The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [113]
“My life wasn’t so great before I came here,” I muttered. “Trust me.”
“You accept this, you can never go home,” Dean said. “You can never work with those machines you love. You can never be anything but a heretic to all of those nice, rational folks back there in Lovecraft. Because trust me on this, princess: they will turn on you faster than ghouls fighting over a corpse. That something you’re willing to give up?”
I drew back, feeling like he’d slapped me. But I knew, even as I felt my eyes get hot and wet, that he was telling the truth. I could never go back. The Proctors would arrest me. I’d be lucky to be locked up with Nerissa after what I’d found here in Arkham.
I couldn’t be inside even half a house for another second. I bolted, out into the rain, nearly turning my ankle several times as I raced through the forest.
Dean caught me easily enough, his long strides carrying him along with the heavy thump of steel-toed boots. “Aoife, for the love of grease and gears, hold up. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have laid it out so bluntlike.”
I slowed, reluctantly. “You’re right, Dean. That’s the whole problem. I wrecked my life over a fantasy.” Just like everyone had always insisted I would. “I should just give up this ridiculous notion of the Weird and everything now before I get you and Cal executed in Banishment Square.”
He frowned. “Giving up ain’t like you.”
“Dean, you’ve known me for a week. You don’t know what I’m like,” I said. “Cal’s got family to bat for him—he can go back to the School of Engines with a slap on the wrist. Even you can fade back into the Rustworks—you’re clever and wicked enough.”
Dean rubbed the back of his neck. “What about you, kid?”
“I’ve got nothing,” I said. “I’d have to turn myself in and pray to the Master Builder for mercy, like a proper Rationalist.”
“Is that really what you want?” The trail looped and started back up the incline toward Graystone. It seemed much longer going up, and the fog welcomed us with open arms.
“No …” I kicked a stone. “Of course it isn’t, Dean. I want to believe that I can do things a normal girl could never dream of. I want to rescue my brother like a heroine in a story. But stories aren’t real. What’s real are the Proctors, and they’re going to find us eventually.”
“Are you afraid of them?” Dean said quietly.
“Of course I am!” I threw up my hands. “Aren’t you?”
“I think there’s worse things than being locked up for heresy,” Dean said. “Much worse. And one of them is being so scared of it that you just sit and wait for them to find you.” He stopped and seized me by the shoulders. “You’re the first person I’ve met who won’t sit and wait, Aoife. Don’t change on me now. Please.”
The mist closed, and for a moment, Dean and I were alone. In that moment, it was easy to nod my head, to promise, so Dean’s smile would come back to his lips.
Because I did believe my father. And I wanted, more than anything, to not need the life I’d abandoned in Lovecraft.
“I won’t,” I said to Dean, and gently moved his hands from me. “I won’t give up. I promise you.”
Even if not giving up meant sacrificing everything. I’d come too far now to look back.
The Graveyard Below
DEAN TOOK OFF to the parlor to fiddle with the hi-fi when we reached Graystone, and I went back to the library. I didn’t have any desire to read more of the journals, or converse with my father, but I felt restless and itchy in my skin, and books always had the virtue of calming me. They promised an escape for a few hours if nothing else, a brief forgetfulness of what I’d agreed to do for the Folk.
If Tremaine didn’t simply drag me into the Thorn Land and cause me to disappear surely as my father and Conrad had vanished when I, inevitably, failed to grasp control of my Weird.
“You look so sad.”
I turned from my perusal of my father’s history books to find Cal, hands shoved in his pockets and rumpled. He looked so usual I almost burst into tears. I’d lose all that, in a little less