The Lady made a breathless little noise, almost a laugh. “People are very disingenuous, dear. They talk and arrange meetings and generally make a great to-do. Do you know how one can tell which of the chorus are sincere?”
Her smile was cold. She could have been made of wax or porcelain like a doll, but her eyes were wicked and bright. “The ones who are sincere leave. The others sink their roots in this quiet town and wring their hands and bemoan the loss of their children, and all the while, they take their payment, and they keep the town and they feed it, just like they’ve always done.”
Her eyes were dark and awful. I had an idea that she never stopped smiling.
“So, killing kids isn’t something you do because you’re morally bankrupt psychopaths, but more like a public service.” My voice was hard and that made me feel braver. “You’re doing it for everyone, right? Not just to feed yourselves, but for the town because the town needs devastated parents and dead kids. And hell, might as well burn their churches down as long as you’re at it.”
“Yes,” the Lady said, very calmly. “Their blood is their blood and when they honor me with it, I receive it and then give that power back to them. I make them prosper.” She reached up and tried to touch my face. “Just accept it, dear. Everyone else has.”
I pulled away, twisting out of her reach. “If you’re just going to go around bleeding the town, why bother with the church at all? Why make them suffer if you’re going to take their blood anyway?”
“Because my wretched goblin of a sister has fallen well outside the bounds of my authority, allowing her fiends to show themselves in the streets at every opportunity. Her cavalier regard for prudence might seem precious now, but it undermines us all. They won’t be joyful enough to give her what she wants if they’re looking to their own tragedy.”
“So you’re punishing her.”
The Lady smiled and her mouth was beautiful and cruel. “I only want us to be amicable, to reach a compromise. But if she refuses to see reason, then there’s nothing I can do and she must be punished. Will you tell her so when next you see her? Tell her all this could have been avoided.”
“I’m not your messenger. I work for the Morrigan, and it’s not my job to tell her what she’s doing wrong.”
The Lady smiled, eyes downcast. “Oh, my naive darling, the Morrigan doesn’t command you. You’re a creature of free agency who came to me tonight of your own accord. She would have held you back had she been able. On occasion, you might dally in her pitiful circus, but your will is your own.”
“At least your sister cares about something besides herself. She saved my life, so stop talking about her like she’s so beneath you.”
“She is beneath me. She has no pride and no dignity. She sends her creatures out to dance like monkeys and degrade themselves before the town.”
“And so you decided to hate her?”
The Lady shook her head, looking off toward Natalie. “She lied and deceived me. She stole a child from my house and brought it home. She defied me and threatened us with discovery. She nearly destroyed the town.”
“She thought it was disgusting to keep kids as toys and pets, and she’s right. What are you going to do with your new toy? Pin her on a corkboard and then show everyone your collection and talk about how pretty she is?”
“This little imp? Nothing so significant. She’ll go to the earth like all the rest, completely unremarkable.”
“She doesn’t have to be remarkable to matter. She’s a kid with a family. She’s someone’s sister.”
“Just so. And now she’s nothing. She’ll go to the unholy ground in the hour before dawn as All Souls’ passes into a forgotten saint’s day, and she’ll die for the renewal of the town.”
“And that’s all it takes to make you happy? You kill little kids, then go home and wait until it’s time to do it all again? What the hell kind of existence is that?”
The Lady raised her head, looking off at something in the distance. “They used to honor us with warriors.” She glanced over at Natalie, like the idea of using something so powerless disgusted her. “And now we’ve been reduced to sprites and goblins, and only the slaughter of the weak keeps us alive.”
I backed away from her. The room was full of glass-eyed birds and dead butterflies and big, old-fashioned furniture. All these things were very clear, like they were the only things that had ever happened in my life.
The Lady went across to the table and picked up a little brass bell. When she rang it, the sound was high and clear.
Then she sat down, looking at me steadily. “This meeting has gone on long enough, sir. I thank you for your company and bear you no ill will, but I can’t take back the destruction of the church or give you what you want. The Cutter will escort you out.”
I remembered what the Morrigan had said about the Cutter. For one second, I could almost picture him—a massive silhouette, huge and hulking. Then it was gone. Instead, there was just the image of a woman. She lay on her back in a pool of murky water, face mangled, arms strapped to her sides.
“No,” I said, already knowing that the word didn’t matter but needing to say it. “I’m not leaving her here. She’s little, she’s just a kid.”
“It’s no use arguing,” the Lady said. “I won’t cede her to you willingly, and you can’t stand against the Cutter. None of us can.”
I tried to think what a brave person would do. What Tate would do. But Natalie was her family, and I was underground with a woman who emptied entire lakes and then dumped them in her sister’s living room when she was feeling particularly vindictive. Who called up endless rain and burned down buildings just to make sure that no one forgot her. Compared to her, I was useless.
When the door swung in, Natalie cringed, shrinking against the Lady’s skirt and holding on to her birdcage. The Cutter stood in the doorway. He was thin, taller than the Lady. He could have been her brother. He had the same dark hair, the same watery, diseased look around his eyes.
Everything about him was familiar in flashes—the black coat, the thin, colorless mouth, the bones in his face—all vague and uneasy, like something from a dream.
He touched his forehead, even though he wasn’t wearing a hat.
When I looked at him, I remembered being small, just the right size to fit in the crook of his elbow. He was creeping into the bedroom, taking the rightful baby out of its crib, closing the window. Leaving me behind. He was the only thing I remembered from a life before Gentry.
The Lady rose from her chair, giving him a wide path, and he watched her back away. His eyes were sharp and narrow.
When the Lady spoke, she was looking away from him. “Show our guest out if you please, sir.”
The Cutter smiled—a strange, empty smile—and bowed to me, and then I smelled the smell that was seeping out of his skin. He smelled toxic, reeking with iron. I could feel my heartbeat—not just in my chest, but in my arms and hands and throat.
The Lady had covered her face with a handkerchief, and my question wasn’t so much curiosity as numb confusion. “What is he?”
She looked at me over the lacy edge of her handkerchief and her answer was muffled. “A sadist and a masochist. He endures tremendous suffering because it pleases him to see the suffering of others.”
The Cutter didn’t look particularly miserable or suffering. His eyes were red rimmed and bloodshot, but he moved quickly. “Come along,” he said in a hoarse whisper, and grabbed me by the arm.
As he pulled me out into the hall, I looked back. The last thing I saw was Tate’s sister, settling back down onto her pillow, hugging her birdcage.
Then the fumes washed over me and I staggered. The Cutter held me steady, digging his fingers into my arm. His expression was polite, like a gentleman in a movie about people who rode around in carriages, but his voice was deep and rough and should have belonged to someone else.
“Easy does it,” he said. “You’re all right.”
With his hand on my arm, he
led me along the hall.
“Tell me, cousin, how’s the weather up in the park tonight? I thought it smelled like rain.”
When I didn’t answer, he gave me a little shake and tightened his grip, dragging me along by the elbow with his coat flapping behind him. “Don’t go faint on me now or I’ll have to slap the sense back into you. Maybe you think I haven’t a care for what happens up ground, but God help me, I love that town. The Lady, she pines after the old days, but tribes and villages can’t match the hospitality we’ve seen here.”
I concentrated on putting one foot after the other, keeping myself upright and my eyes on the floor in front of me.
“Let me tell you a story,” he said. “A story about us and about the people who live just above us. It was a miserable, desperate time, and they looked to us for salvation. Cousin, we had more blood than any hill’s ever had in a single year. We bled their lambkins on all the old feast days—Imbolc and Beltane and Lammas—and on every holy day.” He smiled over his shoulder, showing small, even teeth, but his gums were raw and infected looking. “There are a lot of holy days, cousin.”
“In the Depression,” I said. My voice sounded thick and disjointed.
“The what?”
“In the Great Depression, you took that blood from the town. You took their children and they blamed it on Kellan Caury. They hanged him out on Heath Road for stealing kids.”
The Cutter stopped walking and turned to face me. Then he grinned—a wide, leering grin that took over his whole face. “Oh, Caury did it, all right. Make no mistake. He took them.”
The smell that came off him when he talked was thick and scummy, like flaking rust and old blood. I yanked my arm out of his hand and leaned against the painted wallpaper. “What are you talking about? He wasn’t a kidnapper. He just wanted to live a normal life.”
The Cutter laughed. “Sure. Sure, he wanted to live peaceful and idyllic, tending his shop and stargazing with his girl. And we wanted something else. We get what we want.”
For the first time, I looked at the Cutter—really looked at him. His face was symmetrical, with a straight nose, a sharp chin and jaw, but the tightness around his eyes made him look hollow and vacant.
Except for the pack of rotten girls, people in the slag heap seemed healthy. They were strange and sometimes ugly, but their faces were painless and their eyes were clear. The Cutter looked contagious. I took short, shallow breaths. My vision was starting to tunnel, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.
He grabbed my arm again and gave me a hard shake. “Stay with me, cousin. We’re almost to the door.”
“How did you get it—what you wanted from him?”
“Caury? That was simple. He had a sweet, pious girl that played piano in the church on Sundays and didn’t mind much that he was a right oddity. Maybe he didn’t start out begging to do our work, but he was willing enough in the end.” The Cutter’s voice sounded eager suddenly. “By the time I got through, that little tart was half what she’d been before, and he’d have done anything just to see that she didn’t lose any more fingers.”
I felt light-headed, sick in waves. “The way I heard it, you didn’t kill him. It was the sheriff, the deputies—they got together a lynch mob.”
The Cutter shook his head. “Oh, we killed him. Make no mistake. The town came for him, but we were the ones who killed him. They delivered him down to the killing ground, and maybe they didn’t even really know why, but they got him there all right. They bludgeoned him first, beat him in the street like a dog, but there was still enough life in him to scream.”
“You murdered one of your own people.”
He was pulling me along, winding through hallways with fancy carved baseboards and painted wallpaper. We turned a corner and I was back in the entryway, with its smooth floor and its elegant wood-paneled walls. Everything seemed to blur and swim.
The Cutter unlatched the door and pushed it open. “Get along to your little friends, then.”
On the other side, I could smell dead leaves and fresh air. I needed to be out in the park, out where I could breathe, but Tate’s sister was tied to a fancy plush armchair and I turned to face the Cutter with the room tilting all around me. “What if I don’t?”
He stood beside the door, straight and perfect like people in the court were supposed to be perfect, but his mouth was thin and the purple shadows under his cheekbones made his face look like a skull. “You will because I tell you to, and if you don’t, then you can get along to hell. You might be fine and good and fair, cousin, but you’re no cousin of mine.”
His hand hit me between my shoulders then and he shoved me in the direction of Gentry and the outside world.
I stumbled into the drizzle and landed on my hands and knees, leaves cold and slick between my spread fingers. Behind me, the door swung shut and melted back into the shadows.
I got to my feet, gasping and coughing, and started across the park. At the corner of Carver Street, though, I stopped. I stood in the wavering halo of a streetlight, looking at the charm that Natalie had given me. The ribbon was sticky and frayed and the charm was nothing but a zipper pull, made of pink plastic and shaped like a teddy bear.
I crossed the grass to the solitary picnic table where Roswell and I had sat the night before and collapsed on the bench to think.
I was exhausted. My lungs ached and my clothes smelled like smoke, my dad’s church was gone, and Natalie Stewart wasn’t dead, but she was about to be.
I wanted to turn invisible, to disappear. I wanted to lie down and sink into the ground. That way, I wouldn’t have to feel or think. I could be earth, roots, grass. Nothing.
My phone buzzed in my pocket and I took it out to see who was calling. Emma. I knew I should answer, at least tell her where I was and that I was okay, but the conversation seemed impossible. I stared at the phone, at her name glowing on the screen. Then I turned it off.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
SACRED
I woke myself up shivering, curled awkwardly on the picnic bench. The ache in my neck was unreal and my toes had fallen asleep. It was six o’clock in the morning. I had nine missed calls from Emma and two from Roswell.
School wasn’t exactly a priority for the day. My hands and feet were freezing, and I needed to go home, to take a shower and sleep in a bed. But in the daylight, I knew that I had to talk to Tate first, so I took the long way home, down Welsh Street so I’d pass her house.
She was out in the garage with the door up and I guessed that she was either planning some truancy of her own or, more likely, someone had notified the administration that she’d kicked the holy hell out of Alice. The punishment for fighting on school property was suspension.
The hood of the Buick was propped open and she was knocking around under it. As I came up the driveway, she hit her head on the underside of the hood and dropped a wrench. It clanged against the cement, then bounced under the car.
She kicked the bumper and hopped back a little, wincing.
“Tate,” I said. And then I didn’t say anything else. My voice sounded hoarse and used up.
She turned, already starting to smile, and then the smile faded. “What’s wrong? What are you doing here?”
I shook my head, catching her by the sleeve, pulling her away from the car and toward the weak daylight. “Have you seen this before?”
“Hey—” She reached for the zipper pull. “Hey, where’d you get that?”
I tried to make her see the answer in my face, no completely inadequate explanations, no words, but she just stared up at me with a panicked look.
“No, where did you get it? Did you find it somewhere? Where the hell did you get that?” Then she snatched it out of my hand and held it up. “You see this? Do you see this piece of plastic in my hand? You need to tell me where you got this.”
I looked down at her. The truth was awful and I had no name for myself and none for what was happening under our town. “Wherever you think it came from, that’s where
.”
She looked down at the little charm, and I could see the change happen on her face, like something inside her cracking and then, just as fast, fusing back together. “You saw her.”
I was struck, suddenly, by how dry my mouth was. “Underground.”
Tate stared at me. “But you saw her. Right now, she’s alive, and you saw her and you didn’t do anything—you didn’t bring her back?”
I shook my head, feeling helpless and ashamed. “I couldn’t, Tate. They’re so used to just being allowed to do this, and no one ever stops them, no one does anything. I don’t know how.”
“Well, you better figure it out!”
I thought of my mom, weird, distant, cold, and sad. “Are you sure that’s what you want?”
“Yes, I’m fucking sure. She’s my sister!” Tate screamed it, slamming her hands down on the hood of the car. “Why would I not do everything I can to get my sister back?”
I didn’t know how to explain life at my house, how bad and weird and creepy it could get. How my mom was still being punished just for surviving, and they’d waited fifteen years to get revenge, because to people like them, fifteen years was two seconds and nothing was ever really forgiven. They could make you pay for the rest of your life.
“It’s just going to mess up your family,” I said.
Tate took a long breath and reached for my hand, not like a girlfriend, but hard and panicked like someone drowning. “Mackie, my family is already so messed up that I can’t think of a single thing anyone could do right now to make it worse.” She squeezed my fingers, staring up at me, and everything smelled like metal. “Just tell me what to do.”
I shook my head. Tate never asked anyone what to do, and I had no answer, no secret knowledge. This was just what always happened and what had been happening for decades. Maybe centuries.
Tate’s eyes were hard and shiny, but not like tears. Her gaze was brutal, and she wasn’t the kind of girl who begged for anything. “There has to be something I can do because I’m not going to just sit around and do nothing!”
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