The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [51]
The crow stretched its wings, lava-glass beak snapping. It regarded Dean for a moment, then shifted its gaze to me, and to Cal, who sneered at it, making a shooing motion with his hands.
Fluffing its wings in what I’d call irritation, the crow took flight, gliding over the iron-strapped walls and dipping into the valley like a spot of living ink on a vast misty page.
My memory went soft then, like a needle slipping off a phonograph groove. Next I knew, I’d left the hard surety of Dean’s arms for a feather bed that smelled like lavender and must, and I wandered through hell and ice as the fever wrung itself out of my flesh and my dreams. The dreams were black, twisting, and tasted of metal. I touched what Nerissa touched—diamond-edged shrieking clarity that let me see everything too bright, too sharp. The madness that let me see the magic she imagined wreathed our ordinary world.
In the fever dream, Dean was a blur, like a smudge of soot against clean skin. Cal floated bloodred and gold around the edges of my sight. The house, Graystone, whispered to me with a voice made of dry rot and dust, in the language of houses, all pops and creaks.
At last, it lulled me into the sleep beyond dreaming, the sleep in a dead space where there’s nothing but weary emptiness. I anchored myself there and would have gladly stayed for centuries.
When I woke again, I was disoriented. Night had thrown a velvet mask over the windows of the bedroom. Dean dozed in an overstuffed chair next to the bed, a pinup magazine much worn at the edges folded open on his chest.
“Cal?” I whispered. He was nowhere to be seen. Dean’s breath hitched, but he didn’t wake.
I swung my feet over the edge of the high bed, carved with animal heads for each post. The heads had enormous ears, bulbous eyes, fangs. Nothing from a natural history book.
Setting my feet on the itchy Persian carpet, I tested my balance. Every bit of me ached, as if I’d turned all the gears of the Lovecraft Engine by hand, but I was solid as the rock we’d climbed to reach Graystone, no longer plagued by dizzying illusion.
“Dean?” He shifted in his sleep, laying his head against the chair. A lock of hair escaped its comb tracks and snaked into his eye. I reached out to brush it away, got close enough to feel the warmth of his skin, and then pulled back. He’d just wake up, and I’d have to explain why I was out of bed. And thank him for saving my life, and admit that now I owed him something more than a fee. I hadn’t owed anyone except Conrad a thing in my life, and I wasn’t sure I liked it.
From below, a great ticking like a heartbeat echoed. I was thirsty and still half asleep, but I was sure the sound hadn’t been there a moment ago. My mind wasn’t playing tricks on me any longer—I was myself, clear and focused. The sound was real.
This was my father’s home, even if he hadn’t yet made an appearance. I was uninvited. Wandering about was for sneak-thieves and vagabonds, not respectable girls. Not for daughters.
I chewed on my lip, thinking, then picked up the oil lamp guttering by the bedside, its small flame throwing spook shadows across the velvet damask curtains and the water-spotted wall panels. At second glance, everything about the room was rotten at the edges, from the moth-chewed carpet to the notes uttered by the warped floorboards under my feet.
Glancing back once to make sure Dean hadn’t come awake after all to stop my exploration, I slipped out the high narrow door into a high narrow hall and followed the sonorous heartbeat of Graystone toward its source.
A Clockwork Heart
MY CREEPING FOOTSTEPS kept time with the invisible pendulum. The lamp in my hand gave off a buttery glow, older and more secretive than the crisp blue of aether globes.
Graystone sprawled like a spiderweb, and the hallway twisted and turned back on itself. Soon enough, I was walking an unfamiliar hall and could only go forward until I reached a landing. The sound came from below me, in the empty space where