Grey closed her eyes. A tear squeezed from between her lashes and swept a clean line through the grime and blood on her cheek. Finally, she nodded.

True.

Then she stood and went to where Tyler’s skin now lay empty and deflated on the forest floor. Gabe, like Rosie, was gone, moved on to wherever the dead went when they let go of this place, when it let go of them. What he left behind in his absence was gruesome: Tyler’s skinsuit with no bones or muscle or soul to animate it. A flat sack of skin, the hair and eyelashes and fingernails still attached.

I had left Tyler alone. I had left him alone in the woods and my father had found him, taken him, done this to him.

I wondered where Tyler’s flayed body was. I looked back at the pyre. The fire churned above the tree line now, the stakes that had been set up for us engulfed in flames. The smoke smelled of blistering fat, burning bone. In there. His body must be in there, hidden beneath the blaze, where we were supposed to be.

Grey was bent over his flat skin. “I’m not letting you go,” she chanted. “I’m not letting you go, I’m not letting you go.”

“We saw Gabe skin him,” Vivi rasped as she rolled onto her side. I went to her and slid my palm under her cheek and picked leaves from the tacky wound at the back of her head. “Poor Grey.”

“I’m not letting you go,” Grey continued, her hands hovering over the skin that had once covered Tyler’s chest. God. No one should have to see someone they loved like that. “I’m not letting you go.”

“Grey,” I said quietly. “We have to go home.”

“I am not leaving without him,” she said. “I can save him.”

“How?”

“The same way I saved you. If he’s stuck here, I can stitch his soul back inside his skin.” She leaned down to speak to him. “Listen to me, Tyler. I bind you with my grief. I blame myself for your death and I’m not letting you go. Come back to me.”

I tried to wrap my head around all the different pieces of him. His dead body, burning unseen in the pyre. The skin from that body, laid out in front of me. His soul—or whatever it was—the leftover part of him that would pass through this place on its way to oblivion.

I might see him again. I let that small hope kindle in my chest as we waited.

And waited.

And waited.

“I don’t think he’s here,” Vivi’s cheek was hot beneath my burned hand. We couldn’t linger. We had to get out of the Halfway. “I don’t think he’s coming.”

“No,” Grey breathed, her hands sinking into the forest floor. Pendants of saliva swayed from her lips as she wailed out the pain of her grief. It wrung her body of air, contorted her into a ball of ribs, fists. When she sucked in her next breath, it was the sound of a church organ: huge and long and mournful. Sobs shook her, bent her, broke her, until the despair left her spent. The most beautiful woman in the world, so used to the universe bending to her will, unable to save the life of the man she loved.

I saw a flicker of movement at the edge of the clearing. There was a figure, dark-haired and naked, staring at me from between the trees. I opened my mouth to cry out to him, but he shook his head.

Then, as quickly as he had appeared, the soul of Tyler Yang faded back into the shadows.

23

Climbing out of the Halfway wasn’t like falling into it. Falling into it had been as easy as taking a step over a threshold, like slipping down a slide. Gravity did most of the work. Coming the other way was hard. I had to drag my whole body through tar. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t see. I was drowning in nothingness, and then, finally, I fell backward, into a field of flowers and smoke. It was dark. The ground beneath me was hard and stank of burned wood and the chemical punch of smoking plastic. For a second, I was worried it hadn’t worked. Then Grey and Vivi fell after me, on top of me. The pain of my broken ribs and the disorientation of the door forced bile from my stomach. I rolled onto my side and vomited.

I blinked. The darkness thinned to vapor. We were in a burned-out kitchen covered in a blanket of carrion flowers. Grey’s kitchen. I pulled myself upright on the checkerboard floor. The backs of my arms and legs were coated in soot. The world was silent and still.

“God, it sucks even harder coming back,” Vivi moaned, her voice raspy and wrong.

I helped her roll onto her side and slid her backpack under her head while Grey riffled through the books that had been strewn on the floor when we toppled the bookshelf.

“We should get her to a hospital,” I said as I stroked the peach fuzz of Vivi’s skull.

“Soon,” Grey said. She found what she was looking for: a book that opened to reveal that it wasn’t a book at all, but a secret compartment. Typical Grey. Nothing was ever simple with her, nothing was ever what it seemed. Inside was an assortment of herbs in glass vials and a small bottle of vinegar. Grey used the edge of her knife to crush the anise on her kitchen floor, then added it to the vinegar along with salt and wormwood, and then she shook. The same potion that Agnes had made.

She sank down on Vivi’s other side. “Drink,” she said as she put the bottle to our sister’s lips.

Vivi squirmed away, her face sour. “I don’t want that shit.”

“Drink it,” Grey ordered, and of course Vivi did as she was told, because Grey was in charge. Grey soothed her as she vomited the Halfway out, a slop of green dead things spilling from inside her and over the charred floor.

“You killed children,” I said quietly as I watched my sister tear a strip from her hospital gown and begin to dab the tincture on the mash of broken skin at the back of Vivi’s head.

Grey looked up at me, her eyes black and flat. “Yes,” she answered.

“I’m not Iris Hollow.”

“No. Not on the inside.”