The Iron Thorn (48 page)

“Have you …” My voice was rough and squeaky, and I abhorred Cal thinking I was frightened of him, even though he unsettled me. I cleared my throat behind my hand. “Have you always been able to turn into a human?”

“It’s called taking the skin.” Cal’s tongue darted out and
over his lips. “It’s shape-shifting. I’m not human. Isn’t that what you’re trying to say?”

I tossed up my hands. “Hell, Cal. You’re a monster that mothers threaten children with and you’re still touchy as an ugly girl in a pretty dress.”

After a moment, I heard a gentle snorting in the dark. The snorting turned into chuckling, Cal’s laughter, familiar and safe.

I joined, unable to keep a most unladylike giggle from rising to the surface.

“Do you remember when we hid an aethervox under Marcos’s bed and convinced him his room was haunted?” Cal asked finally, gasping for breath.

I nodded, clapping a hand over my mouth. “He was ready to take orders for the Master Builder’s seminary to make it stop.”

“You know,” Cal said abruptly, “I have plenty of hearth mates in my nest. We grew together, we learned to hunt together—hunt
humans
together—and Toby is my twin.” He lowered his head. “But I never had a friend until I met you.”

The fear ebbed. That was Cal talking, even if his face was strange.

“I didn’t even have that,” I said after a moment. “I grew up in group homes. Conrad and I …” I trailed off, hoping he’d understand.

“Survival doesn’t make for fast friendships,” Cal agreed. “The goddess Hecate teaches us that any one of us might die on any hunt. Her faces are the Huntress and the Hunger. She forbids frivolity. Friendship and love make the
ghul
weak.”

“People, too,” I said. Cal reached for me, then realized there was no way we could clasp hands with his elongated digits, and pulled his paw away.

“Don’t say that, Aoife. You showed me yourself it isn’t always true.”

We came to a junction in the tunnel. Toby stood on his hind legs and scented the air, making himself a head taller than I was. I backed up.

“We’re alone,”
Toby said.
“We can head for home. If you still insist on bringing the meat.”

“I do! And stop calling them meat,” Cal growled.

Toby gave a wet sniff.
“Whatever you say. They’re your problem.”

He scampered down the left-hand tunnel, and Cal padded after him, mumbling under his breath. I followed, glad that I was bringing up the rear with Dean, where nothing could surprise me.

The tunnel widened into a disused water main. Old clay crumbled under my feet. I watched my tread, and nearly plowed into Cal when he stopped abruptly.

Cal pointed to a glow in the distance, where three massive mains made a junction half collapsed from age and disuse. “Up there. It’s home.”

The Gift of the Ghouls

T
HE GHOUL NEST
crouched under the junction like a giant spider, the long fibrous ribbons of the nest tunnels clinging to the ancient drainage main that swept debris from old Lovecraft south and out to the river.

“Go slow,” Cal said. “Let them smell you and see that you’re not hostile.”

I had no desire to rush into the heart of the city’s worst nightmare, and I stopped a few yards from the waist-high hole that was the nest’s entrance.

The ghoul nest was woven from snatches of metal and leather, canvas and fabric, humped tents clustered around a central hub wafting gentle smoke that smelled of char and something richer and darker. An old, old memory, of a madhouse surgery after my mother broke her mirror into a knifelike shard, called back to me. I was smelling blood.

An ancient jitney, so old it still bore the seal of the Massachusetts Transit Authority rather than the City seal,
contained a horde of ghoul pups, all jockeying for position at the windows. They bared their teeth, pocketknives instead of wicked blades, but still sharp enough to eat me.

“Ever feel like an entrée?” Dean muttered. “All we need is a little drawn butter.”

“Mother!”
Toby called, dropping onto all four limbs so he could pass easily into the nest.
“We’re home. We’re all home!”

“Your mother lives in there?” I said, then realized I sounded as spoiled as any typical Uptown princess. “I mean, of course she does.”

Cal looked to me. “This is what Draven said he’d come and burn to ashes.” His eyes begged me to understand.

A female ghoul half my height came forth, an ivory-handled walking stick in her grasp. Though she limped on two legs, her hair was only half silver, and twisted into gypsy braids, and her arms and legs were banded with iron muscle. There was a scar across her smushed nose, and unlike Cal, nothing human glinted in her gaze.
“We?”
she demanded.
“I sent you out for a simple errand, October, and you return with—”

Cal lifted one paw. “It’s me, Mother. I came back.”

The woman’s walking stick clattered out of her grasp, and she let out a sound that was half shriek and half sob.
“Carver!”
she gasped.
“I thought we’d next see you in the hunting halls beyond.…”

They met halfway between the nest and where I stood, and I couldn’t help but feel a stab close to my heart when Cal threw his arms around his mother.

I wouldn’t get the chance to do the same with Nerissa. I wouldn’t ever see Conrad again.

The pups bounded forward from the doors and windows
of the jitney, chattering to Cal and Toby and, thankfully, ignoring Dean and me.

Toby laid his hands on the heads of the two smallest and growled gently, shaking them by their scruffs. The rest mobbed Cal, climbing up his legs and into his arms, demanding to know where he’d been and if he’d brought them presents from aboveground.

Cal and Toby’s mother turned her eyes on Dean and me while Cal roughhoused with the pups.

“Does some kind soul wish to tell me why there is live meat at my door?”

Dean stepped forward and extended his hand. “Dean Harrison, ma’am.”

Cal’s mother snarled at his fingers, and Dean snapped his hand out of range. I felt my eyes widen at the sight and size of her teeth.

“Erlkin,”
she snarled.
“We’ll have none of your trickery here.”

“No, ma’am,” Dean assured her, eyes the size of quarters. The crone humphed, and picked up her stick once more, jabbing it at me.

“A female, young … you’re the bag of bones my boy was taken and tortured over.”

My knees knocked at her cut-glass gaze. Her eyes were the same color as Cal’s but sharper, tempered with anger and more sights of the hard world. “Yes,” I said quietly. “I suppose I am. My name’s Aoife Grayson.”

“I don’t give a tinker’s damn what your name is, meat,”
she croaked, reaching up to pinch my arm. Her claws dug into my skin.
“You’re barely fit for a cook pot, never mind my boy’s life.”

“Mother …” Cal shifted in place.

“I’m sorry that Draven took Cal away from you,” I said. “But we’ve helped each other get free of him, and I don’t have anywhere else to go.” I stiffened my spine against the next words, which I could hardly believe flew out in the face of something that could tear me limb from limb. “If you don’t like it, I suggest you ask your son about me.”

“Carver, what foolishness is she spouting?”
Cal’s mother demanded, jabbing one clawed finger at me. There was something dark and crusted at the end of her talon.

“The Proctors want to burn me,” I elucidated. “The Kindly Folk have threatened to kill me, and I may or may not be going mad inside of a week. So if it pleases you …” I paused and waited for her name.

“Reason.”
She spat it at me, with a hiss on the end.

“If it pleases you, Reason, I’m here to fulfill my duty to my father and my friends and then accept whatever fate is mine, and being called names and threatened is, frankly, nothing new.”

Cal’s mother looked me up and down, a pale white tongue flicking over her spotted lips. I didn’t know if she was about to slap me or eat me, but I stood fast.

“You’re still meat,”
she said at last, and then tapped Cal on the leg with her cane.
“But for the life of my son, you gain yours.”
She put her teeth away, her grimace becoming something marginally less terrifying.
“Bring them inside, Carver. Who taught you manners?”

“You did,” Cal shot back. Reason gave him a quick box on the ear, and when Cal hissed in pain her smile vanished.

“You’re hurt,”
she exclaimed.

“It’s my fault,” I piped up. “The Proctors said they
wanted information. But I really think Draven just paid him back for not stopping me soon enough.”

Reason glared at me over the top of Cal’s head.
“You think that you’re special, little girl? You have something extra the other meatbags don’t?”

“I have a task,” I said quietly. “And I’m sorry that Cal got caught up in it, but he was protecting me. You can be proud of him for that.”

Reason put her arm around Cal and drew him away from me.
“I don’t need to hear from human meat that my boy is a good boy. I know it.”

They disappeared into the nest, and Toby followed them.
“You can wait with me,”
he grumbled.
“Cal’s the baby of our litter. Mother fusses, but he’ll be fine soon enough.”

I ducked my head to fit into the door of the nest, the scent of burnt meat and wood smoke filling my nostrils. My eyes watered from the close, hot atmosphere, but the nest was clean and dry, and soon enough we came through the woven tunnel to a center point.

Toby flopped down on his haunches with a sigh.
“This is our hearth. Never had any humans sitting at it before.”

“First time for everything,” Dean said, sitting cross-legged next to Toby. Dean’s shoulders were tight, but he took pains to settle himself close enough to Toby that the ghoul could have leaned over and bitten him in the throat.

I sat on Toby’s other side, showing the same trust. Beds of shredded rags and hay and small coal fires dotted the ground of the central nest. The air was close and heavy but not spoiled, laden with spice and tang. The hearth itself was a brick chimney built around a heat source drifting up from below the brick. The rotten-egg scent of a pipe fire was
missing, but the chimney exuded warmth, and I curled against the outer wall.

Presently, Cal and Reason returned, Cal’s bruises and cuts faded to weeks old rather than hours. Cal crouched next to me, and I brushed a finger over his temple. His skin as a ghoul had a velvet cast, nothing like the slimy, clammy hide I’d first touched when he’d changed.

“You’re all fixed,” I said. “Good as if I fixed you myself.”

Cal grinned at me. I still wasn’t able to reconcile his teeth with the boy I’d known, but it was getting easier to look at him. “I’m not sorry about what happened in Ravenhouse.”

I smiled. “Me either.”

He pointed down a tunnel off the hearth. “I’m going to sleep. You and Dean can stay by the hearth. None of the others will bother you there, but don’t wander around. You smell pretty tasty.”

“Just what every girl wants to hear,” I told him. “We won’t go anywhere.”

“Don’t,” he said. “Not all of us feel the same way about humans.” He crawled off down the tunnel, and after a time Toby took his leave as well.

I poked in corners of the hearth room a bit, while Dean dozed with one eye open against the warm brick. “You need a pillow, princess, I’ve got an arm,” he said.

“I’m not tired,” I told him, fingering a dog-eared, year-old copy of
Amazing Stories
. I smiled to myself. Knowing that Cal’s love for trashy pulps, at least, hadn’t been a lie eased the wound his true face had left.

Dean drifted to sleep while I examined the detritus that the ghouls had collected—broken china, collections of
gears that came from a hundred different machines, a single red patent-leather pump. Shards of glass and metal hung on red string from the ceiling, refracting the gentle light from the gaps in the hearth chimney. Broken dolls were nailed in rows along the walls of the nest, their empty eyes staring down at me. At the apex of the roof, glass globes from old lamps had been arranged on wire to reflect our solar system. A ghoul had made a miniature universe above my head, stars and planets spinning slowly in their orbit.

Even here, ghouls saw the same stars I did, though not in the same way. They saw broken, fractured, fragile glass, while I saw the only constant in the world. The sky was the sky, no matter where I stood.

Except, it appeared, under the ground.

To distract myself from the cold knowledge of where I’d ended up in my mad plan to awaken the queens, I tried to discern how the hearth chimney worked. A small cooking door sat nestled into the hand-laid brick, and I turned the wheel to crank it open. Heat pinked my face as I squinted into the depths of the hearth. A steam pipe sat in the center of the brick, puffing fragrant warmth into the open air. My Weird prickled as I realized what I was seeing. I gasped and then shouted for Dean.

He came upright with a start, and Cal and Toby appeared from the nest tunnels.