Tyler said nothing.

We burned Agnes’s body in the fireplace. It seemed wrong to leave her abandoned on the floor of an empty house, her death unnoticed and unmourned. When I lifted her, she was light and hollowed out, like a long-fallen tree. We burned her wrapped in her blankets and used the newspaper clippings she slept with as kindling. It didn’t take long. The pyre smelled not of flesh and hair, but of smoking greenery and forest fire.

I hoped that, wherever she ended up now, she was at peace.

“I suppose you have a plan,” Tyler said as he buttoned up his floral shirt. “You Hollows always seem to have a plan.”

I shook my head. “Grey’s the planner. Not me. I’m a follower. I didn’t even fight. I just . . . stood there while Agnes shot him. I let a kid defend me.”

“Well, not fighting it turned out to be a good idea,” Tyler said as he touched his fingertips to his broken cheekbone. “Look, you are Grey’s sister. You are as strong and smart and, frankly, as terrifying as she is. How do we follow them?”

“I don’t know.”

“You do know, because you’ve been there before. How do we follow them?”

I let out a frustrated exhale. “How do you get to the land of the dead?” I was certain that that’s where we were trying to go: a strange sliver of space between here and nothingness.

“I suppose dying would get you there, though that seems to be a very permanent solution.”

I locked eyes with him. “It wasn’t for you.”

“Yes, well. I’d rather not do that again.”

“That’s fine,” I said, already making my way toward the stairs. “I can go by myself. I’ll fill the bathtub, you can hold me under until I die, then give it a minute or so and do some CPR. I’ll find them.” Hadn’t I seen that in a movie or read it in a book? It had worked then—why wouldn’t it work now? I wanted Tyler to say yes before my adrenaline waned and I chickened out. My heart was beating so fast, I felt like I might vomit it up. I was already imagining the terrible moment my burning lungs sucked in a flood of water while he held me, thrashing, under the surface.

“Iris,” Tyler said, pulling me back. “I won’t drown you. Don’t ask me to do that.”

I snatched my hand away from his. “Do you want to save her or not?” I yelled, because I felt my courage breaking. Didn’t I always think I was willing to die for my sisters? Here was an opportunity—was I too weak to take it?

“We both have to go,” Tyler said. “Together.”

I sighed and softened. “Your eye looks terrible.”

“Well, I did take a right hook from a demon, bang in the socket. Frankly, it’s a miracle I’m not dead. My delicate bone structure was not built for physical combat.”

I grabbed an old bag of frozen vegetables from the freezer and threw them to him. We should both go to the hospital, but there was still a tinge of something otherworldly in the air. I thought, if we didn’t follow them tonight, we might not ever be able to follow. We would forget that impossible things were possible. It was now or never. It had to be.

I pulled back the curtain an inch and looked into the sloe-black Edinburgh night. Somewhere out there was a door to another place, a crack in the world into which girls and boys slipped, never to be seen again.

Well, almost never.

The three of us had come back, somehow. We had found a way.

“Did Grey ever talk to you about what happened to us when we were children?” I asked Tyler as he pressed the vegetables to his face. The flames of Agnes’s body had simmered down to smoke and bone.

“Of course not. I would have immediately sold the story to the Daily Telegraph if she’d told me the truth.” When I glared at him, Tyler rolled his eyes. “I’m kidding. It was off-limits to even ask.”

“Did you ever wonder?”

“Oh, I wondered. I grew up reading the Reddit threads and watching the unsolved-crime specials the same as everyone else. Of course I wanted to know the answer. Sometimes when she was drunk, she talked about it in a vague way, like it was a thing that had happened to someone else. It was almost like . . . a dark fairy tale about three sisters who fell through a crack in the world and met a monster who did something terrible to them.”

“What did the monster do to them?”

Tyler stared at me, peas still pressed against his face. “I don’t know for sure, Little Hollow. But I can imagine. Can’t you?”

I went to pick up the shotgun from where Agnes had dropped it. I’d never held a gun before and it felt heavier and more lethal than I expected.

“So where are we going?” Tyler asked.

“Back to the beginning.”

“Stop speaking in riddles, for Christ’s sake. What does that mean?”

“Look, whatever happened to us happened here first, in Edinburgh. It happened in the Old Town, not far from here. There’s a door there. Or, at least, there used to be. A door that used to lead somewhere, but now leads somewhere else. We’re going back there. We’re going to find a way to follow them.”

I watched a YouTube video on how to load a shotgun while Tyler stuffed Vivi’s backpack full of some meager supplies scavenged from Agnes’s kitchen. We put on our coats—his ridiculous, mine functional—I slipped Grey’s knife into my pocket, and then we set off.

Outside, Edinburgh was steeped in predawn darkness. We headed toward Saint Giles’ Cathedral, in the direction of the narrow street I had disappeared from. We walked, shivering, through the Old Town’s warren of narrow lanes, retracing my steps from that night, though I knew them not from memory but from snatches of police reports and the witness statements of my parents.

Grey’s energy was here, though it was no stronger than a whisper. She had been here, though not recently. Years ago. I felt Vivi’s energy too, and my own. Yes, we had come this way.