The feast makers, p.1
The Feast Makers, page 1
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Acknowledgments
About the Author
by H. A. Clarke
The Scapegracers Trilogy
The Scapegracers
The Scratch Daughters
The Feast Makers
EREWHON BOOKS are published by:
Kensington Publishing Corp.
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Copyright © 2024 by H. A. Clarke
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Erewhon and the Erewhon logo Reg. US Pat. & TM Off.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ISBN 978-1-64566-081-1 (hardcover)
First Erewhon hardcover printing: April 2024
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number is available upon request.
Electronic edition: ISBN 978-1-64566-082-8 (ebook)
Edited by Diana Pho
Cover art by Anka Lavriv
Cover design by Dana Li and Samira Iravani
Interior design by Dana Li
Author photograph by Asya Sagnak
for the proto-august who wrote scapegracers. cut your hair, nerd
“Before such an irresistible force ‘conspiring kings’ will be powerless.”—Peter Kropotkin
“Dykefags eat the rich!”—Local dive bar
bathroom stall graffiti
One
First Person
Tomorrow was the flocking. Covens from all across the states would be gathering to sift through the recovered specter hoard for the stolen parts of their dead friends. It’d be the most witches I’d ever met in one place, my mother’s coven included, and I would sort out my feelings in the morning. Magic and a comfortable crossfade meant I didn’t think much about how I’d been waitlisted by two of the three colleges I applied to, or wallow in disappointment about how getting my specter back hadn’t instantaneously reversed my mental illness, or that it was “imminently confronting my foundational childhood traumas” o’clock and so on. I walked down a torn-up drive with my friends. It was late on a Friday in mid-March. The five of us shivered in our little outfits, all slathered in scribbled sigils, slaphappy from the pregame, and I loved them, which made this easier. I loved them completely. You’ve got to lean on what you have.
The warehouse flickered in the dark. From outside, Homo Erectus looked like Giovanni’s Room flipped inside out. Grime oozed between its jaggedy bricks and drooled in fingers down toward earth. It looked structurally unwell, multiply risky. I’d bet this had been just another factory once upon a time, i.e., in the eighties, that’d choked with the rest of the Rust Belt. Maybe lumber had been pulped here and beaten into flags of paper, or it could’ve been an auto manufacturing plant, or a steel mill or something. Whatever! It’s for mischief, now. Its windows strobed magenta and lime and music slammed inside it. The bass throbbed in the soles of my boots. There wasn’t a sign. We traipsed along, Jing leading with bravado in a swishing leopard coat, and as I marched on behind her I wondered vaguely how Shiloh had found out about this place. They’d known themself for all of five months and were already a rave connoisseur, which meant that suddenly I was a rave connoisseur, and that my coven had a reputation beyond the corporate limits of Sycamore Gorge. There were bigger scenes than house parties. My girls were not without ambition.
There was a line. We stomped past it. Waiting dancers eyed us and a vaguely familiar few flashed us scrunchy, unsober smiles. Jing stretched her arms over her head, then relaxed her shoulders, let her leopard coat dip to the small of her back. Yates tucked herself into Daisy’s side, and they clung to each other, ran after Jing on synchronized tiptoe, and Shiloh and I edged behind them, all of us within a yard of each other. Particulates in our own little planetoid. Tall girls with little shorts and choppy mullets murmured something about those witches.
Hot to be preceded. These days, we held ritual service every time we went out.
As she ran, Daisy unhooked one arm from Yates’ waist and produced a bottle of Gatorade from nowhere. She cleared it in one swallow then flipped a Lego between her teeth. Yates mirrored Daze and pulled one hand free to check her phone, then blinked fast, eyes shiny, either from the chill or the fact that it still wasn’t Ivy Day, even now, thirty, forty-five seconds since the last time she’d checked her inbox. She’d pulled her curls into two puffs on either side of her head and the spirals of a hangover-proofing sigil sparkled on the nape of her neck. Up front, Jing reapplied her lip gloss. She balanced the kitschy clamshell compact I’d gifted her for Christmas in her palm. It caught the party lights above her, sparkled on her mouth like it’d struck water. Jing snapped the compact shut. She turned to Daisy. Daisy flicked her eyes up and down her, and she crushed her empty plastic bottle and thrust it underfoot, leaned in with a swish of caramel-colored pigtail, and ghosted the edge of her thumb around the corner of Jing’s bottom lip. A plummy stain clung to her nail.
“Ugh,” Daisy said. She flashed her teeth, expression so bright it was nearly unhinged. Pupils small, still. It’d take a few minutes. “Just heartbreaking.”
Shiloh examined their nails. They were meeting up with someone, if I understood their vagaries correctly, and they’d dolled up for it, wore a tiny white tank top, perilously low-slung slacks they’d inherited from Julian, a belt chain borrowed from yours truly, oxblood platform clogs they’d found in the shop. Blotted lip stain, a ghost of blush in the apples of their cheeks. Bone-blond hair, long as their jaw now, smoothed behind their ears with crisscrossed bobby pins. My teeth chattered. Leather sucks for windchill. The shirt I wore beneath, hacked free of its sleeves, didn’t help much either. I was cold where my jeans gashed open and cold where my shirt collar dipped. I’d touched up my buzz cut a week ago, and the breeze raked every groove of my skull, pressed on those zigzagged bits where the smaller bones fused together. I sniffed, bounced like a boxer, then pulled my hands out of my pockets and texted them: You look cute jackass
Shiloh’s pocket lit up. They withdrew their phone in a fluid motion a breath later, frowned at it, then over their shoulder at me, and replied: ew ilu
Where’s the guy?
inside already
Is he cool?
hes a vegan trotskyist
Does that mean yes or no
bite me
I felt an odd kick of pride that I knew Shi, and that they’d so quickly grown from an extremely evil libertarian nightmare person into a way less evil communist nightmare person. Happy that they could be in the room with the Scapegracers without Daisy hissing now, too. I thought about us coming to save them two months ago only to find them standing in the dirt road’s delta with a bag in their fist, speechless, rigid, past tears. I mashed the thought down. I grinned and the dry skin on my lower lip promptly split. It puffed, I tasted like pennies. The night air stung when I took a breath. I was unkissable at baseline, I didn’t need the boost. I shoved my phone back in my pocket, then shook my hands out at the wrists, swept one thumb over my opposing palm, and rubbed out some of the tension.
The bouncer said, “Scapegracers?”
Jing said, “That’s right.”
The bouncer made a face. He asked for Daisy’s ID.
Daisy pulled it from thin air and forked it over.
I squeezed my eyes shut, paranoid for a moment that this time, the realfake sigil would flake out on us and we’d be shit out of luck. It was a relatively recent addition to our repertoire. Definitely wouldn’t get you through an airport or anything that intense, but it had held up so far in similar circumstances. Fuck, would it be a bummer if it went belly-up on us now! To stand in the cold for nothing! Being known as Scapegracers wasn’t a guarantee of getting into places, particularly parties we didn’t frequent. This bouncer was a stranger.
He handed back her plastic and waved her through the door.
One by one, my friends melted into the scalding pink darkness. It happened fast. I blinked and suddenly it was just me out here in the cold. Wasn’t sure if they were waiting just beyond, or if they’d dispersed and I’d have to wander aimlessly for one thousand years to find them. Alone, I stepped up to the bouncer, who was annoyingly taller than me, and handed him my legal ID.
I hardly looked like that picture now. It was a year old. That version of me had shaggy curls and muddy eyeliner, looked smaller statured, sourer but softer everywhere. No hair meant I had more jaw. I hadn’t worn makeup in a month and had the eyebags to prove it. I sniffed, glanced between the bouncer’s grip and his screwed-up brow, tried to guess whether he noticed the inconsistencies, or whether he saw through the spell work to my real age, or if he was about to boot me for being the lone non-pretty member of my clique. But then, this was a queer party. Can’t imagine most of us looked like our government papers.
He handed me back my ID.
I took a step inside and the world went hot again.
High ceiling, heavy fog, bodies knotted and throbbing to an alien, trilling house beat. There was that smell, the dark tart one that seemed to radiate off LEDs, and it hit the back of my throat and I felt emotional all of a sudden, very in my body, very human and awake. The music pressed on me. Pink mist seethed against my skin, glitter splashed me where dancing melted into moshing. People kissed each other. People drank and looked up at the ceiling, looked through the ceiling and through every tier of stratosphere past heaven with their eyes half shut, their lashes thick and tangled, dripping beads of black mascara. I could feel, I felt, there was sensation in my body all around me. My fingertips tingled. My head slightly hurt. I felt good, with strobe lights on the back of my neck I felt like my whole horrible self again, and feeling good made me dizzy. Parties are pocket utopias. Took a while to learn that, but fuck if it wasn’t one of the only things I believed with certainty these days. I shook myself. People eddied around me. I nodded to the beat.
Where were my girls? Where’d they wandered off to now?
In my looking I let myself get caught in a current and was swept deeper into the warehouse. I lacked the right vantage to see the far wall from here, assuming that there was a far wall at all and this room didn’t yawn on forever, so I wasn’t sure contextually how deep into the room I’d gone. A circuit boy in a pup harness smiled at me. A molly-eyed redhead in fishnets jerked a nod my way as they passed. Someone offered me a tab I didn’t take, and a flask, and a sticker. The beat changed, felt slower and haughtier, and I followed a girl I thought was Daisy for a while before the girl who absolutely wasn’t Daisy vanished and I was suddenly at the edge of a makeshift bar. Radioactive green lanterns swung from hanging chains. People smoked and dripped off each other. The bartender wore a backless dress, and they sported corset piercings down either side of their spine that they’d strung through with bright white shoelaces. I pressed my hip against the bar and focused on breathing. Breathing felt nice. There weren’t any open stools, but I didn’t particularly need one. I glanced out over the crowd, scanned for Jing’s platinum hair, or Yates’ ruffled gingham dress, or Daisy’s sugarcoated Looney Tunes violence energy signature. Far away from me, twisting between throngs of dancers, I thought I spotted Shiloh’s arms around a narrow waist, their cheek leaned on a bony shoulder. I gnawed my bottom lip, squeezed my eyes shut for a second. They were overworked. Too much to see. The bartender asked so I got myself water and a sour. I put a twenty on the counter. It must’ve been enough.
Vision unfocused, I clasped my fist around the cold, wet tin and murmured something like Thank you you’re the best sick piercings uhuh thanks. I flipped the lid with my thumb. It opened with a hiss. I brought it to my mouth and the taste hurt my teeth. I took a hearty swallow, shut my eyes again.
“Scapegracer?”
I opened one eye just a sliver, peeked between my lashes.
It was a girl. I didn’t know her. She was shorter than me even with platforms. She had a curly bob and wore heart-shaped gems below her eyes. I lowered my drink and inclined my head, leaned so I could hear her over the screaming treble, meanwhile swept my free hand over my breast pocket, felt around the place where I’d stashed a few gnarly Polly Pockets for commission hexing purposes. I was rarely without at least one these days. Didn’t like to be caught without supplies. I pressed the pad of my index finger over a plastic ankle, barely thicker than a toothpick, and cleared my throat. Both eyes open now, mostly focused, unclouded again. I peered around the crowd over her shoulder. Eyeballed anyone who eyeballed back. “Is he here?”
“No,” she said, and then smiled and added something I couldn’t hear over the music.
“Speak up,” I said. I leaned down a little lower, tip of my nose just above the strap of her dress. It was a milky shimmery bodycon, looked holographic under the flashing lights, soft like a corn snake’s belly. Hypnotic. I tongued my gums.
“Do you want to dance?” She smiled at me. One of her hands drifted up and she brushed fingers over my leather lapel, hooked the edge with the zipper teeth. She gave me a little tug.
I took an impassioned swig of my drink then abandoned the rest of it, hoped it hadn’t made my hand too cold to the touch. I tried for a smile and faltered, feeling dumb and a little stiff. My head buzzed. My brain was a beehive. My teeth could rattle out of my gums. Whatever face I’d made must’ve been good enough for her, though. She walked backwards with a fistful of my jacket, and I let her lead me to another corner of the warehouse, nearer to the DJ, a place where there was so much glitter underfoot that it crunched like sand beneath my boots. It was murkier here, saltier. Lots of overlong wrists drifting loosely through the dark.
She tightened her fist, yanked me down a touch, snaked her free arm around the back of my neck. I felt the crook of her elbow against my nape. My gut wrenched like spell work. She moved her hips and I followed her, the bassline went jammy in my bone marrow and made my body feel hollow and when she swayed against my chest I felt a fuse bust in my brain, there were bright lights then nothing. Some central cognitive superego control panel went dark. I grinned like an idiot, then my grin slid off, my eyes shut again. Her temple was warm where it pressed beside my jugular. She said something I didn’t quite hear.
I opened my mouth to ask her to repeat it, but instead I went, “What’s your name?”
“Lina.” (Or Mina? Nina? Sheena? Karina? What?) Then, once again, told me something that did not register in my brain as language. This music was too deep in me. I couldn’t hear for shit.
“What was that, sweetheart?”
“I love masculine lesbians.”
I fell out of sync with the music for a second. My vision stalled. My throat clapped.
Fingers closed around my hips. I was being pulled backwards, away from this girl, and I blinked and she was gone, swallowed by the ever-churning knot of human people. I whipped my head around but whoever had me was shorter than me, all I could see was red fog. I looked down at the hands on my belt loops then, saw how they were long-fingered, slim-knuckled, with neat sharp nails and maroon papercuts. Gold rings on every knuckle. Jing.
I found it in me to turn around.
She somehow kept her grip on me during my half rotation. She crooked her indexes, hooked them in the loops above my hipbones. The lights bounced off her hair; I couldn’t see her eyes beneath her bangs except in flashes. She leaned up on tiptoe, pressed her cheek against mine.
“Where’d you go?” I felt watery and I smiled more earnestly than I hoped she’d catch. I pressed my cheekbone above her ear. No way she could see evidence of goofiness, or any lingering weird. “I was looking for you.”
“Daisy’s got a hex patron.” Jing smiled, I heard it in her tone. “Except she’s rolling so I think she’ll need backup. Are you game?”
“Yeah,” I said. My chest thrummed where she leaned on it. “Where is she?”
“Further back,” she said against the hinge of my jaw.
Almost like dancing, her leaning on me this way. She swayed against me. This song felt nice in the soles of my boots.
I felt her lashes. She must’ve blinked. “Did I spoil your fun?”
