Under the slag heap, the House of Mayhem was humid from the rain. At opposite ends of the lobby, the two huge fireplaces had been lit and the room was warmer than usual.
The flock of rotting blue girls huddled together around one of the fireplaces. They were sorting through trays of Janice's bottles, melting wax over the tops and pasting on labels. They worked in kind of an assembly line, passing the bottles along and talking in low voices. Behind the reception desk, the Morrigan was sitting on the floor, playing with a doll made of feathers and dirty, knotted string. I came around the desk and stood over her.
"Hello, castoff," she said without looking up. "Are you here to tell me how sorry you are for running off to beg favor from my sister?"
"No, I'm here to tell you that you just made one huge fucking mistake. And stop calling me that."
"What would you prefer? Foundling? Changeling? Child left in someone else's bed?" She dropped the doll and stared up at me. Her teeth reflected the firelight back at me in bright pinpricks. "I gave you cures and medicines, cared for you when you were ill. Without my mercies, you would have died, and still you disregard me, you slight me for my sister?"
"Yeah, I talked to your sister, okay? Fine, I'm a terrible person. Tell your rancid hookers to give Emma's gloves back."
The Morrigan nodded toward the far side of the room. "Tell them yourself."
The girls were clustered together on the floor, laughing in a soft, breathless way. One of them, starved looking, with matted hair and ragged gashes down her arms, was wearing a pair of pink suede gardening gloves.
I crossed the lobby and stood over them. Close to the fire, they smelled worse--all wet dirt and rank, decomposing flesh. In the flickering light, they looked greenish under the skin.
"May we help you?" said the one wearing Emma's gloves. She smiled a loose, mushy smile, showing black teeth and rotting gums.
"Yeah, give me those."
"Give you which?"
"Give me my sister's gloves. I'm through dicking around."
The girl next to her leaned in and elbowed her, grinning up at me. She was holding a smoldering stick of wood and a lump of half-melted wax. Her tongue was blue and her whole mouth was crawling with little white maggots. "How will she be compensated for her cooperation?"
"Kiss her," whispered the girl from the Halloween party.
The others laughed and covered their mouths. "Yes, kiss her, kiss her and we'll let your sister's hands go."
The one with the gloves got to her feet, stepping close and smiling up at me. "Just once," she said, and her voice was softer than the others'. Almost sad. "Kiss me once, and I'll give them back to you."
I looked down at her. Her eyes might have been green once, but now they were cloudy and pale.
"It doesn't have to be passionate," she said. "You don't have to convince me that you mean it. Just give me the chance to pretend you don't find me revolting."
The other girls watched, hungry and eager, but the girl with the gloves just looked cold. She wasn't laughing.
I bent and kissed her on the cheek, close to the corner of her mouth. The smell was bad. She reeked like groundwater and decay, but underneath was the thin fragrance of church incense and funeral flowers, the dismal aroma of grief, of never really dying.
I stayed with my face close to hers, my mouth against her cheek, even after I'd given her what she asked for. The only thing she'd wanted. I wanted to make it count because I was sorry for her. Because she was dead and I wasn't.
When I finally straightened and stepped back, the girls on the floor muttered restlessly, but the one with the gloves just gave me a wistful look.
"That was nice," she whispered, holding out her hands.
I took the gloves by their fingertips and slid them off. Underneath, her hands were a healthy pink, but even in the firelight, I could see it draining out of her. The warm tinge faded, and her fingernails went an ugly bruised color. She sighed and smiled at me. The smile made the skin on her lips crack.
I jammed the gloves in my coat pocket and crossed back to the desk, where the Morrigan sat playing with her doll, dancing it along the floor. I could still smell the chilly stench of the girl's skin, this ghostly miasma that drifted and clung to me. The Morrigan was humming and it made me want to kick her.
"Why did you let them do that to Emma? I thought the whole agreement was that you would leave her alone if I worked for you. I thought she and Janice were supposed to be friends."
The Morrigan glared up at me. "You chose to appeal to my sister. You ran to her at the first opportunity. She did her best to break the town, and you went to bow to her." She swung the doll against the leg of the desk. Its head made a hollow noise when it hit. "They don't have the will to give us favor when they're sad. They're too caught up in their own misery, their own tragedy, and then they don't love us."
"Look, you started this. You called out the Lady when you stole my mother back."
The Morrigan sat with her legs folded under her, hugging the doll against her chest. "And look at where it got us. The town is sick. It gets worse every year, and now the buildings are falling, the house of God is destroyed, and even the train tracks and the trestles rust."
I let my breath out between my teeth and then held out the zipper pull. "They're going to kill a three-year-old girl. Not a warrior or a king. She's a little kid--she's like you."
The Morrigan took the plastic bear, turning it over in her hand. Then she looked up at me, teeth sharp and glossy. "No, not like me. I'm quite sturdy. She, on the other hand, is going to bleed a river."
When I finally spoke, my voice sounded dry. "What is your problem?"
She dropped the doll into her lap and looked up at me, still holding the plastic zipper pull. "You choose them over us. Every single time."
"And I'll keep doing it! This isn't about picking sides. The Lady is completely out of her mind, and you know how to stop her. Tell me what I need to do to steal Natalie."
The Morrigan seemed to consider that. Then she gave me a sly look. "Dead is dead," she said. "But my sister is plenty cold herself. Sometimes she can't tell the difference."
"Okay, but what does that mean?"
"Only that there are always spare children, dead in borrowed beds, buried in borrowed clothes, waiting to be made use of." Her smile was wide and it was hard to tell if it was cruel because she was cruel or if that was just her smile.
"No." I shook my head. "That's not what you're talking about--not children. You're talking about bodies. About grave robbing."
"Call it what you like. You asked how I managed it, and I've told you. The night was long, and in her sitting room full of dead beauties, I exchanged one more dead thing for a live one, and it was hours before she knew. Before she realized that her prize was gone and the silent child in her sitting room was one of ours."
I took a deep breath and felt a little sick. "Tell me how. How you made the Lady believe the body was real."
The Morrigan smiled, shaking her head. "Dearest, it was real."
"How you made it seem believable, then, how you replaced something alive with something that wasn't."
She fidgeted with the zipper pull, rolling it between her fingers, humming and rocking. "Our children rot, but not as readily as theirs do. They're restless things, the failed replacements."
Over by the fireplace, the blue girls whispered and snickered, braiding each other's brittle hair. The one I'd kissed was looking back over her shoulder at me, just once. Then she turned away, keeping her head bowed.
The Morrigan stood up, facing me with the mangy doll in one hand and the zipper pull in the other. She looked like a little girl, old-fashioned and strange, but her teeth were brutal, and her eyes were wide and black. "I'm not your keeper and I don't owe you anything, not anymore. If you intend to cross her, that's not my business, but you should know the cost. A person should always be familiar with the cost of his actions."
"What's the cost?"
She dropped the doll and it landed spread-eagle on the floor, its arms and legs sticking out at awkward angles. "If you don't know after this morning's escapades, I'm certainly not going to tell you."
She smiled up at me and held out the plastic bear. After a second, I took it.