Fullepub 
Chapter 6
6
I had sevenmissed calls and a dozen messages from my mother when we left the club, all of them dinging into my phone at once when I turned airplane mode off.
“Damn,” I whispered as I tapped Cate’s name to call her, my heart fast and swollen with guilt. “Our mother is going to kill me.”
“Iris?” Cate said instantly. I could taste the panic on her tongue, a sour scent that made my stomach crumple.
“I’m so sorry.” Vivi and I were walking to the Tube, the cold stripping the skin off my legs, turning me inside out. “I’m okay. We’re heading home now.”
“How could you do that to me?” my mother demanded. “How could you do that to me?”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m okay.”
“I’m at work. I almost called the police.”
“I’m okay, Mama.” I hadn’t meant to say it. Sometimes it just slipped out.
I could hear Cate breathing on the other end of the line. “Please don’t call me that,” she said quietly. “You know I don’t like that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Go home immediately.”
“We’re on our way already. We’ll be there in about half an hour. I’ll message you when we’re there.”
I hung up. The cold had sent my fingers numb and I struggled to bend them enough to slip my phone into my coat pocket. I could feel Vivi staring at me disapprovingly.
“Iris,” she said.
“Don’t say anything,” I snapped.
“What is Cate going to do next year when you go to university, huh? Move to Oxford or Cambridge with you?”
“We’ve been looking at places and she’s been putting some feelers out for jobs.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“It’s not like we’ll live together. Just close by. Just so I can see her from time to time and so she doesn’t feel—”
“Iris.”
“Look, it’s easy for you to lecture me. You’re never here. I’m all she has left, okay? I have to be everything for her, every day.” Cate Hollow had suffered more grief in her lifetime than most people. Her parents had died suddenly, a terrible thing had happened to her children, her husband had lost his mind and then his will to live, and then her elder daughters had left home so young and all but cut off contact with her. I couldn’t understand the way my sisters treated her sometimes, like she was a stranger. All Cate wanted was to be needed. “I’m all she has left,” I said again, softer this time. It seemed like the least I could do, to let her track me on an app and braid my hair like she had when I was little.
“That’s a pretty heavy burden to bear,” Vivi said. “Being everything for someone.”
“Yeah, well. Aren’t you lucky you don’t have to carry it.”
Vivi placed her hand in the middle of my back, between my shoulder blades. I felt the warmth of her skin through the silken fabric, felt the cord of power that connected us. Blood to blood, soul to soul. The knot of panic that had been tangling somewhere between my ribs and throat started to come undone.
“Come on, kid,” Vivi said. “Let’s get you home.”
We caught the Northern Line back to Golders Green, the late-night commuters drinking in my bare legs and collarbones with big, hungry eyes. I felt like a thing to be devoured, sucked down to the marrow. I shrank in my seat and tried to stretch my short dress a little farther over my thighs. The Tube rattled and squealed. The woman sitting next to me smelled of sweet alcohol, her breath a cloud of fruit and sugar. The curved windows on the other side of the train carriage reflected a strange beast back at me. There were two Irises: one my regular reflection, one upside down, both joined together at the skull. A creature with two mouths, two noses, and a shared pair of eyes, empty black ovals distorted and made huge by the curve in the glass.
Vivi and I walked home together along our well-trod path, past the red double-decker buses at the station exit, along a long, straight street lined with low houses with darkened leadlight windows. We had always come this way even though the route to our house was faster through the backstreets, because the main road was brightly-lit and busy. We knew all too well what could happen to girls on poorly lit streets at night, because it had happened to us.
Then again, all girls knew that.
Tonight, that old danger felt close. We checked behind us every few paces to make sure no one was following. An old woman in a nightdress and coat stood smoking on the balcony of an apartment block, watching us with sunken eyes as we passed. Would she remember us if we ran into the horned man between here and our house and never made it home? What would she tell the police if they came knocking, looking for witnesses? They seemed agitated. They were underdressed for the weather. They were in a hurry. They kept looking behind them, as though they were being pursued. What did they expect, dressed like that?
We turned left, then looped back onto our street. It was darker than the main road and lined with skeletal trees that looked monstrous in the low light.
The man, whoever he was, knew the route I ran through Hampstead Heath in the mornings.
He knew where I went to school.
He knew where Vivi’s show was.
He knew, I was certain, where we lived.
After we locked the door behind us, I messaged Cate to let her know I was safe while Vivi checked all the windows and doors were secure. We changed out of Grey’s gossamer clothes and into pajamas—harsh against our skin after designer silk and wool—then sat cross-legged on the kitchen island, eating pasta from a bowl Cate had left in the fridge. Sasha meowed from the floor, begging for more food even though she’d already been fed.
We still hadn’t heard from Grey. I called again—nothing—and sent another message that went undelivered. We decided to give her the night before we called the police. There were no signs of a struggle at her apartment, and besides, she was a jet-setter; she could be on a yacht in the Caribbean for all we knew, her phone out of service.
Just because a creep was stalking us and just because a man with black eyes who smelled like death had been asking after her didn’t mean something bad had happened to Grey.
I am the thing in the dark,she had said once, and in that moment, I had believed her.
“Why do you think we’re so strange?” I asked Vivi as we ate. “Why do you think we can do the things we can do?”
“Like what?” Vivi said around a mouthful of pasta.
“Make people do what we want them to. Other things.”
“That doesn’t feel strange to me. It feels right.”
“Other people can’t do what we do.”
“Sure they can. Other people can do weird stuff too, you know; they just don’t talk about it. There have always been people like us, Iris. Look in any history book, any folklore: witches, mediums, Wiccans. Whatever you want to call it. We’re connected to the world and to each other in a different way. We might be peculiar, but we’re not new.”
I shook my head. “There’s something wrong with us. I feel it sometimes. Something rotten on the inside.” It was why I buried myself in books on coding and robotics and titration, so the wrongness had less room to seep in. I was certain that others—people like Justine Khan and Jennifer Weir—could feel it too. Maybe they were right to be cruel to me. Maybe I let them get away with it because some part of me believed I deserved it. “Do you think that thing—the guy in the skull—do you think he has anything to do with what happened to us? Do you think he’s back to finish what he started?” I reached out to trail my fingers over the scar at my sister’s throat, hidden now beneath a twisted vine of ink. “Who cuts little girls’ throats?”
Vivi chewed her mouthful slowly, her eyes boring into me. “I think it’s time we went to bed.” She slid off the kitchen bench and left without another word.
I brushed my teeth, tried to catch up on some of the classwork I’d missed that day, then went to find her in her old bedroom, curled up in her childhood single bed. I crawled in next to her. The stink of the perfume had faded, and Vivi’s natural scent—sylvan, milky—passed through now. I wiped some smudged eyeliner from her cheek and watched her while she slept. None of us were attractive sleepers. All of the sharp angles that made us striking when we were awake gave way to slack jaws and puddles of drool the moment our heads hit pillows. We’d once spent an entire month seeing who could take the most hideous sleeping pictures of the others.
I stroked Vivi’s cheek and felt a pang of longing for her, and for Grey, for the years we’d been inseparable. Not yet split apart by countries and time zones and careers and lives.
I pressed my fingertips lightly to her throat, right at the point where her heartbeat sprang beneath her skin. It was how we’d slept as children, our finger resting on one another’s pulse points, a cross-hatched thicket of wrists and necks and hands. For a long time, years, I couldn’t sleep deeply unless I felt the heartbeat of both my sisters thrumming beneath my fingers. But they had grown up and left home, and I’d realized there were scarier things in the world than the monsters that lived in my nightmares.
Grey,I thought in silent prayer, knowing somehow that, wherever she was, she’d hear me. I hope you’re okay.
I woke before dawn, as I always did, and messaged my mother, and checked my Find Friends app, and ran through Hampstead Heath, cursing the Romans for settling in such a damp, miserable place. It was raining again, because it was London. The weirdness of yesterday felt washed away, but I still stuck to the busier paths and avoided the wooded area where I’d seen the man yesterday. I ran until it hurt to breathe and my body begged me to stop, and then I ran some more. I held my phone in my palm the whole time, willing it to vibrate with a message from Grey, but every time I looked, there were no new notifications.
When I got home, Cate was cooking breakfast in her scrubs. Vivi was sitting on the kitchen island again, her long tattooed legs dangling as she plopped cherry tomatoes into her mouth.
“Look who I found,” Cate said when she saw me.
“The prodigal daughter returns,” Vivi said, opening her arms wide and staring off into the distance like a Renaissance painting of Jesus.
“You know the definition of prodigal is ‘wastefully extravagant’?” I said as I went to the fridge in search of milk.
Vivi put her arms down. “I thought it meant ‘favorite,’ and I’m going to stick with that. Pour me one too,” she said as I set out a glass.
“Please,” Cate said out of habit.
“Please,”Vivi said. I handed her a glass of milk and sat at the breakfast bar while Cate scrambled some eggs.
Vivi had an easier relationship with our mother than Grey did. Cate had always been overprotective—how could she be expected to be any other way, after what she’d been through?—which Grey had taken as a personal threat to her freedom. Vivi, on the other hand, was never bothered by our mother’s rules, because she never followed them. If Vivi was busted, which wasn’t often because she was so good at sneaking around, she would apologize with handwritten cards and breakfast in bed.
They were very different women who had lived very different lives and were interested in very different things, but somehow—despite each considering the other an anomaly—they usually managed to find some middle ground. They spoke on the phone at least once a month. They teased each other constantly: Cate sent Vivi links to tattoo removal clinics, Vivi sent Cate links to pictures of body modders with split tongues and their teeth filed to points, captioned Do you think this would suit me? When Vivi sent recordings of her new music, Cate responded with comments like I think you sent the wrong track? This is a recording of cats being murdered. They were silly with each other. Sweet with each other.
“Have you heard from Grey?” I asked Vivi.
Vivi shook her head. “Cate doesn’t seem to think we should worry.”
“Grey can look after herself,” Cate said. The way she said it without even looking up from what she was doing made me purse my lips.
My thoughts went to the night Grey left home. They had been at odds with each other for months, Cate and Grey, squabbling over curfews and boyfriends and parties and alcohol. Grey was pushing the boundaries, seeing what she could get away with. One night, she stumbled home rotten drunk and vomited on the kitchen floor.
Cate was furious and grounded her on the spot. Grey was a seventeen-year-old girl, filled with the rage and power of a thunderstorm curling beneath her skin. When she snapped, she put her hands around our mother’s throat, forced her against the wall, and whispered something in her ear. A needle. A pinprick. Something that was so small, so quiet, I didn’t hear it. Cate was still. Then whatever Grey had said splintered through her, electrifying her. She was a tree split by lightning. One moment a woman, the next something wild and ruptured. She slapped my sister so hard across the face that Grey’s lip split; there were still three brown specks on the wall where her blood had soaked into the plaster.
“Get the fuck out of my house,” Cate had ordered in a low, steady voice, “and don’t ever, ever come back.”
The sudden violence of it had made me hyperventilate. For years, as my father’s delusions had swollen inside his mind, I’d become more and more afraid that he would hurt us, put a pillow over our faces while we slept. It wasn’t unusual to wake in the middle of the night to his shadowy form hovering at the end of my bed, whispering softly. “Who are you? What are you?” Yet even as the spools of himself unraveled, he never laid a finger on us.
Then here was Cate Hollow, a small, gentle woman who had done something so brutal, so indefensible. I still wasn’t sure what terrible thing Grey had said to her to make her snap like that, to pull her so far out of herself.
Grey hadn’t cried. She’d set her jaw and packed her bags and done what our mother asked: left the house and never come back, except once, to clear out her room. They hadn’t spoken since that night, four years ago now.
“Should we call the police?” I asked. “Should I not go to school?” It was a tempting thought. I wondered what fresh punishment JJ had in store for me for embarrassing them last night.
“You are going to school,” Cate said as she pointed from me to Vivi. “One day of cutting class with your miscreant sister is tolerable, but no more.”
“I think you meant to say ‘genius rock-goddess sister,’ but okay,” Vivi said.
“I would like a doctor in the family,” Cate said, her fingers crossed on both hands. “Or at least one daughter to finish high school. So go and get ready.”
“What if we don’t hear from her?” I asked.
I looked to Vivi, who shrugged. I was immediately frustrated by the sense that if Grey were here and Vivi were missing, Grey would know exactly what to do. There would be forward motion. There would be a plan. Grey was like that: There was no problem so large that it couldn’t be solved. The universe seemed to bend to her will. Vivi and I, in comparison, were too used to being foot soldiers under our eldest sister’s rule. Without our unifying central command unit, we were lost.
“I was supposed to fly back to Budapest this afternoon, but I guess I can push my flight until tomorrow,” Vivi said. “I’ll call her agent and manager after nine. I’m sure they’ll know where she is.”
