She did, eventually. She was calmer now than this afternoon, no longer rabid. I let the joy of her being alive, alive, alive flood me again. I wrapped my arms around her wasp waist and squeezed her close, my head on her shoulder. Grey was rigid for a moment, and then she melted into the hug.

“I’m sorry I hurt you,” she said as she pulled back and trailed her fingertips over a soft bruise along my jaw. “I was scared.”

“It’s okay. It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. I’m just glad you’re okay. Where were you? What happened?”

Grey’s eyes welled and she pressed her lips together. “He took me. That bastard. I thought I’d never see you again.”

“Who . . . who do you think is coming for you?”

“Wait,” she said. “Watch.”

I glanced at the floor, where arterial blood dripped from the tip of the scalpel, the tips of Grey’s fingers. Another smack of déjà vu. Why did this scene feel familiar? “Did you . . . did you hurt the policeman, Grey?”

Grey’s eyes went to his body, then back to her ward door. “He was not what he seemed.”

I swallowed my horror and took Grey’s free, bloody hand in my own. What would this mean for her? A lifetime in prison for his murder? Or would they go easy on her because of her mental state? Not guilty by reason of insanity, the rest of her twenties spent in a mental institution? Both options were grim, life-destroying, but she had done something gruesome to an innocent man whose only crime was trying to protect her.

We waited together. We watched together.

In the minutes that passed, my sister stood unmoving and unblinking by the glass panel, her eyes bolted to the door of her hospital room across the corridor. I thought about what the doctor had said earlier in the evening, that Grey was in the grip of psychosis. It ran in our family, this predisposition to derangement. It had happened to our father, after all.

The day he killed himself, Gabe Hollow woke us in the early hours of the morning and bundled us into the family car. Cate was still asleep. We went quietly, without complaint. We could sense the danger in him—he handled us roughly, slammed the car doors, screeched out of the driveway—but what could we do? How could we fight? We were only little girls.

Gabe drove erratically. He was muttering to himself, crying, screaming that he was going to drive the car off a cliff and kill us all if we didn’t tell him the truth.

Where were his children?

What had we done to them?

Who were we?

What were we?

Vivi and I bawled our eyes out in the back seat, but it was Grey, sitting in the passenger seat up front, who talked him down.

“Please, Papa,” she whispered.

“Don’t call me that!” he said with a sob, knuckles stone-white on the steering wheel.

Grey put her tiny hand on his arm. “Take us home.” Her morning breath smelled strange, both syrupy and sour at once. It wasn’t until a year later, when I saw her kiss the woman who broke in, that I began to suspect Grey had compelled our father—and probably saved our lives in doing so.

Gabe took us home and killed himself later that day, while we were at school. We found him when we returned, hanging from the banister in the entranceway. Vivi and I screamed, but Grey didn’t. She dragged a chair over to his body, patted him down, took the note he’d folded in his pocket, read it, and then tore it up into small pieces and threw it out the window. I spent the afternoon in the garden, collecting all the scattered scraps in my pocket, while Cate called relatives and made arrangements for his funeral. It was late spring, an unusually hot day in London, the afternoon temperature climbing past thirty degrees Celsius. I sat in my room and taped all the pieces of his note back together with sweaty hands.

I didn’t want this, it had said. Four words to sum up a whole life.

I wondered if the same thing was happening to Grey right now. I wondered, for a few brief moments, if Tyler was right, if Grey’s hysteria was catching. How much of what we had seen was real? Had there really been a dead body in Grey’s ceiling? It had happened quickly and I had no physical proof of the strangeness, only scent and blood and memory. No one but Vivi and I had seen it. We had not been sleeping well, had been fueled by caffeine and adrenaline. The edge of our reality had begun to twist and burr as it brushed up against something else.

There was a hitch in Grey’s breathing. She closed her fingers around the door handle, still holding the scalpel, still staring at her room across the hall. “Take off your shoes,” she said.

“What?” I looked down at Grey’s own bare feet. The nail beds were blackened, her ankles rubbed raw from restraints. “Why?”

“Do it. He’s here,” she said. The flickering lights went out, and darkness dropped over the hallway like a stone. I scuffed out of my shoes and held them in one hand.

Then he was there, just as she said he would be. I knew him from his silhouette, even if I couldn’t see his face: the man from Grey’s burned-out apartment. Tall and thin, the skull of a dead bull worn over his face. The stench of him palmed my face, driving splinters of rot and damp and smoke into my nose. A flicker of broken memories skipped across the surface of my thoughts: a decomposing forest, a hand with a knife, three children warming themselves by a fireplace. Three little girls with dark hair and blue eyes. Us. Whose house were we at?

I was crying, though I didn’t understand why. We were not safe here. Whoever he was, he had found us, again. Found Grey. Come to take her away from me. I wanted to run, I wanted my feet to move as fast as my heart was beating, but my sister tightened her grip on my hand. Not yet.

The man knelt by the body of the police officer and turned him over—except he was not wearing a police uniform. A thicket of white flowers was bursting from the dead man’s eyes, his nostrils, his mouth, their petals waxy in the low light. Something was happening to him, something I’d seen before. Hair-thin vines grew from the roots of the flowers in his mouth, twisting their way across the skin of his face. There was the smell of blood, yes, but also something green and sour. I covered my mouth to keep from gagging.