I wasn’t sure what had changed, except that I was furious, a barb of rage twisting at the center of me. My stomach was filled with blood, my mouth slick with venom. The other two times that I had compelled people, I had been vulnerable and unsure, and my attackers had fed on that.

Now, this time, I was the one who would feast.

“What’s your name?” I asked the woman.

“Claire,” she answered.

“Tell me where my sisters are, Claire.”

“I’ll tell you anything you want,” Claire whispered softly. Lovingly. She kissed my collarbone, but tears were streaming down her face. There was fear in her eyes, but her lips betrayed her. “I’ll give you anything you want.”

“Tell me where Grey is. Tell me where Vivi is.”

“Gray,” the woman said. “Gray is . . . the color of stones and the sky during a storm.”

“Tell me where she is!”

“Bloody hell, Iris!” Tyler snapped. “She doesn’t know!”

Tyler pulled me back from the woman, who reached out to touch my face even though her lip was trembling. I shook Tyler off.

“Three little girls went missing from right outside your house ten years ago. Did you know that?”

“Yes,” Claire said. “Of course. Everybody knows that.”

“Do you know where they went?”

“No.”

“Shit!”

Claire’s baby started screaming. “When it happened,” Claire said as she slipped her nipple into the baby’s mouth, “my grandmother kept me close for weeks. A little girl had gone missing when she was growing up, and my grandmother thought the same thing had happened to those sisters. ‘Stay away from Saint Anthony’s Chapel,’ she said. ‘Stay away from the door, or you will end up like Agnes Young. You will end up like the Hollow sisters.’ So I did. I stayed away.”

A chill rolled over me. “Don’t remember this,” I ordered her. “Forget that we were here.”

“Of course,” Claire said as she stroked my cheek, the baby snuffling as it suckled at her chest. “Of course.”

Tyler yanked my jacket again, and this time I let him drag me back into the hall.

Out on the street, we saw Claire watching us from her front window, her baby crying again as she juggled it over her shoulder, trying to soothe it. The spell had broken as soon as she could no longer smell me, and she stared at me now in the dark with a look of confusion, as though she was experiencing intense déjà vu. I knew the feeling of that look; it was something I regularly suffered myself. The feeling of knowing you had memories about something but were unable to access them.

I shuffled off Vivi’s backpack and flicked through Grey’s journal with shaking fingers, looking for something I was sure I’d seen before. And then, there it was—a detailed sketch of a freestanding stone wall, into which was set three windows and a door. Beneath it read Saint Anthony’s Chapel, Edinburgh—July 2019. The same door Agnes had fallen through.

I typed Saint Anthony’s Chapel into Google Maps and set off into the dark, Tyler swearing after me that I was reckless, stupid, just like Grey. Yet just like he had followed Grey, he followed me. I felt the power in that. We hurried through the Old Town, along Cowgate and Holyrood Road toward Arthur’s Seat. The dawn was coffin-cold, the streets wisely abandoned in favor of warm beds and sleep.

My hands were numb and my breath short by the time we arrived. The ruins of the chapel sat on a squat hill overlooking a small loch in Holyrood Park. Beyond that, the lights of the city dotted the land toward the sea. The ruins were two stories tall; only the corner of the chapel remained now, the walls rendered in rough stone in some century long passed.

Saint Anthony’s Chapel was now nothing but a single wall, the north side of a ruined church. There were windows, but most importantly, there was a door. It used to lead somewhere, but now—maybe—it would take us somewhere else.

Tyler and I stood panting, staring through the doorway, both knowing how crazy this was. We were far too old to still believe in fairy tales, and yet here we were.

We’d come this far; no matter how insane it was, we had to know. We had to try.

I checked the weather app on my phone for the exact moment of sunrise: 7:21 a.m. The veil between the realms of the living and the dead was thinnest at dusk and dawn, when the world was on the edge of day and night.

We waited in the winter cold until the sky began to lighten at the edges and then we held hands, both knowing that if this didn’t work, we had nothing. There were no more clues to follow.

The air around us was bitter enough to make our teeth chatter, but it in the minutes leading up to sunrise, it smelled strangely burnt. At 7:20 a.m. we stepped closer to the door.

“Wait,” I said to Tyler. “Are you sure about this? I don’t know how it works. There’s no guarantee we’ll be able to get back. Even if we do, once it gets inside you, you can’t get rid of it. It will change you.”

“I’m coming,” Tyler said. “I’m sure.”

The sky was lightening quickly then. The first sliver of sunlight would fall over us in under a minute, and then it would be too late.

“Please work,” I said. I squeezed Tyler’s hand, took a deep breath, and stepped over the threshold with him.

18

I was seven the first time I slipped from the land of the living to the land of the dead.

The second time, I was seventeen.

I stepped through a broken doorway that once went somewhere, and then went somewhere else.

The first change I sensed was the smell. Somewhere between one inhale and the next, the air became tainted. The clean scent of Edinburgh—grass and sea and stone—was usurped by smoke and wild animal and rot.