The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [33]
A raven, unlike an automaton, could see, and if it marked a heretic, it could fly back to Ravenhouse and croak to its masters from its metal throat. The whirr of their gears and the hiss of their aether flames drowned out everything, even my own heartbeat.
“Not but a hundred steps,” Dean panted. “Then we’ll be in the foundry. Those spy birds can’t spy through steel.”
I dug down, my feet clanging against the grate, my school bag slapping my hip, breath scissoring its way in and out of my lungs. Cal trailed us, his limbs flying in every direction as panic caught his feet and took him to ground.
“Cal!” I whirled, and my wrist wrenched in Dean’s grasp. He stumbled in turn, cursing.
“What in the blue hell are you doing, kid?”
I covered the two steps back to Cal, as the faint ghostly lamps atop the span of the Night Bridge winked out, one by one, covered by dusky wings.
“My ankle,” Cal moaned. “I think I broke it.”
“Aoife, we need to go,” Dean snapped, his panic creeping up to his eyes. “If I get caught and dragged to Ravenhouse, it’s curtains for the whole trio, you get me?”
Cal’s eyes were wide, his nostrils flaring in pain. I slung his arm over my shoulder. “Up. Put your weight on your good leg.”
“Just leave me,” he groaned. “Just leave me here … I swear I won’t give you up.…”
“Cal Daulton, I swear that if you don’t shut your trap, get up and run, I am going to sock you in the jaw and give you to the Proctors myself.” I had passed the point of my usual nervy fear, the kind that made my hands shake and my voice go soft. Now I was afraid on a much more basic level. I wasn’t going to the Catacombs. I wasn’t leaving Conrad on his own.
I’d come this far. I wasn’t turning around.
I stood, heaving Cal along with me. He was much heavier than his frame belied and I felt the rush of air along my face as the raven’s wings stirred the air.
Cal’s weight lifted all at once, and Dean was next to me, taking Cal’s other arm. “It’s a good thing I took a shine to you, Miss Aoife,” he said. “Because this is above and beyond.”
Dean muttered a swear as we dragged Cal between us. “Hard left. Head for the automaton sheds inside the foundry fence.”
The gates of the Nephilim Foundry were shut for the night, but Dean found a gap in the fence and I helped Cal through. In the shadow of the outbuildings and the loaders—the sleds that ferried the slag, the by-product of the foundry—we stumbled through a patchwork world of glow and shadow, iron and frozen ground.
I could barely breathe from our dash and Cal’s weight, but I forced myself on, staying close to Dean.
He rattled the doors of the nearest building, a machine shed with the phantom shapes of automatons waiting for repair beyond the dirt-coated glass panes. “In here,” he rasped. “Put yourself on the floor—those things are still coming.”
Spurred by the ever-present sound of wings, I skip-hopped across the open space with Cal and we ducked through the doors just as the ravens swooped over the towers and tin roofs of the foundry and banked, turning back toward Lovecraft in the same rigid pattern that mimicked life but was as cold and precise as a surgeon’s tool.
I let Cal down gently, and slumped next to him. My heart was beating on my ribs like a fist on a madhouse door.
Dean exhaled and leaned his head back against the corrugated wall. “That was entirely too near for my taste.” He pulled a flattened packet from his back pocket and a silver lighter from his jacket. “Care for one?” he said as he bit off a Lucky Strike from the pack.
“Girls with good breeding don’t smoke.” I quoted Mrs. Fortune without even realizing it, and then blushed. Dean wasn’t the kind of person who’d care what a school