I felt better when I was done. I changed back into my sweaty T-shirt and jeans, my skin protesting at the salt and grime clinging to the fabric.

Tyler took first watch while Vivi and I slept on the living room floor next to Grey. The day was unseasonably bright for winter in Edinburgh. The room was hot from the boiler, and the air felt close and stank of rotting forest, but none of us had really slept the night before, and the nights before that had been riddled with stress and waiting and wanting, so we both fell into heavy, dreamless sleeps. I slept more deeply than I had in weeks, my fingertips pressed to Vivi’s wrist on one side of me, Grey’s throat on the other. The rhythm of their pulses like a metronome.

I woke through a hazy curtain sometime in the afternoon when the girl—Agnes—came back. I watched her for a little while as she sat in a chair by the front window, the shotgun resting across her lap. When I woke again, it was night. The house was dark, but there was a light on in the kitchen and the hushed voices of Vivi and Tyler—made soft and giddy at the edges, I guessed, by several servings of alcohol—drifted through. I put my palm on Grey’s cheek. Her fever had broken sometime during the afternoon and her skin no longer felt sodden. When I peeled back the bandages on her arms, the flowers were wilted, the wounds they grew from almost healed.

“Hey, kid,” a gravelly voice whispered.

I looked up. Grey’s eyes were cracked only a sliver, but she wore half a smile.

“You’re awake!”

“Shhh,” Grey said, laughing weakly. “I just want a few more minutes of peace before I have to get up.”

“I thought you were dead,” I whispered as I buried my face in her neck. “I thought you were dead.”

“Hey, hey. No. I’m here. I’m here.”

“There was a body in your apartment. There are people following you. A man who wears a bull skull on his head. The little girl—Agnes—says he’ll be able to find you here.”

“How long have I been out? We should probably get back on the road before he tracks us down.”

“Who is he? What does he want from you? Did he kidnap us when we were children?”

Grey ran her fingers through my hair and tucked a strand of it behind my ear. “No, he didn’t take us when we were children.”

“You said in Vogue that you remember. You remember everything that happened to us. So what happened to us?”

There was a noise from the kitchen, a round of Vivi’s snorted laughter. “Who else is here?” Grey asked.

“Vivi and Tyler.”

“Tyler came?”

“We haven’t been able to get rid of him.”

Grey smiled. “Can I see him?”

“What are we going to do, Grey?” Where would we go now? How could we run from an enemy who would always be able to find us? Grey tried to speak, but her throat caught and she coughed. “Hang on. I’ll get you some water.”

I stood and stretched and went into the kitchen, where Vivi had stripped down to a crop top and jeans, her bare feet up on the table, a clove cigarette in her mouth and another tucked behind her ear. She and Tyler were playing cards and drinking whiskey. Vivi’s wisteria tattoo had grown since I last saw it. It now twisted under her bra and around her rib cage, across the flat plane of her stomach and around her portrait of Lady Hamilton before it dipped below the waistband of her jeans. Purple watercolor blossoms bloomed from the vines. Some of the leaves had begun to curl and blacken with rot. I wondered if she’d purposefully added to it, or if the ink had grown wild across her skin, unable to be stopped.

“Care to join?” Tyler said around one of Vivi’s clove cigarettes. He, too, was shirtless in the warm kitchen. I tried not to let my gaze linger on him for too long.

“You two are playing poker and getting pissed on your watch?” I asked as I poured a glass of water from the sink.

“We both have extremely high alcohol tolerances,” Vivi said.

“By that, she means we’re high-functioning drunks who require at least a few shots of medicinal booze every day to remain operative. Really, getting pissed was the responsible thing to do,” Tyler said. “How’s Grey?”

“Awake,” I said, then nodded at Tyler. “She wants to see you.” Tyler stood so quickly that his chair toppled over behind him. I handed him the glass of water. “Take this to her.”

“How is she?” Vivi asked.

“Weak. I’m so used to her being strong. It feels wrong to see her like this.”

“Well, thank God she’s awake now to tell us what to do. If I had to make one more decision . . .” Vivi mimed her head exploding.

“Where’s Agnes?”

Vivi looked puzzled. “Who?”

“The little girl.”

“Oh. The kid climbed up on the roof with the gun. Said if he’s going to come, he’s probably going to come at night. Thinks she’s Clint Eastwood or something.”

“I’ll take her some tea.” There was no kettle, so I put a pot of water on the stove and waited for it to boil. “Grey’s fever has broken,” I said as I searched the cupboards for cups. “We should get out of here as soon as she’s strong enough. Preferably sober.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Vivi said as she leaned over the table to peek at Tyler’s cards.

I found two mugs in the sink, crusted with grime. They looked familiar: raw clay on the outside, green glaze on the inside, imperfect handles. GH stamped on the bottom, the mark of their creator: Gabe Hollow. Grey must have brought them here from London. I put my hands around one, cupping its form, holding it the way he must have held it as it turned beneath his fingers on the wheel. My hands, exactly where my father’s hands had once been.

I stirred dark leaves into them both.