“Fire destroys, but it also reveals,” I said. “They like to grow on doors.”

The fire had slammed down the hall and into the kitchen, consuming the walls and everything else as it went. The white herringbone parquet was smeared with soot and ash. All of Grey’s treasures were gone. No more crystals, no more terrariums. No more feathers, no more incense. No more dried bouquets or sketches of monsters. No more journals or jewelry or taxidermied creatures.

I couldn’t even feel her energy anymore. Grey had been erased from this place, scrubbed clean. The man who’d come here had not only taken her but destroyed proof of her existence as well.

The kitchen was in better shape than the bedroom, though not by much. The wall closest to the bedroom was disintegrated and most of the cabinets had burned quickly, their contents spewed across the floor, but the bookshelves on the far wall were heavy oak and had survived mostly intact. The books they’d once held were scattered on the ground now with the rest of the debris, their pages curled from fire and water.

We picked through what little remained of our sister’s life. I felt the grief of losing the contents of her apartment almost as acutely as I felt the grief of losing Grey herself. This place had been a museum devoted to her, a vault filled to bursting with her secrets. Now she and all her secrets were gone. We might never know what had happened to her. If there was anything hidden in the walls, any clues stitched onto blankets or riddles engraved in wood, they were gone now too.

I picked up a charred hardcover copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It was my favorite book as a kid. Grey would read it to me over and over again. I opened its pages. They were filled with annotations in her handwriting; lines highlighted, words circled, notes written in the margins. No doubt she’d written an essay about it when she was supposed to be studying something else. There was a photograph of the three of us as kids being used as a bookmark. I handed it to Tyler. He traced his fingertips over Grey’s face.

And then—something. I swept my flashlight over the bookshelves again and noticed the spray of flowers twisting outward from them, across the floor, across the ceiling.

“Do you feel that?” I asked Vivi. Something had begun to tug at the edge of my heart. A sensation that felt familiar and yet alien at once. All of Grey’s energy had been burned away from this place—except for a low thrum at the far end of the kitchen. It was a soft, punchy beat.

“What?” Vivi asked as I walked to the end of the room and put my palm against the wood. Yes, there it was again, a fizzle in my fingertips.

“Come here,” I said.

Vivi came and put her hand next to mine, then snatched it back quickly. “It’s her.”

“What do you mean, ‘It’s her’?” Tyler said as he put his hand on the wood over and over again and felt nothing.

“It’s weak but . . . fresh,” I said. “Almost like she’s right on the other side of the wall.”

“Help me move the bookshelf,” Vivi ordered Tyler.

They shuffled it forward together until it toppled down with a crash, its damaged wood splintering into pieces on the floor. The wall behind the shelf had been mostly protected from the flames; its canker-green paint had only buckled close to the ceiling. And there, pressed tightly against the wall, was a hidden wooden doorframe growing thick with carrion flowers. It led to nowhere, but perhaps that didn’t matter.

Perhaps all that mattered was that it used to lead somewhere else.

“Where is she?” Vivi whispered.

“In the gap at the back of the couch that crumbs and coins fall into,” I said as I ran my hands over the old wood. “Halfway.”

Grey had sent us here to find answers—but answers alone weren’t enough for me. I wanted my sister back. “Grey, it’s Iris,” I said to the empty doorframe, to the green wall behind it. “If you can hear me, I want you to follow the sound of my voice. We’re close, but we need you to come to us. We can’t find our way to you.”

We stood in silence for a full minute, our breaths shallow and hearts racing as we waited. Even Tyler was quiet, watchful.

Finally, he shook his head. “You’re both completely bonkers,” he said, kicking the fallen bookshelf on his way back toward the hall. “It’s been a long, shitty day. I need a nap. And then I need one last line of cocaine before I go to jail.”

Vivi exhaled, and then she followed him. I waited a little while longer, my forehead pressed against the doorframe, before my throat grew dry with the taste of smoke and I knew I had to go. Maybe Tyler was right. Maybe we had gone a little nuts.

As I stepped into the hall, something moved in my peripheral vision. I yelped and scrambled back. Someone else was there. A figure had emerged from the warped doorway—from the wall—and was now leaning against it, gasping.

A girl, dressed in white, her fingertips dripping blood.

“Oh my God,” I whispered. “Grey?”

My oldest sister looked up at me. Her eyes were black and her white hair hung in filthy clumps around her face.

“Run,” she said. She tried to take a step toward me but sank heavily to her knees. “He’s coming.”

13

My head lolled forward, searching for sleep, then snapped back at the last moment, the movement dragging a gasp from my lungs and a furious flutter from my eyelids. I shifted in my chair and tried to sit up straighter in the bleach cold of the hospital waiting room.

“Would you stop doing that?” Tyler said, his own face smushed into his palm, his elbow balanced precariously on the arm of his plastic chair. “You sound like someone is stabbing you every thirty seconds and it is very annoying.”

“Sorry,” I said, then began the slow slump back into almost unconsciousness. Loll, snap, gasp, flutter. Tyler groaned as I shook my head and sat up straight again. Vivi, who possessed the talent of being able to sleep anywhere, in any position, was fast asleep, her head back and mouth wide open. Cate flicked through a magazine and sipped a cup of tea, her teeth clenched tight.