“They make blood sacrifices,” I said. “Just like in the books. I mean, it sounds crazy, like something someone made up. But it’s the truth.”
Emma didn’t respond right away. When she did, her voice was unnaturally calm. “Maybe that’s not surprising. A lot of cultures have a history of human sacrifice.”
“It is surprising because it’s insane. This isn’t the Stone Age. We don’t go around sacrificing people to the gods.”
She laughed and it sounded shrill and breathless, almost like a sob. “We do, though. We take for granted that sometimes you lose a child. And sometimes everyone else gets hit by the recession. Everyone else’s unemployment skyrockets, and their tech plants go bankrupt and their dairy farms fail, but not ours. Never ours, because if you feed the ground, the ground feeds you back. You get food and prosperity and peace, and there are no disasters or plagues, and nothing bad happens.”
“Except that every seven years, someone kills one of your kids.”
“You have to understand: It wasn’t always bad.”
“So, some little kid gets murdered, but it’s cool?”
For a second, Emma was so quiet it sounded like she was holding her breath. When she answered, she stayed very still. “I think it’s complicated. It wasn’t always a kid. Some of the Germanic tribes believed that volunteering to be sacrificed was a kind of magic by itself. Like a transformation. One of the old druidic texts in the Bevelry volume talks about going into a cave to be eaten by a goddess and coming out as the greatest poet of all time. They went into the dark and came out reborn.”
I squeezed my eyes shut until I saw stars. “How can you be eaten and then become a poet?”
“Stop being so literal. It’s a metaphor and you know it.” Emma rolled over and her voice sounded farther away, like she was talking to the wall. “The prosperity rituals work on a trade-off. The cost is a way of showing that you’re serious, that you’ll give something up in order to gain favor.”
I nodded, but it was more complicated than a straight trade. She wasn’t just talking about what it cost to feed the Lady or look the other way while kids disappeared from their beds. I came from somewhere. I could have lived an ugly life in a world of tunnels and black, murky water and dead girls, with a little tattooed princess to watch over us. I would have belonged there. Instead, I was just a stranger in a strange house, with too many lights on. That was a cost too.
“It’s been hard for you,” she said finally. “All the time. How do you think that makes me feel, that everything is poisonous and everything hurts you and there’s nothing I can do about it? And everything has to be a secret. Everyone’s always asking how we can be so different from each other. They all want to know how you turned out to be the delicate one, like it’s my fault that my brother’s prettier than me.” Her voice was higher and softer than normal. “Girls are just supposed to be pretty.”
“You’re pretty,” I said, and knew that if I could say it, that made it true.
Above me, Emma laughed like I’d just said I wanted to grow up to be a toaster oven or a giraffe. I got up and switched on her desk lamp.
She squinted at me, blinking in the light. “What? What’s wrong?”
I sat on the edge of her bed, trying to get an idea of what other people saw.
“Stop it,” she said. “What are you doing?”
“I’m looking at you.”
Her face was soft, broader and flatter than mine, her hair limp, coming to just past her shoulders. It was brown, faded looking against her daisy-print pajamas. She was sitting up now, holding the blankets in a fierce double handful. Her cheeks were pink and shiny.
Around us, the bookshelves reached almost to the ceiling. Books about chemistry and physics and gardening, sure, but mythology and history too, all kinds of folklore and fairy tales. She read academic journals and ordered books online. She stockpiled literary criticism and essays. Her room was a private library of answers, trying to help me, save me, decode me. It was just another part of what made her beautiful.
She was looking off over my head. “They trade their sick children for healthy babies.”
I nodded.
She hugged herself and still wouldn’t look at me. “Sometimes, if the new mother loves it and takes really good care of it, the sick baby gets better. It stops being ugly and grows up strong and healthy and normal. Sometimes, if the mother just loves it enough, it becomes beautiful.”
I knew that part too, but the way she said it was miserable, like she was trying to tell me something else. She was looking past me. Maybe thinking in the back of her mind that if our mother had just loved her more, she would have turned out looking like something in a magazine and not like the girl I’d known my whole life. I wanted to point out that strong, healthy, and normal were not words anyone would generally apply to me.
Anyway, the stories always missed one crucial thing. Mothers didn’t love the hungry, scary things that replaced their kids. It wasn’t their fault or anything. They just couldn’t bring themselves to love something that awful. But maybe sisters could, if they were miraculously unselfish, if the trade happened when they were young enough.
My whole life, Emma had just been there. Cutting my hair with the aluminum kindergarten scissors just so I didn’t have to go to the barbershop downtown, with its metal countertops and its stainless steel shears. Making me breakfast, making sure I ate and went out with my friends and did my homework. Making sure nothing bad happened. I wanted to hug her and say that everything was much better than she believed. It was just so strange that she couldn’t see.
“Emma—” I got a tight feeling in my throat and started again. “Emma, Mom didn’t make me like this. Keep me alive this long . . .You did.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
CONSECRATED
The next day was Sunday, and I woke up to rain coursing steadily down my window. I lay in bed watching it, waiting for my alarm to go off and feeling wide awake. In the daylight, everything looked gray and weak. The night before didn’t seem so disturbing or so real.
I rolled onto my back, trying to decide whether I wanted to get up or just lie there awhile.
Finally, I pushed back the covers. Even overcast, the light was brighter than it had seemed in weeks, but it didn’t hurt my eyes. Out in the yard, everything looked crisp around the edges.
I got out the bottle the Morrigan had given me, cracked the wax seal, and took a swallow. Right away, I felt good. My reflection in the mirror was shockingly, gloriously normal.
Downstairs, I could hear my dad humming to himself. His steps were quick and light and it was weird to think that Sundays made someone happy.
When I went down to the kitchen, Emma was already at the table. She was bent over a book, and when she looked up and saw me, she smiled. I stood in the doorway and watched her. She was small and destructible, with soft hands and fine, straight hair.
I wanted to be shocked. I wanted to be dumbstruck and appalled, but I couldn’t do it. It was completely unshocking that there were monsters in the world, secret rituals and underground burrows filled with the dead, when in my own way, I was secret and sort of monstrous too. It just didn’t show in the same way.
I was still standing in the doorway when my mom came wandering in, wearing her hospital sneakers and her scrubs. The outfit was radically inappropriate for church and I wondered if she knew what day it was. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and it looked very blond in the sunlight.
“Morning, sweetie.” She poured herself a cup of coffee and put in more sugar than any reasonable person would need. “What are you doing up so early?”
I shrugged. “I thought maybe I’d come to church with you guys.”
Emma set down her book. “The weather report said it’s going to rain all day. Are you sure you don’t want to stay home?”
“Nah, it’s not that bad out. I’ll hang around on the lawn or something.”
We were late leaving the house. This was due entirely to the fact tha
t my dad wouldn’t start the car until my mom went back inside and changed out of her scrubs.
After they’d gone inside and the doors had closed, I sat on the lawn of the classroom addition and faced the church. It was large building, warm and buttery looking. Even under a gray sky, it made me think of sunlight, all vaulted roof and blond brick. The windows were pieced together with diamonds of colored glass.
Beyond it, the cemetery stretched back for almost two acres, graves planted in rows, neatly mowed. Along the north side, the unconsecrated area was less orderly. The headstones were grimy and ancient, the names worn off or else never chiseled on in the first place. They leaned drunkenly around a lone crypt, fourteen feet high and made of white marble. I didn’t know how far back it dated, but it was one of the oldest fixtures in the cemetery. Everything else had sprung up around it.
I tipped my head back and looked up. The clouds were low, dark with the constant rain.
In the park across the street, the trees had already gone from green to red and yellow and orange. Now they were turning brown.
I lay on my back in the wet grass. The ground was cold through my jacket and I closed my eyes, trying to shut out the drizzle and the looming shape of the building. This was the place where everything in my life was clearly divided. My mom and dad and Emma disappeared through the double doors every Sunday, and I stayed outside.
It didn’t matter how many David and Goliath coloring books I’d colored or how hard my dad tried to make everything seem normal and okay. The plain truth was, my family was there in the church, under the steeple, and that was someplace I couldn’t go.
But maybe things were changing. It was hard to stop focusing on how good I felt. How completely different from my normal, awkward self.
“Good morning,” said someone above me. The voice was raspy and familiar.
When I opened my eyes, I was looking up at Carlina Carlyle. She stood over me in scuffed boots and a long coat. She had on a bizarre kind of pilot’s hat, with a leather strap that buckled under her chin. She looked exactly like she did when she took the stage at the Starlight. And at the same time, not like herself at all. Her features looked ordinary. Her fierce stage strut had turned awkward, the same way Janice could look weird and creepy in my kitchen and beautiful when she bent over her glass beakers and flowers. Above me, Carlina’s eyes were pale like robin’s eggs, without the devilish glow from the footlights.
When I didn’t say anything, she flopped down next to me. “Don’t you get cold out here?”
“Sometimes, I guess.”
She looked like she was waiting for me to say something else. Her mouth was wide, but now it looked tight at the corners, like maybe she was the kind of person who could understand.
“Mostly, I just get lonely.”
She nodded. “We like to think we’re so solitary, so self-sufficient.” When she smiled, it was tired and kind of ironic. Her hair was spilling out from under the hat, curling around her face. “What a stupid thing to be proud of, huh?”
“Who are we?” I said, and my mouth felt dry and sticky, like I didn’t really want to know.
She hunched forward with her chin in her hands. With her face turned away from the overcast sky, her eyes were a darker blue.
“Do you really want to know where we come from?” she said. “In every century, in every country, they’ll call us something different. They’ll say we’re ghosts, angels, demons, elemental spirits, and giving us a name doesn’t help anybody. When did a name ever change what someone is?”
And that was something I understood. Because it didn’t matter how often my dad called me Malcolm or introduced me as his son. It just made things worse. In fact, saying it once always seemed to make him say it again, like once it was out, he had to keep repeating it, so many times it just lost meaning.
“Does God hate us?” I asked, looking down at the ground.
Carlina didn’t answer right away. She leaned forward, looking off at a glossy stand of barn-red maple trees, bright as blood.
“I don’t know about God,” she said finally. “But I know about tradition. We’re literal people, you and me. Whatever the most obvious interpretation is, that’s our truth. When the old churches made their laws, they set a precedent. They believe that hallowed ground rejects our souls, and because they believe it that much, our bodies hurt.”
I nodded, but it was discouraging to know that an inanimate object could reject a person. That strangers could make a place hate me without ever having met me.
Carlina glanced over. “You’ll be at the Starlight tonight, yeah?”
“I kind of have to be, don’t I?”
“Yeah.” She brushed wet leaves off her coat and stood up. “You do.”
Then she sauntered out of the yard and down the street, looking proud and cool and about a century out of place.
I lay back, staring up through the rain. The lawn was dying in a soggy, golden way, cold against my neck, and the leaves shifted and slithered under me when I breathed.
When I thought about the church, I had a vivid, wordless impression of my dad, up there at the podium. His sermons on paper were quiet, but he wasn’t a quiet man and I knew that when he read the words out loud, they must sound powerful and definite.
I stood up.
I wanted to watch the realest, truest part of him, how it showed in his face and his voice. I wanted to see what he saw. I’d never seen him in any way that mattered, and now I understood that I was probably never going to.
I crossed the lawn and was at the property line before I could change my mind. As soon as I stepped onto the property, though, the tight, cracking pain was there like always. My cheeks and forehead started to burn and I backed away fast.
I wanted so badly for the ground to have a different truth—my truth, but the church didn’t waver. It wasn’t changeable. It hurt like an electric shock because no special drink, no amount of conviction or belief could make me something I wasn’t.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
APPLAUSE
That night, Roswell came to get me and didn’t ask questions. I half wanted him to ask why I had my bass with me, but he didn’t. We listened to the radio. All the songs were about true love and drug addiction.
When we pulled up at the Starlight, no one from Rasputin was there yet. Roswell and I stood in the middle of the floor and watched the crowd. A lot of people were in costumes, even though Halloween was still two days away. They moved easily through the Starlight, staring past me, and I wondered what they saw when they looked in my direction. Not a god or a monster. Maybe no one.
Then I heard a high, shrieking laugh and turned in time to see Alice. She was wearing her cat costume again, but this time she had a rhinestone collar around her neck and her whiskers were purple. She was walking with a guy named Levi Anderson, hanging on him as they came toward us. When they were almost even with me, she gave me a spiteful look, then plastered herself against Levi.
“Classy girl,” Roswell said under his breath, but I didn’t feel hurt or angry. My heart was starting to race and I didn’t feel anything.
I found us an empty booth in the corner and sat staring at my hands while Roswell went up to the bar for something to drink.
“Are you okay?” he said when he slid into the seat across from me. He had a paper cup of Mountain Dew in his hand. “’Cause you kind of look like hell.”
I nodded and stared down at the table. There were cigarette burns all over it.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“Do you ever think about the secret stuff in Gentry, the ugly things? Like, what it means when kids . . . when they die?”
He looked at me a long time before he answered, turning the cup so the ice clattered and cracked and the Mountain Dew splashed in circles, antifreeze colored. “I think that people are complicated and everybody’s got their share of secrets.”
I nodded and wondered why he wasn’t pushing the conversation. Why he wasn’t asking questions. I wanted him t
o make me say the things that wouldn’t come out in words unless I couldn’t avoid them. If he asked the right questions, I’d have to tell him. But he didn’t say anything.
Across the dance floor, Carlina Carlyle was standing by the soundboard. When she saw me looking, she opened her eyes wide and waved me over.
Her hair was piled on top of her head. She looked strange and fantastical and startling and normal.
I stood up, reaching for my bass. “I have to go,” I told Roswell.
“Go where?”
“Go work for them, play for them. Something. I’m in it now, and I don’t think I can get out. I don’t know what to do.”
He just shrugged and nodded toward the stage. “So, go up there and do something amazing.”
Carlina led me back through a narrow hall and into a tiny dressing room, more like a closet than a room. There was a gouged wooden dresser and a chair and nothing else. Everything smelled like dust.
I stood in the middle of the room with my heart racing. “Is this all you really need to survive? I mean, is there something I’m supposed to do to make the music work?”
Carlina was rifling through the dresser. She closed a drawer and turned to face me, shaking her head. “It’s a living.” Her voice sounded flat. “Gentry doesn’t always remember that we’re here, but they remember that they like a good performance. Everyone loves a good performance.” She tossed a bundle of clothes at me. “Put these on.”
I picked through them. Black wool slacks and a white button-down shirt, the blinding-black shoes, the suspenders. The fact remained, I wasn’t really her bassist. I was quiet and skinny and sixteen years old and I got a tight, nervous feeling in my stomach if I was called on to answer in class.
Carlina sighed and turned her back. “Just hurry up and put them on.”
I started stripping off my clothes. I yanked the slacks up, buttoned the shirt. I tried to figure out the clasps on the suspenders, but my hands were shaking.
“Here.” Carlina took the clasp from me and opened it. “You need to relax.”