Chapter 15

15

“It’s time forsome bloody answers,” Tyler demanded as I put my shoes back on. I couldn’t disagree with him. “My love,” he said, holding my now-unconscious sister’s face in his hands. “You must wake up. You’ve got some explaining to do.”

“Would you let her rest?” Vivi said.

“No! I just saw my girlfriend murder a woman with a scalpel. And that man—that thing—its skin was scabby and rotting. No more excuses.”

“I don’t think being unconscious is an excuse, you twat.”

“Nor do I! So wake up!”

I turned around from where I sat in the front seat. “Let’s just calm down and debrief for a minute.”

“Oh, you want to debrief? You want to debrief? A murderous bull just crushed my esophagus, Little Hollow. I am not okay—and I am still not convinced this isn’t all an elaborate ploy to ruin my life,” Tyler said to a still-unconscious Grey. “Do you hear that, darling? I know what you’re up to.”

I sighed and turned back around. “Where are you taking us?” I asked the driver as he pulled onto the highway, heading north. He stared, dead-eyed, out the windshield, but he was under Grey’s spell, not mine, and had no interest in me. The inside of the car smelled like honey wine on the verge of turning to vinegar. The air was close, thick with blood and some invisible magic. I cracked a window to let in some fresh air and clear my heavy head.

How long would it be before someone realized our driver was missing? The Uber app was open on his phone. In the glove compartment was an assortment of things no doubt shoved in there before his shift started: three colored pencils, a pair of women’s sunglasses, a charging cable, and one pink and one purple hair bobble, each with fine blond hairs caught in the elastic.

“What if one of us has to pee?” Vivi asked. “Is he going to just . . . keep driving?”

“Now might be a bad time to mention that the hospital cafeteria sandwiches seem to be disagreeing with me,” Tyler said.

I thought about messaging my mother—but what would I say to her?

We’re driving north but I don’t know to where.

I don’t know how long we’ll be gone for.

A masked man is trying to kill us all.

Don’t stress.

In the end, my phone died in my hand before I could send anything. Maybe it was better that way. Cate would be sleeping in her lonely room in London, dreaming of a time before her children disappeared.

Peeing didn’t end up being a problem. We ran out of fuel less than two hours after our escape, not far past Northampton. The car rolled to a sputtering stop on a quiet street next to a field hemmed by a low fence. It was the early hours of the morning. No one else was around. The driver, still under Grey’s spell, got out of the car, left the lights on and his door open, and started walking along the side of the road.

“Hey!” I shouted as I ran after him. “Hey, where are you going? Are you just going to leave us here?” Even when I grabbed his arm and tried to stop him, the man kept his pace. Mouth slightly open, eyes unfocused. I let him go, let him sink into the waiting dark.

“Excuse me, I’m going to go and shit in the woods like an animal,” Tyler said as he hopped over the fence and wandered into the field.

“Charming,” Vivi said. “You can really see why Grey dated him.”

“I heard that!” Tyler called.

“You were supposed to!” Vivi shouted back.

We waited. One minute stretched to five stretched to ten. I kept wandering around the car, waiting for another vehicle to pass us by. Vivi kept holding her phone high like they do in horror movies when they’re looking for a signal. Like that ever worked.

I wondered if the driver would continue on foot all the way to the destination Grey had given him. I wondered how far that might be and if the man would stop at all along the way. Would he walk until his feet bled, until his stomach growled and his joints ached? Would he break for food and water, or would he walk until he died? Did we have the terrible power to do that to people?

“Iris, come here,” Vivi said as I paced. I went to where she had trained the beam of her phone flashlight, by the open door of the car. Vivi stepped aside to reveal Grey’s waxy face, her eyes rolled back in her head, her skin tight and slippery with fever sweat.

“Oh my God. She looks terrible.” I crouched and put my palm on her forehead. “She’s burning up. What do we do?”

“Take her to the hospital again?” Vivi suggested.

“Because that worked out so well the first time.”

“Well, shit, I don’t know. What if she’s dying? We can’t do nothing.”

“We could call Cate,” I suggested, wondering if our mother would be willing to provide urgent medical care to the daughter she had thrown out of her house.

“Even if I had a damn signal, I’m sure Cate would be super enthusiastic about helping.”

We found a half-empty bottle of water and a gym towel in the trunk, then soaked it through and mopped Grey’s forehead, trying to bring her fever down. Tyler came back, holding his stomach. “Now that that’s out of the way . . . what’s going on?” he asked.

“You didn’t notice that she was as hot as an oven, you incompetent dunce?” Vivi snapped.

A noise then, from the darkness: footfalls on gravel and a sloshing sound.

“Who’s there?” I asked, but it was only the spelled driver, now carrying a large red jerry can. “Oh, thank goodness.”

“Well, look who it is,” Tyler said. As the man passed, Tyler put his foot in front of the man’s legs to try and trip him. The man stumbled, then kept on walking as if nothing had happened. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Don’t torment him,” I said as the driver went by me, in a world entirely his own. “He’s not himself.”

“What does that even mean?” Tyler asked.

Vivi took Tyler’s face in her hands, looked at him for a moment, and then leaned in to kiss him. It was a deep kiss, rich with whatever elixir lived on my sister’s lips. My lips. Even I felt the power of it and, underneath that, something else—a pinch of envy.

Vivi pulled back and watched Tyler carefully.

“Well, I feel violated,” he said as he wiped his wet mouth. “Yuck. Not interested, FYI. Been there, done that. You’re all as bonkers as each other.”

“Interesting,” Vivi said to me. “He’s entirely unaffected. Maybe because he has no brain.”

“How old are you?” Tyler said.

Vivi could tease him all she wanted, but I knew why Grey dated Tyler.

The second time someone kissed me was backstage after Grey’s very first House of Hollow catwalk at Paris Fashion Week. The show had been a resounding success, but I didn’t feel like celebrating. A hard stone sat in my stomach because a man had been watching me for two days. I never learned his name. All I knew was that he was an up-and-coming photographer who wore a brown leather jacket and tied his light hair in a bun. He was tall and young and handsome and spoke with a purring accent. Women should have been all over him, but he lingered for too long around the models, and he liked to look at me too much. I suppose he figured that a teenage girl would be thrilled by the attention from a grown man. I suppose he figured that I liked the way he brushed his fingers across the back of my jeans when he asked me for a selfie together.

I suppose he figured a lot of wrong things.

What I figured was this: It was vitally important that I was never alone in a room with him. I had spent two days making sure he never got the opportunity, not because I was certain something bad would happen, but because I couldn’t be certain that nothing bad wouldn’t happen. Now that the show was over, I could let my guard down. I was flying home to London the next morning, Grey had organized an Uber back to my hotel room, and the creepy man wouldn’t be there.

All I needed was to dash backstage to get my coat.

Backstage had been chaotic for hours before the show started, busy with filament-limbed models and makeup artists and producers darting across the space, yelling into headsets—but it was quiet now. The chemical smell of hair spray lingered, as did the burned-hair tang of curls left in irons for slightly too long. The Hollywood lights bordering each of the mirrors were dark, and the dresses that each of the models had worn on the catwalk had been packed into garment bags and hung on rails along one side of the room. I couldn’t help smiling as I passed them in the lowlight, these small miracles of thread and fabric born from my sister’s wild brain. I’d seen rough sketches of her creations in the months leading up to fashion week, but nothing had prepared me for seeing them in real life, the beauty and grotesquery of them.

I found my coat draped across the back of a folding chair and shrugged it on.

“Hello, Iris,” a male voice said. I turned. It was the photographer.

Here, with me. In the dark. Alone.

“Oh. Hello. I didn’t know anyone was still here.”

“They’re not. Everyone’s gone to the after-party.”

“Where’s Grey?”

“I just saw her get in an Uber.” That didn’t sound right. Grey was supposed to take me back to my hotel before she went partying. Cate had made her promise. “I can give you a lift home, if you want.”

I tried to slip past him, to see if he was telling the truth, but he caught my wrist and sent my heart cartwheeling in panic.

“You’re beautiful, you know,” he said with his lips, but with his fingers gripped tight enough around my arm to leave bruises, he said something different. And then it happened. He leaned in to kiss me. He got too close. He breathed in the untamed power of me, fizzing with sweat and fear, and it sent him wild, the same way it had sent Justine Khan wild. His eyes turned to saucers, and the next thing I knew, I was on the ground, under him, under his weight and his hardness as his fingers scratched at my waistband, trying to force their way into my jeans. I screamed and I fought beneath him. I thrashed and scratched his face with my nails, but the sudden scent of his own blood only made him more rabid. The hot stink of his breath in my face. The warm trail of saliva he left on my skin as he kissed me, bit me, licked the wounds he left on me.

I’m not sure if Grey heard my scream or felt my distress instinctually, but suddenly she was there—not gone, like the photographer had said—standing over us, wearing the face of a vengeful god. She took the man by the throat and wrenched him off me with one hand, then slammed him against a mirror, shattering the glass and light bulbs behind him. Her slim fingers were so tight on his neck, he could barely breathe, but—though his face was red and his throat made clucking sounds as it struggled to pull air into his lungs—the photographer did not seem to mind. He was already violently high on her, giddy and lovesick.

Why was it a useful, easy power on Grey, but on me, it made me a victim?

Grey was breathing hard, spitting venom with every exhale. She squeezed the man even harder, until I could see the capillaries bursting beneath her grip. “You are going to go home,” Grey ordered, “and when you get there, you are going to kill yourself. Make it slow. Make it painful. Do you understand?”

The man bit his lip and smiled, then nodded coyly, like he was flirting with her.

“Grey,” I said through my sobs. “Don’t. Don’t make him do that. It’s . . . It wasn’t entirely his fault. It was . . . more of an accident. I got too close and he went too far. I don’t know how to . . . Please. Please take it back. Just let him go.”

Grey let go of the man’s throat and slapped him hard across the face. A tinkling rain of glass shards fell from his hair. “You’re lucky my sister is more merciful than I am. Don’t you ever, ever fucking touch someone without their consent again. Get out of my sight. Get out of Paris and don’t come back.”

When he was gone, Grey rounded on me. “And you. You have to be more—”

“What?” I snapped as I pulled myself off the ground. “Careful?” I was shaking, bleeding. I wanted Grey to fold herself around me like a blanket and make the hurt go away, but she didn’t. She stood there and watched me, unmoving, as I did up the top button of my jeans and pressed cotton makeup rounds to the bleeding bites on my neck, my shoulder.

“You have to be stronger, Iris.”

“Are you kidding me? It’s not like I asked for it! He followed me back here. Why are you angry with me?”

“Because you’re weak. Because you let lesser people push you around. Because you are afraid of how powerful you are and you shrink away from it. Because I won’t always be around to protect you and I know, I know you are capable of protecting yourself, because you’re more like me than you realize.”

“Who the fuck are you?” I asked, because this person was not my sister. Her words were so vile, so wrong—how could they have come from Grey? How could this person who claimed to love me more than anything hurt me so deeply after what she’d seen happen to me? I thought, then, of the broken pinkie finger on my sister’s left hand. On my left hand.

“Does it hurt?” I’d asked her when it happened.

“Yes,” she’d whispered, cradling the swollen bones to her chest. “It hurts so much.”

“How can I make it better?”

She’d looked up at me, her eyes black, her breath coming in sad little drags. “Break your finger too.”

On my way out, Grey snatched up my bruised wrists in her hands. I winced at the layered pain, hurt on hurt. “Use the gifts you have been given,” she said to me. “No one should be able to lay a finger on you. You can bring them to their knees, if that’s what you want. You can make them pay.”

“That isn’t what I want,” I said as I twisted out of her grip, the way Vivi had shown me after one of her Krav Maga classes. “That’s never been what I want. Why can’t you get that? What I want is to be normal.”

Later that night, in my hotel room, I spent two hours in the shower trying to scrub the smell of him off me, and then, when it was gone, trying to scrub out whatever rotten thing lived under my flesh and made me so weak. I scrubbed my scar so raw, it bled for days.

So yes. I thought I knew why Grey dated Tyler. Because to be near a person who wasn’t prey to your intoxicating power, to kiss someone who would never become crazed at the scent of you—someone you couldn’t make want you, someone you couldn’t make love you, someone who desired you of their own free will—was something I had daydreamed about but thought was impossible for me.

We watched as the driver used a funnel to refuel the car, then got back in the front seat and turned on the engine.

“Hey, hey, hey!” I yelled as he put the car into first and began to roll away without us, all of the doors still open. We all piled in—Vivi in the front this time, Tyler and me in the back—and slammed our doors shut.

“I must say, I am not a fan of this Uber,” Tyler said. “One star. Two at most.”

I sat with Grey’s clammy head in my lap, her bare legs draped over Tyler’s knees. Her hair was sodden with sweat, and her skin smelled sharp and wrong, meat and vinegar undercut with something sweet and floral, like gardenia. I pushed her hair off her forehead. Even like this, even sick and sallow and shaking, Grey was beautiful.

I’d never seen her really unwell before. It had always been Grey taking care of Vivi and me when we were little girls, not the other way around. Grey had always been the one in charge. Grey had always been the strongest.

“I’m going to keep you safe,” I whispered to her, just as she had whispered to me every night when she tucked me in. “Forever. I promise.”

---

We stopped for more fuel not long after, at a twenty-four-hour service station along the highway with acid-white lighting. I dashed inside while the driver filled the tank. I bought a liquid painkiller meant for kids and water to try and lower Grey’s fever. I was back in the car, my arms full of medicine and snacks from by the register, before the guy had even finished refueling. Tyler was walking around, stretching his legs. Vivi twirled an unlit clove cigarette in her fingers, maintaining eye contact with the glaring station clerk the whole time.

“Grey,” I said as I slipped back inside the car and rested her head in my lap. The man docked the nozzle at the pump. “Grey, you need to take this.” I thought the man would head into the station and pay, but he opened his door and started the ignition. “Shit, Tyler!” I called as the car jerked forward. “Get in!”

Tyler legged it after us and made it inside as the driver pulled out of the station, the clerk already outside yelling after us.

“Dude is gonna get us arrested,” Vivi said.

“Help me with this,” I instructed Tyler once we were back on the highway. I hiked Grey’s limp shoulders farther up on my knees and held her head so Tyler could open her mouth and pour some of the painkiller in.

Tyler leaned over and stroked the side of her cheek. A tender moment. He ran his thumb over Grey’s bottom lip, then opened her mouth.

“There’s something . . . something in there,” he said.

“In her mouth?” I leaned over and looked. There was something green and rank lodged at the back of Grey’s throat. I put my fingers in past her teeth and tried to scoop it out: a slop of rotten leaves covered in a fur of powdery mildew. The tinny stink of it made my eyes water. Tyler and Vivi both gagged as the close air of the car ripened. I turned on the car’s overhead light and looked in Grey’s mouth, then immediately wished I hadn’t. I gagged too. A nest of rotten leaves and carrion flowers and ants, all growing in her. Swollen with her blood. Bursting from the flesh of her throat.

“What is it?” Tyler asked.

“An infection,” I lied. “Drive faster,” I instructed the driver, though I knew he likely wouldn’t listen to me, “or she might not make it to wherever we’re going.”

We drove for four or five more hours, until dawn began to leech the dark from the edges of the sky, and all of us sat with our legs crossed, our bladders pressed tight and low. Grey’s fever waxed and waned, but her skin remained slick with sweat, her lips sapped of color, her breath stained rotten green.

I sank in and out of sleep. I wished I’d had the opportunity to tell Cate I was okay. Soon, she would wake to the news that we had disappeared from the hospital overnight, that we were gone without a trace. What would that do to her?

In the shadow light of the early morning, I saw ants slip from the corner of Grey’s mouth and walk a tight trail over her cheek, toward her eye.

Vivi yawned and stretched. “Where are we?” she asked as we pulled past the outskirts of a city.

“Edinburgh,” I answered. I’d suspected as soon as we’d crossed the border into Scotland that this was our final destination. Where it all began, a lifetime ago, on a quiet street in the Old Town, in a slip of moments between one year and the next.

When I thought about that night, when I tried to remember it, nothing came back to me. It was only through the retellings of others that I could get a sense of what it had been like.

The way Cate told it, there was no magic hanging in the air, no sense of foreboding, no tall stranger in dark clothing following unnoticed behind us. It was a normal night on a normal street. We were a normal family and then, just like that, we weren’t. Something terrible and impossible happened to us here, and I couldn’t remember what—but maybe Grey did. Grey, with her secrets and her perfumed lips and her unnatural beauty that had brought the world to its knees before her.

Grey, who said she remembered everything. Everything. All the answers, wrapped up on the other side of a fever. All we had to do was break it.

A few minutes later, the car rolled to a stop on a tight, cobbled street. The city was still soaked in darkness. The light here was old, borrowed from another century. Even the modern streetlights seemed unable to fully shift the weight of the Scottish night.

Tyler stretched and went to open his door.

“Stop,” Vivi said, looking up out the windshield at something I couldn’t see. “There’s a kid pointing a gun at us out her window.”

“A kid?” I asked.

“Yeah, a creepy-looking little girl with a shotgun,” Vivi said.

The driver got out of the car slowly and stood there, staring up at her with his hands raised. I heard a gun pump.

“You owe her,” the man said, and then he turned and— without closing his car door—began walking back the way we came. How ruined would his life be from his night of driving three strange girls and a male supermodel across the country?

“What’s she doing?” I asked Vivi, who was sitting very still in the front seat.

“I think she’s contemplating shooting me in the face,” Vivi answered. “The odds are not looking in my favor.”

I opened my door then, slowly, the way the man had, and slipped out from beneath Grey with my hands held over my head. The barrel of the shotgun moved to me. Vivi was right—the person holding it was only a child, a little girl of no more than ten or eleven.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to.

The girl broke her stance, glancing over the gun to get a better look at me: my white-blond hair, my black eyes. If the girl knew Grey, she would see her in me. She drew the gun inside and closed the window.

“I think it’s clear,” I said.

Tyler and Vivi opened their car doors and got out. I thought for a minute that that would be it, that the child would shut up the windows and lock the doors on us—but no, the front door opened, and the girl stepped out onto the porch with the gun slung over one shoulder. She was tangle-haired and squalid, her hands and bare feet thick with grime. She wore a cotton nightgown that might once have been white, but was now soiled with earth and muck. It looked like she’d been buried alive in it and then dug herself out of her own shallow grave.

Her eyes traveled from Vivi, to me, back to Vivi’s tattooed throat, and then to my throat, to the shiny hook of scar tissue that glittered in the early morning sun. Her eyes were wide and her lungs drew the rapid, shallow breaths of a hare watching a wolf across a field—as if deciding whether she should run or remain stock-still.

Tyler looked over her shoulder and into the house. “Are your parents home, sweetheart?”

“Shut it, Tyler,” Vivi said.

I took a step toward the girl, my hands raised. “We need you to help her,” I said. “Grey sent us here because she knew you’d know what to do.”

The child looked at me, questioning. I nodded toward the back seat, where my sister lay shaking.

The girl stepped barefoot onto the cold cobbles and came to look at Grey. “Bring . . . ,” she said, her voice a dry and strangled thing. I wondered how often she spoke to anyone. “Bring her inside,” she rasped—and so we did.

Vivi, the strongest of us, held Grey under the arms while Tyler carried her feet. They set her down on a dust- and crumb-covered rug in the living room just off the hall. I ducked back outside to close the car doors and the front door. There was a stack of two dozen or so unopened envelopes piled up in the hall, all addressed to Adelaide Fairlight. Our grandmother’s name. It was also the name Grey used to check in to hotels to hide her identity. So this was another of our sister’s hidden nests. How extensive was her web of mysteries?

I knelt by Grey’s side with the others and looked around the space for more signs of our sister. Green things had begun to grow through the windows and floorboards. Tendrils of vine snuck in through the window frames. Yellow pops of lichen burst from the walls. The wood stacked by the fireplace was cocooned in a fuzz of mold. The rug under Grey’s back was spongy with some kind of fungus that grew in coral-like polyps that swayed softly when the air shifted.

It felt like a place Grey belonged, yet the furniture was sparse and there were none of the trinkets she liked to pack her hidey-holes with: no incense or crystals or candles. I could only guess the apartment was a safe house of some sort—or that Grey had rented or bought it in our grandmother’s name for the little girl. For a moment I wondered if the child was Grey’s secret daughter, born after she ran away. I searched her features for similarities, but there were none. The girl had chestnut hair and green eyes, and besides, she must’ve been ten or eleven, and Grey left only four years ago.

The girl left us then and went into the adjoining kitchen. There was banging, the sound of glass bottles clinking together and a spoon stirring. When she came back a few minutes later, she was holding a bowl. I caught the smack of vinegar and salt, mixed with the licorice of anise and the bitter, medicinal tang of wormwood. A witch’s brew.

The little girl motioned for me to open Grey’s mouth and pinch her nose shut. When I had done what she asked, she poured some of the liquid down Grey’s throat. Grey gagged and swallowed, then immediately vomited, a placental sac of rot and roots and greenery slopping out of her and onto the rug.

“Oh God, I cannot handle this,” Tyler said as he stood and went outside. I heard him retching a moment later, the few snacks we ate in the car splattering onto the sidewalk as he made his retreat.

The girl motioned for me to hold Grey’s nose again while she poured more of the draft into her mouth. Again, Grey gagged, swallowed, vomited, this time bringing up sticky strings of bile laced with flowers and thin worms.

The girl noticed the bandages on Grey’s arms and laid her blackened palms over them. Then she went to the kitchen and returned again with a pair of meat shears and slipped them under the coils of cotton, slicing the bandages off. Beneath, the skin of Grey’s arms was covered in three cuts, two of them closed with sutures that looked like barbed wire. White death flowers grew from each wound, a carpet of them, their roots vein-blue from drinking deeply of Grey’s blood.

“Jesus,” Vivi whispered. “What’s happening to her?”

The girl took the scissors she’d used to cut Grey’s bandages and drew one of the blades across her own palm. I cringed at the thought of the pain, but when she opened her hand there was no blood, only a runnel of brown liquid that smelled at once of iron and sap.

“It gets . . . ,” the girl rasped, but her throat closed. She swallowed, tried again. “It gets inside you.” She used two fingers from her opposite hand to hold her wound open. Inside were no capillaries or tendons or raw red flesh, but what you might expect to find on a decomposing tree on the forest floor: a fen of rot and moss and mold.

A tear slipped down Vivi’s cheek. “What are you?” she asked.

“It is in me,” the girl said, placing her hand over her heart. “In her.” She put her palm on the scar at Grey’s throat. Finally, she pointed at Vivi. “In you.”

Vivi shook her head, slowly at first and then more angrily. She smacked the tears from her eyes and stood. “Fuck this,” she said. She kicked the bowl of witch’s brew, which went clattering across the room, and did what Vivi does: stormed out, probably to find an off-license that would sell her booze before ten a.m.

The girl tore a strip from the bottom of her dress and soaked it in the puddle of leftover tincture. “For you,” she said as she handed the material to me. I was confused, but then the girl tapped the soft basin of flesh between her collarbones, and my fingers instinctively went to my own, went to my scar, where the knot beneath my skin had re-formed. I pressed the wad of wet fabric to my skin. Something beneath the surface squirmed in protest.

The girl soaked Grey’s cut bandages with what remained of the remedy, then laid them over the cuts.

“Why . . . ,” the girl began. She swallowed. “Why did she do this?” she asked as she ran her fingers over the wet strips of cotton.

I held my sister’s hand. “I don’t think she did. Grey’s been missing for a week. We found her like this. I think someone did this to her. A man. A man who wears a bull’s skull to hide his face.”

“He . . . cut her?” the girl rasped.

“I don’t know. I don’t know why anyone would do that.”

The girl stood and grabbed the shotgun and pointed it squarely at my face.

“You cannot stay here,” she growled.

“Whoa, whoa, just wait a—”

“No,” she said, slamming the barrel of the gun into my shoulder, toppling me over. “Go.”

“Please just tell me what’s going on!”

“He has her blood.” The way she spoke was like a wild animal that had been taught human language. “He will always be able to find her. If she is here, he will come. He is already on his way.”

“You owe her,” I said quickly, echoing what the driver had said before he left. I didn’t know exactly what a child could owe Grey, only that reminding her had gotten us inside, and maybe it would be enough to let us stay a little longer. Grey was weak and dehydrated. I worried that moving her again would do more damage, and besides, the girl seemed to know how to care for her when a hospital couldn’t. We needed to be here. We didn’t have anywhere else to go. “We need your help and you owe her. Please. Please.”

The girl was breathing hard. “When she wakes, you go,” she ordered, and then she dropped the gun and followed Vivi and Tyler out onto the street.