I had loved him, even though he’d scared me.

My father flicked Vivi’s lighter and held the flame over the tinder. “Join your sisters.”

I sobbed. I had spent years missing this man. I wanted him to pull me into his arms and comfort me the way he had when I was small. I shook my head. “I can’t leave Cate all alone.”

“Please don’t fight.” Gabe’s voice cracked. “Please make it easy for me.”

“This isn’t you.”

There were tears rolling down his cheeks. “You don’t know me.”

“I do. I may not be your daughter but you are my father.”

“Don’t.”

“I know that you are kind and gentle and you wouldn’t hurt me.”

“Please let me have this,” Gabe begged. “Please get on the pyre.”

“No.”

“You burn with them. Or you watch.”

Gabe dropped the lighter. The pyre sparked and caught. Sour smoke began to churn in seconds. Grey started to choke, thrashing against the rising flames.

I screamed and ran toward her, but Gabe caught me by the backpack and yanked me to the ground. I lost hold of the knife. In a second he was atop my body, his knee a barbed spike against my broken ribs, his fingers around my throat. It was quick and violent and ugly.

What would Grey do? What would Grey do? I thought as I lay dying. My nails clawed at my father’s hands. My heels dug into the soft ground beneath me, trying to find purchase. My eyes bulged from their sockets. My head was full of blood and a creeping darkness that seemed to be spreading from my ears toward my eyes, thinning my vision.

Grey would fight. Grey would make him bleed, somehow. Grey would scramble for the knife that had landed just beyond my reach. Grey would rend flesh and break bones and salt the earth of your life if you crossed her.

She was screaming now, more for me than for herself. “Let her go!” she howled at Gabe, her words muffled by her gag. “I will destroy you!”

A clear thought made its way through the rising shadow in my mind: You already have.

Grey had destroyed this man, as she had many others. Grey was a tornado in the form of a girl. She took what she wanted and left a trail of destruction in her wake, and I had always admired her for it. It took guts to be a girl in this world and live like that. She did it because she was powerful. She did it because she could.

I thought of Justine Khan and her mouth on mine, her eyes wide with fear as she bit down on my lips. I thought of my father’s pale form at the end of my bed, the way he froze when I opened my eyes, the way prey freezes when it spots a stalking predator. I thought of Grey walking along dark streets at night, waiting for men to catcall her or worse, waiting for someone to give her an excuse.

Grey Hollow was the thing in the dark—but as much as I loved her, wanted to be her, I wasn’t like her. I couldn’t bend the world to my will, because I didn’t have the stomach to hurt people the way she did. That had always made me feel weak—but perhaps that was my strength.

What would Iris do? I thought as my field of vision narrowed to a pin.

I reached out and put my hand on Gabe’s cheek, the way I had when I was a child, for those few easy, early weeks he had let me love him.

I couldn’t remember being dead. I couldn’t remember being trapped in this place. I couldn’t remember slipping into the skin of his daughter. What I could remember was this: the warmth of Gabe Hollow’s chest as he carried me from the couch to my bed after I fell asleep watching TV. The scent of his shirts, always a mixture of Danish oil and the bone ash tang of his pottery glaze. The cadence of his voice as he read me bedtime stories. The iris flowers he helped me press between the pages of books. How hard I had cried at his funeral.

“Papa,” I managed to gasp. Gabe’s eyes in Tyler’s face met mine.

I was not his daughter, but I looked like his daughter. I had her face—and I hoped that was enough. I hoped, even knowing what I was, that he couldn’t stare into my face while he killed me.

Our eyes held. Gabe sobbed, gave one hard, final squeeze—and then he let me go.

I sucked in a ragged breath and lunged for the knife and scrambled out from beneath him, to the pyre, to where the flames were snapping at the heels of both my sisters. Grey was moaning, groggy from smoke inhalation. I dumped the backpack on the ground and scrambled up the burning debris toward them, picking a path through the fire. My eyelashes curled and melted in the wall of heat. There was no air to pull into my lungs. I inhaled ash and embers. The fire licked and hissed, searing my hands, my knees, my bare feet as I climbed.

I slipped Grey’s blade through her leather bonds first. The moment she was free, the power shifted. I felt it. It was as if time slowed. Grey unfurled to her full height and took the knife from my hand and cut Vivi free, and then she was dragging us both through the fire as it lurched after us. Wood split and popped, sending hot embers into our hair, our clothes. The fuel beneath us burned fluorescent red and the heat was a wall, solid and impassable until Grey pulled us away and we tumbled out the other side onto the cool, sodden grass of the clearing.

“Vivi!” Grey said as she shook our sister’s shoulders. “Vivi!” Then she was bent over her, her palms sinking into Vivi’s chest, four, five times, until Vivi finally moaned. “Oh, thank God, thank God,” Grey said as she took Vivi’s ash-slicked face in her hands and bent to kiss her forehead.

I stared at my arm, where a patch of my skin had burned away and blackened at the edges. Beneath it, the truth I’d wanted to know and hadn’t wanted to know: a second layer of skin, untouched by the flames.

Grey was watching me, her breaths coming in stabs.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” I asked her. I was shaking. The pain of my burns was beginning to gather, the singed nerve endings waking up in my toes, my hands, the tips of my fingers. “We’re not us.”