He caught her as she came toward him, opening a row of shallow slashes down the side of her neck, but she never flinched. There was just the Cutter and Tate and the bar. It was black in her hand and this time it hit him across the chest, knocking him back.
The Cutter staggered, then caught himself. He stood leaning forward slightly, and I thought for a second that he was going to throw himself at Tate, but he only raised a gloved hand and touched his forehead. The claws made a row of little welts where they brushed his skin.
“I stand down,” he said. His voice was hoarse and ferocious, his breath coming in huge gasps.
“Really, sir,” the Lady said from the dark. “I asked that you remove this inconvenience and am quite mystified as to why you don’t do it.”
“I stand down,” he said again, and this time he raised his head. The look he gave the Lady was murderous.
She spoke coldly from under her hood. “You do whatever I require, and at the moment, I require you to get rid of that girl.”
He turned his back on her.
The Cutter faced Tate, who stood holding the crowbar, but he didn’t make any attempt to challenge her. His expression was furious but rigidly controlled.
“You,” he said. His voice sounded rough, and blood ran darkly off his chin. “Ill-mannered as the devil, but you’re clever enough with a blunt instrument. You and I, we could stand to go another round one day, don’t you think?”
Tate didn’t answer. She was staring past him, toward the Lady’s corner of the cemetery, and looking more frightened than she had at any point during their confrontation. I followed her gaze and understood. One of the bony men had stepped out from behind the crypt with Natalie in his arms.
The Cutter gave Tate a jerky bow, then shoved past her, away from the cluster of rotting girls and out into the cemetery. The pair of broken claws lay on the ground at Tate’s feet. He didn’t look back.
“Enough of this.” The Lady stepped forward, snatching Natalie from her handler and dragging her along toward the white crypt. “We’re going in now, and we may be a while.”
Tate lunged toward them, but two of the Cutter’s men moved to intercept her. They caught her by the back of her jacket, almost lifting her off the ground. Her legs thrashed wildly, and she was screaming for Natalie in a voice that made my chest hurt.
I remembered what my mother had said when the Morrigan had found me, asked for my service and I’d agreed because I didn’t want anything to happen to Emma. Everything involves choice.
I knew what she’d been trying to say—that you have to think about your options, weigh the consequences before you make decisions, but the advice was so worthless when it came to the things that mattered. This wasn’t one of those times.
This was the endgame. The time when everything got quiet and there was only my fast, panicked breath and my heartbeat. There was only me. The one outside of everything, when everyone else had a place where they belonged.
“Wait,” I said.
The Lady stopped with her back to me. “What do you mean by this, Mr. Doyle?” But she sounded like she was smiling.
“Let me go instead. It’s the only real choice.” It wasn’t until I said it that I knew how true it was. “It’s the only thing left to do.”
The Lady turned and shoved Natalie into the crowd, almost throwing her at Tate, who jerked away from her bewildered guards and ran to catch her. Tate knelt on the ground, holding Natalie against her chest. It was closest I’d ever seen her come to crying.
From the shadows, the Lady’s voice was sweet and, under that, darkly excited. “Come along, Mr. Doyle.”
Tate looked up at me, shaking her head, and I stared back at her, trying to make her see my conviction. Just let me go.
She squeezed her eyes shut and buried her face in Natalie’s hair. The gesture made me more certain than ever that I was doing the right thing. The only thing. I turned to follow the Lady, who stood waiting on the stone step of the crypt.
As I came up to her, she pushed back her hood to show her face and I almost stopped breathing. She was badly changed from the woman I’d met in the reading room. Her eyes were bigger, blacker than the Morrigan’s or any of the blue girls’. In the white of her face, they looked like lumps of soot, all deep shadow and no color.
I remembered Emma’s story about going into the cave to be eaten. How if you went willingly, then death wasn’t death, but transformation.
There are all kinds of things that can scare you every day. What if someone you know gets cancer? What if something happens to your sister or your friends or your parents? And what if you get hit by a car crossing the street or the kids at school find out what an unnatural freak you are and what if you go too far out in the lake and the water is over your head and what if there’s a fire or a war?
And you can lie awake at night and worry about these things because it’s scary and unpredictable, but it’s real. It’s possible.
The Lady’s deep, unblinking gaze was black and impossible.
She held out her hand, waiting for me, and I took it, letting her draw me away from my life, my friends, and toward the crypt.
“Wait,” I said, feeling the word catch in my throat. “I just want to look.”
Roswell and the twins were pinned against the churchyard fence, held there by the Cutter’s men. Drew had the same blank expression the Corbetts usually wore, but Danny was watching me with a look like there was something sharp under his ribs and someone twisting. Roswell stood with his back against the fence, restrained by two men in black coats. He was still holding the revenant, watching me. Just watching.
Between the headstones, Tate crouched with her arms around Natalie. Her mouth was open like she wanted to say something, but what was there to say? Her sister was her family. The only right thing was to turn away from her, away from the whole shining world and toward the Lady.
For a second, though, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to. Tate’s eyes were on my face, and it was hard to give that up. To give up my life when it was finally starting.
The musicians and the blue girls stood quietly. This was what they’d come for, not out of pleasure or malice. They’d come to see their world renewed and that meant blood. It didn’t matter that I was standing right in front of them. In all important ways, I was already dead.
“Come to me,” the Lady called, her voice echoing to me from inside the crypt. The door was open now, a dark slash against the white stone, and I turned and followed her because it was the last, best thing to do.
In the entrance, I could smell wet dirt and cold stone. The floor was covered in a shallow layer of water, ground seepage or rain. I couldn’t hear anything except the sound of my own heartbeat.
“You’re bleeding,” the Lady said from the shadows. “I can smell the copper and the salt.”
In the dark, her face was ghostly, almost transparent. Her bones showed palely through her skin. When she raised her head to look at me, I could see her teeth and now they were just as cruel and as jagged as the Morrigan’s.
She smiled and held out a hand. “Come closer and let me look at you.”
I took another step, away from the ruined church and the circle of watchers, into the dark.
“I dreamed this,” she said. “Dreamed of you for years, even before I knew you. But a dream is a poor substitute for the flesh.”
We were inside the crypt now, out of sight of the churchyard. “How long have you been living off the blood of innocent people?”
She reached for my arm, pulling me close so she could whisper into my ear. “You ask me to calculate in years? You would be better served by gallons. Time is only the mythology of those who have not lived long enough to see every structure collapse, every condition fold back on itself. The people demonize us, and then a century later, they pray to us.”
“Not in Gentry,” I said. “It doesn’t matter how much peace or prosperity you give them—they’ll never worship you. Not like they did in your old home.”
<
br /> The Lady smiled, lips peeling back from her teeth. “Home? My home is wherever they know me. In Gentry, they make effigies to me, and you think it matters whether they burn them for spite or for love?”
“You’re saying that it doesn’t matter if they love you as long as they believe in you?”
The Lady nodded. “This is the natural order. Gods fall out of favor and become monsters. And sometimes they rise from the rank and file of the vanquished to become gods again.”
“What about you?” I said, watching her starved face. Her eyes were impossibly dark, like time stretching back forever, and it was deeper and more complete than any famine or plague or war. It went on so long that it seemed to see inside me. “What are you?”
She smiled, reaching up to touch my face. “I am terror.” Her hand was papery against my cheek, her skin getting thinner. “I draw strength from their fears and I feed on them.”
“I thought you fed on the blood from their offerings.”
She laughed, and it was a dry, moldy sound. “Darling, you are too delightful. I feed on the fact that they offer. I eat their devotion and their abasement. Now hold out your hand.”
I let her take my wrist. She cradled my hand in both of hers, turning it like she was feeling for a pulse. Then, without warning, she sank her teeth in.
Pain surged up my arm and I gasped but didn’t pull away. I took a shallow breath and then another. The force of her bite made huge white spots bloom in front of my eyes.
“I expected different,” she whispered, scraping my hand with her teeth. “Since the day I first drank the blood of my own, I’ve been dreaming of it. The desperation, the surrender. Like a man they called Caury.”
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.
CHAPTER THIRTY
THE TRUTH
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?”
“Ugly,” the Lady whispered. “Monster and filth and traitor.”
“No,” said the Morrigan, stroking her forehead. “No, dearest, no. That’s you.”
All through the graveyard, the blue girls were whispering, giggling their weird, shrill giggles while the Lady coughed and squirmed, bleeding all over the stone.
The Morrigan knelt over her. She touched the handle of the paring knife, running her fingers over the place where it stuck out of the Lady’s shoulder. In her other hand, she held one of the Cutter’s broken claws. It smoked in her palm, giving off a rotten smell that made my stomach turn, but she didn’t seem to notice. “You’re terribly selfish, you know. I’ve loved you so long, and it was never dear or precious to you. I might as well have not loved you at all.”
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