Twenty-Two

I stepped out of the bathroom. I had to stop thinking about Matt. Stop worrying about how I could have read him so wrong.

I had to look around, plan a way to escape.

The light from sconces on the wall was very dim, but I could make out a small card table, the splintered wooden rafters, the old rusty nails, the crumbling chimney bricks, and all the dead birds hanging from the ceiling that Iris had described to me.

There were a couple of windows, so opaque from salt spray I could hardly see out. It was starting to get dark. I pressed my forehead against a windowpane. Streetlights and harbor lights, four stories below, glowed through the murky glass. Shouldn’t Minerva have brought help by now?

Then it hit me: She had led us here, Iris and me. What if Minerva was working with Fitch and Matt? She had the gene—it was to her advantage for her cousin to keep going with his research, to find a cure. I felt despair, to think I might have been so wrong—not only about Matt, but about Minerva, too.

Then I felt a jolt of hope. If “the boy”—Fitch or Matt or even Chris—hadn’t grabbed Iris, could she have run away? But if that was the case, why hadn’t she sent someone to save us? Was she still scared to call the police? My mind was spinning in circles, an out of control merry-go-round.

I gazed at that filthy window, at the lights shining up from the street, and thought of life going on down there. All the cars, all the people out to enjoy the June night. And how no one passing by had any idea that Hayley and I were being held prisoner in the attic of the Miramar Hotel.

Iris had spoken of a brick chimney, and there it was, right in the middle of the attic. It must have served fireplaces on the lower floors, but all it did up here was block us from seeing directly across the space—there were no hearths to light, to warm the vast attic. As I rounded the brick column, there—leaning against the attic’s far wall—were the panels of the three sibyls: the same sisters depicted on the ghost sign down by the harbor.

I stopped and stared.

“The reason we’re here,” Hayley said, following my gaze.

“You know about the Sibylline sisters?” I asked.

“Yes, two of the three died of the family disease—the ones who had the same blood type as Iris and me. Fitch thinks genetics holds the key to finding a cure. To healing his sister,” Hayley said. She gestured toward the person asleep on the canopied bed across the room.

I’d known it had to be her. I walked over to the bed and stared down at Abigail Martin. I hadn’t seen her in a while, since she’d stopped going to school. Fast asleep, she was wearing a long white nightgown, like the dresses worn by the girls in the panels. Her skin looked dry and pasty, as if she had a fever. I felt her forehead with the palm of my hand; it was hot. She didn’t wake up at my touch. Standing beside her, I saw thin wires attached to the bed frame.

“What are those wires for?” I asked Hayley.

“He has a machine that monitors her sleep,” Hayley said. “It tells him when there are changes, and it’s supposed to jolt her awake. That doesn’t always work. When it doesn’t, he comes running.”

“Why?” I asked, not getting it.

“Because she dies in her sleep, sometimes,” Hayley said.

That’s what Iris had told me, but I still couldn’t believe I had heard right.

“She stops breathing,” Hayley says.

“And she literally dies ?” I asked.

Hayley nodded. “It’s like sleep kills her,” she said. “If Fitch wasn’t paying attention, she might not be able to wake up. When she gets like that, I’ve yelled, shaken her, but she just lies there, not breathing.”

“But she eventually does breathe, obviously,” I said, gesturing at the sleeping Abigail.

“So far,” Hayley said. “The episodes don’t happen every night, but when they do, it’s so scary. I worry about her so much.”

“Is that the condition that Fitch is trying to cure?” I asked.

Hayley nodded.

“But what are we doing here? What do her ‘episodes’ have to do with us? With you and Iris? With Eloise?” I asked.

Hayley glanced up surreptitiously at the ceiling, where earlier she had indicated that there were cameras. Then she gently took my arm and led me back toward the corner, next to one of the windows. We stood there, our backs to the room.

“We have to be careful,” Hayley said. “You know he has cameras on us.”

I nodded. “The birds see all,” I said.

“The birds?”

“Yes, it’s perfect for birders like Fitch and Matt.”

“Well, he keeps track of what’s going on up here. And he always knows when Abby-Gale—Abigail—goes into an episode.”

“Why does he need a camera or a spy? Doesn’t the monitor, whatever those wires lead to, tell him that?” I asked.

“It’s supposed to buzz when she hasn’t moved in too long. Once it was close, she almost didn’t come out of it, but he got to her in time.” She paused. “He’s very attuned to her.”

“I know their mother travels all the time,” I said. “She’s not exactly present in their lives. But seeing all this,” I said, gesturing around. “How does she not have a clue about what her son is doing? Or does she?”

“I’ve heard Fitch and Abigail talking,” Hayley said. “They say the family has tried all the conventional treatments, but nothing has worked. Not just for Abigail, but for all the women who have the gene.”

“What is the gene, anyway?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Hayley said. “They just say ‘the gene.’ And they talk about AB negative. The only ones who get sick have that blood type. He doesn’t have enough subjects to do his research on, so that’s why he took me and Iris, and the other girl, too. Because we have it.”

Other girl . My sister.

“Anyway, I know his mother is a doctor,” Hayley said. “I think he’s raided her office, to get the knockout meds.”

“Doctors have to keep track of that stuff,” I said, thinking of how careful Gram’s physicians were about prescribing her medications, especially ones to relax her or help her sleep. “Maybe his mom gives it to him.”

“I really doubt she knows anything,” Hayley said. “She never shows up here. Fitch gets angry because he feels she’s given up on Abigail.”

“How could someone give up on their daughter?” I asked.

“Because it’s such a hopeless situation,” Hayley said. “It’s really bad, Oli. She honestly does die. It tears him up.”

“Well, I don’t feel sorry for him,” I said harshly. “He’s a criminal. Hayley, for him to do what he’s doing, he has to be a psychopath.”

She didn’t respond. I knew she was thinking of Iris, of what he had done to her.

“He killed my sister,” I said.

“What?” she asked, shocked.

“Before he took you and Iris, he took my sister. You said the ‘other girl’—that was my sister. She knew him, she trusted him. They were friends. It wouldn’t have taken much for him to convince her to go somewhere with him. She loved birds.” I looked up at the stuffed owls and hawks hanging overhead. “She had planned to go owling with another friend the day she disappeared. I think Fitch used that somehow to trick her?.?.?.” My mind was racing, wondering exactly how he had done it.

“I’m so sorry, Oli. He tricked us, too—he pretended to love cats,” she said. “What was your sister’s name?”

“Eloise. She was about your age. She was wonderful—so smart, funny, the greatest sister ever. My best friend.” I felt my face turning red, but I wouldn’t cry. I needed my anger right now, not my sorrow. I needed rage to stay fierce and get us away from here. “I’m going to make sure he never hurts anyone again,” I said. “I am going to see him punished. We’re going to do it together, Hayley.”

“Good,” she said, and she flashed a big smile. She stood straighter and looked strong.

I saw her glance down at Abigail—still fast asleep, out cold.

“In a way, it’s hard not to blame her,” Hayley said. “He says we have to be a hero to the goddess. He means Abigail—this is all for her. He doesn’t care who suffers as long as he gets his answers. So she can live. He thinks if he can induce seizures in us, he can figure out a way to stop them in her.”

I stared down at the sleeping girl. I remembered that her seizures, and their serious underlying cause, were the reason she had left school. It was obvious that Fitch loved Abigail very much, in order to do what he was doing. I understood sibling love as well as—better than—most people. I would have said it was impossible to love anyone more than I did Eloise. But would I sacrifice other people’s lives for her? Because it seemed pretty clear he was doing just that, to find a cure for his sister.

“They’re terrible,” Hayley said, shivering. “Her seizures. I hate when she has them. It’s almost as if she’s possessed—by a spirit, an awful force that wants to destroy her. A demon.”

“It’s not a demon,” I said. “Fitch’s whole thing is science and medicine. That’s how he’s going about it. He thinks it’s the only way to get credit, make his mother love him. All our friends know it—we just didn’t realized that he was hurting people to do it.” But then I thought of what Minerva had said about the alchemy of gold dust, the magic of the Hammer of Witches , and wondered if Fitch was really as scientific as he made himself out to be.

As if Abigail knew we were talking about her, she moaned in her sleep and turned over in her bed. Now that I had promised Hayley we were going to escape, all I had to do was come up with a plan to accomplish the impossible. But I was exhausted. I tried my best to fight through it.

I told myself I wouldn’t fall asleep in that attic, wouldn’t give in to exhaustion and lie down on one of the mattresses lined up against one wall, but I couldn’t help it. With all the adrenaline I’d been running on all day, my limbs felt like they were filled with sand. I yawned, and Hayley saw.

“Lie down,” she said. “Get some rest.”

“I have to stay alert, to be ready for him,” I said.

“You can’t be ready for anything if you’re falling asleep on your feet. Don’t worry—I’ll stay awake.”

“Promise you’ll wake me up if he comes back?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

So I walked over to a mattress and flopped onto it. My eyelids fluttered, and just before I drifted off into sleep, thoughts of gold dust, magic, and the Hammer of Witches flashed through my mind. I saw Hayley sitting cross-legged on the floor beside me, gazing at me, keeping watch over me, the way I wished more than anything that I could have kept watch over Eloise. Shades of gold flashed behind my eyelids, and I tumbled into a deep sleep.