The Iron Thorn (37 page)

“Let me taste her, Tanner.”
A thin one with a spotty hide slid forward.
“Been so long in a cage. So long since we had anything live.”

“Get off, you.”
The one named Tanner swatted at the upstart with a paw the size of a dinner plate.
“You can have the chitterlings that smell like death. The soft one’s meat is for me
.”

I couldn’t hold my vision steady any longer, and I ground the heel of my palm into my forehead in an attempt to drive out the pain. Beyond the scraping of the ghoul’s guttural snarls there was something in my head, something cold and swelling to bursting. Black whirlpools formed in front of my eyes and my breath caught.

Perhaps I would faint, and wake up with the wandering things in the mists, the corpse-drinkers. Perhaps I’d wake up in the star-home of R’lyeh, with the Great Old Ones.

Either way, the cold knowledge that I was about to perish cut through the pain in my head, and on its heels came the desperate thrashing desire to stay alive.

I heard a slow ticking, the clockwork of my heartbeat. It quickened even as everything around me went fuzzy, loose and slow from pain and panic.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tock
.

Everything went very still, hard and cold inside of me. This wasn’t like the owl in the library, a sudden burst of Weird ripped free by the root, leaving a bleeding hole. I died for a split second, and in that time something living in me silently until that moment uncoiled, wrapped itself around my mind and squeezed.

My Weird blossomed again and I allowed it to spread all through me like molten ore. I felt the iron of the gate mesh with the iron in my blood, the clockwork of the mechanism turning wheels and gears inside my head. It didn’t feel like madness or pain, or anything like the necrovirus that had gripped me after the shoggoth bite.

It felt like I had put on clockwork wings and learned how to make them fly.

And then I could see again. My breath scraped in and out, my lungs burning like I’d dunked my head in a swimming pool. The pain was gone and in its place was a pinpoint of cold, tingling sensation that I recognized from stepping through the
hexenring
. Enchantment was riding my blood, and my Weird was demanding to be set free.

The ghouls snarled at me, their hungry mouths inches from my flesh.

I was freezing, and under my fingertips I felt iron, even though I wasn’t touching anything but air. I breathed in and out, and I could feel the parts of Graystone protecting the tunnel respond.

The gate snapped shut behind the ghouls, rusted mechanism shrieking protest at the speed.

Tanner, the enormous ghoul, levered his heavy head around like a wrecking ball.
“What’s going on? My blood’s burning!”

It wasn’t enough. The creatures were still in the tunnel with me and Cal and could still harm us. I reached out, pushing the spear of the Weird out from my mind, and found gear wheels and metal teeth lying in wait all around us. I tugged at them, feeling the resultant stab of agony through my chest and heart. With a rumble and a groan, Graystone’s majestic machine woke from its slumber.

A spring snapped, and the echo filled my skull.

I was the machine. The machine was me.

Rusted spikes shot from the floor and walls, in and out, random grids covered in old blood but still sharp.

Tanner’s foot exploded as iron bored a hole in his flesh. The ghouls howled and screamed, as their blue blood spattered the stones and coated the spikes.

“What’s happening?” Cal shouted, covering his ears as a ghoul fell, screaming, between us. Cal watched it convulse in horror, his mouth hanging open and his face ashen.

The machine was in my blood, its gears turning brilliant in my brain. My fear had vanished, and all that fed my impulses was the Weird.

I could feel all of Graystone, a great pulsing, shuddering, breathing thing with its heart of steam. I knew that what I asked of it, the house would give.

I demanded the death of the ghouls, and the house gifted me with a sacrifice. I didn’t move, didn’t let go of Cal, until the last howl of despair had ceased and the last droplet of brackish blood had spattered the stones.

Cal and I managed to get to our feet. He was quaking like he was made of paper, but I pulled him to me and together we limped back to the stairway to the light. My knees were skinned and bleeding, and my shoulder, where the shoggoth bit me, was an agony of flame, but I felt light. Free. Floating. The Weird whispered, curled and fell back to sleep inside me, leaving me wrung out, as if I’d just run until exhaustion.

“Why are you smiling?” Cal demanded. He’d clearly been too panicked to suss what was really going on, and for that I was relieved. I didn’t properly understand it yet. I’d be hopeless at explaining.

Cal panted as we stumbled up the stairs and into the crisp autumn air. “We could have died, you realize.” Elated as I felt, Cal looked proportionately haggard. His skin almost seemed to droop over the bones of his face and he was sweating through his coat, damp wool under my hand as I leaned on him for support.

“We didn’t,” I said. “They didn’t get us, Cal. We’re alive.” A small laugh escaped me, pure adrenaline given voice. I’d survived. I’d saved myself and Cal. “I did it, Cal,” I whispered. “I found it.”

“Alive. Great,” Cal said flatly. “What are you on about?”

“Cheer up, Cal!” I demanded, punching him in the
shoulder. “Not even a pack of hungry ghouls can stop me! Think of what you’ll have to tell the guys now.”

“Crazy girl,” Cal said, but without malice. He slumped against the sarcophagus, breathing heavily, shaking. I rubbed his back and patted his neck with my handkerchief until he stopped sweating and quivering. After a moment, color began to return to his face and he lost the morbid walking-corpse pallor, the dark veins no longer standing out under his sagging skin. Once he looked like my friend again, I got us up.

“Let’s go back to the house. I don’t know about you, but I feel like my head might wobble off.” The overwhelming sensory push of the Weird was wearing off, and I could feel my hands and knees beginning to shake like they hadn’t before. It seemed the harder I pushed, the more of a toll it took. But I could figure it out. I could figure all of it out, because I was alive.

“You don’t look so hot,” Cal agreed. “Come on. Let me help you before you fall down.”

“I’m not crazy yet,” I said, and breathed deep of the day. I had found my Weird. I had Cal back. I wasn’t crazy and I might not
turn
crazy, either. For just a moment, as Cal and I walked arm in arm to Graystone, it was enough.

The Arcane Payment

B
ACK IN GRAYSTONE
, in my room, I slept away the pain and creeping fatigue that overtook me on the walk from the graveyard.

When I woke, I found myself covered and with plumped pillows behind my head. My ceiling was stained with the same alien world map, the blankets were the same itchy wool. My shoes were missing, but otherwise I was just as I’d been before the ghouls.

“Cal?” I’d had dreams, dark and dripping blood. The ghouls could hurt Cal. If I wasn’t there, wasn’t able to pull him free from their jaws, they’d take him to their nest, consume him, turn his face into the twisted snarling things that snapped at me from the dark.…

The door to my room swung open of its own volition, with a rifle crack. A simple hinge assembling, connected to rods and wheels in the hollow walls of the mansion, they ran through the place like a cold-blooded nervous system.
I hissed and pressed a hand against my forehead. The Weird appeared to come out when I lost control of myself, got upset or panicked, like when I’d stopped the library clock. I needed to rein it in before something other than a ghoul stepped into its path and I hurt someone. My father didn’t run about setting people on fire—I’d have to get better at using my talent.

Dean’s face appeared in the frame, and he looked at the door askance. “I think your castle needs a tune-up, princess.”

“That’s not all it needs,” I said. “Have you seen Cal?” My door swung back with another rifle shot, and Dean flinched.

“He’s downstairs blabbing Bethina to death about his grand adventure in the zombie’s tomb, or whatever did happen when you two went off.” Dean sat next to me and the dubious bedsprings bowed under his weight. “You’ve been sleeping like you pricked your finger on a spindle, kid.”

I rubbed my shoulder, but the shoggoth’s bite had gone back to being just a sore patch, shallow cuts and bruising.

“I guess I fainted?”

“More like passed out cold,” Dean said. “You came back from your jaunt looking pale and walleyed, babbled something about blood underground and staggered up here. By the time I got after you, you’d fallen asleep and all the rockets both sides dropped in the war couldn’t have stirred you.”

My head felt hollowed out and I was fatigued as if I’d run for miles. The Weird whispered, scratching at my senses, begging to be let free. I shut my eyes. The talent in
my blood had wrung me out and I felt in my bones that if I let the Weird go now I’d never get control of it again.

“There were ghouls down there,” I said. “Down under the ground. Cal wanted to explore the crypt in the cemetery, and he opened the ghoul trap by accident and let them out.”

“Sounds like our cowboy,” said Dean with a toothy grimace. “You all in one piece? Or did they get a bite?”

“No … I killed them.” I looked up at Dean. “I got the trap working again, and the house … it killed them. I was the house. My Weird …”

My hands were still frozen and blue-veined and I shoved them under the blanket. “I can feel it, walking around in my head. The machines and the house. My Weird can speak to them and I hear them now. Whispering.”

The sensation when I’d been lying there, a handbreadth away from bloody scraps for ghoul pups to fight over, of a vast and sleeping consciousness sharing my head, came back with a rush and I grabbed Dean’s arm. It was bare, exposed by the short sleeves of his white T-shirt, and I blushed at the feel of his skin.

“Cripes, Aoife.” He rubbed my hand between his palms. “You’re freezing.”

“I think it’s a side effect,” I said. “I got so cold when I used my Weird in the tunnel, I thought I could never move again.”

“You know what they say.” Dean tucked the blanket around me and edged closer. “Cold hands, warm heart.”

“My mother used to say that,” I murmured without thinking.

“You don’t mention the old lady much,” Dean said. “What’s her story?”

Dean Harrison knew more about me than anyone but Nerissa herself. He knew, and he hadn’t spilled a word to anyone.

“My mother is in a madhouse back in Lovecraft.”

It came in a rush, once I’d decided to break the dam on my worst secret. “She contracted the necrovirus before Conrad and I were born and she started to lose her grip when she was pregnant with me, I mean really lose it. She could still fake sane when Conrad was a baby, I guess. They say everyone in our family goes mad, usually at sixteen—it’s our strain, our particular virus—so, you see, it doesn’t matter that I’ve found out all this about the Folk and the Weird. In no time at all, I won’t remember you or myself or any of this.” I gestured at the faded grandeur of my bedroom. Tremaine could threaten me, but he’d never frighten me as much as the thought of losing who I was to the virus, leaving Cal and now Dean behind and becoming just another deluded madwoman locked in a cell.

I could do as Tremaine asked, but I was still afraid, if I were honest, that I wouldn’t be around to see the result. I’d just have to help him and his queens and pray my effort kept my friends safe.

“I had no idea,” Dean whispered.

I scrubbed the heel of my hand across my eyes. I’d cried over the situation enough. “Yes, well, it’s not a tidbit I go spreading around.”

Dean shifted, leaning down on his elbow so we were roughly perpendicular. “Cal know?”

I nodded, a small gesture because the memory still
strangled me when it broke to the forefront. “He was there when my brother tried to kill me. On Conrad’s birthday.”

Cal held up his hands. Big and ungainly, like puppy paws. “Conrad, don’t hurt your sister. She’s all you have.”

Dean whistled. “So Conrad gave you that scar.”

I didn’t have to confirm his suspicions. Dean knew. “The virus incubated and it came out as madness,” I said. “He didn’t know what he was doing, Dean. He’s still my brother.”

Dean shook his head slowly. “That’s a hell of a thing, Aoife.”

“It’s your payment, Dean.” I smiled even though I felt more like screaming. The door hinges tensed, but I bit down hard on the inside of my cheeks, balled the Weird up inside my chest and kept it small. The door stayed where it was.

Rubbing his face with both hands, Dean shut his eyes. “I don’t want it. This is the kind of secret that never stops bleeding.”

“I can’t keep hiding from everyone in the world,” I said softly. “It’s becoming everything I am. Like a shadow that falls only on you even though the sun is out.” The stone of madness dogged my ankles even as I felt the Weird spurring me to fly, as it had in the cemetery tunnel.