The Replacement

Chapter Twenty-Four The House of Misery

At home, I wrapped a dish towel around my hand and dug through the cupboard over the refrigerator, feeling around in the mess of forbidden cutlery for a paring knife. I was shaking, and my fingers skittered over forks and ladles before I found the knife my dad had been using on his apple the other night. The blade was only about three inches long, not particularly sharp. It had a wooden handle, and the finish had started to wear off. I wrapped it in the towel and put it in the pocket of my coat. Then I put up my hood and started for the park.

At the intersection of Carver and Oak, I cut across the grass, past the picnic shelters and the playground. The swings were squeaking to themselves. The park was empty and smoke hung over everything.

On the other side of the baseball diamonds, the dump hill rose dark and hazy through the rain. The ground was swampy with standing water.

I jumped the fence, wading through a tangle of weeds. At the base of the hill, I stuck the knife deep into the loose gravel and the fill. The door was there almost at once, so dull and worn out that it was almost invisible. There was no handle, so I knocked and stepped back. For a second, nothing happened, but then the outline flared from inside, lit with a warm glow. From far away, I heard the sound of bells and was blindsided by a strange feeling of inevitability. The hill had always been there, looming over the park, right there on the other side of the fence. Waiting for me.

When the door swung open, no one was waiting in the entryway. Glass lanterns lit the corridor in two rows. The panes were set in a network of lead, arranged in fancy diamond patterns. When I pushed my way inside, the door swung closed behind me. The knife lay on the floor and I bent and picked it up.

The Lady’s hill was nothing like Mayhem. The walls were paneled in dark, polished wood, with an intricately tiled floor and carved baseboards. Everything was clean and symmetrical and shiny. Stained glass windows hung in rectangular alcoves along the hall, the pictures lit from behind with oil lamps. The air smelled nice, like cut grass and spices.

At the end of the hall, there was a little table with a shallow silver dish on it.

A boy stood beside the table, wearing dark blue knee pants and a matching jacket. He looked maybe twelve and was looking up at me, holding out his hand. “Your card, please.”

I stared down at him. “Card? What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Your calling card. Present your card and I’ll announce you.”

“I don’t have a card. Take me to see the Lady!”

He looked at me a long time. Then he nodded and gestured for me to follow him. “This way.” He led me through corridors and doorways into a warm, lamplit room.

There were rugs on the floor and a fire burning in a marble fireplace. All of the furniture was the fussy old-fashioned stuff my mom liked.

A woman sat in a high-backed chair, embroidering a cluster of poisonous-looking flowers onto a piece of cloth. She looked up when I came in. The skin around her eyes was pink, like maybe she’d been crying. When she raised her face to the light, though, I saw that her eyelashes were crusted with something yellow and diseased. She looked young and like she should have been delicately, strikingly beautiful, but it was spoiled by her unhealthy appearance.

“Are you the Lady?” I said, standing in the doorway.

She sat perfectly still, holding the needle out from the cloth and watching me. The front of her dress was a complicated arrangement of creases and folds. Above that was a high fitted collar made of lace. She smiled and it made her look frail. “Is that any way to greet someone?”

Her voice was sweet, but it had an icy undertone that cut through the harmony. Her expression was so peaceful it looked arrogant, and I could feel myself getting angrier. “You burned down my dad’s church! Is there a formal greeting for that?”

The Lady set down her embroidery. “It was a necessary evil, I’m afraid. My dear sister has been scampering around like a trained dog, playing jester and fool to people who are already dangerously close to forgetting us. It was time to remind the town what really defines us.”

“That’s your reason—to put the fear of God into a bunch of people who don’t believe you exist? You just destroyed a two-hundred-year-old building! A girl is dead!”

“The fear of God is nothing compared to the fear of tragedy and loss.” She tilted her head and smiled. Her teeth were small and even, perfectly white. “But in the main, it benefits us in other ways. After all, the tragedy has turned sweet and brought us a visitor.”

At first I thought she was talking about herself in the plural, the way that queens did, but then I looked around. On a big pillow near the writing table, there was a little kid wearing button boots and a white sailor dress. She was playing with a wire birdcage, putting a windup bird inside and taking it back out. She had a wide ribbon tied around her waist. The other end was fastened to the leg of the table.

“Do you like her?” said the Lady. “She is such a sweet thing.”

The girl was maybe two or three, with hazel eyes and small, even teeth. She smiled up at me, and one cheek dimpled so deep I could have gotten my finger stuck in it.

I sucked in my breath. She wasn’t how I remembered, but I knew her. Through all the bows and the ruffles, I knew her. She was human. I’d seen her every week in the church parking lot or playing tag with Tate on the lawn in front of the Sunday school. Natalie Stewart sat on the floor, looking at me over the top of the cage.

She waved the clockwork bird, and the Lady reached down, touching Natalie’s hair, patting her cheek.

I remembered what my mom had said about sitting on a cushion at the Lady’s feet. Natalie was so clean that she looked artificial. “So, she’s like your doll?”

That made the Lady laugh, hiding her mouth with her hand. “I do love a pretty child, don’t you? And she complements the room.” She gestured around us. “As you can see, I am a great lover of beauty.”

The walls were covered with glass display cases holding seashells and pressed flowers. The biggest case hung over the back of a velvet sofa. It was full of dead butterflies on tiny brass tacks. Two of the walls were lined with built-in shelves, like a library, but there were no books. Instead, there were birds—robins and jays, mostly—and a huge stuffed crow with orange glass eyes.

While I looked around at all the butterflies and birds, the Lady sat at her table, watching my face. Then she stood up and turned her back on me.

“Please, sit,” she said, gesturing to a chair by the fireplace. “Sit and warm yourself.”

I sat down on the edge of the high-backed chair, leaning forward a little. My jacket was wet and I was dripping on the upholstery.

Natalie put down the cage and came as close as the knotted ribbon would let her.

The Lady smiled. “And what does one say to our guest?”

Natalie tucked her chin and didn’t look at me. “How do you do?” she said, rocking back on her heels.

When she rocked forward again, she held out a hand, offering me a crumpled ribbon with a little charm strung on it. When I reached for it, she dropped the ribbon into my hand. Then she smiled and backed away, tugging a handful of hair across her mouth and sucking on it.

The Lady stood very still, staring off at nothing with her hand at her throat. She kept touching a carved oval on a velvet band, brushing the profile with one finger.

Then she turned to look at me. When she smiled, it looked savage. “My sister used to be a war goddess. Or didn’t she tell you? She used to sit at the ford with an ash branch in her hand and a crow’s wing tied in her hair. She watched as armies crossed the river and chose who and in what order they would die. And then she let herself be ruined, like everyone lets themselves be ruined, shrunken down to fit the visions of the ignorant. All except me.”

“I don’t understand. Why do you care so much what people think about the Morrigan?”

“No one is immune to disbelief. Their weakening faith can destroy us all.” She turned and looked me full in the face, biting down on the word all. Her eyes were dark and bloodshot, caked yellow with infection. “We have always gloried in our strength and our power, even when it made us monsters. But now, they diminish us in their stories, making us spirits and sprites. Trivial people, bent on mischief, petty in their dealings. Petty and spiteful and powerless.” She raised her head and looked me straight in the face. “I assure you, Mr. Doyle, I am not powerless.”

I didn’t say anything. She might look sick and frail, but in that moment, she also looked unbelievably cruel.

“We are changing,” she said. “They’ve ruined my sister and robbed her of her power. We’re a fabular people, defined by the whims of their lore and their tales. They have always told us what we are.”

“Why stay here, then, if it’s so bad? Why stick around and wait for them to ruin you?”

“The town is bound to us. From the earliest days, we’ve helped them where we could, and they’ve helped us.”

“By help, do you mean blood?”

The Lady drew herself up. “We are entitled to payment for the assistance we provide. We gave them prosperity. We made them what they are—the finest, the most fortunate hamlet in the region, and in turn, they remembered us as tall and proud and fearsome. Their belief has been enough to keep us whole.”

But it wasn’t enough. The roofs leaked, the topsoil was washing away in the rain, the rust had settled in, and now Gentry was coming down in pieces. She was pale, red around the eyes, and they needed blood and worship to survive.

I shook my head. “You take kids away from their families, and you kill them. Are you saying that everyone should just sit back and let it happen?”

“We are as much a part of this town as they are—vital to their way of life. And they love us for it.”

I stared into the fire, shaking my head. “That’s not true. They don’t love or need us. They hate us.”

The Lady made a breathless little noise, almost a laugh. “People are very disingenuous, dear. They talk and arrange meetings and generally make a great to-do. Do you know how one can tell which of the chorus are sincere?”

Her smile was cold. She could have been made of wax or porcelain like a doll, but her eyes were wicked and bright. “The ones who are sincere leave. The others sink their roots in this quiet town and wring their hands and bemoan the loss of their children, and all the while, they take their payment, and they keep the town and they feed it, just like they’ve always done.”

Her eyes were dark and awful. I had an idea that she never stopped smiling.

“So, killing kids isn’t something you do because you’re morally bankrupt psychopaths, but more like a public service.” My voice was hard and that made me feel braver. “You’re doing it for everyone, right? Not just to feed yourselves, but for the town because the town needs devastated parents and dead kids. And hell, might as well burn their churches down as long as you’re at it.”

“Yes,” the Lady said, very calmly. “Their blood is their blood and when they honor me with it, I receive it and then give that power back to them. I make them prosper.” She reached up and tried to touch my face. “Just accept it, dear. Everyone else has.”

I pulled away, twisting out of her reach. “If you’re just going to go around bleeding the town, why bother with the church at all? Why make them suffer if you’re going to take their blood anyway?”

“Because my wretched goblin of a sister has fallen well outside the bounds of my authority, allowing her fiends to show themselves in the streets at every opportunity. Her cavalier regard for prudence might seem precious now, but it undermines us all. They won’t be joyful enough to give her what she wants if they’re looking to their own tragedy.”

“So you’re punishing her.”

The Lady smiled and her mouth was beautiful and cruel. “I only want us to be amicable, to reach a compromise. But if she refuses to see reason, then there’s nothing I can do and she must be punished. Will you tell her so when next you see her? Tell her all this could have been avoided.”

“I’m not your messenger. I work for the Morrigan, and it’s not my job to tell her what she’s doing wrong.”

The Lady smiled, eyes downcast. “Oh, my naive darling, the Morrigan doesn’t command you. You’re a creature of free agency who came to me tonight of your own accord. She would have held you back had she been able. On occasion, you might dally in her pitiful circus, but your will is your own.”

“At least your sister cares about something besides herself. She saved my life, so stop talking about her like she’s so beneath you.”

“She is beneath me. She has no pride and no dignity. She sends her creatures out to dance like monkeys and degrade themselves before the town.”

“And so you decided to hate her?”

The Lady shook her head, looking off toward Natalie. “She lied and deceived me. She stole a child from my house and brought it home. She defied me and threatened us with discovery. She nearly destroyed the town.”

“She thought it was disgusting to keep kids as toys and pets, and she’s right. What are you going to do with your new toy? Pin her on a corkboard and then show everyone your collection and talk about how pretty she is?”

“This little imp? Nothing so significant. She’ll go to the earth like all the rest, completely unremarkable.”

“She doesn’t have to be remarkable to matter. She’s a kid with a family. She’s someone’s sister.”

“Just so. And now she’s nothing. She’ll go to the unholy ground in the hour before dawn as All Souls’ passes into a forgotten saint’s day, and she’ll die for the renewal of the town.”

“And that’s all it takes to make you happy? You kill little kids, then go home and wait until it’s time to do it all again? What the hell kind of existence is that?”

The Lady raised her head, looking off at something in the distance. “They used to honor us with warriors.” She glanced over at Natalie, like the idea of using something so powerless disgusted her. “And now we’ve been reduced to sprites and goblins, and only the slaughter of the weak keeps us alive.”

I backed away from her. The room was full of glass-eyed birds and dead butterflies and big, old-fashioned furniture. All these things were very clear, like they were the only things that had ever happened in my life.

The Lady went across to the table and picked up a little brass bell. When she rang it, the sound was high and clear.

Then she sat down, looking at me steadily. “This meeting has gone on long enough, sir. I thank you for your company and bear you no ill will, but I can’t take back the destruction of the church or give you what you want. The Cutter will escort you out.”

I remembered what the Morrigan had said about the Cutter. For one second, I could almost picture him—a massive silhouette, huge and hulking. Then it was gone. Instead, there was just the image of a woman. She lay on her back in a pool of murky water, face mangled, arms strapped to her sides.

“No,” I said, already knowing that the word didn’t matter but needing to say it. “I’m not leaving her here. She’s little, she’s just a kid.”

“It’s no use arguing,” the Lady said. “I won’t cede her to you willingly, and you can’t stand against the Cutter. None of us can.”

I tried to think what a brave person would do. What Tate would do. But Natalie was her family, and I was underground with a woman who emptied entire lakes and then dumped them in her sister’s living room when she was feeling particularly vindictive. Who called up endless rain and burned down buildings just to make sure that no one forgot her. Compared to her, I was useless.

When the door swung in, Natalie cringed, shrinking against the Lady’s skirt and holding on to her birdcage. The Cutter stood in the doorway. He was thin, taller than the Lady. He could have been her brother. He had the same dark hair, the same watery, diseased look around his eyes.

Everything about him was familiar in flashes—the black coat, the thin, colorless mouth, the bones in his face—all vague and uneasy, like something from a dream.

He touched his forehead, even though he wasn’t wearing a hat.

When I looked at him, I remembered being small, just the right size to fit in the crook of his elbow. He was creeping into the bedroom, taking the rightful baby out of its crib, closing the window. Leaving me behind. He was the only thing I remembered from a life before Gentry.

The Lady rose from her chair, giving him a wide path, and he watched her back away. His eyes were sharp and narrow.

When the Lady spoke, she was looking away from him. “Show our guest out if you please, sir.”

The Cutter smiled—a strange, empty smile—and bowed to me, and then I smelled the smell that was seeping out of his skin. He smelled toxic, reeking with iron. I could feel my heartbeat—not just in my chest, but in my arms and hands and throat.

The Lady had covered her face with a handkerchief, and my question wasn’t so much curiosity as numb confusion. “What is he?”

She looked at me over the lacy edge of her handkerchief and her answer was muffled. “A sadist and a masochist. He endures tremendous suffering because it pleases him to see the suffering of others.”

The Cutter didn’t look particularly miserable or suffering. His eyes were red rimmed and bloodshot, but he moved quickly. “Come along,” he said in a hoarse whisper, and grabbed me by the arm.

As he pulled me out into the hall, I looked back. The last thing I saw was Tate’s sister, settling back down onto her pillow, hugging her birdcage.

Then the fumes washed over me and I staggered. The Cutter held me steady, digging his fingers into my arm. His expression was polite, like a gentleman in a movie about people who rode around in carriages, but his voice was deep and rough and should have belonged to someone else.

“Easy does it,” he said. “You’re all right.”

With his hand on my arm, he led me along the hall.

“Tell me, cousin, how’s the weather up in the park tonight? I thought it smelled like rain.”

When I didn’t answer, he gave me a little shake and tightened his grip, dragging me along by the elbow with his coat flapping behind him. “Don’t go faint on me now or I’ll have to slap the sense back into you. Maybe you think I haven’t a care for what happens up ground, but God help me, I love that town. The Lady, she pines after the old days, but tribes and villages can’t match the hospitality we’ve seen here.”

I concentrated on putting one foot after the other, keeping myself upright and my eyes on the floor in front of me.

“Let me tell you a story,” he said. “A story about us and about the people who live just above us. It was a miserable, desperate time, and they looked to us for salvation. Cousin, we had more blood than any hill’s ever had in a single year. We bled their lambkins on all the old feast days—Imbolc and Beltane and Lammas—and on every holy day.” He smiled over his shoulder, showing small, even teeth, but his gums were raw and infected looking. “There are a lot of holy days, cousin.”

“In the Depression,” I said. My voice sounded thick and disjointed.

“The what?”

“In the Great Depression, you took that blood from the town. You took their children and they blamed it on Kellan Caury. They hanged him out on Heath Road for stealing kids.”

The Cutter stopped walking and turned to face me. Then he grinned—a wide, leering grin that took over his whole face. “Oh, Caury did it, all right. Make no mistake. He took them.”

The smell that came off him when he talked was thick and scummy, like flaking rust and old blood. I yanked my arm out of his hand and leaned against the painted wallpaper. “What are you talking about? He wasn’t a kidnapper. He just wanted to live a normal life.”

The Cutter laughed. “Sure. Sure, he wanted to live peaceful and idyllic, tending his shop and stargazing with his girl. And we wanted something else. We get what we want.”

For the first time, I looked at the Cutter—really looked at him. His face was symmetrical, with a straight nose, a sharp chin and jaw, but the tightness around his eyes made him look hollow and vacant.

Except for the pack of rotten girls, people in the slag heap seemed healthy. They were strange and sometimes ugly, but their faces were painless and their eyes were clear. The Cutter looked contagious. I took short, shallow breaths. My vision was starting to tunnel, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.

He grabbed my arm again and gave me a hard shake. “Stay with me, cousin. We’re almost to the door.”

“How did you get it—what you wanted from him?”

“Caury? That was simple. He had a sweet, pious girl that played piano in the church on Sundays and didn’t mind much that he was a right oddity. Maybe he didn’t start out begging to do our work, but he was willing enough in the end.” The Cutter’s voice sounded eager suddenly. “By the time I got through, that little tart was half what she’d been before, and he’d have done anything just to see that she didn’t lose any more fingers.”

I felt light-headed, sick in waves. “The way I heard it, you didn’t kill him. It was the sheriff, the deputies—they got together a lynch mob.”

The Cutter shook his head. “Oh, we killed him. Make no mistake. The town came for him, but we were the ones who killed him. They delivered him down to the killing ground, and maybe they didn’t even really know why, but they got him there all right. They bludgeoned him first, beat him in the street like a dog, but there was still enough life in him to scream.”

“You murdered one of your own people.”

He was pulling me along, winding through hallways with fancy carved baseboards and painted wallpaper. We turned a corner and I was back in the entryway, with its smooth floor and its elegant wood-paneled walls. Everything seemed to blur and swim.

The Cutter unlatched the door and pushed it open. “Get along to your little friends, then.”

On the other side, I could smell dead leaves and fresh air. I needed to be out in the park, out where I could breathe, but Tate’s sister was tied to a fancy plush armchair and I turned to face the Cutter with the room tilting all around me. “What if I don’t?”

He stood beside the door, straight and perfect like people in the court were supposed to be perfect, but his mouth was thin and the purple shadows under his cheekbones made his face look like a skull. “You will because I tell you to, and if you don’t, then you can get along to hell. You might be fine and good and fair, cousin, but you’re no cousin of mine.”

His hand hit me between my shoulders then and he shoved me in the direction of Gentry and the outside world.

I stumbled into the drizzle and landed on my hands and knees, leaves cold and slick between my spread fingers. Behind me, the door swung shut and melted back into the shadows.

I got to my feet, gasping and coughing, and started across the park. At the corner of Carver Street, though, I stopped. I stood in the wavering halo of a streetlight, looking at the charm that Natalie had given me. The ribbon was sticky and frayed and the charm was nothing but a zipper pull, made of pink plastic and shaped like a teddy bear.

I crossed the grass to the solitary picnic table where Roswell and I had sat the night before and collapsed on the bench to think.

I was exhausted. My lungs ached and my clothes smelled like smoke, my dad’s church was gone, and Natalie Stewart wasn’t dead, but she was about to be.

I wanted to turn invisible, to disappear. I wanted to lie down and sink into the ground. That way, I wouldn’t have to feel or think. I could be earth, roots, grass. Nothing.

My phone buzzed in my pocket and I took it out to see who was calling. Emma. I knew I should answer, at least tell her where I was and that I was okay, but the conversation seemed impossible. I stared at the phone, at her name glowing on the screen. Then I turned it off.

Chapter Twenty-five Sacred

I woke myself up shivering, curled awkwardly on the picnic bench. The ache in my neck was unreal and my toes had fallen asleep. It was six o’clock in the morning. I had nine missed calls from Emma and two from Roswell.

School wasn’t exactly a priority for the day. My hands and feet were freezing, and I needed to go home, to take a shower and sleep in a bed. But in the daylight, I knew that I had to talk to Tate first, so I took the long way home, down Welsh Street so I’d pass her house.

She was out in the garage with the door up and I guessed that she was either planning some truancy of her own or, more likely, someone had notified the administration that she’d kicked the holy hell out of Alice. The punishment for fighting on school property was suspension.

The hood of the Buick was propped open and she was knocking around under it. As I came up the driveway, she hit her head on the underside of the hood and dropped a wrench. It clanged against the cement, then bounced under the car.

She kicked the bumper and hopped back a little, wincing.

“Tate,” I said. And then I didn’t say anything else. My voice sounded hoarse and used up.

She turned, already starting to smile, and then the smile faded. “What’s wrong? What are you doing here?”

I shook my head, catching her by the sleeve, pulling her away from the car and toward the weak daylight. “Have you seen this before?”

“Hey—” She reached for the zipper pull. “Hey, where’d you get that?”

I tried to make her see the answer in my face, no completely inadequate explanations, no words, but she just stared up at me with a panicked look.

“No, where did you get it? Did you find it somewhere? Where the hell did you get that?” Then she snatched it out of my hand and held it up. “You see this? Do you see this piece of plastic in my hand? You need to tell me where you got this.”

I looked down at her. The truth was awful and I had no name for myself and none for what was happening under our town. “Wherever you think it came from, that’s where.”

She looked down at the little charm, and I could see the change happen on her face, like something inside her cracking and then, just as fast, fusing back together. “You saw her.”

I was struck, suddenly, by how dry my mouth was. “Underground.”

Tate stared at me. “But you saw her. Right now, she’s alive, and you saw her and you didn’t do anything—you didn’t bring her back?”

I shook my head, feeling helpless and ashamed. “I couldn’t, Tate. They’re so used to just being allowed to do this, and no one ever stops them, no one does anything. I don’t know how.”

“Well, you better figure it out!”

I thought of my mom, weird, distant, cold, and sad. “Are you sure that’s what you want?”

“Yes, I’m fucking sure. She’s my sister!” Tate screamed it, slamming her hands down on the hood of the car. “Why would I not do everything I can to get my sister back?”

I didn’t know how to explain life at my house, how bad and weird and creepy it could get. How my mom was still being punished just for surviving, and they’d waited fifteen years to get revenge, because to people like them, fifteen years was two seconds and nothing was ever really forgiven. They could make you pay for the rest of your life.

“It’s just going to mess up your family,” I said.

Tate took a long breath and reached for my hand, not like a girlfriend, but hard and panicked like someone drowning. “Mackie, my family is already so messed up that I can’t think of a single thing anyone could do right now to make it worse.” She squeezed my fingers, staring up at me, and everything smelled like metal. “Just tell me what to do.”

I shook my head. Tate never asked anyone what to do, and I had no answer, no secret knowledge. This was just what always happened and what had been happening for decades. Maybe centuries.

Tate’s eyes were hard and shiny, but not like tears. Her gaze was brutal, and she wasn’t the kind of girl who begged for anything. “There has to be something I can do because I’m not going to just sit around and do nothing!”

I held her hand in both of mine, gripping her by the wrist, holding her still.

They’d had to work on Kellan Caury a long time before they finally made him their man, but the Cutter had figured it out eventually. You can get a lot from a person if you cut the fingers off his girlfriend.

“Stay inside,” I said with my hands locked around hers.

The look she gave me was terrible. “No—no way. You’re talking about my sister. There is no way I’m just going to sit home like a good little girl and wait for you to decide whether or not you’re going to do something!”

She was so brave and so reckless, and I wasn’t lying when I said, “Look, this is how it is, and you can’t do anything to help her. You need to go in the house and lock the doors. I’ll figure something out.”

Then I kissed her fast and ducked out the open garage door before I could see the look on her face.

I’d been relatively sure that Tate would follow me, but she didn’t. When I’d gone a block and a half without her screaming obscenities at me or chasing me down, I let myself hope that for once, she might actually be listening to me.

I headed home, making a mental inventory of my resources. They weren’t very encouraging. The Morrigan might hate her sister, but she wasn’t going to help me save Natalie because apparently human sacrifice didn’t fall under her classification of inappropriate reasons to steal kids. Or maybe it was just that the Morrigan was scared of her sister—like everyone else. Scared of what happened when the Lady caught someone doing something she didn’t like.

I didn’t have a solution, I didn’t have a plan. I had half a bottle of analeptic and an old paring knife, neither of which was that much help in the greater scheme of things.

At the corner of Concord and Wicker, I stopped. I stood on the sidewalk for a long time, looking at my house like it was one of those find-the-hidden-picture games. The yard wasn’t right, and there were too many wrong things to count.

The stepladder was out, but it was tipped over, open so it made a capital A on the lawn. There were long smears of dirt on the front walk. The grass was mashed down flat in places. The gutter was stopped with twigs and dead leaves, and water ran in a steady fall down onto the front steps.

I tried the door, but the knob was locked and so was the dead bolt, and I had to go scraping around in the bushes for the hide-a-key. Some of the edging was torn up and tulip bulbs lay brown and papery on the cement.

A jack-o’-lantern lay smashed in a pulpy mess on the porch. Its eyeholes gaped up at me, candle scorched, half caved in.

When I stepped into the front hall, I was struck by how deserted the house was. My dad was probably at the police station or maybe helping Jenna’s family make preliminary arrangements for the funeral. He’d be comforting the masses, managing the chaos, and my mom would be at the hospital, working the morning shift, but Emma didn’t have class until noon. Her bag was hanging on a hook behind the door. I waited a second and then called her name.

There was no answer. Her coat lay on the bench by the mail table. All the lights were out and I moved slowly, staying close to the wall.

The kitchen was empty, but I had a soft, creepy feeling on my neck, like I wasn’t the only one in the room. I listened a long time before I heard it. Not a cry, but a breathless gasp. Then nothing.

“Emma?” I flipped the light switch and knelt on the floor.

She was sitting under the table. All the stainless steel flatware and the good knives were lined up in a circle around her, and she had her arms pulled close against her chest. She was holding a butcher knife. There was a bruise coming out on one cheek.

“Emma, what happened?”

She opened her mouth but didn’t say anything, looking out at me from under the table, shaking her head.

I reached for her and the metal circle sent a flash of pain up my arm. I sat back hard on the floor, closing my eyes as the kitchen spun. “You have to move that stuff.”

She shook her head again, a quick, frantic little shake.

I yanked my sleeves down over my hands and raked away the knives, reaching for her, pulling her out from under the table and dragging her across the linoleum into the light.

Dead leaves and little twists of brown grass were stuck all over her clothes and in her hair. Her T-shirt was muddy. Her arms were bare, covered past the elbow in thin, spiral burns. They ran in crazy squiggles, oozing clear and yellow. When I touched one of them, she gasped. The skin around the burn felt sticky. I didn’t do it again.

I put my hands on her shoulders. “Did they come in the house?”

“No,” she whispered. “They were out in the yard. I was on the ladder, you know, to clear the gutter. It was running over. They—uh, they were laughing.”

“What did they look like? Were they like me?”

The look she gave me was agonized. “No, they weren’t like you. They were—” She took a short, hitching breath. “They were ugly.”

I realized I was squeezing her and made myself stop. “Ugly like how?”

“Like bony and white and . . . rotten.” Without warning, she mashed her face against my chest so she was talking into my shirt. “They were dead, Mackie.”

Pain seared across my ribs and I gasped. “Ow. Put that down.”

She looked at the knife in her hand like she was surprised to see it there. Then she tossed it away. It spun like a dial on the floor. When it stopped, it was pointing to the refrigerator.

She took a deep breath. “They came up on the lawn and stood around the ladder.” Her voice was hard. “They asked me if I wanted to come and visit them. They said they ran a sanitarium and I was just the kind of girl they needed on their staff.”

“Then what?” I was brushing at the grass on her T-shirt, picking leaves out of her hair. “What did they do to your arms?”

“They knocked me off the ladder. They had fingernails—long fingernails—and then . . .” She held out her arms and didn’t finish.

The burns were wet and raw. They gave off a bright ozone smell that reminded me of lightning storms. “How did you get away?”

She smiled and it was the most ironic expression I’d ever seen. “I said the Twenty-third Psalm.”

“You chased them away by quoting Bible verses?”

“I read, Mackie.”

“So, what you’re telling me is, you have a book that says if a pack of rotten girls shows up at your house and starts burning graffiti all over your arms, recite a couple of psalms and they’ll go away?”

“Revenants,” she said, with her head against my shoulder. “When a person comes back from the dead, they’re called a revenant.” She sounded fussy and serious, even with her scorched arms, her wet hair soaking through my shirt to the skin. She squeezed me hard and raised her head again. Her arms were a raw, oozing mess and she was holding them stiffly away from her body like she was trying not to show how bad it hurt. “It’s . . . I just didn’t know what else to do.”

“Emma, I’m sorry. I’ll get you peroxide or iodine or something. We’ll get you cleaned up. Just tell me what to do.”

“It’s okay,” she said. Water was dripping down the sides of her face. “I’m okay. They didn’t even come in the house. And it’s not as bad as it looks. It hurt a lot, but it’s better now. I can hardly feel it.”

I looked at her arms again, then held her away from me, staring at her hands. “Are you cold?”

“A little. Not too bad, though.” Then she looked down.

Her hands were pale blue and going bluer as we watched. The veins stood out in a dark network under the skin. Her fingernails had turned a deep bloodless gray.

“They took my work gloves,” she said in a thin, shuddering voice. “They have my gloves.”

I stood up. “Okay, turn on all the lights and lock the doors. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

She reached out, grabbing at my sleeve. Her fingers slipped and fumbled on my jacket, like she couldn’t quite make them work. “Wait, where are you going?”

“To get your gloves back.”

Chapter Twenty-Six The Price

Under the slag heap, the House of Mayhem was humid from the rain. At opposite ends of the lobby, the two huge fireplaces had been lit and the room was warmer than usual.

The flock of rotting blue girls huddled together around one of the fireplaces. They were sorting through trays of Janice’s bottles, melting wax over the tops and pasting on labels. They worked in kind of an assembly line, passing the bottles along and talking in low voices. Behind the reception desk, the Morrigan was sitting on the floor, playing with a doll made of feathers and dirty, knotted string. I came around the desk and stood over her.

“Hello, castoff,” she said without looking up. “Are you here to tell me how sorry you are for running off to beg favor from my sister?”

“No, I’m here to tell you that you just made one huge fucking mistake. And stop calling me that.”

“What would you prefer? Foundling? Changeling? Child left in someone else’s bed?” She dropped the doll and stared up at me. Her teeth reflected the firelight back at me in bright pinpricks. “I gave you cures and medicines, cared for you when you were ill. Without my mercies, you would have died, and still you disregard me, you slight me for my sister?”

“Yeah, I talked to your sister, okay? Fine, I’m a terrible person. Tell your rancid hookers to give Emma’s gloves back.”

The Morrigan nodded toward the far side of the room. “Tell them yourself.”

The girls were clustered together on the floor, laughing in a soft, breathless way. One of them, starved looking, with matted hair and ragged gashes down her arms, was wearing a pair of pink suede gardening gloves.

I crossed the lobby and stood over them. Close to the fire, they smelled worse—all wet dirt and rank, decomposing flesh. In the flickering light, they looked greenish under the skin.

“May we help you?” said the one wearing Emma’s gloves. She smiled a loose, mushy smile, showing black teeth and rotting gums.

“Yeah, give me those.”

“Give you which?”

“Give me my sister’s gloves. I’m through dicking around.”

The girl next to her leaned in and elbowed her, grinning up at me. She was holding a smoldering stick of wood and a lump of half-melted wax. Her tongue was blue and her whole mouth was crawling with little white maggots. “How will she be compensated for her cooperation?”

“Kiss her,” whispered the girl from the Halloween party.

The others laughed and covered their mouths. “Yes, kiss her, kiss her and we’ll let your sister’s hands go.”

The one with the gloves got to her feet, stepping close and smiling up at me. “Just once,” she said, and her voice was softer than the others’. Almost sad. “Kiss me once, and I’ll give them back to you.”

I looked down at her. Her eyes might have been green once, but now they were cloudy and pale.

“It doesn’t have to be passionate,” she said. “You don’t have to convince me that you mean it. Just give me the chance to pretend you don’t find me revolting.”

The other girls watched, hungry and eager, but the girl with the gloves just looked cold. She wasn’t laughing.

I bent and kissed her on the cheek, close to the corner of her mouth. The smell was bad. She reeked like groundwater and decay, but underneath was the thin fragrance of church incense and funeral flowers, the dismal aroma of grief, of never really dying.

I stayed with my face close to hers, my mouth against her cheek, even after I’d given her what she asked for. The only thing she’d wanted. I wanted to make it count because I was sorry for her. Because she was dead and I wasn’t.

When I finally straightened and stepped back, the girls on the floor muttered restlessly, but the one with the gloves just gave me a wistful look.

“That was nice,” she whispered, holding out her hands.

I took the gloves by their fingertips and slid them off. Underneath, her hands were a healthy pink, but even in the firelight, I could see it draining out of her. The warm tinge faded, and her fingernails went an ugly bruised color. She sighed and smiled at me. The smile made the skin on her lips crack.

I jammed the gloves in my coat pocket and crossed back to the desk, where the Morrigan sat playing with her doll, dancing it along the floor. I could still smell the chilly stench of the girl’s skin, this ghostly miasma that drifted and clung to me. The Morrigan was humming and it made me want to kick her.

“Why did you let them do that to Emma? I thought the whole agreement was that you would leave her alone if I worked for you. I thought she and Janice were supposed to be friends.”

The Morrigan glared up at me. “You chose to appeal to my sister. You ran to her at the first opportunity. She did her best to break the town, and you went to bow to her.” She swung the doll against the leg of the desk. Its head made a hollow noise when it hit. “They don’t have the will to give us favor when they’re sad. They’re too caught up in their own misery, their own tragedy, and then they don’t love us.”

“Look, you started this. You called out the Lady when you stole my mother back.”

The Morrigan sat with her legs folded under her, hugging the doll against her chest. “And look at where it got us. The town is sick. It gets worse every year, and now the buildings are falling, the house of God is destroyed, and even the train tracks and the trestles rust.”

I let my breath out between my teeth and then held out the zipper pull. “They’re going to kill a three-year-old girl. Not a warrior or a king. She’s a little kid—she’s like you.”

The Morrigan took the plastic bear, turning it over in her hand. Then she looked up at me, teeth sharp and glossy. “No, not like me. I’m quite sturdy. She, on the other hand, is going to bleed a river.”

When I finally spoke, my voice sounded dry. “What is your problem?”

She dropped the doll into her lap and looked up at me, still holding the plastic zipper pull. “You choose them over us. Every single time.”

“And I’ll keep doing it! This isn’t about picking sides. The Lady is completely out of her mind, and you know how to stop her. Tell me what I need to do to steal Natalie.”

The Morrigan seemed to consider that. Then she gave me a sly look. “Dead is dead,” she said. “But my sister is plenty cold herself. Sometimes she can’t tell the difference.”

“Okay, but what does that mean?”

“Only that there are always spare children, dead in borrowed beds, buried in borrowed clothes, waiting to be made use of.” Her smile was wide and it was hard to tell if it was cruel because she was cruel or if that was just her smile.

“No.” I shook my head. “That’s not what you’re talking about—not children. You’re talking about bodies. About grave robbing.”

“Call it what you like. You asked how I managed it, and I’ve told you. The night was long, and in her sitting room full of dead beauties, I exchanged one more dead thing for a live one, and it was hours before she knew. Before she realized that her prize was gone and the silent child in her sitting room was one of ours.”

I took a deep breath and felt a little sick. “Tell me how. How you made the Lady believe the body was real.”

The Morrigan smiled, shaking her head. “Dearest, it was real.”

“How you made it seem believable, then, how you replaced something alive with something that wasn’t.”

She fidgeted with the zipper pull, rolling it between her fingers, humming and rocking. “Our children rot, but not as readily as theirs do. They’re restless things, the failed replacements.”

Over by the fireplace, the blue girls whispered and snickered, braiding each other’s brittle hair. The one I’d kissed was looking back over her shoulder at me, just once. Then she turned away, keeping her head bowed.

The Morrigan stood up, facing me with the mangy doll in one hand and the zipper pull in the other. She looked like a little girl, old-fashioned and strange, but her teeth were brutal, and her eyes were wide and black. “I’m not your keeper and I don’t owe you anything, not anymore. If you intend to cross her, that’s not my business, but you should know the cost. A person should always be familiar with the cost of his actions.”

“What’s the cost?”

She dropped the doll and it landed spread-eagle on the floor, its arms and legs sticking out at awkward angles. “If you don’t know after this morning’s escapades, I’m certainly not going to tell you.”

She smiled up at me and held out the plastic bear. After a second, I took it.

Chapter Twenty-Seven Raising the Dead

When I came in out of the drizzle and the fog, I was relieved to see my dad’s black overcoat hanging in the hall. He was sitting in the kitchen with his back to the door. The kettle was boiling on the stove and there were cups on the counter, but Emma wasn’t with him and I wasn’t brave enough to go in and ask how he was.

His shoulders were too defeated. His head was bowed like he might be praying. Praying or crying, and neither was something I could deal with. I took off my shoes and went upstairs.

Emma’s room was a mess of books and flimsy plastic trays full of sprouts and cuttings. Her shelves ran all the way up to the ceiling and the walls were covered in tacked-up postcards and pictures of greenhouses and gardens cut from magazines.

She was sitting on her bed with her arms crossed over her chest, holding on to her shoulders and looking small. Her hands were their normal color again and she’d put Band-Aids over the scratches on her arms. She glanced up with a wary expression. “Hi.”

I didn’t have the energy to say it back. I wanted to ask why she wasn’t downstairs with our dad. Her hands were warm and alive. The blue girls’ assault on her that morning couldn’t be the reason they were sitting in different rooms.

The smell of smoke still lay over everything. It was on my clothes and in my hair. Emma’s jeans from yesterday were crumpled on the floor and I smelled the black tar smell of shingles and burned copper wiring.

Emma sat rigidly against the headboard of her bed with her hands cupping her elbows. “Why did they do that to me?”

“Because I pissed someone off.”

“Was it over something important?” Then she turned so I couldn’t see her face, looking away, in the direction of the window. I didn’t know what to say. I’d thought so at the time, but what had I really accomplished?

“I got your gloves back.” I pulled them out of my pocket and tossed them on the bed next to her, and then they just sat there, pink and dirty.

Emma picked them up. After a second, she put them on.

I sat next to her and looked around at all her clutter. There were books spread open on the desk and the floor, pages marked with sticky notes and colored paper clips. Volumes of chemistry and folklore and a little dog-eared paperback of The Ballad of Tam Lin.

Emma slumped next to me. She rested her head on my shoulder and took a deep breath. “What’s happening, Mackie?”

Her voice was barely a whisper, and she sounded sad, like she knew there was no way the answer would be good.

I leaned my cheek on the top of her head. “The same thing that always happens.”

Emma nodded and I wondered if she knew what it was that always happened or if that was part of the creepy thing about Gentry. You always knew that something was happening, but you never knew what it was.

“I know what’s wrong with Mom,” I said.

“A little chunk of granite where her heart should be?”

“Sort of, yeah. You know how I came from somewhere else? For her, it’s backward. They stole her away, then brought her back, and she couldn’t ever figure out how to be normal after that.”

Emma was still watching the pink gloves. “Are you sure?” she said.

I nodded.

She leaned against me suddenly, letting her head drop against my shoulder. We sat like that, leaning against each other. Outside, the sky was dark and heavy. Rain pattered on the window and ran down the glass, reflecting yellow and red in the light from the street.

“We have to do something terrible,” I said. “We have to dig up—” I stopped. “There was this thing that replaced Tate’s sister. We have to dig it up.”

Emma pulled away from me. “What are you talking about?”

I didn’t want to take the conversation any further. Digging up a grave was the worst kind of desecration, but I knew there was no other choice. Even if I stood back and let Natalie die, none of the bad things would stop. Kids would keep being replaced. Gentry would keep looking the other way, just like it always had. Except that then, I’d have to live with myself.

I took a deep breath. “Natalie Stewart’s alive and I think we can save her. But we can’t do it unless we have something to leave in her place. If we can get the body back, there are ways of waking them up. I’m not sure how, but I know there are ways.”

Emma’s gaze drifted to her bookshelves. “I’ve read about replacements coming back from the dead, but you need the blood, or sometimes the possessions, of the people they replaced. We’d need something of Natalie’s. You could call Tate, right?”

“I really don’t think that’s a good idea. Anyway, I’ve already got something.” I took the zipper pull out of my pocket. “It’s not much, but it’s Natalie’s.”

Emma gave it a doubtful look. “Okay,” she said finally. “I’ll start going through folk stories, scholarly essays, anything that might give us instructions. But this is going to be pretty bad. And it’s going to mean a lot of digging.”

“I know. I think we should call Roswell.”

“Excuse me?”

“He’ll help,” I said. “He might not be thrilled about it, but he’ll help.”

Emma sat very still, eyes fixed on some unlikely point just past my shoulder. Finally, she pushed away the quilt and stood up. She yanked her hair back into a ponytail with one hand and went to her dresser for a rubber band. Her face was sober and her hair was already slipping down again, drifting in mousy wisps around her clenched fist.

“Okay,” she said, snapping the band around her hair. “Okay, but we need a plan. This is serious, what you’re talking about.”

“Yes, but it’s not a break-in.” I tried to keep my voice steady. “It’s not black ops. Everyone in charge of anything is down at the hospital or the police station, Dad’s at home, the church is wrecked. We’ll wait until dark and then sneak in. No one’s going to be looking out for trespassing or vandalism. The whole town is too busted up to care what someone’s doing in the graveyard.”

I lay on my bed, trying to get some sleep and failing completely. Planning to dig up a body pretty much ruled out any peace of mind.

Tate called twice, but I didn’t answer and didn’t listen to her messages. It was hard enough to contemplate the night’s work without her getting involved. If she knew what I was going to do, she’d be horrified. Or worse, she’d want to help.

After half an hour of dozing off and immediately jerking awake again, I got up and went downstairs. I found my dad in the kitchen. The kettle was still rattling on the burner and he hadn’t moved since the last time I’d looked in.

I crossed to the stove and turned it off. “Dad?”

He glanced up and his face was hollow, raw around the eyes. “Yes?”

“The building doesn’t matter.”

He straightened in his chair, looking up at me like he was trying to figure out if he should be angry or hurt or something else just as bad.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said again. “The church is you and the town. Where doesn’t matter. You’ll build a new one and the congregation will be there with you, and that’s what you love. Them, not the building. It will be as good as it always was.”

For a second, I thought he’d tell me I was disrespectful, out of line, that I didn’t understand how important that building had been. That someone like me could never understand. He sat with his hands resting slack on his knees and his jaw working. Then he stood up.

He crossed the kitchen and I tried not to tense my shoulders. I was completely unsure about what was going to happen, and for a second, the look on his face was so intense, I thought he was going to shake or hit me. Instead, he grabbed me in a rough hug, one hand on the back of my head, fingers digging into my scalp. He smelled sharp and exhausted and everything was still acrid with smoke. We both were. He was leaning against me, holding on like he was looking for rescue.

I stood out in the driveway, waiting for Roswell and holding my dad’s work gloves. It was nine o’clock and pitch dark. The cloud cover was heavy and the drizzle made puddles and soggy places on the lawn. The teddy bear charm was in my pocket and my heart was beating hard with the idea of digging up something that ought to be buried. This was the kind of thing that only desperate people did. The last resort, the only thing left, and so I must be desperate.

When Roswell pulled up to the house, he was wearing his other jacket. The black one. I hadn’t said anything about appropriate clothing.

We stood in the street, looking at each other over the hood of his car. The neighborhood was silent. No other cars, no wanderers. Gentry knew enough to be afraid of the dark. A few jack-o’-lanterns still glowed on porches, grinning crumpled grins.

“What’s up?” he said, like the church was always burning down and I always called him on a school night, telling him to come over after dark and to bring a shovel.

I swallowed, trying to keep back the panic that was rising in my chest. “I need your help. We have to do a bad thing. We have to dig up a grave. Don’t look at me like that—the girl who’s supposed to be buried isn’t dead. I saw her tonight. But we need what’s in the box.”

Roswell didn’t look confused and he didn’t ask me to repeat anything. “Grave robbing. That’s what you’re talking about.”

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyelids. “They kidnapped Tate’s sister and we can’t get her back unless we have the thing that was buried in her place.”

When I took my hands away, Roswell was still watching me, but I couldn’t look at him. I stared across the street at the Donnellys’ jack-o’-lantern.

“They?” he said, sounding apprehensive.

“Me. They’re like me.”

“Don’t be a jackass,” Roswell said, but not meanly. “No one’s like you.”

Emma came around the corner of the house, dragging the stepladder behind her. She was carrying a roll of canvas under her other arm. She had a duffel bag hooked over one shoulder and a scarf tied over her hair.

Roswell glanced from me to her. “We’re really doing this, then?”

And I’d known he’d come through, because he always did, but I was still so unbelievably relieved to hear him say we.

Emma handed me the ladder. Her expression was tense and her hands were shaking. She hitched the duffel bag higher on her shoulder, and when she looked at Roswell, he took the bundle of canvas and tools without having to be asked. The three of us stood in the yard, watching each other. Then, without saying anything, we stepped off the curb and started for the church.

At the cemetery gate, Emma dug around in the duffel bag, took out a flashlight, and handed it to me. The lens was covered with a sheet of heavy paper and when I switched it on, the light shone through in a narrow beam. It sliced palely through the gloom, sweeping over the ground. Everything else was dark. My dad’s church was gone, but the graves were untouched. The only part of his whole life’s calling that had survived was the dead part.

I held the doctored flashlight up to my face. “How are you suddenly an expert on breaking into cemeteries?”

“I don’t like to go into things unprepared.” She held up the keys. “And it’s like you said, we’re not breaking in.”

When she turned the lock, the gate squealed open. It was the strangest feeling, standing there on the footpath. I’d never been in a cemetery in my life. We stuck to the unconsecrated side, following the northern path that ran by the unnamed graves and the crypt. I could smell the smoke, much stronger now that we were near the black wreckage of the church. It sank into the town, leaving the air stale and unbreathable. The whole place was still and eerie. Completely silent, like the silence before an electrical storm, like everything was hunkered down, waiting for the worst of it to pass. It occurred to me that it was completely irrational to think that way about dead people. This was how they always sounded.

Emma led the way toward the back of the cemetery, picking her way between the headstones where the ground was unconsecrated, reserved for suicides and stillbirths. But that wasn’t the truth, was it? It was reserved, but for abandoned monsters in borrowed clothes.

We made our way past the mausoleum, heading toward the back wall, where the white headstone sat small and pale in the dark.

At the edge of the grave, Emma dropped the tarp, then reached into the bag and started bringing out hand tools. She lined them up across the canvas like she was doing surgery. “Hold the light close to the ground.”

I shone the beam over the grave, muddy and bare, still waiting for the turf to be laid over it. After we’d scraped the worst of the mud away, Emma adjusted her tarp, lining it up along one side of the grave. “Shovel onto that and try to keep it neat. That way we can put things back when we’re done.”

Roswell and I took turns, trading out while Emma stood up on the edge of the grave, keeping track of the dirt and handing down tools.

The night seemed to stretch out forever. I was in the little grave, digging deeper, deeper. Like the hole was so deep that I wouldn’t ever be able to get out. The dirt piled up on the tarp and trickled back down in streams, getting all over my hair and my clothes and the ladder.

The air was cold and smoky. My arms and back hurt, and even through the chill, I was starting to sweat when my shovel hit something hard and flat. I scraped the dirt away and Roswell jumped down to help me.

The box was small, maybe four feet long. It was heavier than it looked, but we got it loose between us, levering with the shovels, then getting under one end and shoving it up onto the grass. The wood was damp, slick with grave mold or moss. It had only been in the ground a few days, but it already smelled like it was starting to rot.

“It’s a cremation casket,” Emma said in a voice so low that I could barely hear her. She was kneeling down, running her hand over the lid. “It’s not a real burial casket.”

“They’re cheaper,” Roswell whispered, and he sounded hoarse.

Emma picked up a screwdriver and started working at the latch. It had already begun to rust. When the screws stripped, she jammed the blade between the metal and the wood. Suddenly, she gasped and the whole latch peeled away with a squealing sound.

We just sat there for a minute, kneeling in the grass, looking at the closed casket.

Then Emma took a deep breath. “Okay, hand me the flashlight.” Her hands were steady, but her voice was high pitched.

I gave her the light and she inched forward and lifted the lid.

The body was small and weirdly perfect. Then Emma shone the beam over its face and the eerie sense of flawlessness was gone.

The nose was losing its shape, starting to collapse. The smell came rushing out of the open box, rising in clouds. The odor on top was thin, a sweet layer of rot that seemed to float and twinkle in the air, and under that, a hard, chemical stink that might have been embalming fluid.

Emma was on her feet, stumbling back. The flashlight fell and rolled across the grass. Light splashed over the headstones and the weedy graves. She had both hands against her mouth like she was trying to cover her own screams.

Roswell stepped around the pile of dirt and reached to grab her, but I couldn’t move. I stood looking down at the little body, half in shadow on the satin lining. “We have to take it out.” The sound of my own voice seemed flat and far away.

“You okay?” Roswell asked, looking over at me, covering his mouth and nose.

I nodded. The rain made everything waver and blur, and three of us stood looking at the body.

After a second, I collected the dropped flashlight and stood over the casket, too numb to tell that I was shaking except for the way the light jumped and fluttered. I tried to hold it steady, but I couldn’t feel my hands.

Roswell was the one who got down on his knees and reached into the casket for the body. For the baby. He leaned over the casket, wincing, but reaching in anyway, gentle, cautious. He was so brave I felt sick.

I held the barrel of the flashlight tighter and cleared my throat. “Will it be okay, or is it too rotten to pass?”

“No,” he said, with his fingertips under its chin. “It’s in really good shape. Really good. I don’t think there’s any way it could have been human.”

His voice was like cotton, like it was coming from far away.

I handed Emma the light and put my hands over my face. I’d known. Of course I’d known. Hearing him say it just made it the truth. Someone would send a baby out to suffer and die in a poisonous world without regretting it, without feeling guilty at all. It might as well have been me.

Roswell straightened and then got to his feet. “Mackie.”

I didn’t answer. My throat was so tight it hurt to breathe.

He stepped around the casket and hugged me. I didn’t want him to. I wanted him to let me stand back in the shadows and be nothing. I wanted to stop seeing. Roswell was always hugging somebody, but not seriously, not like it meant anything. This time, he pulled me hard against his shoulder, holding on to the back of my jacket even when I tried to pull away.

All my life, Roswell had been rescuing the moment, saying the right thing, but this time he didn’t say anything. The rain was slow and cold and I didn’t think I could stand it if he tried to make things better.

Then Emma was there, reaching for me. She had both arms around me and was pressing her face against my shoulder. I let her hold on to me and she was warm through her sweatshirt. She smelled like autumn and dirt and home, like the burned-out church and the grave. I leaned against her, thinking how strange it was that I hadn’t ended up in a little wooden box years ago, that anyone in the world loved me that much.

When she let me go, I felt light and far away, numb from the cold. Numb enough to touch the body. It lay in the box, chilly and stiff like a doll. Roswell and Emma looked up at me expectantly from where they knelt on either side of it, not speaking.

Finally, Emma took a little hitching breath and whispered, “Should we take it out?”

We lifted the body from the coffin liner and wrapped it carefully in Roswell’s jacket. Its hair was dark and thick but brittle. Its skin was gray. It was nothing like the true, living girl tied to the Lady’s armchair.

Emma stroked the dull hair, cradling the body in her lap. After a minute, I tied the charm around its wrist, not knowing what else to do. The body lay stiffly in Emma’s arms, looking pathetic and horrific in the ruffled funeral dress and the makeshift bracelet.

I stood over them. “What now?”

Emma looked into the emaciated face. “In the stories, people talk to them, but none of the accounts have a script or anything. I don’t know what to say.”

“It’s okay. I think I do.”

I leaned down and whispered in the replacement’s ear all the things I’d wanted to tell the blue girl in the House of Mayhem. What someone else had done to her, and it was okay to be gruesome and frightening because it wasn’t her fault.

When the bundle in Emma’s arms began to move, I wanted to look someplace else. The squirming body was worse than the still, tragic one. It fidgeted in Emma’s lap and she stared up at me with a mute, hopeless expression.

I crouched over it and pulled Roswell’s jacket open.

The thing was small and delicate, almost like a real kid. It wasn’t a perfect replica, but it resembled Natalie. It blinked slowly at me, reaching up with a tiny hand. Its eyes were blank and a little cloudy, but they were hazel like Natalie’s. Like Tate’s.

“We have to hurry,” I whispered, thinking of Emma’s hands when the blue girls had taken her gloves. How they’d started rotting.

Emma breathed out in a long, slow sigh. She held the wriggling, squirming thing in her lap, looking up at me from the muddy ground. Her eyes were full of tears, like she wanted to put it down.

“Jesus Christ,” whispered Roswell. He was holding the shovel, standing stiffly by the open grave. “That’s about the freakiest thing I’ve ever seen.”

I shook my head, looking down at the thing in Emma’s arms. “It’s just a body someone didn’t want. It’s not any worse than me.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight The Revenant

Roswell closed the casket and we dropped it back into the grave. It thudded in the dirt and I flinched. After a minute, Roswell started to shovel the dirt back in.

The grave was nearly filled in when my phone started buzzing. Tate. When I didn’t answer, she called twice more, then texted the words: total bullshit, mackie. i’m coming over.

I turned off the phone and shoved it in my pocket. There was no way to head her off. I could only hope that when my dad opened the door, he would see a distraught, grief-stricken girl and decide she was in need of some counsel. I didn’t have much confidence in that scenario, though. I knew from experience that once Tate got going, she was nearly unstoppable, and my dad was more broken up than I’d ever seen him.

She’d just have to show up at the house and then do whatever reckless, ill-advised thing she was going to do when she found me gone. It was not a comforting thought.

“So, what’s the plan?” Roswell said, tamping down the last of the dirt with his shovel.

Emma was sitting on the muddy ground holding the revenant, but now she stood up.

I leaned on the handle of my shovel, breathless and dizzy from the steel, soaked from the rain and still too hot. “Go down into the house under the dump hill and take Natalie back.”

“And they’re not going to have a huge problem with that?”

I gave him a helpless look. “We need a distraction. Like, an offering or a present. The woman in charge there loves it when people pay their respects to her.”

“What does she want that we could give her?”

I thought about that, about how angry she’d gotten at the Morrigan—so angry that she’d flood them out slowly, over years, instead of just punishing them once and getting it over with. “She wants to be able to control everyone—the whole world. She wants to make sure that everyone is so scared of her that they’ll never disobey her, never trick or lie to her.”

Emma moved closer to me with the revenant against her shoulder, looking uneasy. “Like we’re about to do, you mean?”

“Pretty much. I guess you could say that people tricking her is her biggest ongoing problem, but I don’t really have a solution for that, and neither do you.”

Roswell nodded, looking thoughtful. “But we know some people who do.”

The twins were not happy about being dragged out into the rain in the middle of the night and less happy about being asked to part with the Red Scare, but they showed up at the cemetery in under fifteen minutes. Danny was carrying the polygraph. It had a handle, like an old suitcase, but he held it carefully in both arms.

The twins could generally be depended on to be completely unshocked by anything. They took the revenant with less self-control than usual.

“Jesus,” said Danny, staring at the thing in Emma’s arms. “What have you guys been doing? Are you out of your minds?”

Drew didn’t say anything. After a second, he reached out and touched the revenant’s arm. It twitched irritably and he stepped back.

I explained the plan, such as it was, and Drew nodded, still watching the revenant with a kind of wary fascination.

Danny was less accepting. He held up the polygraph. “Okay, I’m all for not letting Natalie Stewart get murdered—that’s not really in question. But why are we giving away our most successful project again?”

I tried to think how to explain the Lady and her appetite for power and control, but it was Roswell who answered. “We need a convincing present for the woman who has everything.”

Danny nodded, looking resigned. “Everything except a portable McCarthy-era polygraph, apparently.”

“Well, come on,” said Drew. “That’s pretty much everyone.”

The walk to the park seemed longer than it ever had.

Emma was a trooper about the revenant. She carried it wrapped in Roswell’s coat. It didn’t seem to mind, just rested its head against her shoulder and kept quiet.

At the dump hill, I reached to take it from her. “We can’t all go—it just doesn’t make sense. And Mom and Dad are going to be going crazy wondering where we are. I think you should go home.”

Emma backed away, clutching the revenant and shaking her head. “No. I’m going with you.” There was dirt was smeared all over her face and her neck. She looked like she’d escaped from somewhere.

I stood looking at her. She’d always been willing to do whatever it took. Always. She’d been going with me my whole life. “You can’t. There’s no reason to, and it might be dangerous.”

Emma moved very close. “Listen to me.” The thing in her arms began to fidget and whine, and I had a feeling she was squeezing it. “I have spent years making sure you don’t die.”

“And I never asked you to—you didn’t have to follow around after me, taking care of me. You could have had your own life.”

“I know. Listen to me. When it’s been a choice between you and anything else, I’ve always picked you. I’m not sure I always made the right choices, but it doesn’t matter. I made them—me. You didn’t do anything to me. I picked you and I am not sorry.”

We stood in the dark at the base of the hill. Roswell and the twins were standing back, staying out of it. The argument was ours—mine and Emma’s. We’d been talking to each other in the dark for pretty much my whole life. The thing is, you don’t realize how much people lie with their faces when they talk. Emma’s voice was always honest, the realest, truest part of anything she said. It was scary to hear how much she meant it.

I looked down at her and said, “Please, Tate is on her way to our house—she might already be there—and I don’t know what she’ll do when she finds out we’re gone. I think she’ll come looking for us, and you have to stop her. Keep her away from the park, away from the cemetery. If she gets involved, it’s going to be a disaster.”

Emma didn’t say anything, but after a second she nodded and let Roswell take the revenant.

“Emma,” I said. “Thank you.”

She went on tiptoe and kissed me on the cheek. “Just come home, okay?”

Then she turned and started toward Welsh Street. I watched her walk away through the playground with her head down, not looking back. I knew she was crying, but there was nothing I could do except keep moving forward. We jumped the fence, and I led the way to the base of the dump hill and used the paring knife to open the door to the House of Misery.

In the entryway, the boy with the footman’s uniform asked for my card and I told him I didn’t have one. He gave me a disapproving look and I told him he could fuck right off.

Behind me, the twins were staring around the hallway incredulously. Roswell seemed beyond comment, which wasn’t that surprising, considering the fact that he was holding a squirming, rotting baby that had been dead an hour ago.

“It’s very ill mannered to bring guests without an invitation,” the boy in uniform said.

”We have a present,” I told him. “It’s rare and valuable, and she doesn’t know it yet, but she wants it bad.”

The boy nodded and started away down the hall into the House of Misery, but he didn’t lead us back to the reading room. Instead, he showed us down a wide gallery and through a pair of double doors.

“She will receive you in the formal parlor.”

The room was fancier than the Lady’s reading room, with an intricate rug and painted vases in niches along the walls. There were bronze sculptures of soaring birds and shepherdesses placed on tables around the room. The Lady was reclining on a long dark-colored sofa. When we stopped in the doorway, she looked up and smiled like she’d been expecting us.

Danny and I stepped into the room, while Roswell and Drew hung back in the doorway, with Drew slightly in front so he was shielding the revenant from view.

“Mr. Doyle,” the Lady said. “It is so lovely to see you again. To what do we owe this pleasure?”

I kept my expression neutral and pleasant. “I was thinking about some of the things you said before. I was pretty unfair—I know that—and I wanted to bring you a present.”

The Lady smiled at me expectantly. Then she looked past me and the smile disappeared. “Send them out,” she said, looking thunderous. “Out, now!”

My first thought was that she’d seen the revenant, and it took me a second to realize that she was talking about Drew and Danny. I stared at her, shaking my head. “They can’t both go. They’re the reason we’re here.”

“You brought unnatural monsters into my house? How dare you? How dare you presume to defile my house!”

I glanced back at the twins. Their resemblance had never seemed shocking or even very unusual. Or at least, they’d always seemed a lot more normal than I was. Apparently, freakishness was a little different for everyone.

I moved toward the Lady and held up my hands. “Wait, if Drew goes, can Danny stay and show you the present? One of them has to stay and show you how it works.”

The Lady watched me, her expression wary. “Very well. You, with the gift. You can stay. Make the other wait in the hall.”

Drew and Roswell beat a precipitous retreat and the Lady turned her attention back to me. “What gift do you have for me?”

“I wanted to bring you something that would help you. You were talking about how the Morrigan lied to you, and up in town, they have a solution for that. This would keep anyone from lying to you ever again.”

The Lady smiled and her eyes were hungry. “That would be a precious gift indeed.” She barely glanced at me. Her gaze was on Danny and the suitcase. “But it looks so ordinary.”

He was kneeling on the floor, opening the suitcase. “That’s part of how it works. No one knows you’ve got it until it’s too late.”

I began to back toward the door. “While you’re seeing how it works, do you mind if I check on my friends?”

The Lady didn’t even look up. Her eyes were fixed lovingly, greedily on Danny’s hands as he undid the clasps and opened the Red Scare.

Roswell and Drew were waiting in the hall, looking out of place and nervous. I didn’t want to leave Danny, but we needed to find Natalie.

We started back toward the entrance, then I retraced the way to the Lady’s reading room. I had an idea that even though the burrow under the park was big and sprawling, there weren’t nearly as many people living there as there were in the House of Mayhem.

We found the room without much trouble and without seeing anyone. The fire was out and some of the wall lamps had been shut off.

At first, I didn’t see her. The House of Misery didn’t seem to be as big as the House of Mayhem, but it was just as convoluted, and if they’d taken her someplace else, I didn’t know how we’d find her. But Natalie was there. She’d dragged her pillow under one of the low tables and sat staring into her birdcage. Her hair was messed up, the bows untied. She’d taken off the button boots and one sock.

I crouched next to her and went to pick her up, but she turned away, covering her face. When she raised her hands, I got a good look at her arm. A raw, oozing seam circled her wrist, red at the edges and nearly black at the center. Around it, the discoloration feathered out, spreading under the skin, working its way in the direction of her shoulder.

“Roz,” I said in a low voice, trying to sound calm and conversational so that I wouldn’t scare her. “Take the charm off the revenant, now.”

Roswell came up behind me. “But what about the plan? Isn’t the whole point to have it look real?”

“Take it off, now!”

“Okay,” he said. “Sure. It’s your show.” There was a sharp ripping sound as he snapped the ribbon. Then he yelped and there was a heavy thump. “Oh, Jesus!”

I twisted around, but I already knew what I’d see. Roswell had dropped the revenant on the carpet, and there was nothing remotely human about it anymore. It was still moving, writhing on its back, but its skin was so gray it was nearly colorless. It squirmed over onto its hands and knees and raised its head to look at me. Its irises were a dirty yellow and so were its teeth.

From under the table, Natalie made a thin high-pitched noise, like a caught rabbit, and Roswell dove for the revenant. He threw his jacket over it and scooped it back up, keeping its face hidden, but Natalie was already working her way farther under the table, hiding her own face, trying to wedge herself into the corner.

“Natalie,” I said, but she wouldn’t look at me. “Natalie, it’s okay. Come out from there.” I didn’t want to grab her, but it looked like I might have to.

Then Drew sat down next to me and took out a quarter. “You like magic tricks, right, Nat?” He walked the quarter over his knuckles.

When she peered out between her fingers, he made the quarter dance along the edge of his hand and said, “I used to be your neighbor. Do you remember?”

She didn’t answer, but after a second, she nodded.

I knelt on the floor and started working at the knot that fastened her to the chair. Roswell was trying to keep the revenant covered, but it didn’t want to stay under his jacket.

When I got the ribbon loose, Drew leaned under the table, never looking away from Natalie, even when the revenant started to whine and struggle behind him. “We’re going to take you home now, and you need to cover your eyes.”

For a second, Natalie didn’t move, but when he said it again, she dropped the bird and put her hands over her eyes. He picked her up, holding her close against his shoulder. He kept her turned away while Roswell unwrapped the squirming body, trying to keep it from clutching and pawing at him.

“This is bad,” he whispered, knotting the ribbon around the revenant’s waist, peeling its hands off every time it reached for him. “We’re going to hell for sure. This is so bad.”

“You haven’t begun to appreciate how bad things can get,” said a hoarse voice behind us.

Someone was standing in the doorway, so still and so backlit that at first I couldn’t make out his face. His arms were folded over his chest and he was nothing but a shadow except for the flicker of his eyes.

“Forgive me being so bold as to say so, but we’re in a world of trouble, aren’t we?” He stepped into the room and I saw his face. It was the Cutter. He looked exactly like he had when he’d shown me out except that now he was wearing black gloves. They were heavy, with short steel claws sewn into the fingertips.

Natalie had her arms around Drew’s neck, clutching at him, and I tried not to stagger as the Cutter moved toward me and the first clouds of iron seeped into the room.

“Would you care to explain what you are doing in the Lady’s private quarters with two trespassers and a corpse?”

Roswell stood up, looking resolute and not half as scared as I felt. He was taller than the Cutter but young looking, without any of the qualities it took to be cruel. “What are you supposed to be, like some kind of boogeyman?”

The Cutter smiled. “I prefer to think of myself as a demon, personally. But it makes no difference in the greater scheme of things. I’m content to be called nightmare and monster and goblin, so long as they call me something.”

I took another step back, trying to get away from the smell. “But that’s not what the Lady wants—she doesn’t like being named.”

“The Lady has no vision. No perspective. She can’t stand the idea of being anything but a god. She aches for a life that doesn’t exist. We’ll never be the race we were, so it’s time to be something else.”

I took a deep breath and felt it burn all the way down my throat. “What are you going to do?”

The Cutter watched my face. His expression was polite—mildly interested, even. Then he grinned, showing raw, swollen gums, and swung his fist into one of the bell jars on the mantel.

It shattered, spraying the room with slivers of glass. The sound was very loud.

Roswell jumped back, and Drew tried to shield Natalie, covering her face with his hand.

The Cutter kicked aside what was left of the broken jar and stepped over it. “This is not a negotiation. We are not bargaining. If you refuse to hand over that sweet little lamb, I’ll systematically collect everyone you’ve ever cared about and start cutting pieces off them until you agree. Understand that I have no reservations about this.”

I backed up, stumbling between armchairs and low tables, away from him.

He followed me. “You thought you could just come in here and trade us a child for a piece of worthless meat?” Behind him, the bell jar lay in pieces all over the floor. “We know that trick, cousin. We invented it.”

“But you didn’t recognize it when the Morrigan came for my mom. She left a revenant in her place and guess what? The Lady bought it. The Lady didn’t catch her because she couldn’t tell the difference—you couldn’t tell the difference.” I was almost shouting by the time he reached me.

He caught me by the front of my jacket, slamming me against the wall. Next to my head, a shadow box full of beetles fell and splintered on the floor. He twisted my collar, pinning me so that my back was against the wall.

Behind him, Roswell was a tall, indistinct shape, moving toward us.

The Cutter leaned toward me, resting his forehead against mine. “Fool me once,” he whispered, “shame on you.” He pressed the bridge of his nose against mine, his breath burning the back of my throat. His voice was rough and furious. “Fool me twice, and I will cut out your fucking throat.”

“Hey,” Roswell shouted, yanking at the Cutter’s coat “Hey, let go of him!”

The room was so murky now that I could barely focus. The only thing I was sure of were the Cutter’s murderous black eyes.

He didn’t look around. “Is that the trespasser talking, putting his hands all over me? You must be out of your mind.”

“He’s right,” I muttered. “Stay out of this. He likes torture too much.”

The Cutter laughed his slow, husky laugh. “Torture? No, I just want to see the blood run, cousin. It’s beautiful when it catches the light.”

He leaned close, laughing, and I smelled rust and under that sickness, disease. His grin was a glowing slice of white, floating in front of me like the moon. Then I blinked and there was nothing but his breath against my face.

“Cousin,” he said next to my ear. “Cousin, look at me.” He grabbed my jaw and wrenched my face close to his. “Look at me. I’m going to brand you with my sigil, brand it right over your heart, and you’re going to meet my gaze like a man. Then I’m going to break you, and you’re going to beg for mercy like a little boy.”

He was so close that I could see the raw-meat texture of his gums. I stared at his smile, wondering where Roswell and Drew were, waiting for him to cut me. It was what he wanted—pain, blood, the chance to make someone beg.

“We’ll start with your face,” he said. The knife was long and sharp and strangely bright, like it belonged in his hand. “Your smile needs improving.”

In the rush of his breath, there was nothing but the smell, the dizziness. The room was shrinking, squeezing in, and I couldn’t focus. I felt sick and almost weightless.

I was alone. Roswell, Drew were nowhere. There was nothing but the wall at my back and the blade in front of me.

The Cutter adjusted his grip, turning the knife back and forth inches from my face. “Open wide,” he whispered. I clenched my teeth and waited for the metallic taste, the pain that would blot out the world.

Then Roswell’s hand swung into my field of vision, colliding with the side of the Cutter’s face. There was a hiss and the smell of burning skin and he stumbled back. I didn’t have the strength to catch myself as I slid down the wall onto the carpet. The revenant was sitting a few feet away from me. Her eyes were yellow and empty.

“Get the hell off him,” shouted Roswell, standing between me and the Cutter. His voice sounded angry and impatient.

Then Drew was beside him, holding Natalie in one arm. His shoulders were set and his feet were apart, like he was expecting to get hit.

The Cutter sneered at me, baring his teeth, and for a second, he looked as scary and as nasty as anyone in the slag heap. There was a circle of puncture marks on one cheek that looked like a bite.

“Have it your own way,” he said, starting for the door. “It doesn’t matter. Stay and wait for the end. Honestly, I like it better that way—the horror, the screaming. You’ll want to watch, of course,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at Drew. “Cuddle and croon to her all you want. She’ll still be dead by morning.”

Drew squeezed Natalie hard against his chest and she hid her face from the Cutter.

He cleared his throat and spat. Then he turned, kicking at the broken glass in the carpet, and walked out of the room. The door slammed shut behind him and a key turned in the lock. The sound was very loud.

Roswell stood over me, fists clenched. Then he opened his hand. He was breathing hard, looking furious. He was holding a bottle cap.

He put it back in his pocket and tried the door, making an attempt to force it with his shoulder. He kicked the handle and the hinges a few times but halfheartedly, then said the thing I already knew. “I can’t. It’s too heavy.”

I stayed slumped against the wall. My vision was going and I could feel myself starting to slide sideways, tilting in the direction of the floor. At some point, I’d rested my hand in the broken shadow box and my palm was full of glass and pins and sharp, glossy fragments of crushed beetle.

Roswell crouched next to me and glanced up at Drew. “Hey, he’s not looking too good. Think you can help me out here?”

Drew stood over us, still holding Natalie. “Just a sec. I don’t want to put her down where there’s glass. She’s not wearing shoes.” He sounded dazed.

Roswell was examining my hand, brushing off the loose debris, picking out slivers of embedded glass. He studied the blood that was welling up in the cut places, dark and sticky, almost purple.

“Looking good,” he said, and I recognized all the old bravado and the cheerfulness for what it was, easy and fake. The voice he used when nothing was good at all.

It made me feel empty to remember how often he’d done this, sat next to me while I shivered and wheezed, telling me everything would be fine.

After a second, he spoke again, and for once, his voice was truthful. “Well, we’re screwed now, I guess.”

My hand stung as he removed the glass, but my breathing was better. “Danny’s still out there. He could find Emma or my dad. He could still get help.”

Roswell straightened up with a handful of beetle pieces and bloody glass, looking highly unconvinced. “Sure, maybe.”

“Well, that’s all we can hope for right now.”

There was a scuffle out in the hall. Then the sound of a key in the lock and the door opened on Danny, looking rumpled and furious. The Cutter had him by the back of his jacket, lifting him up on his toes. There was a bruise darkening under one eye and his lip was bleeding.

The Cutter tossed him into the room and shut the door. Danny fell hard on the carpet and then picked himself up.

“Sorry,” he said. “I tried, but she’s not stupid.”

Drew went to him, brushing him off in a vague, mechanical way, like he was dusting furniture. “Did it crap out? Was she mad? I knew we shouldn’t have tried to move it—it must have shorted.”

Danny shook his head, glaring down at the floor. “She made me try it.”

Roswell stared at him. “But you were just supposed to show her what it does. How could she know what we were really here for?”

“Because it’s a polygraph, goddamn it! She asked questions. What part of ‘it works’ did you not get?”

“Wait, she used it on you?” Roswell squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. He sighed and sank down on the couch while Danny paced the room and I tried to breathe as shallowly as possible.

“Sorry,” he said again, glancing at me and covering his bleeding lip, searching around for something to blot it with. He grabbed a lacy runner off an end table and held it against his mouth. Then he sat down in one of the high-backed chairs and stared at the floor.

I took a seat on the sofa between Roswell and Drew. The revenant sat across from us on the edge of one of the velvet armchairs. Roswell leaned forward, watching her with a resigned look.

He sighed and turned to me. “We can’t leave her.”

She sat like a stuffed toy, propped against the arm of the chair, not moving, not breathing. I considered her vacant eyes, dark yellow at the iris, a lighter yellow at the cornea. She was nothing like the blue girls, who whispered and laughed like anyone else. She was empty, and I wondered if it was my fault, if I’d done the raising wrong. If I’d broken her.

Finally, I shook my head. “I don’t think it matters. She doesn’t know where she is. She doesn’t care what happens or who’s around.”

Roswell leaned forward, propping his elbows on his knees. “She can be destroyed, though, right?”

I recited the limited hazards the Morrigan had listed for the blue girls. “By cutting off her head or setting her on fire.”

“And your friend with the claws—he looked like he’d cut her up just for fun.”

I nodded.

“Then we can’t leave her. I just don’t know what we should do with her.”

I closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the upholstery of the couch. “If we can get her out of here, I’ve got someone who’ll take her.”

I knew that the Morrigan and the House of Mayhem would take care of her. She was strange, maybe broken, but there was still a place for people like her, which was more than I could say for myself.

Drew sighed and leaned back too. Natalie was still holding him around the neck, hiding her face against his shoulder. “Get her out? We can’t even get ourselves out.”

And that was the truth. Being underground meant no convenient porches and no windows. The door was two feet thick and the hinges were on the outside.

We sat in silence, waiting for whatever came next.

The collar of my jacket kept brushing the raw gouges from the Cutter’s claws, but I just sat on the couch and didn’t try to adjust it. It didn’t hurt that bad. The room was quiet and dim. I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees, thinking that sometimes this was just the way the game ended. Sometimes you did your best, and it all went straight to hell anyway.

Chapter Twenty-Nine The Seventh-Year Sacrifice

It wasn’t long before they came and got us, dragging us out of the dump hill and toward the graveyard in early-morning darkness.

They were tall bony men, seven of them, and all dressed like the Cutter, only none of them were covered in steel. One carried Natalie awkwardly under his arm. No one tried to take the revenant from Roswell.

The Cutter escorted me personally, staying uncomfortably close and wheezing into my ear. His breath rattled and caught, full of a deep, phlegmy glee.

“You’re going to love this,” he whispered. “She’ll go into that crypt to get eaten, and then she’s going to scream like blue murder. They always do.”

“Bet you like that,” I muttered, too breathless and hoarse to speak louder. “Bet you love watching kids get slaughtered.”

“No, cousin. Oh, no. I’m going to watch your face.”

On Welsh Street, the ground was still smoking. The church—what was left of it—stood crumpled and black, jutting at the sky.

The men shoved and dragged us, leading us into the cemetery toward the crypt. The air smelled like a new kind of smoke, dry and perfume-y like incense.

The Morrigan was already waiting for us in the unblessed corner of the cemetery with her pack of blue girls clustered behind her. All of them were soaked, and she was holding her doll. The rest of the House of Mayhem was fanned out around them. Carlina and Luther stood close together, hugging each other. Janice and the star girl were holding hands, and the blue girls all had little bundles of herbs tied with twine and burning gently.

When she saw me, the Morrigan’s expression was grave. “What are you doing here? You ought to be home where it’s safe.”

I struggled in the Cutter’s grip. “The Lady’s going to kill Natalie. Please, can’t you do anything to stop her?”

“Dearest,” the Morrigan said, holding the doll against her chest. “This isn’t what I would have chosen if I’d been given a choice, but there’s no other way. Without blood, the whole town suffers.” She glanced back over her shoulder, looking anxious.

The Lady stood in the shadow of the oak tree, wearing a long, dark cloak. The hood was up and it hid her face, but I knew her by the embroidered train of her dress and the way the handful of house servants clustered around her.

The Morrigan turned back to me and opened her mouth like she had something else to say. Then she froze, staring past me at someone in the crowd.

It was Tate. She shoved through the crowd in her blue mechanic’s jacket, looking absolutely furious, and pushed her way to where I stood, held motionless by the Cutter.

She gave him one cold, appraising look, then turned on me. “What the hell, Mackie! You told me you were going to take care of it!”

“I tried,” I said, fully aware of how weak that sounded. How completely worthless. “Jesus, what are you doing here?”

“What do you think I’m doing? Emma said stay away from the graveyard, so I figured hey, it must be the place to be.”

The Morrigan came scrambling over to us, careful to stay as far as possible from the Cutter. She stood in front of Tate, fidgeting and rustling in her burned party dress.

She was clutching her doll, but when she lifted her chin and spoke, she sounded patient and very adult. “You aren’t supposed to be here. The understanding is that you choose not to see us when we do our darkest work.”

Tate flinched back from the ravenous teeth but looked in no way dissuaded. “Yeah, well, I see just fine and I’m not going anywhere without my sister.”

The Morrigan reached out, resting her hand on Tate’s wrist. “This is aeons older than you or your family. Older than the town. Blood makes the sun shine and the crops grow. This is the truth of the world.”

Tate stared down at her, then said in a soft, deadly voice that was almost a whisper, “Fuck the world. I just want my sister back.”

“Enough.” The Lady’s voice echoed from across the stretch of unconsecrated ground. “Your sister is trifling, barely more than a pittance. This is not my concern, and if you continue to disrupt my affairs, I’ll have no choice but to call for the man who sees to disruptions.”

Tate glanced at me and for the first time, her expression was uneasy. She stared around the graveyard, like she was just now beginning to realize how many of them there actually were and how scary some of them looked.

When her gaze came back to me, the Cutter leaned in over my shoulder and held up a gloved hand, letting the claws drift lazily in front of my face, not touching, never touching, but letting Tate see how easily he could.

I watched as he flexed his fingers. “What do you want?”

He touched the side of my neck and the iron felt cold against my skin. “All I want is for you to stand here and watch the people you love be horribly mutilated. Is that too much to ask?”

I held very still, trying not to give him the satisfaction of seeing how much even a light touch hurt.

Beside me, Roswell and the twins were struggling to get free from the Cutter’s bony men but without much luck. Tate had no one holding her, though.

“Let him go,” she said, and she sounded hard and mean, like she was ready to destroy him.

The Cutter was so close I could feel him laughing against my ear. “You’re a regular little firebrand, aren’t you? Come and take him, then. I’m keen to see if you can.”

His claws dug harder, harder. They broke the skin and I was breathing in spasms, trying not to make any noise, and everything happened very fast.

Tate bent and yanked the cuff of her jeans up, reaching for the top of her boot.

He let me go and stepped step back, raising his hands like he was surrendering, letting her have me. Then he slammed his fist into the side of my head.

I hit the ground and for a second, all I could see was a shower of tiny lights. I lay in the mud and the ashes, trying to catch my breath. The ground was wet against my back, soaking through my coat. The Cutter crouched over me, resting his claws against my neck. His touch was so gentle it seemed indecent that it could possibly hurt that much. The mark of Roswell’s bottle cap stood out dark on his cheek.

“Get off him,” Tate said again. Her voice was very low.

The Cutter just laughed his low, rattling laugh. “No, precious, no. What’s going to happen is this: I’m going to carve him up a little, and you’re going to watch me, and that’s how it will go because if you try to stop me, I’ll cut a gully down his throat and the two of us can sit here in the dark and watch him bleed out.”

The points dug hard into my neck and then I did yell, hoarse and aching, hating the sound of my voice. Suddenly, there was a flat, heavy thud and the claws were gone. I rolled sideways with a cold, searing pain racing up through the base of my skull.

The Cutter lay next to me. He had his hands raised, like he wanted to press them against his face, but the claws kept him from touching his own skin. There was a long burn down one cheek.

Around us, everyone stepped back. Tate stared out at them. She was holding something long and narrow, matte black in the light from the street. It was a crowbar.

The blue girls began to laugh in shrill, screeching howls as the Cutter scrambled to his feet. Clearly, the House of Mayhem had some uncharitable feelings toward him. They didn’t care if he took a crowbar to the face. They were just here to bear witness to whatever happened. He glared around at them, then turned on Tate.

She looked small next to him. Young. His smile was wide and it promised murder and before that, pain. The most desperate desire of his life was that he wanted pain for everyone.

“Little girl,” he said, and there was a lilt in his voice that sounded almost like regret. “Little girl, please put down your toy. You’ll die if you don’t.”

She shook her head and adjusted her grip.

“Put it down, or I’ll lay you open and leave your eyes for the crows.” When he slashed at her, there was no warning. He raked at her arm, claws slicing through the shoulder of her jacket. Even when blood soaked through the canvas, she didn’t back away.

Instead, she smiled. It was the same smile she’d given Alice in the parking lot. The smile that said, I have fun when I break stuff.

The Cutter was grinning back at her, like this was their moment. Like he didn’t know that the surest way to piss her off was to draw blood.

She swung again, and this time the bar connected, slamming into his teeth. He fell, stumbling and slipping in the mud and the soot, blood dripping from his mouth and chin, seeping into the ground, smoking on the crowbar in Tate’s hand. Already, his breath was grating out of him. He knelt between the headstones, shuddering and coughing.

Tate stood over him, holding the crowbar in both hands. She was still smiling, looking electrified and wild. Around us, the crowd was silent.

The Cutter didn’t move. Blood was running from his mouth. He swiped an arm across his chin and glared up at her, looking savage.

“Attend to her,” the Lady said, and her voice was shrill.

The Cutter struggled to his feet, spitting blood onto the muddy ground. Then he lunged.

Tate swung the crowbar hard, aiming for his hand, breaking off two of the claws. They flashed as they fell and the Cutter jerked back. She was moving away, already whipping around for another swing.

He caught her as she came toward him, opening a row of shallow slashes down the side of her neck, but she never flinched. There was just the Cutter and Tate and the bar. It was black in her hand and this time it hit him across the chest, knocking him back.

The Cutter staggered, then caught himself. He stood leaning forward slightly, and I thought for a second that he was going to throw himself at Tate, but he only raised a gloved hand and touched his forehead. The claws made a row of little welts where they brushed his skin.

“I stand down,” he said. His voice was hoarse and ferocious, his breath coming in huge gasps.

“Really, sir,” the Lady said from the dark. “I asked that you remove this inconvenience and am quite mystified as to why you don’t do it.”

“I stand down,” he said again, and this time he raised his head. The look he gave the Lady was murderous.

She spoke coldly from under her hood. “You do whatever I require, and at the moment, I require you to get rid of that girl.”

He turned his back on her.

The Cutter faced Tate, who stood holding the crowbar, but he didn’t make any attempt to challenge her. His expression was furious but rigidly controlled.

“You,” he said. His voice sounded rough, and blood ran darkly off his chin. “Ill-mannered as the devil, but you’re clever enough with a blunt instrument. You and I, we could stand to go another round one day, don’t you think?”

Tate didn’t answer. She was staring past him, toward the Lady’s corner of the cemetery, and looking more frightened than she had at any point during their confrontation. I followed her gaze and understood. One of the bony men had stepped out from behind the crypt with Natalie in his arms.

The Cutter gave Tate a jerky bow, then shoved past her, away from the cluster of rotting girls and out into the cemetery. The pair of broken claws lay on the ground at Tate’s feet. He didn’t look back.

“Enough of this.” The Lady stepped forward, snatching Natalie from her handler and dragging her along toward the white crypt. “We’re going in now, and we may be a while.”

Tate lunged toward them, but two of the Cutter’s men moved to intercept her. They caught her by the back of her jacket, almost lifting her off the ground. Her legs thrashed wildly, and she was screaming for Natalie in a voice that made my chest hurt.

I remembered what my mother had said when the Morrigan had found me, asked for my service and I’d agreed because I didn’t want anything to happen to Emma. Everything involves choice.

I knew what she’d been trying to say—that you have to think about your options, weigh the consequences before you make decisions, but the advice was so worthless when it came to the things that mattered. This wasn’t one of those times.

This was the endgame. The time when everything got quiet and there was only my fast, panicked breath and my heartbeat. There was only me. The one outside of everything, when everyone else had a place where they belonged.

“Wait,” I said.

The Lady stopped with her back to me. “What do you mean by this, Mr. Doyle?” But she sounded like she was smiling.

“Let me go instead. It’s the only real choice.” It wasn’t until I said it that I knew how true it was. “It’s the only thing left to do.”

The Lady turned and shoved Natalie into the crowd, almost throwing her at Tate, who jerked away from her bewildered guards and ran to catch her. Tate knelt on the ground, holding Natalie against her chest. It was closest I’d ever seen her come to crying.

From the shadows, the Lady’s voice was sweet and, under that, darkly excited. “Come along, Mr. Doyle.”

Tate looked up at me, shaking her head, and I stared back at her, trying to make her see my conviction. Just let me go.

She squeezed her eyes shut and buried her face in Natalie’s hair. The gesture made me more certain than ever that I was doing the right thing. The only thing. I turned to follow the Lady, who stood waiting on the stone step of the crypt.

As I came up to her, she pushed back her hood to show her face and I almost stopped breathing. She was badly changed from the woman I’d met in the reading room. Her eyes were bigger, blacker than the Morrigan’s or any of the blue girls’. In the white of her face, they looked like lumps of soot, all deep shadow and no color.

I remembered Emma’s story about going into the cave to be eaten. How if you went willingly, then death wasn’t death, but transformation.

There are all kinds of things that can scare you every day. What if someone you know gets cancer? What if something happens to your sister or your friends or your parents? And what if you get hit by a car crossing the street or the kids at school find out what an unnatural freak you are and what if you go too far out in the lake and the water is over your head and what if there’s a fire or a war?

And you can lie awake at night and worry about these things because it’s scary and unpredictable, but it’s real. It’s possible.

The Lady’s deep, unblinking gaze was black and impossible.

She held out her hand, waiting for me, and I took it, letting her draw me away from my life, my friends, and toward the crypt.

“Wait,” I said, feeling the word catch in my throat. “I just want to look.”

Roswell and the twins were pinned against the churchyard fence, held there by the Cutter’s men. Drew had the same blank expression the Corbetts usually wore, but Danny was watching me with a look like there was something sharp under his ribs and someone twisting. Roswell stood with his back against the fence, restrained by two men in black coats. He was still holding the revenant, watching me. Just watching.

Between the headstones, Tate crouched with her arms around Natalie. Her mouth was open like she wanted to say something, but what was there to say? Her sister was her family. The only right thing was to turn away from her, away from the whole shining world and toward the Lady.

For a second, though, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to. Tate’s eyes were on my face, and it was hard to give that up. To give up my life when it was finally starting.

The musicians and the blue girls stood quietly. This was what they’d come for, not out of pleasure or malice. They’d come to see their world renewed and that meant blood. It didn’t matter that I was standing right in front of them. In all important ways, I was already dead.

“Come to me,” the Lady called, her voice echoing to me from inside the crypt. The door was open now, a dark slash against the white stone, and I turned and followed her because it was the last, best thing to do.

In the entrance, I could smell wet dirt and cold stone. The floor was covered in a shallow layer of water, ground seepage or rain. I couldn’t hear anything except the sound of my own heartbeat.

“You’re bleeding,” the Lady said from the shadows. “I can smell the copper and the salt.”

In the dark, her face was ghostly, almost transparent. Her bones showed palely through her skin. When she raised her head to look at me, I could see her teeth and now they were just as cruel and as jagged as the Morrigan’s.

She smiled and held out a hand. “Come closer and let me look at you.”

I took another step, away from the ruined church and the circle of watchers, into the dark.

“I dreamed this,” she said. “Dreamed of you for years, even before I knew you. But a dream is a poor substitute for the flesh.”

We were inside the crypt now, out of sight of the churchyard. “How long have you been living off the blood of innocent people?”

She reached for my arm, pulling me close so she could whisper into my ear. “You ask me to calculate in years? You would be better served by gallons. Time is only the mythology of those who have not lived long enough to see every structure collapse, every condition fold back on itself. The people demonize us, and then a century later, they pray to us.”

“Not in Gentry,” I said. “It doesn’t matter how much peace or prosperity you give them—they’ll never worship you. Not like they did in your old home.”

The Lady smiled, lips peeling back from her teeth. “Home? My home is wherever they know me. In Gentry, they make effigies to me, and you think it matters whether they burn them for spite or for love?”

“You’re saying that it doesn’t matter if they love you as long as they believe in you?”

The Lady nodded. “This is the natural order. Gods fall out of favor and become monsters. And sometimes they rise from the rank and file of the vanquished to become gods again.”

“What about you?” I said, watching her starved face. Her eyes were impossibly dark, like time stretching back forever, and it was deeper and more complete than any famine or plague or war. It went on so long that it seemed to see inside me. “What are you?”

She smiled, reaching up to touch my face. “I am terror.” Her hand was papery against my cheek, her skin getting thinner. “I draw strength from their fears and I feed on them.”

“I thought you fed on the blood from their offerings.”

She laughed, and it was a dry, moldy sound. “Darling, you are too delightful. I feed on the fact that they offer. I eat their devotion and their abasement. Now hold out your hand.”

I let her take my wrist. She cradled my hand in both of hers, turning it like she was feeling for a pulse. Then, without warning, she sank her teeth in.

Pain surged up my arm and I gasped but didn’t pull away. I took a shallow breath and then another. The force of her bite made huge white spots bloom in front of my eyes.

“I expected different,” she whispered, scraping my hand with her teeth. “Since the day I first drank the blood of my own, I’ve been dreaming of it. The desperation, the surrender. Like a man they called Caury.”

I nodded, trying to focus on breathing. My chest felt tight. “You killed him,” I whispered. “You used him for months, years, maybe, and then you killed him.”

“The town was failing, sweet. We are bound to the people of Gentry, bound to help them, even when they wouldn’t consider it a service. Even when the cost to them is great.”

“Help them.” My voice sounded hoarse. “Yeah, you help them all right. Help their kids into coffins. Help them cover their houses in amulets. You think you’re a god, but you’re just a monster.”

She shook her head. “You presume to name those who have no name. We are pandemonium and disaster. We are the dancing, gibbering horror of the world.” She ran her tongue along my palm and when she raised her head, she was smiling. There was blood all over her teeth. “Look at you. You’ve been shunned, made an outcast, and still, you cling to life, to your friends. You love and keep them, even though they hate you.” Her bite was hot. It burned all the way up my arm and my vision was blurring.

I breathed out, letting her drink, letting go of the guilt, the secrecy, the anxiety and the fear. With it came a flood of pictures and memories.

I thought of Tate, how my black eyes were okay with her. My strangeness was okay with her. And my friends were my friends, not by accident, but because they chose to be. They were all there, out in the graveyard—they’d helped me. Or tried to. My dad, trying so hard, so unbelievably hard, to always do the right thing.

And Emma. Emma laughing and smiling and crying, Emma twelve years old in her Easter dress with a flowery hat and fourteen, setting out tulips in the fall, asleep at her desk with her head on her arms, and helping me with homework, Emma with the hose, watering the vegetable garden. Emma, now, and for all my life.

I thought of her, and all of them, their faces and their voices, and all the ways I loved them and couldn’t seem to let them love me back. I could feel the Lady’s breath on the inside of my wrist, a hot, wet draft as she gnawed at me. The rhythm was slow and matched my heart. The pain in my hand was less electric now. It was fading, like the crypt was fading.

I reached out with my free hand, fumbling for something solid, finding her face and touching it. Her bones were sharp and wicked under her skin. The dark was pressing in. The Lady was strong and I was so tired.

“Do you know what I adore about people like you? Children might fear me, the town might demonize me, but at the core, their fear is uncomplicated. You have the complexity of hating what you are and where you come from. It’s wonderful.”

“Then take it,” I whispered against the floor. “Take it away.”

She let my wrist go, looming over me. She was pale and luminous in the dark, not a witch or a goddess, but something worse. Her skin was smooth now. Her hair was long and transparent like spiderwebs.

I rolled onto my back with my throbbing hand cradled against my chest.

Above me, the dark was alive with a riot of shapes, shadows and wings and nightmares. Something was swarming all around us, too much starved, timeless creature to live inside one body.

I closed my eyes, and her bite was painless now, pulling me straight down into the dark. I floated there, becoming not-myself. And still, I was the same person I’d always been. I was my earliest memories, cold and drifting, going farther from the pain, toward the pale moon, the rustle of leaves. The strange crib and the flapping curtains with their garden print. I was drifting farther and farther away, tumbling through dark, stale air, and then I landed.

I was slumped on a stone floor in an abandoned crypt, shivering in the dark while Gentry’s Dirt Witch crouched over me, gnawing on my hand.

I took a long, rasping breath and started to laugh.

The Lady raised her mouth from my hand. “What is so devilishly amusing that you mock me?”

I smiled in the dark, feeling dazed and a little euphoric. “Everything.”

She grabbed the front of my jacket and shook me. “Why are you laughing? What do you mean by laughing?”

But the question was so misguided, so pointless that I could only shake my head. I didn’t need a reason.

None of the things she’d taken were gone. They washed over me in breakers, happy and scared and curious and hopeful and alive. They rose up and filled my chest until I felt like I was too full of it to breathe, I was so grateful.

This was love. All my life, I’d been so convinced I was beyond it, outside it, but this was love—had been all along—and now I knew it.

Chapter Thirty The Truth

The floor was wet under my head, and that was fine. It was exceptional. We were in a crypt, in a church graveyard, and the fact that I belonged there meant that I could belong anywhere.

The Lady crouched over me, clawing at my jacket, breathing into my face. “What is distracting you from our work, Mr. Doyle?”

My throat was dry and it hurt to talk. “I’m all of it . . . my whole life. All of this is me.”

For a second, there was nothing but the sound of my blood as it spilled out of my hand, pattering on the stone.

“Then give me all of it.” Her voice was harsh. Her fingers sank into my skin, pressing into the soft place at the base of my throat. “I want the fear, the terror in your eyes when you realize, fully and truly, that you’re dying. I want your utter ruin, and I’ll keep digging until I get it.”

The paring knife was still in my pocket, wrapped in a dish towel. Her face was inches from mine, grinning down at me like a skull.

“I’m done with that,” I said. “Done being food, done feeding you. I don’t have anything you want.”

She stuck her finger in one of the raw wounds at the side of my neck and I breathed out in a long sigh but didn’t make a sound, even when she began to dig and tear at the burned place.

“Regret is one of the only true constants in life,” she whispered. “Do you regret your bravado yet?” She dug deeper, ripping at my skin. “I can go all the way down. I can peel you open until you’re fit to do nothing but scream.”

I fumbled for the paring knife, sliding it out of the towel. “No. Not for you.”

“You are so gloriously naive. How charming that you still think yourself to be strong.”

I wasn’t strong. I wasn’t trying to be heroic or prove that I was brave, but her voice was arrogant and empty and it didn’t scare me. The only thing that scared me now was how hard it was to focus, how numb my hands were. I tightened my grip on the knife, willing my fingers to work. Then, I yanked my hand out of my pocket and sank the blade in her shoulder up to the handle.

For a second, the Lady crouched over me, gaping like a fish. Then she flailed away, falling backward. She landed hard, splashing around in the stagnant water.

I let myself slump toward the open door and the fresh air.

The first thing I saw was the sky, wide and spinning. It was still overcast, but the clouds were breaking up, showing patchy scatterings of stars. And then Tate was there, holding on to me, kissing me, and then I was just lying on the muddy ground, kissing her back.

There was a dark smear on the sleeve of her coat where I’d reached for her.

I grabbed her shoulder with my good hand and tried to sit up. She caught me as I overbalanced. I was light-headed and shivering, missing half my blood, but I was still whole. I was shaking and she just kept holding on to me.

As we sat in the mud, arms around each other, the Morrigan came trotting over to the steps of the crypt, where the Lady lay on her back, staring up into the marbled sky.

The Morrigan looked curiously at the paring knife. Her expression was almost scientific. “You’ve been injured,” she said, bending down to examine the Lady’s shoulder. “Will you heal? Does it hurt?”

“Ugly,” the Lady whispered. “Monster and filth and traitor.”

“No,” said the Morrigan, stroking her forehead. “No, dearest, no. That’s you.”

All through the graveyard, the blue girls were whispering, giggling their weird, shrill giggles while the Lady coughed and squirmed, bleeding all over the stone.

The Morrigan knelt over her. She touched the handle of the paring knife, running her fingers over the place where it stuck out of the Lady’s shoulder. In her other hand, she held one of the Cutter’s broken claws. It smoked in her palm, giving off a rotten smell that made my stomach turn, but she didn’t seem to notice. “You’re terribly selfish, you know. I’ve loved you so long, and it was never dear or precious to you. I might as well have not loved you at all.”

The Lady lay at her feet, looking up with black, horrified eyes. Her lips were a cold, deathly blue. “How dare you speak to me like that, you foul little beast?” Her voice was ragged.

The Morrigan smiled, showing all her jagged teeth. “You’re nothing but an unsightly ghoul now, your man is gone, and I’ll speak to you however I like.”

“Insubordinate wretch—I should have you punished. I should have you whipped until you beg.”

The Morrigan shook her head. “But you won’t. There’s no one here to do it.”

She considered the claw in her hand. Then, with scary precision, she stuck it in the side of the Lady’s neck. The point punched through the skin and then went in easily, sinking up to the Morrigan’s fist. On the ground, the Lady clutched at her throat, shrieking up at the bare trees. The Morrigan straightened but left the claw where it was.

Around them, the pack of girls were creeping closer. The Lady’s attendants didn’t wait for the grinning crowd of maggots and teeth. They hurried out of the graveyard, away from where the Lady lay crumpled in the mud. Her cries were softer and more pitiful, and the Morrigan watched her with a strange expression, something close to satisfied. I wondered if this was what she’d been dreaming about, like the Lady dreamed of drinking blood.

But when she turned to face me, she didn’t meet my gaze.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking at something on the ground. “I’m not the monster, I’m the good one. I’m love, you know.” She was crying in little hitching sobs. “I’m the one who doesn’t hold grudges. I’m supposed to be gracious.”

She came shuffling over to where I sat, still shaking against Tate.

“Tell me you forgive me?”

Tate put her arms around me and I could feel her holding me up. I slumped sideways and rested my head against her shoulder. “For what?”

“For being so ugly and so wicked.”

“I forgive you,” I said, and the words felt pointless and unnecessary. Her teeth didn’t bother me much anymore and the only thing I had to forgive were the marks on Emma’s arms.

The little pink princess came skipping across the graveyard, flapping her star wand and leading Roswell by the hand.

The twins were right behind them. Drew was carrying Natalie, who slept with her head against his shoulder. The white dress was looking pretty dismal, fraying at the bottom and covered in mud. Her hair was snarled and stuck up in back like a fuzzy animal’s. Danny was carrying the revenant, who didn’t snuggle against his shoulder. It didn’t do anything.

“You’re losing blood,” the Morrigan said, examining my hand.

I looked down at myself. The front of my jacket was dark and it was all over everything.

The Morrigan trotted away and came back again with Janice, who took a bottle out of her coat and offered it to me. It was one of the ones from the pharmacy room, brown glass, sealed with wax. “You’ll need to drink this.”

She put the bottle to her mouth and bit the seal. Then she peeled away the wax and held it out. I drank it in gulps. It tasted hot, and I felt breathless and light-headed but better. I felt unbelievably tired.

Janice was already opening another jar, scooping out a lumpy paste and packing it into the cut on my hand. It burned for one excruciating second and then went numb.

I leaned harder against Tate, trying to stop my vision from blurring.

“What does this mean for Gentry?” I asked the Morrigan, glancing over at the Lady, who lay on the ground by the crypt.

The Morrigan sat down next to me. She cupped my hand in both of hers, then folded it closed.

“That the bad things will stop because I don’t steal children and I don’t burn churches.”

“What does that mean for the town, though? Will the town stop being so good?”

The Morrigan shrugged and stood up, looking off toward the trees. “Has it ever been good in your lifetime?”

I shook my head. “Not really. Not since before I was born.”

“Maybe it never was.”

I nodded and looked out at all the headstones in the unconsecrated corner, marking the graves of the replacements who hadn’t lasted and hadn’t been revived by the Morrigan.

“Goodbye,” she said.

When I didn’t say it back, she rested her hand on the top of my head. The weight was strange and gentle. “I love you,” she said. “And when I tell you goodbye, I don’t mean forever or for long. Just that I’m going home now, and so are you.”

She bent and picked up her doll, shaking some of the dirt off it and looking strangely adult. Then she crossed to the entrance to the crypt and stood over the Lady.

The fragile beauty was gone. Her face had turned a pale, chalky yellow and her veins showed black through her skin. Her eyes looked shocked and bloody.

“Ugly, sorry thing.” The Morrigan shook her head.

She waved for the dead girls and they came in a whispering pack, lifting the Lady’s body, dragging her away through the mud in the direction of Orchard and the slag heap.

It came to me in a weak, dreamy way that birds were singing somewhere. The light was changing, getting warmer. The sky was pale and the horizon was starting to glow red. It had been weeks since we’d seen a sunrise.

We didn’t talk, just wound our way back through the headstones toward the street. Roswell and Danny tried once or twice to bicker over little things, but nothing took. Natalie still slept against Drew’s shoulder.

I stumbled into Tate and was startled to find that she was real and solid. She put her arm around me. The pain in my hand was faint. The graveyard seemed almost transparent, like I was dreaming it and dreaming the six of us and the narrow, muddy path.

Chapter Thirty-One Daybreak

On Concord Street, the porch light was still on, glowing in the weak dawn light. We climbed the front steps in a little huddle, like we were reluctant to be too far away from each other.

I tried the knob, but it was locked, and I had to lean against the porch railing for a second to stop the world from spinning. Then I pushed myself away and rang the bell.

When Emma opened the door, she took one look at me and threw herself into my arms. I was bloody, covered in mud. It was all over everything, drying on my coat, streaking her face and hands, and she didn’t let go. She looked like she’d been crying for a year.

Inside, my dad was pacing the kitchen, raking his hands through his hair. My mom sat patiently at the table, clasping her hands on the tablecloth like she was waiting for him to stop.

When we gathered in the doorway, they both looked up. My dad’s expression was a mix of shock, confusion, and relief, mostly relief. My mom looked like she was about to pass out, and I was more aware than ever of how gory I was. Emma clutched my arm and beside me, Tate and the twins looked like something out of a war documentary. Roswell was the only one relatively unscathed. His expression was alert and quizzical, like he’d gotten there by accident.

My dad stood on the other side of the table, staring at me. At all of us. “Are you badly hurt? Do you need to go to the hospital?” His voice was husky and I smelled the sharp, rusty smell of anxiety.

I shook my head, leaning forward and bracing my good hand on the table. “Some of the blood’s not mine.”

He nodded and passed a hand over his eyes.

My mom was staring at Natalie, who was awake now, holding Drew around the neck and looking dazedly around the kitchen. My mom went to her, taking Natalie’s face in her hands, staring into her eyes.

Then she let Natalie go and turned to me. “You did this? You took her back?”

I didn’t answer. It hadn’t been me. Or at least, not by myself.

“You went down there just to bring her back?”

I nodded. The next question was going to be, Why did you do something so incredibly dangerous? or, What made an insane risk seem like a good idea? And I didn’t want to talk about that part. The reality of how indifferent I’d been to the world, how much I’d stopped caring in the weeks before meeting the Morrigan was just starting to sink in.

I opened my mouth to cut her off, but the truth must have been there on my face because she didn’t wait for an answer. She crossed the kitchen and hugged me, wrapping her arms around my neck. “You came back,” she whispered. “You could have disappeared forever, but you came back.”

It felt weird to be standing in the kitchen, hugging her. She wasn’t the kind of person who cried or hugged, but she didn’t let go.

“It was a brave thing,” she whispered, clutching the back of my jacket. “A very brave thing.”

If I was honest with myself, I hadn’t been particularly brave. I’d just done the dirty work and the desperate things and then closed my eyes and hoped for something to work out. That wasn’t being brave. But it was nice to know that she thought so.

I went up to the bathroom and washed off the worst of the dirt and the blood. There were still claw marks all over my neck and down one side of my face, but the gash in my hand was already closing, the edges drawn together by the power of Janice’s green paste. If it kept healing, it would be gone in another few hours.

In the mirror, my reflection looked white and exhausted, half dead, but my eyes were brown instead of black, and half dead was still more than barely alive.

Emma was waiting in the hall when I opened the door. Her shirt was streaked with dirt and the dark plummy smears of my blood. For a second, we just stood in the upstairs hallway, looking at each other. Her face was exhausted.

“What did she say to you?” she asked, draping my arm around her shoulders so that I was hugging her.

I pulled her against my chest and thought about what my mom had said, this thing that was so mysterious and so rare. “That she was glad I came back. She hadn’t thought I’d come back.”

“What she meant is that she loves you.”

“I know.”

Emma smiled. “I do too. But you knew that.”

That made me smile too and I squeezed her so hard she yelped. “Always, crazy. Always.”

Chapter Thirty-Two One of Us

Monday was as normal as it could be under the circumstances. Which is to say, pretty normal. The innate ability of Gentry was to let things go right back to the way they’d been.

In the cafeteria, people were more subdued than usual, and Alice had the same raw look that Tate had had the day of Natalie’s funeral. People didn’t avoid Alice the way they’d avoided Tate, but her usual circle of friends wasn’t so friendly. I got the feeling that it was mostly by choice. She and Stephanie clung to each other, like they could close the gap Jenna had left. Everyone else was outside it.

Jenna’s funeral had been on Saturday. I hadn’t gone, but for once, the idea didn’t make me feel lonely or outside of things. I would go to the cemetery some time and stand in the unconsecrated corner and look at her grave because she was someone I’d known. She was part of the town and so was I.

As I watched, Tate came shoving her way toward me through the lunch crowd. It was cold out but sunny, and the light from the windows played on her face. It lit up her hair in a way that no one else could see, but that didn’t matter because I could see it, and I liked it.

“What are you looking at?” Roswell said, turning to follow my gaze.

The lights were buzzing and the sound didn’t really bother me. It was just the sound of the school, the sound I heard when I was knocking around out in the world.

I smiled and could feel myself going red. “Tate.”

Roswell nodded, looking very serious. “Well, as far as forgiving you goes, saving her sister’s got to help, but you’ll probably have to spend some time together if you actually want to date her.”

When Tate reached us, I took hold of her hand and she let me, looking stern and ferocious, like she was trying not to smile.

After school, she walked me home. I’d never been very comfortable inviting people over, and it was kind of novel to ask her if she wanted to come in. She let me take her jacket, and then we started up the stairs to my room.

“Keep your door open,” said Emma, leaning out of the family room. She was giving Janice lessons in seed germination, which seemed a little misguided, considering that the House of Mayhem had no natural light.

I hadn’t heard anything from the Morrigan, but Janice had been over every day, just like always, and I was tempted to admit that maybe she and Emma truly were friends, no strings attached.

I raised my eyebrows at Emma. “Are you serious?”

She smiled. “No. But I’m channeling Dad, and if he finds out you took a girl upstairs unchaperoned, he’ll flip.”

Tate followed me up to my room. She looked around at the scattered homework assignments and the clothes. “You’re way messier than I thought you’d be.”

My bass was on the floor in its open case. I’d been playing all weekend, trying to capture the sound of my thoughts, the things I’d felt when I lay in the crypt, cold and dazed and smiling. Sometimes I even got close, but after my show with Rasputin, it seemed weird to play alone. I still liked the feeling of the strings under my fingers, the deep tones easing out of my headphones, but the bass was only one sound, and the stories would be better with a band.

I shrugged and went over to the bed. “There’s a whole array of skills I do not have, bedroom organization being one of them.”

“At least you’re not a time-waster,” Tate said, raising her eyebrows and folding her arms over her chest. “Straight for the bed. Is this your way of saying I owe you a make-out session?”

I shook my head, leaning across the bed and pushing the window up.

After a second, Tate followed me out onto the roof. “I would have anyway. But not because I owe you.”

We sat on the roof, looking out at the street, and I put my arm around her. “How is it, having Natalie back?”

Tate laughed, shaking her head. Then she stopped and took a deep breath. “It’s wonderful, and it’s scary. I never realized it, but I kind of got used to not having her. She changed, even in just a couple months.”

I nodded, reminded eerily of my mother and of all the ways that life underground could change someone.

“It’ll be okay,” I told Tate, not because I thought Natalie would ever go back to exactly the same person she’d been before, but because whatever happened now, at least she would be herself.

Tate leaned over and kissed me. “You did good,” she said. “I mean, I thought you were totally going to screw it up or else not even try.”

“Because I was such a dick about it?”

She sighed and rested her head on my shoulder. “I just figured you’d do whatever it took not to get involved. I mean, it’s what people do.”

“I did try not to get involved.”

“Maybe, but you came through in the end. When it counted.”

There was a whole sprawling world underneath us, filled with ugly, vicious, beautiful people. The line between the two places was thin, hardly a separation, and both ran on pain and blood and fear and death and joy and music.

But for now, the sunset was enough.

I reached for Tate, feeling for the warmth of her hand, and linked my fingers through hers. The only thing that mattered was the weight of her head on my shoulder.

Our lives were limitless and unknowable, not perfect, but ours. This was life in Gentry.

This is just what we do.