The Replacement (18 page)

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Authors: Brenna Yovanoff

BOOK: The Replacement
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"It's a lot of water, though. I mean, what will you do if it doesn't stop?"
"She'll be kinder after All Souls' Day. Once she gets her libation, we might even prevail upon her to be more sparing with the rain."
"I don't know All Souls' Day. Is that the same thing as Halloween?"
The Morrigan laughed and tapped me on the head with her stick. "Don't be silly. Halloween is just another name for All Hallows' Eve, when the locals burn their lanterns and throw the bones of their livestock on the fire to keep the devils away. Next comes All Saints', for the pious to be revered and sanctified and have their fingers cut off and kept as relics. And very last, there's All Souls' Day, and that's for the rest of us."
"The rest?"
The Morrigan nodded. "The creatures in the ground. All Souls' is when my sister renews her hold on the town and sacrifices an offering to herself. It's when we gather in the churchyard and burn sage and rue. And then, just before the sun comes up, we bear witness to the bloodletting, and the world is better again."
She said it like she was reciting a poem or telling me some kind of story instead of discussing something that happened in an aging steel town on a regular basis.
I gave her a hard look. "And you don't see anything wrong with that? The Lady takes kids so that she can slaughter them, and you're fine with it. You act like what she's doing is normal. You keep
saying
that she's so bad, that she's so out of line--then why doesn't someone do something about it?"
I watched her face, the way she kept touching her mouth, like she was trying to cover her teeth without meaning to. "Do yourself a service and keep out of her way. She's a hard, cruel mistress and she'll punish you as easily as breathing. She has the child in her house and will keep it safe until the night of ritual and blood."
"So, you're saying you're all just going to stand around and let her kill a little kid?" I thought of Tate's hard eyes, her desperate insistence that the girl who'd died wasn't her sister. My mom hadn't wanted to discuss the subject, but the kids who were replaced went somewhere. They didn't just vanish. If there was any purpose or reason to the substitutions, then Natalie was alive right now, waiting for someone to collect her blood.
The Morrigan stood up, raising the stick like a sword or a scepter. "There is nothing you can do for that child. My sister is a wicked beast of a woman, and you'll only come to harm if you cross her."
"You're talking about killing a kid. Someone's daughter." I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. "Someone's sister."
"And it's only a small thing in the grand design of the world. One very small thing, every seven years. What a trivial cost to pay for health and prosperity."
Janice had come wandering over and she sat down next to me, sticking her feet in the pool. "The town needs this, Mackie. We
all
need this."
"So, you all line up in the graveyard and burn your sage and kill kids? That's great. That's just really amazing."
"It's not us doing it."
I could feel my throat get tight, almost like I was going to laugh, but not in a way where everything is so cheerful and humorous. "You're
letting
it happen."
Janice sighed, putting her hand on my arm. "You aren't thinking about this in a rational way.
Everyone
benefits. Us, the House of Misery, the locals and the town."
"No," I said. "It doesn't benefit the town. It hurts and it terrorizes them. How can they be happy when someone's taking their kids?"
The Morrigan nodded eagerly. "That's why we have music. The Lady punishes the town, but we make them happy again."
"And it never occurred to you not to make them miserable in the first place?"
Janice shook her head. "You don't understand, this is just what we do."
"Yeah?" I said. "Well, it's not what
I
do."
The Morrigan reached for me, clutching at my wrist. Her hand was wet from splashing around in the water, but it was still warm. "Oh, don't be hateful. You know the course of events as well as we do. You know the way this has to end."
"Yeah, I do." I peeled her fingers off my arm and stood up. "I leave."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
NORMAL ENOUGH
I
climbed out of the ravine onto Orchard and started toward home. I felt angry and disgusted or else disgusting. I wasn't about to be involved with something so ugly--I couldn't be. But the House of Mayhem was still where I came from and how I'd wound up in Gentry in the first place. If I wanted to be healthy, I had to work for the Morrigan, but the thought gave me a sick feeling.
I wanted to talk to Emma, but I didn't want to talk about any of the things that were actually bothering me, and anyway, she wouldn't be up. When I checked my phone, it was two forty-five. It was still raining, but what else was new.
A car was coming down the street toward me, the yellow beam of its headlights glowing out of the rain. It pulled over so abruptly the front passenger tire skimmed the curb and ricocheted off.
Tate got out and crossed the street, leaving the Buick parked crookedly in the bike lane.
"Hey," she called, splashing through the gutter and onto the sidewalk.
I stopped and waited.
When she reached me, she stood with her hands on her hips. She'd put the hazards on and they pulsed behind her in the drizzle, flashing on and off like a flat orange heartbeat. "I have your bass."
I wanted to ask what she was doing out so late, driving around by herself. "Do you know what time it is?"
She squinted up at me. "Yes, as a matter of fact. It's the middle of the goddamn night. What the hell happened to you?"
I shrugged and tried to look unreadable.
"You didn't fake that," she said. "That, what happened in the car, that was real."
I nodded.
She scraped her wet hair away from her forehead. "Well, are you
okay
?"
"I'm fine. Don't worry about it."
She turned and looked off over the subdivision and the road, shaking her head. "Look, what's wrong with you?"
I didn't answer right away. I had a feeling that even if I managed to answer without using specifics, she'd just rephrase the question and ask me again, so I skipped to the most basic part of it. "Has there ever been something about yourself--or about your life--that you just really hate?"
She laughed, a sharp little bark of a laugh. "God, where do I start?" She was still looking up at me, sort of smiling, and then her face changed.
"What?"
"Nothing. Just, your eyes are really dark." Her expression was thoughtful and a little worried, like she wasn't condemning or judging me, just looking.
I took a deep breath and put my hand on her arm. "I want to talk to you about Natalie." I steered her toward the edge of Mrs. Feely's lawn. "Here, sit down."
She looked unconvinced, but she settled herself on the ground and I sat next to her.
"Can I ask you something first?" I said.
She nodded and yanked up a handful of dead grass, watching me sideways. She'd stopped smiling.
"What would you do if I told you that someone took your sister--that you're right, and this is a shitty town that lets terrible, screwed-up things happen? Would that make any difference? Would it help?"
The rain was striking up from the road in tiny splatters, catching the glare from Tate's hazards. Down at the intersection, the traffic light turned red and the pavement suddenly looked bloody. I had an idea that it had been raining my whole life.
Tate didn't answer, just pulled up another handful of grass. Her expression was stony.
"What are you thinking?" I sounded like I was whispering, even though I didn't want to be.
"Nothing." She said it in a really miserable way, looking tough and helpless at the same time. "I just thought, you're right. It doesn't matter. Whether you know something or not--it wouldn't matter because it already happened. No one could have saved her."
Two days ago, I would have paid money to hear her say that, to have her drop it and just start accepting the situation for what it was so she could let it go and move on. Now, everything had changed. If the Morrigan was right, then Natalie was still alive, at least until Friday at dawn, and I was a world away from knowing what to do about it.
When I reached for Tate's hand, she let me take it.
"I just want to know how it happened. How something like that could happen."
I didn't know what to say, so I just held on, smoothing my thumb over the back of her hand. "It isn't personal or malicious. It's just something that happens. Other people have hurricanes and earthquakes."
She nodded, staring at the street. She had an expression I recognized, like she was holding her breath. With my free hand, I reached across and touched her hair. It was softer than it looked. I brushed her bangs away from her face and she closed her eyes.
"This whole place is so full of hypocrites, it's unbelievable. They're so good at the charitable casseroles and the funerals, but they never do anything to stop it. They just say, 'How sad.'"
I let go of her hand and put my arm around her. I wondered if she was going to start crying. Emma cried at everything, even animated movies and greeting card commercials, but Tate wasn't like that. She felt smaller than I'd expected and softer. I pulled her against me, running my hand up and down her arm.
"I did believe you. Right from the beginning."
"Why didn't you just
say
that, then? I mean, you could have just said that."
She rested her head on my shoulder, and for a second it was pretty much all I'd ever wanted out of life. Then I felt a sharp, burning pain through my shirt. I held my breath and tried not to ruin the moment by pulling away.
She leaned against me and her voice was very soft. "I wasn't trying to blame you. I just thought you might know what happened was all. It's not because of you. I know that."
I nodded, clenching my teeth against the stabbing pain in my collarbone. She
should
be blaming me. Now was when she should be throwing a fit, demanding to know everything I knew because I finally knew something definitive and damning. And she had no idea.
She moved and the pain jolted along my shoulder and down my chest like an electric shock, those paddles, how the EMT yells
clear
. I gasped and let her go.
She leaned away from me fast, looking at the ground. There was a metal ball chain around her neck, tucked down inside her shirt. I wanted to explain, but the words were pretty much nonexistent. I stood up.
"Where are you going?" Her voice sounded hoarse.
"Nowhere. Let's go for a walk." I reached down, offering my hand. "I don't think I can get back in your car. Feel like walking me home?"
Once she got to her feet, she tried to pull away, but I held on. For a second, we were standing by the side of the road, holding hands. Then she yanked her hand away in a hard jerk, like she couldn't stand still long enough to let me touch her.
We walked down Welsh Street, toward the church, not talking much. At the churchyard, we stopped, standing out on the sidewalk.
Tate nodded toward the little cemetery. "They put the body in there. I can show you if you want."
I shook my head. "That's okay."
"I promise I'm not going to do anything all girly and emotional-baggage-y."
"I can't go in the cemetery."
The look she gave me was spectacularly unimpressed. "What are you talking about? Your dad is the
minister
. You can go wherever you want."
"It's complicated," I said. "It's just . . . this thing."
She looked at me for a long time, like she was considering all the different things she could say.
Then she started for the edge of the property line. "Okay, we'll go around and look from the side."
She led me around the building and up to the fence, where a bed of orange flowers were turning brown.
"There," she said, pointing over the fence. "They just put the headstone up. The little white one, back against the wall."
She was pointing past the anonymous headstones and the crypt to the unconsecrated section, where early parishioners used to put anyone they thought was unclean. In the dark, only the marble markers showed with any clarity. They glowed palely from the shadows, while the granite ones were only faint outlines. The stone Tate was pointing to sat square and straight, but most of the others were starting to lean.
There were other plots in other places in the cemetery. Consecrated places. But the thing that wasn't Natalie had been buried with the outcasts because it belonged there, which meant the unholy ground was exactly what the Morrigan had said it was--just another way for the town to play along, to be involved. Something they all agreed to, without having to say it.

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