House of Hollow / Дом пустоты (by Krystal Sutherland, 2021) - аудиокнига на английском

PROLOGUE I WAS TEN years old the first time I realized I was strange. Around midnight, a woman dressed in white slipped through my bedroom window and cut off a lock of my hair with sewing scissors. I was awake the whole time, tracking her in the dark, so frozen by fear that I couldn’t move, couldn’t scream. I watched as she held the curl of my hair to her nose and inhaled. I watched as she put it on her tongue and closed her mouth and savored the taste for a few moments before swallowing. I watched as she bent over me and ran a fingertip along the hook-shaped scar at the base of my throat. It was only when she opened my door—bound for the bedrooms of my older sisters, with the scissors still held at her side—that I finally screamed. My mother tackled her in the hall. My sisters helped hold her down. The woman was rough and rabid, thrashing against the three of them with a strength we’d later learn was fueled by amphetamines. She bit my mother. She headbutted my middle sister, Vivi, so hard in the face that her nose was crushed and both of her eye sockets were bruised for weeks. It was Grey, my eldest sister, who finally subdued her. When she thought my mother wasn’t looking, she bent low over the wild woman’s face and pressed her lips against her mouth. It was a soft kiss right out of a fairy tale, made gruesome by the fact that the woman’s chin was slick with our mother’s blood. For a moment, the air smelled sweet and wrong, a mixture of honey and something else, something rotten. Grey pulled back and held the woman’s head in her hands, and then watched her, intently, waiting. My sister’s eyes were so black, they looked like polished river stones. She was fourteen then, and already the most beautiful creature I could imagine. I wanted to peel the skin from her body and wear it draped over mine. The woman shuddered beneath Grey’s touch and then just . . . stopped. By the time the police arrived, the woman’s eyes were wide and faraway, her limbs so liquid she could no longer stand and had to be carried out, limp as a drunk, by three officers. I wonder if Grey already knew then what we were. The woman, the police would later tell us, had read about us on the internet and stalked us for several weeks before the break-in. We were famous for a bizarre thing that had happened to us three years earlier, when I was seven, a thing I couldn’t remember and never thought about but that apparently intrigued many other people a great deal. I was keyed into our strangeness after that. I watched for it in the years that followed, saw it bloom around us in unexpected ways. There was the man who tried to pull Vivi into his car when she was fifteen because he thought she was an angel; she broke his jaw and knocked out two of his teeth. There was the teacher, the one Grey hated, who was fired after he pressed her against a wall and kissed her neck in front of her whole class. There was the pretty, popular girl who had bullied me, who stood in front of the entire school at assembly and silently began to shave her own head, tears streaming down her face as her dark locks fell in spools at her feet. When I found Grey’s eyes through the sea of faces that day, she was staring at me. The bullying had been going on for months, but I’d only told my sisters about it the night before. Grey winked, then returned to the book she was reading, uninterested in the show. Vivi, always less subtle, had her feet up on the back of the chair in front of her and was grinning from ear to ear, her crooked nose wrinkled in delight. Dark, dangerous things happened around the Hollow sisters. We each had black eyes and hair as white as milk. We each had enchanting four-letter names: Grey, Vivi, Iris. We walked to school together. We ate lunch together. We walked home together. We didn’t have friends, because we didn’t need them. We moved through the corridors like sharks, the other little fish parting around us, whispering behind our backs. Everyone knew who we were. Everyone had heard our story. Everyone had their own theory about what had happened to us. My sisters used this to their advantage. They were very good at cultivating their own mystery like gardeners, coaxing the heady intrigue that ripened around them into the shape of their choosing. I simply followed in their wake, quiet and studious, always embarrassed by the attention. Strangeness only bred strangeness, and it felt dangerous to tempt fate, to invite in the darkness that seemed already naturally drawn to us. It didn’t occur to me that my sisters would leave school long before I did, until it actually happened. School hadn’t suited either of them. Grey was blisteringly smart but never found anything in the curriculum particularly to her liking. If a class called for her to read and analyze Jane Eyre, she might instead decide Dante’s Inferno was more interesting and write her essay on that. If an art class called for her to sketch a realistic self-portrait, she might instead draw a sunken-eyed monster with blood on its hands. Some teachers loved this; most did not, and before she dropped out, Grey only ever managed mediocre grades. If this bothered her, she never showed it, drifting through classes with the sureness of a person who had been told her future by a clairvoyant and had liked what she’d heard. Vivi preferred to cut school as frequently as possible, which relieved the administration, since she was a handful when she did show up. She back-talked teachers, cut slashes in her uniforms to make them more punk, spray-painted graffiti in the bathrooms, and refused to remove her many piercings. The few assignments she handed in during her last year all scored easy As—there just weren’t enough of them to keep her enrolled. Which suited Vivi just fine. Every rock star needed an origin story, and getting kicked out of your ?30,000-per-year high school was as good a place to start as any. They were both like that even then, both already in possession of an alchemical self-confidence that belonged to much older humans. They didn’t care what other people thought of them. They didn’t care what other people thought was cool (which, of course, made them unbearably cool). They left school—and home—within weeks of each other. Grey was seventeen; Vivi was fifteen. They set off into the world, both bound for the glamorous, exotic futures they’d always known they were destined for. Which is how I found myself alone, the only Hollow left, still struggling to thrive in the long shadows they left behind. The quiet, bright one who loved science and geography and had a natural flair for mathematics. The one who wanted desperately, above all else, to be unremarkable. Slowly, month by month, year by year, the strangeness that swelled around my sisters began to recede, and for a good long while, my life was what I’d craved ever since I’d seen Grey sedate an intruder with a simple kiss: normal. It was, of course, not to last. 1 MY BREATH SNAGGED when I saw my sister’s face staring up at me from the floor. Grey’s fine, hook-shaped scar was still the first thing you noticed about her, followed by how achingly beautiful she was. The Vogue magazine—her third US cover in as many years—must have arrived in the mail and landed faceup on the hall rug, smack bang, which is where I found it in the silver ghost light of the morning. The words The Secret Keeper hovered in mossy green text beneath her. Her body was angled toward the photographer, her lips parted in a sigh, her black eyes staring at the camera. A pair of antlers emerged from her white hair as though they were her own. For a short, witching moment, I’d thought she was actually there, in the flesh. The infamous Grey Hollow. In the four years since she’d left home, my eldest sister had grown into a gossamer slip of a woman with hair like spun sugar and a face out of Greek mythology. Even in still pictures there was something vaporous and hyaline about her, like she might ascend into the ether at any moment. It was perhaps why journalists were forever describing her as ethereal, though I’d always thought of Grey as more earthy. No articles ever mentioned that she felt most at home in the woods, or how good she was at making things grow. Plants loved her. The wisteria outside her childhood bedroom had often snaked in through the open window and coiled around her fingers in the night. I picked up the magazine and flicked to the cover story. Grey Hollow wears her secrets like silk. When I meet her in the lobby of the Lanesborough (Hollow never allows journalists near her apartment, nor, it’s rumored, does she host parties or entertain guests), she’s dressed in one of her hallmark enigmatic creations. Think heavy embroidery, hundreds of beads, thread spun from actual gold, and tulle so light it drifts like smoke. Hollow’s couture has been described as a fairy tale meeting a nightmare inside a fever dream. Gowns drip with leaves and decaying petals, her catwalk models wear antlers scavenged from deer carcasses and the pelts of skinned mice, and she insists on wood-smoking her fabric before it’s cut so her fashion shows smell like forest fires. Hollow’s creations are beautiful and decadent and strange, but it’s the clandestine nature of her pieces that has made them so famous so quickly. There are secret messages hand-stitched into the lining of each of her gowns—but that’s not all. Celebrities have reported finding scraps of rolled-up paper sewn into the boning of their bodices, or shards of engraved animal bone affixed alongside precious gems, or runic symbols painted in invisible ink, or minuscule vials of perfume that crack like glow sticks when the wearer moves, releasing Hollow’s heady eponymous scent. The imagery that features in her embroidery is alien, sometimes disturbingly so. Think gene-spliced flowers and skeletal Minotaurs, their faces stripped of flesh. Much like their creator, each piece is a puzzle box, begging to be solved. I stopped reading there, because I knew what the rest of the article would say. I knew it would talk about the thing that happened to us as children, the thing none of us could remember. I knew it would talk about my father, the way he’d died. I touched my fingertips to the scar at my throat. The same half-moon scar I shared with Grey, with Vivi. The scar none of us could remember getting. I took the magazine up to my bedroom and slipped it under my pillow so my mother wouldn’t find it, wouldn’t burn it in the kitchen sink like the last one. Before I left, I opened my Find Friends app and checked that it was turned on and transmitting my location. It was a requirement of my daily morning runs that my mother could track my little orange avatar as it bobbed around Hampstead Heath. Actually, it was a requirement if I wanted to leave the house at all that my mother could track my little orange avatar as it bobbed around . . . wherever. Cate’s own avatar still hovered south, at the Royal Free Hospital, her nursing shift in the emergency room dragging—as per usual—into overtime. Leaving now, I messaged her. Okay, I will watch you, she pinged back immediately. Message me when you’re home safe. I set off into the predawn winter cold. We lived in a tall, pointed house, covered in white stucco and wrapped with leadlight windows that reminded me of dragonfly wings. Remnants of night still clung to the eaves and collected in pools beneath the tree in our front yard. It was not the kind of place a single mother on a nurse’s salary could usually afford, but it had once belonged to my mother’s parents, who both died in a car accident when she was pregnant with Grey. They’d bought it at the start of their marriage, during World War II, when property prices in London had crashed because of the Blitz. They were teenagers then, barely older than I was now. The house had been grand once, though it had sagged and sunken with time. In my favorite old photograph of the place, taken in the kitchen sometime in the sixties, the room was fat with lazy sunlight, the kind that lingers for hours in the summer months, sticking to the tops of trees in golden halos. My grandmother was squinting at the camera, a kaleidoscope of glittering green cast across her skin from a stained glass window that had since been broken. My grandfather stood with his arm around her, a cigar in his mouth, his pants belted high and a pair of Coke-bottle glasses on his nose. The air looked warm and smoky, and my grandparents were both smiling. They were cool, relaxed. If you didn’t know their story, you might think they were happy. From the four pregnancies she’d carried to term, my grandmother had given birth to only one living child, quite late in her life: my mother, Cate. The rooms of this house that had been earmarked for children had been left empty, and my grandparents had not lived long enough to see any of their grandchildren born. There are things in every family that are not talked about. Stories you know without really knowing how you know them, tales of terrible things that cast long shadows over generations. Adelaide Fairlight’s three stillborn babies was one of those stories. Another was the thing that had happened to us when I was seven. Vivi called before I’d even reached the end of the street. I took the call on my AirPods, knowing without even looking at my screen that it was her. “Hey,” I said. “You’re up early. It can’t even be lunchtime in Budapest.” “Ha ha.” Vivi’s voice sounded muffled, distracted. “What are you doing?” “I’m out for a run. You know, the thing I do every morning.” I turned left and ran along the footpath, past empty sports fields and the carcasses of trees that stood tall and stripped in the cold. It was a gray morning, the sun yawning sluggishly into the sky behind a pall of clouds. The chill needled my exposed skin, drawing tears from my eyes and making my ears ache with each heartbeat. “Ew,” Vivi said. I heard an airline announcement in the background. “Why would you do that to yourself?” “It’s the latest rage for cardiovascular health. Are you at an airport?” “I’m flying in for a gig tonight, remember? I just landed in London.” “No, I do not remember. Because you definitely didn’t tell me.” “I’m sure I told you.” “That would be a negative.” “Anyway, I’m here, and Grey’s flying in from Paris for some photo shoot today, and we’re all hanging out in Camden before the gig. I’ll pick you up when I get out of this god-awful airport.” “Vivi, it’s a school day.” “You’re still at that soul-destroying institution? Wait, hang on, I’m going through immigration.” My usual path took me through the green fields of Golders Hill Park, the grass sprinkled with a confetti bomb of yellow daffodils and white-and-purple crocuses. It had been a mild winter and spring was breaking already, rolling across the city in mid-February. Minutes dragged by. I heard more airline announcements in the background as I ran along the western border of Hampstead Heath, then into the park, past the blanched milkstone of Kenwood House. I headed deeper into the twisting wildwood warrens of the heath, so tight and green and old in places it was hard to believe you were still in London. I gravitated to the untamed parts, where the trails were muddy and thick fairy-tale trees grew over them in archways. The leaves would soon begin to return, but this morning I moved beneath a thicket of stark branches, my path bordered on both sides by a carpet of fallen detritus. The air here smelled sodden, bloated with damp. The mud was thin from recent rain and flicked up the back of my calves as I pushed on. The sun was rising now, but the early-morning light was suffused with a drop of ink. It made the shadows deep, hungry-looking. My sister’s garbled voice on the phone: “You still there?” “Yes,” I replied. “Much to my chagrin. Your phone manners are appalling.” “As I was saying, school is thoroughly boring and I am very exciting. I demand you cut class and hang out with me.” “I can’t—” “Don’t make me call the administration and tell them you need the day off for an STD test or something.” “You wouldn’t—” “Okay, good chat, see you soon!” “Vivi—” The line went quiet at the same time a pigeon shot out of the undergrowth and into my face. I yelped and fell backward into the muck, my hands instinctively coming up to protect my head even though the bird had already fluttered away. And then—a small movement on the path far ahead. There was a figure, obscured by trees and overgrown grass. A man, pale and shirtless despite the cold, far enough away that I couldn’t tell if he was even looking in my direction. From this distance, in the gunmetal light, it appeared as though he was wearing a horned skull over his head. I thought of my sister on the cover of Vogue, of the antlers her models wore on the catwalk, of the beasts she embroidered on her silk gowns. I took a few deep breaths and lingered where I sat in the mud, unsure if the man had seen me or not, but he didn’t move. A breeze cooled my forehead, carrying with it the smell of woodsmoke and the wild wet stench of something feral. I knew that smell, even if I couldn’t remember what it meant. I scrambled to my feet and ran hard in the direction I’d come from, my blood hot and quick, my feet slipping, visions of a monster snagging my ponytail playing on repeat in my head. I kept checking behind me until I passed Kenwood House and stumbled out onto the road, but no one followed. The world outside the green bubble of Hampstead Heath was busy, normal. London was waking up. When I caught my breath, my fear was replaced by embarrassment that a wet brown stain had spread over the back of my leggings. I stayed alert while I ran home, the way women do, one AirPod out, a sharp slice of adrenaline carving up the line of my spine. A passing cabdriver laughed at me, and a man out for his first cigarette of the day told me I was beautiful, told me to smile. Both left a prickle of fright and anger in my gut, but I kept running, and they faded back into the white noise of the city. That’s the way it was with Vivi and Grey. All it took was one phone call from them for the strangeness to start seeping in again. At the end of my street, I messaged my middle sister: DO NOT come to my school. 2 AT HOME, I found my mother’s red Mini Cooper in the driveway and the front door ajar. It keened open and closed on its hinges, breathing with the wind. Wet footprints tracked inside. Our ancient demon of a cat, Sasha, was sitting on the doormat, licking her paw. The cat was older than me, and so threadbare and crooked she was beginning to look like a bad taxidermy job. She hissed when I picked her up—Sasha had never liked me or Vivi or Grey, and she made her feelings known with her claws—but she was too decrepit these days to put up much of a fight. Something was off. The cat hadn’t been allowed outside for probably ten years. “Cate?” I called quietly as I pushed the door open and stepped inside. I couldn’t remember when or why we’d stopped calling our mother Mum, but Cate preferred it this way, and it had stuck. There was no answer. I put Sasha down and scuffed off my muddy shoes. Soft voices echoed down the stairs from the floor above, snippets of an odd conversation. “That’s the best you can do?” my mother asked. “You can’t even tell me where they went? How it happened?” A tinny speakerphone voice responded: a man with an American accent. “Listen, lady, you don’t need a PI, you need a psychiatric intervention.” I followed the voices, my footfalls quiet. Cate was pacing by her bed, still in her emergency room scrubs, the top drawer of her nightstand open. The room was dark, lit only by a dim honey lamp. Night shift at the hospital called for blackout curtains, so the space always had a slightly sour smell to it from the constant lack of sunlight. In one hand, Cate held her phone. In the other, a photograph of herself with a man and three children. This happened every winter, in the weeks following the anniversary: My mother hired a PI to try and solve the mystery the police were no closer to unraveling. Inevitably, the PI always failed. “So that’s it, then?” Cate asked. “Jesus, why don’t you ask your daughters,” the man on the phone answered. “If anyone knows, it’s them.” “Fuck you,” she said sharply. My mother rarely swore. The wrongness of it sent a prickle into my fingertips. Cate hung up. A glottal sound escaped her throat. It was not the kind of noise you’d make in the presence of others. I was immediately embarrassed to have stumbled on something so private. I went to turn away, but the floorboards creaked like old bones beneath my weight. “Iris?” Cate said, startled. There was a prick of something odd in her expression when she looked up at me—anger? fear?—but it was quickly replaced with concern when she spotted my muddy leggings. “What happened? Are you hurt?” “No, I was mauled by a rabid pigeon.” “And you were so scared that you shat your pants?” I threw her a very funny pout. Cate laughed and perched on the edge of her bed and beckoned me with both hands. I went and sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her so she could fix my long blond hair into two braids, as she had done most mornings since I was little. “Everything okay?” I asked as she ran her fingers through my hair. I caught the prickly chemical scent of hospital soap, overlaid with sweat and bad breath and other telltale hints of a fifteen-hour shift in the emergency room. Some people thought of their mothers when they smelled the perfume she wore when they were children, but for me, my mother would always be this: the cornstarch powder of latex gloves, the coppery tang of other people’s blood. “You left the front door open.” “No, I didn’t. Did I? It was a long shift. I spent a long time with a guy who was convinced his family was controlling him with anal probes.” “Does that count as a medical emergency?” “I think I’d want some pretty rapid intervention if that was happening to me.” “Fair point.” I sucked my bottom lip and exhaled through my nose. It was better to ask now, in person, than over text later. “Is it okay if I go out tonight? Vivi’s in town for a gig and Grey is flying in from Paris. I want to spend time with them.” My mother said nothing, but her fingers slipped in my hair and tugged hard enough to make me gasp. She didn’t apologize. “They’re my sisters,” I said quietly. Sometimes, asking to see them—but especially asking to see Grey—felt like asking for permission to take up shooting heroin as an extracurricular activity. “They aren’t going to let anything bad happen to me.” Cate gave a short, complicated laugh and started braiding again. The picture she’d been looking at was facedown on the blanket, like she hoped I wouldn’t notice it. I turned it over and studied it. It was of my mother and my father, Gabe, and the three of us girls when we were younger. Vivi wore a green tweed duffle coat. Grey was dressed in a Bordeaux faux-fur jacket. I was in a little red tartan coat with gold buttons. Around each of our necks hung matching gold heart pendants with our names pressed into the metal: IRIS, VIVI, GREY. Christmas presents from the grandparents we had been in Scotland to visit when the photo was taken. The police had never found these items of clothing or jewelry, despite extensive searches for them. “It’s from that day,” I said quietly. I hadn’t seen any photographs from that day before. I hadn’t even known there were any. “We all look so different.” “You can . . .” Cate’s voice split, fell back down her throat. She let out a thin breath. “You can go to Vivi’s gig.” “Thank you, thank you!” “But I want you home before midnight.” “Deal.” “I should make us something to eat before you go to school, and you should definitely have a shower.” She finished my braids and kissed me on the crown of my head before she left. When she was gone, I looked at the photograph again, at her face, at my father’s face, only a handful of hours before the worst thing that would ever happen to them happened. It had carved something out of my mother, shaved the apples from her cheeks and left her thinner and grayer than before. For much of my life, she had been a watercolor of a woman, sapped of vibrancy. It had carved even more out of Gabe. Yet it was the three of us girls who’d changed the most. I hardly recognized the dark-haired, blue-eyed children who stared back at me. I’ve been told we were more secretive after it happened. That we didn’t speak to anyone but each other for months. That we refused to sleep in separate rooms, or even separate beds. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, our parents would wake to check on us and find us huddled together in our pajamas, our heads pressed together like witches bent over a cauldron, whispering. Our eyes turned black. Our hair turned white. Our skin began to smell like milk and the earth after rain. We were always hungry, but never seemed to gain weight. We ate and ate and ate. We even chewed in our sleep, grinding down our baby teeth and sometimes biting our tongues and cheeks, so we woke with bloodstained lips. Doctors diagnosed us with everything from PTSD to ADHD. We collected an alphabet of acronyms, but no treatment or therapy ever seemed to be able to reset us to how we’d been before it happened. We weren’t sick, it was decided: We were just strange. People always found it hard to believe now that Grey and Vivi and I had come from our parents. Everything about Gabe Hollow had been gentle, except for his hands, which were rough from his work as a carpenter and his weekend hobby of throwing mugs on a potter’s wheel. He’d worn cozy clothing from charity stores. His fingers were long and felt like sandpaper when he held your hand. He never watched sports or raised his voice. He caught spiders in plastic containers and carried them out to the garden. He talked to his kitchen herbs when he watered them. Our mother was an equally soft woman. She drank everything—tea, juice, wine—only from the mugs my father had made for her. She owned three pairs of shoes and wore muddy Wellingtons as often as she could. After it rained, she picked up snails from the sidewalk and moved them to safety. She loved honey—honey on toast, honey on cheese, honey stirred into her hot drinks. She sewed her own summer dresses from patterns handed down to her by her grandmother. Together, they’d worn waxed Barbour jackets and preferred walking in the English countryside to traveling overseas. They’d owned wooden hiking poles and hand reels for fishing in streams. They’d both loved to wrap themselves in wool blankets and read on rainy days. They both had light blue eyes, dark hair, and sweet, heart-shaped faces. They were gentle people. Warm people. Somehow, combined, they’d produced . . . us. We were each five eleven, a full ten inches taller than our tiny mother. We were each angular, elongated, sharp. We were each inconveniently beautiful, with high cheekbones and eyes like does. People told us as children, told our parents, how exquisite we were. The way they said it, it sounded like a warning—which, I supposed, it was. We all knew the impact of our beauty and we all dealt with it in different ways. Grey knew her power and brandished it forcefully, in a way I had seen few girls do. In a way I was afraid to mirror myself, because I had witnessed the repercussions of being beautiful, of being pretty, of being cute, of being sexy, and of attracting the wrong kind of attention, not only from boys and men but other girls, other women. Grey was an enchantress who looked like sex and smelled like a field of wildflowers, the human embodiment of late-summer evenings in the South of France. She accentuated her natural beauty wherever possible. She wore high heels and delicate lace bras and soft smoky eye makeup. She always knew the right amount of skin to show to achieve that cool-sexy look. More than anything else, this is how I knew my eldest sister was different from me: She walked home alone at night, always beautiful, sometimes drunk, frequently in short skirts or low-cut tops. She walked through dark parks and down empty streets and along graffiti-smeared canals where itinerants clustered to drink and do drugs and sleep in piles. She did this without fear. She went to the places and wore the things that—if anything happened to her—would later prompt people to say she was asking for it. She moved through the world like no other woman I knew. “What you don’t understand,” she said to me once when I told her how dangerous it was, “is that I am the thing in the dark.” Vivi was the opposite. She tried to banish her beauty. She shaved her head, pierced her skin, inked the words FUCK OFF! across her fingers, a spell to try and ward off unwanted desire from unwanted men. Even with these enchantments, even with a zigzag nose and a wicked tongue and unshaved body hair and the dark grooves beneath her eyes carved out by drink and drugs and sleepless nights, she was achingly beautiful, and ached after accordingly. She collected each wolf whistle, each smacked butt cheek, each groped breast, kept them all beneath her skin where they boiled in a cauldron of rage that she let out onstage on the strings of her bass guitar. I fell somewhere between my sisters. I didn’t actively try to wield or waste my beauty. I kept my hair washed and wore no scent but deodorant. I smelled clean but not intoxicating, not sweet, not tempting. I wore no makeup and only loose-fitting clothing. I didn’t take up the hem of my uniform. I didn’t walk alone at night. I went to put the photograph back in Cate’s open drawer. A manila folder, distended with paper, sat beneath her socks and underwear. I pulled it out, flicked it open. It was filled with photocopies of police files, their edges curled with age. I saw my name, my sisters’ names, caught snippets of our story as I riffled through, unable to look away. The children claim to have no memory of where they have been or what happened to them. Officer ????? and Officer ????? refuse to be in the same room as the children, citing shared nightmares after taking their statements. The flowers found in the children’s hair are unidentifiable hybrids—possible pyrophytes. The cadaver dogs continue to react to the children even days after their return. Gabe Hollow insists that all three children’s eyes have changed, and that baby teeth have grown back in places where they were already lost. My stomach pressed against my throat. I snapped the folder shut and tried to shove it back into the drawer, but it snagged on the wood and split open, heaving paper onto the floor. I knelt and gathered the sheets into a pile with shaking hands, trying not to look at its contents. Pictures, witness statements, pieces of evidence. My mouth was dry. The paper felt corrupted and wrong in my fingers. I wanted to burn it, the way you’d burn a blighted crop so the rot couldn’t spread. And there, at the top of the stack of documents, I found a photograph of Grey at eleven years old, two white flowers—real, living flowers—growing out of the paper as if they were bursting from her eyes. 3 I WAS HUNGRY when I arrived at school, even after Cate had cooked me breakfast. Even now, years after whatever trauma had first sparked my unusual appetite, I was still always hungry. Just last week I’d gotten home ravenous and laid waste to the kitchen. The fridge and pantry had been stocked with food after Cate’s fortnightly grocery shopping: two loaves of fresh sourdough bread, a tub of marinated olives, two dozen eggs, four cans of chickpeas, a bag of carrots, chips and salsa, four avocadoes . . . The list goes on. Enough food for two people for two weeks. I ate it all, every bite. I ate and ate and ate. I ate until my mouth bled and my jaw ached from chewing. Even when all the new groceries were devoured, I downed an old can of beans, a box of stale cereal, and a tin of shortbread. Afterward, my hunger finally sated, I stood in front of my bedroom mirror and turned this way and that, wondering where the hell the food went. I was still skinny, not so much as bump. At school, I felt high-strung and jumpy. When a car door slammed in the drop-off line, I smacked my hand to my chest so hard, the skin was still stinging. I straightened my uniform tie and tried to center my thoughts. My fingers felt grimy and smelled of something putrid, even though I’d washed them three times at home. The smell came from the flowers on the photo. I’d plucked one from my sister’s eye before I left. It was an odd bloom, with waxy petals and roots that threaded into the paper like stitches. I’d recognized it. It was the same flower Grey had turned into a pattern and embroidered on many of her designs. I’d held it close to my nose and inhaled, expecting a sweet scent like gardenia, but the stench of raw meat and garbage had made me dry heave. I’d left the files and fetid bloom in my mother’s drawer and slammed her bedroom door shut behind me. I breathed a little easier at school, felt like I was coming back to myself—or at least to the carefully curated version of myself I was at Highgate Wood School for Girls. My backpack, groaning at the seams with books on Python and A-level study guides, cut hot tracks into my shoulders. The rules and structure here made sense. The weirdness that lurked in old, empty houses and the wildwood thickets of ancient heaths found it hard to permeate the monotony of uniforms and fluorescent lighting. It had become my sanctuary away from the baseline strangeness of my life, even if I didn’t belong here with the children of some of London’s richest families. I hurried through the busy corridors, bound for the library. “You’re five minutes late,” said Paisley, one of the dozen students I tutored before and after school. Paisley was a pint-size twelve-year-old who somehow managed to make the school uniform look boho chic. Her parents had been paying me decent money for weeks to try and teach her basic coding. The annoying thing was, Paisley was a natural. When she paid attention, she picked up Python with an easy elegance that reminded me of Grey. “Oh, I’m deeply sorry, Paisley. I’ll give you a free extra hour after school to make up for it.” She glared at me. “That’s what I thought. Where’s your laptop?” “I heard you’re a witch,” she said as she returned to tapping away at her phone, curls of mousy hair falling into her eyes. “I heard your sisters were expelled for sacrificing a teacher to the devil in the auditorium.” Wow. The rumors had gotten out of control in the last four years, but honestly, I was more surprised that it had taken this long for one to reach her. “I’m not a witch. I’m a mermaid,” I said as I set up my laptop and opened the textbook to where we left off. “Now show me the homework I set for you last week.” “Why is your hair white if you’re not a witch?” “I bleach it that way,” I lied. In fact, the week after Grey and Vivi left, I’d tried to dye it darker. I’d bought three boxes of dye and spent a rainy summer evening drinking apple cider while I painted my hair. I’d waited the forty-five minutes the instructions recommended, then a little longer just to be sure, before rinsing it out. I was excited to see the new me. It felt like the transformative scene in a spy movie when the protagonist is on the run, forced to change their appearance in a service station bathroom after they go rogue. When I wiped away the fog of condensation on the mirror, I shrieked. My hair was its usual milky blond, entirely untouched by the dye. “Homework,” I ordered again. Paisley rolled her little eyes and dug her laptop out of her Fj?llr?ven bag. “There.” She turned her screen toward me. “Well?” she demanded as I scrolled through her code. “It’s good. Despite your best efforts, you’re picking this up.” “What a terrible shame this will be our last session.” God, what kind of twelve-year-old talked like that? I tsked her. “Not so fast. Unfortunately for both of us, your parents have paid through the rest of the term.” “That was until they found out who your sisters are.” Paisley handed me an envelope. My name was written on the front in her mother’s loopy handwriting. “They’re super into Jesus. They won’t even let me read Harry Potter. Suddenly they don’t seem to think you’re such a good influence on me.” She packed her things, stood to leave. “Bye, Sabrina,” she called sweetly on her way out. “Wow,” came a disembodied voice. “Some people are so rude.” “Oh,” I said as a small bottle-blond figure made her way out of the stacks and pulled up the chair across from me. “Hello, Jennifer.” In the months after Grey and Vivi had left school, when the loneliness of being without them sank so deeply into my body that every heartbeat ached, I’d desperately wanted to make friends with some of my peers. I’d never needed friends before, but without my sisters, I had no one to eat with at lunchtime and no one but my mother to spend time with on the weekends. When Jennifer Weir had invited me to her sleepover birthday party (reluctantly, I suspected—our mothers worked together at the Royal Free), I’d cautiously accepted. It was an appropriately posh affair: Each girl had her own mini tipi set up in the Weirs’ vast living room, each frosted with fairy lights and set among a floating sea of blush and gold balloons. We watched three of the Conjuring movies into the early hours of the morning and ate so much birthday cake and so many delicate baked goods that I thought someone might vomit. We talked about the boys who attended nearby schools and how cute they were. We snuck into Jennifer’s parents’ liquor cabinet and did two shots of tequila each. Even Justine Khan, the girl who’d bullied me and subsequently shaved her head in front of the school, seemed not to mind my presence. For a handful of pink, sugary, alcohol-softened hours, I dared to allow myself to imagine a future that looked like this—and it might have been possible, if not for the now-infamous game of spin the bottle that had landed both Justine and me in the emergency room. Jennifer Weir hadn’t spoken to me since that night, when I left her house with blood dripping from my lips. “Did you want something?” I asked her. “Well, actually,” Jennifer said with a smile, “I bought tickets to the gig at Camden Jazz Caf? tonight. I heard your sister was going to be there.” “Of course she’s going to be there,” I said, confused. “She’s in the band.” “Oh, no, silly, I meant your other sister. Grey. I was wondering . . . I mean, I would totally love to meet her. Maybe you could introduce me?” I stared at her for a long time. Jennifer Weir and Justine Khan (together, they called themselves JJ), had been making my life a living hell for the better part of four years. Where Jennifer outright ignored me, Justine made up the difference: witch scrawled across my locker in blood, dead birds slipped into my backpack, and—one time—broken glass sprinkled over my lunch. “Anyway,” Jennifer continued, her saccharine smile beginning to go sour, “think about it. It wouldn’t be the worst thing that could happen to you, you know—being my friend. I’ll see you tonight.” When she was gone, I read Paisley’s note, in which her parents explained they’d heard some “concerning accusations” and asked for their advance back. I tore it up and dumped it in the bin, then checked the countdown timer on my phone to see how many days were left until graduation: hundreds. Forever. The school had a long memory when it came to the Hollow girls, and it had been my burden to bear since the month both of my sisters had skipped town. My first class of the day was English. I took my usual seat at the front of the classroom, by the window, my annotated copy of Frankenstein open on my desk, its pages frilled with a rainbow of multicolored sticky notes. I’d read it twice in preparation for this class, carefully underlining passages and making notes, trying to find the pattern, the key. My English teacher, Mrs. Thistle, was deeply conflicted by this behavior: On the one hand, a student who did the assigned readings—all of them, always, frequently more than once—was something of a phenomenon. On the other hand, a student who wanted the right answer for a work of literature sent her half-mad. It was drizzling outside. A flicker of strange movement caught my eye as I set up my things, and I looked through the glass over the wet gulch of grass between buildings. There, in the distance, was the man in the bull skull, watching me. 4 I STOOD SO suddenly and with such force that my desk toppled forward, my books and pens spilling across the floor. The entire class, startled by the sudden violent intrusion on the tedium of the school day, went silent and turned to stare at me. I was wide-eyed, dragging breaths, my heart punching inside my chest. “Iris,” said Mrs. Thistle, alarmed, “are you okay?” “Don’t get too close to her,” Justine Khan said to our teacher. I had once thought she was beautiful—and she probably still was, if you couldn’t see past the veneer of her skin to the pool of venom stagnating beneath. She now wore her curtain of dark hair long and straight, and carried a brush in her backpack to groom it at recess. It was so shiny and so well cared for that it was almost embarrassing. It also served the double purpose of concealing the scars my fingernails had left on either side of her neck when she’d kissed me. “Everyone knows she bites.” There were some titters of laughter, but most people seemed too rattled to know how to react. “Uh . . .” I needed an excuse, a cover to get out of there. “I’m going to be sick,” I said as I knelt to shove my things into my bag. I left my desk and chair where they lay. “Go to sick bay,” Mrs. Thistle instructed, but I was already halfway out the door. Another good thing about being a shameless teacher’s pet: They never doubted you if you said you were sick. Once clear of the classroom, I slung my backpack over my shoulder and bolted for the spot outside where I’d seen the man, in the shadowy slip of space between two buildings. The day was gray, grim: typical London. Muddy water flicked up the back of my socks as I ran. I could already see from afar that there was no one there now, but I kept running until I stood where he had stood. The air around me was dank with the smell of smoke and wet animal. I could see into my classroom through the mist of rain. I called Grey. I needed to hear her voice. She’d always been good at calming me down. It went to voicemail; she must be on the plane from Paris already. I left a message. “Hey. Uh. Call me back when you land. I’m kind of freaking out. I think someone is following me. Okay. Bye.” Reluctantly, I called Vivi. “I knew you’d change your mind!” she said after one ring. “I haven’t.” “Oh. Well, this is awkward. Turn around.” I turned. In the distance, in the parking lot, I could see her waving. “Ugh,” I said. “I’ve got to go. Some weird woman is stalking me.” At nineteen, my middle sister was a tattooed, pierced, clove-cigarette-smoking bass player with a blond buzz cut, a zigzag nose, and a smirk so sharp it could cut right through you. When I reached her in the school parking lot, she was lounging on the hood of some teacher’s red midlife crisis car, unbothered by the rain. Despite just landing from Budapest, she carried no luggage but a small leather backpack. She was dressed like that old Cake song, in a short skirt and a long jacket. Two years ago, when Grey’s scar had become the season’s hottest fashion accessory and teenage girls had started carving half-moons into their necks, Vivi had covered hers with a wisteria tattoo that unfurled across her collarbones, her back, halfway down her arms. Her tongue was pierced, her nose was pierced, and her ears probably contained enough metal to melt into a bullet. Grey was high fashion, but Vivi was pure rock ’n’ roll. I looked her up and down. “Lose your way to the Mad Max set, Furiosa?” She let her black eyes linger on me while she took a draw of her cigarette. Few people could pull off a shaved head and a gross smoking habit and still manage to look like a siren, but Vivi could. “Like you can talk, Hermione.” I thought of the Cake song again: A voice that is dark like tinted glass. “Oh, sick burn,” I said, shaking my head. “Your mind is slipping in your old age.” We both laughed then. Vivi slid off the car and pulled me into a bear hug. I could feel the tensile strength of her muscles beneath the heavy curtain of her coat; she could handle herself. She’d been serious about self-defense classes ever since that guy had tried to pull her into his car. “It’s good to see you, kid,” she said. “God, you smell terrible. What is that?” “Ah.” Vivi wafted air from under her armpits in my direction. “That noxious stench would be Grey’s perfume.” Hollow by Grey Hollow, her eponymous scent, the one she stitched in little vials into her couture. For Christmas two years ago, she’d sent me a bottle of perfume that smelled like smoke and forest, with something wild and rotten scratching beneath it. One sniff made me drop to my knees, gagging. Like everything that Grey Hollow made, it became a bestseller. Fashion magazines called it heady and cryptic. Grey sent a carton of the vile stuff to my school, a fuck-you-look-at-me-now gift for every teacher who’d ever given her grief. They wore it like drugstore perfume. It clung to their hair and clothing, a damp green aura. It seemed to sweep other scents into its orbit and take them hostage, hints of curdled milk and wood rot tugging at the edges of the perfume whenever the heating climbed too high. Classrooms stank of it. Nobody else seemed to mind the smell. “How many of your friends said no to meeting you today before you called me?” I asked, though we both knew that, much like me, Vivi had no friends in London. “Like, five, six max,” Vivi said. “Everyone’s getting jobs. It’s disgusting. So are you coming or not?” “I can’t just leave school.” “You can. I should know. I did it every day.” “Yes, well, some of us want to go to university. Besides, Cate will freak out if I cut. It was hard enough getting permission to come to your gig. You know what she’s like.” “Cate’s codependence on you and your respect for authority are equally repulsive. Give me your phone.” Vivi guessed my passcode—16 for Grey’s birthday, 29 for Vivi’s birthday, 11 for my birthday—then called our mother, who picked up immediately. “No, Cate, nothing’s wrong.” Vivi rolled her eyes. “I’m kidnapping Iris for the day.” We locked eyes on the word kidnapping. I shook my head. “She’s not going to be at school, so don’t flip when you check your creepy, privacy-invading tracker, okay? . . . Yes, I know. No, Grey isn’t here. It’s just Iris and me, I promise . . . I will . . . I know . . . Yes, Cate, I know. She’s safe with me, okay? . . . Yeah, I’m going to crash at home after the show. I’m looking forward to seeing you too. Love you.” Vivi hung up and threw my phone back to me. “Done. Easy.” I wondered what Cate’s reaction would be if Grey showed up at my school unannounced and tried to pull me out of classes for the day. There would probably already be police sirens screaming in the distance. “Kidnapping?” I said. “Really? Stellar word choice.” “It was an accident. Oh shit, incoming.” Mrs. Thistle was hurrying toward us. “Iris,” she said, “I was on my way to check on you. Are you feeling better?” “Oh,” I said. “No. I think I need to go home.” I pointed at Vivi. Mrs. Thistle’s gaze slid to my sister. “Hello, Vivienne,” she said flatly. “Hello, Thistle,” Vivi replied with a wave . . . which she then turned around into the middle finger. Mrs. Thistle pursed her lips and went back the way she came, shaking her head. Vivi hadn’t been the easiest student. I smacked her in the stomach with the back of my hand. “Vivi,” I said. “What? No matter how many times I tell that old hag my name is just Vivi, she insists on calling me Vivienne. Plus, she failed me in English.” “Yeah, because you never, ever went to English.” “Allegedly.” I rolled my eyes. “Have you heard from Grey today?” “No. Not for a few days. I tried calling her when I landed, but her phone must be out of juice. She knows the plan, though. Come on. Let’s go get food and wait for our terribly busy and important sister to grace us with her presence.” Vivi slammed through the day, chain-smoking clove cigarettes and drinking spiked Earl Grey tea from a flask. I forgot how much fun she could be. After lunch at a kebab shop, we spent the afternoon crashing her favorite London haunts: guitar shops on Denmark Street, vintage shops in Camden, Flamin’ Eight Tattoo Studio in Kentish Town, where she spent a good fifteen minutes trying to convince me to get a full sleeve. We snacked on croissants and slices of sourdough pizza, and Vivi told me all about the six months since I’d last seen her: the European tour through Germany and Hungary and the Czech Republic, the gigs in ruin bars and abandoned warehouses and empty swimming pools, the beautiful European women she’d bedded along the way, in more detail than I cared to hear. The time Grey was supposed to meet us came and went. It felt almost strange to spend time alone with my middle sister, just the two of us. All our lives, even after Vivi and Grey had moved out, whenever we met up, it was almost always the three of us together. Always a set, never a pair. Without Grey, I felt unanchored somehow, like the internal hierarchy of our sisterhood had collapsed into chaos. We all knew our roles: Grey was the boss, the leader, the captain, the one who took charge and made decisions and forged ahead. Vivi was the fun assistant, the suggester of mischief, the teller of jokes, the wild one—but even with her penchant for anarchy and dislike of authority, she always fell in line behind Grey. I half suspected the reason Vivi had set off on her own at fifteen was to escape Grey’s iron rule. My role was to be the youngest, the baby, a thing to be protected. My sisters were kinder and gentler to me than they were to each other. Grey rarely pulled me into line the way she did Vivi. Vivi rarely snapped and yelled at me the way she did Grey. As afternoon turned into evening, we sent her pictures on WhatsApp of us hanging out without her, of all the fun she was missing. It was a special kind of sisterly punishment: Grey hated being left out, hated us embarking on plans that had not been sanctioned by her in advance. She was a general and we were her small but fiercely loyal army. “If Grey jumped off a bridge, would you?” my mother had asked me once as she splinted my broken pinkie finger. Grey had broken her pinkie hours before, so I had found a hammer in my father’s pottery shed and used it to shatter my own. It was a question without answer. It was not a question at all. I didn’t follow my sister. I was my sister. I breathed when she breathed. I blinked when she blinked. I felt pain when she felt pain. If Grey was going to jump off a bridge, I was going to be there with her, holding her hand. Of course, of course, of course. In the evening, we met up with Vivi’s bandmates for dinner before the gig: Candace, a hard-drinking German with a voice like Janis Joplin, and Laura, the Danish drummer, who looked like a pixie and played drums like a banshee. I’d had something of a crush on her since I’d first seen her play, on a weekend trip to Prague six months ago. Grey had met us there and we’d spent two nights wandering the labyrinthine stone alleys of the Old Town, eating nothing but trdeln?k and drinking nothing but absinthe. When we’d watched the band play at a red-lit basement bar, Grey had mouthed the words to each of their songs. It was one of the things I loved most about her: you might not see her for months, and then she’d show up and know every word to every song you’d written and recite them back to you like they were Shakespearean poetry. Grey didn’t just know I got good grades; she contacted my teachers and requested to read every essay I handed in, then commented on their merits the next time we met up. So where was she now? For dinner, we ate bowls of spicy chicken karaage at Vivi’s favorite pub, the Lady Hamilton, named after the famous eighteenth-century muse and mistress Emma Hart. Vivi’s first ever tattoo had been George Romney’s painting Emma Hart as Circe, a soft beauty with round eyes, pouting lips, and hair whipped around by the wind. I wasn’t sure if Vivi had discovered the pub or the woman first, but either way, whenever she came to London, we inevitably ended up eating here. Inside, the pub was warm and cozy, the walls and furniture all dark wood, the roof a lattice of Bordeaux cornice and ceiling roses. Candles dripped white wax onto our table as we ate. Vivi slipped me a sneaky glass of house red wine. Another difference between my sisters: the budgets. If Grey were here, we’d likely be eating the tasting menu at Sketch and knocking back twenty-pound cocktails like they were candy. I thought about the classes I had the next day, all the prep work I was missing out on by taking a night off. I thought about the skin of Laura’s neck, what it might taste like if I kissed her. I thought about how young I looked in my uniform. I thought about the horned man, and how Vivi couldn’t be in town for ten minutes before weird shit started happening. After dinner, we wandered down Kentish Town Road toward Camden, past convenience stores and late-night barbers and the hot-oil smell that lingered around the doorways of chicken shops. Even on a weeknight in winter, the streets around Camden Town Station were humming with people: a punk in a leather jacket and a fluorescent-orange Mohawk was charging tourists a pound for photographs; a vape company handed out free tester kits to the crowds coming home from work or heading to the nearby market for food; revelers spilled out of honey-lit bars; couples held hands on their way to the Odeon cinema; shoppers carried bags of groceries from MandS and Sainsbury’s and Whole Foods. Vivi’s band, Sisters of the Sacred, had been booked to play at the Jazz Caf?, which, contrary to what its name would suggest, was not actually a jazz caf? but rather a nightclub/live music venue in an old Barclays Bank. Its white columns and arched windows gave it a faux Grecian vibe, and blue neon letters loudly declared it LONDONS FAMOUS JAZZ VENUE. There was a line out the front already, despite the cold, which made Vivi and her bandmates stop. “Oh my,” Laura said. “Are we famous now?” Sisters of the Sacred was semi well known in the underground scenes of the mainland’s coolest, grungiest cities, but they certainly weren’t famous. Not in the way that Grey was famous. Vivi stared at the line and lit a cigarette. “I may have told the venue manager that my sister and a gaggle of scantily dressed supermodels would come and watch our show if they booked us.” “This is the correct term for a multitude of supermodels?” Candace asked. “Gaggle?” “It is indeed, Candace.” “Pimping out your own sister for exposure is a bit morally bankrupt,” I said. “Supermodels were invented to sell shit to people,” Vivi said. “What’s the point of being a direct blood relative of one if I don’t occasionally utilize her for profit?” “Oh my God, Iris!” A hand waved frantically from the line. “Here!” Jennifer Weir and Justine Khan were standing close to the front. Jennifer was the one waving at me. Justine had her arms crossed and was staring straight ahead, her jaw set tight. “Friends of yours?” Vivi muttered as Jennifer ducked out of the line and tugged Justine after her. “Mortal enemies, actually,” I muttered back. “Oh my God, I hoped we’d run into you!” Jennifer said. “We got here early and have been waiting in line for, like, an hour.” “Big fans of the band?” Vivi asked. “Oh, sure, yeah,” Jennifer said. Vivi’s gaze slid to Justine. “You look familiar.” My sister clicked her fingers and pointed at her. “I know! You’re the girl who shaved her head in front of the whole school! That was so metal.” Vivi reached out and curled a lock of Justine’s long hair around her finger. “It’s a shame you let it grow out. I much preferred it short.” “Don’t fucking touch me, witch,” Justine snapped. She turned and stormed toward an Italian restaurant across the road. “Justine! Justine!” Jennifer called. “Sorry about her. I don’t know what her problem is.” Jennifer turned back to me. “Is your sister here? Is she still coming?” “I’m her sister,” Vivi offered. “I think she’s coming,” I said. “We haven’t heard from her today.” “Do you think you’ll go to Cuckoo afterward?” Jennifer asked. “Oh my God, do you think Tyler Yang will be there?” “Cuckoo?” “Only the coolest and most ultra-exclusive nightclub in London. Duh. It’s impossible for regular humans to get in, but Grey and Tyler go all the time when she’s here.” A slow, sharp smile spread across Vivi’s face. She despised when people talked about our sister like they knew her. Grey was ours. She belonged to us. “We’ll be sure to let you know,” she said, maintaining the smile. “See you later.” Jennifer was apparently unaware that she’d been dismissed. “Oh, actually, I kind of lost my place in line. Do you think I could come in with you? I would love to see backstage.” Vivi took one long last drag on her cigarette and let the clove-scented smoke bloom in Jennifer’s face. “Do you know any of our music—or are you just here to starfuck Grey? Can you name one song?” Jennifer stumbled over her words. “I . . . I don’t think . . . That’s not fair.” “Actually,” Vivi said as she stubbed out her cigarette with her boot, “what’s our band called?” Again, Jennifer made gasping fish sounds. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Vivi said. “Back in line.” “Ah. Classic Vivi. Making friends wherever she goes,” Laura mused as the bouncers opened the doors for us and we made our way inside. Vivi threw her arms around her bandmates’ shoulders and swaggered into the club like the rock star she was. “Starfuckers never change,” she said, oblivious to the fact that I would be the one who’d have to face said starfucker—now glaring at me with her arms crossed—and her henchwomen at school tomorrow. We hung out backstage while the support act warmed up the crowd. Then, when Sisters of the Sacred took the stage and Grey was still MIA, I messaged her again: They’re starting. WHERE. ARE. YOU? It was weird for her not to have seen my previous messages. Vivi could go weeks without checking social media, but Grey was chained to it. I opened Instagram. My account was set to private, but I had thousands of message requests. Everybody wants a piece of you when your sister is famous. Or rather, they want a piece of your sister, and they want you to deliver it to them. Ghouls haunted my Instagram, my Facebook, hungry for a filtered taste of her. You go to school with my cousin. I think you’re so hot. Send me a pic of you naked, beautiful. (Or your sister if you’re too shy!) Tell Grey that if she breaks Tyler’s heart I will literally kill her. Literally. Hey, I have a theory about what happened to you as a kid. Have you considered the possibility that you were abducted by aliens? My best friend’s great-uncle works at Area 51 and she says he has proof. I can share the details for a low price. Message me back! I know you will probably never read this but I feel like I am DESTINED to become a catwalk model and I would REALLY appreciate you passing my headshots on to your sister. I checked Grey’s page to see if she’d posted recently. Grey Hollow, supermodel, had ninety-eight million followers. NINETY-EIGHT MILLION. There were pictures of her with other supermodels, pictures of her on magazine covers, pictures of her backstage at concerts with pop stars, pictures of her on yachts, pictures of her with her model boyfriend, Tyler Yang, at some pink-lit club—Cuckoo, I guessed—in Mayfair. Grey had first told me about Tyler six months ago on our trip to Prague, after we’d each drunk a few shots of absinthe from delicate glasses. We sat close together at a booth in a nightclub, warm and glittery on the inside from the alcohol and the wormwood, her head resting on my shoulder as we watched Vivi move on the dance floor with a girl she’d met at the bar. Grey held up her left hand and I held up my right and we pressed our fingertips together in an arch. I felt her heartbeat in my skin, in my chest, felt the strong thread that bound us together. “I think I’m in love with him,” she’d said quietly, her breath carrying a trace of sugar and anise. I could hear the smile in her voice. I already knew she loved him. I’d known it since the day before, when we’d met at V?clav Havel Airport and I’d hugged her for the first time in months. She’d smelled different. She’d smelled . . . softer, somehow. It suited her. Being in love made her even more intoxicating. I was surprised and unsurprised in equal measure. Unsurprised because I already knew they were together. I’d seen paparazzi shots of them holding hands on the front of tabloid magazines, and Tyler had started to appear more and more frequently in her Instagram stories. Surprised because Grey had never had a real boyfriend before, only lovers who interested her for a short time, and—unlike Vivi, who frequently offered the details of her love and sex life—Grey was a locked box. She shared no more than morsels. “Tyler Yang?” I’d asked her, and she’d nodded sleepily. “He’s quite special,” she’d continued. “You’ll know what I mean when you meet him.” The meeting had yet to happen, but maybe it would tonight—if she bothered showing up. Grey’s last post was from five days ago, an image of her in a green tulle gown lounging against a red banister with a glass of champagne in her hand, her skin saturated in fluorescent pink light, her blond head wreathed in baby’s breath. TBT London Fashion Week, the caption read. The location was tagged as the Cuckoo Club. Just over fifteen million people had liked it. There were two levels inside Jazz Caf?: the lower level with the stage, the audience pressed up close to it, the band soaked in orange light and laser beams. Overhead, a mezzanine restaurant and bar wrapped around the space for those who preferred sipping wine to getting doused with beer in the mosh pit. I spotted JJ sitting at a round table, both looking sullen. Grey wasn’t there for the first song, or the second, or the third. Candace moved across the stage with Mick Jagger swagger, sex on legs, but I watched Laura, a thimble of a woman with Bambi eyes transformed into a she-beast as she attacked her drums. Hair in her face, sweat and spit flying, her T-shirt riding up to reveal a soft slip of stomach. The crowd was loving the band, but by the fourth song I was distracted, worried. I kept looking around for my eldest sister, sure she would sneak up behind me and put her hands over my eyes at any moment, but she didn’t show. Then, somewhere toward the end of the gig, something happened. Onstage, Vivi stopped playing her bass and let her arms fall slack to her sides. She was staring at someone or something in the crowd behind me, a veil over her eyes. I turned to look at what she was fixated on, but the room was dark and crowded. Laura and Candace exchanged confused glances and tried to catch Vivi’s attention, without any luck. Vivi was frozen, wide-eyed, drawing quick, shallow breaths through her shuddering mouth. Candace moved across the stage as she sang and nudged Vivi, who blinked furiously and shook her head. She found my eyes in the crowd. A tear slipped down her cheek. I knew then that something was very wrong. Vivi swallowed and picked up her instrument again. The band played two more songs, but Vivi’s heart wasn’t in it, and she kept making mistakes. When the crowd called for an encore after the last song, only Candace and Laura came onstage to do an acoustic cover. I made my way through the crowd and slipped backstage. Vivi was sucking on a cigarette like it was hooked up to an oxygen tank, her head between her knees. “Jesus,” I said. I ran to the sink and wet a cloth, then draped it over the peach-fuzz crown of her skull. “What the hell happened out there? Are you okay?” “I don’t know. I don’t know.” A necklace of saliva sagged from her open mouth and drooped to the floor between her feet. “I think I had a panic attack.” “You saw something,” I said. Vivi shook her head. “Yes, you did,” I pushed. “What did you see?” She sat up straight. Her lips were tinted faint blue and her skin was clammy with sweat. “A man. Except not a man. A . . . dude with a bull’s skull over his head.” I stood up and took out my phone. “I’m calling the cops.” “What? No. Iris, seriously, it was dark and I was probably hallucin—” “I saw him today too. Twice. He was at my school. Tall shirtless dude cosplaying a decomposing demon Minotaur.” “What?” “Yeah. So, no, you weren’t hallucinating. Some freak stalker from the internet has decided to try and scare us like that woman who broke in when we were kids, and I’m not putting up with that.” Vivi frowned. “Iris . . . you know this is not that, right?” I hesitated. “Uh. No?” “I recognized . . . the way he smelled. I can’t explain it. It felt . . . familiar.” I stared at my sister for a long time, then at my phone, which still showed no notification from our eldest sister. “Where’s Grey, Vivi? Why isn’t she here?” “I don’t know.” “Grey doesn’t miss these things. If she says she’s going to do something, she does it. If she’s not going to come to us, we’re going to go to her.” 5 WE SLIPPED OUT the back entrance of Jazz Caf? while Laura and Candace were still onstage, then hurried toward the crowded mouth of Camden Town Station, checking over our shoulders the whole way that we weren’t being followed by whoever—or whatever—was stalking us. Vivi was still rattled. On the train, she breathed into her cupped hands to settle her stomach. It took a few stops before the color started returning to her cheeks and dots of sweat stopped rising from her forehead. We emerged from the Underground at Leicester Square, into a world in which Vivi no longer belonged. In Camden, her tattoos and piercings didn’t look out of place, but here, as we hurried past crowds of tourists and chain restaurants and kiosks selling tickets for Matilda and Magic Mike, she was an oddity. We let ourselves into Grey’s apartment building with the keycodes she’d sent us when she bought the flat a year ago, though she was so infrequently in London that neither Vivi nor I had ever actually visited yet. Horrible images slotted into my thoughts as we caught the lift up to the penthouse, one after another, like an old-fashioned slide projector: Grey, OD’ed on her bathroom floor; Grey, murdered by the man in the bull skull. When we opened the front door, though, we found the place neat and vast and impersonal. City lights seeped through floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the Thames. The London Eye turned slowly in the distance. There were no signs of anything weird. In fact, there were very few signs that anyone lived here at all. A couple of coffee table books about fashion but no bookshelves stuffed to bursting with the dark fairy tales Grey had loved most as a teenager. A sleek galley kitchen of gloss white and marble with floors of polished concrete, but no wood, no warmth, no food. The air tasted bitter, the smack of bleach and ammonia. All the furniture looked as though it had been chosen by an interior designer, then styled and lit for a Vogue photo shoot about bland celebrity homes. It didn’t feel like Grey. Grey’s brain was chaotic. When she was a teenager, her room had never been clean. Her socks had never matched. She was always at least fifteen minutes late to everything. Nothing in her life had ever been neat or ordered. She slammed through the world, a tornado in the form of a girl, and left a trail of destruction behind her. That’s what she’d been like at seventeen, anyway. Maybe becoming a supermodel and fashion designer had changed that, but it seemed as impossible as switching out the bones of your skeleton. Vivi and I moved through the apartment in eerie silence, trailing our fingertips over Grey’s possessions. The couches, the mirrors, the clocks and cabinets. It felt clandestine to be in someone else’s personal space like this. Like I could open any drawer or door or cupboard and there find my sister’s bare-naked soul, neatly folded. A thrill settled over me. Suddenly I was ten years old again and obsessed with my big sister. Back then, Grey’s bedroom had been a temple in wartime, a place of worship I had to sneak into when its guardian was unawares. Whenever I knew she’d be out of the house for a couple of hours, I’d push open the door and start exploring. I only did it when I knew I could take my time, savor the experience. Her makeup bag was a favorite, a seemingly bottomless chest of treasure filled with glosses and glitters that left my skin sticky and shellacked. I wanted to live in her skin, to know what it was like to be as beautiful and mysterious as Grey Hollow. But the apartment was not the home of the sister I knew. When Grey daydreamed about running away, it hadn’t been to a place like this. It had been to some rich, dark hidey-hole in Budapest or Prague, a place swaddled in velvet and brass. Vivi’s request to Grey was that the place have a library. All I wanted was black-and-white chessboard floors in the kitchen and bathrooms, like I had in all my houses in Sims 4 whenever I played. At thirteen, I’d considered it the height of opulence. We found neither of those things here. “It’s like an interior designer masturbated in here,” Vivi said, tapping her fingernails against a vase, “and came on everything.” “Gross.” “But true. None of this is Grey. She must’ve paid someone to do it. Either that or a reptilian shape-shifter is wearing her skin.” “I didn’t know reptilian shape-shifters were renowned for their interior decorating skills.” “And that’s why you’ll never be part of the Illuminati.” The master bedroom was something out of a luxury hotel—chic, modern, soulless. The bed was made with neat hospital corners and there were no personal items on display, not so much as a hairbrush or photograph. I opened the walk-in closet. Here, too, it was painstakingly ordered. Rows and rows of unworn heels, bright as beetle backs. I ran my fingers over the clothes. Sequins and braided velvet and silk, all heavy and expensive. Oscar de la Renta, Vivienne Westwood, Elie Saab, Grey Hollow. Vivi held up a pair of snakeskin pants. “The reptilian shape-shifter theory is starting to check out.” “It doesn’t look like anyone has been here for weeks,” I said. “It doesn’t look like anyone has been here ever.” “I suppose she has a cleaner or something?” Vivi trailed a finger over a shelf in the closet; there was no dust. “Has to be, right? Grey is not this tidy.” “What do we do now?” I asked. Vivi shrugged. “I don’t know if we need to worry. Maybe she never even made it home from Paris.” I looked back at Grey’s closet. The green tulle gown she’d worn to Cuckoo Club in her Instagram post from five days ago was wedged in there, pressed and lifeless now that it didn’t have her body to animate it. “If she’s in London, I think I know where she might be.” It felt like some holy ritual. Something I had waited my whole life for. To sit where she sat, to paint my face with her makeup, to slip my body into her clothes. To become Grey. We thumbed through her wardrobe and draped ourselves in her vestments. Even Vivi, who was generally unimpressed by fashion unless it was ripped or studded, was breathless and giddy at the prospect of unlimited access to Grey’s wardrobe. We tried on piece after piece. Eventually, I settled on a gold minidress and a green silk coat that drifted over my skin like cobwebs. Vivi chose a cardinal-red power suit with cigarette pants and lipstick to match, her peach fuzz slicked flat to her skull with shimmery gel. I called Grey again and again during the cab ride to Cuckoo Club, certain that we were overreacting, certain that she would answer my next message and Vivi and I would spend the rest of the week cringing at our silliness, but Grey never answered, never read any of my messages. We got out of the cab on Regent Street and walked beneath a huge shadowed archway to the backstreet that Cuckoo called home. Fairy lights were cast over the street like a net, and restaurants still hummed with late-night drinkers and diners huddled beneath outdoor heaters. There was no line outside the club. The door was unmarked, unassuming. A couple walking in front of us buzzed, and it opened an inch to seep out neon-purple light and electro house music. They had a hushed conversation with whoever answered and were turned away. Vivi and I stepped up next. I buzzed. The door was opened by a short blond woman with eyes like a cat. “Sur la liste?” she asked, and then she looked at us closely and her mouth fell open a little. We were the ghosts of Grey; of course she would recognize us. “She’s not here,” she said in English; her accent was so heavy, her tongue sounded swollen. “Do you know where she is?” Vivi asked. “I told your friend yesterday—I haven’t seen her.” “Someone else was looking for her?” I asked. “Who?” The woman’s expression darkened. “A man. A man who smelled like . . . death and burning.” My heartbeat shifted into a higher gear. I thought of the woman who’d slipped through my bedroom window when I was a child and cut off a lock of my hair, of the man who’d tried to pull Vivi into his car because he’d read about her on the internet. “Did he say why he was looking for her?” I pressed. “What he wanted?” The woman shook her head. “I didn’t let him in. He was . . . His eyes. They were black, like ink. I was afraid of him.” Vivi and I shared a look, and a thought: We need to find her. “We want to talk to this guy.” I showed the hostess a picture of Grey’s boyfriend. “Tyler Yang. Is he here?” “Yes, but it’s a private event tonight,” she said hesitantly. “If you’re not on the guest list, I can’t let—” “I won’t tell if you don’t,” Vivi said, practically purring. She put a finger against the woman’s lips—and that was all it took. The woman closed her eyes at Vivi’s touch, dazed and drunk on the heady smell of my sister’s skin. With her eyes still shut, she opened her mouth and sucked on Vivi’s finger. I had seen my sisters do this thing before. I had done this thing before too, a couple of times, though the power of it terrified me. The things I could make people do when they were high on me. When the woman opened her eyes, her pupils were huge and her breath smelled like honey and rotten wood. Vivi stroked her cheek, then leaned in to whisper, “You want to let us in.” The hostess opened the door, giddy, a dumb smile on her face. Her gaze was fixed on Vivi. In the purple light of the vestibule, I saw what she saw: how frighteningly beautiful my sister was, sharper and skinnier than Grey, like a rapier where Grey was a broadsword. “You shouldn’t do that to people,” I said as we headed down a hall toward the source of the music. A thick bass jumped in my chest. “Do what?” Vivi asked. “Whatever the hell that is.” The club—Grey’s favorite, if her Instagram was to be believed—was lit from all angles by screaming pink neon. For the private event, the ceiling had been laced with a forest of cherry blossoms that dripped down over the dance floor. Oversize buckets of Dom P?rignon with glow-in-the-dark labels gave every table a soft green phosphorescence. The bar was gold and glass and framed by a set of sumptuous purple velvet curtains. Drinks were served in tall, impossibly elegant glasses that looked remarkably similar to the tall, impossibly elegant women who drank from them. The crowd was made up mostly of people in the fashion industry—models, designers, photographers—but I also spotted a famous rapper, an actor couple from an American cult teen TV show, the socialite daughter of an old British rock legend. Many did a double take when they saw us, then leaned together to speak in hushed tones. “Keep your eyes peeled for him,” I told Vivi. “How did you know he’d be here?” “Grey’s here all the time. Tyler is always in her pictures.” Tyler Yang was a heavily tattooed Korean British model who’d gained a reputation in the fashion world for the ease with which his style blurred gender boundaries. Rarely was he seen in something that wasn’t daring: Gucci floral suits, bespoke lace blouses, strings of antique pearls, pussybow shirts, heeled loafers. His eyes were always lined, his lids and lips slicked with a candy shop of bright pop colors. Grey’s sexuality was a much discussed but ultimately unconfirmed topic of gossip. Was she dating this Victoria’s Secret Angel or that new Hollywood leading man? Vivi and I both knew that Grey was straight. It had always been men for her, the same way it had always been women for Vivi. For me, it had always been both. My very first kiss had been with Justine Khan in the game of spin the bottle at Jennifer Weir’s sleepover. Her mouth had been soft and her perfume had smelled like lip gloss and vanilla frosting. It was supposed to be a bit of giggling fun, but it lit something inside me. A disco ball in my chest, an insistent hunger somewhere within me that made me want to thread my fingers through her then-short hair and press my hips against hers. It confirmed something about myself that I had suspected for a while. The kiss did something to Justine too—something strange and ugly. She kissed me again and again, hungry and insistent, until I tried to push her away and she forced me down, until she bit my lip so hard it burst and bled, until her fingernails raked claw marks into my arms and I had to start fighting her off, until all the girls who were watching us realized it wasn’t a game anymore and had to wrestle her, keening and frothing at the mouth, off me. The story had twisted over time, so now girls at school said I was the one who bit her; I was the one who wouldn’t let her go; I was the mad witch who’d tried to bite her face off. It remained the less terrifying of the two kisses I had endured. “There,” Vivi said, nodding toward the back wall. Tyler was in a pink velvet booth wedged between a pop star and a supermodel. An ex–Disney teen star hovered nearby, trying to find her way into the conversation. I could see why Grey liked Tyler: the bouffant of black hair tied in a knot at the crown of his skull, the strong line of his jaw, the muscles that moved beneath his tattoo sleeves. Tonight his brown eyes were rimmed with kohl, his lips shellacked with green lipstick. He wore a sheer lilac blouse and high waisted trousers, the kind men favored in the 1920s. The glowing Dom P?rignon label gave his skin an absinthine quality. The women were beautiful, but Tyler Yang was—like Grey—utterly striking. I licked my lips. “Damn, is that who I think it is?” Vivi said, eyeing the supermodel. “The Victoria’s Secret Angel, right? I think she just broke up with her girlfriend.” “Keep it in your pants,” I said. “We’re investigating our sister’s mysterious disappearance. This is no time for fraternizing.” “Says the girl salivating over Tyler Yang. Said missing sister’s boyfriend.” “I’m not salivating.” “At least not with your mouth.” “Gross.” “Yet true.” Tyler spotted us then. We made and held eye contact across the room. “Uh . . . He does not look super pleased to see us,” Vivi said. Tyler’s expression had fermented into vinegar. He was staring now, his eyes dark and jaw set. He raised a thin finger, curled it toward himself. Come. “It appears we are being beckoned,” I said. “Well, that’s all the invitation I need.” Vivi pushed past me and made a beeline for the model. Shameless. As we approached the table, however, Tyler had a quiet word with the women, and they rose and made their way toward the bar, two goddesses draped in starlight. “No, why are they going away?” Vivi said, staring after the women as they glided through the crowd. My phone pinged in my hand. I glanced at the screen, but the message was from my mother, not Grey. Shit. In all the panic of trying to find Grey, I’d forgotten about my curfew. Heading home soon, I messaged Cate, then I turned on airplane mode so she wouldn’t show up at the club to escort me home. “Little Hollows,” Tyler said, looking from Vivi to me. “You have to be.” “We’re Grey’s sisters,” I said as we sat. “If she sent you to apologize, I’m not interested in hearing it.” “Apologize for what?” Vivi asked. “Oh, you know, for being a lying, cheating witch.” Vivi raised her eyebrows. I pressed my teeth together. We both hated that word. “We’re here because we can’t find Grey,” she said. “We’re worried she might be missing.” Tyler laughed, though not kindly. “No, she’s not.” “When did you last see her?” I asked. “I don’t know. A few days ago, when we broke up. I suppose I haven’t seen her since then.” “You broke up?” Vivi asked. “Yes.” “Why? Did you fight?” “That’s usually what happens when people break up.” Vivi’s jaw tilted down. There was still the ghost of a smile on her lips, but her eyes were sharp. Going in for the kill. “Did you get angry?” The way she asked it, it was almost like she was flirting. “Did you hurt her?” Tyler stirred his drink. “I don’t like where this is going.” He tried to stand then, but Vivi grabbed him by the collar and pulled him down. She sidled up close to him and hooked her leg over his thigh; to anyone watching, it would look flirtatious, not threatening. “You’re the first person the police are going to come to after we call them,” said Vivi, her lips close to Tyler’s ear. I sat up straighter at the word police. Vivi was bluffing, surely. It wasn’t that serious yet—was it? “The ex-boyfriend. You know it’s true. So tell us what happened.” She stroked his cheek, but whatever cloying spell she’d used on the hostess, it wasn’t working on him. He’s quite special, Grey had told me. You’ll know what I mean when you meet him. Is this what she’d meant? Tyler looked the way I felt: afraid. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Police? Why are you getting them involved?” “Because we can’t find her, you idiot,” Vivi said. “Grey is uncontactable. The hostess here tonight said a weird dude was looking for her. Something might have happened to her.” “Grey is always disappearing. That’s nothing new.” “What do you mean?” I asked. “For days at a time, she disappears off the face of the earth, okay? Won’t answer calls, misses work, dates, fittings. Everyone else got used to it. It was part of her mystery. Would she show up or wouldn’t she? All very exciting. But it sucks when you’re dating her. Your sister was a lousy girlfriend.” Vivi prickled. “Be very careful what you say about her.” “Why? Would I bad-mouth her if I’d done anything to her? No. I mean it, Grey was a bad girlfriend. There was someone else, I assume. That’s why we broke up. That’s probably who she’s with right now.” “Grey cheated on you?” I asked. It didn’t sound like her. Grey was wild, sure, but not flippant—especially not with other people’s hearts. “Well, she didn’t admit it to my face, but what else am I supposed to assume? Where does she go when she disappears? All I know is when she was here, she was only ever here halfway— if I was lucky. We were together for a year and I feel like I barely scratched the surface of who she was. She kept so many secrets, so much of herself compartmentalized. Especially the occult stuff.” Vivi and I exchanged glances. Tyler had our attention, and he knew it. “Oh, I suppose you don’t know much about that, do you?” he said. “I don’t either, really. All I know is the one time she let me come to her apartment, it was the creepiest place I’ve ever been. Full of weird shit. Dead things, dark magic. Grey thinks she’s some kind of witch.” “We were at her apartment tonight,” I said. “There was nothing like that there.” “Everybody keeps secrets, Little Hollow. Perhaps your big sister has been keeping more secrets from you than you realize.” It was no surprise to me that Grey was still interested in the occult. It had been that way all her teenage years. Grey liked things that were obscure and dangerous: older men; drugs; s?ances in graveyards; heavy leather-bound books that smelled of chocolate and promised spells to commune with demons. “What did you fight about when you broke up?” Vivi asked Tyler. “I saw a man leaving her apartment,” he replied. Vivi and I shared another look. “That was the final straw.” “Did he . . . ,” Vivi began. “Uh, how does one phrase this? Was he, perchance, some kind of Minotaur with all the flesh stripped off the bones of his face?” Tyler stared at her for a few moments, then smiled. “I think we’re done here, Little Hollows,” he said as he finished his drink and shrugged on his velvet jacket. “When you find Grey, tell her I hate her.” With that, he stood and was gone. 6 I HAD SEVEN missed calls and a dozen messages from my mother when we left the club, all of them dinging into my phone at once when I turned airplane mode off. “Damn,” I whispered as I tapped Cate’s name to call her, my heart fast and swollen with guilt. “Our mother is going to kill me.” “Iris?” Cate said instantly. I could taste the panic on her tongue, a sour scent that made my stomach crumple. “I’m so sorry.” Vivi and I were walking to the Tube, the cold stripping the skin off my legs, turning me inside out. “I’m okay. We’re heading home now.” “How could you do that to me?” my mother demanded. “How could you do that to me?” “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m okay.” “I’m at work. I almost called the police.” “I’m okay, Mama.” I hadn’t meant to say it. Sometimes it just slipped out. I could hear Cate breathing on the other end of the line. “Please don’t call me that,” she said quietly. “You know I don’t like that.” “I’m sorry.” “Go home immediately.” “We’re on our way already. We’ll be there in about half an hour. I’ll message you when we’re there.” I hung up. The cold had sent my fingers numb and I struggled to bend them enough to slip my phone into my coat pocket. I could feel Vivi staring at me disapprovingly. “Iris,” she said. “Don’t say anything,” I snapped. “What is Cate going to do next year when you go to university, huh? Move to Oxford or Cambridge with you?” “We’ve been looking at places and she’s been putting some feelers out for jobs.” “Are you kidding me?” “It’s not like we’ll live together. Just close by. Just so I can see her from time to time and so she doesn’t feel—” “Iris.” “Look, it’s easy for you to lecture me. You’re never here. I’m all she has left, okay? I have to be everything for her, every day.” Cate Hollow had suffered more grief in her lifetime than most people. Her parents had died suddenly, a terrible thing had happened to her children, her husband had lost his mind and then his will to live, and then her elder daughters had left home so young and all but cut off contact with her. I couldn’t understand the way my sisters treated her sometimes, like she was a stranger. All Cate wanted was to be needed. “I’m all she has left,” I said again, softer this time. It seemed like the least I could do, to let her track me on an app and braid my hair like she had when I was little. “That’s a pretty heavy burden to bear,” Vivi said. “Being everything for someone.” “Yeah, well. Aren’t you lucky you don’t have to carry it.” Vivi placed her hand in the middle of my back, between my shoulder blades. I felt the warmth of her skin through the silken fabric, felt the cord of power that connected us. Blood to blood, soul to soul. The knot of panic that had been tangling somewhere between my ribs and throat started to come undone. “Come on, kid,” Vivi said. “Let’s get you home.” We caught the Northern Line back to Golders Green, the late-night commuters drinking in my bare legs and collarbones with big, hungry eyes. I felt like a thing to be devoured, sucked down to the marrow. I shrank in my seat and tried to stretch my short dress a little farther over my thighs. The Tube rattled and squealed. The woman sitting next to me smelled of sweet alcohol, her breath a cloud of fruit and sugar. The curved windows on the other side of the train carriage reflected a strange beast back at me. There were two Irises: one my regular reflection, one upside down, both joined together at the skull. A creature with two mouths, two noses, and a shared pair of eyes, empty black ovals distorted and made huge by the curve in the glass. Vivi and I walked home together along our well-trod path, past the red double-decker buses at the station exit, along a long, straight street lined with low houses with darkened leadlight windows. We had always come this way even though the route to our house was faster through the backstreets, because the main road was brightly-lit and busy. We knew all too well what could happen to girls on poorly lit streets at night, because it had happened to us. Then again, all girls knew that. Tonight, that old danger felt close. We checked behind us every few paces to make sure no one was following. An old woman in a nightdress and coat stood smoking on the balcony of an apartment block, watching us with sunken eyes as we passed. Would she remember us if we ran into the horned man between here and our house and never made it home? What would she tell the police if they came knocking, looking for witnesses? They seemed agitated. They were underdressed for the weather. They were in a hurry. They kept looking behind them, as though they were being pursued. What did they expect, dressed like that? We turned left, then looped back onto our street. It was darker than the main road and lined with skeletal trees that looked monstrous in the low light. The man, whoever he was, knew the route I ran through Hampstead Heath in the mornings. He knew where I went to school. He knew where Vivi’s show was. He knew, I was certain, where we lived. After we locked the door behind us, I messaged Cate to let her know I was safe while Vivi checked all the windows and doors were secure. We changed out of Grey’s gossamer clothes and into pajamas—harsh against our skin after designer silk and wool—then sat cross-legged on the kitchen island, eating pasta from a bowl Cate had left in the fridge. Sasha meowed from the floor, begging for more food even though she’d already been fed. We still hadn’t heard from Grey. I called again—nothing—and sent another message that went undelivered. We decided to give her the night before we called the police. There were no signs of a struggle at her apartment, and besides, she was a jet-setter; she could be on a yacht in the Caribbean for all we knew, her phone out of service. Just because a creep was stalking us and just because a man with black eyes who smelled like death had been asking after her didn’t mean something bad had happened to Grey. I am the thing in the dark, she had said once, and in that moment, I had believed her. “Why do you think we’re so strange?” I asked Vivi as we ate. “Why do you think we can do the things we can do?” “Like what?” Vivi said around a mouthful of pasta. “Make people do what we want them to. Other things.” “That doesn’t feel strange to me. It feels right.” “Other people can’t do what we do.” “Sure they can. Other people can do weird stuff too, you know; they just don’t talk about it. There have always been people like us, Iris. Look in any history book, any folklore: witches, mediums, Wiccans. Whatever you want to call it. We’re connected to the world and to each other in a different way. We might be peculiar, but we’re not new.” I shook my head. “There’s something wrong with us. I feel it sometimes. Something rotten on the inside.” It was why I buried myself in books on coding and robotics and titration, so the wrongness had less room to seep in. I was certain that others—people like Justine Khan and Jennifer Weir—could feel it too. Maybe they were right to be cruel to me. Maybe I let them get away with it because some part of me believed I deserved it. “Do you think that thing—the guy in the skull—do you think he has anything to do with what happened to us? Do you think he’s back to finish what he started?” I reached out to trail my fingers over the scar at my sister’s throat, hidden now beneath a twisted vine of ink. “Who cuts little girls’ throats?” Vivi chewed her mouthful slowly, her eyes boring into me. “I think it’s time we went to bed.” She slid off the kitchen bench and left without another word. I brushed my teeth, tried to catch up on some of the classwork I’d missed that day, then went to find her in her old bedroom, curled up in her childhood single bed. I crawled in next to her. The stink of the perfume had faded, and Vivi’s natural scent—sylvan, milky—passed through now. I wiped some smudged eyeliner from her cheek and watched her while she slept. None of us were attractive sleepers. All of the sharp angles that made us striking when we were awake gave way to slack jaws and puddles of drool the moment our heads hit pillows. We’d once spent an entire month seeing who could take the most hideous sleeping pictures of the others. I stroked Vivi’s cheek and felt a pang of longing for her, and for Grey, for the years we’d been inseparable. Not yet split apart by countries and time zones and careers and lives. I pressed my fingertips lightly to her throat, right at the point where her heartbeat sprang beneath her skin. It was how we’d slept as children, our finger resting on one another’s pulse points, a cross-hatched thicket of wrists and necks and hands. For a long time, years, I couldn’t sleep deeply unless I felt the heartbeat of both my sisters thrumming beneath my fingers. But they had grown up and left home, and I’d realized there were scarier things in the world than the monsters that lived in my nightmares. Grey, I thought in silent prayer, knowing somehow that, wherever she was, she’d hear me. I hope you’re okay. I woke before dawn, as I always did, and messaged my mother, and checked my Find Friends app, and ran through Hampstead Heath, cursing the Romans for settling in such a damp, miserable place. It was raining again, because it was London. The weirdness of yesterday felt washed away, but I still stuck to the busier paths and avoided the wooded area where I’d seen the man yesterday. I ran until it hurt to breathe and my body begged me to stop, and then I ran some more. I held my phone in my palm the whole time, willing it to vibrate with a message from Grey, but every time I looked, there were no new notifications. When I got home, Cate was cooking breakfast in her scrubs. Vivi was sitting on the kitchen island again, her long tattooed legs dangling as she plopped cherry tomatoes into her mouth. “Look who I found,” Cate said when she saw me. “The prodigal daughter returns,” Vivi said, opening her arms wide and staring off into the distance like a Renaissance painting of Jesus. “You know the definition of prodigal is ‘wastefully extravagant’?” I said as I went to the fridge in search of milk. Vivi put her arms down. “I thought it meant ‘favorite,’ and I’m going to stick with that. Pour me one too,” she said as I set out a glass. “Please,” Cate said out of habit. “Please,” Vivi said. I handed her a glass of milk and sat at the breakfast bar while Cate scrambled some eggs. Vivi had an easier relationship with our mother than Grey did. Cate had always been overprotective—how could she be expected to be any other way, after what she’d been through?—which Grey had taken as a personal threat to her freedom. Vivi, on the other hand, was never bothered by our mother’s rules, because she never followed them. If Vivi was busted, which wasn’t often because she was so good at sneaking around, she would apologize with handwritten cards and breakfast in bed. They were very different women who had lived very different lives and were interested in very different things, but somehow—despite each considering the other an anomaly—they usually managed to find some middle ground. They spoke on the phone at least once a month. They teased each other constantly: Cate sent Vivi links to tattoo removal clinics, Vivi sent Cate links to pictures of body modders with split tongues and their teeth filed to points, captioned Do you think this would suit me? When Vivi sent recordings of her new music, Cate responded with comments like I think you sent the wrong track? This is a recording of cats being murdered. They were silly with each other. Sweet with each other. “Have you heard from Grey?” I asked Vivi. Vivi shook her head. “Cate doesn’t seem to think we should worry.” “Grey can look after herself,” Cate said. The way she said it without even looking up from what she was doing made me purse my lips. My thoughts went to the night Grey left home. They had been at odds with each other for months, Cate and Grey, squabbling over curfews and boyfriends and parties and alcohol. Grey was pushing the boundaries, seeing what she could get away with. One night, she stumbled home rotten drunk and vomited on the kitchen floor. Cate was furious and grounded her on the spot. Grey was a seventeen-year-old girl, filled with the rage and power of a thunderstorm curling beneath her skin. When she snapped, she put her hands around our mother’s throat, forced her against the wall, and whispered something in her ear. A needle. A pinprick. Something that was so small, so quiet, I didn’t hear it. Cate was still. Then whatever Grey had said splintered through her, electrifying her. She was a tree split by lightning. One moment a woman, the next something wild and ruptured. She slapped my sister so hard across the face that Grey’s lip split; there were still three brown specks on the wall where her blood had soaked into the plaster. “Get the fuck out of my house,” Cate had ordered in a low, steady voice, “and don’t ever, ever come back.” The sudden violence of it had made me hyperventilate. For years, as my father’s delusions had swollen inside his mind, I’d become more and more afraid that he would hurt us, put a pillow over our faces while we slept. It wasn’t unusual to wake in the middle of the night to his shadowy form hovering at the end of my bed, whispering softly. “Who are you? What are you?” Yet even as the spools of himself unraveled, he never laid a finger on us. Then here was Cate Hollow, a small, gentle woman who had done something so brutal, so indefensible. I still wasn’t sure what terrible thing Grey had said to her to make her snap like that, to pull her so far out of herself. Grey hadn’t cried. She’d set her jaw and packed her bags and done what our mother asked: left the house and never come back, except once, to clear out her room. They hadn’t spoken since that night, four years ago now. “Should we call the police?” I asked. “Should I not go to school?” It was a tempting thought. I wondered what fresh punishment JJ had in store for me for embarrassing them last night. “You are going to school,” Cate said as she pointed from me to Vivi. “One day of cutting class with your miscreant sister is tolerable, but no more.” “I think you meant to say ‘genius rock-goddess sister,’ but okay,” Vivi said. “I would like a doctor in the family,” Cate said, her fingers crossed on both hands. “Or at least one daughter to finish high school. So go and get ready.” “What if we don’t hear from her?” I asked. I looked to Vivi, who shrugged. I was immediately frustrated by the sense that if Grey were here and Vivi were missing, Grey would know exactly what to do. There would be forward motion. There would be a plan. Grey was like that: There was no problem so large that it couldn’t be solved. The universe seemed to bend to her will. Vivi and I, in comparison, were too used to being foot soldiers under our eldest sister’s rule. Without our unifying central command unit, we were lost. “I was supposed to fly back to Budapest this afternoon, but I guess I can push my flight until tomorrow,” Vivi said. “I’ll call her agent and manager after nine. I’m sure they’ll know where she is.” 7 I CALLED GREY on my walk to school and again between each of my classes, already knowing it would go to voicemail. I checked Find Friends—Vivi and Cate were both at home—but Grey’s location came back as unavailable. I was distracted in class, refreshing Instagram and Facebook to see if she’d posted anything new. By lunchtime, I wondered if JJ might just let me get away with the sin of having Vivi for a sister. Justine had ignored me in English, and I hadn’t yet seen Jennifer—and then, when I sat down to eat, I found the picture. A piece of printer paper had been folded twice and slipped into my backpack. On it was a medieval image of three women burning at stakes, their hands clasped behind them in irons as flames licked at their toes. Their faces had been digitally altered to look like my sisters and me. There was no accompanying note, though the message was loud and clear. You will burn. I sighed. My first instinct was to throw it away or take it to a teacher. Instead, I folded it up and put it back in my bag. Grey would like it, would probably find it funny, would appreciate the artistry that had gone into making the burning women look like us. It was the kind of thing she would have framed and hung on her bedroom wall when she was my age. I picked up my phone to call her, forgetting, for a moment, that she was unlikely to answer. Instead, I called Vivi for an update, but her phone rang and rang and rang. When her avatar disappeared from Find Friends a few minutes later, I was left with a panicky feeling in my stomach that whatever had happened to Grey had happened to Vivi too. I cut class for the second day in a row and jogged home through the spitting rain. When I got there, Cate’s car was gone and the house was shut up, dark. “Vivi?” I called when I unlocked the front door. No answer. “Vivi?!” “Up here!” she answered. “In Grey’s room!” I ran up the stairs, my heart thrashing. Vivi was in Grey’s old empty bedroom, sitting on the floor with Sasha in her lap and the Vogue magazine open in front of her. “How did you get in here?” I asked, breathless. “The door has been locked for years.” “Grey’s gone, Iris,” she said without looking up at me. Lightning flashed outside. Thunder followed a moment later, stuttering through the house and making the window glass jitter. My hair was wet and my teeth were chattering from the cold. Cate told me that the three of us were all born in the middle of storms. Grey was lightning, Vivi was thunder, and I was the sea in a tempest. Grey had always hated storms, but Vivi loved them. When a second curl of thunder crawled in through the open window, I wondered if she’d somehow summoned it. “What do you mean, Grey’s gone?” I asked. “I talked to her agent, her manager, her publicist, the photographer she was supposed to shoot with yesterday. I talked to her friends in Paris and London. I talked to her doorman. No one has seen or heard from her in days.” Vivi held up the latest Vogue, the one I’d hidden under my pillow to save it from my mother. “Have you read this?” “A couple of paragraphs, but—” “Read some more.” “There are more important—” “Seriously, read it.” “What am I looking for?” “Oh, you’ll know it when you see it.” I opened the magazine and picked up where I left off. New Year’s Day marked the ten-year anniversary of one of the world’s most enduring modern mysteries: the disappearance of the Hollow sisters. On a quiet street in Edinburgh, three little girls vanished right out from under their parents’ watchful gaze. Then, exactly one month later, they came back, to the very same street they were taken from. They were naked and carried nothing with them but an antique folding hunting knife. They had no serious injuries nor signs of sexual assault. They weren’t dehydrated or malnourished. All three of them bore a fine half-moon incision at the base of their throats, nestled in the crook of their collarbones, that had been stitched closed with silk thread. The wounds were healing nicely. No one has been able to say where they went or what happened to them—not even Grey Hollow, the eldest of the three. She was eleven at the time, certainly old enough to remember snippets of her experience, though she refused to give a statement to Scottish police and has never spoken publicly about her suspected kidnapping. Conspiracy theories abound, the most popular of which are alien abduction, parental hoax, and (perhaps because of the Celtic setting) fairy changelings. There were several large out-of-court settlements from news organizations that had falsely accused the girls’ parents of being involved in their disappearance. The funds went toward enrolling the three sisters in Highgate School for Girls, a lavishly expensive day school that counts famous actors, poets, and journalists among its alumni. One of the Old Girls recently married into an extended branch of the royal family. The grounds are green and expansive, the main building a timber-framed Tudor mansion with wisteria growing thick on the facade. Grey Hollow struggled to thrive there. A series of family tragedies followed in the ensuing years, the most devastating of which was a Capgras delusion—Hollow’s father, Gabe, reportedly believed his children had all been replaced by identical impostors. After two years in and out of psychiatric institutions, he killed himself when Grey was thirteen. Little more is known about her teenage years, but at seventeen, she had a falling-out with her mother and found herself homeless. She dropped out of high school, moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Hackney with three other girls, and tried her hand at modeling. Within six months of leaving home, she’d walked for Elie Saab, Balmain, Rodarte, and Valentino. Within two years, she was the highest-earning supermodel in the world. Now, at the age of twenty-one, Hollow is the owner of and head designer at House of Hollow, whose creations have become some of the most sought-after in the industry after the label’s launch at Paris Fashion Week just under eighteen months ago. One of the first things I tell her is that stitching bits of paper into her creations reminds me of another infamous unsolved crime: the mystery of the Somerton man. In 1948, an unidentified man was found dead on a beach in Australia. All the labels had been cut from his clothing, and police later found a tiny scroll of rolled-up paper sewn into his pants pocket. It read “Tam?m Shud,” which means “finished” in Persian. The words had been torn from the final page of the Rub?iy?t of Omar Khayy?m. “That’s where I got the initial inspiration from,” Hollow says eagerly as she wraps her long fingers—preternaturally dexterous, like she’s a seamstress who’s been working for a hundred years—around a cup of unsweetened Ceylon tea. Her voice is surprisingly deep, and she rarely blinks. With white-blond hair, black eyes, and a smattering of freckles across her nose year-round, she is the definition of ethereal. I have interviewed many beautiful women, but none so truly otherworldly. “As a child I was obsessed with mysteries—probably because I was one.” I’m under strict instructions from her publicist not to ask her about the missing month, but since she was the one who brought it up, I press my luck. Does she really not remember anything? “Of course I remember,” she says, her ink-drop gaze holding mine. Her smile is slight, sly; the same mischievous pixie grin that has made her famous. “I remember everything. You just wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” The article continued, but I came to a snap stop at that line, the line that Vivi had no doubt been talking аbout: Of course I remember. I remember everything. You just wouldn’t believe me if I told you. The words sank into me like acid, dissolving my flesh. I snapped the Vogue shut and sat on Grey’s bare bed, my hand pressed over my mouth. “Yeah,” Vivi said heavily. “That cannot be true.” When I was seven years old, I vanished without a trace for a whole month. On the very rare occasion she drank enough wine to talk about it, my mother emphasized the impossibility of it. How we were walking through the warren of lanes of Edinburgh’s Old Town, back to our father’s parents’ house. How we were there one moment, then gone the next. How she took her eyes off us for a second or two, long enough to peck our father on the cheek when the New Year’s fireworks began. How she heard nothing, saw no one—simply looked up to find the street before her empty. A lace-fine snow was falling through the air, the kind that melts when it hits the sidewalk. The alleyway was lit by oily slicks of light and pops of effervescence from the overhead starbursts. Where there should have been three children, there were none. Cate smiled at first; she thought we were playing with her. “Iris, Vivi, Grey, come out, come out, wherever you are,” she sang. We were bad at hide-and-seek, but she always pretended to take forever to find us. No giggles answered her this time. No whispers. Immediately, she knew something was wrong. In her first statement to the police, Cate would say that the air tasted burnt and smelled of wild, wet animal. That the only thing out of place on the street was a handful of fall leaves and white flowers on the stoop of a house that had burned down the month before. That was the first place she looked for us. All that had survived the flames of the fire was a freestanding doorframe, held up by nothing. My mother stepped through it and called our names and wandered from room to room in the shell of burnt-out bricks and rubble, her panic rising. We weren’t there. We weren’t anywhere. It was like the cobblestones had opened up and swallowed us. My father, Gabe, when he was alive, filled in the rest of the story. How he called the police less than five minutes after we disappeared. How he banged on the doors of every house on the street, but no one had seen us. How you could hear people calling our names—Iris! Vivi! Grey!—from one end of Old Town to the other, until the sun rose and the searchers went home to rest their throats and hug their sleeping children. I remembered none of this. Like a language I’d once been fluent in but had long stopped speaking, the memories of what truly happened had faded to threadbare fragments over time and then to nothing at all. I was grateful for this. I knew what usually happened to kidnapped children. It was better not to know what had been done to us. My memories began a month later, when a woman found us huddled together at midnight, shivering on the sidewalk of the same street we had disappeared from. Our coats were gone and we were naked in the cold, but apart from that, we were unharmed. Our skin was clean. There were leaves and white flowers in our hair. We smelled of mildew and woodsmoke and milk and death. The police came and took the knife from Grey’s shaking hand and wrapped us in foil blankets and offered us hot chocolate and cake made from dark treacle and spices. I was starving. We all were. We gorged ourselves. After our medical examinations, we were released to our parents. Cate swept me into her arms and collapsed to the hospital floor in a sobbing heap. Her face was wet with tears and her hair was a greasy nest twisted into a bun at the nape of her neck. She couldn’t speak, could only rock back and forth on the floor, keening into my ear. It is the first true memory I have of my mother. Of course I remember. I remember everything. You just wouldn’t believe me if I told you. It had to be a lie. Grey didn’t remember. None of us did. It was a central tenet of our story. We were taken. We came back. None of us knew what happened, and none of us ever would. We were the miracle that parents of all missing children dreamed of. Spat back from the abyss, unharmed and whole. “I can’t feel her, Iris,” Vivi said. “I can’t feel her.” “What does that mean?” “Last night, you talked about the strange things we can do. That’s one of them. I’d forgotten—I haven’t tried to do it for years—but when I woke up this morning and you weren’t there . . . I could still feel you. I followed your footsteps down the stairs to the front door. We’re . . . tethered, or something. We’ve always been able to find each other. In the dark, across town, even over oceans. My feet bring me to you if I want them to.” I knew what she was talking about. I always knew if Grey or Vivi was calling me without looking at the caller ID. I always knew where I’d find my sisters if I went looking for them—but I assumed the memories of being able to feel them, to find them if I needed to, were things I’d half dreamed as a kid, like breathing underwater or being able to fly. “But I can’t feel her,” Vivi continued. “Grey is gone—what if whatever happened to us before is happening again? We might be the only ones who can help her.” “Don’t say that. Don’t even think that, okay? Nothing has happened to her.” I could hear in the pitch of my voice how desperately I wanted that to be true. “We’re not kids anymore. Besides, you heard Tyler last night. She disappears all the time.” “We have to look for her, Iris.” “No, I have to go back to school. I have classes, I have tutoring. There’s a titration competition coming up in a month that I haven’t practiced for even once and my Python skills need some—” “Tell me you think she’s okay, and I’ll drop you at school myself.” “Vivi . . . this is crazy.” “Say she’s okay, then. Listen to your gut and tell me you think Grey is okay. Do the thing we can do. Find her.” “I haven’t tried that for a long time.” “Do it.” I let out a long breath and did what Vivi asked me to do. I reached out and tried to find Grey, to feel her, the way I’d been able to as a child, but all that came back was an empty sense of nothingness. I bit my lip. Was that proof of anything? “That’s what I thought,” Vivi said. She tapped the Vogue cover. “Grey’s always kept secrets. When we were kids, she used to hide stuff from us. Her diary, money, booze. She’d squirrel everything away under loose floorboards or behind bookshelves. So where would she keep her secrets now?” I looked around the room. “How did you get in here? Did you pick the lock?” Vivi shrugged. “The door was open.” “The only person who has a key to this room is Grey.” I knew that because I’d tried to get in many times since she left, without success. I thought of the open front door yesterday, of the wet footprints that tracked inside, of Sasha outside on the mat. “What if . . . ,” I started. It was a crazy theory, but we were already talking about crazy things. “What if Grey unlocked the door? What if she was here yesterday? What if she left something for us, something only we would know how to find?” Vivi snapped her fingers at me. “Now you’re thinking like a Hollow.” We spent the afternoon combing Grey’s bedroom, excavating for signs of our sister. Vivi found the first: a collection of runes hand-embroidered in emerald thread on the underside of her mattress. I found the second—an annotated page torn from a book of Emily Dickinson poetry rolled up tight inside a curtain rod—and the third. I was on my hands and knees under Grey’s bed, trailing my fingertips over the baseboard, when my skin caught on a splinter in the wood. A prick of blood welled on my fingertip. I wiped it away on my uniform skirt, then crouched to inspect the offending panel. “There’s something here,” I told Vivi. A crack in the skirting board. I slipped my fingernails under the wood and lifted. It gave, but not enough. “Get me a knife from the kitchen.” Vivi was standing over me now. “Why don’t you get it yourself?” she said. I sighed and turned to give her a seriously? look. “Sorry. Old sibling habits die hard.” When Vivi returned with a butter knife, I slipped it into the crack, eased it open. “You’re going to break it,” Vivi said as she tried to shoulder me out of the way. “Let me do it.” I stopped and glared at her. “Would you quit it?” “Fine. Whatever. Just be more gentle.” “I am being gentle.” Finally, the wood came away from the wall with a bright pop and clattered to the floorboards. Behind it was a hole in the plasterboard, its edges raw. The exact kind of place Grey liked to keep secrets. “Give me your phone,” I said to Vivi, and she did, the flashlight already turned on. I notched it into the darkness, eager to uncover more of Grey’s mysteries, the same way I had been as a child. My heart was clucking in my throat. The hole was laced with cobwebs. There were no diaries or cash or condoms or little bottles of elderflower gin, which is what we used to find in Grey’s hidey-holes before she left home. There was only a dried white flower, an antique hunting knife, and a brass key with a note attached. “Now, this is more like Grey,” Vivi said as I handed her the strange treasures. I could sense Grey in them, feel her energy; she had touched them, not so long ago. On the scroll attached to the key, there was an address in Shoreditch, followed by a message with yesterday’s date: Vivi, Iris, First of all, stop going through my private shit. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you. (Okay, fine, this time I was counting on you to go snooping—but still. Not cool.) I hate to say this, but if you’re reading this, I might already be dead. There is so much I wish I’d told you. Come to the address above. Bring the key. Find the door. Save me. And if he comes for you—run. I love you both more than anything. Grey P.S. Regarding the knife, as Jon and Arya said: Stick ’em with the pointy end. 8 I MIGHT ALREADY be dead. We were in an Uber on our way to the address Grey had given us. The words from her letter were stinging through my nerves, pricking tears at the corners of my eyes. Vivi was silent, her forehead pressed against the window, her jaw set so tight I worried her teeth might crack. I turned the knife over in my hands. Opened it, closed it again. The staghorn handle had a patina and the blade was pocked with age, but it looked slip-through-your-skin-like-butter sharp. It was the same knife we’d been found with as children, the one police had taken from Grey the night we came back. For a while they’d thought it was an important piece of evidence, but the only fingerprints they ever lifted off it belonged to my sister. I wondered how she’d retrieved it from evidence, considering our case was still open, then dropped back into the pool of my terrible imagination. A world without Grey was impossible. Both of my sisters were the great loves of my life. I couldn’t live without them. I didn’t want to. The Uber pulled up outside a pub in a narrow graffiti-lined street. It was late afternoon and there were a handful of Londoners huddled in the honey glow of the bar, drinking pints. The address Grey had given us was for the flat the next floor up. Vivi and I guessed the passcode to the building—162911, the same as all our phone passcodes—then walked up the winding staircase to the second floor. Grey’s door was beetle green, the handle brass to match the key. Vivi put her hand on the paint and shook her head. “She isn’t here either.” I knew it too, I realized. I knew what Grey felt like, the way her energy settled in a room. Old memories were coming back to me. How I could follow the trails of her through our house when we were children, retrace the footsteps of where she’d been five, six, seven hours before. What books she’d read, which pieces of fruit she had picked up, inspected, put back. It wasn’t like I could see threads trailing behind her, or smell the scent of her skin. It was a sense of general rightness. Yes, she had been here. Yes, she had done this. I could do it with Vivi too, though that held less fascination for me. Grey was my obsession. Grey was who I wanted to be. One long, lazy summer in France, the first one without our father, I spent two months living an hour behind Grey. She was fourteen and just coming to understand the exhilarating power of her beauty. I was ten. Too skinny, too tall, still shy and awkward. To me, back then, Grey was a goddess. She wore white flowing dresses and wreaths of wild lavender woven into her hair. I copied everything she did, living in the liminal world she left in her wake. I didn’t have to see her all day to know where she’d been, what she’d done. Sunbathing on the roof. A midday swim in the river. Nectarines and hard cheese for lunch. A kiss with a local boy in the pews of the medieval church (I improvised and used my hand—still, the priest was not pleased when he found me). Wait. A strange memory tugged at the side of my thoughts. Something lost and then found. Another church, this one ruined and half-devoured by the woods. We came across it on our first day there, down by the river. Cate warned us not to go near it. It was derelict. But . . . Grey went. Yes. Went somewhere I couldn’t follow. Not because I was afraid, but because her trail just . . . stopped. Because she stepped through a door and wasn’t there on the other side. I’d wandered around the old church for hours, trying to figure out where she went. Eventually, Grey was there again, whole and solid. She smelled of burning and had flowers caught in the tangles of her hair. Find the door, Grey’s note had said. Vivi put the key in the lock and turned. We stepped inside. The smell hit us first. The wet, heavy stench of fermented shit undercut with a cloying sweetness. We both gagged at the same time and scrambled back into the hall, dry heaving. Vivi looked at me, wide-eyed and knowing. We had smelled a dead body once before. A few years ago, in the week after Grey left but before Vivi packed her own bags, the man in the house next to ours had slipped in his bathtub. It had been eight days before anyone found him. By then, his body had begun to liquefy, and the smell of it had seeped through walls and ceilings and floors. When the paramedics came for him and opened the front door, the stench exploded out onto the street, soaking the air. It hung from the branches of trees like necklaces and took weeks to fade. The words from Grey’s note nipped at my lungs. If you’re reading this, I might already be dead. “A dead animal,” Vivi said, determined. “Not Grey.” Then she pressed inside, breathing through her mouth. I did the same, though I could still taste the dead thing on my tongue, fat and lingering. We moved through Grey’s clandestine apartment together, half looking for the source of the stench, half consumed by the magnificent size of this treasure trove. All our young lives, we had subsisted on morsels of Grey Hollow’s secrets. Diary pages read by flashlight after she had snuck out, thimblefuls of sweet wine stolen from the bottle she kept hidden under her bed. And now here was her soul laid bare for the taking. A feast for the starving. All the curtains were drawn, and the space felt woody and cool. The darkness was tight, damp, the undergrowth of a forest. Vivi turned on a lamp. It was nothing like the first apartment. Here, the walls were painted dark canker green. The floors were bleached herringbone parquet. There were terrariums filled with carnivorous plants and trays full of assorted crystals and delicate animal bones. Vases of feathers and jars of little creatures suspended in formaldehyde. Stacked boxes of balsam fir and red cedar incense. Bottles of gin and absinthe. Books on botany and taxidermy and how to commune with the dead. Pencil sketches were pinned to almost every available surface; Grey’s couture creations, but other images too, of strange creatures and ruined houses. Dried bouquets of flowers and fall leaves hung from the ceiling. And perhaps strangest of all was the taxidermy: a snake bursting from the mouth of a rat, a fox emerging from the skin of a rabbit. The space was thick with Grey’s energy, trails of her crisscrossing the hall and rooms in tight webs. She’d been here more recently than she’d been to her other apartment. The first room off the hall was the kitchen. I paused when I saw it, something hard settling into my stomach. The floor was black and white marble squares, and the opposite wall was entirely covered in shelves bursting with books. My chessboard floor. Vivi’s library. The exact details we’d wanted when we’d dreamed of running away together. Why hadn’t Grey shared it with us already? “Come on,” Vivi said. “Keep moving. Let’s find what she wants us to find and get the hell out of here.” There were two more doors at the end of the hall. We took one each. I opened the handle and peered into Grey’s bedroom. The smell was strongest here, so acrid it stung my eyes and almost physically pushed me back. Some ancient part of my brain begged me not to get any closer, the part that knew the smell of death was a warning. Stay away. “Vivi,” I said quietly. “There’s blood in here.” I felt my older sister at my shoulder. We surveyed the damage together from the doorway, unwilling to take a step into the room. It was trashed. It was the nightmare scene I’d been afraid of finding at Grey’s first flat: Hitchcockian blood splatter on the walls, furniture knocked over, a lamp in shards, a gruesome patchwork of dried brown pools on the rumpled bedsheets. There were boot prints on the wall and holes kicked into the plasterboard and slippery bare footprints in the blood on the floor. Someone had been attacked in this room. Someone had fought back in this room. Judging by the amount of blood that had been spilled, someone had died in this room. I might already be dead. I was crying as Vivi pushed past me into the stinking mess and found Grey’s iPhone, the screen shattered, on her bedside table, along with her passport. They were both sitting atop a copy of A Practical Guide to the Runes: Their Uses in Divination and Magick by Lisa Peschel. I couldn’t see Vivi’s face, but I could see her chest heaving. “I will kill anyone who’s touched her,” she said, her voice harsh and low. I believed her. I would join her. “What’s that sound?” There was a low background hum. An angry buzzing, coming from the closet. I went into the room, careful to avoid stepping in any blood. Vivi opened the closet door and switched on the light. There was a ceiling access panel in the walk-in closet. A dozen flies whirred beneath it. Black liquid dripped from one corner. It pooled on the parquet floor, where it had turned the wood into a soft fen of decay. Vivi grabbed the pull cord. “Don’t,” I said. “I don’t want to see this. I can’t see this.” Not if it was Grey. Seeing her rotting corpse would destroy me. Vivi ignored me. “It’s not her,” she said—a wish, more than anything. “It won’t be her.” Then she pulled the cord. The hatch gagged open and heaved out a body. We both screamed and clutched at each other as it tumbled to the floor and landed with a wet squelch at our feet. It was definitely a human, not an animal. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” Vivi yelped. And then: “It’s not her.” Not a wish this time: a statement of fact. I had somehow scrambled from the closet to the other side of the room and was now crouched next to the bloody bed, though I couldn’t recall how I’d gotten there so quickly. “Um . . . Iris, you should see this,” Vivi said as she squatted to inspect the body. I couldn’t look. I didn’t want to look. I didn’t think my stomach could handle it. I opened a window and took a breath of winter air before I went over to where the body had fallen. It was bruised and bloated but clearly not Grey. It belonged to a man. Young, muscular, naked save for three runes written down his chest in dried blood. The cause of his death was clear: His throat had been slashed. Yet the fact that he was dead and covered in runes and hidden in our sister’s ceiling was not the strangest thing about him. “What is happening to him?” Vivi said. There were waxy white flowers sprouting from his mouth, his nose, the softening remains of his eyeballs. Flowers growing rabid from the gash in his skin, their roots red-black with dead blood. Something moved at the back of his throat, behind his broken teeth. Something alive in the greenery. “Do we call the cops now?” I asked. “As soon as we call the police, this will be a crime scene, and we won’t be able to find what Grey wants us to find. Look around. Look through everything. There’s something here that only we would be able to find.” It was a breeze that saved us. It trilled through the bedroom window and down the hall, where it slammed the front door closed. The door that I’d shut behind me only minutes before. A fresh sprig of fear twisted up my spine. Not for Grey this time, but for Vivi and myself. Whoever Grey was afraid of, they knew where she lived. They had been here. Maybe they had killed someone. Maybe they were back. There were heavy footsteps. In the hall, just outside Grey’s bedroom. Hide, Vivi mouthed to me, already taking off her backpack and crouching to slip under Grey’s bed. Then there was a hand on the bedroom door, pushing it open. I had no choice but to back into the closet, over the body of the dead man. Years of following my sister like a spy had given me sure, quiet feet. I sidestepped the pool of decay and pushed myself deep into Grey’s clothing, hoping it would be enough to hide me. A man came to stand in front of the closet door. A bare-chested man who was wearing a bull’s skull stripped of flesh to hide his face. The man who’d been following me. He stank of rot and earth, powerful enough to momentarily mask the scent of the body. The smell of the darkest part of the forest. The smell of Grey’s perfume. The smell of the missing month. A memory hummed through me, sharp as a plucked string. A house in the woods. Grey taking me by the hand and leading me through the trees. A strip of tartan fabric tied to a low branch. Grey saying, “It’s not far now.” Where were we? I backed farther into the closet, unbreathing, unblinking, as the man discovered the corpse—and was entirely unsurprised by it. The man—in the half-light, his skin looked sallow and seeded with lichen—nudged the body with his bare foot. I thought of the hostess last night, how she’d said a frightening man had been asking after Grey. The man grunted, hot breath coming from the nostrils of the skull. Wordlessly, he knelt to scoop the dead guy up and hoisted him over his shoulder. A runnel of black liquid slipped down his back from the dead man’s open throat. I covered my mouth to stop myself from gagging. He dumped the body onto Grey’s bed, then worked quickly, moving from room to room, bringing back armfuls of Grey’s possessions to stack on top of the corpse. Sprigs of dried flowers, leather-bound notebooks, animal bones. Tapestries, sketches of dress designs, jewelry. Photographs. Many, many photographs, of Grey and Vivi and me, of the three of us together. He piled it into a pyre over the dead man and kindled the flames with scrunched paper, then stood and watched it as it burned. From where I was hidden, I could make eye contact with Vivi. She had a hand pressed to her nose and mouth to stop herself from coughing in the smoke. Her eyes were wide with panic. If the man stayed much longer, she’d have to scramble out from underneath the bed before the flames ate too far through the mattress or the smoke became suffocating. Slowly, I moved to cup my hands over my mouth and nose. The man turned to stare into the shadow of the closet, directly at me. I stopped breathing, didn’t blink. The firelight danced in his eyes, his irises black inside the skull he wore to hide his face. There were bloody runes written down his torso as well, the same markings as the dead man’s. Had this creature snatched me from the street when I was seven? Had he kept me and my sisters locked away for a month? I waited for a gruesome memory to climb forward, but none came. The man turned and left. The smoke was black and choking when the front door finally closed and I burst out of the closet, the air thick with the stink of singed hair and burning fat. Vivi was fighting for breath as I dragged her out from underneath the bed. “Save it,” she gasped through her coughs. “Save it.” Grey’s things. I yanked a quilt off an overturned armchair and cast it over the pyre like a fishing net, hoping it would work like a fire blanket. Vivi and I both paused at the sight of it. On the quilt was the hand-stitched image of a ruined stone doorway teeming with white flowers. An odd look crossed Vivi’s face, a brief moment of recognition and understanding that gave way to confusion. “I don’t . . . ,” she said through a coughing fit. “What the hell is going on?” “What is it?” “A memory.” Vivi traced her fingers over the map’s stitching. “Or maybe d?j? vu.” I felt it too, a word on the tip of my tongue that I couldn’t quite call up. Vivi smiled. “The Halfway. Grey’s made-up place. Oh my God, she used to tell us stories about it when we were little.” I shook my head. “I don’t remember.” “It was this weird place somewhere between life and death. Somewhere people ended up if they couldn’t let go of something—or if someone couldn’t let go of them. Some people get stuck there after they die. The ones who can’t move on.” “Like . . . limbo?” “I don’t know. Grey never made it sound religious. It was more like a version of the afterlife that you’d find in a dark fairy tale: Everything was kind of stuck halfway. Like, it was always dusk and always dawn at the same time. All the trees were rotting but they never died. Food only ever left you half-full.” Vivi laughed. “I haven’t thought about this in years.” “What does the door have to do with it?” “That’s how you get there, I think. You fall through a broken door.” Bring the key. Find the door. Vivi and I waited to see if the flames would prick through the fabric, but the fire had been starved. I peeled the quilt back slowly, like removing dressing from a wound, and let it fall, still smoldering, in a heap. Smoke curled across the bed but the flames didn’t reignite. “The body burned so quickly,” I said as I picked through the journals and drawings and jewelry that had survived. It took hours for muscle and teeth and bone to burn, but more of Grey’s possessions had survived than the dead man. “What answers does she want us to find?” Vivi said as she continued to comb through the charred debris, more frantic by the second. “What door are we looking for?” My gaze drifted back to the decay the man’s body had left. Who was he? Had he attacked her? Had she killed him trying to defend herself, then gone into hiding? Who was the man who came back for his corpse? Where did she want us to follow her to? “I need water,” I said. The air was still stained with the smell of death, and the smoke from the fire hung over us, snaring in our throats. “Want some?” Vivi nodded absentmindedly. I wandered out into the hall, rubbing my eyes, and took two or three steps before I looked up and stopped. “Oh,” I said. “Shit.” 9 THE MAN IN the skull was standing at the end of the hall, staring at me. He’d come back for something—maybe to make sure the fire had taken, or to retrieve something he’d forgotten. He hadn’t been expecting to see me, and I hadn’t been expecting to see him, so both of us stood in shock, unmoving. For a sharp, strange second, it appeared that the creature was afraid of me. Then he was fumbling with something at the back of his waistband. I caught a glint of metal. “Shit, he’s got a gun,” I said, diving into the room as the first shot rang out. The bullet shattered the mirror behind me and sent a shower of glass into my hair. Vivi slammed the door closed behind me and locked it, but that only bought us a second or two. Bullets ripped through the wood, splintering it into toothpicks. Vivi yelped and doubled over. My world contracted to the size of a pinhead. No. No. Not Vivi too. I couldn’t lose both of them. But she sat up when the shots stopped, her right hand pressed to her left arm. A red stain was spreading beneath her fingers. “Jesus, he shot me. You shot me, you psycho!” she screamed at the door. There was silence for a moment, then the door began to groan as the man leaned his weight against it. The wood swelled inward, fabric stretched across a fat gut. “Get it, get it,” I said as I collected a handful of singed treasures from Grey’s bed and threw them out the window onto the wet street one floor below. Vivi followed suit, using her free hand to pick up a journal, some photographs, her backpack. We both scrabbled out of the window backward as the doorframe popped with a relieved sigh and the man tumbled toward us. I lowered myself down until I was hanging. Vivi, unable to grip with an injured arm and a hand wet with blood, fell and landed in a sprawl below me. Grey’s flat was only on the second floor, but the ground still felt far away. I let go and landed hard on my feet, an impact wave rolling up my spine, forcing the air from my lungs and making all my bones feel crumpled. We gathered up what we could of Grey’s things and ran. The man in the skull watched us from the window, our arms full of a few of the sodden, bloody trophies he’d tried to burn. We ran for half a mile, leaflets of paper and drops of blood trailing behind us as we weaved through the backstreets of Shoreditch, past murals and trendy restaurants, sure he was right behind us. Two fire engines screamed past us in the direction we’d come from. We slowed to watch them. A thin column of smoke was rising in the distance now. We stood, breathing hard, and found each other’s free hand, knowing that the man had set our sister’s life on fire and all that was left of it now was what we held in our arms. Wherever Grey was, whatever had happened to her . . . we’d have to figure it out using only what we’d managed to salvage. “Are you okay?” I asked Vivi breathlessly. My fingers were tacky with her drying blood. The left sleeve of her jacket was soaked through. She eased out of it, using the other sleeve to wipe away the slop of red. The bullet had only grazed her arm. There was a lot of blood, and it would leave a scar through her wisteria tattoo as wide and long as a finger, but it wasn’t deep. Vivi dug in her backpack for a scarf and started tying it over the wound to stymie the bleeding. A passerby, an older woman in fur coat, slowed and stared at us. “My cat is vicious,” Vivi said with a shrug, totally deadpan. The woman hurried away. “I got shot,” Vivi said to me. “Can you believe that? Shot. With a bullet!” “I know,” I said as I helped her tie the makeshift bandage. “What the fuck?” said Vivi. “I know.” “I mean, what the fuck?” “I know.” “Iris, you’re not listening to me. What the fuck?” “We need to get off the street,” I said as another woman did a double take at the sight of us. Someone might call the police, and I wasn’t sure how we’d explain our story. The missing sister, the dead body, the burned apartment, the gunshot wound, the armful of stolen artifacts. Even harder: the man in the skull, the flowers growing rampant in all the soft parts of a corpse. “Follow me.” I doubled back the way we’d come, partly to throw our pursuer off our track if he followed Vivi’s bloody trail, partly because I’d seen a caf? a hundred yards back that we could hide in. It was small and dim inside, the floral wallpaper lit by apricot light bulbs that hung in jars from the ceiling. We slid into a booth at the back. My adrenaline was waning and my body had begun to ache all over. I’d landed badly on one ankle and a bright twist of pain bit at me whenever I put weight on it. The thatch of cuts I’d collected on my palms felt gritty and stung in the warmth of the caf?. There was glass in my hair, and blood on my hands, and the smell of death still pasted thick inside my nose. Vivi and I put our salvaged items on the table between us. A leather-bound journal, the edges of its pages wet and flecked with blood. Scrunched, loose-leaf pages that had been torn from a notebook. A handful of drawings, each mostly destroyed now from blood and wet sidewalk and being clutched so tightly during our escape. We laid the drawings out first. The first four were sketches for House of Hollow designs: Distorted, faceless figures sheathed in layers of dark fabric and feathers, the pencil strokes that made them frenzied. The last was something totally different: A depiction of a tumbledown house with broken windows and withered stone walls and a strip of tattered tartan fluttering from the front gate. “I feel like I’ve seen this place before,” I said as I leaned over the table to study the picture more closely. The memory was grainy and coated in dust. Had I been there or had I seen it in a movie when I was little? “The fabric looks like it’s from the coat I was wearing the day we disappeared.” “It is vaguely familiar,” Vivi agreed. “I guess.” “Hang on,” I said as I snagged the notebook pages off the table. “This is Gabe’s handwriting.” I knew the tight coils of his writing instantly because I kept the card he’d made me for my fifth birthday in my bedside table. On the front was a hand-drawn iris flower, purple petals mid-bloom, and inside a short message about why I’d been called Iris: They had been his mother’s favorite flower. “What does it say?” Vivi asked. I scanned through the pages. They seemed like undated journal entries. My children are home. One week ago, this felt like an impossible fantasy. Now here we are. “Oh my God,” I said. “It’s about us.” I kept reading. They don’t speak, except to whisper to each other. When we got back to London, they wandered around our house for an hour, as though they’d forgotten it. They won’t sleep in their rooms alone. They burrow under Grey’s bed and sleep together in a pile. I still have so many questions. What happened to them? Where were they? Did someone hurt them? For now, I am just happy they’re home. I handed the first page to Vivi, then eagerly began reading the next, and the next, and the next. My daughters have been home for three weeks. I should be happy. I am happy . . . but I still can’t shake the feeling that something is wrong with them. Cate thinks I’m being paranoid. She’s probably right. What other explanation could there be? — Six weeks home today. They eat everything in sight. They’re like locusts. Last night, we ran out of food. We found them in the kitchen around 2:00 a.m., naked and shoveling handfuls of cat food into their mouths. They wailed and clawed at us when we tried to take it away from them. Cate cried and left them to it. I couldn’t handle it. I couldn’t be in the house anymore. I walked around Hampstead Heath until sunrise. — When they were gone, all I wanted was for them to be home. For them to be safe. Now they’re here, and all I have is bad thoughts. What’s wrong with me? — It has been three months. When they came back, they looked almost like my daughters, except for the teeth and the eyes. Now their hair is turning white. Why can’t Cate see what I see? — We used to be happy. Life wasn’t perfect or even easy. We weren’t rich and we had to work hard every day to support our children, but we were happy. I loved my wife. Cate was . . . effervescent. She had this high laugh like a tropical bird. We went to the movies on our first date and she laughed so hard and so loud that the rest of the theater laughed at her, and then with her. It was magical. I haven’t heard her laugh in months. She is so thin. She gives all her food to the children and barely eats anything herself. They are draining us of life. — Maybe I am going crazy. I feel like it. Cate thinks I am. My therapist thinks I am. He keeps telling me my theory is wrong and impossible, that it’s a manifestation of my PTSD. That my children are acting strangely because they also have PTSD. — There is something wrong with all of them, but especially with the one that looks like Grey. I am afraid of them. I am afraid of her. Where are my children? If these things are not my children, then what happened to my girls? — I have come to a terrible conclusion: My daughters are dead. “Jesus,” Vivi said. “Talk about a descent into insanity.” It happened quickly, the unraveling of Gabe Hollow. When we first returned after our kidnapping, he’d been exuberant. He’d swept us into his arms, a grown man turned to wet pulp by the miraculous return of his three daughters. He was the one who noticed something wrong with my teeth and eyes, before we even left Scotland. He took me back to the police station without telling my mother and explained the strange problem to the detectives who handled our case: “One month ago, on the night before she disappeared, Iris lost her two front wiggly baby teeth on a hard candy cane. She had been so excited,” he told them. Seven was old to lose your first tooth and I had been enthusiastic to finally meet the tooth fairy. “So what’s the problem, then?” the detectives asked. “Look at her teeth now,” my father said, pulling my top lip up as he pushed me in front of them. “Look at them.” My mouth was full. I had no gaps. The teeth I had lost had grown back, but they’d grown back as baby teeth, teeth I would lose again only a few months later. “Look at her eyes, too,” Gabe insisted. “My daughters all have blue eyes; this child’s eyes are black.” I blinked a few times at the detective, who smiled at me sadly. “You have your daughters back, Gabe,” she said as she closed the file in front of her. “You got the one-in-a-million, impossible happy ending. Go home.” And so we did go home, and for a little while, everything was fine. Gabe was a tall man and his skin was always warm, and in the weeks that followed our return, I grew extra attached to him, grew fond of curling up on his lap and falling asleep in his arms. I liked to push his hair back off his forehead and study the soft features of his face, and when he got up to go anywhere, I liked to go with him, my arms wrapped tight around his neck. For a time, Gabe liked the attention. “My little leech,” he called me. I can’t say for sure when exactly his mind began to slip, though I suspect it was our hair changing color that first triggered him. All three of us had dark hair as children, like our parents, but in the weeks after we came back, it lightened to white-blond. It wasn’t unheard-of for those who’d suffered a severe trauma to spontaneously develop white hair over a short period of time. It even had a name: Marie Antoinette syndrome, named for the queen whose hair supposedly turned stark white the night before her appointment with the guillotine. It was unusual and extremely rare, doctors said, but nothing to be concerned about. Life continued on. We went back to school. Gabe seemed wary around us. He didn’t like to have me on his lap anymore, didn’t like my little arms clasped around his throat. Something sour and treacherous began to sink into him. I don’t know how he came to the idea that we were impostors, whether it was a fairy tale from his childhood that made sudden sense or he read it on a conspiracy-theory forum, but it settled into his head and collected there like dust, until it coated everything. Even when doctors told him our change in eye color had a name too—aniridia, the absence of an iris, a disorder caused by blunt trauma—Gabe had already made up his mind. “What if Papa was right?” I said. “Right about what?” Vivi picked up the sheets of paper and shook them in my face. “These are the deranged ramblings of a madman.” “Well, what happened to us, then, Vivi? What happened to us? Yes, okay, maybe Gabe went crazy, but something triggered that. Who took us? Where did we go?” “I don’t know!” Vivi snapped. She threw the papers on the table. “I need a drink.” “Maybe if you dealt with what happened to you as a kid,” I said, unable to look at her, “you wouldn’t need to numb yourself with drugs and booze.” We all had different ways of coping, but Vivi’s were the most destructive, filled with powders and poisons designed to lessen the pain of a tragedy we didn’t understand. My sister was silent. I chanced a glance at her. Vivi stared at me with cool slate eyes, her bottom jaw set forward so her lips gathered into a scowl. “Maybe if you dealt with what happened to you as a kid,” she said, “your mother wouldn’t be your only friend.” I let out a long breath, all the fight suddenly gone from me. “Let’s not do this.” “Well, don’t come in with a big swinging dick accusing me of being an alcoholic.” “You are an alcoholic.” “Oh, screw you, Miss Perfect.” “Please, Vivi. Christ. Let’s not fight about this right now.” “Whatever. Fine. You started it.” We flicked through the journal together. It was filled with newspaper clippings and printouts of news stories. At the beginning, they were all about us, all written during our disappearance. I’d avoided reading much about our case. I thought we all had. Apparently, I was wrong. “Wow, she was obsessed,” Vivi said as she turned the pages. “She never talked about it. She never wanted us to talk about it either. And the whole time she was scrapbooking like a bored housewife?” The rest of the articles and Wikipedia printouts were about other missing people, all of whom, like us, had disappeared under strange circumstances. Grey had highlighted and underlined and made notes in the margins. Things like: Same? Unlikely. Probably murdered. Just one door, or many? Hard to replicate. Fluke? Maybe my memories aren’t real? I want to go back! Nothing in common. How many come home? V. few. Maybe none? Night? Three sisters? Scotland? Liminality! NYE. Dusk, dawn, etc. Time when veil is thin. If my memories are true-what does that make me? Broken doors! Go back to Scotland? (What if I can’t get back?) WHAT DID I DO? The writing was bubbly and cute, the i’s dotted with pink hearts. Grey had written this when she was a kid, maybe only twelve or thirteen, before she’d switched to the acid-green pens and thin script she’d favored in high school. WHAT DID I DO? was the last annotation. It was in the margin of a Wiki printout about the disappearance of Mary Byrne, a British teenager who’d gone missing from Bromley-by-Bow on New Year’s Eve in 1955. Folded into the pages were a handful of Polaroid pictures Grey had taken when we went to Bromley-by-Bow to stay with my mother’s cousin the week after our father died. We’d stayed near the station, across the river from where Mary Byrne had last been seen decades ago. What I remembered from that week: The four of us slept on an air mattress, our bodies stuck together in the heat, a fen of salt and sweat and grief; I fell over in the long summer grass of Mile End Park and skinned my knees on hidden rocks; I wore pink shorts and applied chocolate-flavored lip gloss at an alarming rate; my mother cried every night; I stroked her hair until she fell asleep; Grey slept rigid against the wall, her back to the rest of us; I missed my father. Grey had been obsessed with Mary Byrne, another inexplicableNew Year’s Eve disappearance, and had spent much of her time in Bromley-by-Bow wandering the streets from dawn to dusk. Vivi and I had been too young to go with her, and Cate and the other adults were too distracted with funeral planning to notice or care much what Grey did. It was a rare opportunity, this relaxing of Cate’s constant surveillance, and thirteen-year-old Grey took full advantage of this taste of freedom, slipping into the streets of East London by herself every day and returning every night, frustrated. Then, on our last night there, the night before our father’s funeral, Grey had come back giddy with excitement and grinning from ear to ear. It was the happiest I’d seen her in a long time. She smelled of something wild and green. The photos in the journal were all dated from that day, the day before we buried our father. The first four were of areas around Bromley-by-Bow: the Greenway, a footpath and bike freeway that stretched for miles through London, bordered in Grey’s picture by tall white apartment blocks set against a darkening sky; the boxed-in metal footbridge that stretched over West Ham Station, the last place Mary Byrne had been seen; an exterior and interior shot of the House Mill, a huge old tidal mill on Three Mills Island that had burned down and been rebuilt in the nineteenth century. The final picture showed a ruined doorway: a freestanding stone wall with an archway at its center. It was inside, perhaps in the basement of the mill, persevered by the new buildings that had been constructed above it. White flowers grew rabid across its surface. It looked much the same as the doorway that had been embroidered on Grey’s quilt. A chill settled across my skin. “Did she think she’d figured out the Mary Byrne mystery or something?” I said. The rest of the journal was filled with nothing but sketches of ruined doors, their location and a date recorded beneath them. Doors in Paris, doors in Berlin, doors in Krakow. Doors in Anuradhapura, doors in Angkor Wat, doors in Israel. Had Grey been to all of these places? The barista leaned over the counter then. “You guys . . . uh . . . you guys okay?” she asked. “We’re fine, thank you,” I said. “Sorry, we’ll order something in a second.” “No, I meant . . . um . . . you’re bleeding on the floor just a tad.” “Oh. Yeah. We, uh . . . fell off our bikes. Do you have a first aid kit?” The barista brought us the supplies and a free cappuccino each to boot. Vivi and I sat together at the back of the now-empty caf?, drinking coffee, the green-and-white box splayed open on the table between us. Vivi sat with her hands resting on her knees, palms up, as I swabbed her cuts with iodine. “Grey’s dead, isn’t she?” she said flatly. Her eyes were deep wells. She didn’t even wince at what must have been stinging pain. “There’s a crucial time frame of forty-eight hours, and after that, they’re dead.” “Don’t say that,” I warned. “That isn’t what happened to us.” “What do you remember about being gone?” Vivi asked. “I don’t remember anything.” “I know that’s what we tell each other. I know that’s what we tell the world. But I remember white petals drifting through the air like autumn leaves. And smoke. And dusk. And . . .” A fireplace. A girl with a knife in her hand. “Don’t,” I said. “You were nine. I was seven. We can’t trust those memories. Let me see your arm.” “There was a girl.” “Stop it.” “I think she did something to us. I think she hurt us.” “Vivi.” “You asked, ‘Who cuts little girls’ throats?’ Don’t you want to know what happened to you?” “No.” “Why not?” “Because . . . I’m afraid.” “You shouldn’t be afraid of the truth. It’ll set you free, right?” “Unless it’s so terrible it screws you up entirely. No, thank you. Maybe I’m totally fine with my repressed memories. Now show me your arm.” Vivi shrugged out of her jacket and rolled up her bloody sweater, her skin prickled with goose bumps. I unwrapped the scarf we’d used to stanch the bleeding. The fabric was sodden with gelatinous blood and smelled heady and wrong. I faltered when I saw the wound. “Hold still,” I ordered as I swabbed it with an alcohol wipe to get a better look. “There’s something here.” Vivi wasn’t paying attention. “We are going to get her back, Iris,” she said as she stared at the ceiling, still unconcerned by the pain. “I will not live in a world without her.” “I agree,” I said, but it was my turn to be absentminded. There was something translucent curled up inside her flesh. I used the fine point of Grey’s knife to lift it out. It wasn’t hard to dislodge: a single, anemic flower. I gave it a gentle tug and plucked it from her wound, tiny root system and all. The same kind of flower that had taken over the dead man’s body. The same kind of flower that had been growing from Grey’s eyes in the photograph. It had been budding inside Vivi, feeding off her blood, blooming in her scored-open flesh. What the hell was going on? I twirled the bloody flower in my fingers and felt suddenly, desperately sick. My throat swelled. I swallowed a sob. Grey was gone, and the weirdness I’d been trying so desperately to escape had found me again. “At least I’ll have a gnarly scar. Chicks dig scars, right? Does it look infected?” Vivi asked. I crushed the bloom between my fingers before she could see it. Acknowledging it made it real—and I was not ready for whatever was happening to be real. “It’s fine,” I said as I dressed her arm with more iodine and wrapped it in gauze, hoping that would be enough to prevent any more gardens from sprouting out of her. “I think it’s time to call the police.” 10 TWO DAYS LATER ANOTHER FLASH WENT off, leaving a new cluster of sticky white spots in my vision. I looked down at my dress and tried to blink them away. A thread was coming loose at the hem. I picked at it, watching the stitching come undone as I pulled. It was a House of Hollow piece taken from Grey’s closet. We’d all dressed in House of Hollow clothing to show solidarity. A blazer for Vivi. An emerald-green velvet dress for me. A brooch for our mother, despite her protests. A dash of Grey’s gag-worthy perfume at our wrists and throats, so we all stank of smoke and the dangerous part of the woods. The dress was high-necked and rubbed against the scar at my throat, making it raw and itchy. I pulled the seam away from the scar, but it still felt like sandpaper working away at my skin. The lead detective was standing, giving his opening remarks. “Miss Hollow does not have her cell phone with her,” he said. “We have not been able to track her through any social media. We are concerned for her safety. We are asking the public to be on the lookout for her, and for anyone who has any information regarding her whereabouts to come forward.” The journalists were immediately feverish. “Do you think this disappearance is in any way linked to her disappearance as a child?” one of them asked. “We don’t know,” the detective said. “We’re liaising with Scottish authorities to determine if there are similarities, though at this stage there doesn’t appear to be any correlation.” “Where was her last confirmed location? Who was the last person she spoke to?” “We can’t release that information yet. I’ll answer more questions in a moment. At this time, Miss Hollow’s family would like to make a brief statement.” In another universe, I was in my Friday English class discussing Frankenstein with Mrs. Thistle. Instead, Vivi, Cate, and I were together at the front of an event room inside the Lanesborough. A crystal chandelier glinted overhead. The walls were richly paneled and gilt frame portraits lined the space; only the leopard print carpets felt modern. My mother sat to one side of me, woody and brittle. Vivi sat to the other, slouched back with her arms folded. She stank, the oily smell of stale booze and sweat and cigarette smoke. Cate hadn’t been able to force her into a shower, so she’d sprayed her with extra perfume to mask two days of hard drinking. It didn’t help. It was Grey’s agent who’d made the call to the police two days ago. We’d waited for them in her office, a chic, modern space adorned with framed pictures of our sister. They’d taken hours to arrive. There was no emergency, after all. No crime scene anymore, no body. Just a burned-down apartment and a missing girl—and girls went missing every day. The police had arrived around sunset to take our statement. We had left out the details we couldn’t explain—the flowers growing on the dead man, the bull skull the man wore over his face—and told them only the bare-bones facts. Grey had left a note saying she was in danger. There had been a corpse in her apartment. A man had broken in and set the place on fire. He had shot Vivi. The cops had been thorough yet workaday in their questioning. They had exchanged disbelieving, exasperated glances approximately every thirty seconds. I got it. Even with the craziest bits left out, it was a wild, implausible story from a wild, implausible family. When the police left, Vivi called our mother, and the agent called Grey’s publicist. An hour later, the world knew that Grey Hollow—beautiful, strange Grey Hollow—was missing. Again. If Grey had been a famous supermodel a week ago, she was now something ten times more intoxicating: an unsolved mystery. It was official. It had begun. Which brought us to the press conference. The event had been planned for the dingy conference room of a local police station, but Grey’s publicist changed it to the Lanesborough. We’d been instructed to look sad, demure, and helpless, which wasn’t hard. We were helpless. Grey had counted on us coming to look for her, and we had. Grey had squirreled away secrets that only we would find, and we had. Grey had left bread crumbs and bet on us saving her—and we had failed. We’d missed something, some vital clue, and now Grey was really gone, and the only two people who might have a hope of finding her had screwed it up completely. Something twisted in my heart at the thought of Grey alone somewhere, afraid, waiting for Vivi and me to rescue her. Waiting, and hoping, certain that we’d come—and eventually realizing that we wouldn’t. I love you, I thought, gulping back a sob. Please know I love you. Please know I tried. The journalists drank my moment of grief in hungrily. The flash of photographers left me headachy, disoriented. Cate stood and muttered her way through a plea for Grey to come home, her words never quite sounding convincing. Lips pursed, affect flat. I’d seen the footage of the press conference our parents gave the first time we went missing, in which our mother had verged on mania. Then her cheeks had been slick with tears, her eyes wide and red and wild, a wet tissue dabbed to her nose every ten seconds as she begged, begged, begged for us to be returned. This was nothing like that. It had been the hardest month of my parents’ lives. It had twisted and cracked them, both individually and as a couple. They blamed each other. They blamed themselves. It had been Gabe who’d pushed to go to Scotland to visit his parents over Christmas and New Year’s. It had been Cate who’d wanted to take us walking through the streets of Old Town at midnight so we could see the fireworks and the revelry. It had been Gabe who’d decided the route. It had been both of them who’d taken their eyes off us to share a midnight kiss. His fault. Her fault. Their fault. Our fault. Hadn’t they taught us not to speak to strangers? Hadn’t they taught us not to wander off? Hadn’t they been hard enough? Soft enough? Enough, enough, enough? In the days that followed, our grandparents’ home was searched for blood, signs of a struggle. Cadaver dogs slunk through the halls and bedrooms, hunting for death. The gardens in the backyard were dug up, destroyed. Their car was seized as possible evidence. Dozens of witnesses were interviewed to try and piece together a picture of what had happened earlier in the day. Nearby lochs were dredged for our bodies. My parents took lie-detector tests. They were fingerprinted. They were photographed. They were followed, by police and journalists alike. The press took pictures of them at their worst moments. If they cried too hard, people accused them of faking it. If they tried to keep it together, people accused them of being cold. God help them if they smiled. No one believed their story—and why would they? It was impossible. Who could snatch three children without being seen, being heard? Who could do that in a matter of seconds? They couldn’t leave Edinburgh without an answer either way. They couldn’t work. They couldn’t stay at my grandparents’ house now that it was the scene of a suspected crime. They spent all their savings on hotels and rental cars and billboards with our faces on them. They barely ate. They barely slept. They knocked on every door in the Old Town. They drifted through the streets desiccated by despair, oily and fetid and thin. They oscillated between comforting each other and hating each other for what had happened. Their souls—and their marriage—came apart at the seams. They were perhaps only a couple of days away from being arrested for our murders when they made their pact. “If they’re dead,” Cate said to my father, “do we kill ourselves?” “Yes,” Gabe replied. “If they’re dead, we do.” A woman found us on the street that night, naked and shaken but unharmed. The papers that had hounded my parents apologized for libeling them and paid big out-of-court settlements for damages—enough to enroll us all in a fancy private school. Gabe and Cate had never recovered. They had been wounded too deeply, and wounded each other too deeply in turn. The worse in for better or for worse had been so much heavier than either of them could have imagined. Now my mother was reliving that same tragedy. I squeezed her hand; she squeezed mine back. Then our part in the press conference was over. It had been decided that Vivi and I wouldn’t speak, that we would take the focus off Grey, so as we all got up to leave the room, the whole press galley was shouting, asking the questions they’d been dying to ask from the moment they saw us. “Iris, Vivi, is there anything you want to say about what happened to you as children?” “Will you be assisting in the investigation?” “What really happened to you in Scotland?” “Do you think Grey has been taken by the same people who took you the first time?” “Cate! Cate! What do you say to the people who still think you’re guilty of kidnapping your own children ten years ago?” I kept my head down, eyes on the floor, my gut filled with oil. Police waved us into the next room, a quiet haven away from the vultures. After the doors had closed behind us, my family broke apart without another word. Vivi made a beeline for the hotel bar. I went home with Cate, back to our big, empty house. My mother shut herself up in her dark room, and I was left alone, still wearing my missing sister’s clothes. My phone pinged in my pocket. It had been going off pretty much nonstop since the first press release, with messages from teachers and the parents of girls I tutored and fellow students who’d never actually spoken to me face-to-face but who’d gotten my number off a friend of a friend so they could pass along their thoughts and prayers. This new message was from an unknown number: OMG babe, so horrible about Grey! Hope they find her soon! P.S. Did you manage to pass my modeling portfolio to her agent? I linked it to you on Instagram, remember? I haven’t heard anything back yet. They’re probably busy with all this missing-persons stuff, but just thought I’d check! I couldn’t stand to have the velvet itching against my skin anymore, cutting a hot path against my scar. I slipped out of it in the hall, then balled it up in my shaking hands and screamed into the fabric. I wanted to destroy something beautiful, so I took the dress and ripped. As I did, a curl of paper, delicate as filament, fluttered from some hidden place inside a seam. I sank to the floor, my back against the wall, and unfurled it. The note was handwritten in Grey’s signature green ink. I’m a girl made of bread crumbs, lost alone in the woods. —GH Yeah, Grey, I thought to myself. No shit. What do you do when someone you love is missing? When all the looking you can do is done, what do you do in the long hours that linger ahead of you, heavy with absence and worry? Vivi’s answer was to get as drunk as possible for as long as possible, to disappear inside herself. My answer was to wander the floors of our house, dusting off memories of Grey in each room, Sasha trailing at my heels as though she could sense my grief and anxiety. Here, in the cupboard under the stairs, was where Grey had layered the space with blankets and cushions and fairy lights, and read the Chronicles of Narnia to us every night for a year. Where I had pressed the pads of my fingertips into the plasticky bulbs of the lights as she read, and marveled at how the brightness shone through me, made fluorescent red by my blood, revealing capillaries and veins and all sorts of secrets beneath my skin. Here, in the kitchen, was where she had cooked breakfast every Sunday morning, dancing around to the Smiths or the Pixies as she slammed through cupboards and left chalky storms of flour on the floor. Here, in my bedroom, was where she had curled up next to me when I was sick and told me fairy stories about three brave sisters and the monsters they met in the dark. Here, in her now-empty room, was where she had tacked the “Telltale Hand” palmistry guide poster above her bed and laden her shelves with salves and smudge sticks. I sat on her bed for a long time, trying to remember what the room had looked like before she left. There had always been clothes scattered on the floor, and the bed was forever unmade. Tendrils of a wisteria vine had crept through her window and always seemed busy overtaking one corner of the room. A pink Himalayan salt lamp had sweated moisture onto her bedside table, curling the pages of her copy of A Practical Guide to the Runes, Grey’s favorite bedtime read. The dresser had been scattered with pouches of herbs, strings of crystals, and highlighted books on ancient Roman curse tablets. All of it was gone now, and the girl was gone with them. My mother was crying. It was not a new sound. It had been the backing track for much of my life. The house moaning in the wind and beneath it, my mother crying. I padded barefoot down the hall to her room, careful to avoid the creaky floorboard that would betray my presence. The door was open a crack; a slice of light jutted out. It was a tableau I recognized: Cate kneeling by her bed, the photograph of me and my sisters and my father in her hand. Her face was buried in her pillow as she sobbed, sobbed so hard I worried she would inhale fabric and feathers and choke. In the afternoon, I sagged into my bed with my laptop and cycled between Twitter and Reddit and every news story I could find about Grey’s disappearance. It had exploded on social media. I followed hashtags and read deep into threads until my head ached with fullness, until my anxiety was a physical weight resting heavy inside my skull, until my body felt gouged out and desiccated. I picked my fingernails until they bled. I couldn’t breathe properly but I couldn’t stop reading and watching people’s reactions. Was it a publicity stunt or a hoax or a cry for attention or a misunderstanding or a murder or a suicide or a government conspiracy or aliens or a pact with the devil? I scrolled and clicked and consumed and filled myself and drained myself until I saw my mother pass my bedroom door around sunset, her scrubs on, her dark hair pulled back in her usual work bun. I went to the hall and caught her at the bottom of the stairs. “You’re kidding me.” “The world has to keep turning,” she said as she grabbed her car keys and made for the front door. The skin beneath her eyes was distended, her lips bee-stung. “Why don’t you love her anymore?” I demanded, following her. “I mean, what could a seventeen-year-old girl have said to you that was so cruel it made you hate her?” My mother stopped halfway out the door. I expected her to protest. I expected her to say I don’t hate Grey. I could never hate my own child. Instead, she said, “It would break my heart to tell you.” I took a few deep breaths and tried to unravel what that meant. “Would you even care if she was dead?” My mother swallowed. “No.” I shook my head, horrified. Cate came back to me then, pulled me into a hug, even as I feigned pushing her away. She was shaking, a frenetic energy humming though her. “I’m sorry,” she said to me. “I’m sorry. I know she’s your sister. I shouldn’t have said that.” I never felt more alien to Cate than when we were standing right next to each other, the height difference between us extreme. My small, sweet, blue-eyed mother, and then me, towering and angular. We were different species. “Don’t go anywhere tonight, okay? Please. Stay here. Stay inside. You know I can’t bear to lose you. I’m sorry . . . but I still have to go to work.” And so she did. She left. I sunk onto the stairs, staring after her, a great twist of acid turning inside me. My scar was still itching from the velvet dress, so I dug my fingernails into it. There was a little hard nodule of scar tissue on one end now, inflamed by the rubbing fabric. I scratched it until it bled. The house felt too quiet, too filled with shadow and too many places for an intruder to hide. What if the masked man was already inside? What if he came during the night, while I was here on my own? I checked Vivi’s location on my phone—she was still at the Lanesborough, still probably drinking at the bar. I hadn’t spoken to her all day. Vivi was volatile like that. She could be your best friend one moment, your coconspirator in all manner of mischief, then completely withdraw the next. Another grim thought: Grey was the grounding force in our sisterhood, the sun we both orbited around. What would Vivi and I be without her? Would we drift apart in the cavernous space Grey left behind, rogue planets spun out into the abyss? Would I lose both of my sisters at once? When the doorbell rang, I thought it was Cate again, back to explain herself. I took my time getting to the door, opened it slowly. “I need a drink,” Tyler Yang said as he pushed inside, walking straight past me without an invitation. “Sure, come in, strange man I’ve only met once before,” I said after him, but Tyler had already found his way up the hall and into the kitchen. I heard cupboards banging, pots crashing. I closed the door and followed him inside. “It’s above the fridge,” I said, my arms crossed as I watched him. He was more disheveled today, his black hair falling over his forehead, his skinny jeans ripped at the knees, but it worked. Even against the bland background of a suburban London kitchen, there was a swaggering, pirate-like energy to Tyler Yang, intensified by his smudged eyeliner, billowy floral shirt and leopard print House of Hollow trench coat that covered his tattooed arms. He was tall, lean. Inconveniently handsome. He found the booze stash, picked the gin, and then took a long swig right from the bottle. “Charming,” I said. “Your sister is Gone Girl–ing me, I bloody know it,” Tyler said as he paced the kitchen, gin bottle still in hand. “What are you talking about?” “She’s faking it! I’m gonna go down for this and that’s exactly what she wants.” He took another long swig, then stopped, eyes darting from side to side in mad thought. “Does England have the death penalty?” “Wait, you think Grey is faking her disappearance to . . . punish you?” “Would you put it past her?” I thought of how Justine Khan had shaved her head in front of the whole school. I thought of the male teacher Grey didn’t like, the one who kissed her in front of her class and got fired for it. I thought of how he’d insisted that he hadn’t wanted to do it, that she had whispered in his ear and made him. Grey Hollow did have a slightly warped sense of crime and punishment, and a way of making bad things happen to people who crossed her. Tyler was pacing again. “A lot of strange shit happens around that woman. An unnatural amount of strange shit!” I sighed. I knew. “The police went to my flat while I was out, you know,” he continued. “Apparently, they have an arrest warrant.” He sniveled. “It’s trending on Twitter.” I checked; it was. “They’ve got something on you?” I asked. Another muffled sob. Another swig of gin. “Hell if I know.” “So you came . . . here? When the police are about to charge you with . . . what, my sister’s murder?” Tyler pointed the gin bottle at me, his fingers dripping with thin silver rings. “You know I didn’t have anything to do with her disappearance. I can see it in your eyes. You know something, Little Hollow. Tell me.” I shook my head. “We thought we knew something. We thought it might somehow be linked to what happened to us as kids, but . . . we’ve got nothing.” “Fuck!” Tyler ran his hand through his hair, sweeping it back out of his face, then sank onto the kitchen floor, his head bobbed forward onto his chest and both arms limp at his sides. I went and crouched in front of him. Up close, I caught the stink of gin and weed and vomit, and wondered how drunk and high he already was when he got here. “You knew her, Tyler,” I said. He shook his droopy head. “I don’t know if anyone ever really knew her,” he said, his words slurred. “Think. Think hard. Is there anything you can tell me, anything at all, that might be a good place to start? A name, a location, a story she told you?” I waited for a full minute, then shook his shoulder, but he flopped a hand in my direction with a whimper and then slumped back against the cupboard, unconscious. “Oh, for God’s sake,” I said as I stood up. Tyler was too heavy for me to move, so I found a spare blanket and pillow in the linen closet and left him there, sprawled out on my kitchen floor. I woke on Saturday morning to the taste of blood and the smell of sweat and alcohol. There was a deep, jagged hunger inside me; I’d been chewing on my cheeks and tongue in my sleep. The blood was my own. It had dried on my lips, dripped onto the pillowcase. The smell of sweat and alcohol came from Vivi, still dressed in what she wore to the press conference yesterday, her makeup a cracking fresco on her skin. Her warm body was curled around me, one of her legs draped over my hip bones. It had been a strange, sleepless night. The hours had clumped together and then fallen away in great chunks. I had only managed to close my eyes as sunrise blanched the winter sky. In the end, I had been grateful for Tyler Yang’s uninvited presence. Checking on him throughout the night to make sure he hadn’t choked on his own vomit gave me something to do that wasn’t worrying about Grey. The news of Tyler’s arrest warrant had spread fast and far on the internet, and I fell from one rabbit hole to the next reading about him, about his relationship with my sister and his career and his past. Which inevitably brought me to the tragic story of Rosie Yang. I had been sitting on the kitchen floor next to Tyler when I came across the headline. DROWNING HORROR: WITNESSES TELL OF HAUNTING SCENES AS GIRL, 7, DIES ON FAMILY TRIP TO BEACH I picked my fingernails while I read. It had happened years ago, when Tyler was five, at a busy seaside town in midsummer. There had been a heat wave. The beach had been packed with thousands of people escaping the sticky heat. Tyler and his older sister had wandered off from their parents and been found floating facedown in the surf not long after. Tyler was revived on the scene. Rosie could not be resuscitated and was pronounced dead at the hospital. The article included a picture of her from her birthday party the week before. A little girl in a yellow sundress with the same black hair as Tyler’s, the same impish grin, the same dimples. I had put my palm against Tyler’s chest as he slept and felt the steady rise and fall of his rib cage, the strong beat of his heart, and imagined the scene on the beach that day. The hands of a lifesaver against his chest, the compressions so deep they splintered his thin ribs. The bare, wet skin of his back pushed into the hot sand as onlookers crowded around, pressing their fingers to their mouths and holding their own children back so they couldn’t see. His parents hovering over him, hovering over his sister, barely able to breathe through the pain and the hope and the wanting. One child sputtering water from his lungs, a sudden intake of breath. The other limp, blue, cold. Tyler Yang was confident and cocky and cavalier. Tyler Yang did not seem like a man with a tragic past. Yet the worst thing that I could imagine happening, the thing that was maybe happening to me right now—losing a sister—had happened to him already. He was a grim testament to a truth I knew but refused to acknowledge: that it was possible to suffer devastating, incomprehensible loss and continue to live, to breathe, to pump blood around your body and supply oxygen to your brain. I sat in the kitchen for most of the night after that, checking Tyler’s breathing, Grey’s knife in my hand in case the horned man came back, until finally, at dawn, I crawled into my bed and collapsed. I rested my cheek on Vivi’s tattooed chest and listened to the beat of her heart, one arm across her stomach. My heart beat in time with hers. The three of us, with the exact same rhythm in our chests. When one was scared, the hearts of the others knocked. If you cut us open and peeled back the skin, I was sure you’d find something strange: one organ shared, somehow, between three girls. We were puzzle pieces, the three of us. I’d forgotten how good it felt to wake up next to her, curled into her, a whole with three parts. Grey’s absence felt raw and aching this morning. I wanted her more desperately than I ever had before. I wanted to find her and collapse into her and let her stroke my hair the way she had when I was little, until I fell asleep cocooned in her arms. My sister. My refuge. A tear slipped from the corner of my eye and hit Vivi’s warm skin. She stirred when I started to sob. “Hey,” she said groggily, releasing a plume of sour breath. “What’s wrong?” I nuzzled further into her. “I thought I’d lost you too. I thought you might not come home.” “I’m not going anywhere.” Vivi shook her head against me. “I . . . I shouldn’t have left you here, Iris. After Grey ran away. I should have stayed here and watched out for you, helped you carry the load. I’m not leaving you again.” Tyler burst into the room then, floral shirt crumpled, eyes wide, hair wild atop his head. “YULIA VASYLYK!” he said, pointing at me. “YES!” Then, as quickly as he’d appeared, he was gone again. Vivi sat up and stared at the empty doorway, as if trying to make sense of what she’d seen. “Am I still wasted or did I actually just see Tyler Yang in your bedroom?” “I think he’s hiding from the police,” I said. “That’s . . . kind of genius. It’s the last place they’d look.” Tyler appeared again and clapped for us to get up. “Little Hollows. That was a eureka moment. You must come.” “I am way too hungover to deal with this,” Vivi said as we disentangled ourselves and went downstairs. We found Tyler in the kitchen, his bedding from the night before neatly folded on the bench. He was pacing again. I saw him differently now, this man who carried such tragedy in his heart. Sasha watched him from atop the refrigerator, her tail flicking furiously to show her distaste for this intrusion into her space. “Yulia Vasylyk,” he said. “That’s where we start.” “Are you speaking English?” Vivi asked as she sat at the breakfast bar and put her cheek on the kitchen counter, eyes closed. “It’s a name,” Tyler said. “A woman. Someone Grey has mentioned before.” I was so hungry, my stomach felt like a black hole expanding up into my rib cage. I pulled out my phone, typed Yulia Vasylyk into Google, and hit return. The disappearance of Yulia Vasylyk three and a half years ago had not been big news. There were only a handful of short articles, and two of them had referred to her as Julia. “I don’t get the link,” I said. “Another missing woman?” “Type Yulia Vasylyk Grey Hollow,” Tyler said. I was skeptical but did what he said. Google returned only one exact match. I read it out loud. UKRAINIAN WOMAN FOUND A WEEK AFTER BEING REPORTED MISSING Nineteen-year-old Yulia Vasylyk, an aspiring fashion model from Ukraine, has been located one week after her boyfriend reported her missing. Vasylyk was found wandering near her Hackney apartment late Monday night, barefoot and confused. Police took her to a nearby hospital for evaluation. No further details were released. In a strange twist of fate, Vasylyk shares h?er small, one-bedroom Hackney apartment with three other girls, among them . . . I stopped reading and looked up at Tyler. “Keep going,” he urged. I took a breath and continued. . . . among them another famous missing-then-returned person: Grey Hollow. Hollow, now eighteen, was abducted from a street in Scotland when she was a child, but found safe one month later. Neither Vasylyk nor Hollow could be reached for comment. “Holy shit,” Vivi said, lifting her head from the kitchen bench. “It happened again.” Tyler was grinning. “Bingo, baby,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Someone else came back.” 11 YULIA VASYLYK WAS easy to track down online. With a hundred thousand Instagram followers, the once aspiring catwalk model had become a makeup artist and hairstylist of some renown. Tyler had even worked with her several times before he started dating Grey. When Yulia found out they were together, she refused to style him anymore, which is when Grey had told Tyler their odd backstory. Tyler spent the morning calling contacts in the industry to find out where Yulia might be, without much luck: News of his impending arrest had spread quickly, and people were wary of handing over the whereabouts of another young woman, lest he was a budding serial killer hell-bent on murdering her too. Cate messaged me around the time her shift usually ended to say she was staying late to cover for a sick colleague and did I maybe want to start thinking about going back to school after the weekend? Routine helps, she wrote. Normalcy helps. I know you think I’m cold, but I’ve done this before, remember? I didn’t message back. Eventually, after Vivi and I had showered and changed and fed Sasha and eaten three breakfasts apiece, Tyler started pumping his fist in the air while he was on the phone. “Yulia’s on a shoot at a warehouse in Spitalfields,” he said when he hung up. “Am I good or am I good?” “Gee, Sherlock, it only took you two hours,” Vivi said, her voice still gravelly with hangover. Tyler borrowed a big pair of sunglasses for the Uber ride to Spitalfields, though his “disguise” was so clearly an attempt to not look conspicuous that the driver spent most of the journey glancing at him in the rearview mirror. I held Vivi’s hand. My right leg jiggled up and down, animated by a new sense of hope. It wasn’t much, but it was something. A lead. It wasn’t over yet. We found the shoot in a warehouse, right where Tyler’s contact had said it would be. It was an haute couture photo shoot with models wandering around in transparent raincoat ball gowns and jumpsuits made from netted rope, their faces glazed with bloodred eye shadow and neon-pink freckles. The three of us wandered in, our presence unquestioned because we looked like we belonged there. “Why aren’t you in hair and makeup yet?” a woman with a clipboard snapped before looking at us closer and realizing, suddenly, who we looked like, who we were. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.” Then she hurried away into the next room and left us be. We found Yulia at the back of the warehouse, painting the face of a man with blue permed hair. Yulia wore no makeup herself. Her dark hair was in a braid, and the clothes she wore beneath her tool belt were functional, sensible: She looked almost out of place in such extravagant surrounds. “I don’t know where she is,” Yulia said when she looked up and saw us. “I haven’t talked to her since before I met you,” she said to Tyler. Then she turned and went back to her work. “We’re not looking for Grey,” I said. “We’re looking for you,” Tyler said. “We know you lived with her,” Vivi said. Yulia looked up at us again. “My parents owned the apartment. They let me live there when I was going to castings, but I needed roommates to help cover the rent. Hence, your sister. I’m not interested in answering any more questions.” “Please,” Vivi said as she stepped forward and reached seductively for Yulia’s face. “Don’t,” Yulia said, smacking Vivi’s hand away with a makeup brush. “Don’t you dare do that vile thing to me.” “Ow, ow,” Vivi said, her hands up in surrender. “All right. Sorry.” “You’re just like your sister,” Yulia snapped, stabbing the brush at us. “Manipulative. Now get out of my workplace before I call the cops.” Her gaze slid again to Tyler. “I’m sure they’d be very interested to know that you were here.” “Hag,” I heard Tyler say under his breath. “Please,” I said, trying to calm the situation. “Please. We promise we won’t come near you. We won’t touch you, we won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. We just want to find our sister.” Yulia exhaled, then nodded and bent to whisper in the ear of the model. When he left, she picked up a pair of scissors and held them at her side. “Don’t come any closer,” she said. “I will defend myself.” “Is that really necessary?” Vivi asked, nodding to the scissors. “I know your sister. If you’re anything like her, then yes,” Yulia said. “Ask your questions.” “You have absolutely no idea where she might be?” Tyler asked. “Last I heard, you killed her. Next question.” We needed a different angle. “What was she like when you knew her?” I asked. That caught her off guard. Yulia paused before answering. “Beautiful,” she said finally. “That’s the first thing anyone notices about her, obviously. Also secretive. Quiet. Weird.” “Weird how?” I asked. “Most girls, when they get into modeling—they’re swept up in the scene. It’s the first time they’ve lived away from their parents. They drink, they party.” “You’re telling me Grey Hollow didn’t party?” Tyler said. “Unlikely.” “Not with us,” Yulia said. “We would go to clubs and she would stay behind. When we came home, she’d be gone, sometimes for days at a time.” “Gone?” I asked. “Yes,” Yulia replied. “Gone, as in conspicuously absent.” “Where do you think she went?” “Probably having sordid affairs, as is her custom,” Tyler said. Vivi glared at him. “At first I thought a lover,” Yulia said. Tyler threw his hands up. “Then maybe a drug problem.” Vivi scoffed. “Grey dabbled, but she would never have developed a habit.” “What would you know?” Yulia snapped. She grasped the scissors harder. Her knuckles blanched white. There was an animal flash in her eyes, the look of something ready to fight for its life. What had Grey done to this woman? “Grey kept all sorts of secrets. No doubt she kept many from you. I didn’t even know she had sisters until she was famous. She never talked about either of you. She was a nightmare to live with. She had a lot of weird hobbies, but the taxidermy was the weirdest. How many teenage girls do you know who like to skin mice and birds and snakes and make them into weird Frankenstein monsters? That was how she paid her rent, in the first few months, before the modeling money started rolling in. Apparently, her taxidermy was so good that weirdos off the internet would reach out to her for freelance work. Great for her, really shitty for my kitchen table. I never got the stains out.” “And then there was the week you took a little tumble off the face of the earth,” Tyler said. “What happened, peach? Where did you go?” Yulia took a breath. “I was like most people. As soon as I saw Grey, I . . . I loved her. I was obsessed with her. Like a pet following a master. I can’t explain why, only that she was beautiful. I followed her around like a shadow. Then it happened. One day when Grey left to go wherever it was she went, I went after her. Trailed her. I wanted to know where she kept disappearing to. Grey came back. I didn’t.” She licked her lips. “My boyfriend at the time went to the police. Reported me missing and told them he thought Grey had done something to me, but they said girls like me went missing all the time. Nobody cared. Nobody even looked for me.” “So . . . where did you go?” I asked. “That’s the thing. I don’t remember,” Yulia said. “Oh, Christ!” Tyler said. “You’re all bleeding useless!” “You were nineteen,” Vivi said. “You must remember something.” “I know what happened to me. I followed your sister somewhere I wasn’t supposed to go, and I paid the price. When I came back, I wasn’t . . . right. It ruined me. Now all I dream about is dead people. When I wake up, I can still hear them whispering to me.” Yulia glanced at her shaking hands, then looked past us, over our shoulders. The male model with the blue hair had gone to fetch the woman with the clipboard. They were both staring at us. The woman held a phone to her ear and was having a low, urgent conversation. “I have worked very hard to recover from meeting your sister. Now, you should probably go if you want to get out of here before the police arrive.” I looked at Vivi. I could tell she wanted to keep pushing, to shove her fingers into Yulia Vasylyk’s mouth and get her drunk enough on the taste of her skin that she’d answer any question we asked. I put my hand on her arm and shook my head once. “One last question,” I said before we left. “Where was the apartment you lived in together?” Grey had been practically MIA those first few months after she’d moved out. We’d never even been to that place, though we knew it was somewhere in Hackney. “Near London Fields,” Yulia said. “Grey won’t be there, though, if that’s what you’re thinking. My parents own the place. No one lives there anymore.” “It’s vacant?” “No one will rent it, and my parents haven’t been able to sell it ever since Grey moved out. Whenever prospective buyers or tenants walk through, they say they feel sick. There’s something wrong with it. My parents checked for carbon monoxide leaks and black mold, but I think . . .” “You think what?” Vivi asked. “I think your sister cursed it somehow.” “Thank you,” I said, and I meant it. “Thank you for helping us.” “Hey,” Yulia called as we turned to go. “Yeah?” “They left something out of the news reports,” she said. “When they found me in the street, I was naked except for the bloody runes written on my body. The blood was Grey’s.” Vivi, Tyler, and I caught an Uber and had it drop us close to the south end of London Fields, then walked through Broadway Market toward the park. It was packed, as it was every Saturday, with people buying sourdough bread and artisanal doughnuts and bunches of flowers and vintage Barbour waxed jackets. Along the way, we bought fresh coffee and half a dozen croissants, which barely made a dent in the well of hunger still crawling inside me. “Like a pair of bears preparing for the winter,” Tyler said as he watched us eat. He stuck to unsweetened black coffee. “Why do you think we’re hungry all the time?” I asked Vivi as I licked my fingers after my third croissant. “We are blessed with fast metabolisms,” she said. “Inhumanly fast, some might say,” I said. “Bearlike, some might go so far as to suggest,” Tyler said. My stomach growled. “I need more food.” We stopped again for goat cheese and honey and two sourdough baguettes, then continued to stuff our faces until, finally, after consuming approximately ten thousand calories before lunch, I was something close to satisfied. “What do you make of what Yulia said?” I asked as we left the market and entered London Fields. It was my favorite park in the summertime, when the grass grew thick with red and yellow wildflowers and hundreds of Londoners flocked to the shade of trees to drink Aperol spritzes in the afternoon warmth. Now, in late winter, the midday sun felt diluted, far away. The trees were a scraggy mess of naked branches, and the cold was too caustic to allow anyone to linger for too long. “That this whole situation is way above our pay grade,” Vivi said between mouthfuls of bread. “The bloody runes, though. That is something else.” “Both of the men in Grey’s apartment had runes on them, written in blood,” I said. “That is not a coincidence.” “Just so we’re all on the same page here,” Tyler said, “this is definitely some Satanic cult thing, right? Like some freaky sex cult with blood and human sacrifices. That’s where we’re all landing at the moment, yeah?” As soon as we reached the north end of London Fields, we caught Grey’s trail. It came to me as a tingle in my fingertips and a taste on my tongue, an inexplicable certainty that my sister had been here. The area was thick with her energy, though her presence here felt old and faded now. We walked on in silence until we saw a squat row of houses pressed close to the train tracks. Vivi pointed to one and said, “That one.” I knew she was right. Grey’s energy had nested there, tight and twisted, and it lingered on even years after her departure. “How could you possibly know that?” Tyler asked. An ominous feeling crawled over me. “It doesn’t feel right,” I said. “Yeah, no shit, because you have no evidence this is the right place,” Tyler said. “It is the right place. Grey was unhappy here,” Vivi said. “What she left behind is . . . ugly.” “Ugh, the pair of you are as bad as your sister,” Tyler said as he strode ahead of us toward the building. “It’s always energy and demons and whatnot. Ridiculous!” The Vasylyks had struggled to sell this flat. Cate had tried and failed to sell our family home after our father had died too. I thought it was probably because of the suicide, that people either found out about it or could feel the unsettling energy it left behind. But maybe . . . not. Maybe it was because of us. Maybe our strangeness had seeped into the walls and made the space feel haunted. We buzzed the four flats in the building but all went unanswered. Eventually we slipped inside behind a man with a bag of groceries, then followed Grey’s trail to the door on the second floor. Vivi rattled the handle—locked—but the wood was old and thin, the door beginning to curl at the edges like a wet book. She only had to throw her weight against it once for it to pop open with a dry crunch. Then there we were, inside another of Grey’s apartments, with more questions than we’d ever have answers for. There were a few pieces of furniture stacked in one corner of the living room, but apart from that, the space was empty. The carpet was creamy peach, pilled with age, the walls covered with sun-faded wallpaper. The kitchen was all wood, a fashion statement left over from the seventies. Kitchen, bathroom, living room, one bedroom. It was tiny, dark, grim. Grey had lived here with three other girls, all of them packed on top of each other like rats in a nest. It didn’t feel welcoming. It felt watchful and dangerous in a way I couldn’t place. Shadows stretched long. A line of ants crawled up the wall in the bedroom, into a tiny pock hole of rot near the ceiling. I could feel why they’d had trouble selling or even renting it. It was haunted by our sister, by the sadness and worry she had left in the walls. She had not been Grey Hollow, supermodel, when she’d lived here; she had been a scared seventeen-year-old girl with no money and nowhere else to go. “Well, this is grim,” Tyler said as he opened a window that looked directly onto a neighboring brick wall. We performed what had become our usual routine. We ran our fingers over the baseboard, looking for hidden compartments. We opened all the kitchen cupboards and pulled out all the drawers. We searched under the bathroom sink, inside the cistern, in the creepy crawl space beneath the bathtub. We unscrewed the curtain rods to look for rolled-up scraps of paper and held the curtains up to the light to search for hidden embroidery. We turned over the few pieces of furniture and looked for words scratched into the wood. I caught flashes of her life here, those first few months of freedom away from the burden of high school and two younger sisters. I pictured her coming home from bars, a little tipsy, giddy and grinning because a cute boy had asked for her number. I pictured her in the kitchen in her pajamas, cooking what she cooked for us every Sunday morning: waffles, scrambled eggs, freshly squeezed orange juice. I pictured the way the bedroom had looked when it had been partly hers, her bunk bed draped with all the trinkets and treasures she’d taken with her when she left home. “There’s nothing left of her here,” Vivi said after blowing on all the windows to search for messages written in breath—and yet there was. There was the unsettling energy. Something malevolent, below the surface. I kept coming back to one wall in the bedroom, the wall Grey must have slept against, because I could feel her most strongly here. I trailed my hands over it. There was nothing outwardly strange about it. No bumps or lumps or hidden compartments. Nothing anomalous at all except the line of ants. “You feel it too,” Vivi said as she came to stand next to me. We both stared at the wall. A tangled web of wrongness hummed beneath. “The wallpaper here is slightly different,” I said. It had been bugging me since we arrived, but I’d only just put my finger on it. “Is it?” Vivi said. She looked from one wall to the next and back again several times. “You’re right.” “It’s newer.” I ran my hand over it again. Yes, it was smoother and less faded than the wallpaper in the rest of the apartment. “They papered over this wall, but only this one.” Tyler was pacing behind us. “You two are supposed to be exonerating me, not critiquing hideous decor choices.” “Well, we already busted down the front door,” Vivi said. “What’s a peeled wall after that?” Vivi brought in a chair from the pile of furniture in the living room. I climbed up on it and started in the top right-hand corner where the ants were, fiddling with the paper until an edge came loose enough for me to pull. It was cheap, hastily applied. It came away from the wall in thick sheets, leaving tacky marks on the paint beneath. “Ugh,” Tyler said, gagging as I let a sheet fall to the floor. “The wall is rotting.” “It’s not rot,” Vivi said. We both leaned in to get a closer look. “It’s something else.” Vivi placed her palm against the wall. It was spongy beneath her touch, steeped with moisture. With a little more pressure, her hand sank right through the sodden plaster. The smell exploded out of the dark, a foul, green stench. “Oh, something’s dead,” Tyler said, dry heaving. Vivi pulled away a chunk of wall, and then some more, big clops of it falling to the floor like mud. The plaster was gelatinous, barely even solid anymore. “No. Something’s alive,” she said as she held a piece of the wall up to me. It reeked—but one side of it was covered in little white flowers. The same flowers that had been growing in Vivi. The same flowers Grey stitched in lace to her gowns. “Carrion flowers,” Vivi said as she picked a bloom and twirled it in her fingertips. “The punkest thing I learned in high school science. They smell like rotting flesh to attract flies and bugs.” We pulled more of the wall down, excavating a hole big enough to look through. There was about a foot of soft marrow behind it, and every inch of it was carpeted with corpse blooms and the things that liked to live in them: ants, beetles, creepy-crawlies. “I’ve seen these flowers before,” Vivi said as she leaned her head into the wall, her phone flashlight revealing more of the wet space. “Growing on the dead dude who fell out of the ceiling.” “They’re the same flowers they found in our hair when we came back,” I said. “The police tried to identify them but they couldn’t. I saw it in a file. They’re hybrids, pyrophytes.” “Pyro-whats?” Tyler asked. “Plants that have adapted to tolerate fire. Some of them even need fire to flourish.” I thought of the charred shell of the house in Edinburgh, the blaze so hot it left only the frame of the front door standing. The gunpowder heat of the bullet that grazed Vivi’s arm. The flames that engulfed Grey’s apartment. Heat and flame. Blood and fire. Was there a link? Vivi pulled her head out of the wall and started rummaging in her backpack. “Here,” she said as she held out Grey’s journal, the one we’d found in her hidden apartment. We hadn’t handed these things over to the police. They felt too sacred, too personal. “The last photo and all of the sketches.” I flicked to the middle of the journal, to the Polaroid photograph of a doorway in a ruined stone wall. It was covered in a carpet of white flowers. Vivi pointed to the picture. “A door that used to lead somewhere,” she said as she turned the pages of the book, revealing page after page after page of sketches, each one of a different doorway, “but now leads somewhere else.” The words felt like poetry, something I’d once known by heart but had long since forgotten. “How do I know that saying?” I asked. “What’s it from?” “In Grey’s fairy tale, that was how you got to the . . . in-between place. The Halfway. Limbo. The land of the dead. Whatever. You walked through a door that used to lead somewhere else. A broken door.” My memory reached for something. Yes, a story Grey had told us when we were younger. The place she spoke of was strange, broken. Time and space got snagged there, caught in snarls. “You don’t actually think that . . . she’s, what, somewhere . . . else?” “What if the stories she told us when we were little were true?” I laughed and looked at Vivi, but she was serious. “It was a liminal world,” she said, her face close to the photograph from Bromley-by-Bow, studying the ruin. “A kind of accidental gutter. Like . . . the gap at the back of the couch that crumbs and coins fall into.” Vivi looked at me, her eyes hard as lead. “What if she’s there? What if she found a way back?” “Vivi. Come on.” “Yeah, I’m with . . .” Tyler glanced sideways at me. “The youngest Hollow . . . on this one.” “Oh my God.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “You don’t even know my name!” “We were never formally introduced!” “It’s Iris. You dick.” “Pleasure to make your acquaintance. You harpy.” Vivi was ignoring us. “Do you remember what Grey used to say about missing people?” she said. “Some people go missing because they want to; some go missing because they’re taken. And then there are the others—those who go missing because they fall through a gap somewhere and can’t claw their way back.” “The Halfway was a story,” I said. “I know. That doesn’t mean it can’t be true.” Vivi shoved the journal back into her bag, then pulled out the brass key to Grey’s burned flat. “Something happened to us when we were kids, Iris. Something no one has been able to explain. I’m starting to think we fell through.” “Fell through what?” I asked, but she was already striding away, toward the front door. “Vivi, fell through what?” My sister turned and took me by the shoulders, a half-mad smile on her face. “A crack in the world.” 12 THE SMELL OF burning still drifted in the air, clinging to the tightly huddled buildings of Shoreditch. There were two piles of blackened furniture and debris stacked high on the sidewalk, covered by blue tarps and warning signs. Only the windows on Grey’s floor were boarded up, but there was blue-and-white POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape across the front door. The whole building had been written off. That suited us just fine; it meant we had the place to ourselves. We broke in through the same window we’d jumped from days before. We propped a charred but still-intact table against the wall and scrabbled up the rest of the way using some pipes as footholds. Vivi dislodged the board covering the window with a hard push. Then the three of us slipped inside like fish, Tyler protesting about the damage to his expensive clothes the whole time. The smell was stronger than I expected, the death stench overpowered now by the reek of burning chemicals, the taste of ash and poison. It was pitch-dark with the windows boarded up. We used the flashlights on our phones to navigate what was left of the place. The bedroom, where the fire had started, was a charred shell, the skin of the room eaten away to reveal its wooden bones, now black and warped and blistered. No part of the space was recognizable. The bed frame, mattress, chair, everything had burned in the extreme heat, been reduced to shards. Much of the wall and roof plaster had been torn away by firefighters looking for any hidden snarls of flame still burning in the dark. The floor was spangled with debris. But that wasn’t what we came here to see. “Holy. Shit,” Vivi said as she swept her light across the space. Everywhere, growing on almost every surface, were the death flowers, bursting from the ashes. “What the ever-loving fuck is going on?” Tyler whispered as I plucked a bloom from where it had taken root in a withered wall beam. They clustered most thickly around the warped frame of Grey’s bedroom door, the door to the closet, the door to the en suite. “Fire destroys, but it also reveals,” I said. “They like to grow on doors.” The fire had slammed down the hall and into the kitchen, consuming the walls and everything else as it went. The white herringbone parquet was smeared with soot and ash. All of Grey’s treasures were gone. No more crystals, no more terrariums. No more feathers, no more incense. No more dried bouquets or sketches of monsters. No more journals or jewelry or taxidermied creatures. I couldn’t even feel her energy anymore. Grey had been erased from this place, scrubbed clean. The man who’d come here had not only taken her but destroyed proof of her existence as well. The kitchen was in better shape than the bedroom, though not by much. The wall closest to the bedroom was disintegrated and most of the cabinets had burned quickly, their contents spewed across the floor, but the bookshelves on the far wall were heavy oak and had survived mostly intact. The books they’d once held were scattered on the ground now with the rest of the debris, their pages curled from fire and water. We picked through what little remained of our sister’s life. I felt the grief of losing the contents of her apartment almost as acutely as I felt the grief of losing Grey herself. This place had been a museum devoted to her, a vault filled to bursting with her secrets. Now she and all her secrets were gone. We might never know what had happened to her. If there was anything hidden in the walls, any clues stitched onto blankets or riddles engraved in wood, they were gone now too. I picked up a charred hardcover copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It was my favorite book as a kid. Grey would read it to me over and over again. I opened its pages. They were filled with annotations in her handwriting; lines highlighted, words circled, notes written in the margins. No doubt she’d written an essay about it when she was supposed to be studying something else. There was a photograph of the three of us as kids being used as a bookmark. I handed it to Tyler. He traced his fingertips over Grey’s face. And then—something. I swept my flashlight over the bookshelves again and noticed the spray of flowers twisting outward from them, across the floor, across the ceiling. “Do you feel that?” I asked Vivi. Something had begun to tug at the edge of my heart. A sensation that felt familiar and yet alien at once. All of Grey’s energy had been burned away from this place—except for a low thrum at the far end of the kitchen. It was a soft, punchy beat. “What?” Vivi asked as I walked to the end of the room and put my palm against the wood. Yes, there it was again, a fizzle in my fingertips. “Come here,” I said. Vivi came and put her hand next to mine, then snatched it back quickly. “It’s her.” “What do you mean, ‘It’s her’?” Tyler said as he put his hand on the wood over and over again and felt nothing. “It’s weak but . . . fresh,” I said. “Almost like she’s right on the other side of the wall.” “Help me move the bookshelf,” Vivi ordered Tyler. They shuffled it forward together until it toppled down with a crash, its damaged wood splintering into pieces on the floor. The wall behind the shelf had been mostly protected from the flames; its canker-green paint had only buckled close to the ceiling. And there, pressed tightly against the wall, was a hidden wooden doorframe growing thick with carrion flowers. It led to nowhere, but perhaps that didn’t matter. Perhaps all that mattered was that it used to lead somewhere else. “Where is she?” Vivi whispered. “In the gap at the back of the couch that crumbs and coins fall into,” I said as I ran my hands over the old wood. “Halfway.” Grey had sent us here to find answers—but answers alone weren’t enough for me. I wanted my sister back. “Grey, it’s Iris,” I said to the empty doorframe, to the green wall behind it. “If you can hear me, I want you to follow the sound of my voice. We’re close, but we need you to come to us. We can’t find our way to you.” We stood in silence for a full minute, our breaths shallow and hearts racing as we waited. Even Tyler was quiet, watchful. Finally, he shook his head. “You’re both completely bonkers,” he said, kicking the fallen bookshelf on his way back toward the hall. “It’s been a long, shitty day. I need a nap. And then I need one last line of cocaine before I go to jail.” Vivi exhaled, and then she followed him. I waited a little while longer, my forehead pressed against the doorframe, before my throat grew dry with the taste of smoke and I knew I had to go. Maybe Tyler was right. Maybe we had gone a little nuts. As I stepped into the hall, something moved in my peripheral vision. I yelped and scrambled back. Someone else was there. A figure had emerged from the warped doorway—from the wall—and was now leaning against it, gasping. A girl, dressed in white, her fingertips dripping blood. “Oh my God,” I whispered. “Grey?” My oldest sister looked up at me. Her eyes were black and her white hair hung in filthy clumps around her face. “Run,” she said. She tried to take a step toward me but sank heavily to her knees. “He’s coming.” 13 MY HEAD LOLLED forward, searching for sleep, then snapped back at the last moment, the movement dragging a gasp from my lungs and a furious flutter from my eyelids. I shifted in my chair and tried to sit up straighter in the bleach cold of the hospital waiting room. “Would you stop doing that?” Tyler said, his own face smushed into his palm, his elbow balanced precariously on the arm of his plastic chair. “You sound like someone is stabbing you every thirty seconds and it is very annoying.” “Sorry,” I said, then began the slow slump back into almost unconsciousness. Loll, snap, gasp, flutter. Tyler groaned as I shook my head and sat up straight again. Vivi, who possessed the talent of being able to sleep anywhere, in any position, was fast asleep, her head back and mouth wide open. Cate flicked through a magazine and sipped a cup of tea, her teeth clenched tight. I caught sight of my reflection in a vending machine. There were dark grooves beneath my eyes, a smudge of dried blood on my cheek. I licked my thumb and wiped the red away. Outside, three floors below, I could hear the distant click of cameras, the murmur of the growing crowd who’d come to see the missing supermodel, who—for the second time in her life—had been spat back from the abyss. I stood and stretched, then went to the window and parted the blinds to glance out at the swelling mass of fans and well-wishers. They noticed me immediately and turned their phones and cameras my way. A restless field of stars blinking in the dusk. It had been a confusing, scary afternoon. Getting Grey to the closest hospital had been . . . a challenge. We’d removed the police tape over her apartment door and carried her down the stairwell to the street below. Vivi tried to call an ambulance, but Grey—bleeding, gaunt, and barely able to stand—had pushed us off, thrown Vivi’s phone into the road, and screamed at us to listen, listen. When we’d hailed a cab to get her to the hospital ourselves, Grey had gone wild. There was still a fizzy sting of pain where she’d scratched my cheek, my neck, my arms as I helped Vivi and Tyler hold her down in the back of the taxi. “We have to run, we have to run, we have to run,” she’d chanted, kicking and bucking against us as we struggled to force her into the emergency room. We were all covered in scratches and bite marks and blood by the time doctors and nurses and security came rushing over to help restrain her. The police had come, called by someone, and we’d each given short statements as nurses swabbed our wounds and gave us ice packs for our bruises. Yes, we’d really found her in her burned-out apartment. No, we didn’t know how she’d gotten there, or how long she’d been there for. Then we waited. Waited for news of what the hell had happened to her, waited to hear if she was okay. Waited, along with the rest of the world, to find out the answer to the mystery. Where had she been? For the first time, I understood why people were obsessed with us, why there were Reddit boards with hundreds of comments trying to unravel the answer. I let the blinds slip closed and went back to the vending machine. I was halfway through my sixth packet of chips when a doctor finally appeared, a young South Asian woman in glasses and a green checked shirt. I stood quickly. “Is she okay?” I asked. “Can we see her?” “Mrs. Hollow,” the doctor said to my mother. “My name is Dr. Silva. Perhaps we could speak privately?” “I don’t think so, Doogie Howser,” Vivi said. “We want to know what’s going on.” Cate nodded. “It’s fine.” Dr. Silva looked hesitant but spoke anyway. “Your daughter is stable,” she said. I couldn’t help but notice the way my mother’s lips pursed on the word daughter. “We’ve sedated her to help her rest. Whatever happened to her, it’s over now. She’s safe.” Safe. Grey was safe. Somewhere, in a room tucked off a corridor around the corner, my sister’s heart was beating. The bones went out of my legs, like some tether inside me had been cut. I sank down into the chair behind me and looked at my hands, at the broken pinkie I shared with Grey. It had taken months to heal, a bruised, fat sausage where a finger had once been. Even now, when I ran my thumb over it, the joints beneath were bulbous, bent out of shape. Grey was alive. Grey was back. Relief flooded my body with such force that I gasped and laughed at the same time. With it came a surge of memories. The night my pet guinea pig died, Grey curled up in bed next to me, teaching me to meditate. Her body next to my body, her lips against my ear, her fingertips trailing down my nose as she taught me to breathe in for seven, hold for seven, breathe out for seven. The day that Vivi bit my arm so hard she broke the skin, so Grey bit her back as punishment. The night Grey pulled me onto the dance floor at a school dance and led me in an exaggerated tango, spinning me so fast I could feel gravity trying to wrest us apart, but our hold on each other was so strong I knew no force in the universe could separate us. “What happened to her?” I asked as I wiped mist from my eyes. Dr. Silva glanced at my mother. “As best we can tell, it seems as though your sister is in the grips of a particularly severe psychotic episode. During psychosis, the mind finds it extremely difficult to separate what is real and what is not. Hallucinations and delusions are common. It could explain why she’s been off the grid for a week.” Vivi bristled. “You immediately assume she’s crazy?” she snapped. “We found her cowering and covered in blood. She could have been taken by someone, she could’ve—” “Grey believes she was kidnapped and dragged through a door to another realm by a horned beast, where she was held captive,” the young doctor continued gently. “She believes she managed to escape, but that this creature—again, for emphasis, a fairy-tale creature—is coming for her. She also believes you—her sisters—are in mortal danger. She told us this herself.” “I want to see her,” Vivi said as she pushed past her, but the doctor stopped my sister with a hand on her shoulder. “You don’t. Not right now. We had to restrain her. You don’t want to see her like that, I promise you. Your sister is sick. Her mind and body are exhausted. Now, there is a police officer posted at her door for her protection, more police downstairs to keep the press at bay. Even if someone did wish her harm, they wouldn’t be able to get to her. Let her rest tonight. Talk to her tomorrow.” “Thank you,” Cate said as she pulled Vivi back. “We’ll let her sleep.” “Wait,” I said. “Whose blood was she covered in?” Dr. Silva turned back to look at me. “It was her own. There are cuts on her forearms, some so deep they needed stitching. Self-harm.” “You’re both coming with me,” Cate said as she shrugged on her coat. “I don’t want you here tonight.” “What?” I said, unmoving as she pulled my hand. “Your daughter is in the hospital and you’re going to leave?” “Grey’s here. She’s safe. There’s nothing you can do for her overnight.” “What if she wakes up all alone?” Vivi asked. “She’s heavily sedated and will be kept that way until morning. You’re not going to miss anything by coming home.” Cate looked so tired. Her frown lines cut grooves through her forehead and gathered to a pinch above her nose. She was still dressed in the scrubs she’d worn to her last shift. She clasped my hands in her own and pulled me close. “Please. Please come with me. Don’t stay here.” I glanced down at her bare neck and ran the pad of my thumb over her collarbone. I remembered the delicate necklace of bruising left on her throat the week after Grey left. I remembered how our next-door neighbor had come by during this time with mail that had been incorrectly delivered to his house and how, when Cate answered the door, he had let his eyes linger on the hickey-like thumbprint by my mother’s collarbone for too long, the slash of a smirk on his face, like he could judge the type of woman she was from this one small thing. “Steer clear of him,” Cate had said when she closed the door, her skin flush with goose bumps. It was the first time I had thought of my mother as a sexual creature. I was thirteen at the time and just coming to understand the power and treachery that came with breasts and hips and body hair. Men had begun catcalling me as I walked home from school in the afternoons—but that was my burden to bear. Seeing it done to my mother was something else. It had made me angry, the look he’d given her. It had filled my stomach with blood and bile. The neighbor slipped in the bathtub that night, split his skull on the faucet, and spent the next week liquefying. His was the body I’d smelled, before the dead man in Grey’s apartment. I wondered, for a long time after he died, if my hatred of him had cursed him to death. Part of me was horrified at the thought. Part of me hoped it was true. “I’m not leaving her,” I said. “I can’t.” Cate shook her head and left without saying another word, too exhausted to fight. “That is some bullshit, right?” Vivi said. “There is some weird crap going on, but Grey is not crazy. We saw those dudes in her apartment. We saw a dead guy fall out of her ceiling. We saw her step through a doorway from somewhere else and end up in her burned-out kitchen.” “Did we, though, Middle Hollow?” Tyler said. “I certainly didn’t. For all I know, she could have been curled up in a cupboard the whole time.” “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Vivi said. “I’m going out for a pack of cigarettes.” “Do you think she’s ever coming back?” Tyler asked as Vivi stalked off. “Or is she skipping town to go and start a new family somewhere else?” “I didn’t pin you for the daddy-issues type.” A quick grin slipped across his lips. “No one who has a good relationship with their parents ever becomes a model. Even if they’re as ridiculously good-looking as me.” “Did Grey ever talk to you about our parents?” “Oh, dribs and drabs. Enough for me to know that she was afraid of your father and that she didn’t get along with your mother. Shocker.” “It’s not that they don’t get along. It’s that Cate hates her.” “You are not to speak to her,” my mother warned me the morning after she threw Grey out. “You are not to speak to her ever again.” I hated Cate a little bit for that. It seemed wholly unfair. The day before, we had been a (relatively) normal and happy family, and then all it took was a drunken whisper from Grey to tear it all apart. Now one of my sisters was gone and the other—though I didn’t know it yet—was already planning to go. Vivi left in the middle of the night two weeks after Grey, without warning or fanfare. That was Vivi’s way. Grey was dramatic. Grey liked people to know when she entered and exited the room. Vivi was the opposite. She left with nothing but a backpack and her bass guitar, and left nothing behind to mark her departure except a note on the end of my bed. Sorry, kid, it read, but it’s just not the same if it’s not all three of us together. She caught a midnight Megabus to Paris, then spent the next three years making her way east, through the jazz clubs of France and the grungy nightclubs of Berlin and the absintheries of Prague and finally to the ruin bars of Budapest, collecting tattoos and piercings and languages and lovers along the way. It was rarely an easy, carefree life. We never talked about it, but I knew from Grey that Vivi had done things to get by. Pickpocketing tourists. Selling drugs. Working the odd shift at a strip club. At eighteen, when she moved into a converted warehouse overlooking the Danube with seven other musicians and artists, she had already lived and hurt more than most people do in a lifetime. The first six months after Grey and Vivi left were the worst of my life. They were both mostly MIA, busy transforming themselves into the women they wanted to become. I heard from them only occasionally. A message here, a phone call there. It was like a piece of me had been cut away, two-thirds of my soul suddenly sloughed off. It was also during those months that something changed in my mother. It was then that she started collecting newspaper clippings and police files from our case, started hiring private detectives to follow leads the cops couldn’t or wouldn’t or hadn’t. Before, it had been enough for her that we had come back. It didn’t matter where we’d gone or what had happened to us, so long as we were safe and whole and home. Then suddenly, overnight, she developed this burning desire to know. To know exactly. I would wake sometimes to find her standing in the doorway of my bedroom, watching me with quizzical eyes as I slept, as though searching for the answer to a question she was too afraid to ask out loud. Please, I messaged Grey around the six-month mark. I need to see you. Grey came that very night like Romeo and threw little stones at my window until I opened it. It was past midnight. She beckoned me into the dark. I put a coat over my pajamas and climbed down the tree that grew close to the house. It was the first and only time I have snuck out. We went to a pub in Golders Green and ate salt-and-vinegar chips in a haze of other people’s smoke. It was like meeting in secret with a lover, except I was thirteen and my clandestine liaison was with my estranged older sister. In the six months since I’d seen her, Grey had cut her white hair into a long bob that skimmed her shoulders. She wore a black turtleneck and cat eyeliner. She looked like an assassin from a spy movie. We talked about what she’d been doing, where she’d been living, the boys she’d been dating. She showed me pictures of herself on her phone, beautiful images that would soon run in magazines and appear on billboards. She was on the precipice of intense and immediate international fame, though neither of us knew it yet. “Come and live with me,” she said at one point. “You don’t have to stay there anymore. You don’t owe her anything.” It was a tempting offer. I wanted to go—and I wanted to stay. I was split between the two halves of my heart. “She’s my mother,” I said finally. Grey frowned like she wanted to dispute that but couldn’t. “I can’t leave her all alone. I’m all she has left.” So I stayed, on the condition that I could see and talk to Grey whenever I wanted. Cate allowed it, begrudgingly. The first and only time Grey reentered our house since leaving was to pack up her bedroom. We spent the next afternoon dumping all her bric-a-brac into boxes bound for storage until she had enough money for her own apartment. I wanted to linger over each piece of treasure, to slip lipsticks and candle stubs into my pockets to marvel at later, but she watched me with eagle eyes, and it all went where I had chosen not to follow. “If Justine or her little Barbie sidekick give you any more trouble, let me know,” Grey said as she carried the last box out the front door. “I’ll take care of them.” Before she left, Grey went upstairs to speak to Cate. I followed behind her quietly and listened at the door, hoping to hear them reconcile, but that was not what I heard. “If you hurt her,” Grey said to our mother softly, “if you so much as harm a single hair on her head, I will come back here and I will kill you.” If Cate answered, I didn’t hear it. I went to the bathroom and vomited. I thought of Justine Khan and how I could never unleash my sister on her, no matter how mean she became, because Justine was just a girl and my sister was something more, something crueler, the thing in the dark. Grey left without saying goodbye. Somehow, whatever she had said to my mother the night she threw her out was even worse than the death threat. Here is a terrible truth I had known for as long as I could remember: I was my mother’s favorite child. I was orderly and docile and quiet, and those traits made it easy for her to like me, to understand me. My sisters were difficult girls: too sexy, too angry, too hard to handle. They wanted too much. They were too willing to put their bodies and lives in the way of the world. In the months and years after Grey and Vivi evaporated from our day-to-day, life was better. I learned to live without my sisters as my constant companions. I became myself. The strangeness that haunted them decreased to a low simmer when they weren’t around. Cate and I fell into an easy routine. We watched Doctor Who and drank herbal tea curled up on the couch. We donned Wellingtons and took long strolls in London’s marshes, foraging for knotweed to make jam and elderflower and nettle to make summer cordial. We took flowers to my father’s grave every other week. Without my sisters there to cause trouble, I settled into what was left of my little family with ease. Tyler rolled his eyes. “Ugh, your mother does not hate Grey, Iris. So dramatic.” I stared at the door through which she had left. “No, she does.” I knew it profoundly. I had known it since the night Grey left home. I knew it on the nights I curled up next to Cate on the couch. I knew it in the mornings when we ate our homemade jam. As surely as many children know they are loved, I knew that Cate despised my sister. “She manages to mask it most of the time, but there’s something . . . ugly underneath. I see it sometimes. Cate is afraid of her. I don’t know why.” “You sound like you belong in the psych ward with your sister.” “And I thought you were going home.” “Yes, well. I look like utter garbage. I can’t let the paparazzi shoot me in this state.” A lie to mask the truth: He was worried about Grey too. “I always knew Grey was a bit . . . off. I liked it. It seemed, I don’t know, dangerous in a sexy way. I never thought she was completely nuts, though.” “I don’t think she is.” “Oh, please. You heard what the doctor said.” “I’ve also seen things over the past week that I can’t explain. If it’s all in Grey’s head, why can Vivi and I see it too?” “Folie ? deux, Little Hollow. Or in this case, folie ? trois.” Tyler tapped my temple. “Sometimes madness is catching.” Vivi came back an hour later, once darkness had settled over the city, the knuckles of her right hand raw and bleeding from punching a photographer as he tried to manhandle her for a picture. The three of us went down to the hospital cafeteria together and ate prepackaged sandwiches and old oranges for dinner, then trudged back upstairs to wait and wait and wait. Vivi went to sleep again, her hand bandaged and iced by a nurse. Tyler stared dead-eyed at his phone screen, scrolling through tweets and Instagram posts about Grey’s disappearance and subsequent miraculous return. The story was blowing up on social media. There was already a fan-art meme trending online of Grey as a venerated saint rendered in watercolor, a banner behind her reading “In Hollow we trust.” Dozens of celebrities had reposted it, rejoicing at our sister’s return. I watched over Tyler’s shoulder for a while, and then, even with the plastic chair beneath me biting into my bones, I eventually slipped into a fraught and fitful sleep. 14 I WOKE JUST after midnight with my head on Tyler’s shoulder. My neck was pinched at an angle, my bladder urgently swollen. I stretched off some of the sleep, then made my way to the bathroom. The hospital was darker and quieter than it had been earlier in the evening. No lights came on in the bathroom, so I peed in the dark, my eyes still drooping shut as I rested my elbows on my knees and cradled my chin in my hands. The scar at my throat was crawling again, begging to be scratched. I pressed my fingertip to the familiar ridge of scar tissue—and felt something move beneath my skin. “Jesus, fuck,” I spat, lurching off the toilet seat, sending droplets of piss down my thighs, over the floor. You imagined it, you imagined it. I sat back down and finished peeing and cleaned myself up, my heart whipping an angry beat inside my chest. My whole body was fizzing. You imagined it, you imagined it. Don’t touch it again. I flushed and went to wash my hands with my head down, too afraid to look up at the mirror. What would I see at the base of my neck? The pale-fleshed bud of a carrion flower about to burst through my skin? Or something worse? I looked up. The room was too dark to make out anything but the vague outline of my body, so I turned my phone flashlight on and rested it on a soap dispenser, the beam of light pointed in my direction. The light wasn’t kind to my features. It scrubbed the color from my complexion, carved any softness from my bones. I was a demon in this light. A monster. I couldn’t look myself in the eyes without feeling a snap of fear. Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look at her. I leaned in. I looked. There was a small pustule erupting at one end of my scar, its head hard and shiny black. As I watched it, it moved again, the flicker of something beetle-dark and spindly beneath my skin. A tear slipped down my cheek. What the fuck was happening to me? I pressed the sharp edge of my fingernail into the lump, enough to break the skin and tear the head away, then waited and watched to see what was beneath. Something unfurled. Tiny legs. A black body. An ant. It crawled out of the wound and made its way across my collarbone, tickling my skin. A second followed it, popping from the tiny bore hole in my flesh, and then a third, until the pustule was empty. Thoughts of Grey’s abandoned apartment filled my head. The line of ants and something dead and gruesome hidden beneath the wallpaper. I leaned in closer to the mirror, closer to the light, and gritted my teeth as I took out Grey’s knife and used the tip to open the wound wider. The hot pain made more tears skim down my cheeks. A bead of blood slipped between my breasts. I blotted it away with a paper towel. There was something there, beneath my skin. Something smooth and pale. “What the hell?” I whispered. It was skin, I realized as I leaned in for a better look. More skin. A second layer of it beneath my own, just as there had been a second layer of wallpaper beneath the one we’d peeled away. My phone slipped from the soap dispenser then and clattered to the floor, sending the bathroom strobing. The phone landed at my feet with a glassy clack and shot a beam of light at my face from below. For a second, it was not myself I saw in my reflection, but someone else. Something else. I grabbed my phone and clambered back into the waiting room, madly swatting the ants from my body as I went. I thought I might vomit. I wanted to find one of the nurses, get them to rinse out my wound with alcohol and tell me I was imagining things, but there was no one around. Vivi was sprawled out on the floor, her head resting on her rolled-up jacket, her backpack tucked under one arm. Tyler slept sitting up. Apart from that, we were alone. I hurried to the nurses’ station, where the medics who’d cared for us all afternoon and evening were nowhere to be found. “Hello?” I said. A sandwich sat unwrapped and half-eaten on a stack of paperwork. A can of Coke had been knocked over and left to drip into a puddle on the floor. I went from the waiting room to the corridor where Grey’s room was. The lights above me flickered. A clot of darkness swelled at the end of the hall where the ceiling lights had already been choked out. To my right, a doctor and a nurse squatted in an alcove, their bodies pressed together like soft fruit. Each took quiet, shallow breaths. They were holding hands, shaking, their eyes wide and wet. I looked down the corridor toward my sister’s room, then back at them. The nurse shook his head. Don’t go. I went. I pushed into the stuttering dark, down the long corridor. Grey’s room was easy to identify. It was the one with a chair out in front. Except the chair was toppled on its side, and the police officer who was supposed to be guarding my sister was sprawled facedown on the ground. There was blood. Not a pool of it, but slashes. Grey’s door was locked. I jiggled the handle, then pressed my face against the glass to see inside. It was soaked in shadow. The curtain was drawn around her bed. There was no movement. Just as I was about to bang on the door, to try and wake her, a bloody hand closed hard over my mouth and yanked me back. I tried to scream, tried to thrash against my captor as they dragged me into the room opposite Grey’s, but they were stronger than me. “Stop,” ordered a low voice as they pushed me roughly against a wall. “Stop. It’s me.” Grey lifted her hand from my lips and pressed a blood-slick finger to her own. My sister was a caricature of a madwoman in a red-spattered hospital gown. Her eyes and hair were wild, her lower jaw shaking. In her bloody hands she held a scalpel. What remained of her restraints hung loose and tattered at her wrists. A spark of d?j? vu: Grey with a blade in her hand, and then gone, the familiar image there and then already fading from my mind like white spots left after a flash. “What’s going on?” I whispered, horrified. “He’s coming here,” she said. “To take me.” “Grey,” I whispered. I spat onto my sleeve and scrubbed the blood from my lips, then took my sister’s face in my hands and tried to get her to look at me. She was skinnier now than when I’d last seen her, her collarbones pushing through her skin, and her hair had been lopped off above her shoulders. “Grey, look at me.” She did, eventually. She was calmer now than this afternoon, no longer rabid. I let the joy of her being alive, alive, alive flood me again. I wrapped my arms around her wasp waist and squeezed her close, my head on her shoulder. Grey was rigid for a moment, and then she melted into the hug. “I’m sorry I hurt you,” she said as she pulled back and trailed her fingertips over a soft bruise along my jaw. “I was scared.” “It’s okay. It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. I’m just glad you’re okay. Where were you? What happened?” Grey’s eyes welled and she pressed her lips together. “He took me. That bastard. I thought I’d never see you again.” “Who . . . who do you think is coming for you?” “Wait,” she said. “Watch.” I glanced at the floor, where arterial blood dripped from the tip of the scalpel, the tips of Grey’s fingers. Another smack of d?j? vu. Why did this scene feel familiar? “Did you . . . did you hurt the policeman, Grey?” Grey’s eyes went to his body, then back to her ward door. “He was not what he seemed.” I swallowed my horror and took Grey’s free, bloody hand in my own. What would this mean for her? A lifetime in prison for his murder? Or would they go easy on her because of her mental state? Not guilty by reason of insanity, the rest of her twenties spent in a mental institution? Both options were grim, life-destroying, but she had done something gruesome to an innocent man whose only crime was trying to protect her. We waited together. We watched together. In the minutes that passed, my sister stood unmoving and unblinking by the glass panel, her eyes bolted to the door of her hospital room across the corridor. I thought about what the doctor had said earlier in the evening, that Grey was in the grip of psychosis. It ran in our family, this predisposition to derangement. It had happened to our father, after all. The day he killed himself, Gabe Hollow woke us in the early hours of the morning and bundled us into the family car. Cate was still asleep. We went quietly, without complaint. We could sense the danger in him—he handled us roughly, slammed the car doors, screeched out of the driveway—but what could we do? How could we fight? We were only little girls. Gabe drove erratically. He was muttering to himself, crying, screaming that he was going to drive the car off a cliff and kill us all if we didn’t tell him the truth. Where were his children? What had we done to them? Who were we? What were we? Vivi and I bawled our eyes out in the back seat, but it was Grey, sitting in the passenger seat up front, who talked him down. “Please, Papa,” she whispered. “Don’t call me that!” he said with a sob, knuckles stone-white on the steering wheel. Grey put her tiny hand on his arm. “Take us home.” Her morning breath smelled strange, both syrupy and sour at once. It wasn’t until a year later, when I saw her kiss the woman who broke in, that I began to suspect Grey had compelled our father—and probably saved our lives in doing so. Gabe took us home and killed himself later that day, while we were at school. We found him when we returned, hanging from the banister in the entranceway. Vivi and I screamed, but Grey didn’t. She dragged a chair over to his body, patted him down, took the note he’d folded in his pocket, read it, and then tore it up into small pieces and threw it out the window. I spent the afternoon in the garden, collecting all the scattered scraps in my pocket, while Cate called relatives and made arrangements for his funeral. It was late spring, an unusually hot day in London, the afternoon temperature climbing past thirty degrees Celsius. I sat in my room and taped all the pieces of his note back together with sweaty hands. I didn’t want this, it had said. Four words to sum up a whole life. I wondered if the same thing was happening to Grey right now. I wondered, for a few brief moments, if Tyler was right, if Grey’s hysteria was catching. How much of what we had seen was real? Had there really been a dead body in Grey’s ceiling? It had happened quickly and I had no physical proof of the strangeness, only scent and blood and memory. No one but Vivi and I had seen it. We had not been sleeping well, had been fueled by caffeine and adrenaline. The edge of our reality had begun to twist and burr as it brushed up against something else. There was a hitch in Grey’s breathing. She closed her fingers around the door handle, still holding the scalpel, still staring at her room across the hall. “Take off your shoes,” she said. “What?” I looked down at Grey’s own bare feet. The nail beds were blackened, her ankles rubbed raw from restraints. “Why?” “Do it. He’s here,” she said. The flickering lights went out, and darkness dropped over the hallway like a stone. I scuffed out of my shoes and held them in one hand. Then he was there, just as she said he would be. I knew him from his silhouette, even if I couldn’t see his face: the man from Grey’s burned-out apartment. Tall and thin, the skull of a dead bull worn over his face. The stench of him palmed my face, driving splinters of rot and damp and smoke into my nose. A flicker of broken memories skipped across the surface of my thoughts: a decomposing forest, a hand with a knife, three children warming themselves by a fireplace. Three little girls with dark hair and blue eyes. Us. Whose house were we at? I was crying, though I didn’t understand why. We were not safe here. Whoever he was, he had found us, again. Found Grey. Come to take her away from me. I wanted to run, I wanted my feet to move as fast as my heart was beating, but my sister tightened her grip on my hand. Not yet. The man knelt by the body of the police officer and turned him over—except he was not wearing a police uniform. A thicket of white flowers was bursting from the dead man’s eyes, his nostrils, his mouth, their petals waxy in the low light. Something was happening to him, something I’d seen before. Hair-thin vines grew from the roots of the flowers in his mouth, twisting their way across the skin of his face. There was the smell of blood, yes, but also something green and sour. I covered my mouth to keep from gagging. He was not what he seemed, Grey had said. Not the police officer who’d been tasked with guarding her door. Someone else. The man tried the handle to Grey’s hospital door. When he found it locked, he used his elbow to break the glass, then put his arm through and unlocked it from the other side. He slipped into Grey’s room and shut the door behind him. “We have to go now,” Grey whispered. “Follow me.” She opened the door and padded quietly into the hall, her feet bare, tiny drops of blood slipping from her hand as she moved. My own blood was thundering rapids, but my footfalls were silent as I followed her, also barefoot, crouching low as we moved past her room, careful not to step on any glass as we moved under the broken window. “You have to hide,” Grey whispered to the doctor as we crept back past her. The nurse had already disappeared, but the doctor was now an empty shell, gone from her body. There was a crash from Grey’s room, an animal growl: He’d found her bed empty. The doctor looked that way and swallowed but didn’t move. Grey knelt by the woman’s side, tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear, and then leaned in to press her lips against hers. It had been a long time since I’d seen Grey do this thing, and for a moment I wondered if it would still work, but then whatever sweet potion we carried on our breath, our lips, every inch of our skin worked its way into the doctor’s bloodstream, and I saw her melt beneath my sister’s touch. When Grey pulled back from the kiss, the woman’s pupils were saucers, and she looked at Grey like a bride walking down the aisle on her wedding day. Awed. Overwhelmed. The most in love she’d ever been. “Hide now,” Grey said. The doctor smiled, punch-drunk and dazed, and slipped into the room behind her. My pulse was a flurry. “Come,” I whispered urgently. We ran then, hard but silent, toward where Vivi and Tyler slept, rounding the corner as Grey’s door slammed open, sending more broken glass jittering across the floor. The noise made Tyler jump awake. Grey pressed her palm over his mouth and shook her head. Tyler swallowed. I woke Vivi with a finger against her lips. Her eyelids lurched open, but she was quiet as I pulled her to her feet and motioned for her to take her shoes off, carry them in her hand. Grey removed her hand from Tyler’s face and knelt to help him pull his shoes off. All was silent. Then came the crunch of heavy boots on glass. The footfalls were headed in our direction, following the line of blood drops Grey had left on the floor. Vivi put her backpack on. Grey pulled Tyler out of his seat and wiped her hands on her dress, and then the four of us moved softly, swiftly toward the next hallway, making it around the corner a moment after the man stepped into the waiting room, the shadow concealing our retreat. I watched his diluted reflection in a panel of glass. There were three fresh runes written down his chest in blood. He crouched and placed his palm where I had been sitting. He picked up Vivi’s rolled-up jacket from the floor and pressed it to the stripped-bare bones of his mask, inhaling deeply. He nudged Tyler’s shoes with his toe. From the back of his waistband, he pulled his gun and started in our direction. We peeled away from the wall we’d been pressed against and ran soft-footed down the corridor, as quickly and quietly as we could manage. As we rounded the next corner, Grey slammed into a body. A green aura of stink exploded in my head. “He—” breathed the figure (a woman, I could see now, in the half-light), but Grey drove the scalpel up under her chin and cut off her cry when it was still no more than a breath. Grey yanked the scalpel out of her head and held the woman tightly against her as she lowered her, gushing blood, to the floor. The blood was full of clots and smelled of decay. We kept running in the dark then, turning corners, backtracking when figures appeared at the end of a hall or when a wall of smoke and rot stench hit us. Grey was doused in blood—but was it blood? In the half-light, the stain down her front seemed to twitch across her like shadow. “We need to get off this floor,” Grey whispered. “Out of this hospital.” “There,” I said, pointing to a door at the end of the corridor. EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY, it read. ALARM WILL SOUND WHEN DOOR IS OPENED. “Do it,” Grey said. “Run, and don’t stop running.” We ran. Vivi reached the door first, slammed into it at the same moment the alarm split my teeth open. I followed her, and Grey came up behind me. Tyler hurled himself through the door last. When I looked back, the man was coming straight for us, the bone of his mask catching shards of light as he charged in our direction. “Go, go, go, fucking go!” Grey screamed as Tyler pulled the door closed, the man hitting it three seconds behind us, popping it from its hinges like a craft Popsicle stick. We flew down the stairs, taking them three at a time, our feet slapping the concrete, our lungs sucking hard. The man was fast and agile. As we tore down the stairwell, gripping the handrails to swing around corners faster, we heard him gaining on us. Then we smelled him gaining on us. Then we felt him gaining on us, the wet hotness of his breath, flecks of sweat from his arms and chest flicking the back of my neck. Tyler screamed. I turned. The man held him by the collar and had him pressed up against a wall. Grey was already there. She plunged the scalpel into the creature’s chest and fell back. The gun went clattering down the stairwell, lost somewhere below us. The surgical implement looked comically small lodged in his flesh, a toothpick stabbed into a watermelon. He dropped Tyler, who scrambled toward us, choking. We backed away, down the stairs, as he plucked the scalpel from his chest like a splinter and flicked it to the ground, where it made a pretty twinkling sound. “Run,” Grey said. We turned and hurled ourselves downward again, out the door at the bottom of the stairs and into the cool night. After the shrill alarm of the stairwell and the thick stink of the horned man, the night felt crisp and quiet. We’d been spat out at the back of the hospital. The man burst out of the stairwell behind us, clipping the horns of his mask on the doorway. Grey was the fastest out in the open and she ran hard through the gap between hospital buildings until she reached the street, where she flung herself in front of a passing car. It screamed to a stop, curls of rubber smoke rising from the asphalt beneath it. The driver wound down his window and started yelling obscenities. Grey pitched herself through the window and planted a desperate kiss on his lips. The man went quiet as she spoke in his ear, quickly, urgently, as we all piled into the car. Then Grey folded into the back seat, and the man shoved the car into first and smoked the tires again before we’d all even closed our doors—and not a moment too soon. The man landed a fist on the back bumper, making the car fishtail as we sped away. Then he ran alongside us, almost keeping pace for a second or two, before we finally pulled ahead and left him in the middle of the road, doused in the faded red of our lights.