The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [167]
“I’m n-not …” As soon as I hit the air, I began to shiver again. “I’m not that easy … t-to lose.”
“I’d drink to that, if I still had my flask,” Dean said. He squinted across the river. “It’s all gone. The Engine. The city. Lovecraft is eating itself.”
I looked away. I didn’t want to see my old home, the cold streets and Ravenhouse and my mother’s asylum.
My mother …
“My mother!” I shrieked at Dean. “She’s still there … I have to go back!”
Dean snatched me before I fell into the river again, but his arms couldn’t contain the swell of fear. Nerissa and I did not behave like mother and daughter, had never behaved that way, but she was my only mother and she was trapped in a dying city where the Folk were running free. I had to find her, had to take her somewhere the Iron Land engendered couldn’t touch her.
“We’ll come back for her,” Dean said, rocking me. “We’ll come back. She’s locked down in a madhouse; she’ll be all right. You have my word.”
I didn’t have the strength to fight his arms any longer, and I collapsed back against the pilings.
“It’s all gone wrong,” I rasped. My throat was raw from the water and the smoke that even now filled my nose.
I pulled my legs up to my chest, keeping myself as dry as I could, even though the wind meant that hypothermia would already be setting in. I’d escaped the Engine and Tremaine only to die under a bridge.
“The awful thing,” I said, “is that I was starting to feel bad for Tremaine. His dying world. His poor, subjugated people. His cursed queen.”
“I’m not going to say that I told you not to trust the Folk,” Dean said. “I think you’ve learned it by heart.”
“It’s not easy to be ground under a heel your entire existence,” I said. “That, I understood.”
I was starting to shake, to lose feeling in my hands. My head was floating and I gave a light giggle. “I understood. How stupid am I, Dean?”
“Shit,” he said, rubbing my arms and back. “You’re sliding under. Stay with me.”
“That feels nice,” I said. I knew that I was detaching, my mind like a dirigible drifting away.
“Aoife …,” Dean started, and then stripped off his jacket, wrapping it around me. “Dammit, Aoife, don’t you check out now.”
A rumble and a roar penetrated the warm, buzzing world I’d found myself in, and I looked up, irritated that yet another disaster was going to overtake me. “What now? Hasn’t the city been thoroughly destroyed yet?”
“Harry!” Dean bellowed. “You swamp rat! Where’ve you been?”
I shaded my eyes to watch the oblong shape of the Berkshire Belle, much patched and welded where she’d plowed into the ground, swing low over the river and come to rest above the waves.
The hatch slid up, and Cal peered out, extending his hand. “Climb aboard! Make it fast—there are ravens everywhere!”
Dean handed me up, and when the warmth of the cabin hit me I collapsed on the nearest bench, shivering uncontrollably. Dean hopped into the hatch and pointed at Cal. “Blankets and a hot water bottle if you have it. She’s in a bad way.”
The Belle lurched and Harry shouted from the cockpit. “Where to, mes amis?”
I turned my back on the wreckage of Lovecraft, looking west, toward Arkham, and curled inside the blanket Cal draped over my shoulders. “I want to go home.”
The Fate of Graystone
DEAN SLEPT ON the flight back to Graystone, but the rocking motion of the Belle failed to soothe me. Instead, I got out of my seat and made my shaky way to the cockpit, to stare over Harry’s and Jean-Marc’s shoulders at the landscape below.
“You all right, mademoiselle?” Harry demanded. I tried to smile at him but it hurt.
“I suppose I’ll live.” I’d stopped shivering and mostly dried out, but the ache of falling into the freezing water was prodigious. My head still rang from the Weird, and I’d watched my nose stop and start bleeding three times since Harry had snatched us from the jaws of the river.
“Coming up on the village, Captain,” Jean-Marc said. “And it’s a pitiful sight.”
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