“The king of dreams has his rules and we have ours, and we rewrite them with the ink of our blood,” Nerissa said, fast and in a monotone, as if she were reciting a prayer. “You can go anywhere, Aoife. Anywhere that dreams can see, you can go. You can make the dream king point the way.”
I stayed very still for a heartbeat or two. I was determined that I was going to be a Gateminder in the way the Brotherhood had meant for me to be, before Crosley and Draven had split it apart and allowed the world to fracture. I was determined that I would stop the Old Ones before they spread their madness and destruction across all the worlds I could visit. But in that moment, the only determination I cared about was the small, slender, flickering flame of a chance that I could have Dean back. That I could journey not to the Thorn Land or to the empire of the Old Ones, but to a land that no living thing, be they human or immortal, could visit.
“I can get Dean back,” I repeated to Nerissa, slowly and carefully, as if we were just learning to speak the same language. In a way, I supposed we were. I was learning to decipher her madness, and she was learning to extrapolate from my Weird. “I can go to the Deadlands and get him, and I can push back the Old Ones at the same time.” I swallowed, throat tight and dry. I wanted to hope, but I didn’t dare. “I can get Dean back.”
“Oh, yes,” my mother said, her eyes glistening like beads in the lamplight. “You can go. To the Deadlands and beyond, and what you meet in the Deadlands can be the end of anything you choose. Including the Old Ones. There is a way.”
“How?” I said. “How can you be alive and bring someone back from the dead?”
My mother stepped outside and shut the door firmly. “Walk with me, until we get to the hexenring,” she said, “and I’ll tell you.”
Final entry:
So here I sit, in a spot where no Gateminder ever expected to find herself. The court of the Winter Queen is nothing like the life I knew, but it’s not unbearable. At least, I tell myself that, because I only have to endure the stares of the full-blooded Fae and the glares of Tremaine for a little while longer.
My mother is well, and getting stronger, although I don’t know if she’ll ever be the same after the years of iron poisoning, locked up in Lovecraft.
Octavia spends hours talking to her. I know too well the agony of having a sibling you can’t reach, the almost primal desire to make them well.
Tremaine is just as he has always been, conniving and cruel, although of late, his cruelty is mostly directed at his new human pet, Grey Draven, and I personally feel that’s the way it should be.
So no, I didn’t beat back the Storm. I didn’t fix what I broke. I am the destroyer, and it’s a name that’ll follow me for the rest of my life. But I do have a plan, a new plan. I am living for the plan, because if it fails, I’ll truly have nothing. I’ll just be a mostly human girl trapped in the Thorn Land while everyone she knows and loves back home grows old and dies.
This will be my last entry in this journal. I am not a member of the Brotherhood. I’m never going to be. And my Weird doesn’t work like my father’s, like my family’s. My gift is so much stronger, so much worse than theirs. I’m not going to keep writing about it for some future Brotherhood member to pore over and dissect and use to their advantage.
I don’t know what will happen now, but I have a plan, and my plan is simple: I am going to the Deadlands. I am going to use my gift to get there. I am going to find Dean, and I’m going to bring him back. And when I do that, I am going to kill the Old Ones and make the world safe again.
Or I am going to die trying.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Caitlin Kittredge is a history and horror movie enthusiast who writes novels wherein bad things usually happen to perfectly nice characters. But that’s all right—the ones who aren’t so nice have always been her favorites. Caitlin lives in western Massachusetts in a crumbling Victorian mansion with her two cats, her cameras, and several miles of books. When not writing, she spends her time taking photos, concocting alternate histories, and trying new and alarming colors of hair dye. Caitlin is the author of two bestselling series for adults, Nocturne City and the Black London adventures. The Nightmare Garden is her second book for teens. Look for her first, The Iron Thorn, available from Delacorte Press. You can visit her at caitlinkittredge.com.