“I agree,” I said, but it was my turn to be absentminded. There was something translucent curled up inside her flesh. I used the fine point of Grey’s knife to lift it out. It wasn’t hard to dislodge: a single, anemic flower. I gave it a gentle tug and plucked it from her wound, tiny root system and all. The same kind of flower that had taken over the dead man’s body. The same kind of flower that had been growing from Grey’s eyes in the photograph.

It had been budding inside Vivi, feeding off her blood, blooming in her scored-open flesh.

What the hell was going on?

I twirled the bloody flower in my fingers and felt suddenly, desperately sick. My throat swelled. I swallowed a sob. Grey was gone, and the weirdness I’d been trying so desperately to escape had found me again.

“At least I’ll have a gnarly scar. Chicks dig scars, right? Does it look infected?” Vivi asked. I crushed the bloom between my fingers before she could see it. Acknowledging it made it real—and I was not ready for whatever was happening to be real.

“It’s fine,” I said as I dressed her arm with more iodine and wrapped it in gauze, hoping that would be enough to prevent any more gardens from sprouting out of her. “I think it’s time to call the police.”

10

TWO DAYS LATER

Another flash went off, leaving a new cluster of sticky white spots in my vision. I looked down at my dress and tried to blink them away. A thread was coming loose at the hem. I picked at it, watching the stitching come undone as I pulled. It was a House of Hollow piece taken from Grey’s closet. We’d all dressed in House of Hollow clothing to show solidarity. A blazer for Vivi. An emerald-green velvet dress for me. A brooch for our mother, despite her protests. A dash of Grey’s gag-worthy perfume at our wrists and throats, so we all stank of smoke and the dangerous part of the woods.

The dress was high-necked and rubbed against the scar at my throat, making it raw and itchy. I pulled the seam away from the scar, but it still felt like sandpaper working away at my skin.

The lead detective was standing, giving his opening remarks. “Miss Hollow does not have her cell phone with her,” he said. “We have not been able to track her through any social media. We are concerned for her safety. We are asking the public to be on the lookout for her, and for anyone who has any information regarding her whereabouts to come forward.”

The journalists were immediately feverish. “Do you think this disappearance is in any way linked to her disappearance as a child?” one of them asked.

“We don’t know,” the detective said. “We’re liaising with Scottish authorities to determine if there are similarities, though at this stage there doesn’t appear to be any correlation.”

“Where was her last confirmed location? Who was the last person she spoke to?”

“We can’t release that information yet. I’ll answer more questions in a moment. At this time, Miss Hollow’s family would like to make a brief statement.”

In another universe, I was in my Friday English class discussing Frankenstein with Mrs. Thistle. Instead, Vivi, Cate, and I were together at the front of an event room inside the Lanesborough. A crystal chandelier glinted overhead. The walls were richly paneled and gilt frame portraits lined the space; only the leopard print carpets felt modern.

My mother sat to one side of me, woody and brittle. Vivi sat to the other, slouched back with her arms folded. She stank, the oily smell of stale booze and sweat and cigarette smoke. Cate hadn’t been able to force her into a shower, so she’d sprayed her with extra perfume to mask two days of hard drinking. It didn’t help.

It was Grey’s agent who’d made the call to the police two days ago. We’d waited for them in her office, a chic, modern space adorned with framed pictures of our sister. They’d taken hours to arrive. There was no emergency, after all. No crime scene anymore, no body. Just a burned-down apartment and a missing girl—and girls went missing every day.

The police had arrived around sunset to take our statement. We had left out the details we couldn’t explain—the flowers growing on the dead man, the bull skull the man wore over his face—and told them only the bare-bones facts. Grey had left a note saying she was in danger. There had been a corpse in her apartment. A man had broken in and set the place on fire. He had shot Vivi.

The cops had been thorough yet workaday in their questioning. They had exchanged disbelieving, exasperated glances approximately every thirty seconds. I got it. Even with the craziest bits left out, it was a wild, implausible story from a wild, implausible family.

When the police left, Vivi called our mother, and the agent called Grey’s publicist. An hour later, the world knew that Grey Hollow—beautiful, strange Grey Hollow—was missing. Again. If Grey had been a famous supermodel a week ago, she was now something ten times more intoxicating: an unsolved mystery.

It was official. It had begun.

Which brought us to the press conference. The event had been planned for the dingy conference room of a local police station, but Grey’s publicist changed it to the Lanesborough.

We’d been instructed to look sad, demure, and helpless, which wasn’t hard. We were helpless. Grey had counted on us coming to look for her, and we had. Grey had squirreled away secrets that only we would find, and we had. Grey had left bread crumbs and bet on us saving her—and we had failed.

We’d missed something, some vital clue, and now Grey was really gone, and the only two people who might have a hope of finding her had screwed it up completely.

Something twisted in my heart at the thought of Grey alone somewhere, afraid, waiting for Vivi and me to rescue her. Waiting, and hoping, certain that we’d come—and eventually realizing that we wouldn’t.

I love you, I thought, gulping back a sob. Please know I love you. Please know I tried.

The journalists drank my moment of grief in hungrily. The flash of photographers left me headachy, disoriented. Cate stood and muttered her way through a plea for Grey to come home, her words never quite sounding convincing. Lips pursed, affect flat. I’d seen the footage of the press conference our parents gave the first time we went missing, in which our mother had verged on mania. Then her cheeks had been slick with tears, her eyes wide and red and wild, a wet tissue dabbed to her nose every ten seconds as she begged, begged, begged for us to be returned.