“And they found a way to come here and return to the living?” Tesla shook his head. “You know, I’d read theories. I even tried to construct a prototype once, but it failed miserably. Whoever sent you over is a genius.”
“He’s a drunk,” I said. “He doesn’t even know we’re using his device.”
Tesla barked a laugh. “I know how that feels. How you create something and can’t see that it could be used for evil.” His face drew down. “Can’t see what you’ve done until it’s too late.”
“You couldn’t possibly know what the Gates would do,” I told him, picking up on his discomfort. “You couldn’t know what was beyond them.”
“I had hopes,” Tesla said. “To see worlds beyond my own. Everyone in the scientific community laughed at me, but there were a few men, men who were not of science but of the otherworld, who didn’t think what I’d said was at all laughable.”
He went to the edge of the rock and stood silhouetted against the rising sun. “The Fae had been using their hexenrings to visit the Iron Land since time immemorial, taking our children, playing with humans as if we were pets. We just wanted a way to strike back. I wanted to help. I had no idea that us constructing our own Gate, sending the flow the other way, would fracture the barriers between all the worlds, allow things to come from anywhere and everywhere.” He rubbed his forehead. “Yes, things like you and I and full-blooded Fae need to use a Gate, but I always knew that the endgame would be the barriers fraying, time and space crashing into each other, and the destruction of the universe. Only the Old Ones will survive, and that’s the way they like it. They’re probably laughing at us right now.”
“They’re doing a lot more than that,” I said softly. I thought I’d feel shame, but it felt almost good to finally tell someone the truth. “I almost destroyed the Iron Land, and I bargained with them to set things right. All I really got was my mother back, though. They didn’t fix the destruction, and now they’re returning to the Lands because of what I did.”
Tesla shut his eyes. “You found my last Gate. The one to the dreamland, to that awful man in black.”
“Crow’s not awful,” I said, thinking of the sad, pale man who lived alone in the land that controlled the dreams of all the others. “He tried to stop me. But I didn’t listen. And I didn’t listen to anyone else, so now I’m here trying to save my friend who died because I couldn’t live with what I’d done.”
I didn’t have to breathe in the Deadlands, but it appeared that I could cry. Tears slipped down my cheeks, colder than my frozen skin.
“Listen to me,” Tesla said. He came back to me and took me by the shoulders. “Why you came here isn’t important. You were probably doomed from the moment you went under. The Old Ones are the most powerful things in the universe, yes, but the worst one is Nylarthotep.”
Tesla was solid, if gray, as if he were a piece of lantern reel in the world of color. I looked down at his hands. “What happened to you? You’re not like the other Walkers.”
He gave a dry laugh. “I’m what happens after you’ve been a Walker for a few hundred years. Eventually I’ll dry up and blow away. But not today.”
“The Great Old Ones grew terrified of the power Nylarthotep commanded,” he said, “so they dumped him here, cut off from everything, with only the dead for company. Here he’s the Yellow King.”
I shifted my feet. If the Faceless knew I was gone, then all this trying to get them to lead me to the Yellow King would be for nothing. “I should get back to the camp.”
“No!” For the first time, Tesla’s face hardened, and he grabbed me by the wrist when I tried to walk away. I struggled, panicked, but for a dead man he was strong.
“I must have an audience with him,” I said. “It’s the only way to get Dean out of here.”
“And I’m telling you that there’s no hope of that,” Tesla said. “That Fae nonsense about everyone having a thread of life and only when it’s cut by fate do you descend into the Deadlands? That’s bunk. You die, you’re dead, and the spheres keep turning without you.”
“No …” I shook my head and tried to struggle, but there was no undoing his grasp. “No, I heard if it wasn’t your time …”
“You were marked the moment you came to the Deadlands,” Tesla told me. “The Yellow King knows someone with your gifts is his only hope of getting free, of returning to the power he once commanded. The Old Ones might destroy us, or they might usher in a new age of science and prosperity, but if Nylarthotep is freed it will be the end of everything—for the Fae, for the Iron Land, for everything.”
“You can’t know that,” I told him. I didn’t want to believe anything he was saying, but I had a horrible, sinking feeling in my guts that it was true.
“I can,” Tesla said. “Because when I died and came here, he tried to do the same thing with me.”
A wan smile lit his face, and in the growing light I could see the hollow pain in his eyes, the look of permanent loss, of things he could never get back, only remember. My mother had had the same look, for as long as I’d known her.
“He took me from the Catacombs, when my soul had barely realized it was dead,” Tesla continued, “and he asked me to open a Gate. I was dead, so I could no longer use any of my Weird, but he didn’t believe there wasn’t something I could do for him.”
Tesla released me, but he didn’t need to keep me close. I wasn’t going anywhere now. I had to hear the end of his story.
“He tortured me for months—maybe years,” Tesla said. “Time flows differently here, I’m sure you can feel. He tormented me, kept me as his special amusement. And you’re walking into his trap. He’ll string you along, promising to release your friend’s soul back into the world, and then he’ll cut you a deal—your friend’s new life for his own freedom.”
Tesla shut his eyes and sucked in a breath. “And you’ll take it. Because if I had had the power, at the end of my time under him, I would have done anything he asked just to make it stop.”
“I—” I started, but he cut me off.
“You’ll sacrifice what’s left of the Lands for your friend, because that’s what he wants. Nothing but death and destruction. An age under the Yellow Sign, and even the Old Ones won’t be able to stop him if he escapes.”
I tried to stand, but my knees went weak. I’d been tunnel-visioned for so long, focusing only on Dean, that everyone telling me that what I wanted was impossible had flown in one ear and out the other.
“It can’t be true,” I whispered, but even to my ears my voice was thready and unconvincing. More important, I wasn’t convinced anymore.
Where had I gotten the information from? My mother, who was unreliable under the best of circumstances and given to spinning outright fantasies at the worst.
And ever since I’d come here, Ian and Spider and everyone else had told me it was impossible.
“I’ll just …” I swallowed hard. Letting Dean go felt as if I’d reached into my chest and torn out my own heart, as if I grasped it bloody and warm and still beating in my fist, squeezing the last of the life from it.
“Just wake up?” Tesla snorted. “No. Your body is alive but your soul is here, and now that Nylarthotep knows about you, only he can allow you to leave. And he won’t do that unless you bargain with him.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?” I screamed. A flight of birds lifted from the marsh at the sound, disappearing into the sky.
Tesla shook his head. “He only let me go because I was useless to him. I hope you’re smarter than I am, Aoife. I really do.”
He started to say more, but his head jerked up at a whisper of sound from behind us, and all at once I was surrounded by the Faceless. Tesla had vanished surely as a vapor.