The Nightmare Garden

“What’s going on?” Bethina called tremulously from behind Cal.

“Get off the road now!” Dean bellowed, and grabbed me by the arm, dragging me into the brush. I gasped in pain as thorns snagged my sweater, rending skin and finding blood beneath.

I saw Cal, Conrad and Bethina go into the ditch on the other side of the path as Dean pulled me down. Mud soaked into my stockings and through the holes in my boots, and freezing water numbed me.

“What—” I started, but Dean pressed his finger against my lips.

A second later, I felt something unfurl in my mind, like a flower opening under the light of the moon. It prickled across my forehead, over my scalp and down my spine, fingers of feeling scraping across my every nerve.

Please, I thought as panic pressed on my chest, slowing my breath to almost nothing, not here. Not now. I knew the sensation bubbling up from the recesses of my brain, knew it the same way I knew my own heartbeat. My blood was reacting to iron, iron that whoever Cal had scented carried, iron worked into an unseen machine. And with the machinery came something else: the power that my father, in his journal, had called a Weird. And on the heels of the Weird, because machines and iron were inexorably intertwined, the madness would bloom.

My Weird had been quiet since we’d been walking through the Mists, but not now. Now it was pushing against the inside of my skull, threatening to crack it. I pressed a palm against my forehead and dug the heel in, willing myself to stay quiet as my thoughts went wild, clamoring for me to scream and let my Weird free. Behind them was something blacker, something that crawled and giggled as it picked at the scars on my psyche. Let me in, Aoife. Let me show you.…

I saw a sharp stone protruding from the embankment, and I ran my hand against it, dragging it down my palm. Blood dribbled down my wrist and the sharp, clear prick of pain pushed the whispers back. When all else failed, physical hurt would quiet the voices in my head. For now, anyway.

The Weird still pressed on my skull, and I pushed harder against the stone, focusing only on the pain.

On the road, the trees parted ahead of us and disgorged two tall, thin figures. They weren’t Fae—I could tell that much from their lack of silver eyes and pointed teeth—but they weren’t human, either. They moved too smoothly for that, like the fog all around us glided between the trees, and their forms were too slim and angular.

The Erlkin had found us. The people of the Mists, the other half of Dean’s bloodline, had found the intruders in their domain and were coming to exterminate us. At best. At worst, they were Erlkin working for Grey Draven, and we were about to be shackled and taken back to Lovecraft. I pressed my forehead down into the dirt. That couldn’t happen. It would be the end of even a faint hope that I could remain free and sane.

Dean squeezed my arm, each finger carving a groove that would leave purple marks behind. He was telling me to stay quiet. Stay still. Not to give us away.

I wasn’t the one, as it turned out, who screwed up—a splash came from the ditch on the other side of the path and I knew it could only be Cal.

“Oh, iron damn this day!” I hissed, breaking free of Dean’s grasp, trying to reach Cal before the Erlkin did … something. I’d use my Weird, keep them from taking us, keep us free of imprisonment for one more day. Honestly, I didn’t know what I was going to do. The new Aoife moved without thinking, summoning the scream of the Weird into the front of her mind.

Conrad erupted from his side of the ditch before I could fully leap from my hiding spot, entrapped my arms and took me to ground, my knees crashing into the gravel with sharp, hot blossoms of pain as he smothered me.

The Erlkin shouted at us in a guttural language I didn’t understand, but I knew when someone was yelling at me not to move. And Conrad was muttering to me as the ground shook with their approaching footsteps, a single word over and over.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid. So stupid, Aoife.”

“We know there are more of you skulking in there!” the Erlkin shouted in English. “Show your faces!”

“I’m going to let you up and we’re going to run, all right?” Conrad whispered into my hair. “Fast as you can. Just run. The others will be all right—the Erlkin don’t want them, just us.”

I struggled, trying to get out from under his weight. “Get off me, Conrad!” I hissed. “You’re not making this any better.”

“Show yourselves,” the Erlkin ordered. “Or we open fire into the bushes and drag your bodies back to the dirigible!”

“Wait!” Conrad shouted, raising his head. “We aren’t Fae spies. We’re just traveling through. There’s no need for all this, I promise you.”

I heard the lock and snap of a weapon, and my Weird pounded against my skull at the proximity of a complex machine, a machine it wanted to bend and twist to its will. My will. But that couldn’t happen. The Erlkin couldn’t know about my ability, so I held it back, until I thought I’d burst. I threw Conrad’s arms off me, feeling as if I’d suffocate if he touched me for another second.

“I’m Conrad Grayson,” Conrad announced. He stood above me now, hands out to the side, the long, clever fingers we shared splayed in deference to show his empty palms. “I’ve been here before, and I’ve always been a friend to the Erlkin, just like my father, Archibald Grayson. Maybe you’ve heard of him?”

To my right, Bethina and Cal climbed slowly from the ditch they’d thrown themselves into, Bethina clutching Cal’s arm. He was doing an all-right job of not losing his form, but it wasn’t good enough. I could see long teeth, and yellow eyes, and claws. I jerked my chin at him and he swallowed his ghoul face, features rippling until he was human again.

Now that we’d been caught, all I could think about was how we could convince the Erlkin we weren’t a threat. I wasn’t leaving Dean and Cal and Bethina, that much was certain. Conrad could run if he wanted to. I’d already left enough people behind.

“You,” the Erlkin said to Conrad. “Oh, we know all about you, Conrad Grayson.”

I took the chance to examine the Erlkin while he was focused on my brother and his big mouth. He was tall, thin, with hollow cheeks and stringy black hair pulled back with a leather thong at his neck. He looked like a human who’d been dead a few days, whose skin, tinged blue, had begun to tighten. In another life, when I’d been a student, some of us freshmen had been dared to go into the anatomy room in the School of Hospice. The cadaver on the table, dead of a ghoul attack, had looked much the same.

The thing he held in his hands was about the size of a crossbow but had a bulbous end, a glass ball that enclosed a coil of copper piping running back to a bulky gearbox near a trigger. Putting together what I’d learned at the Academy, I guessed it was a stun gun, with a windup static charge.

“You think you can hire slipstreamers to smuggle you back and forth across our borders any time you please?” the lead Erlkin snarled. “You think we don’t know every time your sack of meat walks through the Mists? We’re not stupid, human, nor are we savages. We see you. We know that someone breached the Gates, and we know that our borders aren’t safe. You’re not welcome here, by any true citizen of the Mists who’s not just out to take your money and leave you to die in a swamp.”

I looked up at Conrad in alarm. I’d thought the Erlkin who’d helped us escape Graystone, our father’s house, had been, at the very least, not criminals. Honestly, I’d hoped they’d been in some kind of authority, that Conrad had used his charm to sway the Erlkin to his cause, but I saw now that I was wrong. Slipstreamers, Dean had said, were Erlkin who used the Gates on the sly, for illicit purposes, caring nothing for what might happen if they misused the Gates or allowed something unwanted to come through along with them. It was horribly dangerous— slipstreamers didn’t really know what they were doing, and often as not, their charges disappeared into a void.

In short, I thought we’d been invited to the Mists. But knowing Conrad as I did, I should have guessed he’d done something underhanded. I could have strangled him in that moment, and I doubted Dean or Cal or Bethina would have stopped me, judging from the looks on their faces.

“Listen,” Conrad said, making a smoothing motion in the air between the Erlkin and himself. “I’m sure we can work this out.”

“You’re a wanted man,” the Erlkin snarled. “And the rest of you are trespassers. Every time you cross from the Iron Land or anywhere else to the Mists, you raise the chance of the Fae finding a way in and crossing over with you. This may be an in-between place, but it’s our place. And we don’t want you.