The Replacement

Chapter Fifteen The After Party

I lay on the ground for way too long, with my face against the wet grass and the rain soaking into my clothes. I knew if I stayed, Tate would come back with Roswell, and then they’d want to take me home or worse, to the emergency room.

I had to get up and get moving. It was a painful and multi-step process, but I did it. The street was empty and the rain made everything disorienting. I was wandering through patches of light and deep shadow. The streetlights hummed so loud that my joints ached each time I passed one. I was on Welsh Street, then Orchard, then down the slope of the ravine and crossing the footbridge. My knees felt weak, and all the times I’d thought about my condition or the chance that I might die, I hadn’t understood what it meant. I hadn’t understood how much I wanted to live.

The ground was slick and muddy, but I made it, sliding on the steep path down to the bottom of the ravine. The slag heap was a vague, looming shape. It had never looked so welcoming.

I slumped against the base of the hill, resting my head on the loose gravel. There was nothing to show me where the door had been, nothing for me to catch hold of or grab onto.

I lay in the shale and the fill, trying to think what to do. I was starting to lose feeling in my hands when I heard the crunch of footsteps, not in the ravine but from inside the hill. The gravel slid away and the door swung open, showing a yellow rectangle of light.

It was Carlina.

“Decided to come after all?” she said, holding a lantern up so that it cast a circle of light over both of us. “You look a little out of sorts.”

I nodded and struggled into a sitting position, trying to catch my breath. “Please, do you think I could get paid now?”

Carlina stood in the doorway. The lantern was so bright that it was hard to see her face. “What have you been doing to yourself? No, never mind. You’d better come in.”

I got unsteadily to my feet and followed her inside.

She closed the door behind us, then turned to face me. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you keep anything on hand for first aid?”

I shook my head.

With a sigh, she took a tiny bottle out of her pocket and uncorked it. “Okay, deep breath.”

She held the bottle in front of my face and I breathed in, feeling my lungs expand. It wasn’t the analeptic, but the green smell of leaves rushed over me and then the huge, shuddering relief of finally getting enough air.

When I’d gotten my breath back and was standing upright without using the wall, Carlina took me by the elbow and started to lead me down toward the lobby. “Is that better?”

I nodded, still a little stupefied over the difference between breathing and suffocating.

Carlina led me down, talking under her breath, shaking her head. “What is it about boys? Why do you always have to push things as far they can go? Just because you’re not completely ragged anymore doesn’t make you invincible.”

I nodded again and followed her along the tunnel and through the main lobby into the huge, high-ceilinged room where the floor was covered in puddles and water welled up from the ground.

The entire room was full of people, talking and laughing. Some of them were playing cellos and violins, and over in a corner, a girl with long, stringy hair was tuning an upright harp, but mostly they just stood around in little groups, looking happy. The floor was covered with intermittent puddles and drifts of bright autumn leaves.

The Morrigan was sitting by one of the dark pools. She’d taken off her shoes and socks and was trailing her feet in the water. She was playing with a folded paper boat, pushing it back and forth across the surface with a stick.

Carlina put her hand on my shoulder. “Here, sit down. I’ll have Janice grab you some more of the hawthorn and we’ll get you sorted out.”

I sank onto the floor, careful to pick a dry spot, and leaned my back against the wall. It was nice to be able to breathe again, but I was exhausted.

The Morrigan glanced over her shoulder and saw me. She jumped up and ran across the room, clambering over my legs and scrubbing her wet feet against the cuffs of my jeans.

She gave me a huge smacking kiss on the cheek and settled down on my lap to watch the milling crowd. I leaned back against the wall and let her hug me around the neck. I was still wet and cold, and she was very warm.

Some of the dead girls were splashing around over by the Morrigan’s pool, laughing and trying to push each other in. The little pink girl from the Halloween party scampered between them, still wearing her princess dress and waving her star wand.

In another pool, farther along the room, a blue-faced girl surfaced slowly, rising out of the water in ghostly silence. Her hair was the powdery-green color of mold and her nose had started to rot away in places.

The Morrigan squeezed my face between her hands. “Aren’t you pleased with yourself? You did this—you and the other players—you’ve made everyone so pleased.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. There was something disturbing about being responsible for partially decayed girls going swimming.

The Morrigan rested her head on my shoulder. “They’re happy,” she said. “The performance was a success, and everyone feels quite merry right now.”

Out in the crowd, a girl with a ragged hoop skirt and no skin on the ridges of her collarbone raised a glass above her head. Her hair was arranged in a braided crown around her head and the hoops showed through the frayed fabric of the skirt like bones. “A curse on the House of Misery! May God strike down the harridan and let her rot!”

That made the other girls laugh and shriek, tossing handfuls of red and orange leaves, splashing each other. “Let her rot,” they sang. “Let her rot in the House of Misery!”

I smiled uneasily at the way the girls howled and danced, but the Morrigan just sighed and fidgeted with her stick.

“The what?” I asked. “What are they talking about?”

“It’s properly called Mystery,” the Morrigan said. “My sister’s venerable house, which they ought to speak of with reverence. Instead, they mock and make jests at her, but it’s only because she frightens them.”

“Why are they scared of her?”

“Because she earns it.” The Morrigan’s head was heavy against my shoulder and she was talking around her thumb. “She frightens me too, come to that.”

Janice wound her way through the crowd and over to us. She was still barefoot but had changed out of her romper suit, or at least put a dress on over it. Her hair was up, and she was carrying a wide, painted fan. She looked rumpled and sleepy. The bottle she held was much bigger than the tiny vials they’d given me before.

“Here’s to wild nights and the maddening crowd,” she said, handing me the bottle. “May you continue to put that bass to good use. And you,” she said to the Morrigan, “you leave him alone until he’s had a chance to get his breath back.”

The Morrigan gave me a quick pat on the cheek. Then she jumped up and went skipping back to her pool and her boat. “Feel better,” she called over her shoulder, waving the stick.

I cracked the seal on the analeptic and took a long drink.

My obvious relief made Janice laugh. “If you lived here like a proper ugly boy, this wouldn’t happen to you.”

Luther and Carlina came over together. They were holding hands, leaning against each other as they walked.

Janice shook her head at them. “Have you talked to this one? He lives up in the town like a local.”

Luther rolled his eyes. “Why, I have no idea. It can’t be pleasant or easy. You’re as bad as that lunatic, Caury.”

I stared up at him. “Kellan Caury? The guy from Hanover Music?”

Luther nodded. “He was a strange one. Thought he could live topside if he just drank his restoratives and played nice with the locals. And look where that got him.”

I looked at the bottle. There was no denying that whatever Caury had believed, it had gotten him someplace messy.

Over by her pool, the Morrigan and the star girl had dropped their toys and were hopping around in a circle, holding on to each other’s hands.

Janice watched as they spun and then fell down. “She’s a sweet little thing. Petulant to try the devil sometimes, but she never misuses us or asks for more than we can give. She cares for us.”

“Why does she use us for music?” I asked. “I mean, does the town really need it?”

It was Carlina who answered. “When we play for them, we give them something rare and wonderful, and in return, they give us their admiration. I know you felt it tonight. You must know you that belong here, with us, playing for their admiration and helping to keep the peace.”

Luther slipped his arm around her waist and pulled her against him, leaning down to kiss her.

I looked away because it seemed impolite to watch them. When they kissed, it was completely unselfconscious, holding on like they loved each other. It bothered me to realize that in my own experience, loving anyone, even my own family, just made me feel sort of awkward and shameful.

In the House of Mayhem, it was different. It wasn’t shameful to be strange or unnatural because everyone else was too.

When I felt better, I got up and crossed the room to sit at the edge of the Morrigan’s pool, watching the paper boat. It was painted with wax to make it waterproof, but it couldn’t last forever, and the bottom was starting to get soggy.

The after party wound down and people began trailing out, leaving the room in twos and threes. Others lay tangled together on the floor or pinned each other against the walls.

The blue girls didn’t seem to be included in the fun, though. Even in the House of Mayhem, the dead ones weren’t popular at parties.

Over in a corner, Carlina still had her arms around Luther’s neck. She kissed him hungrily, pulling his mouth down to hers, and his bony face and jagged teeth didn’t matter because she was beautiful enough for both of them.

The initial wave of euphoria from the analeptic was wearing off and I started to wonder about Tate. What she’d thought when she’d gotten back to the side of the road with Roswell and found me gone. I hadn’t had a choice. It was get myself someplace where someone could help me or stay on the side of the road until I passed out. Even now, I remembered the pain, the terrible weight in my chest, like I was never going to be able to breathe again.

I didn’t want to be so invested in what happened to her, but her eyes were hard to forget. Her grief seemed almost like a solid thing, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I looked down into the water, trying to see the bottom. The pool was too dark to see much, but there was a series of shallow steps cut into one wall, leading down.

“Why are there steps?”

The Morrigan gave me a puzzled look. “For going up and down.”

“Why would you want to climb up and down in the water, though?”

The Morrigan turned her paper boat with the stick, making it wobble and spin. “The water wasn’t always there. My noble sister has been punishing me with a flood. The lower floors are unusable now, except by the restless dead because they aren’t troubled with the inconvenience of breathing.”

“Where does it come from?” I said, watching the boat as it wavered and spun.

“From everywhere. It falls from the sky and seeps up from the ground.”

“Aren’t you worried that she’s going to flood you out?”

“She’ll relent soon and tire of abusing us. Perhaps she’ll even regret her fit of pique. Until then, we’re quite adaptable.” The Morrigan smiled and kicked her legs, slapping the soles of her feet against the surface of the pool. “My sister makes the mistake of assuming that because we live one way, we’re bound to it, but that just isn’t so. Give us the corpses of children and we raise them. Give us water and we learn to swim.”

“It’s a lot of water, though. I mean, what will you do if it doesn’t stop?”

“She’ll be kinder after All Souls’ Day. Once she gets her libation, we might even prevail upon her to be more sparing with the rain.”

“I don’t know All Souls’ Day. Is that the same thing as Halloween?”

The Morrigan laughed and tapped me on the head with her stick. “Don’t be silly. Halloween is just another name for All Hallows’ Eve, when the locals burn their lanterns and throw the bones of their livestock on the fire to keep the devils away. Next comes All Saints’, for the pious to be revered and sanctified and have their fingers cut off and kept as relics. And very last, there’s All Souls’ Day, and that’s for the rest of us.”

“The rest?”

The Morrigan nodded. “The creatures in the ground. All Souls’ is when my sister renews her hold on the town and sacrifices an offering to herself. It’s when we gather in the churchyard and burn sage and rue. And then, just before the sun comes up, we bear witness to the bloodletting, and the world is better again.”

She said it like she was reciting a poem or telling me some kind of story instead of discussing something that happened in an aging steel town on a regular basis.

I gave her a hard look. “And you don’t see anything wrong with that? The Lady takes kids so that she can slaughter them, and you’re fine with it. You act like what she’s doing is normal. You keep saying that she’s so bad, that she’s so out of line—then why doesn’t someone do something about it?”

I watched her face, the way she kept touching her mouth, like she was trying to cover her teeth without meaning to. “Do yourself a service and keep out of her way. She’s a hard, cruel mistress and she’ll punish you as easily as breathing. She has the child in her house and will keep it safe until the night of ritual and blood.”

“So, you’re saying you’re all just going to stand around and let her kill a little kid?” I thought of Tate’s hard eyes, her desperate insistence that the girl who’d died wasn’t her sister. My mom hadn’t wanted to discuss the subject, but the kids who were replaced went somewhere. They didn’t just vanish. If there was any purpose or reason to the substitutions, then Natalie was alive right now, waiting for someone to collect her blood.

The Morrigan stood up, raising the stick like a sword or a scepter. “There is nothing you can do for that child. My sister is a wicked beast of a woman, and you’ll only come to harm if you cross her.”

“You’re talking about killing a kid. Someone’s daughter.” I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. “Someone’s sister.”

“And it’s only a small thing in the grand design of the world. One very small thing, every seven years. What a trivial cost to pay for health and prosperity.”

Janice had come wandering over and she sat down next to me, sticking her feet in the pool. “The town needs this, Mackie. We all need this.”

“So, you all line up in the graveyard and burn your sage and kill kids? That’s great. That’s just really amazing.”

“It’s not us doing it.”

I could feel my throat get tight, almost like I was going to laugh, but not in a way where everything is so cheerful and humorous. “You’re letting it happen.”

Janice sighed, putting her hand on my arm. “You aren’t thinking about this in a rational way. Everyone benefits. Us, the House of Misery, the locals and the town.”

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t benefit the town. It hurts and it terrorizes them. How can they be happy when someone’s taking their kids?”

The Morrigan nodded eagerly. “That’s why we have music. The Lady punishes the town, but we make them happy again.”

“And it never occurred to you not to make them miserable in the first place?”

Janice shook her head. “You don’t understand, this is just what we do.”

“Yeah?” I said. “Well, it’s not what I do.”

The Morrigan reached for me, clutching at my wrist. Her hand was wet from splashing around in the water, but it was still warm. “Oh, don’t be hateful. You know the course of events as well as we do. You know the way this has to end.”

“Yeah, I do.” I peeled her fingers off my arm and stood up. “I leave.”

Chapter Sixteen Normal Enough

I climbed out of the ravine onto Orchard and started toward home. I felt angry and disgusted or else disgusting. I wasn’t about to be involved with something so ugly—I couldn’t be. But the House of Mayhem was still where I came from and how I’d wound up in Gentry in the first place. If I wanted to be healthy, I had to work for the Morrigan, but the thought gave me a sick feeling.

I wanted to talk to Emma, but I didn’t want to talk about any of the things that were actually bothering me, and anyway, she wouldn’t be up. When I checked my phone, it was two forty-five. It was still raining, but what else was new.

A car was coming down the street toward me, the yellow beam of its headlights glowing out of the rain. It pulled over so abruptly the front passenger tire skimmed the curb and ricocheted off.

Tate got out and crossed the street, leaving the Buick parked crookedly in the bike lane.

“Hey,” she called, splashing through the gutter and onto the sidewalk.

I stopped and waited.

When she reached me, she stood with her hands on her hips. She’d put the hazards on and they pulsed behind her in the drizzle, flashing on and off like a flat orange heartbeat. “I have your bass.”

I wanted to ask what she was doing out so late, driving around by herself. “Do you know what time it is?”

She squinted up at me. “Yes, as a matter of fact. It’s the middle of the goddamn night. What the hell happened to you?”

I shrugged and tried to look unreadable.

“You didn’t fake that,” she said. “That, what happened in the car, that was real.”

I nodded.

She scraped her wet hair away from her forehead. “Well, are you okay?”

“I’m fine. Don’t worry about it.”

She turned and looked off over the subdivision and the road, shaking her head. “Look, what’s wrong with you?”

I didn’t answer right away. I had a feeling that even if I managed to answer without using specifics, she’d just rephrase the question and ask me again, so I skipped to the most basic part of it. “Has there ever been something about yourself—or about your life—that you just really hate?”

She laughed, a sharp little bark of a laugh. “God, where do I start?” She was still looking up at me, sort of smiling, and then her face changed.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just, your eyes are really dark.” Her expression was thoughtful and a little worried, like she wasn’t condemning or judging me, just looking.

I took a deep breath and put my hand on her arm. “I want to talk to you about Natalie.” I steered her toward the edge of Mrs. Feely’s lawn. “Here, sit down.”

She looked unconvinced, but she settled herself on the ground and I sat next to her.

“Can I ask you something first?” I said.

She nodded and yanked up a handful of dead grass, watching me sideways. She’d stopped smiling.

“What would you do if I told you that someone took your sister—that you’re right, and this is a shitty town that lets terrible, screwed-up things happen? Would that make any difference? Would it help?”

The rain was striking up from the road in tiny splatters, catching the glare from Tate’s hazards. Down at the intersection, the traffic light turned red and the pavement suddenly looked bloody. I had an idea that it had been raining my whole life.

Tate didn’t answer, just pulled up another handful of grass. Her expression was stony.

“What are you thinking?” I sounded like I was whispering, even though I didn’t want to be.

“Nothing.” She said it in a really miserable way, looking tough and helpless at the same time. “I just thought, you’re right. It doesn’t matter. Whether you know something or not—it wouldn’t matter because it already happened. No one could have saved her.”

Two days ago, I would have paid money to hear her say that, to have her drop it and just start accepting the situation for what it was so she could let it go and move on. Now, everything had changed. If the Morrigan was right, then Natalie was still alive, at least until Friday at dawn, and I was a world away from knowing what to do about it.

When I reached for Tate’s hand, she let me take it.

“I just want to know how it happened. How something like that could happen.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I just held on, smoothing my thumb over the back of her hand. “It isn’t personal or malicious. It’s just something that happens. Other people have hurricanes and earthquakes.”

She nodded, staring at the street. She had an expression I recognized, like she was holding her breath. With my free hand, I reached across and touched her hair. It was softer than it looked. I brushed her bangs away from her face and she closed her eyes.

“This whole place is so full of hypocrites, it’s unbelievable. They’re so good at the charitable casseroles and the funerals, but they never do anything to stop it. They just say, ‘How sad.’”

I let go of her hand and put my arm around her. I wondered if she was going to start crying. Emma cried at everything, even animated movies and greeting card commercials, but Tate wasn’t like that. She felt smaller than I’d expected and softer. I pulled her against me, running my hand up and down her arm.

“I did believe you. Right from the beginning.”

“Why didn’t you just say that, then? I mean, you could have just said that.”

She rested her head on my shoulder, and for a second it was pretty much all I’d ever wanted out of life. Then I felt a sharp, burning pain through my shirt. I held my breath and tried not to ruin the moment by pulling away.

She leaned against me and her voice was very soft. “I wasn’t trying to blame you. I just thought you might know what happened was all. It’s not because of you. I know that.”

I nodded, clenching my teeth against the stabbing pain in my collarbone. She should be blaming me. Now was when she should be throwing a fit, demanding to know everything I knew because I finally knew something definitive and damning. And she had no idea.

She moved and the pain jolted along my shoulder and down my chest like an electric shock, those paddles, how the EMT yells clear. I gasped and let her go.

She leaned away from me fast, looking at the ground. There was a metal ball chain around her neck, tucked down inside her shirt. I wanted to explain, but the words were pretty much nonexistent. I stood up.

“Where are you going?” Her voice sounded hoarse.

“Nowhere. Let’s go for a walk.” I reached down, offering my hand. “I don’t think I can get back in your car. Feel like walking me home?”

Once she got to her feet, she tried to pull away, but I held on. For a second, we were standing by the side of the road, holding hands. Then she yanked her hand away in a hard jerk, like she couldn’t stand still long enough to let me touch her.

We walked down Welsh Street, toward the church, not talking much. At the churchyard, we stopped, standing out on the sidewalk.

Tate nodded toward the little cemetery. “They put the body in there. I can show you if you want.”

I shook my head. “That’s okay.”

“I promise I’m not going to do anything all girly and emotional-baggage-y.”

“I can’t go in the cemetery.”

The look she gave me was spectacularly unimpressed. “What are you talking about? Your dad is the minister. You can go wherever you want.”

“It’s complicated,” I said. “It’s just . . . this thing.”

She looked at me for a long time, like she was considering all the different things she could say.

Then she started for the edge of the property line. “Okay, we’ll go around and look from the side.”

She led me around the building and up to the fence, where a bed of orange flowers were turning brown.

“There,” she said, pointing over the fence. “They just put the headstone up. The little white one, back against the wall.”

She was pointing past the anonymous headstones and the crypt to the unconsecrated section, where early parishioners used to put anyone they thought was unclean. In the dark, only the marble markers showed with any clarity. They glowed palely from the shadows, while the granite ones were only faint outlines. The stone Tate was pointing to sat square and straight, but most of the others were starting to lean.

There were other plots in other places in the cemetery. Consecrated places. But the thing that wasn’t Natalie had been buried with the outcasts because it belonged there, which meant the unholy ground was exactly what the Morrigan had said it was—just another way for the town to play along, to be involved. Something they all agreed to, without having to say it.

Tate stood looking up at me and I knew suddenly that she wasn’t the kind of girl who ever looked away. She could take your skin off if you let her look long enough.

I closed my eyes. “I wish I could do something. I don’t know how to help you.”

Tate moved closer, and her voice was low and breathless, like she was telling me an awful secret. “You know what did it? What made me absolutely sure? It wasn’t how big her teeth seemed suddenly or the way her eyes got strange. I mean yeah, those things mattered, but they didn’t prove anything. It was her pajamas. These pink footie ones with bears on them—she used to wear them all the time, and then, a couple months before she died, I couldn’t find them anymore, but you know what? It didn’t matter because she never asked for them anymore, and she didn’t like picture books and she didn’t like toys. And I’d tell myself it was just because she was sick, but that’s not the real truth because at night, when you think all those things you can’t stand to think about during the day? At night, the real truth was, she wasn’t my sister.”

I stood in the wilted border, leaning on the fence. Beside me, Tate looked small and sad. Her mouth was meaner than I’d seen it in a while. For the first time since that afternoon under the oak tree, she wasn’t looking at me like she expected something.

I wanted to hold on to her, but everything was wrong—the time and the place and the way she jerked and fidgeted, like she couldn’t stand to be touched, so I settled for pressing my forehead against the top of the fence. “There’s something else I need to tell you.”

“So, tell me.”

“I like you.” When I said it out loud, the admission felt hopeless—inescapable, like I’d hit on something that until now, I just hadn’t had the words for. But it felt that way because it was true.

Her laugh was incredulous. “You what?”

I looked at the ground and the dark, drizzling sky and pretty much anyplace that wasn’t her. “I like you. A lot.” When I finally glanced at her, my face was hot and it was hard to keep looking.

She squinted up at me. Then she crossed her arms. “This is a really inappropriate place to be having this conversation.”

“I know. I like you anyway.”

Saying it a third time was like breaking some kind of spell. Her face went soft and far away. “Don’t say that unless you mean it.”

“I don’t say anything I don’t mean.” I leaned closer, smelling the metallic smell again. “Take your necklace off.”

“Why?”

“Because if you don’t, I can’t kiss you.”

She stood looking up at me. Then she reached back and undid the clasp. Her mouth was open a little. She shoved the necklace into her pocket and I put my hand on her cheek. Then I leaned in before I could think about it long enough to chicken out.

I’d never expected much from Tate. Long, bored looks, maybe. A couple rounds of vicious-clever ball breaking that I had no comebacks to. Maybe get my ass handed to me a few times at pool or darts or cards. Instead, here I was, kissing her behind the church. Her mouth was warm and I was surprised by how good it felt not to breathe.

She had her arms around my neck, then she was grabbing at the back of my shirt, fumbling behind her for the sloping ground, and we sat down. She was holding on to me, pushing me flat on the grass. Above her, the sky was wide and full of water. Against the fence, a huge oak tree spread its branches over the corner of the churchyard. The leaves that were left were wet, covered in tiny drops, and each one caught the light from the street in a collection of little starbursts.

Tate brushed my cheek with her fingers, like maybe she was brushing off the bright spots of light. But it was just the rain.

She glanced over her shoulder at the glittering tree, then turned back, smiling a smile that was sly and sort of tender. She was on top of me, straddling me. It’s strange when you’re not happy for a long, long time and then suddenly, you are.

She leaned down and I could taste ChapStick, smell iron and shampoo and under it, that crisp, clean smell.

We lay in the grass beside the cemetery fence, kissing and shivering. Her teeth started to chatter and I pulled her against me, which made me feel like a superhero for no apparent reason. She was clinging to the collar of my jacket like I’d just done something outstanding.

She put her hand on my chest, moving her fingers so that I got chills all over.

I pulled her closer, holding her so her head was tucked under my chin. “I’m not normal, Tate.”

“I know.” Her hand was working its way under my shirt, then touching my skin, sliding over my chest and my stomach, down into my jeans. “Does this feel good?”

I closed my eyes and nodded.

“You’re normal enough.”

Chapter Seventeen Confession

I got through school in a daze the next day. I was running on very little sleep, but the analeptic made things manageable. Roswell wanted to know what had made Tate so upset, and I told him a completely worthless story about feeling carsick, which he didn’t believe, but he left me alone after that.

I’d spent the morning preparing myself for another encounter with Tate, but she wasn’t at school. It was the first day she’d missed since before the funeral, and on the surface, it was way overdue. Even so, I couldn’t help thinking that after telling me all that stuff about her sister, or maybe because I’d kissed her, she was avoiding me.

The idea was more relieving than I would have expected. In the last few days, my life had gotten kind of unmanageable and Tate was a complication I didn’t know how to handle. Still, throughout the day, during lectures and homework reviews, I caught myself going back to kissing her.

By the time I got home, all I wanted was to do was sit down in front of the TV and turn off my brain.

When I walked in the front door, Emma was laughing. She came out of the living room as I was scraping my shoes and peeling off my wet jacket. She smiled in that wide, helpless way, like even if she wanted to, she couldn’t stop—it was just that funny. She was wearing a floppy black rain hat.

“It’s Janice’s,” she said, yanking the hat off and trying to flatten down her hair. “We were just messing around.” She reached for me with a worried expression, catching my face between her hands and pulling me down to look at her. “You look exhausted. Are you sure you’re okay?”

I nodded and was a little suprised to realize that I was telling the truth. The only reason I was exhausted was because I’d been out all night. “Just tired.”

Emma gave me a doubtful look and walked out again. I got an apple from the kitchen, then went into the family room to see what the deal with Janice was.

She was on the couch, leafing through a textbook. Her hair was down around her face and she was back to looking kind of plain and unfortunate.

“What are you doing here?” I said. “I gave you what you wanted, so quit harassing Emma.”

Janice flipped to the index, then back through the chapters. “I’m not harassing Emma. We’re doing homework. And not to be pedantic, but she came to me. I wasn’t out looking for pretty musicians, I was just attending classes.”

I sat down across from her and watched as she made notes in a little leather-bound book. “Why is someone like you even going to school? I mean, what’s the point?”

She ran her finger along the caption under a color diagram of a cell, then looked up. “The point is to learn everything I can about my field.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Your field?”

“Pharmacology, they’re calling it now.” She closed the book and leaned back. “Scientific knowledge changes so fast that it’s hard to keep up, but Emma’s been really nice. She explains a lot of the horticulture. I’ve never actually grown things before and it’s nice to understand things like seed propagation. She’s been giving me lessons.”

I nodded, reflecting that in a place like the House of Mayhem, keeping houseplants was likely to be tricky.

“Emma,” my mom called from out in the hall. “Are you going to use all that peat moss, or should I put it away?”

At the sound of her voice, Janice got a strange, awkward look. She turned toward the door.

“Emma,” my mom said, coming into the family room, and then she stopped.

Janice stood up, offering her hand. “Hello, I’m—”

“Get out,” my mom said. “I know what you are. Get out of my house.”

“Please . . .” Janice trailed off, taking her hand back, picking at the inside of her elbow.

My mom stood with her chin up and her shoulders back, like if she looked away for even a second, that might be all the time Janice needed to do something terrible.

Emma came in behind her with an armful of books and then just stood there. Janice was already edging toward the door, looking sad but like this was about what she’d expected.

Emma watched her. Then she turned and stared at our mother. “What’s going on? What did you say to her?”

My mom breathed in like she was making herself taller. “Tell her to get out,” she said, and the look on her face was one I’d never seen. “Tell her she’s not wanted here.”

Emma raised her eyebrows and made her mouth very small. Her cheeks got pink, which was a sure sign she was about to say something regrettable. It was normal for her to get pissed at our dad, but she never yelled at our mom. I couldn’t figure out if she didn’t because it would be too easy or because something about our mom’s flat silences could be scary.

Finally, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, like she was trying to sound patient. “She’s helping me with botany class.”

It sounded almost convincing, but my mom wasn’t deterred for a second. “She’s unnatural.”

I dug my fingernails into my palms, while Janice just stood there.

Emma kept her temper for roughly three seconds. Then she threw down the stack of books. “So, you’re determined to hate her just because she’s not exactly like you? Does it matter that she’s nice or that ever since I met her, she hasn’t done anything but help?”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about. She’s the worst kind of creature.”

“You don’t even know her! They’re not automatically bad. What about Mackie?”

“Don’t you dare bring him into this. Mackie is fine. He grew up in a decent household, with decent principles. He’s like us.”

Emma stood over her scattered books and said, very quietly, “Well, maybe they’re like us too.”

My mom didn’t answer right away. When she smiled, it was hard and bitter. “Like us. Tell me, do any of our friends and neighbors have a fanatical devotion to a demon? Do they steal children? Do the parishioners at United Methodist kidnap babies and farm them like cattle and sacrifice them to a lost cause? Mackie is a sweet, normal boy, and they are monsters.”

All of us got very still. The dropped books shifted and slid over each other, coming to rest on the carpet. My mom looked like she wanted to cover her mouth with her hands, take it back before she went too far.

Suddenly, I was sure this was it. We were going to talk about all the nasty, screwed-up things in Gentry, like how nice, normal babies got switched out for freaks. Maybe even how I wasn’t really her son and a kid named Malcolm Doyle was dead because a bunch of people who lived underground got off on collecting blood.

We were going to get into the dirty stuff.

My mom took a deep breath and said with her hands clasped tight, “They always come back. It was just a matter of time. They watch and they wait, and then, when you let your guard down, they come in and take everything.”

“Stop calling her they. She’s a person!”

My mom just went on in the same deadly voice. “I knew they’d take my children if I gave them the chance. I did everything I could to prevent it, every trick and charm. I filled the house with bells and coins and embroidery scissors, and in the end, it didn’t matter. Someone took down the scissors, and they came in and got him anyway.”

She and Emma stood looking at each other. I pictured the house, full of her charms and tricks. How later, she must have had to throw all of it away just so I’d stop screaming in the crib.

Emma took a deep breath. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I took them—I took the scissors down and didn’t put them back—I did it. Is that what you want? Is that the big revelation you were waiting for? That I was four years old and a stupid little kid?”

The room felt too small for the four of us, even with me trying to make myself inconspicuous and Janice backing up against the bookcase. My hands were shaking and Emma looked furious.

I realized numbly that she did blame herself.

There were the simple reasons—because she took the scissors down, because she didn’t scream or call out when someone came in the window and took her brother. Because she didn’t even go for help after he was gone but stayed with me all night, sticking her hands through the bars. But those were the simple reasons. More than that, I was here because she’d spent years smiling and listening and protecting me. Because she loved me. I was everything because of her.

“Fine!” Emma yelled, and her voice spiked up, weird and shrill. “Fine, it’s my fault, okay?”

Our mom stood alone in the middle of the room, shoulders slumped, arms limp at her sides. “No,” she said. “It’s mine.”

Her tone was defiant, though, like when people really mean that it’s someone else’s fault.

Janice was still standing against the bookshelf, still touching the inside of her arm. When I cut my eyes toward the hall, she just ducked her head and slipped out. A few seconds later, I heard the front door open and then close, and we were alone with fifteen years of silence and the sad, patient ghost of Malcolm Doyle.

None of us said anything and the room seemed to buzz with a low charge that had nothing to do with the lights or the wiring.

Then Emma sighed and threw up her hands. She gave me a hopeless look and walked out. My mother stood alone in the middle of the room with her back to me and her hands pressed against her face.

“Mom?” I reached out and turned her by the shoulders. “Mom, don’t.”

“What have you been doing?” she said, and her voice was high, bordering on hysterical. “Have you gone underground? What in God’s name did you do?”

I jerked away. The panic in her voice was alarming and I couldn’t close my mouth.

“Sit down,” she said. “We need to talk.”

I sat on the edge of the sofa and when she sat across from me, she didn’t say anything for a long time. Against the wall, the upright clock ticked steadily on and on. I had a scary picture of the two of us, sitting across from each other for the rest of my life and never knowing what to say.

After a long time, she reached across the coffee table, taking me by the wrist.

I held still and waited.

She rubbed her thumb across the back of my hand. “When I met your father, I thought it would be my chance at forgetting. A fresh start, but I was so naive. They’re never really gone when there’s still a chance they could gain something.”

I closed my eyes, trying to think of something they’d want to gain—something I could give them. They had the whole House of Mayhem, full of laughing monsters and flooded tunnels. “I already gave them what they wanted. It wasn’t even bad or dangerous. They just want to be loved.”

She laughed and it was an unpleasant sound, hard and bitter. “Love? Don’t you believe it. They’re looking for a warm body. They have a tax to pay, just like everyone at United Methodist tithes to the bank box each year and the same way everyone lines up in April to give money to the government. It’s like that, except their account only comes due every seven years and the coin of the realm happens to be blood.”

I nodded and didn’t think about Malcolm Doyle. I didn’t think about his blond hair or his true-blue eyes or his bad, bloody death. If I let myself picture it, I’d be dreaming about him for years.

My mom sat with her head bent, looking at her hands. “They guard the town and keep it safe and they make us lucky. It takes certain sacrifices to do that. And because they’re not completely immune to sentimentality, they prefer to use someone else’s children.”

“You, you mean?” But what I meant was Malcolm Doyle, Natalie Stewart, anyone who was stolen away so they could donate their blood.

“I was a special case. Not intended for general use.” Her eyes were vague and downcast, like I was supposed to see how ironic the whole thing was. “The Lady liked me. She called me precious and kept me like a pet and told me about all the offerings they’d made to her. Little kids who cried and screamed. How six hundred years ago, they used warriors who came to her offering their victories and defeats. How she would never let anything happen to me. She kept me for so long it was like being kept in a jar.”

“But if the Lady didn’t want you to go home, why didn’t she just stop you from leaving?”

“She would have. She would have kept me, but someone came and took me back. A strange creature—a monster— took me out of the hill one night and led me out through the park. Then she left me on my parents’ doorstep, the way you’d leave a lost dog.”

I stared at her, trying to understand the hurt in her voice. It made no sense. “But that should be a good thing, right? You went home.”

“You can’t,” she said. “Not really. They find ways to stop missing you after a while. They move on. And what do you do with a girl who can’t stand the smell of car exhaust? Who goes blind in the sunlight? Listen,” she said. “I know them. I know how they think, and it’s always in terms of what they can gain.”

“But what can they gain?”

She shrugged, loose and jerky. “I don’t know, but you can be sure it’s something. They’ll use you, manipulate you, and then they’ll throw you away when they don’t need you anymore.” She smiled suddenly, a scary, helpless smile. “I sat on a cushion at her feet and played with a clockwork bird. I sang little songs and she sang them back. You can’t go back to them. Not for any reason.”

I took a deep breath. “They told me if I didn’t help them, they’d hurt Emma. I can’t just sit around and let that happen.”

My mom raised herself up and leaned close. “Emma is almost twenty years old. She can look after herself. You are rare—maybe valuable—and they want something from you. When someone underground wants something, it’s never harmless. Do not go back.”

“What if they do something awful to her to punish me?”

“They’ll always punish you,” she said, “because they hate to lose. When they stole Malcolm, it was to punish me for leaving.”

“But you weren’t the one who decided to leave. You were just a kid—a victim.”

“But I did leave, and the Lady can’t forgive that because it’s all that matters.” She took her hands away from her face and looked up at me. “They’re just going to use you, Mackie. What will it take to make you see how dangerous they are?”

But when I tried to picture dangerous, there was just the look on Janice’s face, this mix of loss and confusion. Having Emma explain seed propagation wasn’t using, it was just sharing a common interest. It was what you did when you wanted to be friends.

“I’m better,” I said finally. “This is maybe the first time in my life I’ve ever felt okay, and it’s because of them.”

“Don’t you understand? They bought you. They found your price.”

But in the grand scheme of things, my price wasn’t unreasonable. They’d given me more than I’d ever hoped for, but the tipping point hadn’t been relief from pain or exhaustion or even the promise of being normal. Emma was a thought so big and clear suddenly that there was no room in my head for anything else. “I didn’t have a choice.”

My mom sat on the edge of the high-backed chair with her arms around herself. Her eyes were clear and hard. “Everything in life involves choice.”

Chapter Eighteen Beauty and Truth

Emma and my mom were already gone by the time I went down for breakfast on Tuesday, and I ate cold cereal alone, standing over the sink.

I closed my eyes and tried to hear the roar of the crowd at the Starlight, taste what it was like to kiss Tate, feel her hand in mine. But there was just the conversation with my mom the day before, like a scrape I could test with my finger. Something about the rawness made me want to reach for it and just keep digging.

In the living room, my dad stood at the window with his hands clasped behind his back, staring out at the empty street.

I sat down on the floor and leaned against the couch. The sound of the rain was giving me a dull, hazy feeling, like I might be sleeping but wasn’t sure.

I leaned against the couch, thinking how hard it was to ever communicate with anyone. How I couldn’t ever figure out how to say all the things I meant. Because it was more complicated. More complicated than kissing Tate and more complicated than the terrible secret I knew about her sister. It was the claustrophobic idea of someone getting that close, of knowing that much about you. How, for her, I’d have to turn into something real.

I kept thinking about her mouth. How she’d slid her hands under my shirt. How I was so excellent at picking things that weren’t right that it was hard to know if anything was what I should actually want.

I couldn’t help thinking that maybe making out by the churchyard had been some kind of reward, a prize for believing her or a bribe so I’d tell the rest of what I knew. That Natalie was still alive. But I’d only just discovered that interesting fact myself, and there was no way she could have known, so the thing in the grass had to have been real. It had to mean that she’d wanted to kiss me. At least a little?

“You’re in a brown study this morning,” my dad said, turning from the window.

I shrugged and didn’t correct him. What I was was completely out of my depth.

I left for school earlier than usual, trudging along Orchard and cutting across the footbridge. It was foggy down in the ravine and mist hung around my feet as I crossed the bridge, thinking about my mom’s warning, which was in complete agreement with what the Morrigan had said about keeping out of the Lady’s way.

I crossed Welsh Street with my hands in my pockets. The neighborhood was deserted and I was starting to feel lost again, the same way I did at night sometimes, like maybe I didn’t exist, when I saw someone ahead of me. Someone in a gray jacket, with short, messy hair, and I hurried to catch up.

“Tate, hey.”

She looked over her shoulder and made a face that wasn’t even close to a smile. Waved one hand, dropped it again.

I came up next to her. “How are things?”

She shrugged and didn’t answer.

I turned so I was in front of her, walking backward. “Did you do that worksheet for English?”

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t pretend this is a normal conversation, okay? Don’t keep acting like everything’s fine.”

“What do you want me to say?”

Tate sighed. “Why do you keep asking that? I don’t want you to say anything. I want it to matter that she’s gone.”

I felt hot and awkward suddenly but didn’t look away. “Nobody’s saying it doesn’t matter. It’s just not something we can help, you know? It’s not like we can do anything about it.”

And that was true. It was the indisputable truth, but I felt like a liar saying it. Natalie was alive until Friday. Right now, I should be figuring out a way to save her because that’s what brave, honorable people did and I had a weird feeling that Tate could see the guilt on me, this big dishonest smear, splashed across my face.

Everything about her seemed to have locked down since our fifteen or twenty minutes by the graveyard. It was disconcerting to think that I had kissed her and now I could barely look at her.

“How come you don’t have your car?”

She pushed past me. “It wouldn’t start.”

I stepped in front of her again. “What’s wrong with it?”

“If I knew that, don’t you think I’d have fixed it?” She gave me an exasperated look. “Look, I’m in kind of a hurry. Could you maybe let me keep walking?”

By the time I got to English, I was feeling pretty agitated, but I couldn’t tell if it was with myself or with Tate. The idea that she’d only made out with me to thank me for finally admitting I believed her or else to make some kind of point was just low, but on another level, I didn’t really care. I still wanted to kiss her.

A few rows in front of me, Alice sat staring at the whiteboard and playing with her hair. She kept winding it around her finger, then unwinding it again. Her face was smooth and regular, like something you already know is going to be imperfection free.

“Tate,” Mrs. Brummel said, with a sugary smile, like she was trying really hard to prove that nothing uncomfortable had happened on Friday. “Would you hand back the quizzes, please?”

Tate slid out of her desk and she was more like something by Van Gogh, all color and texture and light. Her hair was standing up in a kind of rooster crest and her elbows were sharp through her thermal shirt. She took the stack of quizzes and started down my aisle, sorting through the papers.

I leaned forward in my seat. “Jenna—Jenna, do you have a pen?”

Jenna fished one out of her bag and handed it to me, smiling like a toothpaste ad or how a cat would smile if it had braces and highlighted hair and something to smile about.

I didn’t have my notebook, so I started going through my pockets, looking for ticket stubs, gum wrappers, receipts. Finally, I found a piece of a band flier and wrote on the back, Can I walk you home?

When Tate got to my seat, I held out the note, but she didn’t look at it. She turned the quiz facedown on my desk and went to keep moving down the row.

I caught her wrist. This wasn’t something I’d planned ahead of time, and it took me by surprise. Her skin was cool and her bones felt small in my hand.

For a second, we stayed like that, me holding her by the wrist and her letting me. Then she jerked back like I was contagious.

She handed back the rest of the quizzes and took her seat without looking at Mrs. Brummel or at anyone else. I watched her, but she didn’t raise her head or glance around.

We spent the class period going through the answers to the quiz and discussing each one in mind-numbing detail. I flipped through my textbook, looking for interesting pictures or maybe some magic solution to all my problems.

I was skimming the Romantics section when I turned the page to a photo of a painted jar. The people on the jar were all in profile. They danced and capered and sprawled around playing little flutes. They reminded me of the after party in the House of Mayhem, all celebration and awkward, spooky grace.

On the opposite page, there was a poem. It described how beauty and truth mattered more than anything else. They were the same thing.

But it didn’t matter how pretty you painted the world. The fact was, my friends didn’t know me, Tate didn’t want me, and the truth was a really ugly thing.

I closed the book and stared at the clock, willing it to move faster.

In front of me, Alice and Jenna were discussing the Halloween party out at the lake and whether there’d be a bonfire this year or if the rain would mean they’d have to settle for little campfires in the barbecue pits under the picnic shelters. I watched them because they were both pretty and it was kind of nice to have something normal to distract me from my life.

Alice was wearing another installment in her wide selection of low-cut shirts, and I was enjoying tormenting myself a little, which Roswell would say is a very masochistic attitude. Also, self-indulgent, but her hair was honey brown and shiny, and thinking about Tate made me feel like an idiot.

Alice turned and caught me watching them. She gave me a bored look. “Are you going to the party, Mackie?” Her eyebrows were raised, but her lids were half lowered, like looking at me was making her tired.

On another day—any other day—I would have taken the question for what it was. Her version of being better than me, of writing me off and making me feel inferior. But things had been massively screwed up lately. They’d been downright obnoxious, and I just smiled, raising my eyebrows, leaning forward like I’d seen Roswell do a million times. “Why? Did you want to go with me?”

Alice opened her mouth and blinked. She closed her mouth, and I was surprised and kind of gratified to see that she was blushing. Beyond her, Tate was making dutiful notes on her quiz. I thought I saw her shoulders tighten but wasn’t sure.

Alice gaped at me and then recovered. “Are you asking me to go with you?”

Her voice was playful, challenging, and I kept smiling, liking how her mouth looked soft and shiny. “Well, that depends on whether or not you’re saying yes.”

“Yes,” she said, biting her lip, giving me a conspiratorial smile.

Behind her, Tate sat stubbornly at her desk, staring down at her quiz like the answers mattered.

Chapter Nineteen The Lake

It wasn’t a date. Or at least, it made things easier to keep telling myself that.

It wasn’t a date because I was meeting Alice there. But it was something, because I’d made actual plans to meet her, like normal people go to parties and make plans with girls.

Roswell was still intent on hooking up with Stephanie, but the prospect didn’t seem to cause him much anxiety. When I asked how I should proceed with Alice, he just shrugged and said, “Well, you could start by having a conversation.”

After dinner, I went over to his house. His mom let me in with her hair up in some kind of fancy braid. She was in the middle of fastening the clasp on her necklace and gave me a smile. “He’s in his room, getting all dolled up for his fans. Do you think you can prevail on him to drive responsibly?”

“I can try. I don’t know how much influence I have.”

That made her laugh, and when she did, she looked like him. Her eyes were the same shape and the same deep, frosty blue. She adjusted her grip on the necklace and gave me a one-armed hug. “Don’t sell yourself short, buster. He listens to you.”

Roswell was upstairs, trying to attach his enamel fangs. He’d put in a little more effort now that it was actually Halloween, and his hair was slicked back in a weird-looking pompadour.

I sat at his desk, which was covered with the pieces of his latest clock project, and watched him fumble with the tooth adhesive, squirting it on his fingers and then wiping it off on his jeans.

After he’d positioned the fangs to his satisfaction, he gave me a disapproving look. “What did you say to my mom to make her giggle like a schoolgirl?”

“Nothing untoward. Why does she always seem to think you drive like we’re holding up a bank?”

Roswell grinned and rolled his eyes. “Because that’s what teenagers do, right? They also carve swastikas into their arms, steal prescription drugs from old people, and freebase cocaine. I need to institute a policy where she stops watching 60 Minutes and pretty much all public service announcements.”

I studied the half-built clock. The housing was an old rotary phone, the dial replaced with mismatched foreign coins for the numbers. His desktop was covered with pins and little cogs.

I picked up a brass coin with a hole through the center and studied it. “She never says any of those things to me.”

“That’s because she thinks you’re the good one.”

“I am the good one. Where’d you get all these clock parts?”

“Where do you think? The twins gave them to me. Swear to God, every time Danny fixes something, he winds up with a whole shit ton of ‘extra’ pieces.” Roswell folded his arms and looked me up and down. “No costume?”

I shook my head. “Since when do I need a costume?”

He grinned and thumped me on the shoulder. “Since you stopped looking all weird and cracked out on your own and started looking halfway normal.”

I raised my eyebrows and stood up. “Hey, maybe this is my costume.”

The lake was dry and had been since before I was born.

It sat on the outskirts of town, smelly and empty, a big muddy gouge. The shore was jagged with rocks, but out in the center, it had turned swampy as it filled with rainwater. The area around the lake bed had been a park, with picnic shelters and wooden docks for boating and fishing, but the recreational activities had all been abandoned when the lake dried up. People still went jogging on the paths and walked their dogs through the brush, but mostly, it was prime for minor drug deals and high school parties.

At the south end of the lake, we pulled up to a dilapidated cluster of picnic shelters. The fire pits were all lit, burning like lighthouse beacons. They flickered in a damp breeze as we turned into the gravel parking lot. The path to the shelters was choked with weeds and littered with fast-food wrappers and beer cans. The rain was the same thin drizzle that it had been for weeks.

Alice, Jenna, and Stephanie were huddled together in the middle shelter, wearing winter coats over their costumes. Alice was holding a beer can with both hands, standing close to the fire and hunching her shoulders against the cold.

Roswell and I came up to them and when Alice saw me, she smiled and waved me over to stand with her. Roswell tossed me a beer and I popped it open. It was disorienting to be standing at the center of things instead of watching from the periphery.

Jeremy Sayers came up next to me. He was dressed as a pirate, with a three-cornered hat and an eye patch. “Doyle,” he said, clapping me hard on the shoulder. “You weird pansy fuck!”

It was hard to tell if the designation was supposed to be a compliment. He was smiling, so I took a shot at normalcy and smiled back.

Tyson Knoll squeezed in on the other side of our circle. Also a pirate. “Dude, did you tell him about the blood?”

I tried hard not to sound apprehensive. “What blood?”

“On your locker! Did you freaking love that or what?”

I took a drink of my beer and nodded, not sure what he expected me to say. I would have used a different word. Not love. Definitely not love.

Jeremy swung an arm over my shoulders. He smelled like Axe deodorant and hard alcohol. “Remember how Mason cut his lip in PE last year and you hit the court like a total pussy? Do you remember that? It was so freaking funny!”

I stood next to Alice, trying to look like the story was not completely embarrassing, but she just smiled up at me. I was surprised at how paranoid the years of keeping a low profile had made me. How every unusual occurrence was a threat and every encounter was suspicious. I’d spent so long protecting myself from everything that I didn’t even know how to tell the difference between what was dangerous and what wasn’t.

They were loud and unpredictable, and before, I’d always watched them with the same fascination I had when I watched Roswell. The way some of the less-popular girls were watching Jenna and Alice now, not resentful or jealous exactly, but like they just wanted to be them. Cammie Winslow stood by the railing, one shelter over. She was dressed in an oversized clown costume, looking lost and hopeful, like she would have given anything to be standing with the rest of us, laughing and drinking cheap beer with people like Jeremy and Tyson. And yeah, they were basically idiots, but I’d never known what it felt like to be included before and now, they were acting like I belonged there.

The air was damp and chilly, and the heat from the fire hit my face in a dry rush even though I stayed farther back than the others. The barbecue enclosure and the grate were steel, burned black and caked with soot, but a fog of iron still drifted out through the smoke. I was steady, though, and happy. Everything felt good, like this was how it should be.

Out in the gravel parking lot, some of the guys from the wrestling team were trying to get a fire started so they could burn a straw-and-burlap scarecrow of the Dirt Witch, but the rain was too heavy and mostly they just got a lot of smoke. It drifted toward us in dark billows and smelled unpleasantly like lighter fluid.

Alice moved closer, reaching for my hand. Hers was smaller and broader than Tate’s, with smooth, soft palms and electric-blue nail polish. Her grip was firm and I thought of the Morrigan suddenly, how she always wanted to stand close or be touching me. Like a little kid, always reaching to make sure I was close by.

Alice was beautiful, though, nothing like the monsters in the House of Mayhem. Her beauty wasn’t conditional the way Janice and Carlina’s was, but stable and constant, catching people’s attention, making them want her to notice them, even for a second.

We stood with the guys from wrestling and football while they told stories about dickish things they’d done to other people—in the name of fun, of course—and passed a bottle of Maker’s Mark around the circle. Roswell and Stephanie had gone off to talk, which probably meant to make out. I was on my own, navigating the world of normal people, but it was easier than I’d ever thought it could be. I wasn’t failing at it.

I took the bottle from Alice, and when I drank, the heat felt good, burning all the way down. I thought I tasted a metallic whisper of her tongue stud but couldn’t be sure.

Alice was looking up at me. Her eyes were deep, radiant blue and she was smiling that sweet smile, like everything was and would always be good. I put my hands on her shoulders and I kissed her.

The pressure of her mouth was warm. She tasted like Maker’s and something indefinable, followed by a breath of surgical steel, making my head spin.

I kissed her again, moving closer. The fire was hot and the rain made soft pattering sounds out on the gravel parking lot. Her hands moved over my back and I was very aware of her body against mine and then her tongue, venomous with the barbell, moving over my bottom lip, sliding into my mouth.

Then pain.

For a second, I didn’t know where I was or where the hurt was coming from. It was like a bright, scorching light. It glared down on me and there was nothing else in the whole world.

Alice pressed against me. She had her hand on the back of my neck, pulling me close to her mouth and her cold, excruciating kiss, holding me there. Then I jerked free and staggered back.

I stumbled away from the circle of firelight, bracing my hands on the wooden rail that ran around the outside of the picnic shelter, and tried to think. The pain was immense, like nothing I’d ever felt. I’d never known there could be so many different ways to hurt.

My arms were numb and heavy. I fumbled in my coat for the glass bottle, prying the cork out, slopping it all over my hands in the process.

I drank a huge swallow of the analeptic and pressed my forehead against the rail, curling in on myself as nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing fucking happened. Then something did, but it wasn’t anything good. It came in a hard rush that wasn’t fixed or better, and I hung over the wooden railing, retching. It was grim and miserable and went on forever.

Alice was saying my name, but I couldn’t answer. The party seemed to be happening a million miles away from me, in another country. Another universe. There was just the ground and the railing and nothing else.

“He’s tanked,” Roswell said from somewhere above me, and then I felt his hand between my shoulders. “Shit, he’s completely gone.”

“Should we get him some water?” said Alice, and I kept my eyes closed, leaning on the railing as the cold got worse and then the shaking started.

Roswell stood next to me with his hand on the back of my neck. “It’s cool, don’t worry about it. I’ll make sure he gets home okay.”

“Yeah, that might be a good idea,” Alice said, and the tone of her voice was flat and far away. “Jesus, that’s nasty.”

I was aware of certain things, that Roswell was holding me up, making me walk to his car. Stopping and letting me lean down so I could heave into the gravel. He dropped me into the passenger seat, cranked the window down, and closed the door.

Then he got in and started the car, glancing over at me.

“What’s wrong?” His voice was loud, so sharp that he sounded angry.

I knew I should be careful, keep the secret, but I was too far gone to talk around it. My chest was working in huge spasms and I could barely breathe. “I kissed her.”

“And then you went into anaphylactic shock?”

I closed my eyes and let the rain patter against my face through the open window. “She has her tongue pierced.”

Roswell didn’t say anything else. He jerked the car into reverse and swung out of the parking lot, then turned down the bumpy stretch of dirt that led out to the main road. I slumped in the passenger seat, resting my head against the door and trying not to puke in his car.

Somewhere in the sickness and the pain, I remembered Luther’s voice. It echoed in my head, that whispered declaration, You’re dying. Before the ruinous kiss, the night had been almost normal, but it couldn’t last. There was no normal. Not for people like me.

Out on the paved road, Roswell started asking questions again, sounding more agitated than ever. He was talking too fast, making it hard to follow the line of conversation. “Okay, what should I be doing? If you need to pull over, just tell me. Should I find you some water? Should I call Emma, tell her I’m bringing you home right now and you look like hell?”

“Take me to the dead end at Orchard.”

Roswell took a deep breath, sounding rigidly calm. “Okay, you’re slurring. Say that again, because it sounded like you just asked for something completely insane.”

“You have to take me to the end of Orchard. I have to go to the slag heap.”

Chapter Twenty Horrible Little World

Roswell parked at the top of the ravine and opened his door. In the glare of the dome light, I saw his face, hollowed by shadows and so rigid and watchful I barely recognized him.

I expected an argument, but he just pulled me out of the car and steered me down the path to the bridge. I reflected dully that he was a good friend, if you could call leaving someone half conscious alone on a bridge being a good friend.

As soon as I reached the bottom of the ravine, I felt desperately relieved. And much, much worse. I knelt in the mud, pressing my forehead against the wet slag, whispering for Carlina, Janice, anyone. When the door materialized out of the gravel, I slumped against it and fell inside.

The way down was choppy and disconnected, a series of slides that froze for a second and then switched over. Then I was back in the cavernous lobby, in the House of Mayhem, and I had the deep hopeless feeling that I was never going to get away from their horrible little world. My world. I had no place else to go.

The Morrigan was on the floor by the reception desk, running a little tin train back and forth across the stone. She glanced up when I stumbled into the lobby, and I knew then, from the look on her face, that it was bad. She jumped up, kicking the train out of her way, and came tearing across the room to me.

She grabbed my hand and tugged so hard I almost fell. “Goodness, what happened? Who did this?”

I shook my head, too far gone to explain that I was way more at fault than anyone else.

The Morrigan let me go and ran back to the desk. She opened the top drawer and pulled out a heavy brass bell. She held it over her head, ringing it and shouting, “Janice!” She went to one of the doorways, still clanging the bell, and I had a half-formed thought that I might black out from the noise. “Janice! Bring the exigency serum and the needle.”

Then Janice was there, reaching for my arm, pushing back the sleeve of my jacket. “Here, keep still.”

I steadied myself and tried to focus. She was holding a syringe, but instead of a steel needle, it was fitted with a brass tip that looked too heavy to pierce the skin. I realized with a numb fascination that she was going to stick me anyway, but my head was throbbing and I couldn’t work up the kind of mental investment it took to care.

I had to lean against the reception desk just to stay upright. Janice positioned the syringe, placing the tip against the inside of my elbow and driving it in. A hot pain radiated up my arm as she pushed the plunger down. The serum was a deep brown, rushing out of the syringe and into my blood, burning as it went. I closed my eyes, tipping my head back as the pain peaked and then rolled off. Janice pulled the needle out and I started to shake. The feelings that came next were weak knees and dizziness, unpleasant but familiar. I sank down onto the floor.

Janice put away the syringe, and after a second, I could focus. She was standing over me in her romper and a long, embroidered bathrobe. Her hair was half up and half down, like she’d been asleep.

“I didn’t mean to wake you up,” I muttered, leaning back against the desk. “Thanks for the shot. I feel better now.”

She crouched down, taking my face between her hands and staring into my eyes like she was checking my pupils. Then she yanked my mouth open and shook her head. “Are you trying to kill yourself? What the bloody blue devil have you been putting in your mouth?” She turned to the Morrigan, who was still standing rigidly by the desk, holding her bell. “He needs to lie down. Put him someplace quiet.”

I’d never heard anyone in the House of Mayhem talk to the Morrigan that way, like they’d talk to a servant or a little kid, but she just nodded and took my hand. Hers was so warm that I almost couldn’t stand it. She pulled me toward one of the narrow doorways and led me down a dark hall.

The room was a high-ceilinged bedroom, and I knew that it had to be hers. The floor was covered with a flowery green rug and there was a big four-story dollhouse in one corner, but most of the room was taken up with a giant canopied bed.

“Here,” she said, pulling back the covers. “Rest here.”

I sank onto the bed in my wet jacket and my muddy shoes, shivering and turning on my side.

The Morrigan stood over me. “Are you ever going to learn that you have certain limitations? You can get along in the world, you can survive, but you can’t be like them. I don’t have a serum or a tonic for that. It doesn’t matter how you abuse yourself. You’ll never be able to live the same life they do.”

I didn’t point out the absurdity of Them. Everyone in Gentry was a member of Them, but so was everyone in the House of Mayhem. I was the only one who was not a part of Them. I was just a wayward stranger, outside all of it.

“I don’t want the same life as everyone else,” I whispered, and my voice sounded breathless and ragged. “I just want to live my life.”

“Well, you need the analeptic for that, and you need to start paying more mind to your health. You’ve been very careless with yourself, but you’re here now, you’re safe, and we intend to take good care of you.”

The Morrigan took out a handkerchief and dipped it in a bowl of water by the bed. She wiped my face, scrubbing at the waxy streaks from Alice’s whiskers.

Then she leaned close and whispered in my ear. “I thought my sister had done this to you. I saw you there at the door and I thought that she’d summoned the Cutter and ruined you.”

I shook my head, trying to tell her that nothing was anyone’s fault. That no one had ruined me.

“I loved my sister,” she said, wiping my eyelids with the handkerchief. The water was cold and smelled like pond scum and dead leaves, but it felt nice against my face. I was starting to think that maybe I was home, even if it was a weird, creepy home where I didn’t want to live. Her hands were small and careful. “I loved her so much, but in the end, I couldn’t support her. Is it hypocritical to love a person and still find fault with their actions?”

I blinked away the water and didn’t answer. The question didn’t make sense. There weren’t rules or instructions when it came to loving someone.

“I did a bad thing,” the Morrigan whispered, climbing onto the bed and settling herself on my shins.

The room was soft at the edges, swimming in and out of focus, and above me, the canopy seemed to go on and on. I felt numb, like whatever Janice had injected me with might have taken care of the pain, but it made me dim and stupid, too drugged-up to function.

The Morrigan wriggled up to lie beside me on the pillow. “My sister takes children sometimes. Not for any real purpose, but just to keep them. She might take one because it’s pretty or because it amuses her. And she took a girl, this lovely, clever little girl, and raised her as a toy.”

I couldn’t follow everything, but I got the part where somehow, the Morrigan thought keeping kids as pets was worse than taking kids to kill them. I closed my eyes, picturing a little girl with a blue church dress and blond hair. The image was faded and familiar, marked with creases like it had been folded, but my head was full of white lights and echoes, and I couldn’t quite place it.

The Morrigan twirled the handkerchief, trailing the corner of it over my face. “I took her back. I went to my sister’s rooms, deep into the House of Misery, and I took her. I brought her back to her family. It was the right thing to do, but my sister loathes me for it. The lake went dry shortly after and then came right back to devil us in the tunnels. She leeches all the joy from the town and sends rain.” The Morrigan leaned close to my ear and there was a low, earnest sadness in her voice. “I betrayed her, and now we are estranged. She will punish me for the rest of my life, for one little girl.”

I nodded, keeping my eyes closed. The damp cloth was cold on my face and I knew where the faded picture came from. I’d seen it a thousand times in the front hall, every time I passed the glass-fronted cabinet with the Dutch figurines and the teacups.

“My mother,” I said, and my voice sounded harsh and unfamiliar, like someone else was whispering in my ear.

Chapter Twenty-One Blessed

I woke up in the dark, sprawled on the Morrigan’s four-poster bed with the blankets tangled around my legs. The smell of the sheets was musty and unfamiliar, like the air in a strange attic.

When my eyes adjusted, I began to sort out objects. There was the giant dollhouse and, over in another corner, a heavy dresser with a hinged mirror. The Morrigan was asleep next to me, curled up with her thumb in her mouth and a filthy-looking doll clutched against her chest. Her hair had fallen back from her face and she looked uncommonly peaceful, like a little kid.

I untangled myself from the blankets and swung my feet down onto the floor. The inside of my arm still stung where Janice had stuck me with the syringe, but I felt better than I usually did after a reaction and much better than I had any right to, considering I’d recently had Alice’s tongue stud in my mouth.

I left the Morrigan asleep in her massive bed and made my way back out through the lobby, up the corridor and into the rain.

When I got to Roswell’s house, the porch light was off and his car was in the driveway. It was way past midnight and the ground floor was dark, but there was a light in his window. I stood in his mom’s flower border, in the shadow of the garage, and texted him to come down.

He met me at the side door, looking like he was about to say something, but I shook my head. He shrugged and pointed toward Smelter Park. We walked the two blocks without talking.

At the park, Roswell headed for a wooden picnic table at the edge of the playground and sat down on the bench, leaning forward with his hood up and his coat sleeves pulled down over his hands. I had an idea that everyone was starting to get used to the weather, and if it went on much longer, we’d all just learn to live like this, no umbrellas and no raincoats. We’d all just be perpetually damp all the time.

I sat next to him, trying to formulate what I wanted to say, but my throat hurt and none of the words were even close to right. “So, what are you still doing up?”

He shrugged. “Working on the phone clock, waiting for a sign that you weren’t dead. I tried to call you, but it wouldn’t even send me to voice mail.”

His voice sounded easy, like classic Roswell, but the way he was watching made me nervous.

He turned and put his hand on my arm, somewhere between hitting and grabbing on. “You scared the hell out of me. What happened?”

I looked out at the empty playground, the rusting slide and abandoned swings, trying to act normal. My heart was racing like it did when I got nervous before a class presentation. On the other side of a low fence, the dump hill was just a hulking outline against the dark backdrop of trees and sky.

I could feel Roswell looking at me, watching the side of my face.

“Okay,” he said finally. “This isn’t like a personal attack or anything, but lately you’ve been way weirder than usual. Would you please just tell me what’s going on?”

My heart was beating so fast that it hurt. I closed my eyes before I answered. “I’m not a real person.”

That made him laugh, short and hard, almost a bark. “Yes. You are a real person. Whether or not you’re a crazy person remains to be seen, but I’m not sitting here talking to myself.”

Hearing him say it was like being absolved. I was supposed to be happy, but instead I just felt awful. I hunched forward and covered my head with my hands.

“What’s it like?” he said. His voice was very low. “Just tell me why you’re like this.”

Like I was missing some key ingredient that would make me as whole and as normal as everyone else.I looked down at the grass so I wouldn’t have to look at Roswell. Then I told him the story in pieces. The open window, the screen, the crib and how Emma wasn’t afraid of me, how she reached her hand in through the bars. How, on some fundamental level, I was nothing but a parasite, the same way cowbirds and cuckoos were.

I waited for him to call me a liar or tell me I was crazy. Gentry was good at keeping its secrets, and people were just so used to denying any part of the picture that didn’t suit them.

The playground was at one end of the park, past the baseball diamonds and a big rectangle of mowed grass. When I was little, I’d wanted more than anything to play on the playground but had settled for games on the grass, first tag, then later, Frisbee and touch football, and Roswell had never minded that I had to stay far away from the monkey bars and the merry-go-round.

Roswell took a deep breath, glancing over his shoulder at the street. “It’s never happened in my family,” he said finally. “The stealing, the switching, whatever. It doesn’t happen to us.”

For a minute, I didn’t even know what to say to that. It seemed like a bold statement, given the history of the town. “Are you sure?”

“Unshakably.”

“It seems like it’s happened to pretty much everyone in Gentry somewhere down the line. I mean, everyone’s cousin or father or grandmother or great-uncle has a story about a relative who got really freaking weird and then died.”

He grinned, shaking his head. “Sordid, right? But in the Reed household, it doesn’t happen.”

I stared at him. “Why not?”

He shrugged. “We’re charmed.” He said it like he was making a joke, but it was the truth.

Roswell was exuberant, indestructible. He was the kind of son a normal family should have. If I could have been like him at all, even a little, my entire life would have been different. I thought about what the Morrigan had said. Intent matters. If you believe you’re charmed, capable, likable, popular, then you are.

Suddenly, Roswell’s normal smile was gone. He was staring at his feet. “It’s not like I feel guilty, exactly. . . .”

“But you do.”

He nodded down at his shoes, grinning in a bitter way.

“Is that why you hang out with me, do you think? Like, you don’t mind how weird I am because when it comes down to it, you’re kind of weird too?”

He quit studying his shoes and looked over at me. “It’s not like that. I hate to break it to you, but there are other reasons to be friends with someone than mutual weirdness. You are actually kind of interesting, you know. And with you, I’m not always having to be happy or funny. I can say what I’m thinking. You pretty much suck at being honest, Mackie, but you’re easy to talk to.”

It was nice to think that Roswell could have a legitimate reason for being friends with me, besides the fact that our dads both worked at the church, but it didn’t change the fact that I was something deceitful and strange. “Mackie Doyle’s dead. I’m not anyone.”

Roswell leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “Look, Mackie is you. I started calling you Mackie in the first grade—you—not someone else. I’ve never known a Malcolm Doyle. If he’s dead, then I’m sorry, but it doesn’t mean anything. He’s not you.”

I couldn’t look at him. “Are you . . . look, if you’re dicking me around, I need you to tell me.”

“Mackie, don’t take this the wrong way, but all my life you’ve been the weirdest person I’ve ever met. That doesn’t make you not a real person. In fact, it makes you pretty goddamn specific.”

I dug my fingers into the edge of the picnic table. “This is the defining event of my life and you’re treating it like it’s normal. Like it’s nothing.”

He leaned back, looking up at the sky. “Well, maybe it should stop being the defining event. There’s a whole lot more to an average life than something that happened before you were a year old.”

I knew that he was right, but it was scary. I looked away because I didn’t want him to see how lonely I’d been. It was disorienting to think everything that had defined me for so long was only circumstantial.

“I did something so stupid tonight,” I said, hearing the catch in my voice.

“I figured. When you went all convulsive, I figured it was something big. Tongue ring, huh? Was it because you just like her that much—I mean, so much you’d kiss her anyway?”

I shook my head. “She . . . acts like I’m normal. Nothing different, nothing strange. Like I could be anybody.”

Roswell laughed so loud I worried that someone might come outside to see what was going on. “And that’s your criteria? A girl who makes you feel like you could be anybody?”

“No.” I leaned back on my elbows and looked up into the rain. “I just mean, sometimes it’s nice to hang out with someone who makes you feel like you’re not completely freakish.”

We sat on the picnic bench, staring out at the playground.

It was Roswell who spoke next, sounding like something had just struck him as funny and he was trying not to laugh. “Who would you get with, then, if normal wasn’t an issue? I mean, if having them think you were ordinary and boring wasn’t part of the equation.”

“Out of anyone?” I ducked my head and pulled my sleeves down over my hands. “Tate, probably.”

I waited for him to laugh, maybe ask if I meant Tate Stewart or if I was talking about some other girl who had the same name but a less dire attitude.

He just nodded and knocked his shoulder against mine. “So do that, then. Don’t get me wrong, she’s kind of terrifying, but she can be cool. I mean, at least she’s not a sorori-whore in training.”

I laughed, but it sounded fake, so I made myself stop. “There’s no way. I pissed her off like you wouldn’t believe. Way beyond repair.”

Roswell shook his head. “Nothing’s ever beyond repair. Jesus, the fact that the twins made a working snowblower out of two nonworking ones and some dryer parts should prove that. And people are pretty predictable once you know them. They don’t change all that much. Do you remember in seventh grade, when we had to do current-issues debates and she and Danny got in that huge thing about capital punishment? She didn’t speak to him for like a month, but she forgave him.”

“Great. That was over a civics assignment. And she was twelve.” I sighed and scrubbed my hands over my face. “Roz, you have no idea how hugely I’ve already screwed this up. If she’s got any judgment at all, she hates me.”

Roswell shrugged. “Fine, then she hates you. And if you want to date her anyway, then you suck it up and you tell her you’re sorry. If she’s a reasonable person, she forgives you. If she’s not, you might have to just let this one go and settle for girls who think you’re normal. No tongue rings, though.”

We sat on the picnic bench, not talking, not looking at each other, but being quiet and okay. The rain was almost gone, nothing but a thin, chilly fog. For now, I just wanted to sit on the picnic bench with him and not be anything but fine and uncomplicated.

Chapter Twenty-Two The Fight

The next day was significant, mostly because it was the first day in weeks that it wasn’t actually raining. The sky was still overcast, but the air was cold and dry. It was the first indication that the rain couldn’t last forever and winter might be coming after all.

Drew and Danny were in a weird mood at lunch, looking pleased with themselves and grinning at each other. When Roswell asked what was so funny, they just looked at each other and started laughing.

I leaned on my elbows, trying not to yawn. “You look happy.”

Danny tossed a french fry at me. “You look like shit.”

“We fixed the Red Scare,” Drew said. He was smiling, trying to keep it under control and failing. “Last night. It’s kind of a MacGyvered mess, but it works.”

I wanted to ask how they could stand to know the truth about anything when nothing good could come of it. How anyone could stand to be put on the spot. What it felt like to let someone else know their secrets.

After school, I started home the long way, skirting the edge of the parking lot and studying the soggy ground. I’d only gotten as far as the white oak tree when Tate and Alice came out of the school together. Which was unexpected.

They were side by side, talking as they cut across the blacktop. At least, Alice was talking. Tate was looking off at the blank suburban skyline like she was bored out of her mind.

When they stopped, it had the grim face-to-face look of a gunslinger showdown. Alice was smiling at Tate in a way that looked more like determination than goodwill. “All I’m saying is, you could make an effort. You don’t have to go out and join cheerleading. Just be normal.”

Tate didn’t say anything.

Alice leaned closer. “You’re just so weird. It makes people uncomfortable, and yeah, maybe no one else is going to say it, but it needed to be said.”

“Okay,” Tate said. “Okay, so you said it. Now can you go behind the bleachers and make out with someone?”

Alice laughed, and not in a nice way. “God, you’re such a reject. How you ever thought you were going to wind up with Mackie, I have no idea, but you totally deserve each other.”

Tate gave her a long, amazing look. The kind that burns people down. “You are massively unqualified to tell me what I deserve. I mean, Jesus, just because you choose to share details of your dating life with pretty much everyone does not make us dear, dear friends. In fact, it mostly just makes you sound like a huge bitch.”

Alice slapped her. The sound was very loud and she looked surprised at herself.

Tate just tipped her head to the side. Then she reached out and slapped Alice right back, soft and quick and mocking.

Alice swung at her, and Tate skipped back, knocking her hands away. She moved quickly, like she was playing dodgeball or floor hockey and none of this was serious. Like it was all just a big, stupid joke.

Then Alice hit Tate for real. I don’t even know if she meant to do it. It could have been some freak accident of hand-eye coordination or physics, but it worked. Blood spurted from Tate’s nose, gushing down over the front of her shirt. She did nothing for a second. Then she smiled, which, when someone is covered in blood, is basically the most terrifying thing they can do. Blood was running off her chin, soaking into the collar of her T-shirt. I took my hands out of my pockets and started to walk across the lot. Then, when Tate knocked Alice down, I started to run.

People were crowding around, making a circle. Alice was on the pavement, and Tate was kicking the hell out of her. The blood was bright on the front of her shirt, dripping off her chin, running down her neck. Her posture was straight and arrogant, like pictures I’ve seen of various British queens.

“Hey,” I yelled. “Hey, hey, stop!”

I squeezed between people, trying to get a hand on Tate. I grabbed her by the shirt and she jerked away again. Alice was scrambling backward, trying to get back on her feet.

Around me, everyone was shouting, pressing close, but they weren’t trying to break it up.

I elbowed my way into the middle of the circle and grabbed Tate around the waist. “Tate. Tate!”

Her body arched against my chest, rippling away like a fish. I held on tighter.

“Tate,” I said against her ear. “Stop.”

The blood on her shirt was burning my hands. Alice was still on the ground, scooting away on her butt. Her eye makeup made gray trails down her face and she was crying in short little gasps.

“Tate, stop.” I wanted it to sound hard and authoritative, like someone in charge, but my voice was far away. My ears were starting to ring. “Please stop.”

Her whole body was shaking against my chest. On the other side of the circle, Alice got to her feet. The look she gave us—gave me—was angry and complicated. Then she bolted into the crowd.

In my arms, Tate was unwinding, going limp. Suddenly, I had that prickly, floating feeling, like my body was very light. This is deceptive, because what it really means is, you’re about to fall.

I let her go and staggered back, holding my hands away from myself. For a second, I was almost sure I was going to have to sit down, but it passed.

I started swiping at the blood, trying to scrape it off on the wet grass, on my jeans, anything just to get it off my skin. It had splattered on the backs of my wrists, but I wasn’t graying out like I had during the blood drive. I walked into the building on my own, with Tate behind me.

In the entryway, I tripped on the last step and almost fell.

She put her hand on my shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

“I need water.” My voice sounded hoarse and she was standing so close that I could hardly breathe from the smell. “My hands.”

She grabbed my hands and shoved them under the drinking fountain. The water was freezing, stinging the welts and the raw places. She stayed right behind me, holding me by the wrists, leaning on the press bar with her hip.

After the blood had run off down the drain, she let me go. I leaned back against the wall. My hands were nothing but nerve endings and a tiny static sea still roared in my ears.

Tate stood with her arms folded over her chest, squinting at me. Blood was dripping from her nose and getting all over the floor. I watched her face, her mouth half covered in a red smear. Under all the blood, she was beautiful in the most unsettling way, and I smiled without meaning to.

She sighed and her shoulders relaxed a little. “Are you okay?” she said finally.

I nodded, patting my hands on the front of my shirt.

“I should get cleaned up, then.” She turned and walked into the bathroom without saying anything else.

I sat on the floor and closed my eyes. My hands throbbed and I did my best to dry them on my shirt.

When Tate came out of the bathroom, she had a handful of paper towels against her nose, already soaked red. She crouched next to me and I turned away, holding my sleeve against my mouth.

She didn’t seem to notice the way I was trying to avoid breathing her air, or maybe she just figured that was the least concerning aspect of the situation. She was looking at my hands. “Jesus, what happened to you?”

“It’s okay, it’s no big deal,” I said, keeping my arm against my nose and mouth. “ Let’s just go.”

Tate was still snuffling into the wad of paper towels. The smell of the blood was red and wet. “Go? I’m not going anywhere with you. Look, I’m sorry I had to punch your girlfriend in the face, but sometimes white-trash moments are necessary, okay?”

“It’s not like that. I just need to talk to you.”

Tate stood up. She looked much scarier standing over me. “About what? How you insist on panting around after Alice despite the fact that she is mean as shit and hasn’t figured where she left her brain? No thanks. I know that story already.”

“Tate, please, just give me a chance. Just listen.”

“Why?” she said, giving me the hardest, nastiest look. “As a certain selfless champion once said, what’s in it for me?”

It wasn’t the place I would have picked for a revelatory moment, sitting on the floor in the west entrance with Tate standing over me and narrowly avoiding dripping blood on my head. When I spoke, the words came out muffled against my sleeve. I couldn’t meet her eyes.

Tate fidgeted and sighed. “I’m sorry, is my disdain making you nervous? Do you need some friendly reassurance? Do you need someone to tell you how you’re doing great? That’s it, Mackie—keep mumbling into your coat! I don’t mind that you have this condition where you find it necessary to act like a huge douche!”

I clenched my jaw and said it louder. “Your sister isn’t dead.”

The change was instantaneous. Her hand dropped from her bleeding nose and she stared at me. Her eyes were wide and blood was running down over her lip, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“Cover your face,” I said into my sleeve, holding my breath, turning away.

She pressed the paper towels against her nose again, looking down at me over her hand. “Say that again.”

“She isn’t dead. At least, I don’t think so. Not yet.”

Tate took a long, shuddering breath and her eyes were so lit up she looked like she was carrying an electric charge. “I think you better tell me what that means.”

“Look, let’s not talk about this here.”

“Oh,” she said. “We are going to talk about it.”

I pressed my fingers against my eyelids. “You were right, okay? You’re right about this town. There are these . . . people. These weird, secret people.” People like me. “They took Natalie, and they’re keeping her alive until Friday.”

“Okay. So, how do I get her back?”

I took my hands away from my face but didn’t look at her. “I don’t know.”

Tate made a harsh, breathless noise, not a laugh. “That’s great. That’s beautiful.”

“I don’t know, but I’ll come up with something.”

She stood over me, eyes hard and paper towels bloody. “And why would you do that now? What would I have to do to earn the noble assistance of Mackie Doyle?”

I looked up at her. Her desperation showed on her face but just barely, like she was trying to hide it. “Please, can I walk you home?”

For a minute, I thought she was going to tell me I was disgusting, appalling, that I could go straight to hell, but then she nodded and started for the door.

Tate’s house was older than mine, with a small, scrubby yard full of trash and dead leaves.

Inside, a skinny girl was sitting on the couch, watching TV—some rainbow-looking cartoon with a spaceship in it.

She glanced away from the screen when we came in, staring at Tate’s handful of bloody paper towels. “Oh my God, are you suspended?”

“Connie, shut up.”

The girl slid off the couch and went prancing down the hall to a closed door. “Mo-om, Tate’s been fighting.”

Tate took a deep breath, pointing to the stairs. “Go to your room. Now.”

Connie stomped back into the living room and up the stairs. The door in the hall stayed closed.

Tate sighed and I followed her into the bathroom. She went straight for the medicine cabinet, scraping through tubes and prescription bottles with one hand and holding the wad of paper towels against her nose with the other. She found a bottle of peroxide and some cotton balls and slammed the cabinet shut. Then she dropped the paper towels into the sink and the smell rushed out into the room.

I grabbed for the shower curtain to keep from falling and the sound made Tate swing around. “How you doing, Mackie?”

“Not great.”

“You don’t have to stay here. Sit down or go outside or something while I get cleaned up.”

I went out into the kitchen and opened the freezer. There wasn’t much in it—a few plastic containers with no labels and some toaster waffles—but there was an ice cube tray, about half full. I popped the ice and dumped it into a plastic grocery sack that was sticking out of the trash.

I filled the tray and put it back in the freezer. Then I sat outside on the front porch with my head in my hands and the bag of ice sitting next to me.

After a few minutes, Tate came out onto the porch and stood over me. Her nose had stopped bleeding, but she had a mess of scratches all over one cheek. Her hair was wet, sticking up like a hedgehog, and she’d changed her shirt. I had an amazing, torturous picture of her washing the blood off her neck, her bare chest. In my scenario, her bra was black and made of something lacy, but I couldn’t really imagine Tate going into a store and picking out something like that.

She sat down next to me and held out a hand, still not looking over. I offered her the ice and she took it. Her hands were shaking a little, but her face was hard.

“Are you okay?” I said, but not very loud.

She ran her fingers through her hair. There was a small red mark just under her left eye. “No, but I’ll live.”

I wanted to smile because her voice was so tired and because her wrists looked unbelievably small compared to mine. We sat next to each other, not touching, not talking.

“I wish I could be like you,” I said, and it was weird, saying the thing that I meant more than anything. I didn’t just mean normal. She was sad and angry, but she knew exactly who she was.

She laughed. “Why would anyone—especially you—want to be like me?”

“You’re always so good at acting like you know exactly what you’re doing all the time.”

Tate smiled a small, tricky smile. “What makes you think I don’t?”

We both laughed, then stopped again just as fast. She’d slicked her hair back like a boy, but even wet haired and scrubbed pink, even on the sagging porch, she was beautiful.

“Tate.”

She glanced over and the plastic bag rustled and crunched. “What?”

“I’m sorry.”

She stared out over the yard and sighed. “I know.”

“No, you don’t. At least not all of it. It’s . . . it’s not like you think it is.”

That made her set down the ice pack and turn to face me. “How do you know what I’m thinking?”

“Mostly? A whole lot of personal experience.”

She turned and reached for me, pulling my head down. Then she kissed me, shallow and slow. It caught me completely off guard. I hadn’t really bothered to hope that she’d let me anywhere near her again, but her arms were around me, her mouth was pressed against mine. And I’d given her nothing but the substantiation of something she already suspected.

I raised my hand, touching her cheek, the side of her neck. When she pulled away, her eyes were deep and alert. Her hair was damp under my fingers.

“What is it?” I said, letting my hand rest at the base of her neck.

She reached up and held on to my wrist. “Do you want to go up to my room? Come up to my room. Just for a little while.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“Look, do you want to or not?”

I nodded, feeling electric and out of breath, trying to decide if we were back to the system of rewards or if she meant something more sincere. If a kiss could mean anything besides the acknowledgment that I’d given her what she wanted, I followed her inside because her hand in mine was warm and I could still taste her ChapStick.

Her room was a mix of personalities. She had posters all over the place, Quentin Tarantino and Rob Zombie and Sammy Sosa. Everything was neat, but not really how you’d think of a girl’s room. The dominant color scheme seemed to be communist gray, except for a ludicrous flowered bedspread.

When Tate sat down on the bed, I stopped in the doorway, crossing my arms over my chest. She leaned over to unlace her shoes.

“Tate?”

She raised her head and looked at me. “Yeah?”

“Why are you doing this? I mean, is this just what happens when I tell you what you want to hear?”

She was shaking her head as she peeled off her shirt. “No one tells me what I want to hear.” She had on a very generic bra, off white, plain. Her body was thinner and harder than I’d imagined, but the tops of her breasts curved up soft and round like fruit. God, God, God.

She dropped her shirt on the floor and held out a hand. “Come here.”

I sat next to her, feeling awkward and too warm, and she put her arms around my neck. Then she kissed me and I was kissing her back and nothing was awkward at all anymore. Outside, there was a flash of lightning. The storm was moving in, whipping up in gusts as the sky got darker.

Tate was yanking at my hoodie, sliding my T-shirt up. I elbowed it over my head and got stuck in it and then unstuck. We were both laughing and I knew my hair must be all over the place because she smoothed it down.

I reached behind her to unhook her bra. The clasp was wire and it stung my fingers, but after a few tries, I got it. She slipped out of the straps, leaning into me, letting me slide my hands along her ribs and back.

When I touched her, she sucked in her breath. Her skin was prickling all over with little goose bumps. My heart was beating like crazy and I couldn’t tell if I was more excited or more nervous, but it didn’t matter. Both feelings were equally satisfying.

The wind picked up and branches rattled against the window. There was another flash of lightning, followed immediately by thunder.

Tate’s eyes were squeezed shut, like against bright sunlight. I leaned down and kissed her along her jaw, just below her ear. She turned her face against my shoulder, my bare skin, and I had the feeling of rightness again, like I could just be this, now, and everything was where it should be.

There was a flurry of banging on the door. “Tate?” The knob rattled. “Tate, open the door.”

Tate sighed and pushed me away, sitting up, reaching for her bra. Then she turned toward the door. “Is it an emergency?”

“Tate, I mean it—just let me in.”

“Connie, is this an emergency?”

“Yes!” Her voice sounded high and panicked. The next words were almost lost in the rising wind and the thunder. “Smoke—at the church! Something’s on fire!”

Tate was already hooking her bra, wriggling back into her shirt and throwing mine at me. I put it on in a fumbling rush and we pounded downstairs and out onto the porch.

Chapter Twenty-Three Our Trespasses

The smoke was oily black. It rose in a column, a hundred feet, two hundred feet over the town, like the Israelites’ pillar of fire.

“Shit,” I said, and my voice sounded completely flat. “Shit. The church is burning.”

Tate was on the porch next to me. She put her hand on my arm, but I barely felt it. Thunder rumbled above us and the wind gusted, but under it, I heard the low roar of flames. I bolted down the steps and took off toward the blaze.

On Welsh Street, the whole block was in chaos. Even as I turned the corner, I could feel the heat pulsing out in waves, smell the sharp, dry smell of smoke and ashes. The street was full of lights and sirens, trucks parked at angles blocking off traffic. The church was a surging ruin of flames. They licked up the sides of the building in orange tongues, blackening the brick. There was a jagged hole at the base of the steeple, and smoke was pouring out in billows.

The gutters still ran, but the water came from the hoses and not the sky. It spilled along the sidewalks and into the street, black with soot, glittering with sparks and loose embers.

Firefighters were jogging back and forth on the grass, leading people out in twos and threes away from the building.

I found Emma on the lawn of the courthouse. She was standing by herself, hugging her elbows and watching as the Sunday school burned. I came up next to her, reaching for her, pulling her toward me. When she looked up at me, her face seemed to crumple.

“How did it start?” I asked, keeping my arm around her and letting her hang on to me.

“I don’t know—lightning, maybe—there was lightning. The chapel caught before the trucks could get here. I don’t think they can save it. The roof’s gone.”

“Where’s Dad?”

Emma shook her head. Her mouth was open, but not like she had anything particular to say.

“No, Emma, where’s Dad?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. There were so many people—women’s choir and Bible study and the cleaning crew.” She was shaking her head, not stopping. “There had to have been at least thirty people in there.”

I splashed through the street to the church and crossed the police line, ducking under tape and around stretchers through the crowd to the service driveway, where EMTs loaded choir members into the ambulances, oxygen masks strapped over their mouths. I looked for him in the coughing crowd of people wrapped in fire ponchos and blankets, and when he wasn’t one of the stragglers filing out, I looked for him on the stretchers.

One of the gurneys was covered, and my chest tightened with a deep, wordless dread, but even before I got close, I knew it couldn’t be him. The body was small and delicate under the sheet. The body of a woman. Or a girl.

I came up to the driver and grabbed his arm. He wasn’t part of my dad’s congregation, but his face was familiar from years of hospital picnics, Brad or Brian—some safe, pleasant name—and I held on, turning him toward the sheet. “Who is it?”

He shook his head. “We can’t disclose that. She has to be pronounced.” His voice was helpless and he stared at me with a stark, jacklighted expression. “I can’t pronounce her. She has to be identified by the doctor or the coroner.”

I let him go, staggered by the utter formality of pronouncing someone dead. I knew it already, and so did he, without confirmation from the coroner. Her body was there under the sheet in front of us, and what difference did it make who said it? Nothing would be different if it was a wide-eyed EMT who called her dead and not someone else.

I looked down at the covered body. The rain was just a fine mist, soaking slowly through the fabric. The shape of her profile was unclear. But I knew her shoes. The toes stuck out from under the sheet, just barely, just her toes.

The shoes were flat bottomed, made of black rubber and red leather, with little flowers cut out on the toes. I could see her socks through the openings of the petals. I’d noticed them at Stephanie’s Halloween party. They’d looked so wrong with the rest of Jenna Porter’s costume.

I raked my hands through my hair, trying to find the right set of feelings. She’d been nice. Thoughtless or shallow, maybe. But nice. She hadn’t deserved to die like this, sucking down smoke until her lungs stopped. She’d said hi to me in class and lent me pens and stayed quiet when Alice said nasty, malicious things to other girls—and she did, I’d always known that, even when I was busy being awed by her eyelashes or mesmerized by her hair. But not Jenna. She’d never done anything to anyone.

I backed away from Brad, who was looking slack and shell-shocked, then turned in a circle, scanning the crowd for my dad, until finally I found him. He stood in the middle of the street, in the dark blue suit that he always wore for office hours. His hair was wet and his white button-down shirt wasn’t all that white anymore but streaked gray with soot.

He stood with his arms at his sides and his face turned toward the church as it blackened and crumbled. His expression was bare and helpless, and he didn’t see me. The only thing in his field of vision was the ruined church. It was a landmark, one of the oldest buildings in Gentry, and now it was nearly gone. I stood next to him and watched it go, thinking how strange it was that something could stand for so many things. It was Gentry, like Natalie was Gentry— just a symbol of a town, the particular warm body that represented everyone else.

I watched the smoking church, the demolished Sunday school, feeling a kind of surreal tenderness for it. It had been built to withstand disasters and acts of God. There were lightning rods on two corners of the roof and one on the point of the steeple, and that was where the lightning had hit. The strike had made contact six inches from the tallest lightning rod. It had arced away from the metal, and that was not consistent with lightning, but pretty goddamn consistent with other types of disasters.

I turned away from the smoke and chaos of the blackened church, away from Jenna’s covered body and my devastated father, and headed straight for the slag heap.

On Concord Street, the gutters ran high and fast, and the storm drains were clogged with leaves.

“Mackie! Mackie, wait.” Carlina was hurrying up the sidewalk after me. She was wearing her coat and had wrapped a scarf over her head.

The rain was so thin it was almost fog, coming fine and sideways under the streetlights. It dripped off the bottom of her coat in a little fringe, splashing around her feet.

“Where are you going?” she said, stopping under the streetlight.

“Where do you think? I’m going down to ask the Morrigan where the fuck she gets off torching community property! The church is gone, Carlina. The whole thing, it’s just gone.”

She pressed her hands against her face, letting her shoulders slump. “It’s not like that.” Then she said it again. “It isn’t like that.”

“Tell me what it is like, then. Tell me what happened to the church. Did you burn my dad’s church?”

“We’re not monsters, Mackie. We didn’t do this.”

Her face was strangely plain, and I was struck again by how different she looked from the woman onstage. Carlina Carlyle meant smoke and colored footlights. This new woman was mysterious and still. In the street, the air was hot and used up.

“Who are we?” I said, and I sounded tired, like I didn’t even care anymore.

“We don’t really like names. When you name something, you take away some of its power. It becomes known. They’ve called us a lot of things—the good neighbors, the fair folk. The gray ones, the old ones, the other ones. Spirits and haunts and demons. Here, they never really named us. We’re nothing.”

It was a minute before she said anything else, and when she did, her voice sounded strange. “The Lady is the kind of person who likes to make the town hurt. She’s the kind of person who sets fires.”

“Where is she?”

“There’s a door in the dump hill by the park. But you don’t want to go there. She’s incredibly dangerous, and the Morrigan will be furious.”

“Then she can be furious.”

Carlina turned and looked out over the road. “You need to think about what you’re doing. You can be angry at the Lady for doing this, but it’s not your job to stand up for them.”

“Stop talking about them. I am them.”

Carlina nodded, eyes huge and sad. “Then take a knife with you.” Her voice was low. “Just a regular kitchen knife. Wrap it in a dish towel or a handkerchief if you have to, but take it and stick it in the ground at the base of the hill. The door won’t open otherwise.”

“And that’s it, just stick a knife in the dirt and the door opens. What then? I just smile and walk right in?”

Carlina shoved her hands in her pockets. “Castoffs are always allowed to come home if they want to. She might be a nasty piece of work, but she owes you that much.”

The rain was thin and constant. Castoff was like a slap when Carlina said it.

Maybe she saw something on my face because she folded her arms and looked down. “What I mean is, good luck.”