Wait.

A strange memory tugged at the side of my thoughts. Something lost and then found. Another church, this one ruined and half-devoured by the woods. We came across it on our first day there, down by the river. Cate warned us not to go near it. It was derelict. But . . . Grey went. Yes. Went somewhere I couldn’t follow. Not because I was afraid, but because her trail just . . . stopped. Because she stepped through a door and wasn’t there on the other side. I’d wandered around the old church for hours, trying to figure out where she went. Eventually, Grey was there again, whole and solid. She smelled of burning and had flowers caught in the tangles of her hair.

Find the door, Grey’s note had said.

Vivi put the key in the lock and turned. We stepped inside.

The smell hit us first. The wet, heavy stench of fermented shit undercut with a cloying sweetness. We both gagged at the same time and scrambled back into the hall, dry heaving. Vivi looked at me, wide-eyed and knowing. We had smelled a dead body once before. A few years ago, in the week after Grey left but before Vivi packed her own bags, the man in the house next to ours had slipped in his bathtub. It had been eight days before anyone found him. By then, his body had begun to liquefy, and the smell of it had seeped through walls and ceilings and floors. When the paramedics came for him and opened the front door, the stench exploded out onto the street, soaking the air. It hung from the branches of trees like necklaces and took weeks to fade.

The words from Grey’s note nipped at my lungs. If you’re reading this, I might already be dead.

“A dead animal,” Vivi said, determined. “Not Grey.” Then she pressed inside, breathing through her mouth. I did the same, though I could still taste the dead thing on my tongue, fat and lingering.

We moved through Grey’s clandestine apartment together, half looking for the source of the stench, half consumed by the magnificent size of this treasure trove. All our young lives, we had subsisted on morsels of Grey Hollow’s secrets. Diary pages read by flashlight after she had snuck out, thimblefuls of sweet wine stolen from the bottle she kept hidden under her bed. And now here was her soul laid bare for the taking. A feast for the starving.

All the curtains were drawn, and the space felt woody and cool. The darkness was tight, damp, the undergrowth of a forest. Vivi turned on a lamp. It was nothing like the first apartment. Here, the walls were painted dark canker green. The floors were bleached herringbone parquet. There were terrariums filled with carnivorous plants and trays full of assorted crystals and delicate animal bones. Vases of feathers and jars of little creatures suspended in formaldehyde. Stacked boxes of balsam fir and red cedar incense. Bottles of gin and absinthe. Books on botany and taxidermy and how to commune with the dead. Pencil sketches were pinned to almost every available surface; Grey’s couture creations, but other images too, of strange creatures and ruined houses. Dried bouquets of flowers and fall leaves hung from the ceiling. And perhaps strangest of all was the taxidermy: a snake bursting from the mouth of a rat, a fox emerging from the skin of a rabbit.

The space was thick with Grey’s energy, trails of her crisscrossing the hall and rooms in tight webs. She’d been here more recently than she’d been to her other apartment.

The first room off the hall was the kitchen. I paused when I saw it, something hard settling into my stomach. The floor was black and white marble squares, and the opposite wall was entirely covered in shelves bursting with books.

My chessboard floor. Vivi’s library. The exact details we’d wanted when we’d dreamed of running away together. Why hadn’t Grey shared it with us already?

“Come on,” Vivi said. “Keep moving. Let’s find what she wants us to find and get the hell out of here.”

There were two more doors at the end of the hall. We took one each. I opened the handle and peered into Grey’s bedroom. The smell was strongest here, so acrid it stung my eyes and almost physically pushed me back. Some ancient part of my brain begged me not to get any closer, the part that knew the smell of death was a warning. Stay away.

“Vivi,” I said quietly. “There’s blood in here.”

I felt my older sister at my shoulder. We surveyed the damage together from the doorway, unwilling to take a step into the room. It was trashed. It was the nightmare scene I’d been afraid of finding at Grey’s first flat: Hitchcockian blood splatter on the walls, furniture knocked over, a lamp in shards, a gruesome patchwork of dried brown pools on the rumpled bedsheets. There were boot prints on the wall and holes kicked into the plasterboard and slippery bare footprints in the blood on the floor.

Someone had been attacked in this room. Someone had fought back in this room. Judging by the amount of blood that had been spilled, someone had died in this room.

I might already be dead.

I was crying as Vivi pushed past me into the stinking mess and found Grey’s iPhone, the screen shattered, on her bedside table, along with her passport. They were both sitting atop a copy of A Practical Guide to the Runes: Their Uses in Divination and Magick by Lisa Peschel. I couldn’t see Vivi’s face, but I could see her chest heaving.

“I will kill anyone who’s touched her,” she said, her voice harsh and low. I believed her. I would join her.

“What’s that sound?” There was a low background hum. An angry buzzing, coming from the closet. I went into the room, careful to avoid stepping in any blood. Vivi opened the closet door and switched on the light.

There was a ceiling access panel in the walk-in closet. A dozen flies whirred beneath it. Black liquid dripped from one corner. It pooled on the parquet floor, where it had turned the wood into a soft fen of decay. Vivi grabbed the pull cord.

“Don’t,” I said. “I don’t want to see this. I can’t see this.” Not if it was Grey. Seeing her rotting corpse would destroy me.

Vivi ignored me. “It’s not her,” she said—a wish, more than anything. “It won’t be her.” Then she pulled the cord. The hatch gagged open and heaved out a body. We both screamed and clutched at each other as it tumbled to the floor and landed with a wet squelch at our feet. It was definitely a human, not an animal.