The Iron Thorn (45 page)

Draven passed a hand over his forehead. “It was terrible, terrible what happened. My father was only a boy, but he spoke of the magical cataclysms, the strange creatures that flowed unencumbered through the gateway Tesla ripped open. They called it the Storm. And a brotherhood stepped forward, composed of sorcerers and scientists and madmen. They beat back the Storm. They created the gates with magic and the wonder of Tesla’s technology. But they were not good men.”

I stayed silent, not giving Draven the reaction he clearly wanted, even though my brain was racing to assimilate his version of history. His nostrils flared as he inhaled sharply. “They did not see that the only way was to cleanse the world of
all
supernatural corruption. We did. And so we called them heretics. We erased magic from all the corners of the earth, and only a few times has it reared its head since. But we’ll burn them out. Have no fear. And magic will always be a lie, be no more substantial than a shadow, as long as people believe it’s really only the necrovirus.”

He stepped to his desk and pressed his buzzer as I watched him, insensible.

The necrovirus wasn’t real.

Magic was.

Draven had known all along. He’d let it go on, the burnings and the lockdowns and people like my mother being
shoved into madhouses. Why, I didn’t know, and it didn’t matter.

Everything about Lovecraft was a lie. Everything about this modern, scientific world, the ghoul traps and the madhouses and the worship of reason, was wrong.

Before I could scream, Quinn and another officer appeared. Draven jerked his chin. “Take her to interrogation and test her blood for the usual panel of infection. She’s been outside the city limits. She’s a contamination risk.”

“Let me go!” I screamed as they dragged me along. I lost one of my shoes on the thick carpet, skinned my knees as I thrashed and the Proctors wrestled me along. The truth was sinking in, and as Draven had warned, it was terrible. My head spun and I thrashed like I was a spastic in my mother’s asylum. “Let me go! I’m not contaminated! There
is
no necrovirus! He’s a liar!”

As Quinn and the other officer dragged me away, Draven placed his hand on my carpetbag, on my father’s journal and the goggles and the invigorator, as if they belonged to him, and then he met my eyes and tipped me a wink.

Draven and I. United in the awful, world-burning truth.

The door of Draven’s office slammed shut and then only my own voice echoed down Ravenhouse’s long iron halls.

The interrogation room was bleak and bare, entirely different from Draven’s office. There were no bones of finery here, just concrete and one-way glass.

Cal would have loved it, I thought. It was just like his novels and Saturday matinees. Sweat the villains and make them talk.

“Doctor’s coming in,” Quinn said. “Don’t you make a move, kid.”

My lip had stopped bleeding. Now it just felt swollen and sticky, like I’d let candy melt and linger on my tongue.

I counted stains on the acoustic tiles of the ceiling until the door buzzed and admitted a man in a white coat with a black leather bag. He had a cotton surgery mask over the lower half of his face, but he was taller than Quinn, rangier.

“This is her?” He reeled himself to a quick stop inside the door.

“What?” Quinn said. “You were expecting Al Capone?”

“She doesn’t look contaminated.” The doctor took an identical mask from his bag and handed it to Quinn. “But all the same, I need to ask you to put this on and leave the room.”

Quinn blanched. “I might be exposed?”

It’d serve him right, I thought. Every one of them, if they did contract something nasty from Thorn. Get devoured by a nightjar, or see what really lurked in the Mists. Every last stinking Proctor on earth fed to a corpse-drinker. That would be a start.

“Necrovirus is not transmitted through the air,” the doctor said. “As far as we know. But there are procedures the public health office must follow. Now please, for your own safety. Wait outside until I’ve drawn her blood.”

The Proctor scuttled out of the room, and the door slammed and locked.

“Oh yes,” I said loudly, to the door. “Watch out for the big, bad necrovirus.” Draven and the Proctors had lied to everyone. I couldn’t even begin to contemplate what their lie meant for me. For my madness. For my family. If there
was no necrovirus, then … what? What made my mother believe dreams and visions over reality, even if some of them had come true? Because she certainly wasn’t normal. What had made Conrad transform, at least for a moment, into someone who’d spill my blood?

And when my birthday turned over, what in all of cold space would happen to
me
?

The doctor gave me a smile from behind his mask, seemingly impervious to my shouting panic. “Pretty grim in here, isn’t it?”

“It’s not a vacation to Cape Cod, that’s for sure,” I grumbled. The doctor chuckled.

“Keeping your sense of humor. That’s important.” He took out a rubber cord and a syringe. “I’m going to roll up your sleeve, since you’re shackled. Is that all right?”

“There is no necrovirus,” I insisted. “I’m not infected. Draven lied.…” I realized that my frantic denials at least
sounded
crazy to somebody who was a doctor, a man of science. I had to try to convince him and not sound like a lunatic. “I haven’t contacted any … any virals,” I amended. The word sounded so trite now. If there was no virus, there could be no virals.

My shoggoth bite still throbbed when I moved too quickly.

What was a shoggoth really? A monster? A thing from beyond the stars, fallen to earth? A creature that had oozed into our land from Thorn?

“I know,” the doctor said. He tied the cord around my arm and slapped the inside of my elbow with two fingers. I blinked at him, not understanding.

“You do?”

“I do.” The doctor picked up his syringe and laid it against the blue vein crawling up my arm.

“How do you know?” I pulled away as much as the shackles would allow.
What
did he know?

“Listen to me very carefully,” the doctor said. His eyes bored into mine, stony green as if they’d been mined from some dark, secret cave. “In fifteen seconds, the aether and vox feed for the interrogation rooms will be interrupted. Look around the room. What do you see?”

“I …” I tried not to gape. I might have a week ago, but now I just darted my gaze from the mirrored glass to the tired blue aether lamp bolted into the ceiling to the scuff marks, slimy and concentric, in the cement from a poor job of mopping.

“You’re going to have less than thirty seconds in the dark,” said the doctor, jamming the needle into my arm and filling the long glass tube with blood, ignoring me when I gasped and jerked. “Go through the vent. Go quickly.”

“Who
are
you?” I said. I might not be surprised any longer but I was just as bewildered.

The doctor snapped the band off my arm and zipped his bag closed. “You know who I am, Aoife.”

He backed away from me and pressed the door buzzer. I jumped from my seat, feeling like I was moving through a molten river, but I couldn’t let him leave before I’d seen his face.

I wasn’t quick enough. The doctor stepped through the door, vanishing like he was a vision borne by madness.

A half second later, the aether lamp went out.

Darkness closed over my head like a drowning pool, and
I moved forward on instinct. I fetched my shin against the metal leg of the table and bit back a curse.

Go through the vent. Go quickly
. Doctor’s words echoing in my mind, I closed the distance to the far wall and reached up with my shackled hands to grasp the vent cover. It was coated with dust and grease, but it fell away easily enough.

Climbing in with my hands bound was nearly impossible, but the doctor hadn’t gifted me with a key or a leg up. Just the darkness.

Outside the room, there was shouting, and the door buzzed. Quinn was coming back, coming to see that his prisoner was still in her rightful place and to administer pain if she wasn’t.

I jumped and landed half in, half out of the vent, bashing my forehead on the top and my stomach on the lip.

Pain was tertiary. I could feel it later, for any length of time it desired. Now I felt as if there were a furnace inside me, a steam engine pressurized to bursting. I crawled for my life, using my elbows, my knees, bruising and skinning all of the sharp edges of myself.

I was perhaps fifteen meters down the vent when the lights came back on. A junction presented itself and I curled up in a ball, rolling to the left just as a hand lantern’s light sliced the spot where I’d been.

“Foul the gears! She’s in the ventilation!” Quinn’s nasal voice, made sharper by bouncing off metal, followed me. “Lock down Ravenhouse. Get officers at all the exits. Alert the raven mechanics to have a flight ready to sweep the city.”

I kept crawling, his exhortations to his fellows growing
fainter and fainter. I passed over grates, saw Proctors running to and fro like insects in a man-sized ant farm.

When I felt like I had stripped every last shred of skin from my knees, I stopped, panting, above a grate that covered me in bars of light.

The door in the room below swung open and I heard the clank of shackles. “Get in and stay put!” a Proctor shouted.

“Up your vents!” the prisoner snapped back. I froze in place, curling my fingers over the vent. I knew the voice, the tall silhouette and the dark hair.

Dean.

The Proctor’s Truth

“D
EAN!” I HISSED
. He cast about for a moment and then looked up.

“Aoife?” His mouth slackened. “What the hell are you doing up there?”

“Long story,” I said. “I promise, when we’ve gotten away from here I’ll explain in full.” I shoved on the vent until it gave, then swung myself down, wincing as I landed. I had knocked myself around but good getting out of the interrogation room.

Dean helped me up as best he could with his hands shackled, pressing his forehead against mine. “I can’t believe you’re here. I thought I’d never clap eyes on you again.”

I breathed in for a moment, letting his scent of leather and cigarettes and boy calm my ragged breathing. “They tried,” I whispered. “But it’ll take a little more to get rid of me for good.” I held out my hands. “I think I can slip the
door, but these shackles are another matter.” The skeleton lock, complex and virtually without moving parts, gave not a whisper to my Weird.

“Leave that to me,” Dean said. “Got a hairpin, princess?”

I reached up and snatched one from my bun, which had become just another one of my wild nests of hair in the face of Proctor force.

“I met Grey Draven,” I said as Dean went to work on my shackles. Even with his hands tied, he was quick and smooth as a cardsharp shuffling a deck.

“No kidding.” Dean stuck the tip of his tongue between his teeth as he worked the lock. “Always gave me the creeps in the lanternreels. He has those dead-man eyes, like he sees everything at once.”

“He told me some things,” I said very quietly. “Some really terrible things, Dean. About me, about my father—”

“Got it!” he said as my handcuffs snapped open. He handed me the pin. “I’ll talk you through it—get mine off and we’re gone, baby, gone.”

“There is no necrovirus,” I said as I went to work on Dean’s shackles. “They made it up. Draven knows about the Folk. He told me how the gateways between Iron and Thorn used to be open. How people like my father have been trying to keep the balance while the Proctors just lie. Draven knows everything about me.”

“That’s …” Dean shook his head. There was a long time where the only sound was the scrape of the pin against the lock. “Aoife, I don’t know what you want me to say to make that all right,” he said at last.

“Nothing,” I said as I wiggled the pin in his locks. “Don’t say anything. I just had to tell someone before I exploded.”

“So if there’s no virus”—Dean gave a long breath of relief as his shackles came loose, and rubbed his raw wrists—“what’s wrong with your old lady and your brother?”

I turned to the door, laying my cheek against the metal, caressing the lock and the handle with my Weird. “I don’t know,” I told Dean. “But something is making us mad, and I aim to find out what.” I had always known that Nerissa’s behavior and her hallucinations and my dreams weren’t normal, never mind my own brother coming at me with a knife. There was still something in our blood. But now, at least, there might be a real cure.

The lock popped and the door swung open before me. The Weird was quiet in this place encased in iron, easier to control. I flinched as my nose began to leak blood again. My vision slurred left and right as I stumbled along the wall with Dean.

“We need to find Cal,” I gasped. “Draven said … he said for the Proctors to torture him.…”

I became aware that Dean was no longer behind me.

“I don’t think we’re going to get far on that plan, princess,” he said, and I turned to watch him put up his hands. My stomach plummeted. We’d been so close.

“Nice to see you again.” Quinn was flanked by two other Proctors, and they were all armed. He shouldered his weapon and snatched me by the arm. “Be a good little girl this time,” he whispered. He dragged me away from Dean and down flights of stairs, until dripping water and mold told me I was deep beneath the earth. We spilled into a hallway containing a row of iron doors lit only by a series of aether lanterns hung from crossbeams.