“Me too,” I said as I patted him on the back. It felt so strange and so good to be this close to someone without having to worry about them sinking their teeth into my skin to taste me. “Me too.”

* * *

I steadied myself with three deep breaths before I plugged my phone in to charge.

For the first time ever, I edited my Find Friends app to remove my mother from the list of people who were allowed to see my location. If she knew where I was, she would be on the first flight here to bring me home. I couldn’t let that happen. It wasn’t safe for her.

I tapped her name in my Favorites list and called her.

“Iris, Iris, Iris,” my mother sobbed a half second later. “Oh my God, talk to me, baby.”

“I’m okay,” I said. The pain in her voice was corrosive. I felt it in my blood. God, how could I do this to her? “I’m okay.”

“Where are you? I knew I shouldn’t have let you stay with that thing. I’m coming to get you.”

That thing? “I can’t tell you. I’m safe, but I can’t come home yet. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone for.” I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to come back.

I thought about school then, and the carefully constructed fantasy future I’d allowed myself to dream about for years. The one in which I wore a navy Oxford University sweatshirt as I carried textbooks across the lawns of Magdalen College. The one in which I had classmates who didn’t know me as a famous missing person or the younger sister of a supermodel, but as Iris Hollow, medical student. The one in which I had a girlfriend or a boyfriend and kissing them didn’t feel scary. The one in which I went punting on the River Cherwell and drank cider at summer picnics with my friends and spent long hours studying in libraries built inside the hallowed halls of old churches.

A future that, at this moment in time, felt like it was slipping away—but I had my sister back, and that was what mattered more than anything.

“That thing has taken everything else from me,” Cate said. “I’m not going to let her take you too. Tell me where you are. You are mine, not hers. Do you hear me? You are mine.”

“Are you talking about . . . Grey?”

“Stay away from her, Iris. Please. Wherever you are, just get away from her. You are not safe, you are—”

“Cate. Stop. I’m not leaving her. I’m not abandoning my sisters.”

“Don’t trust her. Run. Listen to me. Please. You have to run. Run. Run. She is not—”

I hung up and pressed the heel of my hand against my mouth to keep from sobbing. My phone vibrated with an incoming call. A picture of my mother and me together filled my screen, my opaline hair and pale forehead pressed close to her flushed cheek, her mop of dark curls. We were both smiling. Our features were startling in their dissimilarity. The call ended, and then my mother called again, and again, and again. I blocked her number.

My mother had called my sister a thing. My mother had told me to run from her.

I didn’t know what to do with that, except swallow my revulsion and lean back against the wall. The house was quiet. The three of us were together. Grey was alive. That was enough.

I savored the calm for a handful of minutes—then I typed minotaur into Chrome and tapped Go. The search returned images of a hulking demon bull with an axe, cartoonish in its size and evilness. It was frequently depicted with washboard abs, cloven hooves, and glowing red eyes. Nothing like the man who was following us.

The Wikipedia article recounted the Greek myth, of a flesh-eating monster trapped at the center of a labyrinth by the master craftsman Daedalus. I scrolled down. The Minotaur appeared in Dante’s Inferno, which piqued my interest—it was one of Grey’s favorite books—but the mention was brief, and Dante and Virgil passed by it quickly. Picasso included the creature in several of his etchings. There were Minotaurs in Dungeons & Dragons and Assassin’s Creed. Useless.

Under the See also section, there was a list of comparable entities: I tapped on Ox-Head, “guardian of the Underworld in Chinese mythology,” and read about it and Horse-Face, two guardians of the realm of the dead who captured human souls and dragged them to Hell. I navigated back and tapped another name I vaguely recognized: Moloch. “A Canaanite god associated with child sacrifice.” I pressed my lips together and skimmed the entry: archaeological evidence of children sacrificed in Carthage, Cronus eating his children.

I stopped at the Peter Paul Rubens painting that had been included alongside the text: Saturn Devouring His Son. In it, a naked male god with gray hair and a gray beard bent over the small child he held in his hand, his teeth ripping at the flesh of the baby’s chest.

“Jesus,” I whispered.

I put my phone down and ran my hands through my hair. I needed a shower. I needed to sleep.

I went upstairs. There were two bedrooms, though one was unfurnished and the double bed in the other was stripped of sheets, its bare mattress stained and sagging. The girl slept, I figured, in the nest of fetid blankets in the corner of the room, its layers lined with leaves and bits of paper. I knelt and unfolded a square of newspaper, a clipping that had turned brittle with age. Missing Child, the headline read, followed by a black-and-white photograph of a little girl. Underneath, the caption read: Eleven-year-old Agnes Young, the only daughter of Phillip and Samantha Young, has been missing for five days. I trailed my fingertips over the girl’s face, over the familiar white cotton nightdress she wore. Another clipping was the death notice from last year of one Samantha Young, aged ninety-six. Reunited with her beloved daughter, Agnes, at long last, it read. I folded them both and put them back where I found them, my thoughts snagging on the dates.

I sat in the shower for a long time after that, my knees tucked up to my chin, arms wrapped around my shins until I was curled as tight as a river stone beneath the falling water.

I cried. Not a lot and not easily, but a few hard sobs clutched at my ribs and squeezed me. I cried for the days Grey had been missing and I cried in relief that she was here and I cried for myself, for the life I had worked for and the life I wanted, the life that seemed so fragile now. I cried because my mother thought my sister was dangerous and I cried because a part of me knew it was true.