I put my hand to my lips.

“Gabe,” I said quietly through my fingers.

Gabriel Hollow. My father.

He moved toward me slowly, the eyes he kept trained on me bulging from his skull. My chin was shaking. Tears slipped down my cheeks, but I didn’t run, didn’t look away.

“Run,” Tyler whispered as he backed away, but where could I run?

I breathed steadily and kept my eyes on him. No sudden movements. Perhaps he expected me to run, to fight, and I was doing neither of those things. He was so close now I could smell the dead-flesh stench of his breath.

Then Rosie was there, in front of me. Tyler must have draped her in Vivi’s old coat while I slept, because it now hung loose about her shoulders. She screamed, a defensive animal scream that kept going and going.

My father stopped to look at her, his focus on me broken.

“I have them,” he said—then he backed away and was swallowed by the mist.

“What the hell is going on?” Tyler demanded as he helped me stand.

“We have to dig up the grave,” I said to him shakily. “I want to know who’s in there. I need to know.”

“That’s what you want to talk about right now?! The grave?! Your dead father has been trying to kill you! Your dead father kidnapped your sisters!”

“Please,” I said. “My ribs are broken. I need your help.”

“No. Absolutely not. I shan’t.” But Rosie was already tugging him toward the gravestone, and he followed her through the mud back to the side of the house.

We dug with our hands, the three of us.

It didn’t take long to find them, despite Tyler’s swearing and complaints. They weren’t buried deep, under less than a foot of earth. I knelt by the grave and pulled damp soil back with my left hand as Tyler and Rosie dug, my broken ribs demanding to be felt.

They were wrapped in a blanket, together. We coaxed them from the earth, loosening them slowly, but the soil gave them up easily, as though it wanted them gone. As though they didn’t belong in this place. We placed them gently on the earth by the hole we had dug. I unfurled one side of the blanket and then the other, my heart beating furiously as I wondered who was buried in the shallow grave marked with my sisters’ names.

With my name.

There were three of them. Three small bodies, each turned mostly to forest now. Their bones were twisted roots and all of the soft parts of them—eyes, mouth—were thick with carrion flowers, but they were still in the shape of people. Still had teeth, still had fingernails. They were the bodies of children, curled up together. Each of them wore an identical heart-shaped gold locket dangling from what remained of their necks. I held the necklace of the smallest and wiped the mud away with my thumb to reveal the engraving beneath.

IRIS, it read. The body it belonged to was missing its two front baby teeth. I unclipped the locket from the dead girl’s neck and held it up for Tyler to see.

“What does it mean?” Tyler asked as he watched the gold heart spin slowly in the half-light.

“It means . . .” I looked up at him. “I’m not Iris Hollow.”

21

I wandered in a daze back into the dark water that lapped at the wall around the house and waded in until I was hip-deep. Tyler thought I was mad—“Your father is still out there!” he shouted from where he stood by my grave—but I was covered in blood and mud and the remains of dead children and even though the water was black and cold, I lowered myself into it until I was fully submerged. I stayed under until my aching lungs urged me to the surface a minute later.

Alive. I was alive. My heart beat fast and pumped warm blood around my body. My lungs drew breath. I was alive—and Iris Hollow was not. The child that had fallen through to this place ten years ago had never left. I was sure of that now. The dark-haired girl who’d disappeared on New Year’s Eve a decade ago was buried in a shallow grave a few meters away.

Something else had come back in her place.

Something that had looked almost like her, but not quite.

A changeling.

Me.

“What do you mean, ‘I’m not Iris Hollow’?” Tyler asked as I made my way back to shore. I examined my own hands as I waded through the water, then touched my fingertips to the scar at my throat. The pustule had gone down, whatever angry thing that had been nesting there quiet for the moment.

“What if my father wasn’t crazy?” I said. I thought of Gabe, of the morning he’d killed himself. I thought of Grey’s small hand on his arm in the car and the way she’d ordered him to take us home. The air had smelled sweet and potent.

I squatted in the mud. My stomach felt wet and shuddery. I tried to keep my breathing steady. “He knew,” I said. “My father knew that we weren’t his daughters. He knew from the moment he saw us.” I wiped my hand on my wet jeans and then pressed my fingers to my teeth. Gabe Hollow continues to insist that all three children’s eyes and teeth have changed. “He was convinced that we were impostors. Things that looked like his children but weren’t really. I think he was right.”

“Are you suggesting you’re not . . . human?” Tyler asked. “Then what does that make you?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you’re not Iris Hollow, why do you look like her?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“Well, try to explain it,” Tyler said.

“It’s not just that I don’t remember the month that we were missing. I don’t remember anything from before the night we were found. It’s all gone, the life I had before. My grandparents, my cousins, the house I grew up in, my friends at school, the TV shows I liked to watch. It all disappeared. When I came back, I was a blank slate. We all were.”