The Replacement

Chapter Nine All That Glitters

At Stephanie Beecham’s, the street was full of car doors slamming. The noise of voices was steady as people filed up to the house and around back. They were mostly in costumes, even though Halloween wasn’t until Tuesday.

The whole neighborhood was decorated for the season. There were paper skeletons in the windows and jack-o’lanterns on all the porches. The rain had settled down to a steady drizzle. In Stephanie’s front yard, someone had staked a burlap scarecrow of Gentry’s own monster of legend, the Dirt Witch. Its hair was made of wire and twine, and someone had drawn a snarling face on the burlap in marker. It loomed off to the side of the porch looking huge and sinister.

Roswell and I walked up the driveway without talking. He didn’t have a costume exactly, but he was wearing a pair of pointy plastic teeth that fitted over his real ones. He kept giving me strange sideways looks.

“What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You didn’t—ow!” He touched his lip and then his new plastic teeth. “You didn’t open the window. You know how long it’s been since you didn’t open the window in my car?”

And I realized that was true. I was fine, even after fifteen minutes in the car. “Is that a problem?”

“No. But it’s weird.”

I nodded and we stood at the top of the driveway, looking at each other. Behind us, someone was shouting the words to the school fight song, high and off-key.

We headed for the open side gate and started around to the back of the house.

The back door opened into a big, brightly lit kitchen, where too many things were shaped or painted like cows.

And there was Tate. Because she was everywhere, creeping in at the edges, getting all tangled up in my life, and she couldn’t leave it alone. She smiled when she saw me, but it was a fierce, triumphant smile, like she’d just beaten me at some kind of game.

She was leaning against the counter between Drew and Danny. She wasn’t wearing a costume either, but she had on this bizarre sort of headband. Two shining stars stuck up from it, swaying back and forth on long stalks. They were raining glitter everywhere.

I took a deep breath and tried to act normal, sliding past her on my way to the refrigerator. I got a can of Natty Light off the shelf on the door and retreated across the kitchen.

Danny was at the sink, knocking around with measuring spoons and bottles, doctoring up some kind of mixed drink. He had on a store-bought skeleton costume with a gray zip-front hoodie over it, like the title character in the movie Donnie Darko. Drew was dressed like Frank the Rabbit of the same film, but his mask was off and lying on the counter.

When he was done adding sloe gin and grenadine, Danny shoved the glass across the counter at Drew. “Try that and tell me what it needs.”

Drew took a sip, then coughed and set the glass down. “That’s awful.”

Danny scowled and tossed a dripping tablespoon at him. “You’re awful. I’m looking for constructive feedback, asshole. What does it need?”

Drew threw the tablespoon back. “It needs to be taken out and shot.”

“Make your own damn drink, Mr. Mixology.”

They punched each other in a friendly way, then Danny slipped the bunny mask over Drew’s head and they started for the living room. As they walked out, Drew reached over and yanked Danny’s hood down over his face.

Roswell had already made a timely exit—probably to see where Stephanie was. I was alone with Tate, not sure whether to start planning my escape because as unappealing as the idea of talking about her dead sister was, I was pretty sure she was just going to follow me, and it might be smarter to get the conversation over with while no one else was around.

I could see the shape of her, the curve of her body under the T-shirt. I knew I should stay back, but suddenly, all I wanted was to touch her. I crossed the kitchen and stood next to her so at least we wouldn’t be shouting our secrets at each other across a room. Her mouth was set in a hard, cynical smile, and nothing good could come of it. Her hair smelled like grapefruit and something light and fluttery that seemed out of place on her, but it was nice.

“What are you supposed to be?” I asked, reaching over to flick one of her antennae.

“Oh, I don’t know—I’m a robotic praying mantis. I’m a Martian. I’m aluminum foil. What are you supposed to be?”

I set down my beer and pressed my hands flat on the counter. I’m not me—I’m someone else.

I’m a normal, ordinary person, born to a normal, biological family, with brown eyes and fingernails that don’t turn blue just because the cafeteria ladies used steel trays for the french fries instead of aluminum.

But I didn’t say anything. Her eyes were hard and mysterious. She reached for Danny’s failed drink without looking away from my face.

I dropped my chin and watched the floor. “Stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

Like I’m stupid and pathetic and you hate me?

I shrugged. “I don’t know. Nothing.” I glanced up and gave her a helpless look. “Just, what are you even doing here?”

There was a fast, pop-y track playing on the stereo—you know the one—how everything will be all right and you just have to be yourself and try your hardest and it’ll work out and all that other bullshit. In the next room, girls were dancing together, singing along.

“The amazing thing about this song,” Tate said, in a voice that sounded aggressively cheerful, like she wasn’t changing the subject completely. “The amazing thing about this song is that it contains absolutely no irony.”

Her gaze was direct, full of a sadness so raw and crystallized that I could see the shape of it. It ringed her pupils in rusty starbursts, but she was grinning—this terrible, ferocious grin. It made her look like she wanted to tear someone’s throat out.

I leaned against the counter, trying to think of something to say that would end the discussion and not drag it out. I needed something definitive that would take care of the problem once and for all. She just finished Danny’s drink in one long swallow, grinning up at me.

I couldn’t work out what she actually wanted. Her sister was dead. Whether being dead happened in a pretty box on Welsh Street or someplace else, it didn’t make a difference. Dead was irreversible. It was permanent. You couldn’t do anything about it, and still, Tate seemed determined to take it back, like with the right answer, she could fix everything.

Her eyes were hard, and glitter showered from her headband, dusting the shoulders of her jacket. “Do you believe in fairy tales?”

“No.”

“Not even the nice, grown-up kind where you follow all the rules and you work really hard and get a good job and a family and everything is happily ever after?”

I snorted and shook my head.

“Good. Then you should be just as righteously pissed as I am that everyone around here loves a nice game of Let’s Play Pretend.”

“Look, you’re taking this way out of context. I’m sorry about your sister, I really am. It’s awful. But for the love of God, this is not exactly my problem.”

Her smile looked frozen on suddenly, and she opened her eyes wide. Her voice was high and mocking and mean. “Oh, let’s play pretend, Mackie! Let’s play the part where you grow a pair and face basic facts and stop acting like everything is sunshine and unicorns! Let’s play that you start treating the girl like she has half a brain and tell her all about how sometimes, nasty little monsters show up in the bed where her sister used to sleep. Why don’t you tell her about that?”

My cheeks got hot, like I’d just been slapped in the face. “Why?” I said, and the question sounded very loud, coming out in a harsh bark. I brought my voice down to a whisper. “Why should I? What’s in it for me?”

She looked up at me and shook her head, making silver sparkles dance all around her. “You really think that everyone is stupid, don’t you?”

For a second I stopped breathing. Then I leaned close and made my voice as hard and as mean as possible. “So, now I’m supposed to be some kind of expert on why your family’s all tragic? What did I ever do to make you think that any of this is my responsibility?”

Tate’s laugh was short and scornful. “Believe me, if I’d had a choice, I would have picked someone with a little more backbone. You’re kind of all I’ve got.”

I threw the beer in the sink, where it foamed up in a white froth, and pushed myself away from the counter. Away from the kitchen and Tate’s hard, merciless grin.

For the first time since Drew and Danny’s art project, I thought about my locker and for a second, I got the idea that maybe Tate was the one who’d scratched Freak on the door. The idea died a quick death, though. The graffiti had happened the day of the funeral, which pretty much ruled her out, for the simple reason that I hadn’t pissed her off yet.

In the living room, the sound system was louder, the crowd thicker. I made my way between superheroes and slutty witches, trying to find a place I could escape to.

“Mackie!” Alice was sitting on the sofa, smiling, waving at me. “Mackie, come over here.” Everything about her was so effortless, a glossy island, normal, relieving. Just what I needed.

When I sat down next to her, she moved closer, so that her leg pressed against mine. She smelled like tequila and some kind of powdery perfume that made my eyes water.

She was dressed like a cat, which I thought was a very obvious costume. It was easier to think of her in a cotton tennis uniform, far away and spotless. But there was no avoiding the clip-on ears and the waxy black whiskers drawn on her cheeks. Every third girl was a cat.

“Hey,” she said leaning closer. Her hair had come loose from one of the clips and it skimmed my arm in tangled waves. “We should go somewhere quiet.”

Her lips were slick and shiny looking. In her mouth, the barbell still hummed at me—a mean, wicked little song. I wondered if the Most Beneficial Hawthorn was strong enough to protect me from the steel. Whether I even really wanted what I thought I wanted. I wanted to kiss her and not in the pure, longing way you want to kiss someone. I wanted it the way you sometimes want to jump into very cold water, even though you know it won’t feel good. I wanted to go numb. To see what it felt like to be someone else.

She moved so that her chest was against my shoulder. “Do you want to go sit somewhere?”

“We are sitting.” My hands were sweating.

She gave me an annoyed look and tipped her head to one side. “I bet there’s someplace more private, though—upstairs? Bedrooms or something.”

I didn’t know how to answer. Yes and yes and no and yes.

I glanced in the direction of the stairs and then I almost stopped breathing.

Two girls were standing halfway up the stairs, leaning their elbows on the banister and whispering to each other.

One was pretty, wearing a huge, puffy dress, complete with a crown and a silver star wand. She looked soft and pinkish, the kind of girl who gets kissed awake at the end of a fairy tale, but she was short. Really short. Standing next to me, she wouldn’t have come up to my elbow. Also, she had the biggest ears I’d ever seen on a real person.

She was standing up on the baseboard with her feet struck through the slats, holding on to the banister. She was talking up at the other girl, who wasn’t small or pink or cute.

The second girl’s face was shiny, like skin after a bad burn. There was a jagged ring around her neck. No blood, just torn flesh and raw edges. Her grin was lunatic, almost as wide as the gash.

She was looking out over the crowded room, and when she smiled, she was smiling at me.

I turned to Alice. “We should go outside.”

She shook her head. “It’s cold out.”

Across the room, the girl stepped away from the banister and started down the stairs. Even from the couch, I smelled the low stink of something dead. It wasn’t a costume.

I grabbed Alice harder than I meant to, yanking her up off the couch. “Let’s just go outside, okay? Let’s go for a walk.”

Out in the backyard, people were standing around in little clusters on the covered patio, laughing and smoking, drinking beer out of plastic cups. I tried to breathe slower, but my heart was beating hard and fast in my throat.

Next to me, Alice was wrestling with the cat costume. “God, this tail is so obnoxious.”

It was, but not in the way she meant. Suddenly, she was right in front of me, pushing herself up on her toes.

In her mouth, the barbell twanged at me. Her hand on my arm was warm. Her lips were less than three inches away. I swallowed and tried to figure out why this wasn’t the best moment of my whole life.

“What’s wrong?” she said, breathing out another gust of tequila and stainless steel. She put a hand on her hip. “Look, are you gay or something?”

I stared at her. She was beautiful in the porch light and very far away. I shook my head.

“What’s wrong with you, then? Seriously.”

But she’d never really looked at me. She’d never seen me. Here she was, making up some complicated story, when Tate was right—the answer had always been dangerously obvious to anyone who felt like looking.

Tate, her face inches from mine as she stared up me, telling me that thing in the box wasn’t her sister, that something else had died in her sister’s bed and all she wanted was for someone to listen when she talked.

Alice leaned closer. “Are you even listening to me?”

But I wasn’t. I was standing under a rain-soaked tree with a girl whose sister was one more casualty of our shitty little town and who had the good sense to be angry about that instead of heartbroken. It was the only thing I could think of and Alice was so far away.

The screen door slammed behind us and I turned, bracing myself for the two strange girls, but it was Tate. She’d come out onto the back steps and was looking down at us with her elbows propped on the handrail, silver-glitter stars swaying back and forth.

The light from the kitchen was shining behind her. It lit her hair around the edges, giving her a halo, like a neon supernatural being wearing deely boppers. I couldn’t see her face, but her silhouette was going back and forth between us. Me. Alice. Me. Alice.

I stood in the yard and looked up, like she was a girl on a balcony. She stepped out from in front of the light and I could finally see her face. I don’t know what I’d been expecting. Something remarkable, I guess. She looked like she always did. Completely unimpressed.

“Roswell’s looking for you.” Her mouth was thin and she was staring me right in the face.

I found him in the living room with a bunch of the student-council girls. He grinned and waved me over, then lunged to tickle Stephanie, making her laugh every time he pretended to chew on her with his fangs.

I squeezed in next to Jenna Porter, who was looking bored and a little drunk. She was dressed in a toga, with leaves in her hair, but she was wearing her normal shoes. They were bright red, with little flowers die-cut on the toes, and didn’t match her costume.

“Hey,” I said.

She nodded and gave me a smile. Over by the coat closet, the two strange girls stood whispering behind their hands. I pretended not to see, but Jenna glanced at them, shaking her head.

“I can’t wait to get out of here,” she mumbled, touching the little steel cross around her neck. “As soon as we graduate, I’m moving to New York.”

“What’s in New York?” I said, raising my eyebrows. My voice sounded easy, but the staring girls were making it hard to act normal. Suddenly, the last thing I was in the mood for was making conversation.

Jenna shrugged. “Chicago, then. Or Boston or L.A. or wherever.” Her eyes slid out of focus, and she smiled without looking like she meant it. “Screw it—I’ll go to Newark or Detroit if it means getting out of this godforsaken place.”

She didn’t have to say what she was really thinking—if it means getting away from these people.

I opened my mouth, trying to think of something generic and reassuring. Then I smelled rotting meat.

The girl with the torn throat had started toward me. She was pushing her way through the crowd with the little pink one scrambling after her, and my pulse was wildly out of control.

Jenna made a whining noise, somewhere between disgusted and scared. “That’s the nastiest costume I’ve ever seen. Seriously. What are you supposed to be?”

The rotting girl didn’t answer. She just turned on Jenna with her crazed smile, and Jenna backed away, looking glad to be going. I was on my own, with a girl who looked like she’d climbed out of a grave.

“Are you avoiding us?” she said, coming in close. Her breath smelled cold and stale. “I’d have thought the hawthorn was good for a chat, anyway.”

“Go away,” I said in a whisper, looking past her, trying not to watch the way her neck gaped and squelched when she talked.

She smiled wider. Her teeth were sharp and yellow. “What’s wrong? Are you worried we’ll attract attention? Expose your little secret? This is our season, dear—the time when even the worst of us can go out on the town and look just like everyone else.”

“Did you see the Orionid shower last night?” the little pink one asked, peering out at me from behind the other girl. “The Orionids are falling all the time now—astral bodies separating from the parent body. They originate from Halley’s comet. Did you see them?”

I shook my head. Her cheeks were very pink.

“They won’t peak until Monday. You have plenty of time.”

The other girl turned on her. “Shut up, you ninny. No one cares about stars.”

“He does,” said the little pink one. “I saw him gazing in the kitchen. He was positively coveting them.” She waved her toy wand at the other girl and tried to pat my arm. “It’s quite all right, you know. Not everyone is as unmoved by beauty as she is.”

I stared straight ahead, tasting rancid meat every time I breathed. “Look, what do you guys want?”

The other girl smiled wider. “You, of course. We’ve been hunting for you.”

“Yes,” said the little pink one, smiling so that her eyes squinted into crescents. “We’re hunting.” Then she tipped her head back and laughed like that was the funniest thing she’d ever heard.

The other girl leaned close, staring into my face with milky eyes. “Your foster sister accepted our services and now she owes us a favor. Come to the slag heap and be quick about it. If you don’t, we’ll find Emma and take the price out of her skin.”

“Oh, don’t be hateful,” the pink one said, swatting the other girl with her wand. She turned to me. “Malcolm, please, if you’re amiable and cooperative, everything is going to be fine.”

Then they were gone and I was standing in Stephanie Beecham’s very floral living room, with a taste in my mouth that reminded me of roadkill. She had called me Malcolm.

Drew was next to me suddenly, smelling stoned and a little like papier-mâché. “Jesus,” he said, taking off his rabbit mask. “What was that all about?”

I turned to face him. “What was what about?”

“Those girls just now.” His expression seemed to narrow. “It looked like a pretty intense conversation is all.”

I shrugged and looked down. “I never met them before.” Which, as we both knew, was not an answer to anything, no matter how factual the statement sounded.

He raised his eyebrows in a suggestive way. “Just as long as you weren’t planning on hooking up with one of them. The tall one was ass ugly.”

“That’s not really a danger,” I said, and reached for Roswell’s arm. “Hey, you ready to get out of here?”

He didn’t act surprised—he never did—just pinched Stephanie’s cheek and started for the door.

In the car, we sat looking ahead, not talking. My heart was skipping beats all over the place.

Roswell turned the key in the ignition. “So, are you up for going over to Mason’s for a little?”

“Nah—” My voice sounded weird even to me and I started over. “I should get home. Stuff to do . . .”

Roswell nodded and put the car in gear. His profile was serious and younger looking than normal.

I didn’t say anything else because I couldn’t think of anything to say. There were too many things in my head. I told myself that Emma was at home, working on a botany project, maybe, or curled up with a book, already in bed. That she was safe. She had to be because I couldn’t stand to consider the possibility that she wasn’t.

Come to the slag heap, like some kind of invitation. But the slag heap was just a crumbling pile of rubble. It was weedy and abandoned, nothing to find if I went there.

Except if the girls were as unnatural as they seemed, there would have to be a secret that went along with it. There would be a way in because sometimes at night, the dead rose and walked around deserted streets. If you listened to the rumors and the dark murmurs of bedtime stories, something lived under the quicklime and the shale. I was no expert, but the girl at the party had been dead. The smell coming off her was the rank, clotted smell of decay, and nothing could live with its veins and arteries cut open. Her smile had been horrific, and I had a sneaking fear that she was just the beginning of what I’d find if I went there.

But only one thing really mattered as I stared out the passenger window on the drive home. Emma. She’d been trying to help—and the little bottle of hawthorn water had helped—but what was the payback, the price? When I thought about it that way, though, the answer didn’t matter. I couldn’t let anything happen to her. So I knew what I had to do.

Chapter Ten Monsters

The neighborhood was quiet. No creatures, no dead things, nothing creeping in the shadows.

I walked along Concord to Orchard Circle, past the dead end and down the slope to the bridge.

It was lonesome walking so late at night and more lonesome navigating the deep ravine between my neighborhood and the center of town, not knowing what I was walking into. As I started down, I could smell a wet, mushy odor like garden compost and rot.

The guitarist from Rasputin Sings the Blues was standing on the footbridge, his silhouette barely visible in the dark and made unnaturally tall by his top hat. He was smoking a cigarette, and when he looked up, the cherry glowed a bright, violent red.

I stepped out onto the bridge. “Are you waiting for me?”

He nodded and waved toward the other end of the bridge. “Let’s go for a walk.”

My skin was prickling all over. “Who are you—what’s your name?”

“Call me Luther, if you like.”

“And if I don’t like?”

“Then call me something else.” After a fairly mysterious pause, he pointed to the other side of the ravine again, then jerked his head down at the slag heap.

“Where are we going?”

“Into the pit, of course.”

The sound of his voice made shudders creep down my neck. A person would have to be crazy to go down into a lair of dead things. A person would have to out of his mind. I knew that I should just tell him no deal, just walk away.

It was no good, though. There were all kinds of arguments for turning around, climbing the path, walking straight back home and locking the door. But when it came to Emma, my loyalty had never been in question. I would do pretty much anything.

I followed Luther across the bridge and along a tangled path that ran down to the bottom of the ravine, where the slag heap sat lumpy and black. As we moved deeper into the shadow of the ravine, it seemed to rise up, huge against the sky.

Luther smiled and touched the brim of his hat. “Home, sweet home.”

“So, you live in the slag heap?”

He twitched his shoulders, almost a shrug. “Well, to be more accurate, underneath.”

Then he reached inside his coat and brought out a knife. The blade was long and yellow, made of ivory or bone. I stepped back.

He laughed. “Don’t be a fool. I’m not going to cut you.”

Then he jammed the knife into the base of the hill, all the way to the handle.

When the blade sank into the slag, nothing happened for a second. Then a sheet of gravel slid away, exposing a narrow door.

He pocketed the knife and pushed the door open, waving me through. The entryway was dark and smelled like mildew. The opening was low and the air was wet and cold, but when he ushered me in, I didn’t hesitate. I stepped inside and Luther followed me into a low tunnel. When I looked back, all I could see was the faded black of his coat as he guided me down.

We moved slowly, and I kept one hand on the wall. It was rough, crusted with loose debris, but the tunnel didn’t seem to be in danger of collapsing. The floor sloped steadily downward as we went and I was increasingly aware that we were deep underground. Deeper than cellars and basements and the water mains that ran in a complex network under the streets. The weight of earth above us was almost suffocating, but something about it was comforting, too. I felt surrounded, like I was being held in place.

As we kept going, the tunnel widened, and the air got wetter and colder. A long way down, there was light.

When we reached the end of the tunnel, Luther stopped, straightening his collar, adjusting his lapels. The light came from the narrow crack between a pair of heavy double doors. He caught hold of twin handles and dragged the doors open.

Then he swept off his hat and bowed low. “Welcome to the House of Mayhem.”

I was standing in a kind of lobby, with a stone floor and a high ceiling. Torches burned in rows along the wall and the smoke had a black, oily smell like kerosene. The handles were mismatched, made from dead branches and baseball bats and one that looked like the handle of a garden shovel or an ax. The walls were lined with other doorways, lower and narrower than the one we’d just come through. On opposite sides of the room were two massive fireplaces, but neither of them was lit.

A group of girls stood around one of the fireplaces, watching us. All of them had on long, grimy dresses and stiff vests that laced up the back. The smell coming off them was worse than the girl at the party. It made me think of a morgue.

At the far end of the lobby, there was a big wooden desk. It was the kind that a librarian or a receptionist might sit behind, but no one was in the chair.

When Luther put his hand between my shoulders, the weight and suddenness of it made me jump.

“Come now,” he said softly. “No need for alarm. She just wants an audience with you.”

He pushed me closer and we leaned over the desk to look behind it.

A little girl was crouched on the floor. She had on a white party dress that looked like it was made of old surgical gauze and also like it might have been on fire at some point. She was sitting with her legs pulled up, drawing on the stone with a burned stick. All the pictures looked like eyes and giant mouths full of teeth.

Luther leaned against the desk and pressed a little brass bell. “Here’s your boy.”

The girl turned and looked up at me. When she smiled, I stepped back from the desk. Her face was young and kind of shy, but her mouth was crowded with small, jagged teeth. Not a nice, respectable thirty-two, but closer to fifty or sixty.

“Oh dear,” she said, putting down her stick and reaching out a dirty hand. “I ought to have been more cautious.” Her voice was soft, and her train wreck of a mouth made her lisp. “You think I’m ugly.”

The truth was, yes. She did look ugly, maybe even horrifying, but her eyes were wide. She was going to be terrifying if she grew any bigger, but for now, she was cute the way even a turkey or a possum can be cute when it’s a baby.

She patted the heavy, high-backed chair beside her. “Here, sit and talk with me. Tell me about yourself.”

I didn’t sit down right away. It was hard to know what to think of her. She was different from Luther and different from the girls at Stephanie’s party. Her jagged teeth and her tiny size made her seem more implausible, more impossible than all the rest of them.

When I took a seat on the edge of the chair, she went back to drawing on the floor.

“I’ve been curious about you,” she said, scraping a new charcoal mouth with her stick. “We were so pleased that you survived childhood. Castoffs generally don’t.”

I nodded, staring down at the top of her head. “Who are you?”

She stood up and moved closer, staring into my face. Her eyes were dull black, like the feathers on a dead bird. “I’m the Morrigan.”

The word sounded strange, like something in another language.

“I’m so pleased that you could find it in your heart to visit us,” she whispered, reaching to touch my chin. “It’s wonderful that you need us because we need you, you see, and business arrangements are so much more satisfying if they’re reciprocal.”

“What do you mean ‘need you’? I don’t need anything.”

“Oh, darling,” she said, smiling and reaching for my hand. “Don’t be silly. Of course you need us. You’re becoming so frail, and it’s only going to get worse. This really is the best solution for all of us. You’ll help me, and in return, I’ll make sure you’re supplied with all the remedies and analeptics you need and you won’t have to live out the rest of your days in slow agony.”

I watched her, trying to see the reason behind why I was even here. “What do you want?” I said, sounding more nervous than I would have liked.

“Don’t look so alarmed. I won’t ask you to do anything you don’t already desire in your heart.” She turned away and knelt on the floor again, picking at her hair. “While music is hardly the most powerful kind of worship, it’s fine and adequate. We’re always looking to bring new blood to our stage.”

“What does that have to do with me, though? I’m just . . . no one.”

“You have a good face,” she said, crossing her legs and fidgeting with her dress. “An undamaged body. Your wholeness makes you immeasurably useful to me. If it’s agreeable, I’ll send you out onstage with the rest of my musical beauties to stand in front of the town and receive their admiration.” Each time she pulled out a clump of hair, she set it carefully off to the side of her drawings, like she was starting a collection.

“Rasputin, you mean? When?”

“Tomorrow, at that estimable venue, the Starlight.”

“But I just saw them. They played last night.”

“We’re in a bad time,” she said. “Don’t tell me you haven’t seen the signs.”

I thought of the rusting grates and brackets at the Starlight and nodded.

“The town is drawing away from us. The rains dishearten them, and their attentions are half felt at best. We need all the adulation we can get. If the season is bad enough, I’ll send them up every night until the worst days have passed.”

“What do you want me to do, though?”

The Morrigan smiled. “Now we come to it. Your sister has been a busy girl, as I’m sure you know. She appealed to us on your behalf, asking for medicines and cures, which we were only too happy to provide. It’s easy enough to mix the medicines you need. All we ask is that you help us in our endeavor for applause.”

I didn’t ask what the point of applause was or how she even knew that I could play. Instead, what came out of my mouth was dazed and stupid sounding. “Why is it important to make them happy?”

The Morrigan ripped out another clump of hair. “They’re better at loving us when they’re happy.”

I was beginning to get the feeling we were just going around in circles. “What does it mean, love us? How can they love you? They don’t even believe you exist.”

“They have to love because otherwise, they fear and they hate, and we’ll all spiral down in one long decline. They’ll hunt us—they’ve done it before. If we don’t keep the peace, they kill us.”

I knew that was the truth. All my daily concerns and everything that defined my life—it all came back to what had been done to Kellan Caury.

The Morrigan scowled and it made her look terrifying. “They can be very dangerous if they take it into their heads, so it’s imperative that they remain placated. Their admiration sustains us, and our music makes them smile, even if they don’t realize it’s us they’re smiling at.”

“You live off groupies?”

She shrugged and drew a large, lumpy animal on the floor. “Off their attentions and their little favors.” She added a pair of eyes, drew two slashes for pupils. “It’s not the only form of tribute, but it’s a good one.”

“If it’s not the only form, what else is there?”

“I have a sister who believes something else.” She said it lightly, but she was looking away and her voice sounded thin and high pitched. “She’s a right vicious cow, though.”

“That’s not a very nice thing to say about your sister.”

“Well, it’s not a nice thing, snatching away children. It makes the town uneasy.” She dropped the stick and crawled over to the corner of the desk, peering around it at the main doors. “And it means giving up our own precious babes to replace theirs.”

The two girls from Stephanie’s party had come in from the long tunnel that led up to the slag heap. The one with the torn throat leaned in the doorway, while the little pink princess skipped around her, waving the star wand.

The Morrigan stood up and pointed to the rotting one. “The family knew her for what she was. They took her out into the hollow by Heath Road one night and cut her throat with a sickle.”

I tried to breathe, but for a second, my lungs wouldn’t cooperate. The girl was horrific, but the story was worse.

The Morrigan only nodded and patted my hand. “Terrible, isn’t it? She was very young. Only a baby, really.”

The girl stood by the double doors, tall and ragged. She was running her fingers over her torn throat, playing with the edges of the gash. When she caught me looking, she smiled.

I glanced away and turned back to the Morrigan. “How could she have died when she was a baby, though? I mean, she’s not little anymore—she grew up.”

The Morrigan nodded. “And why shouldn’t she?”

“Because when people are dead, they don’t do that—they don’t get older.”

She waved me off, shaking her head. “That’s ridiculous. How on earth could I keep a proper house if I had to spend all my time looking after infants who never learned to look after themselves?” The Morrigan smiled, sounding pleased with herself. “The dead mind me. It’s not a hard trick to make them live again if you have the right tokens and charms and the right names to call them by.”

“I don’t know, but I think most people would say that’s a pretty hard trick to pull off.”

She looked up at me, shaking her head seriously. “Mostly, people just don’t want to.”

“People like your sister?”

She grabbed the stick and slammed it down on the floor. “My sister lives on blood and sacrifice. She cares nothing for what’s already dead. But then, she has the distinct advantage of being born heartless.”

“It’s heartless to think dead things should stay dead?”

“No,” said the Morrigan. “It’s heartless to use children so callously, to toss them away simply because she’d rather have something else. But look at me, I’m going on. You’ve come for the hawthorn analeptic, and I intend to give it.”

When she came around the front of the desk and reached for my hand, I followed her.

She led me out through a narrow door and down a short flight of stone steps. The air smelled damp and mineralized, but it was nice and I wanted to keep breathing it. I followed her through doorways and tunnels, amazed by how far the House of Mayhem seemed to sprawl.

We turned down a wide hallway and into a huge room, far bigger than the lobby. The floor of it was covered in patches of standing water, so much in places that there was no way to avoid it.

The Morrigan splashed happily, jumping into the smallest puddles and kicking at the surface so that water sprayed up around her. I followed more carefully, walking around it where I could.

“Mind the pools,” she said, pulling me back from the edge of a wide puddle. “Some of them go quite deep and I would have to call Luther to fish you out.”

I looked closer at the puddle I’d almost stepped in. The edges were steep, cut straight down into the stone, and the puddle was so deep that I couldn’t see the bottom.

At the end of the room, we skirted around a pool that was even bigger than the others. A woman lay on her back, floating in the water. Her arms were crossed over her chest and buckled to her sides with canvas straps, but she drifted on the surface without going under. Her dress was stuck to her legs, sinking down so the hem of it disappeared into the murky water. Her eyes were open, staring blankly at the ceiling, and her hair fanned out around her head, tangled with leaves and twigs. There were deep scars running down her cheeks, crisscrossing and overlapping, like someone had carved a grid into her face.

The Morrigan barely glanced at her, but I stopped and leaned down to get a better look. “Is she dead too?”

The Morrigan scampered back and came up next to me. “Her? Oh, not remotely.”

“What happened to her, then?”

The Morrigan took a deep breath, like she was trying to find the best way to explain something, and said carefully, “Some can go out and some can’t, and some can only go out on nights when strangeness passes for merriment, and some used to go out but due to misfortune or accident cannot go out anymore.” She slipped her arm through mine and whispered, “My sister’s man did that to her—the Cutter. He laid iron rods against her face because it amused him, and now we have to fasten her arms down to keep her from clawing off her own skin.”

In the pool at my feet, the woman opened her mouth but didn’t make any noise. Her lips were a chilly blue and she stared up at me with wide, anguished eyes until I had to look away.

I turned to the Morrigan. “Why, though? What good does it do to hurt someone like that?”

“Not good. It’s never a matter of good. But my sister does love to punish the innocent for our trespasses. She was displeased with me, so she took it out on someone else.” The Morrigan fumbled for my hand. Hers was tiny and hot. “It wasn’t my intention to make you sad. Here, don’t let’s dwell on misfortune. Come along and we’ll fetch you something nice to take away with you.”

When I looked over my shoulder, the woman was still floating, staring at the ceiling as the water slopped gently against her tattered cheeks.

The Morrigan glanced up at me. “It’s not always so bad as that,” she said. “My sister is only unduly cruel to those who cross her. She makes sure we know where we stand and who we answer to, but if you keep out of her way, there’s nothing to fear.”

We left through a door at the far end and went down another flight of steps to a little room off the end of a hall.

I stood in the doorway, staring into a room full of glass cabinets. A marble counter ran the length of the wall, with shelves and cupboards above it. The counter was covered with pipes and test tubes and glass containers in all different sizes.

Emma’s friend Janice was sitting on a little hassock at the counter, picking through a heap of twigs and roots and leaves. I almost didn’t recognize her. Instead of the wild tangle of curls, her hair had been scraped back hard from her face and twisted into a knot on top of her head, like Emma usually did before she went to bed. It made Emma look touchable and soft, but on Janice the effect was the opposite. It left her face completely unobscured, showing high, sharp cheekbones and a delicate jaw.

She was startlingly beautiful, but in a way that could never function in the world. The kind of thing so eerie that people can’t even deal with it, and so they have to destroy it.

She had one leg stuck out behind her at an awkward angle, trailing her bare foot in the flooded place where water bubbled up from the stone.

“Hello, ugly boy who isn’t ugly,” she said without looking up. “Are you here for more of my restoratives and my analeptics?”

The Morrigan went skipping across to her through the puddles and hugged her around the neck. “He would like another dram of the hawthorn, please. Just a taste, to start with. If he does us proud tomorrow, we’ll see about giving him a more practical amount.”

Janice got up and went over to the row of cupboards. She was wearing a sort of romper suit. It buttoned down the front, with lace around the neck and armholes, and looked like it might be some kind of old-fashioned underwear. She opened a glass-fronted cabinet and started sorting through bottles.

When she found one she wanted, she took it back to the counter. With great concentration, she licked a paper label, running it carefully along her tongue, and pasted it to the bottle. Taking a pen from the knot on top of her head, she marked the label with what looked like a big floppy 3. Then she turned and looked up at me.

“A dram,” she said, setting the bottle in my hand. “It isn’t much, but it should be enough to hold you until you’ve earned your keep.”

Behind her, the Morrigan was creeping toward the worktable, reaching for the pile of plant cuttings.

Janice spun around on her hassock and slapped the back of the Morrigan’s hand. “Naughty!”

The Morrigan skipped back, looking guilty and sorry. Janice sorted through the leaves and stems until she found a small yellow flower and tucked it behind the Morrigan’s ear.

The Morrigan ran her fingers over the flower, smiling and ducking her head. “She’s very kind, our Janice. Isn’t she kind?”

I held up the little bottle. “Is this why the dead girls and the people in the band seem okay?”

The Morrigan shook her head. She rolled her head so the side of her face was pressed against my arm. Her cheek was hot. “You are an entirely different class of people. Everyone has their own manner of survival. The blue girls are quite sturdy, only susceptible to true destruction by dismemberment and by fire. My players only need adulation if they’re to thrive, and my lady-sister lives off the blood sacrifice of unfortunate creatures like Malcolm Doyle.”

I stared down at her. “Me, you mean?”

She shook her head. “Oh, no, Malcolm Doyle was a little boy who was taken from his bed in order to feed the ravenous appetites of my sister. You are someone else.”

It was the truth, but it still felt strange to hear someone say it. I am not Malcolm Doyle. I’m someone else. “So, they hurt him.”

“She tore out his throat,” the Morrigan said. “It was very quick. I suppose it may even have been painless, but I can’t be sure. Yes,” she said after a minute, winding a handful of hair around her wrist and then unwinding it again. “On second thought, I do imagine that it hurt.”

“So, when you talk about feeding on the town, you mean murder.”

“Oh, no, no. Not murder—sacrifice. And the cost is small. It hardly even qualifies as hardship, as it only comes in sevens, and the town grows strong on it for another handful of years, and when the town is well, so are we.”

I remembered how bad I’d felt at the blood drive just smelling the iron. “Do you drink it?”

The Morrigan shook her head. “The Lady’s methods are her own business and has barely anything to do with the House of Mayhem. Our job is only to stand in the churchyard and bear witness.”

“What are you talking about? You can’t go in the churchyard.”

“Don’t be dense. It has a plot saved just for us—you know, for the heretical and the unclean.”

“For suicides and stillbirths and murderers, though. Not for people like you.”

The Morrigan smiled up at me and squeezed my hand. “That ground is for us. Each seven years, we go down to the unholy ground and bear witness to the bloodletting.”

I stared at her. “But that means it doesn’t even get used if they’re just pouring it out.”

“Intention is one of the most powerful forces there is. What you mean when you do a thing will always determine the outcome. The law creates the world.”

“But you can’t pour blood on the ground and have it make you strong because you think it should. The world is just . . . the world.”

The Morrigan shook her head, smiling. “All great acts are ruled by intention. What you mean is what you get. In the House of Mayhem, we get what we need when they love us. That’s why we need lovely creatures like you—there’s a great deal of power in beauty, you know.”

I thought about Alice, how she existed at the top of the social ladder for no reason except that the perfect symmetry of her face made people want to do whatever she said.

The Morrigan was hugging herself, rocking back and forth. She leaned against me suddenly, resting her cheek on my arm. “We love the town as best we can, and they love us back, although they don’t always know they’re doing it. But it isn’t enough for my sister. She needs sacrifice.”

She played with the flower behind her ear and said in a low, singsong voice, “She takes their pretty babies, and in exchange, she leaves them our own diseased flesh. Those are the ones who die, of course—almost always. It’s nearly impossible to live outside the hill. So you see, we sacrifice our own too. But it’s a small cost to give up the sick ones, the ones who are only going to die anyway. Except . . .”

“Except what?”

Her hand was small and hot when she reached for mine. She turned and smiled up at me, showing her jagged teeth. “Except you didn’t. Isn’t that the most wonderful thing?”

I didn’t answer. I was too far into my own unsettling memory, thinking about the dark, flapping shadow and the screen. What it meant to be left somewhere and never found.

The Morrigan laced her fingers through mine, holding on tight. I looked down at her and she was shrunken and ugly, smiling like she knew something completely desolate. Like she knew me. Her eyes were huge and dark, and I smiled back because she looked kind of pitiful standing there. She looked so sad.

“Promise,” she said, hooking her little finger through mine and leading me toward the door. “Promise that you’ll work for me and play glorious music, and in return, I’ll make sure you never want for anything. Promise that you stay safe and out of the clutches of my sister, and in return, we’ll cease to trouble your own sister.”

“I promise,” I said, because Emma was the most important person in my life and because it was nice to be able to breathe. “I promise.”

Chapter Eleven Human love

When I left the slag heap, the air was clammy, damp with autumn and the rain that never seemed to stop.

I climbed up the side of the ravine and crossed the footbridge, then started across Orchard Circle, headed for home. On Concord Street, porch lights glowed in a line all the way down the block.

Inside, I stood at the top of the stairs and leaned against the banister, making sure I was composed, before padding down the hall to Emma’s room. I opened the door a crack, pressing my mouth to the gap so I could whisper without letting too much light in.

“Emma?”

There was a sigh, a rustle of blankets. “Yeah?”

Relief washed over me, making my chest relax. I stepped inside and closed the door and then there was just the splash of light shining in under it. I lay on the carpet beside her bed and looked up at the shadows on the ceiling. She didn’t say anything, and I knew she was waiting for me to talk.

“I met some people tonight.”

Above me, she rolled over but still didn’t say anything. Then she took a deep breath. “What kind of people?”

The dead kind. The still-walking-around kind. The reeking, stinking, rotting-from-the-inside-out kind. Toothy and grinning, nasty with the dark and the dust of abandoned strip mines. But none of that was the whole truth. They were more than that. They were Carlina and Luther, electric on the stage, and the Morrigan with her hand on my arm like she knew me and had known me my whole life. And not the Janice who showed up after school to work on botany homework and was bony and weird looking, but the one who lived down in the House of Mayhem and was beautiful, and the girl who liked stars was happy and pink and sort of cute.

“Why is Janice your lab partner?”

Emma answered in a tight, controlled voice. “Well, because group projects pretty much always involve a group.”

“Are you lying to me?”

Emma was quiet a long time, and when she answered, she sounded defensive. “I saw her brush against a stainless steel table. She pulled away and then looked around to make sure no one was watching. I thought she might be . . . like you. I asked if she wanted to work together.”

“You took something from them,” I said, pressing my hands flat against the floor.

“To help you,” she whispered. “Only to help you.”

“This isn’t free, Emma. I think they want something back.”

“Then we’ll pay them,” she said, and I closed my eyes at the conviction in her voice. “We’ll do what it takes.”

“What if it’s not that simple? What if they want something weird or impossible or . . . bad?”

Neither of us said anything after that. Sometimes things are so big and complicated that you can’t actually talk about them.

“They make blood sacrifices,” I said. “Just like in the books. I mean, it sounds crazy, like something someone made up. But it’s the truth.”

Emma didn’t respond right away. When she did, her voice was unnaturally calm. “Maybe that’s not surprising. A lot of cultures have a history of human sacrifice.”

“It is surprising because it’s insane. This isn’t the Stone Age. We don’t go around sacrificing people to the gods.”

She laughed and it sounded shrill and breathless, almost like a sob. “We do, though. We take for granted that sometimes you lose a child. And sometimes everyone else gets hit by the recession. Everyone else’s unemployment skyrockets, and their tech plants go bankrupt and their dairy farms fail, but not ours. Never ours, because if you feed the ground, the ground feeds you back. You get food and prosperity and peace, and there are no disasters or plagues, and nothing bad happens.”

“Except that every seven years, someone kills one of your kids.”

“You have to understand: It wasn’t always bad.”

“So, some little kid gets murdered, but it’s cool?”

For a second, Emma was so quiet it sounded like she was holding her breath. When she answered, she stayed very still. “I think it’s complicated. It wasn’t always a kid. Some of the Germanic tribes believed that volunteering to be sacrificed was a kind of magic by itself. Like a transformation. One of the old druidic texts in the Bevelry volume talks about going into a cave to be eaten by a goddess and coming out as the greatest poet of all time. They went into the dark and came out reborn.”

I squeezed my eyes shut until I saw stars. “How can you be eaten and then become a poet?”

“Stop being so literal. It’s a metaphor and you know it.” Emma rolled over and her voice sounded farther away, like she was talking to the wall. “The prosperity rituals work on a trade-off. The cost is a way of showing that you’re serious, that you’ll give something up in order to gain favor.”

I nodded, but it was more complicated than a straight trade. She wasn’t just talking about what it cost to feed the Lady or look the other way while kids disappeared from their beds. I came from somewhere. I could have lived an ugly life in a world of tunnels and black, murky water and dead girls, with a little tattooed princess to watch over us. I would have belonged there. Instead, I was just a stranger in a strange house, with too many lights on. That was a cost too.

“It’s been hard for you,” she said finally. “All the time. How do you think that makes me feel, that everything is poisonous and everything hurts you and there’s nothing I can do about it? And everything has to be a secret. Everyone’s always asking how we can be so different from each other. They all want to know how you turned out to be the delicate one, like it’s my fault that my brother’s prettier than me.” Her voice was higher and softer than normal. “Girls are just supposed to be pretty.”

“You’re pretty,” I said, and knew that if I could say it, that made it true.

Above me, Emma laughed like I’d just said I wanted to grow up to be a toaster oven or a giraffe. I got up and switched on her desk lamp.

She squinted at me, blinking in the light. “What? What’s wrong?”

I sat on the edge of her bed, trying to get an idea of what other people saw.

“Stop it,” she said. “What are you doing?”

“I’m looking at you.”

Her face was soft, broader and flatter than mine, her hair limp, coming to just past her shoulders. It was brown, faded looking against her daisy-print pajamas. She was sitting up now, holding the blankets in a fierce double handful. Her cheeks were pink and shiny.

Around us, the bookshelves reached almost to the ceiling. Books about chemistry and physics and gardening, sure, but mythology and history too, all kinds of folklore and fairy tales. She read academic journals and ordered books online. She stockpiled literary criticism and essays. Her room was a private library of answers, trying to help me, save me, decode me. It was just another part of what made her beautiful.

She was looking off over my head. “They trade their sick children for healthy babies.”

I nodded.

She hugged herself and still wouldn’t look at me. “Sometimes, if the new mother loves it and takes really good care of it, the sick baby gets better. It stops being ugly and grows up strong and healthy and normal. Sometimes, if the mother just loves it enough, it becomes beautiful.”

I knew that part too, but the way she said it was miserable, like she was trying to tell me something else. She was looking past me. Maybe thinking in the back of her mind that if our mother had just loved her more, she would have turned out looking like something in a magazine and not like the girl I’d known my whole life. I wanted to point out that strong, healthy, and normal were not words anyone would generally apply to me.

Anyway, the stories always missed one crucial thing. Mothers didn’t love the hungry, scary things that replaced their kids. It wasn’t their fault or anything. They just couldn’t bring themselves to love something that awful. But maybe sisters could, if they were miraculously unselfish, if the trade happened when they were young enough.

My whole life, Emma had just been there. Cutting my hair with the aluminum kindergarten scissors just so I didn’t have to go to the barbershop downtown, with its metal countertops and its stainless steel shears. Making me breakfast, making sure I ate and went out with my friends and did my homework. Making sure nothing bad happened. I wanted to hug her and say that everything was much better than she believed. It was just so strange that she couldn’t see.

“Emma—” I got a tight feeling in my throat and started again. “Emma, Mom didn’t make me like this. Keep me alive this long . . .You did.”

Chapter Twelve Consecrated

The next day was Sunday, and I woke up to rain coursing steadily down my window. I lay in bed watching it, waiting for my alarm to go off and feeling wide awake. In the daylight, everything looked gray and weak. The night before didn’t seem so disturbing or so real.

I rolled onto my back, trying to decide whether I wanted to get up or just lie there awhile.

Finally, I pushed back the covers. Even overcast, the light was brighter than it had seemed in weeks, but it didn’t hurt my eyes. Out in the yard, everything looked crisp around the edges.

I got out the bottle the Morrigan had given me, cracked the wax seal, and took a swallow. Right away, I felt good. My reflection in the mirror was shockingly, gloriously normal.

Downstairs, I could hear my dad humming to himself. His steps were quick and light and it was weird to think that Sundays made someone happy.

When I went down to the kitchen, Emma was already at the table. She was bent over a book, and when she looked up and saw me, she smiled. I stood in the doorway and watched her. She was small and destructible, with soft hands and fine, straight hair.

I wanted to be shocked. I wanted to be dumbstruck and appalled, but I couldn’t do it. It was completely unshocking that there were monsters in the world, secret rituals and underground burrows filled with the dead, when in my own way, I was secret and sort of monstrous too. It just didn’t show in the same way.

I was still standing in the doorway when my mom came wandering in, wearing her hospital sneakers and her scrubs. The outfit was radically inappropriate for church and I wondered if she knew what day it was. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and it looked very blond in the sunlight.

“Morning, sweetie.” She poured herself a cup of coffee and put in more sugar than any reasonable person would need. “What are you doing up so early?”

I shrugged. “I thought maybe I’d come to church with you guys.”

Emma set down her book. “The weather report said it’s going to rain all day. Are you sure you don’t want to stay home?”

“Nah, it’s not that bad out. I’ll hang around on the lawn or something.”

We were late leaving the house. This was due entirely to the fact that my dad wouldn’t start the car until my mom went back inside and changed out of her scrubs.

After they’d gone inside and the doors had closed, I sat on the lawn of the classroom addition and faced the church. It was large building, warm and buttery looking. Even under a gray sky, it made me think of sunlight, all vaulted roof and blond brick. The windows were pieced together with diamonds of colored glass.

Beyond it, the cemetery stretched back for almost two acres, graves planted in rows, neatly mowed. Along the north side, the unconsecrated area was less orderly. The headstones were grimy and ancient, the names worn off or else never chiseled on in the first place. They leaned drunkenly around a lone crypt, fourteen feet high and made of white marble. I didn’t know how far back it dated, but it was one of the oldest fixtures in the cemetery. Everything else had sprung up around it.

I tipped my head back and looked up. The clouds were low, dark with the constant rain.

In the park across the street, the trees had already gone from green to red and yellow and orange. Now they were turning brown.

I lay on my back in the wet grass. The ground was cold through my jacket and I closed my eyes, trying to shut out the drizzle and the looming shape of the building. This was the place where everything in my life was clearly divided. My mom and dad and Emma disappeared through the double doors every Sunday, and I stayed outside.

It didn’t matter how many David and Goliath coloring books I’d colored or how hard my dad tried to make everything seem normal and okay. The plain truth was, my family was there in the church, under the steeple, and that was someplace I couldn’t go.

But maybe things were changing. It was hard to stop focusing on how good I felt. How completely different from my normal, awkward self.

“Good morning,” said someone above me. The voice was raspy and familiar.

When I opened my eyes, I was looking up at Carlina Carlyle. She stood over me in scuffed boots and a long coat. She had on a bizarre kind of pilot’s hat, with a leather strap that buckled under her chin. She looked exactly like she did when she took the stage at the Starlight. And at the same time, not like herself at all. Her features looked ordinary. Her fierce stage strut had turned awkward, the same way Janice could look weird and creepy in my kitchen and beautiful when she bent over her glass beakers and flowers. Above me, Carlina’s eyes were pale like robin’s eggs, without the devilish glow from the footlights.

When I didn’t say anything, she flopped down next to me. “Don’t you get cold out here?”

“Sometimes, I guess.”

She looked like she was waiting for me to say something else. Her mouth was wide, but now it looked tight at the corners, like maybe she was the kind of person who could understand.

“Mostly, I just get lonely.”

She nodded. “We like to think we’re so solitary, so self-sufficient.” When she smiled, it was tired and kind of ironic. Her hair was spilling out from under the hat, curling around her face. “What a stupid thing to be proud of, huh?”

“Who are we?” I said, and my mouth felt dry and sticky, like I didn’t really want to know.

She hunched forward with her chin in her hands. With her face turned away from the overcast sky, her eyes were a darker blue.

“Do you really want to know where we come from?” she said. “In every century, in every country, they’ll call us something different. They’ll say we’re ghosts, angels, demons, elemental spirits, and giving us a name doesn’t help anybody. When did a name ever change what someone is?”

And that was something I understood. Because it didn’t matter how often my dad called me Malcolm or introduced me as his son. It just made things worse. In fact, saying it once always seemed to make him say it again, like once it was out, he had to keep repeating it, so many times it just lost meaning.

“Does God hate us?” I asked, looking down at the ground.

Carlina didn’t answer right away. She leaned forward, looking off at a glossy stand of barn-red maple trees, bright as blood.

“I don’t know about God,” she said finally. “But I know about tradition. We’re literal people, you and me. Whatever the most obvious interpretation is, that’s our truth. When the old churches made their laws, they set a precedent. They believe that hallowed ground rejects our souls, and because they believe it that much, our bodies hurt.”

I nodded, but it was discouraging to know that an inanimate object could reject a person. That strangers could make a place hate me without ever having met me.

Carlina glanced over. “You’ll be at the Starlight tonight, yeah?”

“I kind of have to be, don’t I?”

“Yeah.” She brushed wet leaves off her coat and stood up. “You do.”

Then she sauntered out of the yard and down the street, looking proud and cool and about a century out of place.

I lay back, staring up through the rain. The lawn was dying in a soggy, golden way, cold against my neck, and the leaves shifted and slithered under me when I breathed.

When I thought about the church, I had a vivid, wordless impression of my dad, up there at the podium. His sermons on paper were quiet, but he wasn’t a quiet man and I knew that when he read the words out loud, they must sound powerful and definite.

I stood up.

I wanted to watch the realest, truest part of him, how it showed in his face and his voice. I wanted to see what he saw. I’d never seen him in any way that mattered, and now I understood that I was probably never going to.

I crossed the lawn and was at the property line before I could change my mind. As soon as I stepped onto the property, though, the tight, cracking pain was there like always. My cheeks and forehead started to burn and I backed away fast.

I wanted so badly for the ground to have a different truth—my truth, but the church didn’t waver. It wasn’t changeable. It hurt like an electric shock because no special drink, no amount of conviction or belief could make me something I wasn’t.

Chapter Thirteen Applause

That night, Roswell came to get me and didn’t ask questions. I half wanted him to ask why I had my bass with me, but he didn’t. We listened to the radio. All the songs were about true love and drug addiction.

When we pulled up at the Starlight, no one from Rasputin was there yet. Roswell and I stood in the middle of the floor and watched the crowd. A lot of people were in costumes, even though Halloween was still two days away. They moved easily through the Starlight, staring past me, and I wondered what they saw when they looked in my direction. Not a god or a monster. Maybe no one.

Then I heard a high, shrieking laugh and turned in time to see Alice. She was wearing her cat costume again, but this time she had a rhinestone collar around her neck and her whiskers were purple. She was walking with a guy named Levi Anderson, hanging on him as they came toward us. When they were almost even with me, she gave me a spiteful look, then plastered herself against Levi.

“Classy girl,” Roswell said under his breath, but I didn’t feel hurt or angry. My heart was starting to race and I didn’t feel anything.

I found us an empty booth in the corner and sat staring at my hands while Roswell went up to the bar for something to drink.

“Are you okay?” he said when he slid into the seat across from me. He had a paper cup of Mountain Dew in his hand. “’Cause you kind of look like hell.”

I nodded and stared down at the table. There were cigarette burns all over it.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“Do you ever think about the secret stuff in Gentry, the ugly things? Like, what it means when kids . . . when they die?”

He looked at me a long time before he answered, turning the cup so the ice clattered and cracked and the Mountain Dew splashed in circles, antifreeze colored. “I think that people are complicated and everybody’s got their share of secrets.”

I nodded and wondered why he wasn’t pushing the conversation. Why he wasn’t asking questions. I wanted him to make me say the things that wouldn’t come out in words unless I couldn’t avoid them. If he asked the right questions, I’d have to tell him. But he didn’t say anything.

Across the dance floor, Carlina Carlyle was standing by the soundboard. When she saw me looking, she opened her eyes wide and waved me over.

Her hair was piled on top of her head. She looked strange and fantastical and startling and normal.

I stood up, reaching for my bass. “I have to go,” I told Roswell.

“Go where?”

“Go work for them, play for them. Something. I’m in it now, and I don’t think I can get out. I don’t know what to do.”

He just shrugged and nodded toward the stage. “So, go up there and do something amazing.”

Carlina led me back through a narrow hall and into a tiny dressing room, more like a closet than a room. There was a gouged wooden dresser and a chair and nothing else. Everything smelled like dust.

I stood in the middle of the room with my heart racing. “Is this all you really need to survive? I mean, is there something I’m supposed to do to make the music work?”

Carlina was rifling through the dresser. She closed a drawer and turned to face me, shaking her head. “It’s a living.” Her voice sounded flat. “Gentry doesn’t always remember that we’re here, but they remember that they like a good performance. Everyone loves a good performance.” She tossed a bundle of clothes at me. “Put these on.”

I picked through them. Black wool slacks and a white button-down shirt, the blinding-black shoes, the suspenders. The fact remained, I wasn’t really her bassist. I was quiet and skinny and sixteen years old and I got a tight, nervous feeling in my stomach if I was called on to answer in class.

Carlina sighed and turned her back. “Just hurry up and put them on.”

I started stripping off my clothes. I yanked the slacks up, buttoned the shirt. I tried to figure out the clasps on the suspenders, but my hands were shaking.

“Here.” Carlina took the clasp from me and opened it. “You need to relax.”

When I was dressed, she sat me down at the little wooden dresser and reached for a comb. She started raking my hair back from my face, slicking it down with some kind of pomade that smelled like mint and honey and wax. Her hands felt cool on my forehead, like something was seeping over me.

I leaned sideways, trying to see myself in the dresser mirror. “Are you making me look like someone else?”

“No, you’ll still look like you, but not so much that anyone down there would recognize you, if you know what I mean. To most people, even Luther doesn’t look like Luther, and I don’t look like myself.” She touched the comb’s teeth, greasing the tips of her fingers, twisting a lock of hair in front so it hung down over my forehead. “It’s not a spell or a trick, nothing changes. They just see what they want to.”

I looked down at my gleaming shoes and when I glanced in the mirror again, I recognized myself, and I didn’t. I’d been getting used to how I could look like a whole new person when my eyes were dark brown and my color was good, but this was different. My expression was too far away, like I was looking into the mirror, but someone else was looking back. I was seeing what I wanted to see because what I wanted was to be someone besides myself. The visual wasn’t comforting, though. The person in the mirror looked tired and hopeless.

Carlina put the comb down and turned me away from the mirror. She held my face between her hands, smiling her strange, sad smile.

“So we just give them some kind of distraction,” I said. “Another lie.”

She closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against mine. “No, what we’re giving them is the unvarnished truth. They just don’t know it. When you go out onstage, you’ll be closer to yourself than you’ve ever been, and that’s a beautiful thing. It’s what they paid to see.”

But that didn’t make me feel better. My hands were shaking and my mouth felt dry. “I just feel nervous, though. I feel weird and freakish and pointless, and nobody wants to see that. I can’t be what they paid for.”

“Then you have to feel like that, then let it go and do your job.” She whispered it, and I could feel her breath on the bridge of my nose. “We’ll go out onto the stage in a minute, and when we do, you have to make them believe that whatever you show them is the real you because sometimes being believed in is just what it means not to die.”

But I’d been waiting to die my whole life. I’d spent years expecting it any day because that was just what happened. Going onstage was different. Out onstage, the Starlight would be dark, with the spotlight shining down and no place else to look, and that was something I couldn’t just live with and couldn’t wish away. Being seen was the worst thing that could happen to someone like me.

“I just—I’ve never played in front of anyone before.”

Carlina nodded against my forehead. “They’ll love you, though, just like they love us. Do you want me to announce you as a special guest?”

“No, just let me come on with you guys like I belong there.”

She let me go, then stood looking down at me. “You do.”

As soon as the curtain came up, the noise of the crowd was deafening. The footlights glared in my face, and beyond that, there was nothing but a sea of voices and long, shrill whistles.

The drummer and I were supposed to set the tempo, but Luther was the one who stepped into the intro like he owned it, like it was his song—fast and frantic and I knew it in my fingers, even when I didn’t know it by ear or from memory. Earlier, Luther had laughed when I asked to see the set list, but now I understood that set lists were meaningless. They just played whatever they felt like playing.

Luther grinned, watching my face, leading me through each verse and chorus, making me race him. I listened to his changes and found the counterpoint, making every note rumble and screech because the song was about mayhem and being totally, arrogantly out of control.

Adrenaline was coursing through my fingers, tingling in my blood. This was what it felt like to be a rock star.

As soon as I came to the end of the song, though, the feeling stuttered, then disappeared. I let the guitar hang heavy against the strap and my hands felt cold and shaky again. Suddenly, I was very aware that I was standing on a stage in front of two hundred people, and all I had was a cherry-red Gibson reissue and someone else’s shoes.

Luther just swung his guitar around in an arc, sneering down at everyone in the audience. Then he went straight into “Common People,” not caring that it was supposed to have a synthesizer or that it was about thirty years old and most of the kids in the Starlight had never even heard of Pulp. He just picked it and played it, making the guitar sing in his hands, while Carlina acted both sides of a conversation between a rich girl and a working-class guy and screamed herself hoarse about all the ways that being poor sucked.

Every now and then, Luther cut his eyes at me and I tried to read the cues in his glances. He picked the tune faster, showing me how every song was a conversation, a debate between rhythms and tones. I just had to listen and then respond.

We played in tandem, working off each other, until he switched into an old Pearl Jam song. It was “Yellow Ledbetter.”

The bass line was low and inevitable. I hit the first note and the whole building seemed to creak and shudder.

It was a song about loss, but the melody was sweet, and if Eddie Vedder sounded kind of like a stumbling wino in his version, Carlina sounded husky but clear.

Her voice was like loneliness. It was regret. She sang about a past you couldn’t get out of and didn’t want, and standing alone in the cool blue light, she was beautiful—more beautiful than the shows where she wailed and pranced, strutting back and forth across the stage, far more beautiful than she’d been standing over me on the church lawn. With her hands cupped around the microphone, she was the realest part of the Starlight, the realest voice in Gentry. Luther and I supplied the melody, but all the notes were leading up to her. She was the purest, biggest truth, while all the audience were just kids wearing their costumes.

She wailed the first chorus with her chin up and her back straight. Then she brought the mic close, smiling over at Luther. “Now, make me cry.”

Luther smiled back. Not his sly, toothy grin, but a real one, open and honest. He bent over the guitar and played a solo that was just for her—a slow progression of notes, running hard and sharp and up.

I followed it, making my own melody thump and buzz underneath his like a heartbeat, letting each note hang for minutes or years. And then something happened.

It wasn’t like the other songs. There was no story, no conversation. This was just the feeling, without words or pictures, and it had nothing to do with Luther or his clean, stinging guitar.

It was the sound of being outside, of being alien. It was the pulse that ran under everything and never let you forget that you were strange, that the world hurt just to touch. Feelings too complicated to ever say in words, but they spilled out of the amplifiers, seeping into the air and filling up the room.

Out in the crowd, everyone had stopped moving. They stood in the pit, staring up at me, and when I stopped playing, they started to clap.

“Mackie,” Carlina said, coming close to whisper in my ear. “You can’t do that.”

“They liked it, though.”

She nodded, touching the collar of her dress. “It’s just—it’s not good for them to feel it for very long. It’s exhausting, feeling like that.”

Down in the pit, the clapping had already started to die. People were staring up at the stage and the colored lights. Luther went into a frantic version of “Here Comes Your Man” that sounded like a three-day coke bender, and they stood around like dairy cows.

When the Pixies didn’t get a reaction, he pulled out Nick Cave and then Nine Inch Nails, but nothing seemed to get them moving again. He played one last hard, flashy change, then quit torturing “Mr. Self-Destruct” in the middle of the riff.

Behind us, the drummer gave the snare a few more halfhearted beats, and then he stopped too and got up. The four of us stood motionless on the stage and I had just fucked up the special surprise Halloween show, and royally.

Luther shot Carlina a desperate look and jerked his head toward the wings. “We have to bring out the piano.”

She shook her head.

“Do it—play them one of those sad-bastard ballads and finish us up. It’s all they’ll want now anyway.”

“Fine,” she said in the long silence. “Fine, bring it out.”

Luther and the drummer dragged an old upright piano out of the wings and pushed it into the center of the stage. The finish was wearing off the wood in pale stripes.

Carlina tossed her hair back over one shoulder and settled onto the bench. She raised her hands and spread her fingers over the keys. Then she found the first chord.

It was a Leonard Cohen song. I knew it but had never known it like this. It wasn’t bitter or cynical. It was broken.

The piano wasn’t miked, but it didn’t matter. The notes scaled up, shrill, cracking. The whole place was absolutely silent as Carlina ran through the intro and into the first verse. The sound of her voice was painful. She screamed, sobbed, whispered hallelujah, but she never sang it.

Down in the audience, people were reaching for each other, hugging, holding hands. Near the front, a girl with crazy chopped-up hair and too many piercings was crying so hard that her nose was running. Her eye makeup looked mysterious and scary, but her mouth was crumpled like a little kid’s.

Carlina slammed down on the chords, plodded over the keys, but her voice was high and clear, talking about more than being used, being rejected. How when you love someone, sometimes it means that they strip you down, peel you open, and you have to let them and not worry about how much it’s going to hurt.

I was holding the neck of the Gibson too, too tightly as she came to the end. My fingers felt cramped and sticky.

“Hallelujah.” She said it flatly, coming down hard on the last note, and then she let it fade.

There was nothing.

Luther and the drummer were already breaking things down, but I stood at the edge of the stage, staring out at the crowd. No one was dressed like themselves, but they were all suddenly illuminated, lit with something real, their own private versions of the song. It had gotten inside them. I stood above the packed floor, looking down at all of them, shining like lanterns with their love stories and their tragedies.

I just stood looking until Carlina caught me by the arm and dragged me back into the little dressing room. She was breathless and smiling, but her face was pale and she looked tired. “Did you have fun?”

I nodded and unhooked my suspenders. The room was cold and the rush was already starting to trickle away. I yanked off the button-down shirt and reached for my T-shirt and my hoodie.

Carlina stood by the door, politely keeping her back to me. “There’s going to be some festivities down in the pit tonight. Kind of like . . . an after party. You should come.”

I laughed and shook my head. “Thanks, but I think I’ll skip it.”

“Are you sure? You haven’t had a chance to see us when we’re wild. It’s called Mayhem for a reason, you know.”

I knew that she was just being friendly, and when it came to my survival, being friendly with people like Carlina was probably my best option. Still, that didn’t mean I was a fan of the Morrigan’s house or of anyplace where dead girls huddled and whispered behind their hands and mutilated women floated in pools. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see their version of wild.

“I’ll pass this time.”

Carlina shrugged. “Suit yourself, but don’t be a stranger. Our house is yours.”

And in a bizarre way, I didn’t doubt that.

When I was back in my own clothes, I sat at the dresser, staring at the strange reflection that was just starting to look like me again. “That was magic, right, what just happened out there?”

Carlina smiled and shrugged. “I guess. As much as music is ever magic. Or always, I mean. Music is our best language. It’s just what we do.”

“You could take over the world with what you do.”

She laughed, much softer, much shyer than I ever would have pictured her a week ago. “Gentry’s enough.”

Chapter Fourteen Crashing

When I went back out into the crowd, no one really noticed me. I was carrying my bass, and my hair was sticky with pomade, but everything else was ordinary.

I realized I was smiling, which was strange, and stranger to realize that I meant it. Usually, I only smiled when other people were there to see. When it was what they expected from me.

Someone touched my arm and when I turned, Tate Stewart was standing very close.

“It is you.” Her voice was low. “I wasn’t sure.”

My heart was beating hard but steady. A good beat, and not a faltering one. I felt different and new, like I could be someone else.

Over the top of her head, I could see Drew and Danny at the farthest pool table. Drew glanced up and grinned at me. Then he waved me over.

I didn’t go right away. Instead, I stood in the middle of the floor, looking down at Tate. She stared so hard that I got an idea she was seeing through layers of pointless, ordinary things, all the way down to how I felt about her—whatever I was feeling—like it was there in my eyes if I forgot to blink.

Her face was close to mine. “I don’t get you,” she said. “You spend every day at school trying to disappear and now you’re dancing around onstage like a fucking rock star, like you don’t have anything holding you down? I mean, who are you?”

There was nothing to say to that. I didn’t know what performance she’d been watching, but I hadn’t felt carefree up there—not anywhere close.

She shook her head and turned away, and even with the ferocious scowl, even looking disgusted with me, I kind of wanted to follow her.

In an unprecedented display of good judgment, I made my way over to where Danny was bent over the table, lining up a combo.

“You did good,” he said without looking up. The shot was eight ball to two ball to corner pocket. He made an open bridge on the top of his hand and sank it.

I stared down at his bent head and smiled wider. “You recognized me?”

Danny straightened up and gave me a bored, incredulous look. “Well, yeah.”

“Jesus,” Drew said. “We just saw you at that party last night. We’re not senile.”

“I don’t look different?”

Danny butted his cue on the floor. “You do, but it’s a good kind of different. You’re happy, Mackie. I can’t even remember the last time you were happy.”

“I just—I feel better lately.”

Drew was fidgeting with the chalk, making blue slashes on the back of one hand with his fingertip. “That’s good,” he said, but he said it without looking at me.

“What? What’s wrong?”

Danny shook his head. “Nothing. Just be careful. You know?”

I nodded and waited for him to tell me what I was being careful of or why, but he didn’t say anything else and they both went back to studying the table.

After a minute, Drew looked up again. He glanced in the direction of Tate and the arcade, then raised his eyebrows. “What the hell is up with you two? I keep expecting someone to break out the grenades.”

I didn’t answer. There wasn’t really a word for what we were doing, except that it was stupid and confusing, and Tate had a way of sticking her chin out that made me want to stand much closer than necessary.

Out on the floor, I pushed through the crowd, avoiding the kids from school and the strangers.

Tate was in the arcade, playing Earthshaker pinball, dropping quarters in with icy precision.

“Hey,” I said when I came up beside her.

She pulled back the spring-loaded plunger and shot the first ball out into a sea of flashing lights and bright plastic sirens.

I leaned on the top of the machine. “So, did you like the show?”

She was hunched over the game, watching the ball as it clanged through a minefield of bumpers and bells. “It was pretty good, if you’re into that kind of thing.”

“What kind of music do you like?”

“Whatever. A lot of stuff. Would you please get off the glass?”

The sound of her voice made shivers race up the back of my neck and it was hard to tell if it was all from nerves, because I kind of liked it. I stood next to the pinball machine and watched the ball careen through obstacles and pitfalls.

The Morrigan’s tonic was just starting to wear off, and the feeling was disorienting but not unpleasant. It felt leisurely and free, like being just a little drunk. I was at that perfect point where the world is manageable and nothing seems too overwhelming or too bad. I stood in the arcade, watching Tate. She worked the flippers like it was serious business. She didn’t say anything else.

When the last ball had disappeared down into the machine, she sighed and turned to face me. “What? What do you want?”

“Will you give me a ride home?” The words were out before I’d had time to consider them.

Her face was unreadable, turned up to stare at me, and her chin was so obstinate I wanted to grab her by the shoulders just so she would stop looking at me like that.

After a long pause, filled with pinball sirens and flashing lights, she nodded.

We were only a block from the Starlight when it occurred to me that I might have made a bad decision. The hawthorn was wearing off much faster than it had the night before and so was the euphoria of playing for a crowd. Every uneven section of the road, every pothole rattled the car and jolted through my bones.

Tate didn’t seem to notice. She stared straight ahead, peering through the rain on the windshield, talking about school and various independent movies. Her voice was light, like she was in no hurry, waiting for the perfect time. That moment when she would spring some critical question and I would have no choice but to answer her. The air was thick with the smell of iron. I swallowed it down and cracked the window.

We were six blocks from my house when regret hit, sickening and official. I closed my eyes and counted backward, trying to get the shaking under control, get the bad air out of my lungs. Something lurched in my stomach and I tried to ignore it, taking slow, deep breaths. I was sweating.

When the warm, squirming thing lurched again, I cleared my throat. “Tate, could you pull over?”

“Hey—hey, what’s wrong?”

“I feel pretty sick.” Which was a massive understatement. The feeling I had wasn’t like any reaction I’d ever had, even to blood iron or stainless steel, even on my worst days.

The dizziness came in waves, making everything slide. It was radio static in my ears, a rain of black dots that swept in and covered everything. The smell of metal filled my mouth and nose. It was under my skin, in my blood, pounding away in my joints, my bones.

Tate pulled onto the shoulder and slammed the transmission into park. “Is this—”

But I was already yanking at the door.

I made it out but could barely stand. In the dark, the ground pitched up at me. I got down on my knees and held very still until the worst of it passed and I was steady enough to lie down. I needed to be someplace quiet and alone. I needed to curl up in a dark room, with no movement and no sound.

I pressed my face into the grass and breathed the green smells of leaves and stems and roots. The rain felt light and cool against my face. I needed the Morrigan.

“Mackie, are you okay?”

Tate was kneeling over me, reaching like she wanted to put her hand on my shoulder but was scared to touch me. I was shaking in huge wrenching spasms.

I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to stay very still. Every time I took a breath, it touched off a storm of throbbing in my chest.

“Mackie, tell me if you’re okay.” Her voice sounded tight.

The pain in my knees and elbows was getting worse, going from low and throbbing to something more like being hit with a hammer. I looked up at her and tried to find something to say that would make her stop talking. I was afraid of what my voice would sound like.

She reached for my hand, her fingers sliding over my knuckles, my palm. Her touch wasn’t rough, but the pressure made pain shoot up my arm and I jerked away, biting down on the inside of my lip.

“Your hands are cold,” she said.

The concern in her voice made my throat hurt worse. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed for her to go away, to leave me so I could get myself together and figure out what to do. Her worry made me too aware of how bad the reaction was. It knocked the breath out of me. I needed her to leave, but nothing would make her do that. Even if I hurt her feelings, called her the worst things I could think of, she wouldn’t just go because I told her to. Her face was a white oval floating above me. The only place for help was the House of Mayhem.

“You have to go,” I said, making my voice as steady as I could.

“Excuse me? I can’t just leave you on the side of the road. Jesus, I think you’re going into shock. If you’re hurt or sick, you need someone to stay with you.”

“Tate, listen to me. I need you to find Roswell and bring him here, okay?”

“Mackie, you’re scaring me.”

“Please, just go get Roswell.”

She didn’t like it, but she stood up, looking more frightened than I’d ever seen her, and started for her car.

When the Buick pulled away from the curb, I closed my eyes. I breathed out, this miserable, rattling sigh that sounded nothing like relief. It was thin, which made it easier to pretend that it was coming from someplace else than that I’d made it myself. Easier to pretend that everything was coming from someplace else and I was asleep, maybe at home, dreaming the way my chest seemed to tighten and seize. The air was too thick to breathe, almost like water, and the ground had stopped feeling cold.

I turned my face into the grass and wondered if this was how people felt when they knew they were going to die.