Casey yanked her blade from her belt. “Okay, girlie, I respect you, but that crosses the line. I ain’t in bed with the Proctors.”
“Why don’t we all calm down?” Dean suggested. “You two girls want to slug it out later, I’m not going to stop you.”
I uncurled my fist. My palm was red and raw, rubbed bloody from holding frozen metal. “He’s right,” I told Casey. All the rage ran out like so much water, and in its place was just embarrassment. I was supposed to fix problems with my mind, not my fists. I was the smart girl, the civilized one, who didn’t resort to what my female teachers at the Academy would have called “tawdry emotional displays.”
At least, I had been, until all of Tremaine’s lies and everything that had gone on since then. “I’m sorry about that,” I said to Casey, feeling my cheeks heat. “I think we can take it from here.”
“Nah, look,” Casey said. “I’m sorry about saying we leave your brother to go in the drink. I got piss-scared.”
“Fine,” I said shortly, glad she wasn’t going to try to turn things into a real brawl. I wasn’t much of a hand-to-hand fighter unless the element of surprise was on my side. “Let’s just get going, all right?”
“Hell of a right cross,” Dean muttered as we started walking again. “Remind me never to get you testy.”
“Consider yourself warned,” I said, nudging him with my elbow and flashing a grin. Despite where we were and what had almost just happened, I felt a little lighter for the first time since I’d walked out of the Academy and away from the life I’d had there.
We were going to get my mother back, take her far away from the iron that made her mad, and have our family, me and her and Conrad, together.
And then I would find some way to make everything in Lovecraft and the worlds beyond all right again.
Walking through Lovecraft was like walking through the dream I’d kept having in the Mists, except I was awake. Awake enough to see the wrecked shops and burnt-out houses. To know, finally, the toll of having destroyed the Engine and broken the Gates to the Thorn Land. I was awake enough to feel the cold bite against every inch of exposed skin, and awake enough to taste the smoke rising in the south on the back of my tongue.
South was where the Engineworks had been.
The people who had worked in the Engine had evacuated. As far as I knew, I hadn’t killed anyone outright. But how many had died afterward, as a result of what I’d done?
And how many of them deserved exactly what they got? whispered a dark retort inside my head. Part of me, the part who’d kept quiet for fifteen years while her mother went crazy and the Proctors lied to her—that Aoife wasn’t sorry for what she’d done to Lovecraft at all.
Old Town was silent, the crumbling brick storefronts and row houses painted all the colors of the rainbow now pale and faded, deserted and, in many cases, destroyed beyond recognition or repair.
Christobel Charitable Asylum had been a convent a long time ago, when there had still been such things as nuns and people who believed in gods and not the reason-based Master Builder or the Great Old Ones, drifting through the outer stars in their endless, frozen sleep. You could still see the spire poking above the sharp Victorian rooflines, and I angled toward it, up Derleth Street.
I’d walked here so many times as a student, on my way to and from the madhouse. I’d hated the walk then, the obligation to go visit my mother almost a physical weight. I’d never noticed how alive the street was, bustling with life in a way the Academy and Uptown weren’t. Now that it lay silent, windows staring at us with our own reflections, old newspapers caught against the fences and lampposts flapping like wounded birds, I missed the activity acutely.
“I don’t like this at all,” Casey murmured. We walked in a loose, staggered line, choosing whichever side of the street kept us clear of shadows and alleyways. “It’s way too calm,” she elaborated. “No sirens, no screaming, no Proctors.” She inhaled deeply. “Something bad in the air.”
“Could you be any more doom-and-gloom?” Conrad complained. “I’m already sour enough on this whole idea without your naysaying, all right?”
I agreed with Casey. I could feel the iron of this place tickling the back of my mind, and its whisper didn’t even cover the snuffling and scraping I could hear in every patch of darkness, tangible reminders that we could be set upon at any moment by nightjars, ghouls, or worse things that had made it through the cracks from the Thorn Land.
Nothing made a move, which only ratcheted my nerves tighter as we reached the gates of the Asylum. In the distance, I could hear the dull tolling of the bells in St. Oppenheimer’s, as I always used to when I’d visited. Only now they were discordant and hadn’t stopped ringing, as if a giant funeral were going on.
In a way, I supposed it was.
The gates in the fence surrounding the asylum were off their hinges, one bent nearly in half, as if a giant had folded it like a piece of paper. That didn’t bode well, but I tried not to panic. Just because the gates were open didn’t mean anything had breached the asylum itself. Everyone in there could still be fine. Likely agitated, as they wouldn’t have had sedatives in close to a week, but fine. I hoped.
I could see from where we stood that the main doors were shut, yet the massive clockwork locks that kept the place from spilling lunatics into the street were open, and the steps were covered with paper files and office supplies. I looked up. A few papers were still caught in the bars of the upper-floor windows, flapping sadly like dying doves.
That doesn’t mean anything, I insisted to myself again. Surely the doctors and nurses had fled. There might have even been a patient rebellion. The doors were shut. I didn’t see any corpses or hear any screaming. In this situation, crazy as it sounded even in my own head, the silence and desolation were good signs.
“Well?” Dean stood beside me. “We going in?”
I didn’t reply, not able to articulate what I was thinking without sounding as crazy as the patients beyond the walls. I took one step through the wrecked gates, then another, and let that be my answer. I half expected them to slam behind me, even in their ruined state. Going into the asylum never felt like anything other than walking into the jaws of a beast.
“I’ll watch your backs,” Casey said. “I ain’t going in there with the loonies.”
I waved her off, not surprised. Casey was a survivor, and survivors knew when to hide rather than rush ahead. That much I’d learned from Cal.
I stopped on the first step, patients’ charts and photographs crumpling under my boots. I’d waited so long to come back here, and now I could feel myself shaking inside my clothes. The truth about what had become of Nerissa was just beyond the doors, and yet I wanted nothing more than to turn and run. Where, I didn’t know. Just away. I didn’t, though, because Conrad was staring at me, daring me to admit this was a bad idea, and because I didn’t want to show Dean just how scared I was of finding out the truth. Good or bad, I was going to have to own up to my mother about what I’d done when I let Tremaine trick me into breaking the Gates, and I couldn’t imagine her reaction. Just that it would be bad and would probably involve a lot of screaming at me.
If she was even in there.
If she was even alive.
Panic like this hadn’t clutched me since I’d first left the city. My shoulder began to throb again—as it had when the leviathan had appeared.
The shoggoth venom was reacting to something beyond the doors.
I froze in place as the doors yawned open seemingly on their own. A dozen pale white paws, puckered and with a greenish cast like the skin of a corpse, gripped the walls. The ghouls’ snouts were long, longer than Cal’s when he wasn’t wearing his human shape, and their claws were pure black. They were part of another nest. One that was a lot more comfortable in daylight than most ghouls I’d run into who weren’t Cal.