I touched the opening of the Gate with my fingers first. It was an absence of feeling in the shimmering space the aether had created. Holding my breath, and still thinking I could possibly be making the worst mistake I ever made, I stepped through, back along the line of travel to the last location, the one the Proctors had used. Back to Lovecraft, and whatever awaited me.
6
The Ruins of Lovecraft
TRAVELING BY GATE was unpleasant, a fact that I had forgotten in the whirl of more pressing problems since Conrad and I had escaped Graystone.
I was reminded violently as I passed into the Gate and felt as if I’d been jerked by a string implanted in the center of my chest, down and sideways, spinning end over end, out of control. I caught flashes of other places, other skies not my own, mountains of a shape that no horizon of the Iron Land bore.
It was like seeing a tiny slice of the world the shadow figure from my not-dreams occupied, spinning by at a speed a human eye couldn’t hope to process.
I wished I knew how the Gates truly worked, how they folded in all the worlds between Mists and Iron and shot my matter across incalculable distances to reassemble it on the other end. But the only ones who knew that were the Brotherhood, and the Fae, and neither one was a group I relished asking.
I landed on a patch of burnt earth when my journey ended, and pain stabbed up my right arm as my wrist twisted under my full weight.
“Dammit!” I shouted, cradling my arm. I had just recovered my equilibrium when Dean came flying from the Gate and landed on me, sending me into the dirt again.
“Sorry,” he mumbled, face buried in my hair. “Not much in the way of navigation through that thing.”
“It’s okay,” I managed, looking back at where we’d come from. There was no Gate on this side, nothing physical—just a weak spot that nobody except a Gateminder or a Fae would ever notice.
Dean raised his head and smiled down at me.
“All in one piece?”
I managed a smile in return. It was hard not to smile at Dean when he turned the full force of his eyes and his slow, full grin on you. “More or less.”
“Excuse me,” Conrad said loudly from above. His voice broke into the warm place I was drifting in within Dean’s eyes like a jangling chronometer alarm. “But if it’s not too much trouble for you, please get off of my sister.”
Dean dropped me a wink before he rolled up to his knees and then his feet and offered me a hand. I took it and stood, brushing ash and dirt from my clothes. “Where are we?”
“Somewhere around Nephilheim, looks like,” Conrad said. The slumped gray row houses and treeless vista did look like the factory town attached to the Nephilim Foundry, whose belching smokestacks I’d looked out at my entire life in Lovecraft. Now the sad little houses were shuttered and deserted, and the brick factory buildings in the distance were blackened with long streaks of soot. One of the foundry’s smokestacks had partially collapsed, and reached for the brown-tinged clouds like the jagged end of a broken spoke.
I’d expected it to be bad, but the fact that this much ruin had spread across the river, right into Nephilheim, made my stomach drop. How far had the destruction of the Engine reached? How many people had been in its way?
“Aoife?” Dean said, touching my shoulder. “You want to get moving?”
“Yeah,” I said, blinking back what I told myself were tears from the ash drifting through the thick, acrid air. “The bridge isn’t far past the foundry. We should go that way.”
We walked, keeping in a tight group, Conrad at the head and Dean at the back. I nudged him in front of me—if something jumped out at us, Dean could protect Cal, Bethina and himself. Conrad and I would just have to fend for ourselves. Dean took it with good grace, and winked at me.
“Don’t worry, princess. I’m fine.”
I tried to smile back, but the farther we walked and the more wrecked homes we passed, the sicker to my stomach I felt.
“Where is everyone?” Bethina turned in a wide circle, taking in the dirt street and the empty houses.
No one else was in evidence, and the only movement I saw was a white curtain in an open window at the far end of the block, fluttering in the intermittent breeze. It was November and the beginning of winter in Lovecraft and the surrounding towns, and I tucked my hands under my arms to warm them. I didn’t get the eerie prickle of being watched by live eyes as I had in the Mists, but that didn’t mean nothing was watching. The Proctors had plenty of ways to keep eyes all around Lovecraft without any flesh and blood involved.
“Not here,” Cal said. He sniffed discreetly. “There’s nobody within a mile of this place.”
Which just made me wonder where everyone in Nephilheim had gone. Foundry workers, jitney drivers, their families. There was really no good train of thought running down those tracks. I bit my lip hard, hoping the pain would distract me from my racing thoughts. It was just the iron. Whispering treacherous things to me, that I’d done this, that my stupidity with the Fae had made these people disappear.
Just the iron. Not the truth.
I walked a few steps away from the group and looked down the broad avenue. It ended at the west gates of the foundry. Beyond was the Erebus River, which I’d crossed for the first time a little more than two weeks earlier, fleeing the city where I’d spent my entire life.
Now I was willingly going back, into the jaws of the Proctors and who knew what else, things that had slipped through the tears appearing and disappearing in the Gates.
Reassuring myself that I wasn’t already insane was getting harder and harder. And with every step I took back toward Lovecraft, the iron of the city and the land around me whispered louder in my blood.
On the horizon, across the river, columns of black and silver smoke rose, as if souls were drifting up from the broken cityscape, trying to find a hole in the overcast sky. The clouds were blood-red, and lightning danced between them as the smoke from burning aether formerly trapped in the Lovecraft Engine drifted into the atmosphere.
I could hear sirens faintly, the constant warning of an air raid. Those sirens were supposed to warn us of Crimson Guard attacks, but now they were screaming senselessly, echoing back from the smashed walls of the foundry.
Something crunched under my boots, and I looked down to see what it was. The street, in addition to being covered in ash, was peppered with shards of glass—silvery window glass and also crockery, as if everything had been flung and shifted in the Engine’s great spasm.
As we trudged on, block after block with no human in sight, and as the wreckage grew worse, some of the houses window- and doorless, merely yawning maws covered in smoke marks, I pulled Cal aside. “I think you and Bethina should stay here.”
“No,” he said, shaking his head vigorously. “I need to be with you. I have to stay close.”
“Cal,” I said. “You know what’s over there. You know what the Proctors will do if they catch you.” Never mind Cal’s own clan of ghouls, who regarded siding with humans as an offense serious enough to get you torn limb from limb and cooked in a stew.
I gestured toward Lovecraft. The sirens were louder with every step we took, and I imagined that on the same wind, I could hear the howling of the tribes of ghouls that had populated Lovecraft’s sewers. “You know all that,” I repeated to Cal. “And if you go across that bridge you’re not going to be able to hide what you are from her.”
“It’ll be fine,” Cal insisted.
“Calvin,” I hissed, anger at his stubbornness bubbling up. “It will not be fine. It will be a disaster. You’re my friend and I love you, but those ghouls over there aren’t all your family. You said it yourself when the Engine got destroyed—the ghouls in Lovecraft are on a Wild Hunt. I don’t know exactly what that means, but it can’t be good.”