I sank my fingernails into the scar at my throat, tearing at the skin that was not mine. The skin of a dead girl encasing the body of a dead thing. The petals of a heady flower concealing something rotten and dangerous beneath.

“Stop,” Grey ordered. “If you rip your skin off, you’ll die.”

“I’m already dead, though, aren’t I?”

“Think of Cate, Iris. Think of every terrible thing that’s happened to her. You are all she has left. If you die . . . you’ll destroy her.”

I let my hands fall to my sides and sobbed. “Tell me how it happened.”

“There will be a time and a place when—”

“Tell me,” I said. “Now.”

Grey exhaled sharply and went back to tending Vivi’s wound. “I whispered to them through a door on New Year’s Eve. The veil was extra thin that night, as it always is between years. The Hollow sisters heard me. They followed. When I told them I needed help, they came with me willingly. They tied red-and-black tartan way markers so they could find their way home. They were smart—but they were also too trusting. I lured them back to the hovel we were living in. They trusted me, because I was a little girl too.”

“Then you cut their throats and skinned them.”

Grey paused her work and closed her eyes. I felt Vivi go rigid. “Yes,” Grey continued. “I helped you slip into your new skin and stitched you up at the throat. I didn’t . . . enjoy what I did. I’m not a monster. I only did what was necessary to get us out of there. To give the three of us a second chance. All that was left, in the end, was a small scar at each of our throats. We followed their bread crumbs back to where they’d fallen through. We were able to crawl back through to the land of the living. We tricked the door, because we were neither alive nor dead, but something in between. Then we waited on that street in Scotland for someone to find us and give us a home.”

A wolf in sheep’s clothing, Agnes had called Grey. Something monstrous, draped in a disguise, something so unnatural that she confounded not only humans but the very rules of life and death. Half-dead, half-alive, and thus able to move between those states as she pleased.

“Fuck me,” Vivi whispered. “We really are cuckoos?”

“You should drink too,” Grey said as she handed me the draft. I took it from her. “How did you know it would work?”

“It was a guess. A hope, born from fairy tales and fables—but my intuition was right. To escape the Halfway, we had to become halfway. To leave the liminal, we had to become liminal. I don’t think we’re the first like us—changeling myths had to have come from somewhere, right? Old tales of fairy children left in the place of human babies, these creatures with ravenous appetites and strange abilities. Others figured it out too. Not just me. Now drink.”

I turned the bottle around in my hands and watched suspended fragments of wormwood and anise drift in the vinegar. “The carrion flowers. The ants. Why are they everywhere?” I took a bitter, salty sip and immediately felt something move inside me, deep in my gut, and then my body was screaming to get it out. My stomach convulsed, and I vomited again, this time bringing up bile and mold and insects.

Grey held my hair back. “You’re okay,” she said as I retched again. “You’re okay. I don’t know all the secrets of the place, Iris. It smells like death and decay because everything there is dead. It gets inside everything, infects everything, pulls everything apart if you let it.”

Grey took the bottle back from me and took a sip herself, then gagged up what had been growing inside her. “We should get you both to a hospital.”

“I’m not done yet,” I said. “Why are we always hungry?”

“Because you’re dead and the dead are always starving.” The way she said it, so matter-of-factly. You’re dead. “Food can never sate your hunger, can never fill the emptiness inside you.”

Vivi pulled herself up. Her movements were groggy but her expression was cold stone. She looked at Grey the way I was looking at Grey: with my teeth gritted and my lips curled down in disgust.

“You made us forget,” I said. “When we came back through to Scotland. You whispered something to us. ‘Forget this.’ You took it all away.”

Grey shook her head. “I can’t make you do anything, Iris, just like I couldn’t make Tyler. Our power only works on the living, not on the dead, and not on those who’ve died briefly. I told you to forget, and you did, because you wanted to.”

“Jesus. You’re a monster,” Vivi said.

“No,” Grey said. “Don’t call me that. I promised you I would always keep you safe—and I did. I have. I brought you back to life.”

“Who is under this skin?” I pressed. “What do I look like underneath Iris Hollow’s skin?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know?”

“I know you want neat, tidy answers for everything but I don’t have them. I don’t remember who we were before. After we came back, I began to forget everything too. The Halfway started to feel like a dream, like something that hadn’t really happened. I wasn’t sure anymore whether it was a story or whether it was real. I had to know, so I tried to go back. It took me a dozen tries before I figured it out.”

“In Bromley-by-Bow,” Vivi said. “The week after Gabe died.”

“Yes. I fell through a door. The same door Mary Byrne must have fallen through on New Year’s Eve in 1955. I had no trouble coming home, though. I didn’t understand, yet, that our blood was special. I didn’t remember what I was or what I’d done.”

“How did you figure it out?”

“Yulia Vasylyk, my first roommate when I left home. She followed me through a door. Stupid girl. I tried to bring her home but she couldn’t follow me back. The doors wouldn’t let her. When it became apparent that she was stuck there, she went wild. Started tearing her clothes off, biting me, scratching my face. She split my lip and I swallowed a mouthful of my own blood. Then I had an idea: If there was something in my blood that let me come and go as I pleased, maybe it could get Yulia home too. I had to knock her out, she was so hysterical. Then I smeared my blood on her, I made her drink some—nothing seemed to work. I don’t know why I thought to try runes. You know I keep a copy of A Practical Guide to the Runes on my bedside table, I just . . . I was out of other ideas. But it worked. A simple spell. A gateway between death and life. Once we were back in London, she fought me again, ran away from me. The police found her wandering the streets naked, and she blamed me for what had happened to her, even though I saved her. I brought her back.