The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [119]
The door to my room swung open of its own volition, with a rifle crack. A simple hinge assembling, connected to rods and wheels in the hollow walls of the mansion, they ran through the place like a cold-blooded nervous system. I hissed and pressed a hand against my forehead. The Weird appeared to come out when I lost control of myself, got upset or panicked, like when I’d stopped the library clock. I needed to rein it in before something other than a ghoul stepped into its path and I hurt someone. My father didn’t run about setting people on fire—I’d have to get better at using my talent.
Dean’s face appeared in the frame, and he looked at the door askance. “I think your castle needs a tune-up, princess.”
“That’s not all it needs,” I said. “Have you seen Cal?” My door swung back with another rifle shot, and Dean flinched.
“He’s downstairs blabbing Bethina to death about his grand adventure in the zombie’s tomb, or whatever did happen when you two went off.” Dean sat next to me and the dubious bedsprings bowed under his weight. “You’ve been sleeping like you pricked your finger on a spindle, kid.”
I rubbed my shoulder, but the shoggoth’s bite had gone back to being just a sore patch, shallow cuts and bruising.
“I guess I fainted?”
“More like passed out cold,” Dean said. “You came back from your jaunt looking pale and walleyed, babbled something about blood underground and staggered up here. By the time I got after you, you’d fallen asleep and all the rockets both sides dropped in the war couldn’t have stirred you.”
My head felt hollowed out and I was fatigued as if I’d run for miles. The Weird whispered, scratching at my senses, begging to be let free. I shut my eyes. The talent in my blood had wrung me out and I felt in my bones that if I let the Weird go now I’d never get control of it again.
“There were ghouls down there,” I said. “Down under the ground. Cal wanted to explore the crypt in the cemetery, and he opened the ghoul trap by accident and let them out.”
“Sounds like our cowboy,” said Dean with a toothy grimace. “You all in one piece? Or did they get a bite?”
“No … I killed them.” I looked up at Dean. “I got the trap working again, and the house … it killed them. I was the house. My Weird …”
My hands were still frozen and blue-veined and I shoved them under the blanket. “I can feel it, walking around in my head. The machines and the house. My Weird can speak to them and I hear them now. Whispering.”
The sensation when I’d been lying there, a handbreadth away from bloody scraps for ghoul pups to fight over, of a vast and sleeping consciousness sharing my head, came back with a rush and I grabbed Dean’s arm. It was bare, exposed by the short sleeves of his white T-shirt, and I blushed at the feel of his skin.
“Cripes, Aoife.” He rubbed my hand between his palms. “You’re freezing.”
“I think it’s a side effect,” I said. “I got so cold when I used my Weird in the tunnel, I thought I could never move again.”
“You know what they say.” Dean tucked the blanket around me and edged closer. “Cold hands, warm heart.”
“My mother used to say that,” I murmured without thinking.
“You don’t mention the old lady much,” Dean said. “What’s her story?”
Dean Harrison knew more about me than anyone but Nerissa herself. He knew, and he hadn’t spilled a word to anyone.
“My mother is in a madhouse back in Lovecraft.”
It came in a rush, once I’d decided to break the dam on my worst secret. “She contracted the necrovirus before Conrad and I were born and she started to lose her grip when she was pregnant with me, I mean really lose it. She could still fake sane when Conrad was a baby, I guess. They say everyone in our family goes mad, usually at sixteen—it’s our strain, our particular virus—so, you see, it doesn’t matter that I’ve found out all this about the Folk and the Weird. In no time at all, I won’t remember you or myself or any of this.” I gestured at the faded grandeur of my bedroom. Tremaine could threaten me, but he’d never frighten me as much