Grey let go of the man’s throat and slapped him hard across the face. A tinkling rain of glass shards fell from his hair. “You’re lucky my sister is more merciful than I am. Don’t you ever, ever fucking touch someone without their consent again. Get out of my sight. Get out of Paris and don’t come back.”

When he was gone, Grey rounded on me. “And you. You have to be more—”

“What?” I snapped as I pulled myself off the ground. “Careful?” I was shaking, bleeding. I wanted Grey to fold herself around me like a blanket and make the hurt go away, but she didn’t. She stood there and watched me, unmoving, as I did up the top button of my jeans and pressed cotton makeup rounds to the bleeding bites on my neck, my shoulder.

“You have to be stronger, Iris.”

“Are you kidding me? It’s not like I asked for it! He followed me back here. Why are you angry with me?”

“Because you’re weak. Because you let lesser people push you around. Because you are afraid of how powerful you are and you shrink away from it. Because I won’t always be around to protect you and I know, I know you are capable of protecting yourself, because you’re more like me than you realize.”

“Who the fuck are you?” I asked, because this person was not my sister. Her words were so vile, so wrong—how could they have come from Grey? How could this person who claimed to love me more than anything hurt me so deeply after what she’d seen happen to me? I thought, then, of the broken pinkie finger on my sister’s left hand. On my left hand.

“Does it hurt?” I’d asked her when it happened.

“Yes,” she’d whispered, cradling the swollen bones to her chest. “It hurts so much.”

“How can I make it better?”

She’d looked up at me, her eyes black, her breath coming in sad little drags. “Break your finger too.”

On my way out, Grey snatched up my bruised wrists in her hands. I winced at the layered pain, hurt on hurt. “Use the gifts you have been given,” she said to me. “No one should be able to lay a finger on you. You can bring them to their knees, if that’s what you want. You can make them pay.”

“That isn’t what I want,” I said as I twisted out of her grip, the way Vivi had shown me after one of her Krav Maga classes. “That’s never been what I want. Why can’t you get that? What I want is to be normal.”

Later that night, in my hotel room, I spent two hours in the shower trying to scrub the smell of him off me, and then, when it was gone, trying to scrub out whatever rotten thing lived under my flesh and made me so weak. I scrubbed my scar so raw, it bled for days.

So yes. I thought I knew why Grey dated Tyler. Because to be near a person who wasn’t prey to your intoxicating power, to kiss someone who would never become crazed at the scent of you—someone you couldn’t make want you, someone you couldn’t make love you, someone who desired you of their own free will—was something I had daydreamed about but thought was impossible for me.

We watched as the driver used a funnel to refuel the car, then got back in the front seat and turned on the engine.

“Hey, hey, hey!” I yelled as he put the car into first and began to roll away without us, all of the doors still open. We all piled in—Vivi in the front this time, Tyler and me in the back—and slammed our doors shut.

“I must say, I am not a fan of this Uber,” Tyler said. “One star. Two at most.”

I sat with Grey’s clammy head in my lap, her bare legs draped over Tyler’s knees. Her hair was sodden with sweat, and her skin smelled sharp and wrong, meat and vinegar undercut with something sweet and floral, like gardenia. I pushed her hair off her forehead. Even like this, even sick and sallow and shaking, Grey was beautiful.

I’d never seen her really unwell before. It had always been Grey taking care of Vivi and me when we were little girls, not the other way around. Grey had always been the one in charge. Grey had always been the strongest.

“I’m going to keep you safe,” I whispered to her, just as she had whispered to me every night when she tucked me in. “Forever. I promise.”

* * *

We stopped for more fuel not long after, at a twenty-four-hour service station along the highway with acid-white lighting. I dashed inside while the driver filled the tank. I bought a liquid painkiller meant for kids and water to try and lower Grey’s fever. I was back in the car, my arms full of medicine and snacks from by the register, before the guy had even finished refueling. Tyler was walking around, stretching his legs. Vivi twirled an unlit clove cigarette in her fingers, maintaining eye contact with the glaring station clerk the whole time.

“Grey,” I said as I slipped back inside the car and rested her head in my lap. The man docked the nozzle at the pump. “Grey, you need to take this.” I thought the man would head into the station and pay, but he opened his door and started the ignition. “Shit, Tyler!” I called as the car jerked forward. “Get in!”

Tyler legged it after us and made it inside as the driver pulled out of the station, the clerk already outside yelling after us.

“Dude is gonna get us arrested,” Vivi said.

“Help me with this,” I instructed Tyler once we were back on the highway. I hiked Grey’s limp shoulders farther up on my knees and held her head so Tyler could open her mouth and pour some of the painkiller in.

Tyler leaned over and stroked the side of her cheek. A tender moment. He ran his thumb over Grey’s bottom lip, then opened her mouth.

“There’s something . . . something in there,” he said.

“In her mouth?” I leaned over and looked. There was something green and rank lodged at the back of Grey’s throat. I put my fingers in past her teeth and tried to scoop it out: a slop of rotten leaves covered in a fur of powdery mildew. The tinny stink of it made my eyes water. Tyler and Vivi both gagged as the close air of the car ripened. I turned on the car’s overhead light and looked in Grey’s mouth, then immediately wished I hadn’t. I gagged too. A nest of rotten leaves and carrion flowers and ants, all growing in her. Swollen with her blood. Bursting from the flesh of her throat.