“Because when my kid sister runs off, it’s my job to bring her back.”
“I’m doing this for Dean, Conrad,” I said. “It’s the only way. I have to make up for what I did. It’s my fault he got shot, and Nerissa said …” I drifted off, not able to continue my train of thought. My mother’s information was probably just a flight of fancy, but it was all I had.
Conrad rubbed his forehead and then spread his hands out on the table, a move that reminded me too much of our father. “Aoife, you have to know that it can’t be real. To visit the Deadlands, you have to be dead.” He moved one hand subtly, to cover mine. “I don’t want you to be dead.”
I felt a stab in my gut then. Conrad could be a pain. He was vain and superior and had a bad temper, but he was my brother, and I’d never doubted for a second that he loved me.
I couldn’t say that about anyone else.
I turned my hand to give Conrad’s a squeeze. “I’ll be careful,” I promised.
“How can you be careful if you’re dead?” Conrad demanded. “This is exactly the kind of thinking that led to this whole mess, that led to that hole in the sky and our father being in a coma.”
“Hey,” Cal said. “If it weren’t for Aoife, you’d still be hiding in the Mists and I’d still be under the thumb of the Proctors. She saved us both from that.”
Quickly as I’d come to feel guilty about doing all of this to Conrad, anger replaced it, like flame turns water to steam.
“No,” I said to Cal. “Let him get it out. No secrets between us, Conrad.” I fixed him with a glare. “If you’ve got a problem, lay it on the table.”
Conrad’s lip twitched, the nervous tic he got when things weren’t going his way. “I never should have sent you that letter.” He sighed. “I was scared, and I made a bad decision.”
He might as well have pulled back his hand and slapped me, because that was what it felt like. The letter—the one that had touched off my leaving the Academy, finding out what my family could do, encountering Tremaine—had been so simple. Find the witch’s alphabet. Save yourself. A desperate plea from Conrad to stave off the iron poisoning that had consumed him, to free him from the Mists.
“So I should have stayed in Lovecraft?” I whispered. “I should have gone mad, just like our mother?”
“No!” Conrad snapped. “No … I just meant … you weren’t ready. You let Tremaine sway you and I couldn’t help you, because if I’d left the Mists he’d have found me, too.”
There it was. The unspoken ball of anger and resentment between us finally had a name. Conrad blamed me for falling for Tremaine’s tricks. Even though I’d tried to fix it. Even though there was no way I could have known the Fae were liars.
“You’ve got some nerve,” I told Conrad quietly. I felt like turning over the table, throwing my tea in his face and storming out, but I wasn’t one to give in to my rages.
“Do I?” he said. “I love you, Aoife, but you caused a lot of this, and I take partial blame because you didn’t know about anything involving our family, and you weren’t ready to fend off the Fae. I might not have a Weird, but at least I was prepared for the truth.”
“Not because of that,” I said. “That’s all true. I let Tremaine trick me.” I stood, smoothing my hands over the rough uniform the Proctors had put me in on Alcatraz. “You’ve got nerve for pretending that if it had been you he was offering the bargain to, you wouldn’t have done the exact same thing.”
I started to leave, quietly and without a tantrum. I could scream once I was out in the street. Cal moved to stop me, but before he could, I was intercepted by the waitress, holding a bevy of plates piled with steaming meats and vegetables.
I seethed. Conrad was incapable of seeing that he would also have taken the Fae’s bargain. And I seriously doubted he would have tried so hard to set his mistake right after the fact, all the way up to voluntarily going to the Brotherhood and using Tesla’s gate to the realm of nightmares. Bargaining with the Old Ones. Any of what I’d endured.
It made me sad, in an odd way, to know we were so fundamentally different that we’d never again be a family the way we had been when we were kids.
But then, that was what happened when you grew up. You found out that people you trusted weren’t who they said they were, and that big brothers you idolized were painfully human.
It was the worst feeling in the world, and I waved the plate away when the waitress offered it to me. “I lost my appetite.”
“Aoife,” Conrad started. “Don’t get upset. Don’t be like that just because you don’t like the truth.”
I pointed my finger at him and gave him my worst glare, one that I’d first seen framed by Grey Draven’s angular face. “Don’t start with me, Conrad.”
“Listen,” the waitress said. “I hate to interrupt, but there’s two gwai lo across the street who’ve been staring a hole in this place since you came in. Anybody you know?”
I examined the figures who’d been staring in the teahouse window. Hats pulled low over their faces, long coats, completely nondescript.
The Brotherhood’s goons.
“We have to go,” I said to Cal and Conrad. “Right now.”
“There’s a back door,” the waitress said. “I don’t know who you ticked off, but I got no beef with you. I didn’t see anything.”
We started for the kitchen as a throng of vendors pushing steaming carts passed, obscuring us from the Brotherhood for a few seconds.
“One more thing,” I said to the waitress. “I’m looking for a scientist. His name is Horatio Crawford. He does experiments with the dead. Have you heard of anyone like that anywhere in the city?”
Her eyes widened, and she took a step away from me. “I don’t mess with that stuff,” she said. “And I ain’t heard of no scientists. You want the dead, you go to the Spiritualist séances, down on Boneyard Row. But I don’t mess with that. Dealing with ghosts is bound to make you one yourself.”
“Boneyard Row?” I said. “Any particular Spiritualist?”
“I never been, but I hear the best one is Madame Xiang,” the waitress said. “Now get out of here before those goons decide to come in.”
We wound our way through a cramped and boiling kitchen and popped out into an alley.
“Well, this is perfect,” Conrad said. “No money, no plan and the Brotherhood a dozen yards behind us at all times.”
“It’ll be all right,” Cal said. “We can hide.” But he was fidgeting, and I knew he wasn’t any more optimistic than Conrad.
I wasn’t as down in the dumps. I did have a plan. “Come on,” I said, winding my way between rain barrels and piles of debris.
“Where are we going?” Conrad demanded.
“To see Madame Xiang,” I said. “You can come or not. I don’t really care.” I held his gaze until he dropped it to his shoes. I did care what happened to Conrad, of course—I wasn’t heartless. But I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been so angry at him, and when we walked, I made sure I was in front so I didn’t have to look at him.
Finding Boneyard Row wasn’t much of a trick—everyone we asked knew where it was, and pointed us through an encroaching series of row houses, wooden and brick, thrown down seemingly at random and creating narrow alleys and streets teeming with people, carts and the occasional single-vent jitney, its two wheels bouncing over the rutted pavement.
We had to move at the pace of the crowd, and we inched along until one of the brightly hung windows, resplendent with gilt paint, silk curtains and crookedly painted statues of Chinese animals, read MADAME XIANG: SPIRITUAL COMMUNICATIONS FROM BEYOND THE AETHER TO YOU.