It felt like a place Grey belonged, yet the furniture was sparse and there were none of the trinkets she liked to pack her hidey-holes with: no incense or crystals or candles. I could only guess the apartment was a safe house of some sort—or that Grey had rented or bought it in our grandmother’s name for the little girl. For a moment I wondered if the child was Grey’s secret daughter, born after she ran away. I searched her features for similarities, but there were none. The girl had chestnut hair and green eyes, and besides, she must’ve been ten or eleven, and Grey left only four years ago.

The girl left us then and went into the adjoining kitchen. There was banging, the sound of glass bottles clinking together and a spoon stirring. When she came back a few minutes later, she was holding a bowl. I caught the smack of vinegar and salt, mixed with the licorice of anise and the bitter, medicinal tang of wormwood. A witch’s brew.

The little girl motioned for me to open Grey’s mouth and pinch her nose shut. When I had done what she asked, she poured some of the liquid down Grey’s throat. Grey gagged and swallowed, then immediately vomited, a placental sac of rot and roots and greenery slopping out of her and onto the rug.

“Oh God, I cannot handle this,” Tyler said as he stood and went outside. I heard him retching a moment later, the few snacks we ate in the car splattering onto the sidewalk as he made his retreat.

The girl motioned for me to hold Grey’s nose again while she poured more of the draft into her mouth. Again, Grey gagged, swallowed, vomited, this time bringing up sticky strings of bile laced with flowers and thin worms.

The girl noticed the bandages on Grey’s arms and laid her blackened palms over them. Then she went to the kitchen and returned again with a pair of meat shears and slipped them under the coils of cotton, slicing the bandages off. Beneath, the skin of Grey’s arms was covered in three cuts, two of them closed with sutures that looked like barbed wire. White death flowers grew from each wound, a carpet of them, their roots vein-blue from drinking deeply of Grey’s blood.

“Jesus,” Vivi whispered. “What’s happening to her?”

The girl took the scissors she’d used to cut Grey’s bandages and drew one of the blades across her own palm. I cringed at the thought of the pain, but when she opened her hand there was no blood, only a runnel of brown liquid that smelled at once of iron and sap.

“It gets . . . ,” the girl rasped, but her throat closed. She swallowed, tried again. “It gets inside you.” She used two fingers from her opposite hand to hold her wound open. Inside were no capillaries or tendons or raw red flesh, but what you might expect to find on a decomposing tree on the forest floor: a fen of rot and moss and mold.

A tear slipped down Vivi’s cheek. “What are you?” she asked.

“It is in me,” the girl said, placing her hand over her heart. “In her.” She put her palm on the scar at Grey’s throat. Finally, she pointed at Vivi. “In you.”

Vivi shook her head, slowly at first and then more angrily. She smacked the tears from her eyes and stood. “Fuck this,” she said. She kicked the bowl of witch’s brew, which went clattering across the room, and did what Vivi does: stormed out, probably to find an off-license that would sell her booze before ten a.m.

The girl tore a strip from the bottom of her dress and soaked it in the puddle of leftover tincture. “For you,” she said as she handed the material to me. I was confused, but then the girl tapped the soft basin of flesh between her collarbones, and my fingers instinctively went to my own, went to my scar, where the knot beneath my skin had re-formed. I pressed the wad of wet fabric to my skin. Something beneath the surface squirmed in protest.

The girl soaked Grey’s cut bandages with what remained of the remedy, then laid them over the cuts.

“Why . . . ,” the girl began. She swallowed. “Why did she do this?” she asked as she ran her fingers over the wet strips of cotton.

I held my sister’s hand. “I don’t think she did. Grey’s been missing for a week. We found her like this. I think someone did this to her. A man. A man who wears a bull’s skull to hide his face.”

“He . . . cut her?” the girl rasped.

“I don’t know. I don’t know why anyone would do that.”

The girl stood and grabbed the shotgun and pointed it squarely at my face.

“You cannot stay here,” she growled.

“Whoa, whoa, just wait a—”

“No,” she said, slamming the barrel of the gun into my shoulder, toppling me over. “Go.”

“Please just tell me what’s going on!”

“He has her blood.” The way she spoke was like a wild animal that had been taught human language. “He will always be able to find her. If she is here, he will come. He is already on his way.”

“You owe her,” I said quickly, echoing what the driver had said before he left. I didn’t know exactly what a child could owe Grey, only that reminding her had gotten us inside, and maybe it would be enough to let us stay a little longer. Grey was weak and dehydrated. I worried that moving her again would do more damage, and besides, the girl seemed to know how to care for her when a hospital couldn’t. We needed to be here. We didn’t have anywhere else to go. “We need your help and you owe her. Please. Please.”

The girl was breathing hard. “When she wakes, you go,” she ordered, and then she dropped the gun and followed Vivi and Tyler out onto the street.

16

Vivi came back not long after, much to my surprise, not with a bottle of tequila but with fresh bread and fruit and coffee. We ate together on the front porch in the cold morning sun. I told her about what the girl had said, that the man looking for Grey would find us here like he’d found us at the hospital, that our time here was limited.

Vivi sucked on a clove cigarette and breathed out a plume of smoke, her thoughts ticking.