Free Iron Codex 2 - The Nightmare Garden by Caitlin Kittredge Page B

surfaced in legend, when it feasted on what floated above.
    Gatling guns swiveled toward Windhaven from the hull, their cylinders turning slowly, and the dirigible was so close I swore I could count the individual bullets waiting to stream forth and puncture the glass bubble we stood in.
    Shard swore, a coarse, barking word I didn’t understand but recognized instantly as a curse. “Evasive action,” she snapped. “Get us out of their fire zone!”
    “Headwind, Commander,” the pilot said. “We can’t.”
    “Do it!”
Shard screamed.
    “You have a choice, Erlkin,” Draven’s voice purred. “It’s an easy one. Give me Aoife Grayson or I blow that floating scrap heap out of the sky.”
    I backed toward the door, desperate to get away from Draven’s voice and the view of his great dark shadow of an airship. If I couldn’t see or hear him, I could pretendthis wasn’t happening. Shard wasn’t paying attention to me now. She was screaming orders, and her crew was scrambling to obey.
    “I guess you’ve made your choice,” Draven said. “Too bad.” With that, tracers of orange fire streaked across the distance between the zeppelin and Windhaven. One shell shot through the glass of the pilothouse and embedded itself in the far wall. Wind screamed through the opening, and cracks like spiderwebs spread from the hole. Windhaven appeared to be well armored, but Draven’s gunners had been lucky, and the glass fell away in jagged slices as the negative pressure fought with the bullet holes.
    “Return fire!” Shard bellowed. “Don’t let them get another shot like that!”
    I bumped into the hatch and reached behind me to spin the wheel. My heart was hammering in time with the rounds from the Gatling guns on Draven’s airship. I couldn’t think beyond the cold fact that we had to get off Windhaven before Draven boarded it and found us. If he’d already tracked us here, there was nowhere I could truly hide from him. Draven was relentless. Eventually he’d board Windhaven, and then we’d be, as Cal would put it, screwed up like sugar in the gearbox.
    I’d known Draven was depraved and possibly insane, but obsessive enough to track me into a foreign land full of hostile Erlkin? I shuddered to think what he’d do if he actually caught me again.
    I slipped out through the hatch, unnoticed by any of the crew, and fled down the corridor, back the way I’d come. Windhaven jolted and swayed under round after round offire, and there was a shriek followed by a thump that rocked me off my feet, sending vibrations through the entire hull.
    Some kind of antiaircraft projectile. Windhaven righted, but I felt a change in the tenor of the turbines. We’d been hit, and a dip in my stomach told me the craft was losing altitude.
    Hands took me by the arm and tried to right me, and I swatted at them reflexively.
    “Relax!” Dean shouted over the whooping alarms and thudding of projectiles as Windhaven and the dirigible exchanged fire. “It’s me. Just me.”
    “Thanks be for small favors,” I said, slumping. “We have to go, Dean. Now.”
    His face was grim, and his jaw twitched when he nodded. “Yeah. Figure no good’s going to come of me staying here. My mother can take care of herself.”
    I let him pull me to my feet. “Where are Conrad and the others?” I said.
    “Cal and Bethina are in the regular cabins like you,” Dean told me. “My mother put Conrad in a holding cell down near the engine room.”
    “Of course she did,” I muttered. Nothing could ever be easy on me and my family. “Is there a way we can tell Cal and Bethina how to meet us at the balloon bay?”
    “There’s aethervox between the rooms, yeah,” Dean said. We stopped at a red iron box with a symbol stamped on the outside, three lines rising from a triangle. Dean picked up the handset and cranked a knob to bring up power, then turned two dials, one for deck number and one for room.
    Erlkin were beginning to fill the corridor around