Alabaster

"It's only a toy," she says.

"That's what he's afraid of," the stuffed bear growls from across the room, and Dancy laughs, because she knows he's telling the truth. Dead bears don't like riddles, either, and when she tries to stand up she falls, tumbles like a dropped teapot that would never stop falling if she had a choice, would never have to shatter like the china-doll woman who shattered a long, long time ago and the Sava

Dancy opens her eyes, and the bottle's lying on the floor in front of her. The roaring, hurtful voices inside drip from her nostrils and lips and ears, a sticky molasses-dark puddle on the rug, and "Pick it up," the thing that isn't a boy in a dress snarls, making words from the tumult of feathers and hurricane wind. "You're dying, anyway. There's nothing it can do to you. Show me the trick."

"There isn't any trick," she says, reaching for the bottle. "It's only a toy."

"No," the bear growls. "Don't you touch it. Make him do his own dirty work," but she's already holding the bottle, so light in her hand, so warm, a balm to soothe the pain eating her alive, and she looks up into the maelstrom spi

"You should have tried the window," the bear says, and Dancy vomits, nothing much in her stomach but the tea that Dead Girl let her drink, but she vomits, anyway.

"It knows you, Dancy Flammarion. Before you were born, it knew you. Before the sun sparked to life, it was already calling you here."

"I don't want it," she coughs and wipes her mouth.

"You know the trick. We know you know the trick," and the thing in the air above the sofa is screaming, screeching, turning faster and faster, and bits of itself are coming loose and drifting slowly down to the floor. Wherever they land, the rug scorches and smolders.

"Open it!"

Dancy sits up, and for a moment she stares deep into the wheel, the paradox still point at its absolute center-consuming and blossoming heart, nothing and everything there all at once. "Abracadabra," she whispers, her throat gone raw and her head coming apart at the seams, and she throws the bottle as hard as she can. It arcs end over end, and the pretty boy with starshine eyes (and she sees that he has become a boy again, that the boy was there somewhere, all along) is scrambling after it. When the bottle hits the wall, it bursts into a spray of powdered glass and blue-golden flame that rises quickly towards the ceiling. A sparkling ruin that twines itself into a hammer, a wave, a fist of the purest light, and as the pain leaves her head and the world slips kindly away to leave her alone in darkness, the hammer falls, and the only sounds left are the promises that monsters make before they die.

"Is it over?" Mary Rose asks, speaking very quietly, and Biancabella holds an index finger up to her lips, hush.

The Ladies of the Stephens Ward Tea League and Society of Resurrectionists wait together in the long hall outside the door to the Crimson Room. Miss Aramat is sitting on the stairs, alone with Porcelina's body in her arms, singing softly to herself or to Porcelina's ghost-Blacks and bays, dapples and greys, when you wake you shall have all the pretty little horses. The bread knife she used to cut Porcelina's throat lies at her feet, sticky with drying blood. The house on East Hall Street is quiet now, breathless in the battered silence after the storm, and there's only Miss Aramat's voice and the obstinate ticking of the grandfather clock by the stairs, the distant ticking of other clocks in other rooms.

All the things they've heard, or only think they've heard, since the Bailiff left and Samuel's boy went into the room with his bottle and the albino girl, the inescapable, inevitable moment of Porcelina's death, but all of it not half so terrible as this silence. This waiting, and once Candida put her hand on the doorknob and pulled it quickly back again, her palm scalded raw by the cold.

"He used us," Isolde murmurs. "He lied to us."

"They both used us," Emily replies, then the look from Miss Aramat enough that neither of them says anything more.

Just the clocks and pretty little horses and the long, last hour before dawn.

And then the knob turns, finally, the tumblers of the lock rolling themselves, the irrelevant key in Biancabella's pocket, and the door swings open. Dancy Flammarion stands silhouetted in lamplight and a weirder, flaxen glow, fairy fire, foxfire, that seems to shine from somewhere just behind her. A power in that light, and dignity, and darker things that will haunt the dreams of the Ladies for the rest of their lives. But the glow fades immediately away when she steps out into the shadow-strewn hallway, and she's only the Bailiff's hitchhiker again.

Dancy holds one of the swords from over the fireplace gripped tightly in both hands. Her face is streaked with tears and blood and vomit, and Biancabella notices that one of her boots is untied.

Miss Aramat stops singing. "What did you do to him?" she asks. "Is he dead? Did you kill him?"

"He would have let you open the bottle for him," Dancy says. "He would have let you all die trying."

Miss Aramat looks down at Porcelina's head in her lap, and she smiles sadly and strokes the dead girl's matted hair.

"What was in it?" she whispers.

"Nothing meant for you. Nothing meant for him, either."

"I tried to tell her," Miss Aramat says, wiping a bloody smear from underneath Porcelina's left eye. "I tried to tell her we wanted nothing to do with the goddamned thing."

"Is that why you killed her?" Dancy asks her.

Miss Aramat wipes away another splotch of blood, and then she closes Porcelina's eyes. "I can't remember why I killed her," she says. "I knew for certain, only a moment ago, but now I can't remember. Do you know, Biancabella?"

"You were angry," Biancabella replies, keeping her eyes on the sword in Dancy's hands. "You were afraid."

"Was I? Well, there you go, then. Biancabella's hardly ever wrong."

"Are you going to kill us all now?" Alma asks Dancy. "We wouldn't really have hurt you, you know, not really. We were only-"

"Jesus Christ," Biancabella hisses. "You only wanted to cook her with plantains. Shut up, or I'll kill you myself."

"I'm leaving now," Dancy says, and she takes another step away from the door to the Crimson Room, still holding the sword out in front of her like a shield. Alma and Candida step out of her way, and "Thank you, oh, thank you," Alma gushes. "We wouldn't have hurt you, not really. We would never, ever-"

" Alma, I told you to shut the fuck up!"

"I'm sorry," and then Alma 's backing away from Dancy and Biancabella both, presses herself insect flat against the wall. "I won't say anything else, I promise. I'm sorry I ever said anything at all."

"Get the hell out of here, girl," Biancabella growls. "Now, before I change my mind. I don't give a shit what happened in there, you couldn't kill all of us."

Dancy glances at the sword and then nods once, because she knows that Biancabella's probably right, and what she came to do is finished, so it doesn't matter anyway. She turns and hurries towards the front door. Outside, the first watery hints of dawn, grey-blue wash through the window set into the front door, and she never thought she'd see daylight again.

"Stop!" Miss Aramat shouts, and when she stands up, Porcelina's body rolls forward and tumbles loudly to the bottom of the stairs.