Iron Codex 2 - The Nightmare Garden by Caitlin Kittredge Read Free Book Online

something to occupy my mind, rather than fretting over what would happen when the door opened again. Fretting rarely did anyone any good.
    Third entry:
    The Erlkin seem hostile at best, but they helped my father escape so the Fae couldn’t force him to do what they eventually made me do—break the Gates, allowing the Fae and their nightmare creatures to flow freely through the Iron Land and attempt to eradicate the iron, then annex the land to the Thorn. And they helped Conrad, or at least a certain group of them did
.
    They don’t love the Fae any more than they love humans or other trespassers, that much Dean told me. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Straight out of Proctor propaganda, when it encouraged us to
inform on each other, to collude to send heretics to the castigator for punishment
.
    Who’s worse? The Proctors or me? They fought the power beyond their understanding with lies and terror. On the other hand, I’ve read enough from my father’s books about the Brotherhood of Iron to realize that at least I’m not entirely alone in my struggle. The Brotherhood was my grandfather’s cadre of scientists, magic users and scholars. They fought that same power by keeping their society absolutely secret, accepting the occasional casualty and adhering to ancient rules that neither the Fae nor the Proctors are playing by any longer. My father himself fought it … or did he? I still don’t know why he broke with the Brotherhood, only that Draven has a score to settle with him
.
    And then there’s me. I didn’t even try to fight the power. I set it free, and in the process I shattered the world
.
    Not shattered—cracked. I’ve cracked the mask, and the true face is showing from underneath, and it is horrible, ugly and crawling with maggots, something no human eye should be forced to look at
.
    Where is my father? He got me out of Lovecraft, but he could be dead now, for all I know. If he didn’t get out before the blast, before the cataclysm, he could be gone, like all the other poor souls
.
    Gone. My mother can’t be gone. I can’t have unwound things that badly. I’ll get out of Windhaven and go back and find her, no matter what Conrad says. I’ll do what I have to
.
    Somehow
.
    *  *  *
    The sound of the hatch wheel spinning alerted me, and I jammed the pencil back into the drawer and my notebook back into my bag. When the hatch opened, I was sitting primly, my ankles crossed and my hands folded, like the star of any comportment class.
    A single Erlkin entered, and I tried not to stare. She was nearly as tall as Skip, with twin braids running from her temples down her back, thin and tight as bullwhips. Her clothes were a simple olive drab jacket with a double row of silver buttons and tight military pants tucked into steam ventor’s boots like the ones Dean wore, steel toes gleaming and the leather spit-polished.
    “Aoife Grayson, I gather,” she said. She gestured at me with a long-fingered hand. “Stand up.”
    I raised an eyebrow at her, more in surprise that she was being so businesslike about taking me prisoner than anything else. “Why?”
    Her lip twitched, and I could tell she wasn’t used to being questioned when she gave an order. “Get up, you wretched girl,” she said, and grabbed my arm, hefting me easily out of the chair. I wasn’t big, and she was, and strong besides. “I just want to get a look at you.” She took my chin between her thumb and forefinger and turned my head from side to side. “Skinny,” she said, “but not too skinny. Not a pale-faced wreck, either. That hair—that hair is most definitely human.”
    I flushed, even though my grooming or lack thereof should have been the furthest thing from my mind. My black curls had been a gift from my father—my mother hadhair as sleek and golden as a lion’s pelt. Back at the Academy, my hair had been one of my primary worries. Things sure did change. “I’ve been in the wind.”
    “And a sense of humor,” the