The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [114]
“I’m fine.” I tried a game smile. Cal shook his head.
“You’re a good liar for a girl, but not that good. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing anyone can fix.” I pulled down one of the books. A History of Rational Thought. It had been heavily annotated, and rested in my hands as thick and weighty as my mind and body felt.
“Did Dean do something to make you this way? I’ll pound his face in.” Cal started for the door. “He may be big and carry that switchblade—”
“Cal, stop.” I put the book down on the desk and went to him. “It’s not Dean. It’s me. I thought … I thought I’d found something special in the library above, and then you and I had that awful fight …” I pressed my fingers against my temples, dug in my nails. Used the pain to stave off tears. “Cal, I think I was wrong about coming here. You should go back to Lovecraft. You should get on with your life.”
I expected another lecture on my relative madness, or for Cal to simply bolt like a dog freed from a kennel, back into the waiting arms of the School and the Proctors.
Instead, he nearly smothered me when he threw his arms around my frame. “I could never leave you,” he said. “Never.”
I returned his embrace, tight and hard as I could. To touch someone else with no expectation of a result, or to worry about hiding my true nature, felt like all of my burdens, for just a moment, dropped off my shoulders.
I clung to Cal until he gently let go and smoothed my ruffled hair behind my ears. “Now, it can’t be all bad. Let’s get out of this stuffy old room and you can tell me about it.”
“I wish that it weren’t,” I sighed. “Truly.”
“Come on.” Cal punched me lightly on the shoulder. “Day’s still young and there’s lots of grounds to explore yet. We can be adventurers for an hour or two and I bet you forget all about what’s bugging you.”
Even after my walk with Dean, I felt relieved at something other than my father and brother and our fate as a family to occupy my thoughts. I got my cape and Cal his coat, and we took the kitchen door, but instead of turning to the orchard, Cal chose the boxwood path that curved around the west wing of the mansion. The maze was largely dead, the walls a phantom suggestion of the winding paths that once grew on the spot.
Beyond the boxwood there was a long lawn sloping down to a pond and a few tumbledown stone structures surrounded by an iron fence.
“That’s the cemetery I told you about,” Cal said. “It’s boss. Want to see?”
“I suppose,” I said. I didn’t take the same delight that Cal did in boneyards. The dead didn’t bother much. Live people were utterly worse.
“No iron rods in the ground that I saw,” Cal said. “Hasn’t been swept for ghouls and … you know. Walkers.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “Cal, the necrovirus can’t make corpses walk. That’s a myth.”
“You don’t know that.” He shuddered. “I’ve seen lots this past week that people back home call myths.”
We crossed the lawn, agreement to visit the cemetery unspoken. “You know what Conrad used to say when things went wrong?” I asked Cal. “I’d be sad or angry, and he’d pick out whatever was bothering me, and he’d fix all the broken pieces and say, ‘There. All the stars in the sky where they’re supposed to be.’ ”
“I wish that were still true.” Cal stopped at the cemetery fence.
“Me too.” But it wasn’t, so I nudged him on the elbow because I was, all at once, fully sick of moping around. Conrad wouldn’t give up and knuckle under to his fate with the Folk.
Conrad would master his Weird, and he’d fight. And I was his sister, and in his stead the least I could do was pick up the sword. “Come on,” I told Cal. “Let’s take a look at the dear departed Graysons.”
The gate groaned when I pushed it open, and my feet sank into soft piles of rotted leaves that had gathered autumn upon countless autumn without disturbance.
I brushed the vegetation away from the nearest headstone. Wind and water had nearly obliterated