Iron Codex 2 - The Nightmare Garden (26 page)

Conrad looked at the ground, looked back at Archie. Veins stuck out in his neck and at his temples, and his face turned crimson. I took a step toward him, to try to calm him down, but he beat me back with a glare.

Archie sighed and then went over and patted Conrad on the back. “That’s enough. Don’t hurt yourself.”

Conrad let out his breath in a rush, white mist meeting the freezing air. “I can’t do it, all right?” he shouted. “I’ve waited and waited and tried every damn thing—fire,
water, wind, even machines, like Aoife—and I can’t do it. I’m useless.”

He stormed past us and back toward the house. I ran after him without thinking. “Conrad, wait!”

I caught him by the arm as he reached the steps, and he shook me off. “Why should you care?” he growled. “You’re the one he wants, aren’t you? You’ve got the gift.”

I reminded myself he was angry and probably didn’t mean it as cruelly as it came across. I grabbed his arm when he tried to run off again, harder. “You think this is a gift?” I whispered. I could barely hear myself over the wind. “Conrad, all it means is I have something in my blood that can kill me, that can split my skull apart if I try to control it, and that makes me a target for everyone in the Thorn and Iron Lands who wants a pet Gateminder. It doesn’t make me better. It doesn’t make me not your sister. Forget about what Archie thinks.
You’re
my family. You’re the only one I’ve known until now.” I stopped talking, but held on. I wanted the distance between us to stop. I wanted this painful chasm of bad feeling and resentment to close.

Conrad snarled for a moment, looking for all the world as if he was going to slap me across the face, but then he collapsed, wrapping his arms around me so tightly I couldn’t breathe.

I hugged him back, as hard as I could. Relief flooded through me. This was the Conrad I knew, the one I’d grown up with.

I realized amid my pounding heart and the wind that Conrad was saying something to me, and I pulled back to listen. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so, so sorry, Aoife.”

“For what?” I said, confused. “Neither of us has been very nice lately, but that’s not—”

“No.” Conrad tugged my scarf down. I flinched when he touched my scar but squeezed his hand between my own.

“It wasn’t your fault. The iron madness—”

“Nothing will make my attacking you all right, Aoife,” he said. “Not the fact that I was crazy, not the fact that I’m in remission. Nothing will make this mess with me making you come find me all right. Just let me say I’m sorry.”

I dropped his hand and nodded, pulling off my scarf on my own. “I forgive you, Conrad.” After everything that had happened, the words that had once stuck in my throat at merely thinking them came without any effort at all.

Conrad didn’t say anything; he just buried his face against my shoulder. We stayed that way for a minute, until Archie came up and coughed softly. He looked almost ashamed to be intruding, and I thought it sort of served him right. He was trying to teach Conrad to be a survivor, but calling him out had been cruel. I held on to my brother protectively as Archie spoke.

“I think that’s enough for today, son. You can go on back to the house.” He gave Conrad an awkward tap on the shoulder, the sort of male gesture that somehow conveyed it was all right, that he wasn’t really mad.

Once my brother had gone out of earshot, Archie turned to me and shook his head. “This is going to cause an epic uproar, I hope you know. There has
never
been a female Gateminder, not in the hundred and twenty years since Tesla made the damn things in the first place. If you turn out to be my heir with the Weird—and let’s face it, we
both know it’s likely after your brother’s performance just now … Well. There’s going to be some hurt feelings in the Brotherhood.”

I didn’t particularly care what sort of uproar I’d cause. By now, I was pretty used to being the one who made everything go sideways for the people in charge. “Are you mad at me?” I asked my father. He gave me a look as if I were going crazier than I already was.

“Of course not. I’m damn proud of you. You’re smart, and your Weird is something to behold. Once we toughen you up, you’re going to do a much better job of this whole thing than me.”

I blushed a little. Inspiring pride in Archie was a new sensation, and I liked it. “But without the Brotherhood, what good are the Gateminders?” I asked. “What will it matter if it passes to me?”

“We’re still the only humans who can open Gates,” Archie said. “In this world or any other. As long as that’s the case, we have a duty to police what comes through, whether or not those fat cats who’ve taken over the Brotherhood have a say.”

I kicked a furrow in the sand with my foot. It was a lot of responsibility. But it certainly wasn’t more than what I’d already decided to shoulder myself: to find the nightmare clock. That was what I had to do, above all else.

“I’ll do my best,” I said to my father. I felt lousier than I admitted about lying to him, even partially. But his falling-out with the Brotherhood wasn’t mine, and I needed a look at the Iron Codex, now more than ever. I needed a way to find the nightmare clock and use it, and Archie couldn’t do that for me.

I was as ready as I was ever going to be, I realized. And I was going to have to disobey my father to do what I needed to do—only, now there was at least the small hope that he’d forgive me after the fact for running off on my own.

Archie pulled me in with one arm and gave me a squeeze. “Thank you,” he said.

I frowned in confusion. “For what, Dad?”

“Trusting me,” he said. “I know it was a lot to ask. All I ask now is that you keep being smart, and strong, and trust yourself.” He held me at arm’s length, and for the first time the expression in his eyes softened when he looked at me. I wouldn’t have called it fatherly, but it was no longer calculating. “Trust yourself, Aoife. And never stop fighting.”

Trusting other people doesn’t come easily to you when you’ve never had someone who trusts you. But I had to tell someone about my dreams of the dark figure and the spinning worlds beyond his glass prison, someone who wouldn’t tell Archie or Valentina in turn. Or let it slip to the girl he was infatuated with.

Dean shook his head when I finished, and lit a cigarette. “Hell of a story, Aoife.”

“They’re not regular dreams,” I said. “I’m sure of that. They
feel
too much. I can taste the air and hear the gears clacking, feel the vibrations under my feet.”

“I’ve had some doozies of dreams,” Dean said. “Bourbon and bad diner food will do it. But not lately.” He slid closer to me and draped his arm around my shoulder. “I sleep nice and tight here, princess.”

“It’s different,” I said, blushing at his reminder of the day before. “If the nightmare clock actually exists, and I think it does, Valentina said it can … change things. Reality.” I swallowed, hoping it didn’t sound insane when I said it aloud. “It could put the world right again. The Engine, the Gates, everything.”

“Right.” Dean exhaled. “You mean back like it was, with Proctors and secret prisons and burnings? Because that was top-notch, I gotta say.” Venom dripped from his words.

“Back to where I know why my mother is sick, and I can help her,” I whispered, feeling tears prick at the corners of my eyes and hating my weakness. “And where the Proctors don’t exist at all.”

Dean ground out his cigarette against a porch post. “You’ve got that look, Aoife. Like all the gears are seized. What crazy thing are you thinking of?”

“Someone who knows more than Archie could be a big help,” I said.

“True, but you’re stuck here with dear old Dad,” Dean said. “He’s got his eye on you, to make sure you don’t …” He trailed off and rubbed his chin, not meeting my eyes.

“Blow up an Engine and break the Gates?” I supplied. It was the truth. It shouldn’t have hurt. But it did, and I pulled back.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Dean said. He drew me close again. “I know you feel like you have to put things right. I just don’t want you to get hurt. Besides, who knows more than your old man about this stuff?”

“The Brotherhood,” I said instantly. “They have the Iron Codex—all the knowledge this world has of any other.”

“I thought Archie said we couldn’t trust them,” Dean
said. “People who think they know everything are usually pretty good at hiding stuff, Aoife.”

“But I don’t know anything right now,” I said, all the frustration I’d been feeling earlier cropping up again. “I don’t know if my dad’s right or just paranoid. I’d just like the chance to ask them myself.”

“Well, if you insist,” Dean said. “Let’s bust out of here and go ask ’em. Where do they bunk?”

I shrugged. “No idea.” I looked back at the house, where off-key piano music floated out through the glass. “But I bet Valentina knows all about it.”

Valentina and Archie shared the master bedroom in the Crosley house. The four-poster bed was unmade, and bottles of ink and papers bearing my father’s jagged handwriting were scattered across the writing desk in the corner.

I stood still for a moment, taking in the details of the room. A negligee hung from the door of the wardrobe, and one of Archie’s shirts was crumpled on the floor.

A creak from below reminded me that I was on borrowed time, and I went over to the dressing table, which was covered with rows of makeup pots and perfume bottles and a powder puff, all the tools Valentina had shown me how to use to put my face on. She’d really tried to make this easier on me, and a small part of me felt rotten for snooping now and deceiving the both of them.

But in the greater scheme, if I fixed things, if I used the clock the way Valentina had said some believed it could be used, wouldn’t it justify what I was doing now?

I sure hoped so.

While Dean kept watch on the door, I dug into the drawers, beneath the underthings and the odds and ends of old hairpins and mostly empty bottles.

Valentina had to have something—a letter, her own witch’s alphabet—that would tell me how to connect with the Brotherhood of Iron.

My fingers brushed paper—good, thick vellum paper—and I moved aside a stack of slips to see several oversized envelopes tied with a blue silk ribbon.
Finally
. Elated, I pulled them from the drawer and flipped through them one by one. They were all addressed to
Miss Valentina Gravesend Crosley
in the same precise hand.

I slipped the letters—six of them—out of the envelopes and retied the parcel sans the pages inside the envelopes. That would buy me a little time before Valentina and Archie discovered what I was up to.

What I was up to could be mad; I’d considered that. The iron of the Iron Land could be poisoning me—more slowly than before, it was true—but then, my particular brand of madness had always shown itself first in dreams.

Still, if there was a chance I could put things right, I was going to take it, no matter what the odds might be. I knew myself well enough to know that.

Shoving the letters into the waist of my skirt, I pulled the pin-neat white cardigan Valentina had lent me over the bulge and went back to my own little room.

I propped a chair under the doorknob to avoid being interrupted. I’d hit the jackpot. The letters, all but one, were from Valentina’s father, and he’d signed them
Herbert
Gravesend Crosley
, which just solidified the image I had of Valentina’s parents as stuffy, unappealing sticklers.

Lastly, I unfolded a letter in familiar handwriting—the jagged slanted scrawl of my father. It was old, the ink worn away at the crease, and written on cheaper paper than the rest; it was beginning to fray at the corners.

I shut my eyes and sucked in a breath of the stale air in my room. A love letter. A love letter written when I was still in Lovecraft, when my mother was locked away, when Conrad and I were in some orphanage.

That couldn’t matter now. Shaking my head to clear it, I read on.

Too late, I thought. I gripped the letter hard enough to make tiny tears in the edges of the paper. There was a second Storm now—a slow-moving plague that was pouring from the shattered Gate into the Iron Land, a Storm I’d had a hand in causing when I’d broken the Gates to Thorn.

Archie’s handwriting started to skid off the page, his pen blotting and leaving long dribbles of ink that obliterated entire words.

After that, the words were blotted out, until the very end.

I crumpled the letter and tossed it across the room. It landed in the corner, with a flutter rather than a satisfying bounce.