“I didn’t ask you, but I have a feeling you’ll tell me anyway,” I said. I didn’t care that I was being a mouthy brat—not the way I’d care if it were my father across from me. I didn’t feel the connection to Nerissa I did to him. I guessed Conrad was right. Our mother had left us long before she’d been committed.
“You really are a difficult child,” my mother sighed.
“I’m not a child,” I told her. “By this point, I think I’ve earned the right to be treated like an adult.”
“You’re not,” my mother said. “But I can see you aren’t going to give up this ridiculous idea, so I’ll tell you what I know: when I was in the madhouse another patient told me about a man in San Francisco.”
Oh, this was perfect. “Mother,” I said, slow and direct, “your one idea comes from another inmate in a mental institution.”
“I didn’t belong there,” my mother snapped. “Neither did he. He was a Spiritualist, and the Proctors locked him up for heresy. He worked with a doctor who had made a machine that could reach the Deadlands. Horatio Crawford, that was his name. Dr. Horatio Crawford.”
“And?” I prompted. One madman’s tale of a magical device that could peel back the layers of space and time when even my Weird failed was suspect, to say the least.
“You’ll probably scoff, since it’s a Fae tale and not made of math and metal,” my mother said. “But I thought there was a thread that bound souls to life, a measure of time that was only theirs, and when the thread got cut, well … Octavia always used to tell me that was what led to spirits and phenomena and such.”
I didn’t reply. I didn’t want to anger her now that she was talking by suggesting that Fae ghost stories held about as much water as the kind my classmates and I used to tell. The notion of the thread, though—if there was a connection between worlds via the Gates, why not a connection of the soul to the Land it had inhabited in life?
“If Crawford found a way to use his machine to tether the soul to life but allow it to be free of a body … well, that makes sense to me,” Nerissa said. “Your father always said magic was just science nobody could quantify yet.”
“That sounds like him,” I said. I desperately wanted to hear more about her and Archie’s life together, but now wasn’t the time. Now, time was precious.
“Thank you for trusting me,” I said, when she only stared up at the high windows of Graystone, which reflected the mountains beyond, gray and implacable as stone eyes.
“I just know you’re too stubborn to give up,” she said. “And I don’t want you to get hurt, or have your spirit broken worse than it already is. I do care about you, Daughter.” She pressed her hand over mine, and I tried not to start at her cold skin. The gesture was so foreign, all I could do was squeeze her fingers, because I didn’t want her to think it was in vain.
“Go to San Francisco and find Horatio Crawford,” my mother said, giving my hand a squeeze back. “If he’s still alive, then perhaps the two of you will be clever enough to cheat Death.”
She rose and smoothed her skirts. “I’ve been here too long. Goodbye, Aoife.” After a moment of hesitation, she reached out and cupped my face with her thin, cool palm. “Be careful,” she whispered, an unidentifiable expression flitting across her face. Then she stepped back and walked away, and the mist swallowed her up.
I stayed where I was. My mother had never been reliable, but when it came to Dean, could I really be picky about where I got help?
There was nothing I could do for Dean or my father by sitting on a garden bench moping. I finally had a sliver of hope, and not to follow it just because of the source would be the worst kind of foolish.
I stood up and turned back toward the house. There was only one direction to go, and that was west, to San Francisco.
4
Winging Westward
IT WASN’T HARD to convince Cal to come with me. Cal was always up for an adventure, for bucking authority, whether it was the Proctors or Conrad. That was one of my favorite things about him.
I should have been terrified of Cal. Ghouls lived under old cities like Lovecraft—infested the sewers built before the Proctors took control—and would attack like a lightning strike made of muscle and teeth when they were hunting. But Cal had been my friend before I’d found out the truth about myself and the world, the necrovirus, all of it. And he’d kept right on being my friend after. Besides, as a changeling, I didn’t have much room to talk. If the two of us told a normal human the truth, it’d be a toss-up whom they’d turn their shotgun on first.
He procured extra clothes for both of us, plus food, money and a map of California from my father’s vast library. I waited outside my father’s room while Cal asked Bethina to look after him until we got back. I didn’t want to antagonize Conrad any more than I had to, but I also didn’t trust that he wouldn’t go running off and leave my father to his own devices. Bethina was tough and trustworthy, and I knew my father would be safe with her.
“Now what?” Cal asked when he came back and handed me my bag. The white cat watched us leave from one of the upstairs windows. I looked at the road ahead. I didn’t want to be reminded that my father was back there, insensible to the world, and that it was probably my fault.
“Airship terminal,” I said, “and hope we have enough to buy passage to San Francisco.”
“Don’t you think that’ll be kind of dangerous?” Cal said. “Going back to Lovecraft? Even with no Proctors, they don’t exactly welcome people like us.”
“I’m not going to just waltz in,” I said. “I’ll let you buy the tickets and I’ll stick to the shadows.” Of course, if we needed immigration papers or Proctors were still watching the airfield, then everything would go wrong. Theoretically, one could travel between quarantined cities without papers, but if the Proctors en route were feeling mercurial, who was to say what could happen?
“Okay,” Cal said, casting me a sidelong look. We came to the three-sided shelter that was the Arkham jitney stop, the path that would take us to the airship field outside Lovecraft. “I gotta say, this isn’t the most genius of your plans, Aoife.”
“It’s a bad plan,” I agreed, shifting the weight of my bulging bag. “But it’s the only one I’ve got.”
Logan Airfield was supposed to be a modern marvel, something all the good citizens of Lovecraft could lord over San Francisco and New Amsterdam. The first things I saw when the express jitney pulled up were the swooping gull wings of the main terminal’s roof, and the first thing I heard was the trumpet of loudspeakers announcing departing and arriving flights.
We joined the stream of well-dressed travelers and their luggage. Nobody gave us more than a cursory glance, and I stayed beneath the great sign, lit from within, that scrolled through flights, destinations and times.
In the shadows, I was able to watch the ordinary people approaching the ticket desks, giving their luggage to porters, retrieving their tickets. They all seemed so carefree, even the men with briefcases and frowns and the woman trying to wrangle four small, screeching children. Even the Proctors, standing with their arms folded, bored, or talking in groups while travelers flowed around them, didn’t seem particularly concerned.
Maybe they hadn’t heard about what had happened in Arkham. Maybe they were all willfully ignoring their bad dreams.
Cal shot me a look from the miles-long line, and I shrugged in sympathy. Patience wasn’t something either of us possessed in spades. The next flight to San Francisco was in forty minutes, and if we didn’t make it we’d be stuck at the airfield until morning, under the watchful eye of the high windows and the gleaming steel walls engraved with scenes of great engineering feats from the past—the Eerie Canal, the Babbage Bridge, the Lovecraft Engine.