Valentina, before her unfortunate decision to leave her place in society and take up a … front-line position in the Brotherhood, doing things unsuitable for a well-bred young woman like her.” The way he said it, lips pursing, left no doubt how he felt about his daughter’s allegiances. Apparently I, not being of the same breed of rich jerk, was exempt from such disapproval.
He excused himself to the bar and claimed a silver tea service with two cups and saucers. I watched him until somebody flopped into the chair opposite me. “Hey. You made it.”
I nearly choked when I recognized the face. “
“You act like you’re surprised,” she said. “Takes more than a few ghouls to keep me down. Also, you trust people way too easy when you’re getting what you want. Your old man’s right—you need to learn if you’re gonna live to be seventeen.”
Rage flamed in me, and for a moment I forgot that I was supposed to be acting harmless. “You … you …
Casey wagged her hand. “I was
“The Brotherhood was
“Until I lost you in Old Town you took off from the Crosley house for Innsmouth,” Casey said. “Lost you. Too many damn ghouls running around.”
My breathing started again, fast and full of relief. Casey hadn’t seen me with Draven. She hadn’t dipped below the first layer of my reason for coming to the Bone Sepulchre.
“So, this place is pretty crazy, right?” Casey said. “I can see it in your eyes. You’re bugging out.”
Glad of any topic except her following me around for stone knew how long, I nodded. “More than pretty crazy,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”
Casey sat forward in excitement, eyes lighting up as she talked. “We pull aether right out of the air. There’s a device in the tower that they say was designed by Tesla himself. You don’t need to refine it; you can pull a full charge and disperse it into a feed just like normal. That’s why it’s purple, not blue. No refining chemicals.”
That explained the “aurora borealis” I’d seen. Not light. Aether. The energy of the cosmos ripped directly from the air. A machine like that, especially one built by Tesla, would normally be something I’d be eager to see, but not now. Now, I was fishing. “Seems kind of boring around here,” I said. “No lanternreels, no books that I can see.”
“Oh, you’re wrong. There’s a giant library,” Casey said. “I know you’re a bookworm.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Exactly how long have you been watching me?”
“Me personally? Only since you rabbited from the Academy,” Casey said. “Before that, I couldn’t say if Mr. Grayson or someone else had an agent watching you.” She sat back in the chair and regarded me. “Nobody else can do what you do, Aoife. You’re important to a lot of people for that reason, and a lot of things that aren’t people at all. But I’m glad you chose us and not the Proctors.”
“Of course I did,” I said, shrugging as if there were no question at all. “I believe in what you’re doing. Draven and the Proctors are vile.” True. I knew it was always best to put a little truth in your untruths. It made you believable.
“Ah, Miss Casey,” said Crosley, returning with the tea. “So good of you to take Miss Grayson under your wing.” He grinned at me. “Casey is a very capable girl, much like yourself. She can show you to your room, order you some supper, and explain to you the kinds of tests we’ll be running.”
I paused, the teacup halfway to my lips. “Tests?” I said, pulling back from Crosley warily. Nothing that started with “running a few tests” ever ended well, in my experience.
“Relax!” Crosley boomed genially. “We just want to see what your Weird can do, and how much we can still teach you. We must use the Gates for good instead of as instruments of disaster going forward, and to do that we have to see where your talent lies.”
His hand landed on my shoulder, and the weight pushed me deeper still into the armchair. “Does that sound all right to you, my dear?”
That sounded just the opposite of all right. “I’ll prove to you I have my Weird,” I said. “But I don’t relish being poked at like a laboratory rat.”
Crosley folded his fingers together in a motion I recognized from when my professors were trying to make a pop quiz appealing. “Terrible what happened to your mother, Aoife. Just terrible. And young Conrad showed symptoms as well before he removed himself from the Iron Land. We know that if you stay away from iron, out of cities and such, the onset is slower, and comes not at all in Thorn, but if you stay in the Iron Land, you’ll inevitably go mad, and I think it’s a crime that Archie would never allow me to help him with his children’s … unique bloodline. I’m confident that with time, we can find a way to help you. So you won’t have to risk iron madness every time you go into a city.”
That all sounded, to put it mildly, just a bit too good to be true. “How do I know you won’t just chain me up and force me to use my Weird to do whatever you want with machines and the Gates?”
Crosley laughed. It was deep and wet, from the lungs of a man, I realized, who was gravely ill. His face turned crimson, with amusement or lack of air, I couldn’t tell. “Aoife, if we wanted to imprison you, wouldn’t doing so immediately after you’d arrived have made more sense than offering you a conversation and a nice cup of tea?”
I set the teacup back down and looked him in the eye. “There are all different kinds of prisons, Mr. Crosley.”
“Smart girl. So there are,” he said, “but this is not a prison, it’s a promise. You let me run my tests and cooperate, and I will not only give you access to the Codex, I will find a solution to your iron madness. A permanent one. You won’t have to end up like poor lost Nerissa.”
I twitched at my mother’s name crossing his lips. He didn’t know anything about us, spies or not. Nerissa had done the best she could. In our small apartment, before she was committed, we’d at least been free.
I didn’t let any of that come across to Crosley, and he spread his hands. “I ask again—does this sound equitable to you, young Miss Grayson?”
I looked into his eyes and found the same falseness there I knew I was showing in my own. “Sounds fantastic,” I said dryly, but Crosley didn’t pick up on my sarcasm, just grinned again and left me in the care of Casey.
She sat with me while I drank my tea, chattering about the great cause of the Brotherhood of Iron, Tesla and his prototype Gate, and how she’d personally seen two Fae! In the flesh! “They were creepy,” she said, and shuddered. “Had hollow spaces where their eyes should be, and fangs.”
I didn’t bother telling her that she’d most likely seen something that had crawled from the Mists rather than full-blooded Fae. Besides, perfect faces with gleaming beauty and dead, unblinking eyes weren’t really any less terrifying.
After I finished my tea, she guided me to a guest room, where a cot piled high with furs and lit by the same eerie purple aether lamps greeted me. The Brotherhood, for all their status as fugitives, had means far beyond even the Proctors. Clean clothes waited for me, thick woolen socks and silk pajamas that trapped the heat next to my skin, and I burrowed under the blankets, some of the hides nearly as thick as carpets.
It was pure luck, burrowed as I was, that I heard the door lock from the outside. I’d probably been meant to fall asleep, warm and dry and full of soporific tea, lulled into a false sense of security by Casey and her uncomplicated nature.
That jibed a bit with what Archie had told me. I didn’t think his view of the Brotherhood of Iron was entirely fair, but I also knew my father wasn’t stupid. If he’d broken with the Brotherhood, there was a good reason. At the very least, I was the daughter of the man who’d stolen Harold Crosley’s own daughter, and I’d broken the Gates besides. Nobody, no matter their nature, was that forgiving.
And now I was locked in, and even if I wasn’t, they’d taken away my cold-weather gear. If I went back onto the ice dressed as I was, I’d be dead inside of ten minutes.
