“Where the fuck—” Lin wasn’t smiling for once, no attempt to defuse, disarm. “You know what? Doesn’t fucking matter. You know this probably belonged to a dead person, right?”
“The hell is wrong with you?” Faiz trotted out from a side room, wearing executioner blacks: a regular suit, slightly rumpled, bowtie and everything. “If you’re going to be an asshole, get out.”
“Sorry,” Lin said, not sounding like he was at all. “Just pointing out the obvious.”
Faiz pinched his brow. “You two are drunk idiots.”
I slid down to a knee, gritted my teeth against the headache painting lights behind my eyes. “This is a mistake.”
“Are you talking about the ghost girl?” Phillip circled around from behind me, cupped me below the arms, and lifted me straight up, propped me against an alcove where a vase blooming with dead flowers sat. The petals crumbled to ashes as I leaned back. The air tasted like honey, had a chewiness to it. “No one’s seen her. Don’t worry.”
No. Not like honey, I corrected myself. It was sinewy, sweet as a knot of tendon after you’d gnawed on it for minutes, a faintly corrupt delight. “We need to go.”
“After the ceremony,” said Phillip.
“We need to go,” I said again.
“It’ll be fine.”
“Spoken like a true white guy.” Lin rolled a frustrated noise in his throat, entirely animal. Ahead of us, Faiz and Talia joined shy hands in front of an altar to the faded dead, the small gods of whatever still lived in the eaves. You could feel the house pull in a breath. You could feel its eyes. I could. “Ignoring everything that Cat’s said, how does any of this seem like a good idea? Even—even assuming that it’s all just the delusions of an incredibly drunk mind, this is just plain weird. How the fuck does any of this make sense to you people?”
“You know—” Talia sighed.
Lin, always so happy to rephrase everything as a joke, sucked at the air, before the words came out in a shotgun blast. “Fuck you and everything you think you know.”
“You’re welcome to leave. The only person who wanted you here was Cat, and the two of you—” She bit her lip as I stood, teeth a wound of white. Untangling from Faiz, Talia surged forward, red silk worming behind her. “Just. Get out, will you? No one wanted you here. Not you, not your jokes, your stupid goddamned cheese—”
“Hey. You ate as much of my rice as anyone else, thank you very much.”
“Go,” Talia said, one last time with feeling. “Just. Go away.”
“Fine,” I said.
Everyone turned as I spoke. Every eye in the hall including the ones dotting the walls, the ones framed in gold-leaf, drawn in brushstrokes. The room spun, wobbled on the fulcrums of a thousand painted faces.
And the manor breathed out.
“We’re leaving,” I said, and then once more for good measure, softer the second time around. “We’re leaving.”
“Cat, don’t.” Faiz was already cutting in. “You don’t have to go. We don’t have any problem with you. It’s just. Lin, dude. Sorry. No hard feelings. But I’d like this to be a happy thing, you know? Just. Can you take—actually, I don’t know, you know?”
“They can both go, if they want,” said Talia.
“Talia.” Phillip, intervening at last, a clergy’s bright collar buttoned to his cassock, every inch the Hollywood caricature. Neither Talia nor Faiz were Catholic, but the joke had been that it didn’t matter. This whole thing was meant to be non-denominational, nonorthodox. A gift wrapped up in a joke, wrapped up in an experience. “Is this really what you want for your wedding? I don’t think kicking Lin out of—”
Talia tweaked her veil into place: an anachronism, a concession to media indoctrination by the West. It was a scrap of white lace, so gaudy against her borrowed raiments, threaded with something that made it gleam in the light. The tasseled curtain came down with a sigh of silver.
The lights twitched.
“Don’t need your pity,” I said, stiffly. “Don’t want it either.”
“Cat. You’re drunk,” Phillip said, and his kindness had a kind of teeth to it, had subtitles. Sit the hell down, it said. The walls wore a senate of kitsune, pale-furred, the tips of their tails dip-dyed in coal. They waited, uncharacteristically imperious. A delegation of tengu was bringing their prime minister a gift.
“What happened to trying to keep these idiots alive?” said Lin.