Iron Codex 2 - The Nightmare Garden Read Free Page A

other while the throaty call of a crowechoed from a nearby thicket. I wasn’t going to be the one to look away. I’d been glad of Conrad’s protection in our care-homes and at the Academy, but since he’d left, I’d realized I didn’t need him. He needed to see it now too. He was my brother, and I loved him, but the closeness of our old relationship had blown away with the ash from the ruined Lovecraft Engine.
    “Well?” I said at last. Dean, Cal and Bethina, who’d been a chambermaid in my father’s house before a few days ago, stopped and clustered around me. Conrad had elected himself group leader, but so far they’d stuck with me. Not that I knew where we were going, or where we were going to stay when it got dark again. These were ancient forests, night forests, and who knew what was lurking in the shadows? In Lovecraft, things like nightjars, shape-shifting blood drinkers and springheel jacks, terrifying long-toothed predators, ruled the night along with the ghouls. And those were just the creatures who’d managed to slip through from Thorn and other places. Here in the Mists, this native land of theirs so far from Iron, if they caught us we’d be so much lunch meat. I felt a small, traitorous prick of pride at that and tried not to show it on my face. I’d managed to get us as far as the Mists. I tried to believe I could see us through to wherever we ended up, but I wasn’t very convincing, even inside my own head. Conrad
did
know the Mists, and I had no idea how to even find my way out of this wood.
    Conrad folded his arms. “Aoife, you’re being a child.”
    “I left her there, Conrad,” I said quietly, voicing what had been bothering me since the morning dream. “I left her to whatever might happen.”
    Conrad sighed, shifting his feet. “Listen, when we getsomewhere safe we can talk about this. Right now, we’re exposed and we need to keep moving.” He started walking again, until my words distracted him and he tripped.
    “She’s
our mother
.”
    My brother turned back to me, and his face was colder than I’d ever seen it. “Nerissa hasn’t been a mother to me for ten years, Aoife. To you either. She left us to the mercy of people who’d just as soon burn us alive, or cut us open and study us. She didn’t even try to keep us from that when she knew she couldn’t take care of us. Some kind of
mother
to do that.”
    “I said I wouldn’t leave her there,” I told him. I’d promised her. No matter what she’d done, I’d promised that I’d keep her safe because she couldn’t do it for herself. That was what you did, when you had a mother, and I hadn’t managed to do anything except put her in more danger. Guilt made my stomach roil. “This is my fault,” I said, “all of it, but most of all Nerissa, and I have to—”
    “Dammit, Aoife!” Conrad bellowed. The crows took flight in a ripple of glossy black against the silver sky. “Going back to the Iron Land and risking your neck won’t change what happened! You’re going to have to accept that so we can all stay alive.”
    I wished he’d just slapped me. The hole that opened in me at his words was a hundred times more painful than any blow would have been. Because I knew he was right. My guilt was like a chain around my ankle, attached to a weight the size of my mother. If I couldn’t put the thoughts out of my mind until we’d reached safety, I’d drag them with me. But I didn’t know how. I swiped at my eyes, telling myself my face was damp only with cool fog, not hot tears.
    “All right, now,” Dean said. “I think we’ve established neither of you is giving up this ghost, so why don’t we agree to disagree?” He helped me off the stump and put his arm around me. “And Conrad—how about shutting your big trap and not making your sister cry before I knock your teeth in?”
    Conrad blinked once. “What did you just say to me?”
    “Hey!” I clapped my hands. Boys could be like unruly dogs. Where was a