Chapter 24

24

The X-rays showedthat four of my ribs were fractured. There wasn’t much the doctors could do for my ribs apart from pain relief, but a junior doctor was stitching the cut on my forehead by the time Cate arrived, her eyes wet and her face thin with worry.

She stood at the doorway, sniffling, looking me up and down. I knew what she was looking for this time: She wanted to make sure I was really who I said I was.

“It’s me, Cate,” I said as she stared at me. “It’s me.”

She pulled up a chair next to me and folded my free hand into hers, then bent to inhale the scent of my skin again, again, again.

“You were gone for two weeks,” she said finally.

“Two weeks?” It had felt like two days.

“I thought . . . I thought it had happened again.” Cate swallowed hard, her throat tacky with grief. “That I’d lost you again.”

“I’m back. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Oh, I know. You are banned from ever leaving the house again. Homeschooling, university by correspondence, then some kind of freelance job that doesn’t require you to ever leave me again. Okay?”

I smiled a little. “Okay,” I said as I patted her head.

“What happened?” she asked. I took a deep breath in. Cate could tell I was about to start lying and pressed one of her fingers to my lips. “Please. Please tell me the truth. I want to know. I can handle it.”

Could she, though? Could any mother handle that terrible truth?

“All done here,” said the doctor. “Let me check on how your sisters are doing, but you’re all good to go.”

“Thank you,” Cate said as he left the room.

“I went back,” I said when it was just the two of us. “I have something for you.” I motioned to Vivi’s backpack, on a chair across the room. Cate brought it to me. I unzipped it and took out the three strips of fabric I’d cut from our childhood coats. No—not our childhood coats. Cate’s daughters’ childhood coats. One of red-and-black tartan. One of green tweed. One of Bordeaux-red faux fur. There were specks of blood on each of them, though I hoped my mother would mistake them for mold or dirt.

“You found them,” Cate said as she thumbed the fabric. And then she was on her knees, shaking, gasping for breath. “Where are they?”

“They’re there. In the place we went. They . . . They’re not . . . They were together when it happened,” I continued quietly. I sank beside her, tried to comfort her. “They didn’t feel any pain. They felt warm and safe. They thought they were coming home to you.” I didn’t know if anything I said was true, but I hoped it was. My mother was sucking sharp, painful breaths into her lungs.

My mother,I thought again, rolling the words around in my head. Not my mother. Someone else’s mother. “I didn’t know,” I told her as she cried. “I promise. I didn’t know what we were or what she did.”

“I know, Iris,” she said. Then she reached up and stroked my hair. “I know.”

“How can you stand me?” I whispered. “How can you stand to have me in your house?”

“Because you’ve been my daughter for ten years. How could I not love you?”

“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry about Grey. I’m so sorry I gave you so much grief when you kicked her out.”

“You’re like her, you know. My Iris. She was quiet and empathetic and whip smart.”

There was a soft knock at the door. Vivi was standing in the doorway, her arms and head bandaged. She spotted the strips of fabric Cate held in her hand, then went to wrap her arms around our mother where she’d collapsed on the floor.

“I’m sorry,” Vivi said as she stroked her hair. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

---

Grey Hollow sat in the room across the hall, surrounded by police. Vivi escorted our mother past the doorway so she wouldn’t have to see Grey, but I stopped and lingered. The light was caustic, and the air smelled thick and vile, of blood and honey and lies. Each of the half dozen people around her watched her with deep pools for eyes, drunk out of their minds on the flood of power that seeped from my sister.

A spider queen with her prey wrapped neatly in her web.

Grey leaned in to place her lips on the mouth of the lead detective, the one who’d spoken at the press conference. The man shuddered with pleasure, his bones barely able to hold up his jelly body.

“A stalker,” she told him. “A crazed man, in love with me and my sisters since we were children. The same one who kidnapped us in Edinburgh. He took me and held me captive for weeks. I escaped. Tyler Yang—” Her voice trembled, a string plucked by pain. For a moment her spell wavered, but Grey was stronger than her grief. Such a human emotion was not enough to undo her. She sniffled and sat up straighter, as did every other person in the room, mirroring the enchantress who kept them rapt. “Tyler Yang tried to save me. He was killed by the stalker. It’s a terrible tragedy.”

“A terrible tragedy,” one of the officers echoed, her fingertips trailing across my sister’s thigh.

“There’s no need to take statements from my sisters,” Grey said, and the officers around her agreed.

“Yes, no need to put them through that,” the lead detective said as he swept the back of his palm down Grey’s shin.

“A stalker,” one of them repeated.

“A crazed man. A monster,” said another.

“What a terrible tragedy,” said a third.

Grey looked up at me, as did all of the police under her spell, a sudden flood of wide irises all pinned to mine. I held my sisters gaze. The power that bound us sparked in my chest.

Then I turned and left her there on her own.

---

My breath snagged when I saw my sister’s face staring up at me from the floor.

Even when rendered as a tattoo, Grey’s fine, hook-shaped scar was still the first thing you noticed about her, followed by how achingly beautiful she was. The Vogue magazine must have arrived in the mail and landed faceup on the hall rug, smack bang, which is where I found it in the silver ghostlight of the morning.

It was not my sister on the cover this time, though, but Tyler. The tattoos on his arms and chest were exposed: Grey’s portrait stood out in a sea of ink. I turned on the hall light and picked the magazine up and studied it—him—more closely.

In the photograph they’d chosen of him, he sat in a chair wearing nothing but fishnets and patent red loafers, his legs crossed, his black hair spilling around his face to his shoulders. There was no text, only the picture and the years of Tyler’s birth and death. He was twenty. A year younger than Grey.

“You ready?” Vivi said as she made her way down the stairs, dressed in plum lipstick and the most un-Vivi outfit I’d seen her in since she’d stopped letting Cate dress her a decade ago: a dark, conservative dress that covered her arm tattoos and skirted her knees.

“Who are you and what have you done with my sister?” I asked.

“That’s way dark, Iris.”

“What, too soon for changeling jokes?”

Vivi looped her arm around my waist and rested her head on my shoulder. “I liked him,” she said as she studied the Vogue cover. “He deserved better than what he got.”

“Everyone we come into contact with deserves better than what they end up getting.”

“We should go,” Cate said from the top of the staircase as she tugged on a pair of low pumps, Sasha looping around her feet. “Iris, come here, I’ll braid your hair.”

Vivi looked at me but said nothing.

“Cate . . . ,” I said as my mother made her way down the stairs. “Do you mind if I don’t have my hair braided anymore?” It was a ritual she shared with her dead daughter, something to keep them tethered. It felt cruel to snatch it from her, but Vivi was right. I couldn’t be everything for her all the time. I could only be myself, whatever that was. “It’s just . . . I prefer it out.”

Cate paused, one arm threaded through her coat. “Of course I don’t mind.” She shrugged her coat all the way on and took my chin in her hand. “Of course I don’t mind. I do mind, however, that we’re going to be disgracefully late. Come on, come on.”

It was raining outside, not the usual drizzle of London, but a cold and swollen day that drove rain into our faces as we slipped into my mother’s red Mini and drove toward the cemetery.

Tyler Yang’s funeral was, much like the man himself, extravagant and highly Instagrammable. It was held in a church that had clearly been styled by some celebrity event planner: thousands of candles cast dim light in the shadowy space, rich floral arrangements curled up the columns and trailed down from the ceiling, and a string ensemble played mournful songs as the pews filled. We found seats at the back as a steady stream of increasingly famous celebrities filed in, most wearing dark House of Hollow creations. A British actress whose TV show had recently become an international sensation was there, as was a famous ex–pop star with her famous footballer husband. There were models, actors, directors, designers—even a few lesser-known members of the royal family. Many people were crying already.

Tyler’s coffin was at the front, engulfed in an explosion of white roses and baby’s breath—and closed, obviously, because it was empty. I wondered how many people Grey had had to bewitch to sell her extravagant new lie. How many careful threads of silk she’d had to weave, just so, to convince the world that Tyler Yang had been murdered by her stalker when the police would never find any evidence to corroborate her tale.

Tyler’s family came in last, along with Grey.

A collective hush befell the crowd when they saw her. My sister was dressed in an elegant House of Hollow dress with a sheer black veil draped over her face. The portrait of a weeping widow from a fairy tale. Through the veil, I could tell that her eyes and nose were raw red, as though she’d been crying and had only managed to compose herself moments before. Her jaw shook as she walked down the aisle grasping the arm of a tall woman I assumed was Tyler’s mother. Grey’s sadness spilled out of her, rushing over the room like a wave, curling up the walls, drowning everyone. It was terrible to see something so beautiful in so much pain. Hands reached out to her as she went by, hundreds of hands jostling to touch her, hands that trailed over her veiled shoulders, her arms, soaking up some of her grief. It appeared, as she moved, as though she were a magnet moving through a field of iron filings that stood rigid and then sighed as she past.

Everyone. She would bewitch everyone to make her lie the truth.

The rest of Tyler’s family followed. His father, tall and handsome like him. His two living sisters and their partners, one with a newborn slung across her chest: Rosie’s namesake.

How unbearable, I thought, to lose two of your children. Then I looked at my mother, who had lost three on the same night. Who had had the living ghosts of her murdered daughters haunting her house, eating her food, siphoning her life, for a decade. I slipped my hand into hers and threaded our fingers together.

The service wasn’t long. A priest led a prayer and conducted a blessing. Tyler’s father gave a reading. His sisters Camilla and Selena delivered his eulogy. There was a slideshow of photographs and videos of him throughout his life. Pictures of a baby with chubby cheeks and arms that looked like bread rolls. First day of school pictures of a tiny boy in an oversized uniform. Pictures of four siblings always together, and then, after a time, only three. Pictures of him as a teenager, skinny and cute but not yet handsome and stylish. Pictures of him as I knew him, tall and angular and striking, his body decidedly masculine but his fashion sense and makeup gender nonconforming. The last photograph was of Rosie holding him on the day he was born, staring down at him while he stared right back up at her.

When it was over, five of Tyler’s close friends—and Grey—served as his pallbearers. In her black Louboutin heels, she stood taller than the men around her, the image of a veiled specter from a haunting as she floated back down the aisle with an empty coffin in her hands. As she passed me, I could see her crying. I could feel that she wanted me to reach out to her, to place a hand on her shoulder, to tell her that it would be all right. My fingertips tingled, aching to comfort her. Time froze as she stood in front of me, silently begging. Then, as quickly as she came, she was gone again, the procession moving past us, toward the church doorway now glutted with press. I exhaled and unclenched my fingers. Outside on the street, police were stationed to control the roiling mass of fans who’d come to lay flowers on the steps of the church and to witness Grey’s grief. They wailed as the coffin past.

There was an extravagant after-party planned, naturally—how else would you bid farewell to Tyler Yang?—but we left after they buried the coffin. It felt wrong to linger with the people who had known him for longer than I had, better than I had. I had known him for a handful of days and only liked him for half of them. I had held his hand and led him through a doorway to another world. I had kissed him once, a clandestine kiss stolen from a man who was not mine to kiss.

We wandered across the wet lawn of the cemetery beneath our umbrellas, away from the mourners, to the grave of Gabe Hollow, beloved husband and father. Cate, who usually visited most weeks, hadn’t been since Grey had gone missing. She knelt to pull the weeds that had begun to sprout at the base of his headstone, then parted the soft earth with her fingers and opened a hole, into which she placed the three strips of fabric I had brought back from the Halfway. All that remained now of Iris, Vivi, and Grey.

“They’re all together,” Cate said as she closed the hole and pressed her palms into the dirt.

When she stood we held her, and then we all went home.

---

I went back to school two weeks after the Halfway let me go, when my ribs were healed enough to sit at a desk all day.

Justine Khan made a loud ugh sound as she caught sight of me in the hall. “Was it too much to hope she was dead?” she muttered to Jennifer and her other friends as they passed me in a giggling group. “We should be so lucky.”

“Is there something you wanted to say to me, Justine?” I said. I had never confronted her directly before. Years of torment—muttered jokes in class, dead birds slipped into my backpack, bloody witch smeared across my locker—and I had never once called her out to her face. Let it go. Leave it be. It will be easier if you don’t fight back.

Justine and Jennifer both ignored me, so I followed them and said again, louder this time, “Is there something you wanted to say?”

Finally, Justine had no choice but to turn and come face-to-face with me. “Um,” she stammered, searching for something witty to say and coming up empty-handed. “No.”

“Are you sure? Now’s your chance. You have my full attention.”

“Oh, screw you, witch.”

“Not so brave now, are you? Not when you have to look me in the eye.”

Justine stared at me, lips pursed and nostrils flared, but she didn’t say anything. I lunged forward in a feint. Justine screamed and clutched at her heart and stumbled backward, landing hard on the ground behind her, taking Jennifer down with her.

“If you mess with me,” I whispered as I knelt by her side and tucked a strand of her long, dark hair behind her ear, “I will make you shave your pretty head in front of the whole school again. Do you understand?”

I was not like my sister. I would not use the power that had been forced upon me through blood and violence to hurt more people, destroy more lives.

I knew this—but Justine Khan didn’t need to.

Justine swallowed and nodded. I extended my hand to help her up but she scrabbled back in horror, so I stood, and I left her there, and I went to class.

I was not Grey Hollow. I was not Iris Hollow, either.

I was something stranger.

Something stronger.

For the first time, I felt the power of what I was coursing through my veins, and it didn’t scare me.

It made me feel . . . alive.