The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [155]
Toby flopped down on his haunches with a sigh. “This is our hearth. Never had any humans sitting at it before.”
“First time for everything,” Dean said, sitting cross-legged next to Toby. Dean’s shoulders were tight, but he took pains to settle himself close enough to Toby that the ghoul could have leaned over and bitten him in the throat.
I sat on Toby’s other side, showing the same trust. Beds of shredded rags and hay and small coal fires dotted the ground of the central nest. The air was close and heavy but not spoiled, laden with spice and tang. The hearth itself was a brick chimney built around a heat source drifting up from below the brick. The rotten-egg scent of a pipe fire was missing, but the chimney exuded warmth, and I curled against the outer wall.
Presently, Cal and Reason returned, Cal’s bruises and cuts faded to weeks old rather than hours. Cal crouched next to me, and I brushed a finger over his temple. His skin as a ghoul had a velvet cast, nothing like the slimy, clammy hide I’d first touched when he’d changed.
“You’re all fixed,” I said. “Good as if I fixed you myself.”
Cal grinned at me. I still wasn’t able to reconcile his teeth with the boy I’d known, but it was getting easier to look at him. “I’m not sorry about what happened in Ravenhouse.”
I smiled. “Me either.”
He pointed down a tunnel off the hearth. “I’m going to sleep. You and Dean can stay by the hearth. None of the others will bother you there, but don’t wander around. You smell pretty tasty.”
“Just what every girl wants to hear,” I told him. “We won’t go anywhere.”
“Don’t,” he said. “Not all of us feel the same way about humans.” He crawled off down the tunnel, and after a time Toby took his leave as well.
I poked in corners of the hearth room a bit, while Dean dozed with one eye open against the warm brick. “You need a pillow, princess, I’ve got an arm,” he said.
“I’m not tired,” I told him, fingering a dog-eared, year-old copy of Amazing Stories. I smiled to myself. Knowing that Cal’s love for trashy pulps, at least, hadn’t been a lie eased the wound his true face had left.
Dean drifted to sleep while I examined the detritus that the ghouls had collected—broken china, collections of gears that came from a hundred different machines, a single red patent-leather pump. Shards of glass and metal hung on red string from the ceiling, refracting the gentle light from the gaps in the hearth chimney. Broken dolls were nailed in rows along the walls of the nest, their empty eyes staring down at me. At the apex of the roof, glass globes from old lamps had been arranged on wire to reflect our solar system. A ghoul had made a miniature universe above my head, stars and planets spinning slowly in their orbit.
Even here, ghouls saw the same stars I did, though not in the same way. They saw broken, fractured, fragile glass, while I saw the only constant in the world. The sky was the sky, no matter where I stood.
Except, it appeared, under the ground.
To distract myself from the cold knowledge of where I’d ended up in my mad plan to awaken the queens, I tried to discern how the hearth chimney worked. A small cooking door sat nestled into the hand-laid brick, and I turned the wheel to crank it open. Heat pinked my face as I squinted into the depths of the hearth. A steam pipe sat in the center of the brick, puffing fragrant warmth into the open air. My Weird prickled as I realized what I was seeing. I gasped and then shouted for Dean.
He came upright with a start, and Cal and Toby appeared from the nest tunnels.
“What’s wrong, Aoife?” Dean demanded. “You find trouble?”
“No,” I said. “Just the opposite.” I pointed to the gear and sickle stamped into the pipe casing, just above where it had snapped and left itself open to the ghouls.
“You’re gonna have to explain this one,” Dean said. “I’m not seeing the excitement in a grody old pipe.”
I beamed, feeling sweat trickle down my spine