Go, her eyes pleaded. Go. Please.

I shook my head. Grey’s nostrils flared in anger, but there was nothing she could do to make me leave. I would sooner take my place next to them on the pyre than leave knowing I hadn’t done everything I could to save them.

Tyler? I mouthed to my oldest sister. Grey took a few quick breaths without blinking, then shook her head. What did that mean?

No, she didn’t know where Tyler was?

Or no, Tyler was already dead?

I didn’t like the way she cowered. Grey Hollow, who feared no man, who went looking for trouble because she was the thing in the dark. It was wrong to see her tremble.

Then a figure appeared from the other side of the pyre.

“Tyler?” I whispered. Tyler turned to look at me.

Alive, alive, alive. Somehow, he’d found his way to my sisters and made it here before me. I stepped out from my hiding place and hesitated at the edge of the wood. I wanted to run to him and throw my arms around his warm chest. The relief at not being alone—not having to face this horror by myself—washed over me.

Grey was yanking hard against her bonds, screaming silently into her gag. Tears streaked down her face as she shook her head furiously.

When I reached him, Tyler said nothing. I studied his face. There was something wrong about his eyes. All of the features were right—the skin, the lips, the smug arch in his eyebrow—but something deeper was incorrect. The bones that had been knocked out of place by the Gabe’s punch back in Edinburgh had snapped back to their correct position. The tattoos on his arms were warped, as though his skin had been wet and wrung out and redraped over his bones.

And then, when his lips parted, his mouth was wrong. The gums had turned black and the teeth had started to rot.

Gabe Hollow continues to insist that all three children’s eyes and teeth have changed.

I stumbled back and looked him up and down. It was a close match. A very close match. So close that, if he kept his mouth shut, you might never know.

“No,” I whispered. “You’re not Tyler.”

“You’re not Iris,” he rasped in reply—but it was not his voice.

It was the voice of my father.

It was the voice of Gabe Hollow, coming from Tyler’s face, Tyler’s mouth.

Tyler’s skin.

Gabe took a step toward me. I took another step back.

“What did you do to him?” I asked.

“The same thing you did to my daughters,” my father’s voice answered.

My gaze traveled from Gabe’s face to his throat. Or rather, Tyler’s face to Tyler’s throat. He lifted his chin a little to give me a better look. There, nestled in the crook of his collarbone, was a fresh cut stitched with silken thread. Neat work. It would heal well, as mine had.

I took another step back, my mind dipping again into the abyss where understanding dwelled just out of reach. My heart beat hard against my sternum, my skin suddenly cold with sweat. All of the little puzzle pieces were laid out, waiting for me to put them together into a picture that made sense.

I was not Iris Hollow. I looked like Iris Hollow.

My father was not Tyler, but he looked like Tyler.

Gabe Hollow continues to insist that all three children’s eyes and teeth have changed.

“How could you?” my father asked. “How could you do it to children? To helpless little girls?”

I glanced at Grey, who was crying hard now.

I turned back to Gabe. “I don’t understand.”

Gabe searched my face. “You know what you are.”

“I don’t. I swear.”

He drew a finger knife across his neck, then mimed sticking the fingers of his right hand in the wound and drawing the skin up, up, up over his head. My jaw shook as he stared at me, waiting for a reaction. “That thing you call a sister is a monster,” he said as he pointed at Grey, “but at least she let you forget that.”

Forget this, Grey had whispered to me. “Forget what?”

Gabe was circling me now. I tightened my grip on my knife. “That you are a dead thing walking around wearing the skin of a murdered girl,” he said, his voice shaking. “That you went home to her family—to her bed, to her parents’ arms—while she decomposed in a grave in a dead place. That you slipped her warm skin over yours, and then your sister stitched you up at the throat.”

“That can’t be true,” I whispered, because it was gruesome and terrible and impossible—but I knew, even as I said it, that it could be.

That it was.

Gabe had known, from the moment he saw us, that something wasn’t right. That something inside of us had changed. Different eyes, different teeth. A layer of skin beneath skin.

“After that thing made me kill myself, I ended up here,” Gabe said. “I searched for my children. I found them where you left them. I buried them myself.”

I didn’t want this, his note had read—because he’d truly had no choice. Because he could not resist the compulsion of the changeling who’d taken up residence in his nest, who had pushed out his real children and ordered him—as she’d ordered the photographer who’d attacked me—to take his own life.

Another terrible truth crystalized: “You killed Tyler,” I said. “You skinned him. You’re . . . wearing him.”

“I want to go home. I want to go back to my wife. I want to go back to the life the three of you stole from me.”

A sweet man. A soft man. A man who made things with his hands. That was how Gabe Hollow had been remembered at his funeral. I’d stood at the edge of his grave and thrown an iris flower on his coffin as they lowered him into the ground, so that he’d have a piece of me wherever he’d gone.