Chapter 12

12

The smell ofburning 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.”