The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [158]
“There’s no one here,” Dean said gently. “No one but me.”
Cal crept in from the nests. The fires were low and I knew that this was what passed for night under the earth. Cal’s face fell. “It’s the madness dream? You’re still having it.”
“At least you’re not saying necrovirus any longer.” I half-smiled.
“No need.” Cal’s tongue flicked in and out. “All a lie, isn’t it? You don’t know how it stuck in my craw pretending to be scared of the Proctor’s fable. Ghul weren’t made by any virus. We’ve always been here, under the skin of your world.”
“It’s no comfort, the lie,” I said. “My family does go mad, no matter what causes it. I feel like there’s an abyss in front of me, and a wind at my back.…”
“Aoife.” Cal wrapped his long, skeletal arms around himself. “No matter what happens, you’ll be Aoife. I’ll come visit you in the madhouse, if that’s what it takes, but I won’t desert you. I’ll learn a new boy-shape. Draven will never catch me.”
“Why can’t I just go back?” I whispered, ignoring his attempts at comfort. “Erase all of this and go be a student whose biggest problem was a schematic she couldn’t draw?”
“Because,” Dean said, “then you’d lose everything you’ve gained since. Truth, magic. Even the real face of your obnoxious little friend here.”
“You’re calling me obnoxious,” Cal huffed. “If you could only hear yourself.”
I managed a laugh. “At least some things haven’t changed.”
“I’m still the Cal you knew,” he said. “I know you don’t trust me, but underneath I’m the same. I’ll go to the Engineworks with you. If I don’t make it, or the Proctors grab me again—”
“Don’t talk like that,” I said, moving away from Dean and straightening up. “You won’t be coming.”
Cal sighed. “I’m not working for Draven anymore. I swear it.”
“I mean,” I said, “we need someone to meet the airship. To come for us if Dean and I get caught again.” I gave Cal a smile, a whole one, even though it was purely meant to make him cooperate. I guessed I had learned a thing or two from Dean. “I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have looking out for me.” And if Cal did decide that his loyalties lay elsewhere, at least we wouldn’t be together in the Engine when he did.
Dean stayed when Cal crept back to his nest. “I can stay,” he said. “If you want me.”
I moved and made room for him in the hammock. I wanted Dean to stay, badly. I never, I realized, wanted him to leave again. “Please.”
Dean slipped out of his leather jacket and his heavy boots and settled next to me, letting me sink back into the comfort of his chest, wrapping his arm around my waist and resting his chin on the top of my head. His breath ruffled my hair. I stayed still, afraid I might break our comfortable silence like a soap bubble.
Dean spoke, eventually. “Dreams, huh?” he whispered in my ear. “Bad ones?”
“The worst imaginable,” I said. “Ever since I was a little girl.”
“Well,” Dean said softly. “I’m here now. Any bad’s going to have to get through me.” He ran his fingers down my cheek, over my neck and arm, and then kissed the back of my neck before settling his head onto the pillow. “Sweet dreams, princess.”
I knew that no one, not even Dean, could keep the dreams at bay, but I allowed myself to think he might, until I fell back into a fitful, smoke-tinged sleep.
I woke alone, shivering in the chill of a dead fire. Ashes blew softly across the hearth, as if subterranean snow had fallen while I slept.
“Dean?” I whispered, scrubbing vision back into my eyes. I was stiff and sore from sleeping in the crook of the hammock, but I had slept soundly and long. Light fell from somewhere far above, in bars and crosses across the rough earthen floor.
“He went to smoke a cigarette,” Toby’s guttural voice piped from the corner of the hearth. “I don’t understand why you breathe the smoke in willingly. Your city is covered in it.”
“We all have our vices,” I said. Toby grinned at me, his bluish fur almost silver in the early light.
“I said I’d watch you so you didn’t turn into breakfast. Although I am hungry.”
I swung myself down from the hammock, planting my feet with