Yulia took a breath. “I was like most people. As soon as I saw Grey, I . . . I loved her. I was obsessed with her. Like a pet following a master. I can’t explain why, only that she was beautiful. I followed her around like a shadow. Then it happened. One day when Grey left to go wherever it was she went, I went after her. Trailed her. I wanted to know where she kept disappearing to. Grey came back. I didn’t.” She licked her lips. “My boyfriend at the time went to the police. Reported me missing and told them he thought Grey had done something to me, but they said girls like me went missing all the time. Nobody cared. Nobody even looked for me.”

“So . . . where did you go?” I asked.

“That’s the thing. I don’t remember,” Yulia said.

“Oh, Christ!” Tyler said. “You’re all bleeding useless!”

“You were nineteen,” Vivi said. “You must remember something.”

“I know what happened to me. I followed your sister somewhere I wasn’t supposed to go, and I paid the price. When I came back, I wasn’t . . . right. It ruined me. Now all I dream about is dead people. When I wake up, I can still hear them whispering to me.” Yulia glanced at her shaking hands, then looked past us, over our shoulders. The male model with the blue hair had gone to fetch the woman with the clipboard. They were both staring at us. The woman held a phone to her ear and was having a low, urgent conversation. “I have worked very hard to recover from meeting your sister. Now, you should probably go if you want to get out of here before the police arrive.”

I looked at Vivi. I could tell she wanted to keep pushing, to shove her fingers into Yulia Vasylyk’s mouth and get her drunk enough on the taste of her skin that she’d answer any question we asked. I put my hand on her arm and shook my head once.

“One last question,” I said before we left. “Where was the apartment you lived in together?” Grey had been practically MIA those first few months after she’d moved out. We’d never even been to that place, though we knew it was somewhere in Hackney.

“Near London Fields,” Yulia said. “Grey won’t be there, though, if that’s what you’re thinking. My parents own the place. No one lives there anymore.”

“It’s vacant?”

“No one will rent it, and my parents haven’t been able to sell it ever since Grey moved out. Whenever prospective buyers or tenants walk through, they say they feel sick. There’s something wrong with it. My parents checked for carbon monoxide leaks and black mold, but I think . . .”

“You think what?” Vivi asked.

“I think your sister cursed it somehow.”

“Thank you,” I said, and I meant it. “Thank you for helping us.”

“Hey,” Yulia called as we turned to go.

“Yeah?”

“They left something out of the news reports,” she said. “When they found me in the street, I was naked except for the bloody runes written on my body. The blood was Grey’s.”

* * *

Vivi, Tyler, and I caught an Uber and had it drop us close to the south end of London Fields, then walked through Broadway Market toward the park. It was packed, as it was every Saturday, with people buying sourdough bread and artisanal doughnuts and bunches of flowers and vintage Barbour waxed jackets. Along the way, we bought fresh coffee and half a dozen croissants, which barely made a dent in the well of hunger still crawling inside me.

“Like a pair of bears preparing for the winter,” Tyler said as he watched us eat. He stuck to unsweetened black coffee.

“Why do you think we’re hungry all the time?” I asked Vivi as I licked my fingers after my third croissant.

“We are blessed with fast metabolisms,” she said.

“Inhumanly fast, some might say,” I said.

“Bearlike, some might go so far as to suggest,” Tyler said.

My stomach growled. “I need more food.”

We stopped again for goat cheese and honey and two sourdough baguettes, then continued to stuff our faces until, finally, after consuming approximately ten thousand calories before lunch, I was something close to satisfied.

“What do you make of what Yulia said?” I asked as we left the market and entered London Fields. It was my favorite park in the summertime, when the grass grew thick with red and yellow wildflowers and hundreds of Londoners flocked to the shade of trees to drink Aperol spritzes in the afternoon warmth. Now, in late winter, the midday sun felt diluted, far away. The trees were a scraggy mess of naked branches, and the cold was too caustic to allow anyone to linger for too long.

“That this whole situation is way above our pay grade,” Vivi said between mouthfuls of bread. “The bloody runes, though. That is something else.”

“Both of the men in Grey’s apartment had runes on them, written in blood,” I said. “That is not a coincidence.”

“Just so we’re all on the same page here,” Tyler said, “this is definitely some Satanic cult thing, right? Like some freaky sex cult with blood and human sacrifices. That’s where we’re all landing at the moment, yeah?”

As soon as we reached the north end of London Fields, we caught Grey’s trail. It came to me as a tingle in my fingertips and a taste on my tongue, an inexplicable certainty that my sister had been here. The area was thick with her energy, though her presence here felt old and faded now. We walked on in silence until we saw a squat row of houses pressed close to the train tracks. Vivi pointed to one and said, “That one.” I knew she was right. Grey’s energy had nested there, tight and twisted, and it lingered on even years after her departure.

“How could you possibly know that?” Tyler asked.

An ominous feeling crawled over me. “It doesn’t feel right,” I said.