Brenna Yovanoff - The Replacement

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

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

He nodded and passed a hand over his eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What she meant is that she loves you.”

“I know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Because I was such a dick about it?”