Chapter 4

4

I stood so suddenly and with such force that my desk toppled forward, my books and pens spilling across the floor. The entire class, startled by the sudden violent intrusion on the tedium of the school day, went silent and turned to stare at me.

I was wide-eyed, dragging breaths, my heart punching inside my chest.

“Iris,” said Mrs. Thistle, alarmed, “are you okay?”

“Don’t get too close to her,” Justine Khan said to our teacher. I had once thought she was beautiful—and she probably still was, if you couldn’t see past the veneer of her skin to the pool of venom stagnating beneath. She now wore her curtain of dark hair long and straight, and carried a brush in her backpack to groom it at recess. It was so shiny and so well cared for that it was almost embarrassing. It also served the double purpose of concealing the scars my fingernails had left on either side of her neck when she’d kissed me. “Everyone knows she bites.”

There were some titters of laughter, but most people seemed too rattled to know how to react.

“Uh . . .” I needed an excuse, a cover to get out of there. “I’m going to be sick,” I said as I knelt to shove my things into my bag. I left my desk and chair where they lay.

“Go to sick bay,” Mrs. Thistle instructed, but I was already halfway out the door.

Another good thing about being a shameless teacher’s pet: They never doubted you if you said you were sick.

Once clear of the classroom, I slung my backpack over my shoulder and bolted for the spot outside where I’d seen the man, in the shadowy slip of space between two buildings. The day was gray, grim: typical London. Muddy water flicked up the back of my socks as I ran. I could already see from afar that there was no one there now, but I kept running until I stood where he had stood. The air around me was dank with the smell of smoke and wet animal. I could see into my classroom through the mist of rain.

I called Grey. I needed to hear her voice. She’d always been good at calming me down.

It went to voicemail; she must be on the plane from Paris already. I left a message. “Hey. Uh. Call me back when you land. I’m kind of freaking out. I think someone is following me. Okay. Bye.”

Reluctantly, I called Vivi. “I knew you’d change your mind!” she said after one ring.

“I haven’t.”

“Oh. Well, this is awkward. Turn around.”

I turned. In the distance, in the parking lot, I could see her waving.

“Ugh,” I said. “I’ve got to go. Some weird woman is stalking me.”

At nineteen, my middle sister was a tattooed, pierced, clove-cigarette-smoking bass player with a blond buzz cut, a zigzag nose, and a smirk so sharp it could cut right through you. When I reached her in the school parking lot, she was lounging on the hood of some teacher’s red midlife crisis car, unbothered by the rain. Despite just landing from Budapest, she carried no luggage but a small leather backpack. She was dressed like that old Cake song, in a short skirt and a long jacket. Two years ago, when Grey’s scar had become the season’s hottest fashion accessory and teenage girls had started carving half-moons into their necks, Vivi had covered hers with a wisteria tattoo that unfurled across her collarbones, her back, halfway down her arms. Her tongue was pierced, her nose was pierced, and her ears probably contained enough metal to melt into a bullet.

Grey was high fashion, but Vivi was pure rock ’n’ roll.

I looked her up and down. “Lose your way to the Mad Max set, Furiosa?”

She let her black eyes linger on me while she took a draw of her cigarette. Few people could pull off a shaved head and a gross smoking habit and still manage to look like a siren, but Vivi could. “Like you can talk, Hermione.” I thought of the Cake song again: A voice that is dark like tinted glass.

“Oh, sick burn,” I said, shaking my head. “Your mind is slipping in your old age.”

We both laughed then. Vivi slid off the car and pulled me into a bear hug. I could feel the tensile strength of her muscles beneath the heavy curtain of her coat; she could handle herself. She’d been serious about self-defense classes ever since that guy had tried to pull her into his car. “It’s good to see you, kid,” she said.

“God, you smell terrible. What is that?”

“Ah.” Vivi wafted air from under her armpits in my direction. “That noxious stench would be Grey’s perfume.”

Hollow by Grey Hollow, her eponymous scent, the one she stitched in little vials into her couture. For Christmas two years ago, she’d sent me a bottle of perfume that smelled like smoke and forest, with something wild and rotten scratching beneath it. One sniff made me drop to my knees, gagging.

Like everything that Grey Hollow made, it became a bestseller. Fashion magazines called it heady and cryptic. Grey sent a carton of the vile stuff to my school, a fuck-you-look-at-me-now gift for every teacher who’d ever given her grief. They wore it like drugstore perfume. It clung to their hair and clothing, a damp green aura. It seemed to sweep other scents into its orbit and take them hostage, hints of curdled milk and wood rot tugging at the edges of the perfume whenever the heating climbed too high. Classrooms stank of it. Nobody else seemed to mind the smell.

“How many of your friends said no to meeting you today before you called me?” I asked, though we both knew that, much like me, Vivi had no friends in London.

“Like, five, six max,” Vivi said. “Everyone’s getting jobs. It’s disgusting. So are you coming or not?”

“I can’t just leave school.”

“You can. I should know. I did it every day.”

“Yes, well, some of us want to go to university. Besides, Cate will freak out if I cut. It was hard enough getting permission to come to your gig. You know what she’s like.”

“Cate’s codependence on you and your respect for authority are equally repulsive. Give me your phone.” Vivi guessed my passcode—16 for Grey’s birthday, 29 for Vivi’s birthday, 11 for my birthday—then called our mother, who picked up immediately. “No, Cate, nothing’s wrong.” Vivi rolled her eyes. “I’m kidnapping Iris for the day.” We locked eyes on the word kidnapping. I shook my head. “She’s not going to be at school, so don’t flip when you check your creepy, privacy-invading tracker, okay? . . . Yes, I know. No, Grey isn’t here. It’s just Iris and me, I promise . . . I will . . . I know . . . Yes, Cate, I know. She’s safe with me, okay? . . . Yeah, I’m going to crash at home after the show. I’m looking forward to seeing you too. Love you.” Vivi hung up and threw my phone back to me. “Done. Easy.”

I wondered what Cate’s reaction would be if Grey showed up at my school unannounced and tried to pull me out of classes for the day. There would probably already be police sirens screaming in the distance.

“Kidnapping?” I said. “Really? Stellar word choice.”

“It was an accident. Oh shit, incoming.”

Mrs. Thistle was hurrying toward us. “Iris,” she said, “I was on my way to check on you. Are you feeling better?”

“Oh,” I said. “No. I think I need to go home.” I pointed at Vivi.

Mrs. Thistle’s gaze slid to my sister. “Hello, Vivienne,” she said flatly.

“Hello, Thistle,” Vivi replied with a wave . . . which she then turned around into the middle finger. Mrs. Thistle pursed her lips and went back the way she came, shaking her head. Vivi hadn’t been the easiest student. I smacked her in the stomach with the back of my hand.

“Vivi,”I said.

“What? No matter how many times I tell that old hag my name is just Vivi, she insists on calling me Vivienne. Plus, she failed me in English.”

“Yeah, because you never, ever went to English.”

“Allegedly.”

I rolled my eyes. “Have you heard from Grey today?”

“No. Not for a few days. I tried calling her when I landed, but her phone must be out of juice. She knows the plan, though. Come on. Let’s go get food and wait for our terribly busy and important sister to grace us with her presence.”

---

Vivi slammed through the day, chain-smoking clove cigarettes and drinking spiked Earl Grey tea from a flask. I forgot how much fun she could be. After lunch at a kebab shop, we spent the afternoon crashing her favorite London haunts: guitar shops on Denmark Street, vintage shops in Camden, Flamin’ Eight Tattoo Studio in Kentish Town, where she spent a good fifteen minutes trying to convince me to get a full sleeve. We snacked on croissants and slices of sourdough pizza, and Vivi told me all about the six months since I’d last seen her: the European tour through Germany and Hungary and the Czech Republic, the gigs in ruin bars and abandoned warehouses and empty swimming pools, the beautiful European women she’d bedded along the way, in more detail than I cared to hear.

The time Grey was supposed to meet us came and went. It felt almost strange to spend time alone with my middle sister, just the two of us. All our lives, even after Vivi and Grey had moved out, whenever we met up, it was almost always the three of us together. Always a set, never a pair. Without Grey, I felt unanchored somehow, like the internal hierarchy of our sisterhood had collapsed into chaos. We all knew our roles: Grey was the boss, the leader, the captain, the one who took charge and made decisions and forged ahead. Vivi was the fun assistant, the suggester of mischief, the teller of jokes, the wild one—but even with her penchant for anarchy and dislike of authority, she always fell in line behind Grey. I half suspected the reason Vivi had set off on her own at fifteen was to escape Grey’s iron rule. My role was to be the youngest, the baby, a thing to be protected. My sisters were kinder and gentler to me than they were to each other. Grey rarely pulled me into line the way she did Vivi. Vivi rarely snapped and yelled at me the way she did Grey.

As afternoon turned into evening, we sent her pictures on WhatsApp of us hanging out without her, of all the fun she was missing. It was a special kind of sisterly punishment: Grey hated being left out, hated us embarking on plans that had not been sanctioned by her in advance. She was a general and we were her small but fiercely loyal army. “If Grey jumped off a bridge, would you?” my mother had asked me once as she splinted my broken pinkie finger. Grey had broken her pinkie hours before, so I had found a hammer in my father’s pottery shed and used it to shatter my own.

It was a question without answer. It was not a question at all.

I didn’t follow my sister. I was my sister. I breathed when she breathed. I blinked when she blinked. I felt pain when she felt pain. If Grey was going to jump off a bridge, I was going to be there with her, holding her hand.

Of course, of course, of course.

In the evening, we met up with Vivi’s bandmates for dinner before the gig: Candace, a hard-drinking German with a voice like Janis Joplin, and Laura, the Danish drummer, who looked like a pixie and played drums like a banshee. I’d had something of a crush on her since I’d first seen her play, on a weekend trip to Prague six months ago. Grey had met us there and we’d spent two nights wandering the labyrinthine stone alleys of the Old Town, eating nothing but trdelník and drinking nothing but absinthe.

When we’d watched the band play at a red-lit basement bar, Grey had mouthed the words to each of their songs. It was one of the things I loved most about her: you might not see her for months, and then she’d show up and know every word to every song you’d written and recite them back to you like they were Shakespearean poetry. Grey didn’t just know I got good grades; she contacted my teachers and requested to read every essay I handed in, then commented on their merits the next time we met up.

So where was she now?

For dinner, we ate bowls of spicy chicken karaage at Vivi’s favorite pub, the Lady Hamilton, named after the famous eighteenth-century muse and mistress Emma Hart. Vivi’s first ever tattoo had been George Romney’s painting Emma Hart as Circe, a soft beauty with round eyes, pouting lips, and hair whipped around by the wind. I wasn’t sure if Vivi had discovered the pub or the woman first, but either way, whenever she came to London, we inevitably ended up eating here. Inside, the pub was warm and cozy, the walls and furniture all dark wood, the roof a lattice of Bordeaux cornice and ceiling roses. Candles dripped white wax onto our table as we ate. Vivi slipped me a sneaky glass of house red wine. Another difference between my sisters: the budgets. If Grey were here, we’d likely be eating the tasting menu at Sketch and knocking back twenty-pound cocktails like they were candy.

I thought about the classes I had the next day, all the prep work I was missing out on by taking a night off. I thought about the skin of Laura’s neck, what it might taste like if I kissed her. I thought about how young I looked in my uniform. I thought about the horned man, and how Vivi couldn’t be in town for ten minutes before weird shit started happening.

After dinner, we wandered down Kentish Town Road toward Camden, past convenience stores and late-night barbers and the hot-oil smell that lingered around the doorways of chicken shops. Even on a weeknight in winter, the streets around Camden Town Station were humming with people: a punk in a leather jacket and a fluorescent-orange Mohawk was charging tourists a pound for photographs; a vape company handed out free tester kits to the crowds coming home from work or heading to the nearby market for food; revelers spilled out of honey-lit bars; couples held hands on their way to the Odeon cinema; shoppers carried bags of groceries from M&S and Sainsbury’s and Whole Foods.

Vivi’s band, Sisters of the Sacred, had been booked to play at the Jazz Café, which, contrary to what its name would suggest, was not actually a jazz café but rather a nightclub/live music venue in an old Barclays Bank. Its white columns and arched windows gave it a faux Grecian vibe, and blue neon letters loudly declared it LONDONS FAMOUS JAZZ VENUE. There was a line out the front already, despite the cold, which made Vivi and her bandmates stop.

“Oh my,” Laura said. “Are we famous now?”

Sisters of the Sacred was semi well known in the underground scenes of the mainland’s coolest, grungiest cities, but they certainly weren’t famous. Not in the way that Grey was famous.

Vivi stared at the line and lit a cigarette. “I may have told the venue manager that my sister and a gaggle of scantily dressed supermodels would come and watch our show if they booked us.”

“This is the correct term for a multitude of supermodels?” Candace asked. “Gaggle?”

“It is indeed, Candace.”

“Pimping out your own sister for exposure is a bit morally bankrupt,” I said.

“Supermodels were invented to sell shit to people,” Vivi said. “What’s the point of being a direct blood relative of one if I don’t occasionally utilize her for profit?”

“Oh my God, Iris!” A hand waved frantically from the line. “Here!”

Jennifer Weir and Justine Khan were standing close to the front. Jennifer was the one waving at me. Justine had her arms crossed and was staring straight ahead, her jaw set tight.

“Friends of yours?” Vivi muttered as Jennifer ducked out of the line and tugged Justine after her.

“Mortal enemies, actually,” I muttered back.

“Oh my God, I hoped we’d run into you!” Jennifer said. “We got here early and have been waiting in line for, like, an hour.”

“Big fans of the band?” Vivi asked.

“Oh, sure, yeah,” Jennifer said.

Vivi’s gaze slid to Justine. “You look familiar.” My sister clicked her fingers and pointed at her. “I know! You’re the girl who shaved her head in front of the whole school! That was so metal.” Vivi reached out and curled a lock of Justine’s long hair around her finger. “It’s a shame you let it grow out. I much preferred it short.”

“Don’t fucking touch me, witch,” Justine snapped. She turned and stormed toward an Italian restaurant across the road.

“Justine! Justine!” Jennifer called. “Sorry about her. I don’t know what her problem is.” Jennifer turned back to me. “Is your sister here? Is she still coming?”

“I’m her sister,” Vivi offered.

“I think she’s coming,” I said. “We haven’t heard from her today.”

“Do you think you’ll go to Cuckoo afterward?” Jennifer asked. “Oh my God, do you think Tyler Yang will be there?”

“Cuckoo?”

“Only the coolest and most ultra-exclusive nightclub in London. Duh. It’s impossible for regular humans to get in, but Grey and Tyler go all the time when she’s here.”

A slow, sharp smile spread across Vivi’s face. She despised when people talked about our sister like they knew her. Grey was ours. She belonged to us. “We’ll be sure to let you know,” she said, maintaining the smile. “See you later.”

Jennifer was apparently unaware that she’d been dismissed. “Oh, actually, I kind of lost my place in line. Do you think I could come in with you? I would love to see backstage.”

Vivi took one long last drag on her cigarette and let the clove-scented smoke bloom in Jennifer’s face. “Do you know any of our music—or are you just here to starfuck Grey? Can you name one song?”

Jennifer stumbled over her words. “I . . . I don’t think . . . That’s not fair.”

“Actually,” Vivi said as she stubbed out her cigarette with her boot, “what’s our band called?”

Again, Jennifer made gasping fish sounds.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Vivi said. “Back in line.”

“Ah. Classic Vivi. Making friends wherever she goes,” Laura mused as the bouncers opened the doors for us and we made our way inside.

Vivi threw her arms around her bandmates’ shoulders and swaggered into the club like the rock star she was. “Starfuckers never change,” she said, oblivious to the fact that I would be the one who’d have to face said starfucker—now glaring at me with her arms crossed—and her henchwomen at school tomorrow.

---

We hung out backstage while the support act warmed up the crowd. Then, when Sisters of the Sacred took the stage and Grey was still MIA, I messaged her again:

They’re starting.WHERE. ARE. YOU?

It was weird for her not to have seen my previous messages. Vivi could go weeks without checking social media, but Grey was chained to it. I opened Instagram. My account was set to private, but I had thousands of message requests. Everybody wants a piece of you when your sister is famous. Or rather, they want a piece of your sister, and they want you to deliver it to them. Ghouls haunted my Instagram, my Facebook, hungry for a filtered taste of her.

You go to school with my cousin. I think you’re so hot. Send me a pic of you naked, beautiful. (Or your sister if you’re too shy!)

Tell Grey that if she breaks Tyler’s heart I will literally kill her. Literally.

Hey, I have a theory about what happened to you as a kid. Have you considered the possibility that you were abducted by aliens? My best friend’s great-uncle works at Area 51 and she says he has proof. I can share the details for a low price. Message me back!

I know you will probably never read this but I feel like I am DESTINED to become a catwalk model and I would REALLY appreciate you passing my headshots on to your sister.

I checked Grey’s page to see if she’d posted recently. Grey Hollow, supermodel, had ninety-eight million followers. NINETY-EIGHT MILLION. There were pictures of her with other supermodels, pictures of her on magazine covers, pictures of her backstage at concerts with pop stars, pictures of her on yachts, pictures of her with her model boyfriend, Tyler Yang, at some pink-lit club—Cuckoo, I guessed—in Mayfair.

Grey had first told me about Tyler six months ago on our trip to Prague, after we’d each drunk a few shots of absinthe from delicate glasses. We sat close together at a booth in a nightclub, warm and glittery on the inside from the alcohol and the wormwood, her head resting on my shoulder as we watched Vivi move on the dance floor with a girl she’d met at the bar. Grey held up her left hand and I held up my right and we pressed our fingertips together in an arch. I felt her heartbeat in my skin, in my chest, felt the strong thread that bound us together.

“I think I’m in love with him,” she’d said quietly, her breath carrying a trace of sugar and anise. I could hear the smile in her voice. I already knew she loved him. I’d known it since the day before, when we’d met at Václav Havel Airport and I’d hugged her for the first time in months. She’d smelled different. She’d smelled . . . softer, somehow. It suited her. Being in love made her even more intoxicating.

I was surprised and unsurprised in equal measure. Unsurprised because I already knew they were together. I’d seen paparazzi shots of them holding hands on the front of tabloid magazines, and Tyler had started to appear more and more frequently in her Instagram stories. Surprised because Grey had never had a real boyfriend before, only lovers who interested her for a short time, and—unlike Vivi, who frequently offered the details of her love and sex life—Grey was a locked box. She shared no more than morsels.

“Tyler Yang?” I’d asked her, and she’d nodded sleepily.

“He’s quite special,” she’d continued. “You’ll know what I mean when you meet him.”

The meeting had yet to happen, but maybe it would tonight—if she bothered showing up.

Grey’s last post was from five days ago, an image of her in a green tulle gown lounging against a red banister with a glass of champagne in her hand, her skin saturated in fluorescent pink light, her blond head wreathed in baby’s breath. #TBT London Fashion Week, the caption read. The location was tagged as the Cuckoo Club. Just over fifteen million people had liked it.

There were two levels inside Jazz Café: the lower level with the stage, the audience pressed up close to it, the band soaked in orange light and laser beams. Overhead, a mezzanine restaurant and bar wrapped around the space for those who preferred sipping wine to getting doused with beer in the mosh pit. I spotted JJ sitting at a round table, both looking sullen.

Grey wasn’t there for the first song, or the second, or the third. Candace moved across the stage with Mick Jagger swagger, sex on legs, but I watched Laura, a thimble of a woman with Bambi eyes transformed into a she-beast as she attacked her drums. Hair in her face, sweat and spit flying, her T-shirt riding up to reveal a soft slip of stomach.

The crowd was loving the band, but by the fourth song I was distracted, worried. I kept looking around for my eldest sister, sure she would sneak up behind me and put her hands over my eyes at any moment, but she didn’t show.

Then, somewhere toward the end of the gig, something happened.

Onstage, Vivi stopped playing her bass and let her arms fall slack to her sides. She was staring at someone or something in the crowd behind me, a veil over her eyes. I turned to look at what she was fixated on, but the room was dark and crowded. Laura and Candace exchanged confused glances and tried to catch Vivi’s attention, without any luck. Vivi was frozen, wide-eyed, drawing quick, shallow breaths through her shuddering mouth. Candace moved across the stage as she sang and nudged Vivi, who blinked furiously and shook her head. She found my eyes in the crowd. A tear slipped down her cheek.

I knew then that something was very wrong.

Vivi swallowed and picked up her instrument again. The band played two more songs, but Vivi’s heart wasn’t in it, and she kept making mistakes. When the crowd called for an encore after the last song, only Candace and Laura came onstage to do an acoustic cover. I made my way through the crowd and slipped backstage. Vivi was sucking on a cigarette like it was hooked up to an oxygen tank, her head between her knees.

“Jesus,” I said. I ran to the sink and wet a cloth, then draped it over the peach-fuzz crown of her skull. “What the hell happened out there? Are you okay?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” A necklace of saliva sagged from her open mouth and drooped to the floor between her feet. “I think I had a panic attack.”

“You saw something,” I said.

Vivi shook her head.

“Yes, you did,” I pushed. “What did you see?”

She sat up straight. Her lips were tinted faint blue and her skin was clammy with sweat. “A man. Except not a man. A . . . dude with a bull’s skull over his head.”

I stood up and took out my phone. “I’m calling the cops.”

“What? No. Iris, seriously, it was dark and I was probably hallucin—”

“I saw him today too. Twice. He was at my school. Tall shirtless dude cosplaying a decomposing demon Minotaur.”

“What?”

“Yeah. So, no, you weren’t hallucinating. Some freak stalker from the internet has decided to try and scare us like that woman who broke in when we were kids, and I’m not putting up with that.”

Vivi frowned. “Iris . . . you know this is not that, right?”

I hesitated. “Uh. No?”

“I recognized . . . the way he smelled. I can’t explain it. It felt . . . familiar.”

I stared at my sister for a long time, then at my phone, which still showed no notification from our eldest sister. “Where’s Grey, Vivi? Why isn’t she here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Grey doesn’t miss these things. If she says she’s going to do something, she does it. If she’s not going to come to us, we’re going to go to her.”