The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [121]
The Bottomless Room
AFTER DEAN HAD made a pot of strong coffee, he poured me a mug and followed me into the library. “Feel like an assist, princess?”
“I’d like that,” I said as he helped me onto the ladder. Apparently, we weren’t speaking about what I’d shared with him upstairs, and that suited me just fine.
Dean sneezed when he came through the hatch into the library above. “Dusty as old bones up here.”
“Look for anything about the Folk,” I told him. “Tremaine knows everything about me and I know nothing about them, except that they like to play tricks.”
“And I could have told you that.” Dean flashed me a grin and reached for a book. He stopped, hand fluttering in front of the shelves on the far side of the attic.
I joined him, staring at the gap between the journals and papers, which revealed nothing to my eye except water-stained plaster. “What’s wrong?”
Dean’s eyebrows drew together. “You know there’s another room back here, right?”
I snapped my gaze to his. “What?”
“Another room,” Dean said. “I feel it. Open space, hidden space.” He shook his head, like someone had slapped him. “A place that got lost. I found it.”
Hidden rooms in hidden rooms. Perhaps this room held what I needed to fulfill my bargain with Tremaine.
“There’s got to be a locking lever and a switch here somewhere,” I said. I put my hand on the wood near Dean’s trembling palm. I let my own Weird unfurl, ever so delicately, like letting just a few grains from a handful of sand slip through your fingertips. The switch twitched against my mind, the lock and the wheels all clicking into place with that pressing fullness.
It wasn’t nearly as torturous as when the ghouls had found Cal and me, but it hurt more than enough. After a moment the entire section of wall swung away, ponderous under the weight of its volumes.
“Our own little hideaway,” Dean said. “I think I might like this.”
“Behave yourself,” I said. Abruptly my feet were as unsteady as if we were at sea. I couldn’t be distracted by Dean and what he did to me, even if I wanted to be for the first time ever, with anyone.
Dean’s lighter snapped and the dancing flame sent slivers of bright into the corners of the dingy space beyond. He sucked in a breath, focusing the blue flame on my face. “You’re leaking, doll.”
I felt under my nose with the back of my hand, saw the skin streaked crimson black. “Dammit,” I said, swiping at the blood.
Dean held out his bandanna with his free hand. “Put your head forward until it stops.”
I did as he bade, and he watched me with a calculating eye. “This happen every time?” he said quietly.
I shrugged as best I could with a blood-soaked rag on my face. “I’ll let you know once I’ve used it more than twice,” I told him, muffled. The trickle of red from my nose eventually ceased, and I laid the rag aside. Taking a moment to compose myself, I nodded at Dean.
“Let’s take a look at this hideaway of yours, shall we?” I was relieved that I kept the quiver out of my voice. If this was the result of using the Weird to open a door, what would happen if I tried to stop a jitney or manipulate Graystone’s clockwork in earnest? I didn’t particularly care to think of it at the moment.
“This is something else,” Dean said, as the lighter’s flickering flame caressed the hidden room with fingers of shadow and light.
I spied a worktable, covered with bundles of plants and bell jars of long-dead animal specimens, a ruin of gears and machine parts alongside all the trappings of witchcraft that we’d been warned of by the Proctors—chalk, candles, red string and black, petrified frogs and eyeballs of unknown origin. Enough evidence to earn the owner a stint in the Catacombs that only ended when he was carried out dead. Claiming to believe in this stuff was bad enough. Actually practicing it, even though the Proctors repeated over and over and over that magic was fake and witches were only charlatans, was a death sentence back home.
And it might be here too, though for very different reasons.
“This is some workshop,” Dean said.