Brenna Yovanoff - The Replacement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

We sat in silence, waiting for whatever came next.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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