Read Dead Iron for Free Online

suffered. Not a scratch upon it.
    Cedar rubbed his thumb over it, smearing blood across the crystal face. He swore softly. The last thing he wanted to see on the watch was blood.
    Two steps toward the hearth and he stopped cold.
    The watch was ticking.
    He tipped it toward dawn’s light. The second hand flicked from where it’d come to rest three seconds away from the twelve, and began its round. The watch ticked like a heartbeat. A cold chill washed over him. The Madder brothers had said it couldn’t be fixed. Yet as soon as his blood touched it, the watch repaired.
    Or maybe sometime in the night he had dropped it, thrown it, done something to shake the gears and springs free.
    That was the logical answer.
    But he knew it was not the true answer. Something broken didn’t just fix on its own. Something had set the second hand tracking smooth and quick as a telegrapher’s finger, but he did not know what that thing was. He rubbed the handkerchief over the watch, clearing it of blood. And still the watch continued to tick.
    Far off, the steam whistle blew. An engine grunted like an old drum beating, slow, heavy huffs that never seemed to come nearer. The railmen were working, feeding great gobs of wood and coal into the matics that winched and lifted and dropped: giant, ingenious beasts ripping the land apart and stitching it back together with iron and steel.
    The Madder brothers were right. There was a change coming. Coming on that rail.
    Cedar set the watch on the mantel, where it should have stayed in the night, and took up his coffee cup instead. He hefted the bucket of water off the ceiling hook, drank until his stomach stopped cramping, and did his best not to think too hard about the rail. That wasn’t his business. And he’d long ago learned it best to keep his mind on his own affairs.
    He crouched in front of the cold fire and ate the beans and cornmeal and venison with the wooden spoon he’d left in the pot. It wasn’t the food he hungered for—meat and marrow and blood—but it was plentiful and filling.
    Feeling more civilized, he searched the one-room cabin for his clothes and found them, folded upon his bunk against the wall.
    Folded.
    He shook his head. The change from man to beast was never clear to him, and things like this woke a powerful curiosity within him. Did he linger in some sort of half state, where his hands were still those of a man, or did the beast take him on full? Did he change back into a man but have no conscious thought and sleepwalk his way through half a night? When, exactly, did he find the time to fold his clothing?
    He didn’t know, and there was no one to tell him. Staring in the mirror had brought him few clues.
    The first change, four years ago, still held strongest in his mind’s eye. He remembered the fear, remembered the painfully satisfying stretch of his body and bones reshaping into lupine form. Remembered looking over at his brother, who, even in wolf form, still carried his own scent and copper brown eyes.
    He remembered most watching as Bloodpaw, the wolf he had been tracking, stood up and revealed himself as not a wolf, not even a man, but a god native to this land. The god had shaken his head and spoken in the tongue that the people of this land still spoke—a language Cedar did not know, yet for that one night, he had understood.
    “Your people come like rabbits running from wolves. They spread far and wide,” the god said. “Dark magic follows in their path. Poisons the rivers and the earth. Then come engines breaking the mountains down, punching holes from this world into the other.
    “Strange things cross through these holes. Strange things hunt and eat and thrive in this world.
    “But you are not a rabbit. You are a wolf. You will turn and hunt. You will drive the darkness back through the holes and send the Strange from this land.”
    The next thing Cedar remembered was waking far from that place, gripped by fever and nausea, the taste of blood and