The room was so murky now that I could barely focus. The only thing I was sure of were the Cutter’s murderous black eyes.
He didn’t look around. “Is that the trespasser talking, putting his hands all over me? You must be out of your mind.”
“He’s right,” I muttered. “Stay out of this. He likes torture too much.”
The Cutter laughed his slow, husky laugh. “Torture? No, I just want to see the blood run, cousin. It’s beautiful when it catches the light.”
He leaned close, laughing, and I smelled rust and under that sickness, disease. His grin was a glowing slice of white, floating in front of me like the moon. Then I blinked and there was nothing but his breath against my face.
“Cousin,” he said next to my ear. “Cousin, look at me.” He grabbed my jaw and wrenched my face close to his. “Look at me. I’m going to brand you with my sigil, brand it right over your heart, and you’re going to meet my gaze like a man. Then I’m going to break you, and you’re going to beg for mercy like a little boy.”
He was so close that I could see the raw-meat texture of his gums. I stared at his smile, wondering where Roswell and Drew were, waiting for him to cut me. It was what he wanted—pain, blood, the chance to make someone beg.
“We’ll start with your face,” he said. The knife was long and sharp and strangely bright, like it belonged in his hand. “Your smile needs improving.”
In the rush of his breath, there was nothing but the smell, the dizziness. The room was shrinking, squeezing in, and I couldn’t focus. I felt sick and almost weightless.
I was alone. Roswell, Drew were nowhere. There was nothing but the wall at my back and the blade in front of me.
The Cutter adjusted his grip, turning the knife back and forth inches from my face. “Open wide,” he whispered. I clenched my teeth and waited for the metallic taste, the pain that would blot out the world.
Then Roswell’s hand swung into my field of vision, colliding with the side of the Cutter’s face. There was a hiss and the smell of burning skin and he stumbled back. I didn’t have the strength to catch myself as I slid down the wall onto the carpet. The revenant was sitting a few feet away from me. Her eyes were yellow and empty.
“Get the hell off him,” shouted Roswell, standing between me and the Cutter. His voice sounded angry and impatient.
Then Drew was beside him, holding Natalie in one arm. His shoulders were set and his feet were apart, like he was expecting to get hit.
The Cutter sneered at me, baring his teeth, and for a second, he looked as scary and as nasty as anyone in the slag heap. There was a circle of puncture marks on one cheek that looked like a bite.
“Have it your own way,” he said, starting for the door. “It doesn’t matter. Stay and wait for the end. Honestly, I like it better that way—the horror, the screaming. You’ll want to watch, of course,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at Drew. “Cuddle and croon to her all you want. She’ll still be dead by morning.”
Drew squeezed Natalie hard against his chest and she hid her face from the Cutter.
He cleared his throat and spat. Then he turned, kicking at the broken glass in the carpet, and walked out of the room. The door slammed shut behind him and a key turned in the lock. The sound was very loud.
Roswell stood over me, fists clenched. Then he opened his hand. He was breathing hard, looking furious. He was holding a bottle cap.
He put it back in his pocket and tried the door, making an attempt to force it with his shoulder. He kicked the handle and the hinges a few times but halfheartedly, then said the thing I already knew. “I can’t. It’s too heavy.”
I stayed slumped against the wall. My vision was going and I could feel myself starting to slide sideways, tilting in the direction of the floor. At some point, I’d rested my hand in the broken shadow box and my palm was full of glass and pins and sharp, glossy fragments of crushed beetle.
Roswell crouched next to me and glanced up at Drew. “Hey, he’s not looking too good. Think you can help me out here?”
Drew stood over us, still holding Natalie. “Just a sec. I don’t want to put her down where there’s glass. She’s not wearing shoes.” He sounded dazed.
Roswell was examining my hand, brushing off the loose debris, picking out slivers of embedded glass. He studied the blood that was welling up in the cut places, dark and sticky, almost purple.
“Looking good,” he said, and I recognized all the old bravado and the cheerfulness for what it was, easy and fake. The voice he used when nothing was good at all.
It made me feel empty to remember how often he’d done this, sat next to me while I shivered and wheezed, telling me everything would be fine.
After a second, he spoke again, and for once, his voice was truthful. “Well, we’re screwed now, I guess.”
My hand stung as he removed the glass, but my breathing was better. “Danny’s still out there. He could find Emma or my dad. He could still get help.”
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.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE SEVENTH-YEAR SACRIFICE
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.”
Tate stared down at her, then said in a soft, deadly voice that was almost a whisper, “Fuck the world. I just want my sister back.”
“Enough.” The Lady’s voice echoed from across the stretch of unconsecrated ground. “Your sister is trifling, barely more than a pittance. This is not my concern, and if you continue to disrupt my affairs, I’ll have no choice but to call for the man who sees to disruptions.”
Tate glanced at me and for the first time, her expression was uneasy. She stared around the graveyard, like she was just now beginning to realize how many of them there actually were and how scary some of them looked.
When her gaze came back to me, the Cutter leaned in over my shoulder and held up a gloved hand, letting the claws drift lazily in front of my face, not touching, never touching, but letting Tate see how easily he could.
I watched as he flexed his fingers. “What do you want?”
He touched the side of my neck and the iron felt cold against my skin. “All I want is for you to stand here and watch the people you love be horribly mutilated. Is that too much to ask?”
I held very still, trying not to give him the satisfaction of seeing how much even a light touch hurt.
Beside me, Roswell and the twins were struggling to get free from the Cutter’s bony men but without much luck. Tate had no one holding her, though.
“Let him go,” she said, and she sounded hard and mean, like she was ready to destroy him.
The Cutter was so close I could feel him laughing against my ear. “You’re a regular little firebrand, aren’t you? Come and take him, then. I’m keen to see if you can.”
His claws dug harder, harder. They broke the skin and I was breathing in spasms, trying not to make any noise, and everything happened very fast.
Tate bent and yanked the cuff of her jeans up, reaching for the top of her boot.
He let me go and stepped step back, raising his hands like he was surrendering, letting her have me. Then he slammed his fist into the side of my head.
I hit the ground and for a second, all I could see was a shower of tiny lights. I lay in the mud and the ashes, trying to catch my breath. The ground was wet against my back, soaking through my coat. The Cutter crouched over me, resting his claws against my neck. His touch was so gentle it seemed indecent that it could possibly hurt that much. The mark of Roswell’s bottle cap stood out dark on his cheek.
“Get off him,” Tate said again. Her voice was very low.
The Cutter just laughed his low, rattling laugh. “No, precious, no. What’s going to happen is this: I’m going to carve him up a little, and you’re going to watch me, and that’s how it will go because if you try to stop me, I’ll cut a gully down his throat and the two of us can sit here in the dark and watch him bleed out.”
The points dug hard into my neck and then I did yell, hoarse and aching, hating the sound of my voice. Suddenly, there was a flat, heavy thud and the claws were gone. I rolled sideways with a cold, searing pain racing up through the base of my skull.
The Cutter lay next to me. He had his hands raised, like he wanted to press them against his face, but the claws kept him from touching his own skin. There was a long burn down one cheek.
Around us, everyone stepped back. Tate stared out at them. She was holding something long and narrow, matte black in the light from the street. It was a crowba
r.
The blue girls began to laugh in shrill, screeching howls as the Cutter scrambled to his feet. Clearly, the House of Mayhem had some uncharitable feelings toward him. They didn’t care if he took a crowbar to the face. They were just here to bear witness to whatever happened. He glared around at them, then turned on Tate.
She looked small next to him. Young. His smile was wide and it promised murder and before that, pain. The most desperate desire of his life was that he wanted pain for everyone.
“Little girl,” he said, and there was a lilt in his voice that sounded almost like regret. “Little girl, please put down your toy. You’ll die if you don’t.”
She shook her head and adjusted her grip.
“Put it down, or I’ll lay you open and leave your eyes for the crows.” When he slashed at her, there was no warning. He raked at her arm, claws slicing through the shoulder of her jacket. Even when blood soaked through the canvas, she didn’t back away.
Instead, she smiled. It was the same smile she’d given Alice in the parking lot. The smile that said, I have fun when I break stuff.
The Cutter was grinning back at her, like this was their moment. Like he didn’t know that the surest way to piss her off was to draw blood.
She swung again, and this time the bar connected, slamming into his teeth. He fell, stumbling and slipping in the mud and the soot, blood dripping from his mouth and chin, seeping into the ground, smoking on the crowbar in Tate’s hand. Already, his breath was grating out of him. He knelt between the headstones, shuddering and coughing.
Tate stood over him, holding the crowbar in both hands. She was still smiling, looking electrified and wild. Around us, the crowd was silent.
The Cutter didn’t move. Blood was running from his mouth. He swiped an arm across his chin and glared up at her, looking savage.
“Attend to her,” the Lady said, and her voice was shrill.
The Cutter struggled to his feet, spitting blood onto the muddy ground. Then he lunged.
Tate swung the crowbar hard, aiming for his hand, breaking off two of the claws. They flashed as they fell and the Cutter jerked back. She was moving away, already whipping around for another swing.
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