did, and I pulled back.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Dean said. He drew me close again. “I know you feel like you have to put things right. I just don’t want you to get hurt. Besides, who knows more than your old man about this stuff?”
“The Brotherhood,” I said instantly. “They have the Iron Codex—all the knowledge this world has of any other.”
“I thought Archie said we couldn’t trust them,” Dean said. “People who think they know everything are usually pretty good at hiding stuff, Aoife.”
“But I don’t know anything right now,” I said, all the frustration I’d been feeling earlier cropping up again. “I don’t know if my dad’s right or just paranoid. I’d just like the chance to ask them myself.”
“Well, if you insist,” Dean said. “Let’s bust out of here and go ask ’em. Where do they bunk?”
I shrugged. “No idea.” I looked back at the house, where off-key piano music floated out through the glass. “But I bet Valentina knows all about it.”
Valentina and Archie shared the master bedroom in the Crosley house. The four-poster bed was unmade, and bottles of ink and papers bearing my father’s jagged handwriting were scattered across the writing desk in the corner.
I stood still for a moment, taking in the details of the room. A negligee hung from the door of the wardrobe, and one of Archie’s shirts was crumpled on the floor.
A creak from below reminded me that I was on borrowed time, and I went over to the dressing table, which was covered with rows of makeup pots and perfume bottles and a powder puff, all the tools Valentina had shown me how to use to put my face on. She’d really tried to make this easier on me, and a small part of me felt rotten for snooping now and deceiving the both of them.
But in the greater scheme, if I fixed things, if I used the clock the way Valentina had said some believed it could be used, wouldn’t it justify what I was doing now?
I sure hoped so.
While Dean kept watch on the door, I dug into the drawers, beneath the underthings and the odds and ends of old hairpins and mostly empty bottles.
Valentina had to have something—a letter, her own witch’s alphabet—that would tell me how to connect with the Brotherhood of Iron.
My fingers brushed paper—good, thick vellum paper—and I moved aside a stack of slips to see several oversized envelopes tied with a blue silk ribbon.
I slipped the letters—six of them—out of the envelopes and retied the parcel sans the pages inside the envelopes. That would buy me a little time before Valentina and Archie discovered what I was up to.
What I was up to could be mad; I’d considered that. The iron of the Iron Land could be poisoning me—more slowly than before, it was true—but then, my particular brand of madness had always shown itself first in dreams.
Still, if there was a chance I could put things right, I was going to take it, no matter what the odds might be. I knew myself well enough to know that.
Shoving the letters into the waist of my skirt, I pulled the pin-neat white cardigan Valentina had lent me over the bulge and went back to my own little room.
I propped a chair under the doorknob to avoid being interrupted. I’d hit the jackpot. The letters, all but one, were from Valentina’s father, and he’d signed them
Lastly, I unfolded a letter in familiar handwriting—the jagged slanted scrawl of my father. It was old, the ink worn away at the crease, and written on cheaper paper than the rest; it was beginning to fray at the corners.
Dearest Valentina,
I shut my eyes and sucked in a breath of the stale air in my room. A love letter. A love letter written when I was still in Lovecraft, when my mother was locked away, when Conrad and I were in some orphanage.
That couldn’t matter now. Shaking my head to clear it, I read on.
It’s cold here, and I’m getting more frustrated by the day.
The Brotherhood as it is now is a disgrace. They sit, fat and content here at the top of the world, and they scheme and argue, but they never do anything. Not about the Thorn Land, not about the Proctors, not about the instability of the Gates.
They don’t realize that with every bargain they cut with the Fae, they bring us an inch closer to another Storm. They are weakening the very world that they helped build. The tenet of never trusting the Fae has fallen by the wayside, and nobody listens to anything I have to say on the matter. They sit and scribble in their damn notebooks, natter on and on about the glory of the Iron Codex, and never admit that things are worse now than they ever were when the Storm was raging.
Too late, I thought. I gripped the letter hard enough to make tiny tears in the edges of the paper. There was a second Storm now—a slow-moving plague that was pouring from the shattered Gate into the Iron Land, a Storm I’d had a hand in causing when I’d broken the Gates to Thorn.
This is not about protecting the human race anymore. This is not even about balance, about living in harmony with the eldritch things that crawl out of Thorn. This is a shell game to see who can grab the most power and influence from under the cup before the whole thing collapses and we all realize we’ve grabbed a fat handful of
