The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [54]
The clock whirred faster, the hands only a blur as they spun. A rattlebone chorus of ticking grew inside my skull, and I scrubbed at my forehead with my free hand. The shoggoth’s poison was undoubtedly still in me. I shouldn’t have slipped out of bed. It was the poison, I told myself, not anything else. Not what had been in my blood to start.
I grabbed up the vellum scrap and retreated to the far side of the library, hoping that distance would take away some of the looming malignancy that the clock had set in my mind.
Near the doors, I stopped and unfolded the scrap, holding it close to the lamp globe. What I expected, I can’t say. A coded message from a Crimson Guard spy, perhaps, or a warrant issued by the Proctors. A love letter from my mother.
Instead, Conrad’s handwriting grabbed me like fingers around the throat.
AOIFE
More ghost ink. More secrets for only my eyes. Conrad had put a note here. He’d made it to Arkham after all. Conrad might still be alive.
Conrad might still be sane.
My hand shaking so hard the paper looked like moth wings in the oily light, I held the vellum over the flame. It curled, crackled, and my fingers singed because the scrap was much, much smaller than my brother’s last letter, but I held on.
The ink burned, turned, twisted and, with a huff of smoke, gave up its secret.
Fix it.
“Fix what?” I demanded of the acrid cloud. “What, Conrad?”
Sharp needles of heat in my fingertips warned me, and I dropped the paper on the carpet just as it burst into flames and gave a whip-crack snap of yellow powder as the chemical of the ghost ink combusted. I stomped on the flames until they went out, leaving a burn hole in the carpet.
That was simply terrific. If my father did return to Graystone, he was going to tan my hide.
A floorboard croaked in the hallway and I froze, mind and muscle. I’d watched a lanternreel about feudal Japan in history during my first year. The emperors of centuries past had fabulous peak-roofed palaces, and in the palaces, nightingale floors. Wood that sang, and announced the presence of the enemy, that warned the feudal lords when assassins were close.
My heart became a stone. My hand itched for Dean’s switchblade.
A long thin shadow crawled through the open doors of the library, echoes of long thin footsteps following.
I blew out the lamp and inched back against the books, their soft spines flexing under my weight.
The figure in the door was long-legged and loping, and tangled its feet in the carpet. One pale hand with pale wormy fingers reached out and felt its way along the books, coming close. The shoggoth’s bite throbbed in time with my heart, and I shrank back, but too slowly. The fingers brushed my hand, leaving contrails of cold.
Terror fired me, and I struck, balling up my fist with my thumb tucked outside and under like Conrad taught me and carrying my blow with the weight of my shoulder behind it. My knuckles glanced off jawbone and it felt like broken glass had buried itself in my hand. The long shadow and I both yelped.
“Cal?” My heart could have outpaced a jitney.
“Eyes of the Old Ones!” Gears chattered from an unseen device and then a thin, wavering line of blue lit up the space between me and Cal. Cal carried an aether lantern with a crank handle, the bubbly glass filmed over from age.
“I’m sorry …” I tried to touch the rising welt on his jaw, but he jerked his head away. “I thought you were something else.”
“What else would I be?” Cal cranked the lantern again, to little effect. The aether inside the globe was ancient and nearly white.
“I thought …” A living shadow, a cold thing from the primordial pool of the necrovirus, something from under the ground looking for a feast. “I guess I don’t know,” I finished, looking at my hands—anywhere but Cal’s face.
Cal put a finger under my chin and lifted my gaze to his own. “Are you seeing things, Aoife? We can go home right now, petition the city for quarantine. You’re a girl. They won