Chapter 16

16

Vivi came back not long after, much to my surprise, not with a bottle of tequila but with fresh bread and fruit and coffee. We ate together on the front porch in the cold morning sun. I told her about what the girl had said, that the man looking for Grey would find us here like he’d found us at the hospital, that our time here was limited.

Vivi sucked on a clove cigarette and breathed out a plume of smoke, her thoughts ticking.

“What?” I asked her.

“It’s like . . . Well, maybe it’s like how the three of us can find each other,” she said. “He has her blood, and so now he can find her too.”

“How does that make sense?”

“Fuck, Iris. I don’t know. I don’t know what any of this means. I have no answers for you. I’m just throwing some thoughts out there, trying to get a brainstorming session rolling.”

“Okay, okay. God. What do we do now?”

“Keep moving, I guess.”

“Forever?”

“Until we can figure this thing out.”

“What is there to figure out?”

“How to kill a Minotaur? We’re humans, right? We’re, like, the dominant species for a reason. We’re terrifying. We have guns. We should easily be able to kill an upright cow.” Vivi stubbed out her cigarette. “I don’t have patience for this anymore,” she said as she stood and went inside. I heard her muttering to herself as she knelt by Grey’s side and slid a pillow under our sister’s head. “I want to go back to Budapest. I want to go back to drinking elderflower beer and making out with beautiful Hungarian women every night. Do you hear me? Wake up and sort out your mess. I like my life.”

I took a long inhale, then spotted Tyler at the end of the street, walking toward me with new sneakers on his feet and a Nike shoe box tucked under his arm. In his floral shirt and leopard print coat, he was an anachronism set against the cobbled road and stone houses.

“Nice kicks,” I said as he sank to the porch beside me. I offered him a banana and what was left of my coffee.

“Yes, well,” he said after taking a sip. “They’re not exactly my usual style, but they’d run out of lizard-skin Gucci loafers, so what’s a man to do?”

“I thought we might have seen the last of you.”

“I went to the train station and bought a ticket. I even got on the train and found my seat.”

“So why are you back here?”

“Oh, some kind of fire alarm went off and they evacuated all the passengers. I obviously wasn’t going to wait on the platform in the cold.”

“And here I was thinking you were suddenly struck by a moment of conscience.”

“God, no.” Tyler stretched out his long legs in front of him and tapped his new shoes together.

“I read about your sister.”

Tyler said nothing.

“If you don’t want to talk about her, I—”

“It’s fine. I just . . .” He scratched the bridge of his nose. “It happened a long time ago. I’m the youngest of four. The only boy. We were at a beach in the summer. I was five, Rosie was seven. We were good swimmers. We were daring each other to swim farther and farther out.” He recounted it like it was a Wikipedia article. It was the same way I talked about my abduction, if I had to. Removing the emotion and stating the bare-bones facts made it easier. “We got caught in a rip. We both went under. When they pulled me out, I had no heartbeat for three minutes. Eventually, they revived me. They couldn’t bring her back.”

“I know it’s not enough to say I’m sorry, but I’m sorry.”

Tyler had only 3 percent battery left on his phone, but he unlocked it and navigated to his Favorites folder in his photographs and showed her to me. Rosie. The little girl I’d seen in the news article, with long dark hair and a heavy fringe. There were pictures of her visiting family in Seoul. Pictures of her toothless grin on her first day of school. Pictures of her playing with her siblings: her two teenage sisters and Tyler. “Rosie was the bravest and most mischievous of the four of us. Always getting into trouble.”

“Sounds like Vivi.”

“Vivi reminds me of her, actually. Both full of attitude and incredibly annoying at times but endearing, somehow.” Tyler put his phone away. “Grey thinks I went there, you know.”

“Went where?”

“The Halfway. For the few minutes my heart stopped, that’s where she thinks I went.”

“Huh.”

“Huh, what? That was a very epiphanic huh.”

“Just that . . . Grey told me once that she thought you were special. I wonder if that’s why we can’t make you do whatever we want.” Tyler had died. Tyler had come back. Tyler was impervious to our compulsion. “I thought you thought this was all in my head?”

“Well, the way Grey talked about it—I mean, I assumed, like a normal person, that it was a fairy tale. I don’t remember much about that day, after I went into the water, but I do remember the smell of smoke when I came to on the beach. My mother told me—when I coughed up water from my lungs during the CPR, she thought she saw me coughing up flowers. I just never . . . It’s real, isn’t it? What’s happening is real.”

“Yeah. I think it is.”

“I bought you a gift,” he said. Tucked inside the Nike shoe box were three new iPhone chargers. Tyler handed me one. “One for you, one for me, one for your aggressively tattooed sister.”

“Thank you. That’s weirdly thoughtful.”

“People are always so surprised when I turn out to not be an absolute dick.”

“To be fair, you do seem to go out of your way to act like an absolute dick.”

“All part of my image, Little Hollow. Bad-boy swagger. I’m actually very deep.”

“I knew there had to be some reason Grey was dating you.”

“Beyond my outrageous good looks, you mean? I didn’t really go to the train station, you know.” Tyler took another sip of my coffee and then turned to look through the door, to where Grey slept on the squalid rug. “I want her to be okay. I need her to be okay.”

“Me too,” I said as I patted him on the back. It felt so strange and so good to be this close to someone without having to worry about them sinking their teeth into my skin to taste me. “Me too.”

For the first time ever, I edited my Find Friends app to remove my mother from the list of people who were allowed to see my location. If she knew where I was, she would be on the first flight here to bring me home. I couldn’t let that happen. It wasn’t safe for her.

I tapped her name in my Favorites list and called her.

“Iris, Iris, Iris,” my mother sobbed a half second later. “Oh my God, talk to me, baby.”

“I’m okay,” I said. The pain in her voice was corrosive. I felt it in my blood. God, how could I do this to her? “I’m okay.”

“Where are you? I knew I shouldn’t have let you stay with that thing. I’m coming to get you.”

That thing? “I can’t tell you. I’m safe, but I can’t come home yet. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone for.” I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to come back.

I thought about school then, and the carefully constructed fantasy future I’d allowed myself to dream about for years. The one in which I wore a navy Oxford University sweatshirt as I carried textbooks across the lawns of Magdalen College. The one in which I had classmates who didn’t know me as a famous missing person or the younger sister of a supermodel, but as Iris Hollow, medical student. The one in which I had a girlfriend or a boyfriend and kissing them didn’t feel scary. The one in which I went punting on the River Cherwell and drank cider at summer picnics with my friends and spent long hours studying in libraries built inside the hallowed halls of old churches.

A future that, at this moment in time, felt like it was slipping away—but I had my sister back, and that was what mattered more than anything.

“That thing has taken everything else from me,” Cate said. “I’m not going to let her take you too. Tell me where you are. You are mine, not hers. Do you hear me? You are mine.”

“Are you talking about . . . Grey?”

“Stay away from her, Iris. Please. Wherever you are, just get away from her. You are not safe, you are—”

“Cate. Stop. I’m not leaving her. I’m not abandoning my sisters.”

“Don’t trust her. Run. Listen to me. Please. You have to run. Run. Run. She is not—”

I hung up and pressed the heel of my hand against my mouth to keep from sobbing. My phone vibrated with an incoming call. A picture of my mother and me together filled my screen, my opaline hair and pale forehead pressed close to her flushed cheek, her mop of dark curls. We were both smiling. Our features were startling in their dissimilarity. The call ended, and then my mother called again, and again, and again. I blocked her number.

My mother had called my sister a thing. My mother had told me to run from her.

I didn’t know what to do with that, except swallow my revulsion and lean back against the wall. The house was quiet. The three of us were together. Grey was alive. That was enough.

I savored the calm for a handful of minutes—then I typed minotaur into Chrome and tapped Go. The search returned images of a hulking demon bull with an axe, cartoonish in its size and evilness. It was frequently depicted with washboard abs, cloven hooves, and glowing red eyes. Nothing like the man who was following us.

The Wikipedia article recounted the Greek myth, of a flesh-eating monster trapped at the center of a labyrinth by the master craftsman Daedalus. I scrolled down. The Minotaur appeared in Dante’s Inferno, which piqued my interest—it was one of Grey’s favorite books—but the mention was brief, and Dante and Virgil passed by it quickly. Picasso included the creature in several of his etchings. There were Minotaurs in Dungeons & Dragons and Assassin’s Creed. Useless.

Under the See also section, there was a list of comparable entities: I tapped on Ox-Head, “guardian of the Underworld in Chinese mythology,” and read about it and Horse-Face, two guardians of the realm of the dead who captured human souls and dragged them to Hell. I navigated back and tapped another name I vaguely recognized: Moloch. “A Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice.” I pressed my lips together and skimmed the entry: archaeological evidence of children sacrificed in Carthage, Cronus eating his children.

I stopped at the Peter Paul Rubens painting that had been included alongside the text: Saturn Devouring His Son. In it, a naked male god with gray hair and a gray beard bent over the small child he held in his hand, his teeth ripping at the flesh of the baby’s chest.

“Jesus,” I whispered.

I put my phone down and ran my hands through my hair. I needed a shower. I needed to sleep.

I went upstairs. There were two bedrooms, though one was unfurnished and the double bed in the other was stripped of sheets, its bare mattress stained and sagging. The girl slept, I figured, in the nest of fetid blankets in the corner of the room, its layers lined with leaves and bits of paper. I knelt and unfolded a square of newspaper, a clipping that had turned brittle with age. Missing Child, the headline read, followed by a black-and-white photograph of a little girl. Underneath, the caption read: Eleven-year-old Agnes Young, the only daughter of Phillip and Samantha Young, has been missing for five days. I trailed my fingertips over the girl’s face, over the familiar white cotton nightdress she wore. Another clipping was the death notice from last year of one Samantha Young, aged ninety-six. Reunited with her beloved daughter, Agnes, at long last, it read. I folded them both and put them back where I found them, my thoughts snagging on the dates.

I sat in the shower for a long time after that, my knees tucked up to my chin, arms wrapped around my shins until I was curled as tight as a river stone beneath the falling water.

I cried. Not a lot and not easily, but a few hard sobs clutched at my ribs and squeezed me. I cried for the days Grey had been missing and I cried in relief that she was here and I cried for myself, for the life I had worked for and the life I wanted, the life that seemed so fragile now. I cried because my mother thought my sister was dangerous and I cried because a part of me knew it was true.

I felt better when I was done. I changed back into my sweaty T-shirt and jeans, my skin protesting at the salt and grime clinging to the fabric.

Tyler took first watch while Vivi and I slept on the living room floor next to Grey. The day was unseasonably bright for winter in Edinburgh. The room was hot from the boiler, and the air felt close and stank of rotting forest, but none of us had really slept the night before, and the nights before that had been riddled with stress and waiting and wanting, so we both fell into heavy, dreamless sleeps. I slept more deeply than I had in weeks, my fingertips pressed to Vivi’s wrist on one side of me, Grey’s throat on the other. The rhythm of their pulses like a metronome.

I woke through a hazy curtain sometime in the afternoon when the girl—Agnes—came back. I watched her for a little while as she sat in a chair by the front window, the shotgun resting across her lap. When I woke again, it was night. The house was dark, but there was a light on in the kitchen and the hushed voices of Vivi and Tyler—made soft and giddy at the edges, I guessed, by several servings of alcohol—drifted through. I put my palm on Grey’s cheek. Her fever had broken sometime during the afternoon and her skin no longer felt sodden. When I peeled back the bandages on her arms, the flowers were wilted, the wounds they grew from almost healed.

“Hey, kid,” a gravelly voice whispered.

I looked up. Grey’s eyes were cracked only a sliver, but she wore half a smile.

“You’re awake!”

“Shhh,” Grey said, laughing weakly. “I just want a few more minutes of peace before I have to get up.”

“I thought you were dead,” I whispered as I buried my face in her neck. “I thought you were dead.”

“Hey, hey. No. I’m here. I’m here.”

“There was a body in your apartment. There are people following you. A man who wears a bull skull on his head. The little girl—Agnes—says he’ll be able to find you here.”

“How long have I been out? We should probably get back on the road before he tracks us down.”

“Who is he? What does he want from you? Did he kidnap us when we were children?”

Grey ran her fingers through my hair and tucked a strand of it behind my ear. “No, he didn’t take us when we were children.”

“You said in Vogue that you remember. You remember everything that happened to us. So what happened to us?”

There was a noise from the kitchen, a round of Vivi’s snorted laughter. “Who else is here?” Grey asked.

“Vivi and Tyler.”

“Tyler came?”

“We haven’t been able to get rid of him.”

Grey smiled. “Can I see him?”

“What are we going to do, Grey?” Where would we go now? How could we run from an enemy who would always be able to find us? Grey tried to speak, but her throat caught and she coughed. “Hang on. I’ll get you some water.”

I stood and stretched and went into the kitchen, where Vivi had stripped down to a crop top and jeans, her bare feet up on the table, a clove cigarette in her mouth and another tucked behind her ear. She and Tyler were playing cards and drinking whiskey. Vivi’s wisteria tattoo had grown since I last saw it. It now twisted under her bra and around her rib cage, across the flat plane of her stomach and around her portrait of Lady Hamilton before it dipped below the waistband of her jeans. Purple watercolor blossoms bloomed from the vines. Some of the leaves had begun to curl and blacken with rot. I wondered if she’d purposefully added to it, or if the ink had grown wild across her skin, unable to be stopped.

“Care to join?” Tyler said around one of Vivi’s clove cigarettes. He, too, was shirtless in the warm kitchen. I tried not to let my gaze linger on him for too long.

“You two are playing poker and getting pissed on your watch?” I asked as I poured a glass of water from the sink.

“We both have extremely high alcohol tolerances,” Vivi said.

“By that, she means we’re high-functioning drunks who require at least a few shots of medicinal booze every day to remain operative. Really, getting pissed was the responsible thing to do,” Tyler said. “How’s Grey?”

“Awake,” I said, then nodded at Tyler. “She wants to see you.” Tyler stood so quickly that his chair toppled over behind him. I handed him the glass of water. “Take this to her.”

“How is she?” Vivi asked.

“Weak. I’m so used to her being strong. It feels wrong to see her like this.”

“Well, thank God she’s awake now to tell us what to do. If I had to make one more decision . . .” Vivi mimed her head exploding.

“Where’s Agnes?”

Vivi looked puzzled. “Who?”

“The little girl.”

“Oh. The kid climbed up on the roof with the gun. Said if he’s going to come, he’s probably going to come at night. Thinks she’s Clint Eastwood or something.”

“I’ll take her some tea.” There was no kettle, so I put a pot of water on the stove and waited for it to boil. “Grey’s fever has broken,” I said as I searched the cupboards for cups. “We should get out of here as soon as she’s strong enough. Preferably sober.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Vivi said as she leaned over the table to peek at Tyler’s cards.

I found two mugs in the sink, crusted with grime. They looked familiar: raw clay on the outside, green glaze on the inside, imperfect handles. GH stamped on the bottom, the mark of their creator: Gabe Hollow. Grey must have brought them here from London. I put my hands around one, cupping its form, holding it the way he must have held it as it turned beneath his fingers on the wheel. My hands, exactly where my father’s hands had once been.

I stirred dark leaves into them both.

Tyler and Grey were huddled together on the couch when I went back in the living room, her head against his shoulder, his fingers in her hair. I lingered on the stairs and listened to them speak softly to each other, relieved whispers of I missed you and I love you and I’m sorry drifting to where I stood. I continued upstairs to find Agnes. She was in her room, sitting on the roof just outside her window, blackened feet still bare even in the caustic cold that had settled in after sunset. I handed her one of the steaming cups of tea. For a moment she hesitated, but then she took it.

I crawled through the window and sat next to her and looked out over the city. The sleet light of the winter sky had turned the world grayscale. For a while, we sipped in silence.

“You were there,” I said finally. It was a guess. “You fell through. To the same place my sisters and I ended up when we were children. Except you didn’t get to come home like we did. You got stuck.” Agnes sipped her tea and didn’t disagree with me, so I continued. “Then Grey found you and brought you back somehow—but wherever you were, you’d already spent too long there. It got inside you. Changed you.”

“The Halfway never lets you go,” she said. “Not really.” The tea had wet her throat, smoothed over the roughness. For the first time, she sounded almost like a child and not like something wild. “It’s supposed to be a one-way ticket. Things that end up there are not supposed to be able to find a way back.”

“What is it? The Halfway? My sister seems to think it’s somewhere between life and death.”

“Your sister is right. It’s a liminal place on the borders of the living and the dead—though I thought of it more as a kind of hell. Everything that dies passes through there. People, animals, plants. Most things move on quickly, as they’re supposed to, but some things get stuck. Humans, usually. The ones who can’t let go, or who are mourned too deeply by those they leave behind. There’s an old folk song—‘The Unquiet Grave.’ Perhaps you know it?”

I breathed into my cup. My breath rose off the surface of the tea and sent a warm, moist cloud to linger about my face. I did know the song. In it, a woman died and her lover mourned her so hard, weeping by her graveside for a year, that she couldn’t find peace, couldn’t move on. Was Agnes saying that the grief of the living could disturb the dead, could trap them in a slip of space between life and death? “How did you end up there if you didn’t die?”

“When I was a child, I was playing in Holyrood Park at sunset. There were old chapel ruins there that people said were haunted. My parents had banned me from playing there, but I was curious. I heard a voice on the other side of a ruined doorway. I followed it. I ended up somewhere else and I couldn’t find my way back. Sometimes the veil between the living and the dead grows thin. Sometimes the dead speak to the living and lure them through.”

“Is that what happened to us too?” I whispered.

Agnes sipped her tea. “You disappeared on New Year’s Eve?”

“At the stroke of midnight.”

“Between one year and the next. It makes sense. The veil is thinnest at liminal times. Sunset, sunrise, midnight.” Agnes looked like a child, but didn’t speak like a child. She had been missing for decades. I wondered how old her mind was. “If you were near a ruined door, perhaps you heard the dead calling. Perhaps you followed.”

“We were in the Old Town, on a street where a house had burned down a few weeks before. It was all destroyed—except for the front doorframe. That was still there, freestanding.”

Agnes nodded. “A door that used to lead somewhere, but now leads somewhere else.”

“You came back. You’re like us.”

“I am not like you. You must understand, by now, that you are different. Why are you so beautiful, do you think? So hungry? So able to bend the wills of those around you? You are like the death flowers that grow rampant in your wake: lovely to look at, intoxicating even, but get too close and you will soon learn that there is something rank beneath. That’s what beauty often is, in nature. A warning. A disguise. Do you understand?”

“No.” Yet I did understand, on some basic level. The purple, otherworldly petals of the monkshood flower concealed poison that could deliver instant death. Poison dart frogs were pretty as jewels—and one gram of the toxin that coated their skin could kill thousands of humans. Extreme beauty meant danger. Extreme beauty meant death.

“There is something in your blood that lets you slip between the place of the living and the dead—and back again—as you please.”

“Well, then, how did you get back?”

“Runes written on my skin in your sister’s blood. The rune for death.” Agnes took my hand and drew a shape on my palm with her finger: a line with three prongs at the bottom in the shape of an inverted arrow. “The rune for passage.” Agnes drew the shape of a capital M. “The rune for life.” This time, she drew the inverse of the first rune: a line with three prongs at the top. “Grey figured it out. I don’t know how. An incantation in blood and language to allow the dead to slip through to the world of the living.”

“You’re not dead, though.”

“No. The man that hunts you is, though. I can stay here because I belong here—I never died—but he can only cross over temporarily using Grey’s blood and the runes.”

“What makes us different? Why were we able to come back? Why does our blood let us come and go as we please?”

“Your sister is a wily one. A trickster. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.” Agnes reached out to trail a gangrenous fingertip over the scar at my throat. “Do you think there is any terrible thing she wouldn’t do to save you? Any line she wouldn’t cross? Any sacrifice she wouldn’t be willing make?”

“Tell me. Tell me the truth.”

“Your life would be happier if you didn’t know.”

“Knowledge is power.”

“And ignorance is bliss.”

There was a muffled yelp from downstairs then, followed by a thump. Agnes snatched her hand back from my throat. We looked at each other for a moment, each questioning the other: Did you hear that too? There was silence for a few heartbeats. Then Vivi’s scream bolted us both into action. I scrabbled to get inside, but slipped down the old roof tiles. Agnes was faster than me, smaller and more nimble. She was already on the stairs by the time I hauled myself through the window, my limbs windmilling and adrenaline slamming. I heard glass break; a gasp of pain; Tyler swearing. I took the stairs three at a time and stuttered to a stop on the last one behind Agnes, who was standing with her shotgun aimed across the room.

The man had found us. In one hand he held Grey by the hair, her chin lolling on her chest, her hospital gown a Jackson Pollock painting of blood and vomit. Vivi, still dressed in a crop top and jeans, was hefted over his shoulder, biting and clawing and kicking, trying to break free. Tyler brandished a broken wine bottle and was trying to stab it into the man’s chest, but he was too slow, his reflexes softened at the edges by booze. Then he caught one of the horned man’s fists full in the face and collapsed, boneless, to the ground.

Agnes screamed. The man looked toward us. Agnes pumped the shotgun and, without hesitation, pulled the trigger. The gun went off and made a stippled mess of the man’s shoulder, but he didn’t bleed. He grunted and dropped Vivi and let Grey go, then came barreling toward us. Agnes shot again, but the man was furious now, and even a second shot that tore a chunk of dead flesh from his neck and sent shattered particles from his bone mask flying like grains of rice wasn’t enough to stop him. He slammed both of us into the wall, the wood and plasterboard tearing like paper beneath our weight. It was suddenly dark and I couldn’t breathe, the heft of two bodies on top of me, a pile of rubble digging into my neck, the soft parts of my back. Then the weight of him was gone and I sucked in a breath. The world blurred and rippled around the pain. I coughed up a wad of blood and spat it to the side.

We’d burst through the wall and were sprawled out on the kitchen floor. I pushed Agnes off me and stood, trying to ignore the too-limp feeling of her body, the ugly angle of her neck. None of my limbs were broken, but whenever I inhaled, a bright pop of pain in my ribs made me gasp. I staggered back through the hole in the wall—which, I noted dully, was filled with crawling things and black mold. Tyler was slack on the floor, one side of his face bloody and sunken. The room was trashed and the front door was open.

Both of my sisters—and the man—were gone.

I didn’t stop to check if Tyler was alive. I fished Grey’s knife out of my coat pocket and lurched down the front steps onto the street. There was a sharp, tugging pain across my collarbone that brought tears to my eyes. Somewhere, not far away, Vivi was still fighting, giving the man hell. I could hear her strangled shrieks, the slap of her fists against his skin, just around the corner. “Vivi!” I tried to scream, but the impact had crushed something in my lungs, in my throat, and I couldn’t get out more than a wheeze. I tried to run but kept teetering sideways if I moved too quickly. A concussion, maybe.

Then Vivi’s screams abruptly stopped midway, fizzling out like hot metal plunged into water. I turned the corner, half expecting to find the man standing over her lifeless body, but the street was empty. I caught the scent of smoke and rot. A handful of dry leaves curled across the cobblestones toward me.

There was nothing else.

They were both gone.

They had both been taken.

“No,” I rasped, limping down the street. “No, no, no, no, no.”

They could not be gone.

I would not allow them to be gone.

Not both of them.

Not again.

I banged on doors and windows, wheezing a broken animal moan. “Vivi! Grey! Vivi! Grey!” I rattled door handles and rang bells. Lights came on in windows. Sleepy residents came to their doors and swore at me. Didn’t I know what fucking time it was?

Somewhere, not far from where I stood, my sisters had been dragged through a crack in the world. I didn’t know how to follow. The one person who did—a little girl with rotten limbs—was, I suspected, already dead. Tyler might be too.

Something tightened in my chest, picking holes in my lungs. I couldn’t stand anymore. I sank to my knees in the middle of the street, struggling to suck air past my broken ribs, and cried with my forehead pressed against the cobbles until I heard sirens.