Brenna Yovanoff - The Replacement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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