“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” Vivi yelped. And then: “It’s not her.” Not a wish this time: a statement of fact.

I had somehow scrambled from the closet to the other side of the room and was now crouched next to the bloody bed, though I couldn’t recall how I’d gotten there so quickly.

“Um . . . Iris, you should see this,” Vivi said as she squatted to inspect the body.

I couldn’t look. I didn’t want to look. I didn’t think my stomach could handle it.

I opened a window and took a breath of winter air before I went over to where the body had fallen. It was bruised and bloated but clearly not Grey. It belonged to a man. Young, muscular, naked save for three runes written down his chest in dried blood. The cause of his death was clear: His throat had been slashed.

Yet the fact that he was dead and covered in runes and hidden in our sister’s ceiling was not the strangest thing about him.

“What is happening to him?” Vivi said. There were waxy white flowers sprouting from his mouth, his nose, the softening remains of his eyeballs. Flowers growing rabid from the gash in his skin, their roots red-black with dead blood. Something moved at the back of his throat, behind his broken teeth. Something alive in the greenery.

“Do we call the cops now?” I asked.

“As soon as we call the police, this will be a crime scene, and we won’t be able to find what Grey wants us to find. Look around. Look through everything. There’s something here that only we would be able to find.”

It was a breeze that saved us. It trilled through the bedroom window and down the hall, where it slammed the front door closed. The door that I’d shut behind me only minutes before.

A fresh sprig of fear twisted up my spine. Not for Grey this time, but for Vivi and myself. Whoever Grey was afraid of, they knew where she lived. They had been here. Maybe they had killed someone. Maybe they were back.

There were heavy footsteps. In the hall, just outside Grey’s bedroom.

Hide, Vivi mouthed to me, already taking off her backpack and crouching to slip under Grey’s bed. Then there was a hand on the bedroom door, pushing it open. I had no choice but to back into the closet, over the body of the dead man. Years of following my sister like a spy had given me sure, quiet feet. I sidestepped the pool of decay and pushed myself deep into Grey’s clothing, hoping it would be enough to hide me.

A man came to stand in front of the closet door. A bare-chested man who was wearing a bull’s skull stripped of flesh to hide his face. The man who’d been following me. He stank of rot and earth, powerful enough to momentarily mask the scent of the body.

The smell of the darkest part of the forest.

The smell of Grey’s perfume.

The smell of the missing month.

A memory hummed through me, sharp as a plucked string. A house in the woods. Grey taking me by the hand and leading me through the trees. A strip of tartan fabric tied to a low branch. Grey saying, “It’s not far now.” Where were we?

I backed farther into the closet, unbreathing, unblinking, as the man discovered the corpse—and was entirely unsurprised by it. The man—in the half-light, his skin looked sallow and seeded with lichen—nudged the body with his bare foot. I thought of the hostess last night, how she’d said a frightening man had been asking after Grey.

The man grunted, hot breath coming from the nostrils of the skull.

Wordlessly, he knelt to scoop the dead guy up and hoisted him over his shoulder. A runnel of black liquid slipped down his back from the dead man’s open throat. I covered my mouth to stop myself from gagging. He dumped the body onto Grey’s bed, then worked quickly, moving from room to room, bringing back armfuls of Grey’s possessions to stack on top of the corpse. Sprigs of dried flowers, leather-bound notebooks, animal bones. Tapestries, sketches of dress designs, jewelry. Photographs. Many, many photographs, of Grey and Vivi and me, of the three of us together. He piled it into a pyre over the dead man and kindled the flames with scrunched paper, then stood and watched it as it burned.

From where I was hidden, I could make eye contact with Vivi. She had a hand pressed to her nose and mouth to stop herself from coughing in the smoke. Her eyes were wide with panic. If the man stayed much longer, she’d have to scramble out from underneath the bed before the flames ate too far through the mattress or the smoke became suffocating.

Slowly, I moved to cup my hands over my mouth and nose. The man turned to stare into the shadow of the closet, directly at me. I stopped breathing, didn’t blink. The firelight danced in his eyes, his irises black inside the skull he wore to hide his face. There were bloody runes written down his torso as well, the same markings as the dead man’s. Had this creature snatched me from the street when I was seven? Had he kept me and my sisters locked away for a month?

I waited for a gruesome memory to climb forward, but none came.

The man turned and left.

The smoke was black and choking when the front door finally closed and I burst out of the closet, the air thick with the stink of singed hair and burning fat.

Vivi was fighting for breath as I dragged her out from underneath the bed. “Save it,” she gasped through her coughs. “Save it.” Grey’s things. I yanked a quilt off an overturned armchair and cast it over the pyre like a fishing net, hoping it would work like a fire blanket.

Vivi and I both paused at the sight of it. On the quilt was the hand-stitched image of a ruined stone doorway teeming with white flowers. An odd look crossed Vivi’s face, a brief moment of recognition and understanding that gave way to confusion. “I don’t . . . ,” she said through a coughing fit. “What the hell is going on?”

“What is it?”

“A memory.” Vivi traced her fingers over the map’s stitching. “Or maybe déjà vu.”

I felt it too, a word on the tip of my tongue that I couldn’t quite call up.