The Replacement

by Brenna Yovanoff

  The Lady lay at her feet, looking up with black, horrified eyes. Her lips were a cold, deathly blue. “How dare you speak to me like that, you foul little beast?” Her voice was ragged.

  The Morrigan smiled, showing all her jagged teeth. “You’re nothing but an unsightly ghoul now, your man is gone, and I’ll speak to you however I like.”

  “Insubordinate wretch—I should have you punished. I should have you whipped until you beg.”

  The Morrigan shook her head. “But you won’t. There’s no one here to do it.”

  She considered the claw in her hand. Then, with scary precision, she stuck it in the side of the Lady’s neck. The point punched through the skin and then went in easily, sinking up to the Morrigan’s fist. On the ground, the Lady clutched at her throat, shrieking up at the bare trees. The Morrigan straightened but left the claw where it was.

  Around them, the pack of girls were creeping closer. The Lady’s attendants didn’t wait for the grinning crowd of maggots and teeth. They hurried out of the graveyard, away from where the Lady lay crumpled in the mud. Her cries were softer and more pitiful, and the Morrigan watched her with a strange expression, something close to satisfied. I wondered if this was what she’d been dreaming about, like the Lady dreamed of drinking blood.

  But when she turned to face me, she didn’t meet my gaze.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, looking at something on the ground. “I’m not the monster, I’m the good one. I’m love, you know.” She was crying in little hitching sobs. “I’m the one who doesn’t hold grudges. I’m supposed to be gracious.”

  She came shuffling over to where I sat, still shaking against Tate.

  “Tell me you forgive me?”

  Tate put her arms around me and I could feel her holding me up. I slumped sideways and rested my head against her shoulder. “For what?”

  “For being so ugly and so wicked.”

  “I forgive you,” I said, and the words felt pointless and unnecessary. Her teeth didn’t bother me much anymore and the only thing I had to forgive were the marks on Emma’s arms.

  The little pink princess came skipping across the graveyard, flapping her star wand and leading Roswell by the hand.

  The twins were right behind them. Drew was carrying Natalie, who slept with her head against his shoulder. The white dress was looking pretty dismal, fraying at the bottom and covered in mud. Her hair was snarled and stuck up in back like a fuzzy animal’s. Danny was carrying the revenant, who didn’t snuggle against his shoulder. It didn’t do anything.

  “You’re losing blood,” the Morrigan said, examining my hand.

  I looked down at myself. The front of my jacket was dark and it was all over everything.

  The Morrigan trotted away and came back again with Janice, who took a bottle out of her coat and offered it to me. It was one of the ones from the pharmacy room, brown glass, sealed with wax. “You’ll need to drink this.”

  She put the bottle to her mouth and bit the seal. Then she peeled away the wax and held it out. I drank it in gulps. It tasted hot, and I felt breathless and light-headed but better. I felt unbelievably tired.

  Janice was already opening another jar, scooping out a lumpy paste and packing it into the cut on my hand. It burned for one excruciating second and then went numb.

  I leaned harder against Tate, trying to stop my vision from blurring.

  “What does this mean for Gentry?” I asked the Morrigan, glancing over at the Lady, who lay on the ground by the crypt.

  The Morrigan sat down next to me. She cupped my hand in both of hers, then folded it closed.

  “That the bad things will stop because I don’t steal children and I don’t burn churches.”

  “What does that mean for the town, though? Will the town stop being so good?”

  The Morrigan shrugged and stood up, looking off toward the trees. “Has it ever been good in your lifetime?”

  I shook my head. “Not really. Not since before I was born.”

  “Maybe it never was.”

  I nodded and looked out at all the headstones in the unconsecrated corner, marking the graves of the replacements who hadn’t lasted and hadn’t been revived by the Morrigan.

  “Goodbye,” she said.

  When I didn’t say it back, she rested her hand on the top of my head. The weight was strange and gentle. “I love you,” she said. “And when I tell you goodbye, I don’t mean forever or for long. Just that I’m going home now, and so are you.”

  She bent and picked up her doll, shaking some of the dirt off it and looking strangely adult. Then she crossed to the entrance to the crypt and stood over the Lady.

  The fragile beauty was gone. Her face had turned a pale, chalky yellow and her veins showed black through her skin. Her eyes looked shocked and bloody.

  “Ugly, sorry thing.” The Morrigan shook her head.

  She waved for the dead girls and they came in a whispering pack, lifting the Lady’s body, dragging her away through the mud in the direction of Orchard and the slag heap.

  It came to me in a weak, dreamy way that birds were singing somewhere. The light was changing, getting warmer. The sky was pale and the horizon was starting to glow red. It had been weeks since we’d seen a sunrise.

  We didn’t talk, just wound our way back through the headstones toward the street. Roswell and Danny tried once or twice to bicker over little things, but nothing took. Natalie still slept against Drew’s shoulder.

  I stumbled into Tate and was startled to find that she was real and solid. She put her arm around me. The pain in my hand was faint. The graveyard seemed almost transparent, like I was dreaming it and dreaming the six of us and the narrow, muddy path.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  DAYBREAK

  On Concord Street, the porch light was still on, glowing in the weak dawn light. We climbed the front steps in a little huddle, like we were reluctant to be too far away from each other.

  I tried the knob, but it was locked, and I had to lean against the porch railing for a second to stop the world from spinning. Then I pushed myself away and rang the bell.

  When Emma opened the door, she took one look at me and threw herself into my arms. I was bloody, covered in mud. It was all over everything, drying on my coat, streaking her face and hands, and she didn’t let go. She looked like she’d been crying for a year.

  Inside, my dad was pacing the kitchen, raking his hands through his hair. My mom sat patiently at the table, clasping her hands on the tablecloth like she was waiting for him to stop.

  When we gathered in the doorway, they both looked up. My dad’s expression was a mix of shock, confusion, and relief, mostly relief. My mom looked like she was about to pass out, and I was more aware than ever of how gory I was. Emma clutched my arm and beside me, Tate and the twins looked like something out of a war documentary. Roswell was the only one relatively unscathed. His expression was alert and quizzical, like he’d gotten there by accident.

  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.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  ONE OF US

  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?”

  She sighed and rested her head on my shoulder. “I just figured you’d do whatever it took not to get involved. I mean, it’s what people do.”

  “I did try not to get involved.”

  “Maybe, but you came through in the end. When it counted.”

  There was a whole sprawling world underneath us, filled with ugly, vicious, beautiful people. The line between the two places was thin, hardly a separation, and both ran on pain and blood and fear and death and joy and music.

  But for now, the sunset was enough.

  I reached for Tate, feeling for the warmth of her hand, and linked my fingers through hers. The only thing that mattered was the weight of her head on my shoulder.

  Our lives were limitless and unknowable, not perfect, but ours. This was life in Gentry.

  This is just what we do.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  There are a lot of people who made this book possible, and even more who made it better. I owe particular thanks to:

  My agent, Sarah Davies, for her invaluable feedback and her unwavering conviction that what I’d written was, in fact, a story.

  My editor, Lexa, who understood my book, then showed me how to fix it.

  Ben Schrank and the Razorbill team, for making a mysterious process less mystifying.

  My Merry Sisters, Tessa Gratton and Maggie Stiefvater—Tess keeps me honest and Maggie keeps me
from rusting.

  Gia for surprise candy-delivery. Also, driving me around when I was sleep-deprived, thereby keeping the roads much, much safer.

  Little Sister Yovanoff for taking excellent pictures and writing down all the parts where she was confused.

  My husband David, who believed unfailingly—even on days when I didn’t.

  And Syl, who has always been willing to read everything I write, and then tell me exactly what she thinks.