The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [64]
“I …” I wrapped my fingers around the cup he handed me, suddenly chilled with the knowledge I’d said too much. “That stays a secret.” I liked Dean, probably more than I should, but I was determined to have no one visit me in bleach-scrubbed halls that smelled of antiseptic, echoing with the screams of patients whose medication couldn’t stave off their nightmares. I’d rot my days away under the eye of no one but the shadow companions birthed from my viral mind. I wouldn’t ensnare sane victims, like Nerissa had. I’d decided it the day my mother was committed permanently.
“All right, it’s your secret. For now,” Dean said. “But we still need to settle up my payment.”
I huddled deeper under the blankets. “I probably can’t afford your payment, Dean. I barely have any money and certainly nothing else someone … like you … would want.”
“You’ve got that secret,” Dean said. “Someday, you’ll tell it to me. And when you do, I’ll take your secret and then it will be mine to keep instead of yours.”
Faintly, I remembered one of Nerissa’s stories, the poor weaver girl who makes straw into gold and trades with a witch for secrets.
“Miss Aoife?” Dean’s mouth turned down at the corners. “That secret’s my price. We got ourselves a bargain, sure and sealed?”
Nerissa wasn’t here, and if she were she’d say nothing to help me. I was just a girl who came and listened to her stories. She no more cared if I ended up indebted to a so-called witch than if I dropped out of the Lovecraft Academy and joined a troubadour caravan.
Though I had the sense that I was stepping over some threshold, and that by promising my secret to a boy like Dean Harrison I could never return, I stuck out my hand and pumped Dean’s once. “Yes. It’s a bargain.”
After Dean left, I ripped back my coverlet and went rooting in the wardrobe for something to wear that wasn’t mud-encrusted and days old.
The wardrobe stood taller than me by a head and a cloudy mirror reflected a stained and damaged Aoife back at me. Forget a new wardrobe—I needed new skin with the amount of dirt and blood I was wearing.
Poking behind the various narrow doors of the bedroom yielded me a wash closet with a steam hob circulating heated water in the corner. It hissed like an amiable snake when I spun the tap, and delivered a helping of rusty red water into the basin.
I found a washrag and scrubbed myself clean as I could while minding the bandage Dean had put on my shoggoth bite. He’d done a fair job, fair as I’d receive at the Academy’s infirmary, and the bite hardly hurt at all except when I pressed on it. The skin around the bandage carried a pallor, but there was no blue-veined, green-fleshed infection crawling its way through my system from the spot where the shoggoth’s kiss had landed. Dean’s skills as a field surgeon could have probably netted him legitimate work in Lovecraft, tending to victims of ghoul attacks and Proctors who fell to heretics during rioting. But imagining someone like Dean forced to march lockstep with the severe nurses and surgeons of the Black Cross, the Proctor’s medical arm, didn’t end well—he’d probably be expelled for his smoking alone before he was a week in.
The worst of the grime fell away with the washrag when I tossed it into the now-empty basin to dry out, and I padded back to the wardrobe. Most of the clothes were for a boy, old-fashioned short trousers, a waistcoat, shirts made for celluloid collars and high leather riding boots. However, at the rear of the cabinet I found a drop-waist silk dress, and a search of its cubbies yielded a comb to twist up my hair. It still looked like a nest for Graystone’s crows, but at least it was out of my eyes. The dress gleamed ruby-wet and the comb was mother-of-pearl, glistening bone against the dark of my hair. I tried on the riding boots and found that the long-ago boy who’d inhabited the room had exceedingly small feet. The boots hugged my calves like hands.
When the wardrobe