The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [45]
Cal took my arm with a part-smile, and his dogged recitation of propaganda didn’t matter as much. That was Cal’s way—calm and reliable, bumbling and normal. If only he knew how normal he was compared with me.
“We can’t be caught,” I told Dean. “Not after what that wretched Alouette must have told them.” Behind us I saw Jean-Marc and Harry emerge from the wreckage, battered but intact. I hoped they’d make it to wherever they called home without any further trouble.
“Don’t worry your pretty brunette head, miss,” Dean said. He lit a cigarette as we marched, and puffed a smoke ring. “They haven’t managed to catch me yet.”
The Shoggoth’s Dream
HOURS OF CHILLED cheeks and aching feet later, a sign on the mud-spattered, ice-pocked road, snugged against the Berkshire foothills, pointed to Arkham. Its wooden limbs stood akimbo, tattered from buckshot.
“Off the road now,” Dean said. “Arkham’s village police run to mean and bored, and they’ll call down the ravens on us if we go through town.”
The winding lane sat as a ribbon of darker against dark, overhung with the winter skeletons of oak trees and bound by stone. Dean hopped the low mossy wall and I helped Cal over.
The predawn field rolled and dipped, low curls of ground fog like tongues and tentacles rising from the frosted stubble of grass. The sky made a lid on the earth, a dome of silk dove clouds, and on the horizon the faintest line of blue-white fire sparked the dawn.
The ground was soft and thick as a coverlet, and I slipped in the freezing mud and fell against Dean. He caught me around the waist.
“Sorry!” I whispered. “I’m clumsy. Always have been.”
“I don’t see the downside.” His smile matched the ghostly glow of sunrise. “Care for a dance, while you’re here?”
I pulled myself free too fast and nearly fell again. Dean Harrison wasn’t my kind. He was wild-raised, no one I needed to form attachments with. If I let Dean get close, we wouldn’t go on a proper date, where I’d smile and laugh behind my hand while I lowered my eyes demurely like a city-bred young lady. Dean was trouble, and I’d be in an even worse stripe if I acquiesced to his charms. “No, that’s not happening,” I said, and felt myself flush even in the cool damp air of dawn.
Cal grumbled until Dean and I parted, and ignored my offered hand even though he was reduced to hopping on one leg with his bound-up ankle swinging.
We walked through the mist in silence, and it closed in on us like it could see and taste our presence.
“There’s a path cut in the rock,” said Dean. “Far side of this field.” He pointed at the raw gray granite climbing out of the earth. “I’m guessing that honking mansion up on the cliff is your pop’s place, since there’s not one Grayson inside the village walls that I’ve ever met.”
I had never seen Graystone, except for a curl-cornered picture my mother kept in a shoebox. The house of my father was all angles and turrets and the rough, body-sized granite blocks that gave the estate its name. Singularly unwelcoming, like an asylum or a heretic prison. Much like, I’d always assumed, the man who called it home.
Would I see my father? I could ask him how he and Nerissa had come together, what her madness first showed itself as. Cleverness, like Conrad, or her fancies about fairies and witches? Or just that sad, miles-gone stare that looked through me as if I were window glass?
Alternately, I could say nothing, and just savor my first look at the man who was half of me. There were no pictures of my father except the clues in my own face. I wanted to memorize him if I could, because the one thing you learned as a ward was never to assume the same face would open the door when you came home again. It wasn’t something to be maudlin about, just a truth, like secondhand shoes or being the last to eat at supper.
“You quit talking, Miss Aoife. You five by five?” Dean said. The mist held us in, kept our secrets close to our skin.
“Squared away,” I said, sneaking a phrase from Cal’s