The Iron Thorn

27 The Enchantment’s End

MY FATHER’S ATTIC room appeared around me again by degrees, as the enchantment of the hexenring slipped away. Dean grabbed me by the shoulders. “Aoife. Aoife, what did he do to you?”

I blinked at him. “Nothing. He did …” I breathed deep to compose myself. “It’s nothing I can’t handle.”

“Did he hurt you?” Dean gave me a shake. I winced as he grazed the shoggoth bite.

“Not any worse than you are right this moment.” I shrugged Dean’s hands off. They were too heavy, too hot. The spot where Tremaine had touched my face was cold—felt brittle, as if it could break.

“Doll, you look like something chewed you up and spat you out the other end.” Dean moved my hair out of my face, his fingers rougher than Tremaine’s, warmer and livelier.

“I think I want to go downstairs,” I muttered. I wasn’t up to reassuring Dean I was all right. I wasn’t sure I was all right.

Dean opened the hatch and gave me his hand to help me down the ladder. “Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”

“Honestly?” I paused on the bottom rung. “I’m more concerned with you. You were trapped in that ring.… I thought you might have lost years when he took me out.…”

Dean put his hands on my waist and lifted me the last foot to the floor. “I told you they lie, Aoife. Besides, it takes more than the Folk flashing magic to stir me up.”

“Still.” I smoothed a speck of dirt from the Thorn Land off Dean’s shirt, his skin beneath warming my fingers. “I’m sorry you had to see that.” I didn’t want Dean to see the ugly consequences of my Weird. If he did he’d give me a wide berth, and I didn’t want Dean to be gone. I needed him there.

Dean nudged me. “Forget about that. Come with me.”

He took me to the back parlor and stood me in the center of the room while he flipped the switch on the hi-fi to start the aether warming up. I regarded him suspiciously. After what Tremaine had threatened me with, I wasn’t in the mood to switch back to cheerful.

“I tinkered with it while you were gone,” Dean told me. “The hi-fi. You can get a little more than static and the Miskatonic U station now.”

“Cal will be thrilled,” I said. “But what’s it to do with me?”

“Listen,” Dean said, “I know that what happened is twisting you up. Twisted me up, and I’m fairly sure I’ve seen a lot more oddness in my life than you have.”

He turned the hi-fi’s dial until a wax record scratched and dropped over the aether, burbling pop music. “You’re not gonna think straight until you calm down. So will you trust me for a few minutes? I want to help.”

The song continued, and Dean held out his hand. “Now or never, princess.”

“Never,” I said, darting out of Dean’s reach. His mouth turned down, but I held firm. “I don’t dance.”

“And I aim to rectify that situation,” Dean said. “Please, Aoife. Trust me.”

I hesitated. Tremaine had shaken me terribly. I was getting better at not showing it, but my stomach was churning and I couldn’t stop thinking about his last words.

Dean was right. I wasn’t going to figure anything out in my state.

I jumped as Dean slipped his arm around my waist. “Here we go,” he said. “Put your other hand on my shoulder.”

“Dean,” I said as we swung in a wide, parabolic circle. “This is ridiculous.”

“Listen,” Dean said. “Close your eyes and listen. Let yourself move.”

My steps smoothed out as I obeyed him, though I still kept a death grip on his hand and shoulder. And just like a switch flipping over, we were dancing in time, moving by turns around the parlor. It was easier to focus on my feet than the storm inside me. I felt a tiny bit less terrible.

“It’s, well … not so bad,” I conceded.

“And?” Dean gave me a small smile.

“I might like it,” I admitted. “A little.”

Dean spun me out and back. “Course you do. I’m hoping you’ll grow to like me, too.” He winked. “A little.”

I didn’t answer, I just danced until the song ended and static hissed along the empty aether. “Too forward?” Dean said, lowering our hands so they were pressed together between us. The shine faded from his eyes.

“It’s not that.” I didn’t let go of Dean and he didn’t let go of me. “But this won’t last. Me, and the Weird, and the Folk—”

“Aoife,” Dean interrupted, bending his head toward mine. “I don’t care about lasting. I just want right now.”

We swayed together on the spot, bonded by hand and hip, my breath and heartbeat trapped in Dean’s starlight gaze.

“Dean?” I whispered.

“Yeah, princess?”

I stood on tiptoe to close the distance between us. “I want right now too.”

When I kissed Dean I shut my eyes as if I were dancing again, and shut out everything except his scent, and his skin, and the music whispering in my ears.

Dean let out a soft sound when I pressed my lips to his and then pulled me tight and flush against his chest. His hand on my waist was warm, and I could feel every finger pressing into my ribs. His other slid across my neck, the tips of his fingers catching my hair.

“Aoife,” Dean said huskily, when we finally pulled apart.

I opened my eyes, slowly, afraid that he’d become nothing more than smoke if I looked at him.

“Yes, Dean?”

His eyes were stormy, darker than I’d ever seen them. Dean’s hand moved from my neck to cup my cheek, the spot where Tremaine had slapped me. When he touched me, my skin was finally warm. “I don’t want to let go of you.”

“Me either,” I whispered. My stomach was light and my head was full of vertigo, like the floor was falling away beneath me, and yet I knew Dean would anchor me, keep me close.

Dean pressed his forehead against mine. “So let’s just stay like this a while.”

“Aoife!” The new voice slammed me back down to earth.

Dean and I turned as one, his hands still on me. “Cal?” I gasped. How much had he seen? His expression told me that he’d seen far too much for me to have any hope of explaining.

Cal stood in the doorway, a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a glass of milk slack in his hands. “I heard music. I brought you some …,” he started, eyes darting between Dean and me. “Bethina got some groceries in this afternoon and made them.…” He shook his head, lips peeling back to show all of his teeth in a grotesque echo of Tremaine. “Really, Aoife? Him? Him?”

“Cal, it’s not …,” I started. His face went stone, and his expression was ugly. He wasn’t my Cal in that moment, and I didn’t want to know the new person who was staring at me with unabridged contempt. Cal looked like every student who’d stared down at me—Marcos, Cecelia, every one.

“It is, Aoife. He’s not our kind. You’ll have to choose, and you’ll leave me behind.” He slammed down the plate and glass, so that milk sloshed all over the parlor table. “I hope you’re happy.”

“Cal …” I extricated myself from Dean’s grip, anything but happy. I’d never seen Cal so angry. “Cal, wait!” But my friend had stormed out, and the frightful foreign expression hadn’t left his face.

“You should go talk to him,” Dean said.

I pressed my hands over my face, feeling a hot tangle of anger and sadness, but not shame. I wasn’t embarrassed about what Dean and I had done. I’d wanted to kiss him since our first day in Arkham, and after what had happened since that day, I was through being ashamed of wanting things. “It won’t do any good,” I said. “Cal’s … fragile. He’ll think that I lied to him.”

“I don’t mean salve his dashed notions of romance. I mean calm him down.” Dean shoved his hair off his forehead. “If he throws a rod and goes back to the city spouting stories, he could hurt you, Aoife. And then I’d have to beat the crap out of him, and that’d be a real shame.”

“Cal wouldn’t …” My stomach flipped over, dizzy and unsettled. I realized I didn’t know Cal as well as I had the night we left Lovecraft. “Would he?” I realized I didn’t know the Cal who’d run out of the parlor at all. He might.

“I once spent six hours in freezing rain outside the flat of a girl I was crushing hard for,” Dean said. “And when her boyfriend came around I got myself a night in lockup over the scene I caused.” He took my chin between his fingers and kissed my forehead, softly. “A guy does a lot of things he doesn’t think too hard about when he’s got it bad for a girl.”

“Was she pretty?” I said, a tinge of sharpness I hadn’t intended in the question. “The girl you went to jail over.”

“Pretty enough,” he said. “Gold hair, blue eyes. The usual.” He let go of me and winked. “She was sure no you.” He tried a cookie, crumbs lingering on his chin. “That Bethina’s got a real trick for the hearth.” He licked his fingers. “With my kind of people, you might almost call her a witch.”

I cocked my head. “And what would you call me?”

He considered. “Dangerous. What you have, and your old man—the knack for elemental enchantment, messing with fire and iron—that ain’t usual, and we heretic types know not to cross what’s unusual. No future in it.”

I looked at my hands. Even here in the parlor, where there was no clockwork to speak of beyond the door hinges and the shutters, I could feel the Weird under my fingers, resonating with the iron that ran in my blood. For the first time my hands were terribly alien to me, the hands of a stranger who commanded eldritch, unearthly forces.

“I suppose I better go put things right with Cal before he takes a runner,” I muttered. The thought that I had to talk my best friend out of betraying us galled me.

“I’ll go out for a smoke,” Dean said. “I’ll be within hollering distance if he gets sassy.”

He kissed me on the top of my head before he went out and I tried not to feel guilty at the magnetic pull as my Weird responded to his touch.

“Cal?” I went from parlor to billiard room to kitchen, finding not hide nor hair. “Cal, where are you?” If he’d already gone, I’d have to go after him, and I didn’t relish that scene.

“He went out for a walk,” Bethina said. She had her sleeves rolled up and was working a white lump of bread dough on a butcher board. “Said he needed air. Looked fit to pop.”

“That’s my fault,” I sighed. Rational or not, I’d upset Cal, and that, I did feel terrible about.

Bethina stopped kneading and brushed her hands. She left ghostly prints down her apron front. “Can I ask you something, miss? And expect honesty in return?”

“As honest as I can be,” I said, wondering what fresh hell I was in for. I went to the icebox and opened it, picking out nothing. My stomach was far too troubled for hunger, and there was nothing edible inside anyway.

“Do you fancy Cal?”

I lost my grip on the chrome handle in my surprise, and the icebox slammed shut. “Do I …” It was a fair question. Cal was noble, true and innocent. Dean wasn’t any of those things. But Cal saw the worst in me, and I couldn’t go back to what he thought I should be. Not now that I had opened the way to a world I’d thought was only my mother’s stories with the Weird and with the Folk.

“Miss?” Bethina stood very still, as if she were waiting for a slap. “I’d like an answer. Please.”

“No. Not that way,” I said. “Not in the way that he wants.”

“He’s your friend, though, miss,” Bethina insisted. “He’s loyal to you, and he thinks you’re pretty. He said.”

I threw up my hands. I’d figured Cal might have a crush, but I’d been careful not to give him hope. “It doesn’t work that way in real life, Bethina. I know what he wants and I don’t want the same. I’m sorry.”

Bethina’s face fell. “Well, I—I do care for Cal. In the way he wants. He’s just like Sir Percival, in the King Arthur tales.”

“And I thought I read too many books,” I murmured. I’d never thought like Bethina and normal girls did. Boys didn’t look at me and I had no time for them. Dean was the first one to talk to me like I wasn’t beneath him or just stupid. Even Cal talked down to me at times. He’d been raised to, in a respectable household with respectable people. Dean was the only boy I’d met who was like me.

Bethina folded, like someone had cut her strings. “You don’t think someone like me is worth him.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t think anything of the sort.” Bethina would be good for Cal. She was steady and sweet and practical and she’d keep him with his feet on the ground. “Just tell him,” I said to Bethina. “We don’t get much time as it is, and we waste too much of it wondering.”

“You’re smart, miss,” Bethina said. “So much it’s spooky.”

“I frighten even myself,” I assured her, and went out the kitchen door to find Cal.

Cal wasn’t hard to track—he’d gone directly to the cemetery and was sitting on the gate, letting it swing back and forth while he perched on the top bar, his heels hooked in the scrollwork.

“Aren’t you worried more ghouls might come?” I said when I was a few feet away—just speaking distance. I’d never felt awkward in front of Cal before, and it sat as a stone in my throat.

“They wouldn’t want me,” Cal grumbled. “I’m not a big side of beef like your friend in there. I’m only scraps.”

I had been prepared to be contrite, but my annoyance came back at his complaining tone. “Listen to yourself, Cal!” I snapped. “I’m sorry that you thought we were something we’re not. I’m sorry. You’re my friend and I never wanted to hurt you.”

“Maybe not,” Cal said. “But you did it.” The gate swung under his weight, imitating the voices of the circling crows.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I sat on a pile of leaves against the fence and tucked my skirt under my knees. We both looked at the pond and the slowly dying season. I didn’t want to meet Cal’s eyes in that moment and see his answer.

He propped his chin in his hands. “You’re not who I thought you were, Aoife. I got a lot of guff for being friendly with a girl who carries the necrovirus. And when Conrad went mad in front of everyone—”

“I’m not responsible for Conrad’s madness,” I said. It stung that he’d use that against me after all. “But neither was he. I won’t abandon my brother, Cal. Blood is blood and friendship is friendship. It doesn’t have to end just because we’ve changed.”

“You’re not the Aoife Grayson I met on the first day of classes,” Cal said. “She asked to borrow my pen. She helped me pass calculus. She was a good girl, a proper girl. You’re not her.”

A long moment passed while we watched leaves fall and float on the glassy surface of the pond beyond the cemetery walls.

“No,” I agreed. “I’m not.” I looked at Cal again. “I’m scared to tell you how much I’m not, Cal. I want to, but I’m scared of what you’ll do.”

“Scared?” He swiped his hands through his hair. “Aoife, you have nothing to be scared of from me. That Dean, he’s the problem. He’ll lead you astray and you’ll never find your way back.”

“Cal,” I said quietly, knowing there was only one thing I could say to stem his anger. “I don’t like what’s gone between us, and if I tell you something to make things right, you have to promise me that you’ll stop ripping on Dean and really listen.”

“Fine,” he said after a long time. “But don’t expect me to like it.”

He was hurt, that much was evident, and I tried not to let his hard tone and hard eyes sting too much. “My father used enchantments,” I said. “Not fakery and sleight of hand. Real power that science can’t explain. He communicated with creatures from beyond this world. I can do the same thing.”

“That’s the necrovirus talking for you,” Cal said, too quickly. The words put a blade in me, low down, in the stomach, and started a fury that, after my encounters with Tremaine, was becoming familiar.

“Dammit. I’m not crazy, Cal, and I’ll prove it to you.” I held out my hand. “You have anything mechanical on you?”

He shrugged. “Just my portable aether tube and my multitool.”

“The tube,” I said. “Give it to me.”

“Aoife, don’t embarrass yourself,” he said. “The virus has made you see things. Enchantment isn’t possible. All of the great minds have proved that. The Proctors tell us—”

“You don’t really believe I’m only infected,” I cut him off, folding my arms. “Or you wouldn’t still be here. I think you want to believe, Cal.” Just like Nerissa wanted to believe there was something beyond the dreary horror of the madhouse. Just like I wanted to believe our family wasn’t doomed and like all of the so-called heretics the Proctors chased wanted to believe in something beyond cold, hard rational thought, prison bars and raven spies.

I took the tube, the bits of copper and glass and aether that I’d taken for granted a week ago, with its enamel dial and thin tuning wires running along the inside of the glass, where the cloudy aether swirled, breathing like a sleeping animal.

I could feel the machine slither under my skin. The copper and the dial and the wire binding everything together. The aether prickled my Weird, like static electricity when I touched metal in the cold of winter.

My eyes fluttered closed. I saw all the components in my mind, the switch that sparked the aether to life with a static charge, the wires that reached out into the fathomless distances of the fabric of the universe to receive the signal beamed from one tube to another.

I knew the pressure now, the fullness. The machine coming into my mind, my Weird sliding out to the machine.

The tube came to life in my hands, and a sportscaster broke the afternoon quiet. “It’s the windup … the pitch … strike one for Susce, in a surprising performance.”

“Maybe this is the year for the Sox,” I said. “The curse can’t last forever.”

Cal stared at the tube, at me. “How’d you do that?”

“I told you, Cal,” I said. I pushed at the tuner, the small black slide on the side of the device. The station changed, big band music, the NBC comedy hour, back to baseball. “Take it,” I said, handing it to him. “See that I’m not just doing one of Conrad’s tricks.”

He accepted the tube with stiff fingers, and when it was in his grasp I pushed the static away from my mind, sending it back into the switch.

The tube shut off. Cal started. “Aoife. This is …”

“Unbelievable?” I offered. “Yeah. But there it is.”

“So back there, in the tunnel?” He dropped the tube into the leaves like it was a vial full of necrotic blood.

“Me,” I said quietly.

“The airship crash?”

“Cal, don’t be stupid. The Proctors caused that by blowing big holes in the Belle.” I picked up one of the leaves, a perfect skeleton, and stared at the pond through it.

Cal moved from the gate, standing between me and the water, twitching like I’d just covered him in ants. “This is … this is bad, Aoife.”

I crushed the leaf between my palms. “It’s me, Cal. You wanted to know.”

The gate creaked, and long shadows crept from beneath the trees and the headstones before Cal spoke again. “You’re my only friend, you know. Those guys back at the School aren’t my friends. I can’t tell them anything the way I do you. After Conrad … you’re it.”

“I still want to be it,” I said. “I wouldn’t have got on at the Academy without you, Cal. Without someone to talk to, a friend …” I stood up and brushed myself off. “I know you’re angry, but I’m afraid that’s all I can offer. You can stay and we can try it, or you can go home and turn me in.”

“Jeez, Aoife,” Cal sighed. “I’d never turn you in. Not to the Proctors.”

For all of his moods, Cal was honest to a fault. He wouldn’t turn me in. I reached for his hand, but he tugged it away. “Thank you,” I said, and meant it, even though my hand was hanging in midair like a fool’s. My face went warm again, Tremaine’s bruises turning rosy.

Cal shrugged. “It’s nothing. But I have something to say, if we’re still friends. That Dean … he’s bad news, Aoife. Conrad would slap sense into you if he saw what I saw.”

“I’m going inside,” I said, holding up a hand to end the diatribe I sensed in my future. “It’s cold and I have a lot of practice to do.”

Cal climbed back onto the gate as I walked away. The hinges spoke in the gathering dark, a dirge for something that we’d both lost.