6

I had seven missed 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.