The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [50]
“Make it stop,” I begged Dean. He pressed me against his chest as his footsteps bounced us up a steep trail. Bare trees laced their branches over our heads, forming a bony canopy that blurred under my sight until it became actual bones, an army of fingers and hands covered in weeping flesh and a tattered shroud reaching for me.
I moaned and pressed my face against Dean’s chest. The nearer to him I stayed, the less it hurt.
“Hang on, Aoife,” Cal said. His voice was like needles through Dean’s comfort. “Hang on, we’re almost there.”
“No …,” I moaned, and clutched at Dean’s shirt. I had fire in my blood, poison burning me inside like oil on the Erebus. “No more, I can’t do it.…”
“Yes, you can,” Dean panted. “You can, Aoife. Just a few minutes more.”
He squeezed me tighter, and in that way I managed to keep myself from crying out again as we climbed, slowly, through the mist and toward the dawn.
Graystone
I SAW GRAYSTONE for the first time through a dream haze, that gray drifting place between dreaming and waking.
Mist parted, running fingers down the pitted bars of a pair of iron gates. Rock walls crawling with moss closed the estate off from the outside world, and a crow atop a copper finial stained green with corrosion opened its beak and let out a dry caw.
The house itself sat at the edge of a cliff overlooking the Miskatonic Valley and the huddled, sleeping village of Arkham. The glowering mansion gave the impression of digging claws into the granite skin of the mountain, eyes of thick blue leaded glass staring down from pitch gables and finger-thin twin turrets, unblinking.
Graystone was a house of bones. Its black spires reached skyward from a swaybacked slate roof. Garrets and warrens of rooms spilled away from the four-chambered brick heart, the cross-shaped center of the house crawling with moss and vines that spelled out sigils and signs before my feverish eyes. Aluminum flashing and guttering gleamed like mercury veins in the dawn.
I moaned. Looking at Graystone was to look on something old and sleeping, and when it woke I feared it would be monstrously hungry.
“Get the door open,” Dean ordered, and I heard Cal’s limping walk on the gravel of the front drive.
“We shouldn’t just be breaking in like this,” he murmured. “Mr. Grayson would be within his rights to shoot us.”
“Listen, cowboy. I ain’t lost a customer yet and I’m not gonna start with one as pretty as Miss Aoife here. She needs a bed, bandages, and maybe a shot of whiskey, since I’m dry. Now can you gimp yourself up those steps and open me a door, or can you just flap your gums?”
“You know, I might be more of a pal if you’d quit ordering me around like we’re in some war serial,” Cal grumbled. “For a criminal, you’re real bossy.”
“What I am is her guide and my guiding ain’t done until I deliver my clients to their threshold,” Dean said. “And since Miss Aoife is the one paying me, I’ll order anyone else I damn well please.”
The crow followed us, landing on the brass Moorish lamp over the massive front doors. It hopped on skinny bird legs and its throat pulsed. Caw caw caw.
“Door’s open.” Cal’s voice went faint with shock. “Shouldn’t it … not be open?”
I watched the crow. I could see every feather on its body, every reflection in its black bead of an eye. The fever in me racked my bones with a violent cough as the bird stared.
“Let your clutch out, then, and go find Aoife a bed,” Dean said. “She needs to sweat out this foulness.”
Cal caught sight of the crow and shuddered. “Grim thing. I hate those nasty carrion birds.” He snatched stone from the iron planters flanking the front door, but Dean’s free hand shot out and knocked the stone back to the ground. “Bad, bad luck to harm a crow. He’ll run back to his witch and tell her all about you, you throw that stone.”
“They eat the dead,” Cal said. “It just wants Aoife.”
I tried to tell him I wasn’t dead yet, but I was shivering too violently. Dean’s fingers flexed, leaving deep marks in my flesh as he struggled to hold me. “That old boy’s just curious,” he told Cal. He tipped