I wanted to swear, or scream, but all that made it out of my mouth was a light squeak, like a mouse’s. I didn’t even dare look to see if Conrad and Dean were still with me. Any movement could provoke a ghoul.
“Mmm,” the ghoul in the lead purred. “A delivery. I love it when the meat walks right up to your front door.”
Before I could move, the ghoul tucked its legs and sprang, clearing the steps in one bound. I barely had time to flinch in expectation of its weight on my chest and its teeth in my skin before Dean tackled me, slamming me out of the way.
We landed in the gravel at the foot of the stairs as the rest of the ghouls burst forth from the asylum, howling in anticipation of a meal.
Dean hauled me up. “Run,” he growled in my ear. “For your life.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Conrad and Casey head the other way, toward Uptown. There was no argument from me. I snatched Dean’s hand. In the face of horrors, he’d thrown himself into the line of fire with no regard for his own safety.
I didn’t have time to even hope Conrad would be all right. The ghouls were hot on our heels, their screaming bringing more and more of them out of hiding, spilling out of broken shop windows and shadowed alleys and an open sewer grate in the center of the street.
We ran. We ran until it felt like there was fire and razors in my chest in place of air. Ran so fast that my feet didn’t even catch in the pockmarks left by missing cobblestones.
Dean whipped his head back, then forward again. “Shit” he gasped, and when I looked I saw that the entire street had become a churning, rushing mass of bodies, white and blue and corpse-gray all the way down to rotted, decomposing greenish-black. There were hundreds of the ghouls, fighting and clawing to be at the front of the pack, and their screaming was the only thing I could hear over my own heartbeat.
We hit the top of Dunwich Lane, the center of despicable goings-on back when Lovecraft had been the Lovecraft I knew. Now Dunwich Lane’s red-light district was a smoking, ash-gray ruin. Fire could have started in any one of the dive bars or brothels by the river, and it had chewed on the shabby neighborhood’s bones as surely as the ghouls were going to chew on ours if they caught us.
Still we ran, until I couldn’t feel myself, except for my straining breath, and could barely see except for a tiny tunnel straight ahead.
We weren’t going to make it. I could smell the foul, orchid-sweet stench of the ghouls, and before me I could see the flash of the river. We would have a choice in a moment: jump in and freeze, or stand on the bank and be torn limb from limb, turned into dinner for the horrific and hungry citizens of this new Lovecraft.
The last houses on the street were on pilings out over the river, listing dangerously and plastered with warnings that they were condemned. The street ended at a crumbling wall, and beyond there was nothing but the river. My heart sank.
As Dean and I ran toward the wall, I heard a great whirring from overhead, the sound of a zeppelin’s fans. I looked up, thinking Draven had finally caught up with us. That would be the grand finale to this wretched day.
It wasn’t Draven’s black craft, though—it was a smaller ship, the balloon a dark green and the cabin underneath made of polished wood trimmed with brass that gleamed even in the smoky sunlight. The craft banked sharply over the river and a ladder extended from the cabin hatch.
“You!” bellowed a voice made sharp and metallic by the horn of an aethervox. “You two on Dunwich Lane! Grab the ladder and get on board!”
The ladder drifted into range. I looked to Dean, and he nodded vigorously. Whoever was in the dirigible, he was better than what was closing in on us, no question. I grabbed the ladder’s wooden rungs and leather straps and climbed as best I could while it swayed in the wind. Dean jumped on behind me, and the dirigible rose into the air, away from the ravening horde of ghouls.
“Any others alive in the city?” the voice bellowed at us.
“North!” I shouted, gesturing in the direction Conrad and Casey had run.
Another ladder dropped from the other side of the dirigible, and we swooped over the grounds of Christobel Asylum in a hard turn, toward what had been Uptown and the Academy grounds. From above I could see that the back wing of the asylum had been gutted by fire, and ghouls were scampering across what had once been a garden where the patients could walk in warm weather. Half-chewed bodies in the asylum-issued gray pajamas lay like discarded toys on the flagstones, but from what I could see, my mother wasn’t one of them.
That was it, then. The truth I’d known in the back part of my mind, the black part that only understood logic and odds, fell home with a hammer blow.
My mother wasn’t there. Nobody human was. If she’d managed to survive, she was alone in the city, adrift.
We swooped low across the mazelike streets leading to Banishment Square and Ravenhouse, the Proctors’ headquarters in Lovecraft.
Conrad’s movements were easy to pick out among the stately granite buildings. He was alone, cornered near Ravenhouse’s back wall.
My stomach flipped from the abrupt change in altitude as the dirigible lowered, and I waved frantically at him. “Grab the ladder!”
Conrad jumped, then did as I’d said and clung tightly as the dirigible rose. The ladders clanked against the metal parts of the hull as they retracted into the hatches of the craft, and I scrambled into the cabin along with Dean.
“You all right?” I asked Conrad, who’d climbed in from the other side. He nodded, patting himself down.
“Mostly. That was a hell of a close call.”
“Where’s Casey?” I asked.
“Dunno,” Conrad panted. “Lost her in the back alleys. She was rabbiting back toward Nephilheim last I saw. Not ghoul food yet.”
He rubbed his arms, shivering. “I tried to stay with her, Aoife.…”
“It couldn’t be helped,” I reassured him. “Nobody expects you to be ghoul lunch.” I patted him awkwardly on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, Conrad.”
“And why not? This is a Proctor ship isn’t it?” he grumbled. “We’re under arrest.”
“I have no idea who picked us up,” I said. “But I doubt they’re Proctors.”
He managed a weak smile, which I returned. Never mind that I had less than no clue who this airship belonged to and why the pilot had rescued us.
I examined our surroundings, hoping to make a guess on that score. We were in a narrow cargo bay at the aft of the dirigible, and there were no hints, just a few boxes tied down in a corner, devoid of any markings.
“Aoife’s right. I don’t think it’s Proctors,” Dean said. “Proctors probably would’ve just left us to get eaten. Less work for them that way.”
“Good point,” Conrad said. He got up and brushed himself off. “Come on. Let’s see what kind of degenerates we’ve hooked up with.”
I went to the hatch that led to the rest of the dirigible to see what I could find out. Best case, we’d been picked up by pirates or smugglers who also hated the Proctors. Worst, we’d been picked up by pirates or smugglers who didn’t hate the Proctors enough to turn down a quick buck they could earn by handing us over.
I tried the hatch, which swung open easily enough. At least we weren’t locked in. I stepped through it before Dean or Conrad could protest. A ladder led up one level to a deck, swaying aether lamps lighting my way as the airship climbed at a steep angle, passing through turbulence in the clouds.
The passenger deck was richly appointed, like the interiors of the private craft wealthy families in Lovecraft once used to fly from their mansions to New Amsterdam or their vacation homes in Maine. Lush velvet covered the corridor walls, and all the fittings were brass. When I peeked above deck I saw rich wood and bookshelves lining the room. Furniture bolted to the floor creaked gently as the craft banked, and I saw a plethora of charts spread out on the wide dining table. I’d never seen anything like it in real life—the only airship I’d been on previously was a repurposed war buggy, stripped to the bare bones. This was the sort of craft I’d always dreamed of flying on when I was just another girl at the Academy. I was sad I couldn’t explore it now, but I did take in all the details to remember later, when I had the time.