The Mirrored Shard (6 page)

“It happened right after you left,” he said. “People started falling asleep and not waking up. Or they’d dream so vividly they’d think it was actually happening and they’d do things like walk into traffic or attack their loved ones.”

“The Proctors tried to control it and set up more quarantines,” Cal added, “but they’ve lost a lot of power. There’s all sorts of investigations by the government into their conduct, and without Draven, individual offices have pretty much gone off and done what they liked.”

“Riots in some places,” said Bethina, “and others are on total lockdown. Arkham pretty much got cleaned out, folks taken off to quarantine, after a bad rash of dreamers swept through and tried to light the place on fire.”

“Same thing happened on Cape Cod,” Conrad said. “Proctors were everywhere. Valentina decided to split up from us and try to find help, sympathetic folks in the Brotherhood of Iron, and she made me responsible for getting Dad back here, where he’d be safe.”

I squeezed my father’s hand. This was worse than I ever could have imagined. I’d been warned there were consequences to what I’d done to try to reverse the Fae’s deception and save my mother, but I’d never imagined that they would be so direct, so tangible. That they would hurt my father.

“How long has he been like this? And having the dreams?” I said.

“Nightmares, more like,” Conrad confirmed. “He thrashes and screams—it got so bad last night we had to hold him down. It started right after you left. Valentina found him on the floor of his study, asleep. Nothing on
this earth could rouse him, and she tried everything, believe me.”

“It’s an epidemic,” Bethina said quietly. “All over the country. People goin’ to sleep and not wakin’ up for love or money.”

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered to my father. I didn’t know if my being there could have prevented this, but the plain truth was I hadn’t been. Hadn’t been thinking of anyone except myself and the thin hope that I could get Dean back and put things right via some vague notion fed to me by my mother. She was insane, and by believing her, I was probably just as crazy and desperate in my own way.

My father would be ashamed of me. In that moment,
I
was ashamed of me.

“Can we talk outside?” I said to Conrad, and he looked as if he’d rather do anything but. “Please?” I insisted. Conrad nodded, and I’d never been so relieved to leave a room as when we stepped from the oppressive shadows back into the weak sunlight of the mist-laden day.

We walked in silence the entire length of the lawn and sat on a stone bench by the reflecting pond, the bench covered with moss and pockmarks from decades, if not centuries, of weather. It mirrored the pond, choked with algae and lily pads, speckled with the crimson shards of fallen leaves floating on the surface.

“What was it like?” Conrad said abruptly. He didn’t look at me, just at the water, which rippled as something—a turtle or one of the ancient koi that lurked below the pads—surfaced to snatch at a late-season insect.

“Thorn?” I said. “Boring, mostly. Fae are very stuffy, and very odd. I spent a lot of time with Mother.”

“No,” Conrad said quietly. “Being with her—our mother.”

I thought about that. I’d seen flashes of the old Nerissa, the one who told us stories, took us on walks to search for flowers between cracks in Lovecraft’s sidewalks, let us watch clouds in the park for hours on end rather than going home and tending to things like chores and homework, but mostly I’d seen the new Nerissa, no longer mad, but wholly Fae.

“It was disappointing,” I said, and left it at that. I didn’t tell Conrad about the parts that had been all right, the evenings when we’d sit quietly, just spending time together. Conrad felt abandoned and lost, and I didn’t blame him.

“Then why did you go with her?”

I dug my fingers into the bench, nails carving crescents into the moss and lichen. “I had to, Conrad. She promised me a way to find Dean.”

Conrad turned and stared at me. It was a stare of pure pity, as if he hadn’t realized I was ill and I’d just told him I was terminal.

“Aoife,” he said carefully. “Dean is dead.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I snapped. “I just want to be home and not talk about Thorn anymore.” I prayed that Conrad would drop the Dean business, and thankfully he did. Trying to explain I was still looking for a way to the Deadlands would just get him thinking my iron poisoning was back, that I was mad.

“It’s been weird since you left,” he said. “All around.
Things are happening—it’s almost like an epidemic. Dreams. Madness. The president might have to sit for an impeachment hearing, and the Rationalists are having a fit. It’s like when things were wild all over again.”

Something clicked into place, what the old woman had shouted at me earlier. “Somebody called me a demon this morning,” I said. “A demon from hell. Nobody talks like that. I mean, if they want to stay out of Rationalist jail.”

“Ever since people started falling asleep and the Proctors got stripped of their authority, a lot of that’s been happening,” Conrad said. “I’ve heard rumors that all sorts of creatures are cropping up. People who don’t know the truth blame the necrovirus, but it sounds to me like the barriers between Thorn and Iron and … other places are easier to get past.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. It could all just be mass hysteria. People thinking the world is ending.”

“It’s not ending,” I said quietly. “But this isn’t nothing.” I looked Conrad in the eye. He had our mother’s eyes, pale blue and cloudless, like a new sky after rain. I looked more like my father, both in coloring and features.

Conrad frowned. “Aoife, what are you not telling me?”

I looked up at the sky, at the mist that roiled above our heads like a sea, ancient and birthing primordial creatures onto a phantom shore.

What I’d seen in the Arctic, in the space where dreams were born, had been real. That much was clear to me now.

I told Conrad the truth then, there in the garden. About how I’d tried to reverse what I’d done because of Tremaine, step back through the loopholes of time and undo the damage I’d done to the Lovecraft Engine and the city.
How it hadn’t worked, and how I’d snapped something fundamental in the gears of the worlds, Thorn and Iron and everything in between.

“I thought they weren’t so bad,” I said. “The Old Ones. I thought letting them go was just returning the universe to its natural state. They’re not evil, Conrad. They’re just … alive. A different sort of alive than us, but not malicious.”

“But, if I believe you, they’ve done this.” Conrad’s face was pale and drawn, and he made a sweeping gesture. “It’s them, all of this. All the dreamers and the strangeness. They’re returning to the Iron Land, right? And their influence is driving the entire world insane. How is that not so bad, exactly?” His brow had that crease in it, the one that meant he blamed me, and I couldn’t argue with him.

“I wouldn’t have done it if I’d known,” I mumbled, but even to my ears, it wasn’t convincing.

“I can’t …” Conrad rubbed his hands across his face, and I waited. I’d hoped he’d forgive me, or at least understand. I’d had to do something. What had happened when Tremaine tricked me had to be undone. “I can’t,” Conrad repeated. “I’m sorry, Aoife. I’m done.”

“What do you mean?” I rose as he did, panicked, watching him back away from me. “Conrad, don’t.…”

“You did this,” he said. “It’s because of you that our father is like this. You tried to make it better, and I get that, but you’ve made it worse.”

“Conrad—” I started, but he raised his hand.

“Don’t talk to me, Aoife,” he said. “Don’t try to make this right. I can’t count you as part of my family. We can’t ever repair this.” He started back toward the house. “What’s
done is done. I expect you to be out of Graystone by the morning.”

I could have screamed at him, or run after him and demanded that he hear my side of things, but I just stood there and watched him go. Conrad was even more stubborn than I was.

And he was right. I’d thought that the Old Ones weren’t the evil that the Rationalists preached or the saviors that the Star Sisters, their worshipper sect, insisted they’d be when they returned. When I’d been in the dreaming place, the center of all the worlds, I’d seen them and felt their touch in my mind. It still burned there, as if the mere contact had scarred the channels of my conscience with acid. But I hadn’t felt malice, simply ancient intelligence. Yet to human beings, with their fragile makeup, who was to say the two weren’t one and the same? The Old Ones’ return could simply be too much for the fragile barriers between worlds, and it could signal a fracture that would make them all collapse, one after the other, like dominoes.

I hadn’t known what I was doing, not really, or what I’d set in motion. I’d been trying to save my family, myself. Everything I knew. Trying to put the world back the way it was. What I hadn’t understood was that it couldn’t be that way any longer. I wasn’t the Aoife Grayson who’d left Lovecraft all those months ago, and the world wasn’t the world I’d abandoned for Thorn.

So I let Conrad go, and let the dull ache sit in my chest like a stone while I tried to think of what to do.

Dean was the only thing I could save, at this point. The Old Ones were vast beyond my imagination. There was
no way I could send them back, even if I knew how to access the small nucleus of the dreaming world where I’d found them. Crow, king of dreams, who controlled that place, would not welcome me back. We hadn’t parted on good terms, to say the least. He’d spent millennia keeping the Old Ones at bay from Iron and Thorn and all the living worlds, and in one fell swoop, a changeling who didn’t know what she was truly doing had opened the floodgates, released these ancient, implacable things to do whatever it was they planned to do upon their return to the living parts of the universe.

So it had to be Dean. The Deadlands were my destination now. At least I wouldn’t have to go back into the house to get my things. I doubted that, in the place where the dead went, I’d need clothes or food or anything except what was on my back.

I walked around the edge of the reflecting pond, into the ragged hedge maze that made up one whole side of Graystone’s property. The thing hadn’t been cared for in years, and there were large gaps in the hedgerow that you could pass through, rendering the maze useless.

At the center was a statue, one of the heretical bits and pieces that the Graysons had kept out of view of the Proctors when the Rationalists took control. It depicted a woman holding a fallen soldier, a cowl covering her face. I scrubbed at the oxidized copper plaque until I could read
CUCHULAINN AND THE MORRIGAN
. I had no idea who they were supposed to be—magicians, I guessed, or old gods renounced by the Rationalists.

The crows sat all over the statue, and they didn’t move at
my approach. I was close enough to touch the largest one, and it stared at me with glassy black eyes, never blinking, never moving.

I retreated, discomfited by the birds, who’d been everywhere since I’d emerged from Thorn. Dean had always said they were the watchers, the eyes of the old gods and the magic that veined the world. Even my father’s airship was named after a raven, the most famous raven of all, Munin. My father had told me the story of Odin, a god who sacrificed his eye for wisdom, and who possessed two birds, Hunin and Munin—Thought and Memory—that flew into the world each day and brought knowledge back to Odin in Asgard, where he sat on his throne.

It wasn’t so different, I supposed, from Thorn and Iron, two places connected by the dotted lines of the universe, but at the same time wholly apart. One magic, one iron, one replete with the fantastic and one rooted firmly in the earth whereon it sat. There could be crossover, but there could never be harmony.

I turned my back on the crows, focusing on the Deadlands. My Weird let me cross those lines, fold that page so that I could brush one world against the next, travel from one to the next.

My mother had lured me into the Thorn Land by telling me she knew the way to the Deadlands, but now I was sure it was simple as crossing over to a place I’d never been before. I’d managed to build a Gate to Crow’s dreamworld, and it stood to reason that if I could access that place, I could access the Deadlands.

I didn’t need Nerissa, I thought, bitterness welling in
my stomach. She’d strung me along for months while my father and my friends wasted away here, in an Iron Land thrown into chaos.

Putting aside my anger at my mother and her manipulation, I focused on building the Gate, as I had with the place of dreams. Then, I’d had a focus, something to channel my Weird. This time I was flying blind.

I wasn’t the first person to be able to do this—my much more famous predecessor, Nikola Tesla, had had the gift as well, had conceived of worlds beyond imagination, and was eventually responsible for breaking the bonds between them, creating the world as we knew it.

I didn’t have anything so spectacular in mind. I just needed to make a path, a bridge I could skip across before it collapsed.

Using my Weird felt a bit like standing on railroad tracks as a train approached—a rumble you could sense in your core, a disturbance that fed through every bit of you. My head started to pound, as it usually did, and a trickle of blood worked its way from my nose.

Forming a Gate, the sort of thing that Tesla constructed out of technology and the Fae constructed with their uncanny powers, took a lot of effort. It usually left me spent and drained, racked by headaches for at least a day, but I couldn’t afford that now.

I had to find Dean, and I let that desire pull me toward the gray spots between the bright beacons of Thorn and Iron and all the places in between that I could travel.

I could practically feel him, his warm chest against my cheek, smell his smell, hear his laugh. I was so close that
the tears leaking from my eyes had nothing to do with the pain I experienced as the Gate opened in front of me.

Then, as quickly as I’d felt my Weird begin to respond to my desires, everything went wrong.

A scream ripped through the empty spaces that I saw when I opened myself to my Weird, and I felt a tug against the center of myself as if a jitney had slammed into me. Light exploded in front of my eyes and panic rose in my throat, along with a scream of my own. This had never happened before, and I didn’t know what I could do except be buffeted by a wave of resistance as I glimpsed a sliver of a gray sky and a black, twisted tree in a field of brown grass. Then I saw nothing, simply black velvet cut through by pinpricks of light.