The Iron Thorn Read Free Page A

and the screams had done it to me. “It might not be what you think.” If Cal got himself hurt, and it was my fault … I hurried after him.
    From the entrance of the alley, I could spy a pile of rags, a hunched hobo’s form in oilskins and overalls. The smell of decay permeated everything, sweet like a rotted flower is sweet. Cal had plowed to a stop, confused.
    “That stinks.”
    I watched as the nightjar lifted its head from its feast of the transient, the few scraps of hair still clinging to its skull fine as cobwebs. My throat constricted, sweet bile creeping onto the back of my tongue. I’d never seen a nightjar up close. Never
smelled
one. It was worse than any warning our professors could give.
    “Oh, please help me,” it said in a human girl’s voice. “I’m so cold … so very alone.…” It drew back swollen black lips to reveal its set of four fangs.
    “Oh, shit,” Cal said plainly.
    The nightjar stirred the rest of its body, pale leathery limbs fighting to free themselves from its camouflage skin. The hobo’s clothing and the remains of the man himself slithered away in a heap, and the nightjar expanded desiccated arms with tattered wings growing on the underside. “Come to me,” it pleaded, still in that plaintive, soft voice. “Just one kiss, that’s all I need.”
    Staring at the thing was hypnotic, like looking at a study corpse in the School of Hospice, and its smell overpowered me; the voice that drifted to Cal and me was as lulling as a caress on the cheek, or the scent of poppy that caught the wind in the summer, when the air came from Old Town. Cal took a shuffling step forward, reaching out one hand. He and the nightjar were mere feet apart. “Don’t …,” Cal whispered.
    That snapped me awake. The thought of the thing touching Cal, that foul black-nailed hand with its waterlogged dead skin on Cal’s face, passing the necrovirus into his blood with the contact, so that slowly, day by day, he’d turn to a nightjar as well, made my stomach turn violently and brought me back to the wintry night, in the alley, not the floating summer place the nightjar’s voice had shown me.
    I plunged a hand into my satchel. There were safety guidelines, drills. The Academy projectionist had shown us a lanternreel about this.
The Necrovirus and You!
How to understand transmission, infection, and lastly, how to deal with a person who was beyond help.
    I’d been bored as I always was during those presentations.Everything useful, if there had been anything useful, had flown from my head at the sight of the thing’s frozen-pond eyes and rotted skin.
    I tried to think. Nightjars hated iron filings. Unfortunately, I didn’t generally make a point to carry a handful of those in my bag, next to my lipstick and hairbrush. That strategy was out.
    Light. Nightjars hated light, their skin photosensitized by the virus. My scrabbling fingers found my portable aether tube, filled with the blue marvel of Mr. Edison’s gas, charged only enough to listen to scratchy music or receive the latest reports on protest activity so I could avoid spots where the Proctors were tangling with rioters in the city. It couldn’t even pick up the serial plays Cal loved from the big antennae in New Amsterdam. But it would be enough, I hoped.
    “Cal,” I said sharply. “You better move.” He blinked, but he did as I said. I cocked my arm and threw the aether tube straight at the pavement. The brass housing flew apart and the electric coil sparked. The tube itself exploded, shards of treated glass flying everywhere as the gas inside struggled to escape. I’d watched aether reactions before on lanternreels, huge ones that the government detonated in the desert, but this close, even a small wisp of gas was like a bomb. “Cover your eyes!” I cried, and threw myself against the alley wall.
    The aether let out a
whump
when it made contact with the oxygen in the air and blue flame blossomed, glowing like a lightning strike