Tyler and Grey were huddled together on the couch when I went back in the living room, her head against his shoulder, his fingers in her hair. I lingered on the stairs and listened to them speak softly to each other, relieved whispers of I missed you and I love you and I’m sorry drifting to where I stood. I continued upstairs to find Agnes. She was in her room, sitting on the roof just outside her window, blackened feet still bare even in the caustic cold that had settled in after sunset. I handed her one of the steaming cups of tea. For a moment she hesitated, but then she took it.

I crawled through the window and sat next to her and looked out over the city. The sleet light of the winter sky had turned the world grayscale. For a while, we sipped in silence.

“You were there,” I said finally. It was a guess. “You fell through. To the same place my sisters and I ended up when we were children. Except you didn’t get to come home like we did. You got stuck.” Agnes sipped her tea and didn’t disagree with me, so I continued. “Then Grey found you and brought you back somehow—but wherever you were, you’d already spent too long there. It got inside you. Changed you.”

“The Halfway never lets you go,” she said. “Not really.” The tea had wet her throat, smoothed over the roughness. For the first time, she sounded almost like a child and not like something wild. “It’s supposed to be a one-way ticket. Things that end up there are not supposed to be able to find a way back.”

“What is it? The Halfway? My sister seems to think it’s somewhere between life and death.”

“Your sister is right. It’s a liminal place on the borders of the living and the dead—though I thought of it more as a kind of hell. Everything that dies passes through there. People, animals, plants. Most things move on quickly, as they’re supposed to, but some things get stuck. Humans, usually. The ones who can’t let go, or who are mourned too deeply by those they leave behind. There’s an old folk song—‘The Unquiet Grave.’ Perhaps you know it?”

I breathed into my cup. My breath rose off the surface of the tea and sent a warm, moist cloud to linger about my face. I did know the song. In it, a woman died and her lover mourned her so hard, weeping by her graveside for a year, that she couldn’t find peace, couldn’t move on. Was Agnes saying that the grief of the living could disturb the dead, could trap them in a slip of space between life and death? “How did you end up there if you didn’t die?”

“When I was a child, I was playing in Holyrood Park at sunset. There were old chapel ruins there that people said were haunted. My parents had banned me from playing there, but I was curious. I heard a voice on the other side of a ruined doorway. I followed it. I ended up somewhere else and I couldn’t find my way back. Sometimes the veil between the living and the dead grows thin. Sometimes the dead speak to the living and lure them through.”

“Is that what happened to us too?” I whispered.

Agnes sipped her tea. “You disappeared on New Year’s Eve?”

“At the stroke of midnight.”

“Between one year and the next. It makes sense. The veil is thinnest at liminal times. Sunset, sunrise, midnight.” Agnes looked like a child, but didn’t speak like a child. She had been missing for decades. I wondered how old her mind was. “If you were near a ruined door, perhaps you heard the dead calling. Perhaps you followed.”

“We were in the Old Town, on a street where a house had burned down a few weeks before. It was all destroyed—except for the front doorframe. That was still there, freestanding.”

Agnes nodded. “A door that used to lead somewhere, but now leads somewhere else.”

“You came back. You’re like us.”

“I am not like you. You must understand, by now, that you are different. Why are you so beautiful, do you think? So hungry? So able to bend the wills of those around you? You are like the death flowers that grow rampant in your wake: lovely to look at, intoxicating even, but get too close and you will soon learn that there is something rank beneath. That’s what beauty often is, in nature. A warning. A disguise. Do you understand?”

“No.” Yet I did understand, on some basic level. The purple, otherworldly petals of the monkshood flower concealed poison that could deliver instant death. Poison dart frogs were pretty as jewels—and one gram of the toxin that coated their skin could kill thousands of humans. Extreme beauty meant danger. Extreme beauty meant death.

“There is something in your blood that lets you slip between the place of the living and the dead—and back again—as you please.”

“Well, then, how did you get back?”

“Runes written on my skin in your sister’s blood. The rune for death.” Agnes took my hand and drew a shape on my palm with her finger: a line with three prongs at the bottom in the shape of an inverted arrow. “The rune for passage.” Agnes drew the shape of a capital M. “The rune for life.” This time, she drew the inverse of the first rune: a line with three prongs at the top. “Grey figured it out. I don’t know how. An incantation in blood and language to allow the dead to slip through to the world of the living.”

“You’re not dead, though.”

“No. The man that hunts you is, though. I can stay here because I belong here—I never died—but he can only cross over temporarily using Grey’s blood and the runes.”

“What makes us different? Why were we able to come back? Why does our blood let us come and go as we please?”

“Your sister is a wily one. A trickster. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.” Agnes reached out to trail a gangrenous fingertip over the scar at my throat. “Do you think there is any terrible thing she wouldn’t do to save you? Any line she wouldn’t cross? Any sacrifice she wouldn’t be willing make?”

“Tell me. Tell me the truth.”

“Your life would be happier if you didn’t know.”