I swallowed hard against my throbbing heart. I’d never seen Conrad like this, except once, and it scared me. That time, he’d cut my throat and left me for dead. This time wasn’t looking much better. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Conrad.”
“I’ve seen you,” he whispered. “For weeks, I’ve had dreams because of that hole in the sky. Voices in my head. If you’re really my sister, then prove it.” His eyes narrowed. “You have five seconds.”
I raised my hands slowly, but there was no escape route now. All I could do was run, and then Conrad would shoot me in the back. I had no doubt he’d do it. We might be blood, but something had scared my brother, badly enough that the look in his eye was the same as it was the night iron poisoning had made him try to kill me.
We both had the conviction to follow through on our actions, and Conrad was scared. I was scared. What could I possibly say to calm him?
“Starlight,” I breathed. That night was in my mind anyway, why not use it?
The pistol dipped, just the smallest fraction. Conrad’s thin black eyebrows drew together. “What did you say?”
“ ‘Have you ever seen your blood under starlight, Aoife?’ ” I quoted at him. “ ‘When it’s quite black?’ ”
Conrad let out a shuddering breath, and then his arm dropped. He made a pained expression, as if the pistol suddenly weighed a thousand pounds. “It’s really you,” he muttered. “You don’t know how glad I am to know that.”
“Conrad,” I said, moving toward him again now that his eyes weren’t terrifying me. “What is happening here?”
“You know, you could have picked a happy memory,” he said. “One of those times I read you the horror comics Mom didn’t want you reading, or when we snuck into a showing of The Green Hornet three days in a row. You didn’t have to pick that.”
“I wasn’t exactly thinking about happy memories,” I said. “Not while my own brother is pointing a gun at me.” I tentatively walked toward him and wrapped my arms around his shoulders. Conrad was tall and thin like our father, solid under his too-small jacket, and I felt relief wash over me as I touched him and convinced myself he was real.
“It’s been a crazy couple of weeks,” he said. “Months. Time isn’t doing the same things it used to. I don’t know what the hell’s going on out there, Aoife.”
I had an idea, but I wasn’t about to throw myself on my sword and admit responsibility just yet. Tell Conrad I was responsible for all of the wrong that was happening? All the dreams? I couldn’t be sure, could I? No need to alarm everyone.
I wondered how long I’d be able to rationalize it that way.
“What are you doing here and not on Cape Cod? Where’s Dad?” I asked instead. Conrad’s face fell, and I knew that something was gravely wrong.
“He’s upstairs,” he said. “We had to come back here—the Cape, it’s not safe.… Look, you need to see him to understand. I’m glad you’re back, but you could’ve gotten here a lot sooner.”
I felt a pang of guilt. Of course I hadn’t had to linger in Thorn so long. I could have risked more to escape sooner. The desire I’d felt from the moment I’d left to come to the only place I’d ever considered home, even if living in it would slowly poison me, didn’t make up for my delay.
“How are you doing?” I asked Conrad as we mounted the grand staircase. “I mean with the iron poisoning?”
“It comes and goes,” he said. “I think not having a Weird helps. I’m doing all right, Aoife, you don’t have to worry about me.” He cast a sideways glance at me. “Do I need to worry about you?”
I could feel the pull already, the scream of the iron against my Fae blood like metal on metal, sparking and turning to slag inside me. “Nothing to worry about,” I lied.
Conrad’s raised eyebrow told me he wasn’t buying it. “Uh-huh,” he said. We went all the way to the back of the house, to the master suite, where I’d never been. That was my father’s room. Even when he’d been gone, I’d felt it would be an unforgivable incursion to go inside.
“I really am fine,” I insisted. “I’m more worried about what’s going on down there in Arkham. What’s happened, Conrad? Where’s Dad, and Valentina? Why did you leave Cape Cod?”
Conrad paused at the master suite’s double doors, which were carved high above our heads with phases of the sun and moon in great orbits.
“Speaking of questions, where did you go, Aoife?” he said. “What happened to you? I tried my damndest to get it out of Cal, but his mouth was locked up tighter than a bank vault.”
I felt as if hours passed while we stared at each other; he was waiting for an answer. “I was in the Thorn Land,” I said at last, bracing for Conrad’s inevitable explosion. “With our mother.”
“What?” Conrad’s already haggard face took on a new crop of shadows, making him appear hard and unyielding as granite. I felt the nervous fear rise again. I knew from his expression this couldn’t go anywhere good.
“I had to,” I said.
“I don’t understand why you’d ever give that woman the time of day, never mind run away with her,” Conrad said.
“It was that or lose Dean forever,” I said softly. “I’m sorry, Conrad. Do you at least believe that?”
He heaved a sigh, pushing his hands through his dark hair until it stood straight up. “Yeah,” he said. “I believe you’re sorry. But that doesn’t mean this is all okay with me, Aoife. You know how I feel about the full-blooded Fae.”
“Will you please stop acting like I’m a traitor and tell me what the hell is going on in Arkham?” I demanded. Conrad usually just needed somebody to bite back, to knock some sense into him, and then he’d return to being my slightly pompous but generally tolerable older brother.
Conrad heaved a sigh, and before he could say anything else, the door swung open. The tall, blond figure waved his arms in irritation. “What’s all this noise? I told you that Mr. Grayson needs it quiet.…” Cal trailed off as he took me in, his pale, watery eyes going wide. “Aoife!” he exclaimed, and enfolded me into a hug that was all bony edges and Cal’s distinct, musty scent.
“Hey there, Cal,” I mumbled into his sweater. He squeezed me tighter, and his strength reminded me that I wasn’t dealing with a human boy. Cal was a shape-shifter, and had the prodigious physical abilities to go with it. I’d learned to live with the fact that his kind usually ate human flesh and lived below ground in nests. Cal was Cal, and whatever he was, he was my best friend in the world.
“I was so worried,” he said, holding me at arm’s length. He’d cut his hair, and his clothes fit for the first time in my memory. I was half sure the gray wool sweater and flannel slacks he was sporting had been my father’s at one point in my dad’s misspent youth.
“I’m all right,” I assured him, and cast a look at Conrad. He could hear it twice, and maybe believed me this time.
“Come in, come in,” Cal told me, and before Conrad could protest, dragged me into the master suite. “It’s good you’re here,” he said softly. “I hope it’ll make a difference.”
The first thing I noticed was that all the curtains were drawn. Heavy things, velvet and oppressive, full of dust that tickled my nostrils and trickled down the back of my throat. Blackout curtains, left over from the last war, or maybe the one before that.
The second was that my father was lying in bed, in his pajamas, sheets pulled up to his chest. At his side sat my friend Bethina, her copper curls in disarray, wearing a plain green dress rather than the maid’s uniform she’d worn when we first met. She held my father’s hand lightly, stroking the back of it with her fingertips. I felt a slow-encroaching sense of dread, like a rising tide.