Alabaster

"You have an angel?" and now Bobby sounds skeptical.

"Everyone has an angel. Well, everyone I ever met so far. Even you, Bobby. Didn't they tell you that?"

Dead Girl sighs and picks her book up again, opens it to a page she's read twice already.

"Why don't you see if you can find something on the radio," she says to Bobby.

"But I'm still talking to Dancy."

"You'll have plenty of time to talk to Dancy, boy," the Bailiff says. "She isn't going anywhere."

"She's going to Sava

"Except Sava

"You too, Mercy Brown," the albino whispers, and Dead Girl stops reading.

"What?" she asks. "What did you just say to me?"

"I dreamed about you once, Mercy. I dreamed about you sleeping at the bottom of a cold river, crabs tangled in your hair and this boy in your arms." Dancy keeps her eyes on the window as she talks, her voice so cool, so unafraid, like maybe she climbs into cars with demons every goddamn night of the week.

"I dreamed about you and snow. You got an angel, too."

"You shut the fuck up," Dead Girl snarls. "That's not my name, and I don't care who you are, you shut up or-"

"You'll kill me anyway," Dancy says calmly, "so what's the difference?" and up front the Bailiff chuckles to himself. Bobby finds a station playing an old Joh

Southeast and the land turns from open prairie and piney woods to salt marsh and estuaries, confluence of muddy, winding rivers, blackwater piss of the distant Appalachians, the Piedmont hills, and everything between. The Lowcountry, no fayrer or fytter place, all cordgrass and wax myrtle, herons and crayfish, and the old city laid out wide and flat where the Sava

The mansion on East Hall Street, Stephens Ward, built seventeen long years later, Reconstruction days, and Mr. Theodosius W. Ybanes hired a fashionable architect from Rhode Island to design his eclectic, mismatched palace of masonry and wrought iron, Gothic pilasters and high Italiante balconies. The mansard roof tacked on following a hurricane in 1888 and, after Theodosius' death, the house handed down to his children and grandchildren, great-grandchildren, generations come and gone and, unlike most of Sava

And, at last, delivered across the decades, a furious red century and decades more, into the small, slender hands of Miss Aramat Drawdes, great-great-great granddaughter of a Civil War munitions merchant and unspoken matriarch of the Stephens Ward Tea League and Society of Resurrectionists. The first female descendent of Old Ybanes not to take a husband, her sexual, social, and culinary proclivities entirely too unorthodox to permit even a marriage of convenience, but Miss Aramat keeps her own sort of family in the rambling mansion on East Hall Street. Behind yellow glazed-brick walls, azaleas and ivy, windows blinded by heavy drapes, the house keeps its own counsel, its own world apart from the prosaic customs and concerns of the city.

And from appearances, this particular night in June is nothing special, not like the time they found the transsexual junky who'd hung herself with baling wire in Forsyth Park, or last October, when Candida had the idea of carving all their jack-o'-lanterns from human and ape skulls and then setting them out on the porches in plain sight. Nothing so unusual or extravagant, only the traditional Saturday night indulgences: the nine ladies of the League and Society (nine now, but there have been more and less, at other times), assembled in the Yellow Room. Antique velvet wallpaper the pungent color of saffron, and they sit, or stand, or lie outstretched on the Turkish carpet, the cushions strewn about the floor and a couple of threadbare rècamiers. Miss Aramat and her eight exquisite sisters, the nine who would be proper ghouls if only they'd been born to better skins than these fallible, ephemeral womanhusks. They paint their lips like open wounds, their eyes like bruises. Their fine dresses are not reproductions, every gown and corset and crinoline vintage Victorian or Edwardian, and never anything later than 1914, because that's the year the world ended, Miss Aramat says.

A lump of sticky black opium in the tall octopean hookah, and there are bottles of burgundy, pear brandy, chartreuse, and cognac, but tonight Miss Aramat prefers the bitter Spanish absinthe, and she watches lazily as Isolde balances a slotted silver trowel on the rim of her glass. A single sugar cube, and the girl pours water from a carafe over the trowel, dissolving the sugar, drip, drip, drip, and the liqueur turns the milky green of polished jade.

"Me next," Emily demands from her seat on one of the yellow rècamiers, but Isolde ignores her, pours herself an absinthe and sits on the floor at Miss Aramat's bare feet. She smirks at Emily, who rolls her blue, exasperated eyes and reaches for the brandy, instead.

"Better watch yourself, Isolde," Biancabella warns playfully from her place beneath a Tiffany floor lamp, stained-glass light like shattered sunflowers to spill across her face and shoulders. "One day we're go

"In your dreams," Isolde snaps back, but she nestles in deeper between Miss Aramat's legs, anyway, takes refuge in the protective cocoon of her stockings and petticoat, the folds of her skirt.

Later, of course, there will be di

Madeleine turns another card, the Queen of Cups, and Porcelina frowns, not exactly what she was hoping for, already growing bored with Maddy's dry prognostications; she looks over her left shoulder at Miss Aramat.

"I saw Samuel again this week," she says. "He told me the bottle has started to sing at night, if the moon's bright enough."

Miss Aramat stops ru

Porcelina glances back down at the Tarot card, pushes her violet-tinted pince-nez farther up the bridge of her nose.

"He says that the Jamaicans are offering him a lot of money for it."

Across the room, Candida stops reading to Mary Rose, closes the copy of Unaussprechlichen Kulten and glares at Porcelina. "You may be the youngest," she says. "But that's no excuse for impudence. You were told-"

"But I've seen it, with my own eyes I've seen it," and now she doesn't sound so bold, not half so confident as only an instant before. Madeleine is trying to ignore the whole affair, gathers up her deck and shuffles the cards.