"I don't know," Ghost said at last. "Maybe they were evil, like Miz Catlin says. My grandmother told me you shouldn't try to define evil, that the minute you think you've got it all pinned down, a kind of evil you never even thought of will sneak up behind you and jump inside your head. I don't think anyone knows what evil is. I don't think anyone has the right to say.

"So maybe they were just like us. I hate what they did, what they do. But they'd hate our lives too. Maybe they did what they had to do to live, and tried to get a little love and have a little fun before the darkness took them."

"I love you, Ghost."

Ghost felt his heart expand. "Love you too." He accepted the last of the joint from Steve, sucked at it, closed his eyes. When the smoke was gone, he stretched out on the pine needles, his head in Steve's lap. Steve stroked his hair, and through those guitar-callused fingertips Ghost caught Steve's mood: lonely, but not alone. Bitter, but not destroyed. They had made it through the winter.

They stayed in the graveyard, talking sometimes, drifting off to sleep and waking to see their breath plume in the air, watching the sky until it grew pale with the first light of morning.

EPILOGUE

Fifty Years Later

Night.

Black night in a club, 4:00 a.m. relieved only by the watery neon pulse that filters through the holes in the ceiling. The club is in the basement of a burned-out building, so most of the light is lost in the charred and rusted skeleton of steel that towers seventeen stories into the night. But some light filters through, purplish and flat.

Night in a club. These dives have changed very little. The walls are painted black, scorched in spots, crawling with arcane graffiti: spiky insignia, dripping band emblems sprayed in gold and red. This club is located a few blocks from the edge of the French Quarter, and Mardi Gras week has just begun. Less than a mile away the endless party rages through the streets, the bright costumes swirl by, the liquor flows like milk.

They will be there soon enough.

On the tiny stage, separated from the dance floor by strands of barbed wire, two members of a snuff -rock band are packing up their equipment: the cords and effects, the violin bows and bone-saws, the ampules of blood the audience thinks is fake. They mix it with alcohol to keep it from coagulating too quickly; they have not forgotten their old customs. Their faces are smudged white, with rows of tiny, slightly raised black dots in elaborate patterns of scarification. They wear their hair twisted into hundreds of matted, filthy little braids. Their eyes are ringed in gray. They still bleed from the slashes made by the singer 's chrome-tipped whip upon their hands and faces and naked pierced chests, but they are healing fast.

On a steel bench that runs along the wall, a young man is curled on his side, asleep: the band's singer. His fist is pressed against his mouth, and his lips make a slight sucking motion. He looks perhaps twenty, too thin for his height. His face has taken on a cool ivory beauty: the high sharp cheekbones, the twin black arches of his eyebrows sweeping toward his temples, the flickering dark pools of his eyes as he dreams. His hair falls across his forehead in a straight, smooth sheaf, blue-black. The air in the club is colder than the semitropical night outside, and in his sleep the young man has pulled his purple -lined coat tightly around him.

He has good reason to be tired. He runs a tight crew, and he has kept them alive, well fed, and sated for half a century.

The band have finished packing up. At the sound of their footsteps approaching the young man comes awake, blinking up at them. At first his vision makes them hazy, and he thinks there are three of them-three clumps of hair, three faces defined in blots of dark makeup-but slowly they come clear, and there are only two.

The memory of singing tonight returns to him. He gives strange performances, alternately whispering his words and shrieking them, his hands clenched at his sides, then flung out gesturing at the crowd as if he would conjure them all into hell. He swirls his whip through the smoky air and watches the audience bleed. And sometimes as he sings, he remembers another night at a different club, a night when a pale-eyed wraith clung to a microphone as if the crowd would drown him. He remembers a hoarse golden voice. But the show is over. He smiles up at them and asks, "What did you bring me?"

Molochai pulls his hand out of his pocket and opens his fingers. Lying on his grubby palm is a hypodermic needle full of blood. Nothing opens his mouth. Molochai places the sharp tip of the needle-carefully, ever so carefully-on Nothing's tongue and pushes the plunger. The blood trickles down Nothing's throat, rich and sweet.

"We saved the last for you," Twig tells him.

"We can get more," says Nothing. The others nod in agreement.

"We can always get more," says Nothing.

A smile of happy anticipation spreads across Molochai's scarified face, and he jabs Twig in the ribs. Twig returns the jab with a tug on one of Molochai's tiny braids.

"Because we have time," Nothing tells them. "Forever and ever." For the first time in years he thinks of Christian, his smooth impassive face, his coldly tragic eyes. He believes Christian would be proud of him now.

"Or nearly so," he whispers a beat later. But the others have already turned away.

The stage lights have been turned off, and the neon of the buzz-vendors flickers only fitfully. Nothing leads his family out of the club in darkness. They are headed for Bourbon Street. Nothing knows how to get there, and where they can pick up a bottle of Chartreuse along the way.

Molochai is playing with a heavy silver doubloon of the same shape and size as those thrown from Mardi Gras parade floats along with all the other colored trinkets. But this coin is older than any Mardi Gras doubloon. Molochai keeps tossing it into the air and catching it.

Nothing snatches the coin in midair and looks at it. Over the years Molochai 's sticky fingerprints have worn away some of the carving: the man's lips no longer appear so full, and his sharp teeth are barely visible.

"Let me see that, kiddo," says Twig, making a grab for the coin.

They bandy it about for a few moments, tossing it back and forth, trying to spin it on the ends of their fingers. As they climb the stairs to street level, the sound of their boots on the cement echoes back along the graffiti -swarming corridor, up through the spiderwebs and the maze of burned-out girders, out into the night.

Night. And they are gone.

The footsteps, still echoing.

Then silent.

Then black.