Chapter 23

23

Climbing out ofthe Halfway wasn’t like falling into it. Falling into it had been as easy as taking a step over a threshold, like slipping down a slide. Gravity did most of the work. Coming the other way was hard. I had to drag my whole body through tar. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see. I was drowning in nothingness, and then, finally, I fell backward, into a field of flowers and smoke. It was dark. The ground beneath me was hard and stank of burned wood and the chemical punch of smoking plastic. For a second, I was worried it hadn’t worked. Then Grey and Vivi fell after me, on top of me. The pain of my broken ribs and the disorientation of the door forced bile from my stomach. I rolled onto my side and vomited.

I blinked. The darkness thinned to vapor. We were in a burned-out kitchen covered in a blanket of carrion flowers. Grey’s kitchen. I pulled myself upright on the checkerboard floor. The backs of my arms and legs were coated in soot. The world was silent and still.

“God, it sucks even harder coming back,” Vivi moaned, her voice raspy and wrong.

I helped her roll onto her side and slid her backpack under her head while Grey riffled through the books that had been strewn on the floor when we toppled the bookshelf.

“We should get her to a hospital,” I said as I stroked the peach fuzz of Vivi’s skull.

“Soon,” Grey said. She found what she was looking for: a book that opened to reveal that it wasn’t a book at all, but a secret compartment. Typical Grey. Nothing was ever simple with her, nothing was ever what it seemed. Inside was an assortment of herbs in glass vials and a small bottle of vinegar. Grey used the edge of her knife to crush the anise on her kitchen floor, then added it to the vinegar along with salt and wormwood, and then she shook. The same potion that Agnes had made.

She sank down on Vivi’s other side. “Drink,” she said as she put the bottle to our sister’s lips.

Vivi squirmed away, her face sour. “I don’t want that shit.”

“Drink it,” Grey ordered, and of course Vivi did as she was told, because Grey was in charge. Grey soothed her as she vomited the Halfway out, a slop of green dead things spilling from inside her and over the charred floor.

“You killed children,” I said quietly as I watched my sister tear a strip from her hospital gown and begin to dab the tincture on the mash of broken skin at the back of Vivi’s head.

Grey looked up at me, her eyes black and flat. “Yes,” she answered.

“I’m not Iris Hollow.”

“No. Not on the inside.”

I sank my fingernails into the scar at my throat, tearing at the skin that was not mine. The skin of a dead girl encasing the body of a dead thing. The petals of a heady flower concealing something rotten and dangerous beneath.

“Stop,” Grey ordered. “If you rip your skin off, you’ll die.”

“I’m already dead, though, aren’t I?”

“Think of Cate, Iris. Think of every terrible thing that’s happened to her. You are all she has left. If you die . . . you’ll destroy her.”

I let my hands fall to my sides and sobbed. “Tell me how it happened.”

“There will be a time and a place when—”

“Tell me,” I said. “Now.”

Grey exhaled sharply and went back to tending Vivi’s wound. “I whispered to them through a door on New Year’s Eve. The veil was extra thin that night, as it always is between years. The Hollow sisters heard me. They followed. When I told them I needed help, they came with me willingly. They tied red-and-black tartan way markers so they could find their way home. They were smart—but they were also too trusting. I lured them back to the hovel we were living in. They trusted me, because I was a little girl too.”

“Then you cut their throats and skinned them.”

Grey paused her work and closed her eyes. I felt Vivi go rigid. “Yes,” Grey continued. “I helped you slip into your new skin and stitched you up at the throat. I didn’t . . . enjoy what I did. I’m not a monster. I only did what was necessary to get us out of there. To give the three of us a second chance. All that was left, in the end, was a small scar at each of our throats. We followed their bread crumbs back to where they’d fallen through. We were able to crawl back through to the land of the living. We tricked the door, because we were neither alive nor dead, but something in between. Then we waited on that street in Scotland for someone to find us and give us a home.”

A wolf in sheep’s clothing, Agnes had called Grey. Something monstrous, draped in a disguise, something so unnatural that she confounded not only humans but the very rules of life and death. Half-dead, half-alive, and thus able to move between those states as she pleased.

“Fuck me,” Vivi whispered. “We really are cuckoos?”

“You should drink too,” Grey said as she handed me the draft. I took it from her. “How did you know it would work?”

“It was a guess. A hope, born from fairy tales and fables—but my intuition was right. To escape the Halfway, we had to become halfway. To leave the liminal, we had to become liminal. I don’t think we’re the first like us—changeling myths had to have come from somewhere, right? Old tales of fairy children left in the place of human babies, these creatures with ravenous appetites and strange abilities. Others figured it out too. Not just me. Now drink.”

I turned the bottle around in my hands and watched suspended fragments of wormwood and anise drift in the vinegar. “The carrion flowers. The ants. Why are they everywhere?” I took a bitter, salty sip and immediately felt something move inside me, deep in my gut, and then my body was screaming to get it out. My stomach convulsed, and I vomited again, this time bringing up bile and mold and insects.

Grey held my hair back. “You’re okay,” she said as I retched again. “You’re okay. I don’t know all the secrets of the place, Iris. It smells like death and decay because everything there is dead. It gets inside everything, infects everything, pulls everything apart if you let it.”

Grey took the bottle back from me and took a sip herself, then gagged up what had been growing inside her. “We should get you both to a hospital.”

“I’m not done yet,” I said. “Why are we always hungry?”

“Because you’re dead and the dead are always starving.” The way she said it, so matter-of-factly. You’re dead. “Food can never sate your hunger, can never fill the emptiness inside you.”

Vivi pulled herself up. Her movements were groggy but her expression was cold stone. She looked at Grey the way I was looking at Grey: with my teeth gritted and my lips curled down in disgust.

“You made us forget,” I said. “When we came back through to Scotland. You whispered something to us. ‘Forget this.’ You took it all away.”

Grey shook her head. “I can’t make you do anything, Iris, just like I couldn’t make Tyler. Our power only works on the living, not on the dead, and not on those who’ve died briefly. I told you to forget, and you did, because you wanted to.”

“Jesus. You’re a monster,” Vivi said.

“No,” Grey said. “Don’t call me that. I promised you I would always keep you safe—and I did. I have. I brought you back to life.”

“Who is under this skin?” I pressed. “What do I look like underneath Iris Hollow’s skin?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?”

“I know you want neat, tidy answers for everything but I don’t have them. I don’t remember who we were before. After we came back, I began to forget everything too. The Halfway started to feel like a dream, like something that hadn’t really happened. I wasn’t sure anymore whether it was a story or whether it was real. I had to know, so I tried to go back. It took me a dozen tries before I figured it out.”

“In Bromley-by-Bow,” Vivi said. “The week after Gabe died.”

“Yes. I fell through a door. The same door Mary Byrne must have fallen through on New Year’s Eve in 1955. I had no trouble coming home, though. I didn’t understand, yet, that our blood was special. I didn’t remember what I was or what I’d done.”

“How did you figure it out?”

“Yulia Vasylyk, my first roommate when I left home. She followed me through a door. Stupid girl. I tried to bring her home but she couldn’t follow me back. The doors wouldn’t let her. When it became apparent that she was stuck there, she went wild. Started tearing her clothes off, biting me, scratching my face. She split my lip and I swallowed a mouthful of my own blood. Then I had an idea: If there was something in my blood that let me come and go as I pleased, maybe it could get Yulia home too. I had to knock her out, she was so hysterical. Then I smeared my blood on her, I made her drink some—nothing seemed to work. I don’t know why I thought to try runes. You know I keep a copy of A Practical Guide to the Runes on my bedside table, I just . . . I was out of other ideas. But it worked. A simple spell. A gateway between death and life. Once we were back in London, she fought me again, ran away from me. The police found her wandering the streets naked, and she blamed me for what had happened to her, even though I saved her. I brought her back.

“It’s a grim place to be trapped for eternity, but if you can come and go as you please . . . I had it all to myself to explore. In the first year I left home, I must have gone back and forth a hundred times. It was a place of secrets, and so I started sewing secrets into my designs. People loved it. It made me even more famous. There is so much to see there. Mostly horrors, but glimpses of beauty too.”

“Then something went wrong,” Vivi said.

“About a year ago, someone noticed me coming and going. Someone who’d been waiting for me for a long time.”

“Papa,” I said.

“Yes. Gabe Hollow tracked me like an animal. Watched me. Followed me. He must have seen me bring Agnes back with blood and runes. Is she . . . ?”

“No,” I said. “She didn’t make it.”

Grey pressed her lips together and sniffled. “I tried to make amends for what I did to those girls. I found Agnes, this living child trapped in a dead place, and I brought her home. That has to count for something, right?”

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure it counted for anything at all. What if Grey had stumbled upon Agnes instead of the Hollow sisters? Would she have been so benevolent then?

“Gabe laid traps for me,” Grey continued. “He almost caught me the first time. I got away, but he’d hurt me. He had enough of my blood to come through the doors himself. I didn’t realize he’d be able to track me down, but he did. He found me in Paris. I got away again, caught a flight to London. I didn’t want to involve you if I didn’t have to. I didn’t want him to come after you too, but I needed to leave you a message. I needed to know you’d come looking for me if I disappeared.”

“You broke into our house and hid the key in your old room.”

Grey nodded. “Gabe and some other dead thing ambushed me not long after, in my apartment. I got one of them. Cut his throat. If you kill them on this side of the veil, they go still. Gabe overpowered me, though. He hid the body in my ceiling and dragged me back to the Halfway. I waited. For days and days he kept me. I started to think, maybe, that you wouldn’t find me, that I would die there, all alone, that I would become part of the place I had sacrificed so much to escape. I fought. I got free. But I was weak. I was lost and wandering. And then I heard your voice. I felt your heart beating in my chest. We’re linked by what we did, by the lives we sacrificed. Linked by blood and death and magic. I found my way back to the door that led to my kitchen. Here. You helped lead me home.”

We were sisters. We felt each other’s pain. We caused each other’s pain. We knew the smell of each other’s morning breath. We made each other cry. We made each other laugh. We got angry, pinched, kicked, screamed at each other. We kissed, on the forehead, nose on nose, butterfly eyelashes swept against cheeks. We wore each other’s clothes. We stole from each other, treasured objects hidden under pillows. We defended each other. We lied to each other. We pretended to be older people, other people. We played dress up. We spied on each other. We possessed each other like shiny things. We loved each other with potent, fervent fury. Animal fury. Monstrous fury.

My sisters. My blood. My skin. What a gruesome bond we shared.

“So Papa . . . knew what we were?” Vivi asked.

Grey’s expression went dark. “Not your father. Not really. But yes. He knew. From the very first moment he saw us after we came back, I think he knew. It took Cate longer to believe, but she came to understand as well, after a time.”

“Wait—Cate knows?” I asked. “How is that possible?”

“Because I told her,” Grey said. “The night she threw me out. When I came home drunk, I snapped. I was angry. She was so controlling. I told her that I skinned her children and killed her husband, and if she didn’t leave me alone, I’d skin her too.”

“You . . . killed him?” Vivi said, still putting together the pieces that had fallen into place for me in the Halfway. “You killed Papa?”

“Like I said: I promised you I would always keep you safe, Vivi. Gabe Hollow was a threat. You know that. Papa was losing his mind. You remember the morning he put us in the car. He would have driven us off a cliff and murdered us all if I hadn’t stepped in. So I . . . made a suggestion to him. I was only just starting to understand the power we had over other people. I didn’t want to kill him. I didn’t even mean to kill him.”

I didn’t want this, his note had said. Not a suicide note, after all: a last-ditch SOS to his wife.

“He wasn’t losing his mind, though,” Vivi said. “He was right and you punished him for it.”

“I loved him,” I said.

“You barely knew him,” Grey said. “Besides, tell me you weren’t afraid of him. Tell me you didn’t breathe a sigh of relief when we found him hanging. Tell me you truly believe he wouldn’t have killed you eventually.”

“We deserve to die,” I whispered.

“Wait,” Vivi said. “Why would Cate keep us if she knows that we’re not her children?”

Grey shrugged. “Who knows? My guess is that having something that resembles your children is better than having no children at all. Grief does strange things to people.”

I looked my sister in the eyes and searched there for any sign of remorse for what she had done to Cate and Gabe Hollow, but I found none. I stood and made for the door.

“Iris, wait,” Grey said as she snatched my arm.

“No. Don’t touch me. Listen to me. I don’t want to see you anymore. I don’t want you in my life.”

“I got you out,” Grey said fiercely. “I gave you the life I promised you I would give you. I have no regrets. I want you to know that. I would do everything I did again, one hundred times over. When you are ready to talk to me, I will be waiting for you, because I am your sister.

“In this life, and in the last.”