“If we are to sacrifice at all,” he said, “we should be repaid. Monsters on our own rooftops, and the lot of you don’t mind?”
“Likely just tall tales,” Matt said. “Crier says they’ve been here a year. I never seen one.”
“But Matthew,” and that was Ray, leaning back on two legs of his chair, balanced as perfectly as the log cabin of chicken bones on his plate. No one could leave so pleasant a mess as Ray. “Of course you haven’t seen them. They come to those who need help, and when was the last time you needed any?”
Matt drank. “Don’t see the problem,” he said, after. “Even if they are here. So long as they help people.”
“Maybe someone doesn’t want help,” Corbin said. “Maybe what helps you, hurts me.” He tossed a wing bone down as if casting thunderbolts upon a sinner. “If the Stone Men are back, Lord Kos ought to shatter them. We need Blacksuits on every roof.”
Ray snatched a celery stalk and knifed its hollow full of blue cheese. “You haven’t been to church often this year, have you, Corbin? Plenty of sermons about coming to terms with old enemies.”
“You mean they’re going soft.”
“I mean none of us knows the whole story. Stone Men don’t touch my business. Why should I worry about them?”
“A man ought to own his city.”
“In a single question,” Ray said, “I can prove incontrovertibly the Stone Men are no cause of concern for folk like us, who keep our beaks down: Have we ever seen these creatures?”
Matt followed Ray’s gaze around the table: Ray’s son, face buried in his second burger, shrugged and shook his head and chewed. Sandy Sforza drank her beer and shook her head as well. Sandy’s daughter Lil was staring at Ray’s boy’s barbecue sauce–streaked face with a sickened expression entirely unlike Hannah’s, but when she realized the others were watching her, she said, “No.” The gazes slid to Matt, who grunted no, as did Corbin.
“There you go,” Ray said. “If they’re in the city or not, what’s it matter to us?”
Slow jowly nods around the table. Corbin cracked his knuckles, frowning.
“We’ve seen,” an unsteady voice began, then stopped. Matt looked over in time to see Claire Rafferty draw her hand back from Ellen’s shoulder. Ellen’s pale cheeks colored red, and she returned her gaze to at her plate, as if she’d never spoken.
“Girls,” Corbin said in the voice he adopted while trying to sound nice, or at least less angry. It rarely worked. “What have you seen?”
“Nothing,” Claire answered, cold. “Father.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“Ellen’s telling stories,” Hannah said.
“I’m not.” The second time Ellen spoke, she sounded less hesitant. Still, she spoke into her plate, afraid, Matt thought, to face the table, and especially her father, who watched her with an expression darkened by the beers he’d drunk. “You saw him, too. You both did.”
Claire took Ellen’s wrist.
“Girls.” Corbin’s tone changed, and they turned toward him like iron filings when a magnet drew close. “Let Ellen talk.”
Ellen paled, and Matthew wondered not for the first time, and not for the first time stopped himself from wondering, what life was like inside the Rafferty house.
“Tell me,” Rafferty repeated.
“There’s a prayer,” Ellen said. “We all know it. We all dreamed it. And I used it.” Rafferty leaned toward his daughter, his brows knit tight, the blade of his jaw unsheathed. “I didn’t ask for anything,” she said. “I never would have, but I was scared for you.”
“Ellen.” Claire’s voice, sharp, a shutoff. “This isn’t the time.”
“Two months back you weren’t home, hadn’t been since the day before. The second night we decided, all of us, that we should look.”
Sandy laughed, and Ellen fell silent. The glare Corbin shot Sandy was vicious, though not so vicious as the one with which she answered him. Corbin turned back to his daughter. “Go on.”
“We started early and went to the addresses on your matchbooks. No one had seen you. We got lost. The streets kept turning around.” Which meant they’d been in the Pleasure Quarter, Matt thought, though Ellen wouldn’t say as much: the Pleasure Quarter, where the city’s shattered-glass grid tangled to a briar patch of nameless avenues—the paths of long-dead cows codified by concrete. Playground, the market boys called it, the kids without stall or family who carried and carted for tips: walk in flush with soul, walk out empty save for memories of red light that dulls tears and washes flaws from skin. Matt imagined three Rafferty girls wandering through that maze at night. A sphinx smile darted across Hannah’s lips.
But Ellen was still talking: “I said we should try the prayer, ask for help. Hannah and Claire didn’t want to. It was my idea.”
Thankful eye flicks from sister to sister, which Matt recognized only because the Adorne household of his boyhood communicated in the same code, five siblings united against the Old Man.