The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [97]
A few lines drifted by stained only by an inkblot, as if Cornelius were debating long and hard before he set the next line down on paper, where he couldn’t erase it from prying eyes.
The Folk can be your greatest friend or most diabolical foe. They have motives that far surpass my understanding. I only pray that their eventual purpose for me is benign.
I cannot contemplate the alternative.
It was the last entry in the grimoire. I set it aside and turned down the lamp as it guttered. I was nearly out of wick.
The Kindly Folk weren’t human, at least not like me or Dean or Cal. The Land of Thorn was real, and so was everything my father had written. Tremaine had sought me out, for what? I certainly wasn’t my father. I didn’t even have a Weird.
I was about to reach for the journal again when the lamp went out. It didn’t flutter and die slowly for want of fuel or wick, it simply ceased to be. One moment there was light and the next I was plunged into blackness, a pale sliver of starlight the only hope I had to see.
“Shoot,” I muttered. I’d left Dean’s lighter in the pocket of my skirt, in my room.
I stood to feel my way to the trapdoor.
A heartbeat later, something smashed into the window.
I screamed, stumbling backward against the shelves. A rain of journals and paper came down from my impact, but I was focused upon the thing at the window.
Its great wings were outstretched, and its hooked beak smashed at the panes as its talons scrabbled for purchase on the windowsill.
An owl, but far larger than any I’d ever seen. It was so big it blocked out the light, covered up the glass, until the only illumination came from its glowing green eyes.
The owl reared back and smashed at the glass again. A spiderweb of cracks appeared, and the creature gave a shriek of triumph. Its wings beat louder than my heartbeat, and my panic wore off enough for me to realize that no owl would act in this manner.
This was something else.
I knew virals, perhaps too well, because of my mother. I knew the shandy-men and the shoggoth. This wasn’t viral, wasn’t from a lanternreel or Professor Swan’s stupid pamphlets. This wasn’t something that had once been human, twisted into a viral, or something purely a mutation that had come from this world.
The owl screeched as it splintered a pane, snowflakes of glass falling to mix with the debris on the library floor. Its feathers were a sick, watery bronze, and a few of them fluttered down along with the shards as it tried to wriggle through the hole.
It wasn’t born from the necrovirus. It wasn’t from anywhere this side of Tremaine’s ring. And if it came through the window it was going to kill me.
These were the facts that unspooled through my mind, clinical and cool as the voice of Grey Draven through the aether tubes. Screaming for help didn’t even occur to me. Cal and Dean were too far away, enveloped by the sound of their baseball game. They’d never get here in time and they wouldn’t be able to help if they did.
I had to think. I had to be the girl who killed the beast, not the princess who became entranced by it and so trapped in its maze, forever.
I’d never liked the ending to that story, anyway.
The not-owl had one wing through the hole now, its greenish oily blood dribbling viscous on the library floor. I pressed myself as far back against the shelves as I could, trying to give myself a few precious seconds to think. Think, Aoife. Thinking’s what you’re supposed to be aces at.
The thing’s hideous talons, twice again as long as a flesh-and-blood owl’s should be, left deep hash marks in the sill as it struggled toward me.
“Child,” it croaked, an obscene parody of a human voice. “Little child …”
I turned my face away from it, terror making me squeeze my eyes shut, dust and the corner of vellum pages tickling my nose. Graystone had defenses, even here in this most secret repository. But I was as far from the library panel below as I was from the moon.
If only I had some way to block off the window. If only I could spring a trap on the