I crawled forward and started digging up the soil with my bare hands. “I need to know,” I said. “I need to know who’s buried here.”

“Look,” Tyler said as he knelt beside me. “What you need is some sleep.” I knew he was right, but I ignored him and kept digging. “Can’t you do the magic thing?” he asked. “The energy thing where you’re like, ‘Oh, she’s definitely been here, I feel it in my bones.’ Try that.”

I put my hand on the earth and reached out for the thread that bound me to my sisters. “They’re not here,” I said. I could feel them, closer now than when we first came through the door, but still some distance away. “It’s not them.”

“Then maybe,” Tyler said gently as he pulled me up from the dirt, “this is a mystery that can wait until after you’ve had a kip. There is really only space for one person on this team to freak out at a time, so I’m going to need you to pull yourself together. Okay, Little Hollow?”

“Okay.”

Whoever was beneath the gravestone bearing our names, it wasn’t Grey and it wasn’t Vivi and it wasn’t me.

So who was it?

20

When my father started getting sick, I would often wake to find him standing at the foot of my bed, watching me. The first dozen times it happened, I startled awake in the darkness and yelped for my mother. Cate would come and tell Gabe to go back to bed, then hold me in her arms until I stopped shaking and fell back to sleep.

“Papa is just sleepwalking,” she tried to convince me. The first few times, I believed her—but Gabe kept coming back, and each time I woke, his expression was darker, filled with more fear and loathing than the last. Eventually, I stopped screaming. I would open my eyes in the dark and find him there. I would watch, expressionless, as tears slipped down his cheeks, my tiny heart shivering inside my chest.

Sometimes, after he died, I had nightmares about him in which he stood at the end of my bed with a weapon and watched me with those cold, hate-filled eyes.

Why did someone who was supposed to love me look at me like that?

When I woke in that house in another world and saw a figure in the room, drowned in shadow, I didn’t cry out. I stared at it, at him, the tall man who wore a bull’s skull to hide his face.

I watched him as he watched me with dead black eyes and felt a flicker of recognition at the rage and hatred radiating from him.

I scrabbled back and tried to sit up. Too slow. Tyler lifted his head from where he slept, but the man was already on me. He stank of death and acrid smoke. Beneath the bone mask he wore, half shattered now by the shot Agnes took, I caught glimpses of skin, teeth, eyes: a man. Just a man. He grabbed a handful of my hair. I grunted and kicked him in the groin. The man loosened his grip and I rolled out from beneath him, my broken ribs stabbing a needle of pain that left me unable to breathe. Tyler was standing now, looking on with wide eyes.

“The gun!” I gasped as I crawled away, toward the front door. I tried to stand, but the pain in my lungs was too sharp. Tyler was yelling. Then hands twisted their way into my hair again. The man slammed me forward. My forehead smacked against the floor and my vision shuddered. Tyler was struggling with the shotgun. I dug my fingernails into the man’s skin, but it was dry and rancid, and he didn’t seem to notice the pain. He yanked me up and began dragging me out of the house, toward the water. I tried to catch my breath, tried to untangle my hair from his grip.

Tyler followed behind me, still fumbling with the shotgun. The man was hauling me through the mud, toward the water’s edge.

Finally, finally, Tyler pumped the shotgun and pointed it in my direction.

“Shoot him,” I rasped. “Shoot him.”

There was a pop of gunfire. Shots punched into the trees around me, but if they hit the man, they had no effect on him. The violence with which he handled me was horrifying. We hit the water. I thrashed, sucking in mud and water. Tyler shot again. This time, the shot hit him full in the face, entirely shattering the bone mask. For a split second, I saw the man’s face, the face he’d been trying to hide from me. Then he let me go and melted into the mist. I sank beneath the surface, breathless and panicked as I swam away, sure he would come back for another go. I broke the surface and sucked in air and screamed “Help!” I wasn’t far from land. Tyler was already thrashing through the water and trees toward me, and then I was in his arms, being tugged back toward the muddy bank.

“Move, move, move, move, move,” he was saying. I kicked my legs hard.

“Did you kill him?” I asked—but how could you kill a man who was already dead?

“No,” Tyler said as he dragged me back onto land. There was blood everywhere. My blood, I realized, slipping out of a wound on my forehead.

“You’re alive, you’re alive, you’re alive,” Tyler said as he squeezed my face, crushed me to his chest, squeezed my face again. Then he was on his feet once more, shotgun aimed into the marsh. “Where is he? Did you see where he went?”

“I don’t know,” I said between coughs. I was shaking. The taste of mud and marsh water lingered in my mouth, and there was an oily feeling all through me. I wanted to cry and vomit to get it out, but I could do neither. “I don’t know. I just—he let me go. I saw his face. I saw his face. I know who he is.”

A shadow moved between the trees, sending ripples across the water toward us.

“Fuck off!” Tyler yelled at the forest. He tried to help me stand, but the mud was slick, and I slipped backward, gasping as pain rocketed through my broken ribs again.

For a few tight breaths, it seemed as though nothing would happen. We watched and waited. I thought: Maybe he won’t come. And then he came.

He no longer bothered with his disguise. He emerged from the water in his true form, and I saw him fully for the first time. His eyes were dark sacs and his lower jaw hung loose, at an odd angle, from where Tyler had shot him. The skin of his face was decaying to reveal stripped-bare bone and teeth. His skin was webbed with pockets of decay, and his hair was tangled with water weeds. I could see exposed tendons in each of his joints. The inside of his mouth was black as ink.