The Nightmare Garden

the aether globe shattering open.

“Burn!” she screamed. “Right to cinders!”

The fire caught impossibly fast. Smoke filled the tunnel, obscuring Bethina, who sobbed, naked and covered in soot. Cal listened to the screams of his nest dying, Bethina crying, choking on smoke, and he couldn’t move.

I couldn’t either, tied to his mind until the horrible recurring nightmare played itself out. I couldn’t push on from this. This wasn’t memory, this was pure overwhelming fear manifesting itself like poison in Cal’s subconscious. His senses made it visceral, until I was screaming too, and then choking, until I thought I was going to pass out.

When the smoke cleared, Crow and I were someplace much worse.

I recognized the flat where Conrad and I had last lived with Nerissa. It hadn’t been in a good part of town, sitting on the edge of the Rustworks near South Lovecraft Station. Conrad slept on the sofa, and I slept on a small Murphy bed that came out of the sitting room wall. It might once have been an ironing board, but it was just the right size for an eight-year-old girl.

I wasn’t inside the flat, however, but rather was looking at it from the outside, up at the yellow glow of the window, since the building was so old that it didn’t have an aether feed, just oil lamps that coated everything we owned with a fine layer of soot.

A shape passed in front of the glass, then another. Boy and girl, racing back and forth, yelling in some sort of made-up contest.

“Archie.” The view rolled to the left, and I saw a younger Harold Crosley. Gray still shot through his white hair, and he carried considerably less weight in his jowls. “We need to keep moving,” Crosley said. “Patrols are tighter than ever.”

Archie waved his hand, his breath steaming in the cold. “In a minute.”

“Now,” Crosley insisted. “We can’t stand staring up at a window forever, Grayson.”

Archie rounded on Crosley. “That’s my family in there, Harold.” He ignored Crosley’s huff of irritation and turned back to the window. He stared intently, all his attention on the children inside, hearing them laugh through the thin single-paned glass.

The sense of loss as he stared at the window was so intense, so profound, that I felt myself starting to weep. It was the opposite of being full—when Archie looked up at our flat, he was totally empty. He felt so far from us he might as well have been on the opposite side of the globe.

He knew he had to protect us from the silver-tongued, sharp-toothed Fae. Knew that for that reason, he could never be with us. Must never draw attention to his family. Never expose them to danger.

Nerissa came to the window. She was too thin, her hair lank, her cheeks flushed and feverish. She wouldn’t last much longer here in Lovecraft, Archie knew. I could feel the bank book he carried with him everywhere, an account left over from when his father was alive, secret from the Brotherhood. It wasn’t much, in the scheme of the Grayson family’s formerly vast wealth, but it would be enough to pay off the right city officials to make sure his children were safe.

Archie knew in that moment that he would have chucked his upbringing, his travels to the four corners of the globe, his massive house in Arkham and all the fine things within, to be able to go up the stairs, open the door and sweep Conrad and Aoife into his arms. To kiss Nerissa’s too-warm forehead and tell her it was all going to be all right.

But he couldn’t, so he turned his back on the flat and followed Howard Crosley, pretending it was only the icy winter wind that had caused the moisture in his eyes.

19 The Gears of All Things

AND THEN I was back in my own head. I was on my knees in Crow’s space, at the heart of all things. I was sobbing, my face soaked, and I was trembling. I’d known the dreams would be bad, but I’d never expected the darkest hearts of everyone I cared about to be marched across my mind.

Outside the dome, there was no sky around me now, none of the endless worlds. The places I’d seen, the nightmares of Conrad and Cal and Archie, whirled around me instead, and beyond them, I saw a thin pinpoint of yellow light, like a candle bobbing above the black waters of a river leading away into a secret place.

I knew on some level that I wasn’t really hearing the voice that came out of the dark; rather, it had planted itself deep in my mind, where my Weird came from, where the memories of my oldest ancestors were stored.

Did you dream the Old Ones whispered.

“Yes,” I whispered.

We have dreamed. We have dreamed stars and suns. The before time and the after time. Dreamed your world into being.

“I want you to turn it back,” I said. “Stop all this from ever having happened. Stop me from having met Tremaine, having destroyed the Engine, all of it.”

Is that what you truly wish? the voices hissed, like the burn of steam against my mind. The before time of blood and entrapment? We are trapped. We are trapped so long, dreaming.

Crow stood next to me, staring at the pinpoint as it grew larger and larger, and I saw all at once that it wasn’t a light but an eye, nearly as large as the dome itself, staring down at us from a fathomless distance. The Old Ones, linked inexorably with the nightmare clock. Now that I’d found its heart, they were speaking to me, letting me know what would happen if I turned the thing keeping them prisoner to my own use.

“I want what I did to have never happened,” I repeated.

But the world is bleeding, the voice replied. And the flow can never be stanched. You are a destroyer, and even the great gear of the worlds cannot turn back what has already been done.

My mouth dropped open in shock and anger. “No. I stood up to those horrible things I had to see. Now I get to use the clock.”

Who are you to change the course of history? the Old Ones whispered. You have torn the world. For that there is no cure. Not in your lands, and not in this device. Some things cannot be unmade, Aoife Grayson. Some things simply are.

I snapped my gaze to Crow, furious and unbelieving. “You lied to me,” I snarled.

Crow spread his hands, helpless. “I told you the clock can’t simply turn time around. I thought maybe it would work for you, but there are some things nothing on earth or in the heavens can move, Aoife. The clock can’t undo time and knit the past back together—not like Tesla thought, like he told others it could. But maybe it can set things differently, allow you to see things in a new light.” He took my hand, even though I fought him. My skin was ice. I could feel the clock as a part of me, and saw that Crow and I were both limbs of a greater organism, while below us the Great Old Ones churned, a sea of things so ancient they didn’t even feel alive, only constant and cold, like the stars they traveled.

“Your life before,” Crow whispered. “Was that really a life you wanted? The world was sick long before the Gates shattered, Aoife.” He ran his free thumb down my cheek. “You can’t go back. You can go forward, though.”

Ever onward through the cold of space, the voices agreed, tickling my mind.

I realized that ever since I’d learned about the nightmare clock, I hadn’t really been meaning to reset the world. I’d really just wanted to make things with my mother okay. Crow was right—the Proctors, the Brotherhood and their war had broken it long before I’d ever been born. Tremaine and his trick of forcing me to open the Gates were merely symptoms, not problems. And as long as the worlds sat side by side, bleeding into one another, the boundaries slowly fracturing, no mere mortal was going to be able to change a damn thing.

There would always be Fae to entice mortals; there would always be mortals to protect those who couldn’t resist the temptation, mortals like my father.

There was only one mistake I was directly responsible for, and only one I could set right, because of that.