Chapter 22

22

I wandered through the forest by myself. Beads of sweat rolled down my forehead, made my eyes sting. I was alone now, with no company and nothing to mark my way except the insistent tug in my chest that, yes, my sisters were this way, that each step brought me closer to them.

I tied strips of Tyler’s floral shirt around branches, hoping I would be able to find my way back to him, until I ran out of fabric and had to press on anyway.

Things followed me in the everdusk, things that moved in the corners of my eyes but disappeared when I snapped my head in their direction. Wild dogs, maybe, or something stranger. Dead things with sharp teeth waiting for me to slow, to stop, to sit down.

I kept moving, kept my knife held at my side, but nothing came close enough to try me.

There were more knotted bodies of root and bone and hair: the shapes of dead children curled with their backs against trees, turning slowly to seed; women with their arms outstretched, reaching for something the moment they became more this place than human. There were more structures, too, sloughing into rubble. A junkyard of lost people and lost things.

I kept expecting to see Tyler somewhere up ahead or trailing behind. Whenever a twig snapped or a bird fluttered into flight, I’d swivel in the direction of the sound, momentarily hopeful—but it would only ever be some strange creature, watching me as our paths crossed: deer, cats, squirrels, all of them roaming freely in the half-light of the haunted wood. All were warped, in varying degrees of severity: black-eyed, covered in lichen, little gardens of flowers sprouting from the thick moss on their backs. Creatures from a terrible fairy tale. We would lock eyes for a moment, the animals curious about the intruder who smelled of a different place—who smelled alive—and then they would continue on in the dark, undisturbed by my presence.

My lower back and legs were aching by the time I came across the shoes lying discarded on the forest floor. A pair of Nike sneakers, new enough that I could tell they hadn’t been in the Halfway for long. There was no rot, no mold, no decay.

I picked them up and turned them over in my hands. They were still tied together and the fabric was still slightly damp. They were Tyler’s, the new ones he’d bought in Edinburgh after he’d lost his own shoes at the hospital in London.

Tyler had come this way. Tyler had dropped them here. A bread crumb left for me, perhaps? It was both comforting and ominous—we were headed in the same direction, but I was sure now that Tyler had not come of his own free will.

I turned in a slow circle, searching the forest for any other sign of him, but there was none. I tied the shoes to Vivi’s backpack. When I found him, he would need them.

I kept moving. Time kept shifting in the odd way it did here.

I was weary by the time I reached the clearing, my head smacking with dehydration and hunger. My throat and eyes were grit-dry and my tongue tasted of smoke. If I ever made it home, I was sure my hair would stink of burning wood for weeks.

The clearing was not dissimilar to the one Tyler and I had first arrived in, the ground thick with a carpet of long grass and decaying leaves, and something monstrous in the middle.

“Oh my God,” I whispered when I realized what I was seeing.

Grey and Vivi were here, both gagged and bound to stakes, their wrists tied above their heads. Bundles of wood and dried moss had been stacked at their feet. A swarming garden of carrion flowers grew on them, up their legs and around their torsos and through their hair, breeding on their skin, clustering around their mouths and eyes. I could feel the bird-wing flutter of their hearts, the warmth of them, the life of them, the hot blood that still thrummed through their bodies. Vivi’s was stronger, redder, more vibrant. Grey’s was a faded thing now, thin and thready.

There was a third stake set up between the other two, empty and waiting.

Our father meant to burn us all—but no.

Not our father.

Gabe Hollow was the father of three children buried by a crumbling house in a halfway world. The things he meant to burn—us—were not his children, but the creatures that came back in the shape of his children. Impostors. Cuckoos.

I took my shoes off.

“Damn,” I said quietly at the sight of my feet, turning them this way and that in the low light, touching the sodden, tender flesh I found beneath my damp socks. My toes had begun to blacken. When I touched the nail of my big toe, it came away easily from its bed. There was no pain. A carrion flower bud had begun to unfurl from the bed of my toenail. I plucked the flower from my skin and crushed it between my fingertips.

I shoved my shoes in Vivi’s backpack and moved around the edge of the clearing barefoot, Grey’s knife at my side. I was more nimble without shoes. Years of trailing Grey had taught me how to move quietly across forest floors and down creaky wooden hallways alike. I tried not to look down at my feet as I moved. I didn’t want to see the dying flesh.

Vivi was awake, moving, speaking to someone I couldn’t see. “Let me go!” she muffled through her gag as she threw her head back. “Let me go!” Again, she snapped her head back against the stake behind her as hard as she could. I heard a crack. Vivi fell forward, unconscious, the whole weight of her body borne by the bonds at her wrists. The back of her skull was bleeding. Grey stirred and lifted her head. Her black eyes met mine, unblinking. At first, I wasn’t sure if she could see me or could just feel my presence.

Go,her eyes pleaded. Go. Please.

I shook my head. Grey’s nostrils flared in anger, but there was nothing she could do to make me leave. I would sooner take my place next to them on the pyre than leave knowing I hadn’t done everything I could to save them.

Tyler?I mouthed to my oldest sister. Grey took a few quick breaths without blinking, then shook her head. What did that mean?

No, she didn’t know where Tyler was?

Or no, Tyler was already dead?

I didn’t like the way she cowered. Grey Hollow, who feared no man, who went looking for trouble because she was the thing in the dark. It was wrong to see her tremble.

Then a figure appeared from the other side of the pyre.

“Tyler?” I whispered. Tyler turned to look at me.

Alive, alive, alive. Somehow, he’d found his way to my sisters and made it here before me. I stepped out from my hiding place and hesitated at the edge of the wood. I wanted to run to him and throw my arms around his warm chest. The relief at not being alone—not having to face this horror by myself—washed over me.

Grey was yanking hard against her bonds, screaming silently into her gag. Tears streaked down her face as she shook her head furiously.

When I reached him, Tyler said nothing. I studied his face. There was something wrong about his eyes. All of the features were right—the skin, the lips, the smug arch in his eyebrow—but something deeper was incorrect. The bones that had been knocked out of place by the Gabe’s punch back in Edinburgh had snapped back to their correct position. The tattoos on his arms were warped, as though his skin had been wet and wrung out and redraped over his bones.

And then, when his lips parted, his mouth was wrong. The gums had turned black and the teeth had started to rot.

Gabe Hollow continues to insist that all three children’s eyes and teeth have changed.

I stumbled back and looked him up and down. It was a close match. A very close match. So close that, if he kept his mouth shut, you might never know.

“No,” I whispered. “You’re not Tyler.”

“You’re not Iris,” he rasped in reply—but it was not his voice.

It was the voice of my father.

It was the voice of Gabe Hollow, coming from Tyler’s face, Tyler’s mouth.

Tyler’s skin.

Gabe took a step toward me. I took another step back.

“What did you do to him?” I asked.

“The same thing you did to my daughters,” my father’s voice answered.

My gaze traveled from Gabe’s face to his throat. Or rather, Tyler’s face to Tyler’s throat. He lifted his chin a little to give me a better look. There, nestled in the crook of his collarbone, was a fresh cut stitched with silken thread. Neat work. It would heal well, as mine had.

I took another step back, my mind dipping again into the abyss where understanding dwelled just out of reach. My heart beat hard against my sternum, my skin suddenly cold with sweat. All of the little puzzle pieces were laid out, waiting for me to put them together into a picture that made sense.

I was not Iris Hollow. I looked like Iris Hollow.

My father was not Tyler, but he looked like Tyler.

Gabe Hollow continues to insist that all three children’s eyes and teeth have changed.

“How could you?” my father asked. “How could you do it to children? To helpless little girls?”

I glanced at Grey, who was crying hard now.

I turned back to Gabe. “I don’t understand.”

Gabe searched my face. “You know what you are.”

“I don’t. I swear.”

He drew a finger knife across his neck, then mimed sticking the fingers of his right hand in the wound and drawing the skin up, up, up over his head. My jaw shook as he stared at me, waiting for a reaction. “That thing you call a sister is a monster,” he said as he pointed at Grey, “but at least she let you forget that.”

Forget this,Grey had whispered to me. “Forget what?”

Gabe was circling me now. I tightened my grip on my knife. “That you are a dead thing walking around wearing the skin of a murdered girl,” he said, his voice shaking. “That you went home to her family—to her bed, to her parents’ arms—while she decomposed in a grave in a dead place. That you slipped her warm skin over yours, and then your sister stitched you up at the throat.”

“That can’t be true,” I whispered, because it was gruesome and terrible and impossible—but I knew, even as I said it, that it could be.

That it was.

Gabe had known, from the moment he saw us, that something wasn’t right. That something inside of us had changed. Different eyes, different teeth. A layer of skin beneath skin.

“After that thing made me kill myself, I ended up here,” Gabe said. “I searched for my children. I found them where you left them. I buried them myself.”

I didn’t want this, his note had read—because he’d truly had no choice. Because he could not resist the compulsion of the changeling who’d taken up residence in his nest, who had pushed out his real children and ordered him—as she’d ordered the photographer who’d attacked me—to take his own life.

Another terrible truth crystalized: “You killed Tyler,” I said. “You skinned him. You’re . . . wearing him.”

“I want to go home. I want to go back to my wife. I want to go back to the life the three of you stole from me.”

A sweet man. A soft man. A man who made things with his hands. That was how Gabe Hollow had been remembered at his funeral. I’d stood at the edge of his grave and thrown an iris flower on his coffin as they lowered him into the ground, so that he’d have a piece of me wherever he’d gone.

I had loved him, even though he’d scared me.

My father flicked Vivi’s lighter and held the flame over the tinder. “Join your sisters.”

I sobbed. I had spent years missing this man. I wanted him to pull me into his arms and comfort me the way he had when I was small. I shook my head. “I can’t leave Cate all alone.”

“Please don’t fight.” Gabe’s voice cracked. “Please make it easy for me.”

“This isn’t you.”

There were tears rolling down his cheeks. “You don’t know me.”

“I do. I may not be your daughter but you are my father.”

“Don’t.”

“I know that you are kind and gentle and you wouldn’t hurt me.”

“Please let me have this,” Gabe begged. “Please get on the pyre.”

“No.”

“You burn with them. Or you watch.”

Gabe dropped the lighter. The pyre sparked and caught. Sour smoke began to churn in seconds. Grey started to choke, thrashing against the rising flames.

I screamed and ran toward her, but Gabe caught me by the backpack and yanked me to the ground. I lost hold of the knife. In a second he was atop my body, his knee a barbed spike against my broken ribs, his fingers around my throat. It was quick and violent and ugly.

What would Grey do? What would Grey do?I thought as I lay dying. My nails clawed at my father’s hands. My heels dug into the soft ground beneath me, trying to find purchase. My eyes bulged from their sockets. My head was full of blood and a creeping darkness that seemed to be spreading from my ears toward my eyes, thinning my vision.

Grey would fight. Grey would make him bleed, somehow. Grey would scramble for the knife that had landed just beyond my reach. Grey would rend flesh and break bones and salt the earth of your life if you crossed her.

She was screaming now, more for me than for herself. “Let her go!” she howled at Gabe, her words muffled by her gag. “I will destroy you!”

A clear thought made its way through the rising shadow in my mind: You already have.

Grey had destroyed this man, as she had many others. Grey was a tornado in the form of a girl. She took what she wanted and left a trail of destruction in her wake, and I had always admired her for it. It took guts to be a girl in this world and live like that. She did it because she was powerful. She did it because she could.

I thought of Justine Khan and her mouth on mine, her eyes wide with fear as she bit down on my lips. I thought of my father’s pale form at the end of my bed, the way he froze when I opened my eyes, the way prey freezes when it spots a stalking predator. I thought of Grey walking along dark streets at night, waiting for men to catcall her or worse, waiting for someone to give her an excuse.

Grey Hollow was the thing in the dark—but as much as I loved her, wanted to be her, I wasn’t like her. I couldn’t bend the world to my will, because I didn’t have the stomach to hurt people the way she did. That had always made me feel weak—but perhaps that was my strength.

What would Iris do?I thought as my field of vision narrowed to a pin.

I reached out and put my hand on Gabe’s cheek, the way I had when I was a child, for those few easy, early weeks he had let me love him.

I couldn’t remember being dead. I couldn’t remember being trapped in this place. I couldn’t remember slipping into the skin of his daughter. What I could remember was this: the warmth of Gabe Hollow’s chest as he carried me from the couch to my bed after I fell asleep watching TV. The scent of his shirts, always a mixture of Danish oil and the bone ash tang of his pottery glaze. The cadence of his voice as he read me bedtime stories. The iris flowers he helped me press between the pages of books. How hard I had cried at his funeral.

“Papa,” I managed to gasp. Gabe’s eyes in Tyler’s face met mine.

I was not his daughter, but I looked like his daughter. I had her face—and I hoped that was enough. I hoped, even knowing what I was, that he couldn’t stare into my face while he killed me.

Our eyes held. Gabe sobbed, gave one hard, final squeeze—and then he let me go.

I sucked in a ragged breath and lunged for the knife and scrambled out from beneath him, to the pyre, to where the flames were snapping at the heels of both my sisters. Grey was moaning, groggy from smoke inhalation. I dumped the backpack on the ground and scrambled up the burning debris toward them, picking a path through the fire. My eyelashes curled and melted in the wall of heat. There was no air to pull into my lungs. I inhaled ash and embers. The fire licked and hissed, searing my hands, my knees, my bare feet as I climbed.

I slipped Grey’s blade through her leather bonds first. The moment she was free, the power shifted. I felt it. It was as if time slowed. Grey unfurled to her full height and took the knife from my hand and cut Vivi free, and then she was dragging us both through the fire as it lurched after us. Wood split and popped, sending hot embers into our hair, our clothes. The fuel beneath us burned fluorescent red and the heat was a wall, solid and impassable until Grey pulled us away and we tumbled out the other side onto the cool, sodden grass of the clearing.

“Vivi!” Grey said as she shook our sister’s shoulders. “Vivi!” Then she was bent over her, her palms sinking into Vivi’s chest, four, five times, until Vivi finally moaned. “Oh, thank God, thank God,” Grey said as she took Vivi’s ash-slicked face in her hands and bent to kiss her forehead.

I stared at my arm, where a patch of my skin had burned away and blackened at the edges. Beneath it, the truth I’d wanted to know and hadn’t wanted to know: a second layer of skin, untouched by the flames.

Grey was watching me, her breaths coming in stabs.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” I asked her. I was shaking. The pain of my burns was beginning to gather, the singed nerve endings waking up in my toes, my hands, the tips of my fingers. “We’re not us.”

Grey closed her eyes. A tear squeezed from between her lashes and swept a clean line through the grime and blood on her cheek. Finally, she nodded.

True.

Then she stood and went to where Tyler’s skin now lay empty and deflated on the forest floor. Gabe, like Rosie, was gone, moved on to wherever the dead went when they let go of this place, when it let go of them. What he left behind in his absence was gruesome: Tyler’s skinsuit with no bones or muscle or soul to animate it. A flat sack of skin, the hair and eyelashes and fingernails still attached.

I had left Tyler alone. I had left him alone in the woods and my father had found him, taken him, done this to him.

I wondered where Tyler’s flayed body was. I looked back at the pyre. The fire churned above the tree line now, the stakes that had been set up for us engulfed in flames. The smoke smelled of blistering fat, burning bone. In there. His body must be in there, hidden beneath the blaze, where we were supposed to be.

Grey was bent over his flat skin. “I’m not letting you go,” she chanted. “I’m not letting you go, I’m not letting you go.”

“We saw Gabe skin him,” Vivi rasped as she rolled onto her side. I went to her and slid my palm under her cheek and picked leaves from the tacky wound at the back of her head. “Poor Grey.”

“I’m not letting you go,” Grey continued, her hands hovering over the skin that had once covered Tyler’s chest. God. No one should have to see someone they loved like that. “I’m not letting you go.”

“Grey,” I said quietly. “We have to go home.”

“I am not leaving without him,” she said. “I can save him.”

“How?”

“The same way I saved you. If he’s stuck here, I can stitch his soul back inside his skin.” She leaned down to speak to him. “Listen to me, Tyler. I bind you with my grief. I blame myself for your death and I’m not letting you go. Come back to me.”

I tried to wrap my head around all the different pieces of him. His dead body, burning unseen in the pyre. The skin from that body, laid out in front of me. His soul—or whatever it was—the leftover part of him that would pass through this place on its way to oblivion.

I might see him again. I let that small hope kindle in my chest as we waited.

And waited.

And waited.

“I don’t think he’s here,” Vivi’s cheek was hot beneath my burned hand. We couldn’t linger. We had to get out of the Halfway. “I don’t think he’s coming.”

“No,” Grey breathed, her hands sinking into the forest floor. Pendants of saliva swayed from her lips as she wailed out the pain of her grief. It wrung her body of air, contorted her into a ball of ribs, fists. When she sucked in her next breath, it was the sound of a church organ: huge and long and mournful. Sobs shook her, bent her, broke her, until the despair left her spent. The most beautiful woman in the world, so used to the universe bending to her will, unable to save the life of the man she loved.

I saw a flicker of movement at the edge of the clearing. There was a figure, dark-haired and naked, staring at me from between the trees. I opened my mouth to cry out to him, but he shook his head.

Then, as quickly as he had appeared, the soul of Tyler Yang faded back into the shadows.