The Iron Thorn (38 page)

“I don’t want it,” Dean said again. “You didn’t have to tell me this, even for payment. I …” But he trailed off, shoving a hand through his hair, so it fell every which way.

“I expect you’ll be leaving, then,” I said. “And I thank you for all of your help. Truly. I won’t inconvenience you any longer.” I felt the thickness of tears behind my eyes, and despised it. Some Gateminder I was, crying over a boy.

Dean stood up and went to the door, wiggling it experimentally as if it might decide to slam shut on his knuckles. “I get that you’ve had a lot of running out in your life, princess. A lot of empty rooms and doors slammed in your face. But you paid me fair and square, even if it’s not what I wanted, so dig this when I say it: I’m not leaving you alone. I don’t run out.”

For the first time that day, I managed a real, if wan, smile. I believed Dean when he made his promises, and I wanted to kiss him for it. Stone it, I wanted to kiss Dean Harrison for any old reason at all, but I settled for saying, “You’re one of the good ones, Dean.”

“I’m about as far from good as you can get without running into it again,” he said. “But I keep my bargains and my word is my bond.” He flashed me a smile that was far from his usual killer grin—no, he looked like any boy trying to find a way to ask a girl on a date without stumbling over his feet, his words, or both. I wondered if Dean had ever been that Dean, before he went to the heretics and started guiding in the Rustworks.

He came back and tousled the hair on top of my head, fingers spreading a little static electricity between us. “Rest, princess. It’s been a very long day.”

“Yes, it has indeed,” I said, but instead of obeying Dean I swung my legs over the bed and found my boots. “Could you get Bethina to make me some coffee?” The Weird had exhausted me, and I contemplated that if this was what I had to look forward to every time I tapped the enchantment in my blood, I was going to go through a lot of hot beverages.

“That’s pretty much the opposite of resting your bones,”
Dean said. “But I don’t think we need to bother Bethina over a cuppa. I learned to brew a pretty good pot when my old man had the third shift at the foundry.”

“Good,” I said. “Because if I’m going to break Tremaine’s curse, I’m going to need all the help I can scrounge.”

The Bottomless Room

A
FTER DEAN HAD
made a pot of strong coffee, he poured me a mug and followed me into the library. “Feel like an assist, princess?”

“I’d like that,” I said as he helped me onto the ladder. Apparently, we weren’t speaking about what I’d shared with him upstairs, and that suited me just fine.

Dean sneezed when he came through the hatch into the library above. “Dusty as old bones up here.”

“Look for anything about the Folk,” I told him. “Tremaine knows everything about me and I know nothing about them, except that they like to play tricks.”

“And I could have told you that.” Dean flashed me a grin and reached for a book. He stopped, hand fluttering in front of the shelves on the far side of the attic.

I joined him, staring at the gap between the journals and papers, which revealed nothing to my eye except water-stained plaster. “What’s wrong?”

Dean’s eyebrows drew together. “You know there’s another room back here, right?”

I snapped my gaze to his. “What?”

“Another room,” Dean said. “I feel it. Open space, hidden space.” He shook his head, like someone had slapped him. “A place that got lost. I found it.”

Hidden rooms in hidden rooms. Perhaps this room held what I needed to fulfill my bargain with Tremaine.

“There’s got to be a locking lever and a switch here somewhere,” I said. I put my hand on the wood near Dean’s trembling palm. I let my own Weird unfurl, ever so delicately, like letting just a few grains from a handful of sand slip through your fingertips. The switch twitched against my mind, the lock and the wheels all clicking into place with that pressing fullness.

It wasn’t nearly as torturous as when the ghouls had found Cal and me, but it hurt more than enough. After a moment the entire section of wall swung away, ponderous under the weight of its volumes.

“Our own little hideaway,” Dean said. “I think I might like this.”

“Behave yourself,” I said. Abruptly my feet were as unsteady as if we were at sea. I couldn’t be distracted by Dean and what he did to me, even if I wanted to be for the first time ever, with anyone.

Dean’s lighter snapped and the dancing flame sent slivers of bright into the corners of the dingy space beyond. He sucked in a breath, focusing the blue flame on my face. “You’re leaking, doll.”

I felt under my nose with the back of my hand, saw the skin streaked crimson black. “Dammit,” I said, swiping at the blood.

Dean held out his bandanna with his free hand. “Put your head forward until it stops.”

I did as he bade, and he watched me with a calculating eye. “This happen every time?” he said quietly.

I shrugged as best I could with a blood-soaked rag on my face. “I’ll let you know once I’ve used it more than twice,” I told him, muffled. The trickle of red from my nose eventually ceased, and I laid the rag aside. Taking a moment to compose myself, I nodded at Dean.

“Let’s take a look at this hideaway of yours, shall we?” I was relieved that I kept the quiver out of my voice. If this was the result of using the Weird to open a door, what would happen if I tried to stop a jitney or manipulate Graystone’s clockwork in earnest? I didn’t particularly care to think of it at the moment.

“This is something else,” Dean said, as the lighter’s flickering flame caressed the hidden room with fingers of shadow and light.

I spied a worktable, covered with bundles of plants and bell jars of long-dead animal specimens, a ruin of gears and machine parts alongside all the trappings of witchcraft that we’d been warned of by the Proctors—chalk, candles, red string and black, petrified frogs and eyeballs of unknown origin. Enough evidence to earn the owner a stint in the Catacombs that only ended when he was carried out dead. Claiming to believe in this stuff was bad enough. Actually practicing it, even though the Proctors repeated over and over and over that magic was fake and witches were only charlatans, was a death sentence back home.

And it might be here too, though for very different reasons.

“This is some workshop,” Dean said. “I don’t know what your old man was up to, but this isn’t something I’d let get around.”

“I think my life’s complicated enough,” I agreed. I investigated the curio cases and devices scattered about the perimeter of the room. A few I’d seen before, in lanternreels or in my textbooks. A bell-shaped diving helmet with a pair of air filters attached to the front; a hand telescope with a plethora of extra lenses, attached to a pair of goggles and a headband; and a gun-shaped device with a glass bulb soldered to the end. Aether swished back and forth gently inside the barrel, blossoming and folding within the glass.

I started for the cabinet, but Dean curled his fingers around my shoulder. “Could be dangerous.”

“I’ll take my chances,” I said. I picked up the goggles and slipped them over my eyes. The lens in place at the moment was blue, and the room jumped into sharp black-and-white relief. I rotated the brass dial on the rim of the hand telescope, and a wavering green-blue lens that picked up Dean as an outline of crimson body heat moved into place, followed by a lens that outlined all of the witchcraft paraphernalia in the workshop in bilious green, wavering like seaweed in a current. My vision bulged as if I were looking through a fish’s eye, throwing me off balance and roiling my stomach until I removed the set from my eyes. The effect wasn’t as bad as the one caused by the goggles Tremaine had given me, but these goggles were definitely something of my father’s design. I’d never seen anything like them.

I smoothed my hair. “These things are incredible,” I said, pulse quickening. Devices, machines—this sort of thing was familiar, and yet exciting, because I had never seen
machines like these in Lovecraft. “Want to try?” I asked Dean.

He shook his head with a smile. “Not much scares you, does it, Aoife?”

“Plenty,” I said. “Plenty scares me. But not the dark and what
might
be in there. I’ve plenty of facts that frighten me more than shadows and spooks.”

“Spooks are spooks for a reason,” Dean said. “I’ve seen a few things that’d straighten your hair.”

I started to tell Dean that the specter of encroaching madness, the ever-present Proctors and knowing that your life had a chronometer attached to it was worse than any ghost tale, but before I could, the world fell away.

The twisting, churning, falling sensation was worse this time, my being stretched thin across too many universes. Dean’s hand slipped from mine, and I heard the flutter of a thousand wings before I landed, upright, in a room lit only by firelight.

“There, now,” Tremaine said. “I did tell you we’d speak again.”

“ ’S not been a week yet,” I panted. “I have more time.”

Dean, mercifully, was with me when I glanced over. He went down on a knee and clutched at his forehead. “What in the frozen starry hell is all this?”

“Dean,” I sighed, “this is Tremaine.”

Tremaine stepped forward and held out his hand to me. “My dear. You may leave the
hexenring.
” His cold pale eyes locked on Dean. “Your companion, however, stays where he is. He has the sheen of clever wickedness about him.”

“Get bent, paleface,” Dean gritted. His face was bereft of color except for two spots of flame in his cheeks, and sweat marked all the hollows of his face.

“Breathe,” I told him, trying to let him know with my eyes we’d be all right. “It gets better.”

“Hurry along, child,” Tremaine said. “Decades are running through the boy’s fingers while you dawdle. You don’t want to have an old, gray steed in place of a fine yearling when we’re through, do you?”

“I’m not ready to help you,” I insisted. “I’m still learning how to use the Weird.”

“Aoife, I did not bring you to chastise you.” Tremaine let go of my hand as soon as I’d crossed the
hexenring
. The floor of the room was earthen and white mushrooms sprouted in every corner, phosphorescent in the dim light. It was a haunted place, all shadow and glow. The walls were composed of rushes, sprouting moss that swayed overhead like the sighing of lost souls. The fire itself was purple-tinged and ghostly. The only solid, dead thing in the room was a stone table, with deep grooves in the sides and a depression at one end.

Tremaine passed his fingers against the hollowed spot and gave me a smile so sharp I felt it against my throat. “This is where the head rests during the full moon, you know. There is a hole in the ceiling and in their final moment, one may view the cold fire of our stars.”

“Dreadful machines,” I murmured, my stomach turning over. “That seems to be your hallmark.”

Tremaine’s smile dropped off. “You weren’t defiant last time we spoke. I prefer that.”

“This is what you get,” I said, sticking out my chin. It
had started as Dean’s gesture, but I’d adopted it as my own. “You can like it or not. If you hadn’t lied about how much time I had, I might be more inclined to behave.”

Tremaine moved around the table, his image blinking in and out like a faulty lanternreel. One moment he was feet from me, the next he loomed up in my vision and his knuckles connected with my face, a sharp backhand slap that echoed inside the domed room.

I stumbled, felt my head ring from the blow and couldn’t believe Tremaine had actually hit me. Dean rushed at Tremaine, but the Folk held up a pale beringed hand.

“You step over that line, boy, and you will disintegrate like so much dust in a storm. Think before you do it, greaseblood. Think very hard.”

Dean pulled his boot back from the line of toadstools. “All right,” he gritted. “But don’t think I won’t pay you in full for hitting her.”

Tremaine turned his back on Dean like he was no more than a mumbling hobo on a Lovecraft street and pulled me up from my hunched position. “Now that I’ve knocked you sensible, Aoife, you need to listen.” He gripped me hard, hard enough to grind my wrist bones. “Come along. There’s a good girl.”

“Dean …,” I said as Tremaine jerked me toward the long grass-woven curtains that served as the door of the dome. I couldn’t leave Dean. Not here.

“This is not for his ears,” Tremaine said. We passed through the curtain and I gasped to find myself back in the lily field.

Under the cold steel moon, the coffins of the queens glowed. The light writhed and caressed the sleeping visage
of the Folk girls, an unearthly borealis that turned the flowers and the faces of the queens into something spectral and transparent, an illusion that flickered and flamed and danced.

“Don’t think I enjoyed that,” Tremaine said. “I do not take pleasure in pain.”

My face throbbed, and I could taste a little blood where my cheek scraped my teeth. I swallowed it and didn’t say anything, just glared and hoped Tremaine would melt under my gaze.

“You’ve used the Weird,” Tremaine said. “But you don’t understand it. I tell you now, what you need for my task can’t be found in the shortsighted journal of a foolish man.”