“Grey is always disappearing. That’s nothing new.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“For days at a time, she disappears off the face of the earth, okay? Won’t answer calls, misses work, dates, fittings. Everyone else got used to it. It was part of her mystery. Would she show up or wouldn’t she? All very exciting. But it sucks when you’re dating her. Your sister was a lousy girlfriend.”
Vivi prickled. “Be very careful what you say about her.”
“Why? Would I bad-mouth her if I’d done anything to her? No. I mean it, Grey was a bad girlfriend. There was someone else, I assume. That’s why we broke up. That’s probably who she’s with right now.”
“Grey cheated on you?” I asked. It didn’t sound like her. Grey was wild, sure, but not flippant—especially not with other people’s hearts.
“Well, she didn’t admit it to my face, but what else am I supposed to assume? Where does she go when she disappears? All I know is when she was here, she was only ever here halfway— if I was lucky. We were together for a year and I feel like I barely scratched the surface of who she was. She kept so many secrets, so much of herself compartmentalized. Especially the occult stuff.”
Vivi and I exchanged glances. Tyler had our attention, and he knew it.
“Oh, I suppose you don’t know much about that, do you?” he said. “I don’t either, really. All I know is the one time she let me come to her apartment, it was the creepiest place I’ve ever been. Full of weird shit. Dead things, dark magic. Grey thinks she’s some kind of witch.”
“We were at her apartment tonight,” I said. “There was nothing like that there.”
“Everybody keeps secrets, Little Hollow. Perhaps your big sister has been keeping more secrets from you than you realize.”
It was no surprise to me that Grey was still interested in the occult. It had been that way all her teenage years. Grey liked things that were obscure and dangerous: older men; drugs; séances in graveyards; heavy leather-bound books that smelled of chocolate and promised spells to commune with demons.
“What did you fight about when you broke up?” Vivi asked Tyler.
“I saw a man leaving her apartment,” he replied. Vivi and I shared another look. “That was the final straw.”
“Did he . . . ,” Vivi began. “Uh, how does one phrase this? Was he, perchance, some kind of Minotaur with all the flesh stripped off the bones of his face?”
Tyler stared at her for a few moments, then smiled. “I think we’re done here, Little Hollows,” he said as he finished his drink and shrugged on his velvet jacket. “When you find Grey, tell her I hate her.”
With that, he stood and was gone.
6
I had seven missed calls and a dozen messages from my mother when we left the club, all of them dinging into my phone at once when I turned airplane mode off.
“Damn,” I whispered as I tapped Cate’s name to call her, my heart fast and swollen with guilt. “Our mother is going to kill me.”
“Iris?” Cate said instantly. I could taste the panic on her tongue, a sour scent that made my stomach crumple.
“I’m so sorry.” Vivi and I were walking to the Tube, the cold stripping the skin off my legs, turning me inside out. “I’m okay. We’re heading home now.”
“How could you do that to me?” my mother demanded. “How could you do that to me?”
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m okay.”
“I’m at work. I almost called the police.”
“I’m okay, Mama.” I hadn’t meant to say it. Sometimes it just slipped out.
I could hear Cate breathing on the other end of the line. “Please don’t call me that,” she said quietly. “You know I don’t like that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Go home immediately.”
“We’re on our way already. We’ll be there in about half an hour. I’ll message you when we’re there.”
I hung up. The cold had sent my fingers numb and I struggled to bend them enough to slip my phone into my coat pocket. I could feel Vivi staring at me disapprovingly.
“Iris,” she said.
“Don’t say anything,” I snapped.
“What is Cate going to do next year when you go to university, huh? Move to Oxford or Cambridge with you?”
“We’ve been looking at places and she’s been putting some feelers out for jobs.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“It’s not like we’ll live together. Just close by. Just so I can see her from time to time and so she doesn’t feel—”
“Iris.”
“Look, it’s easy for you to lecture me. You’re never here. I’m all she has left, okay? I have to be everything for her, every day.” Cate Hollow had suffered more grief in her lifetime than most people. Her parents had died suddenly, a terrible thing had happened to her children, her husband had lost his mind and then his will to live, and then her elder daughters had left home so young and all but cut off contact with her. I couldn’t understand the way my sisters treated her sometimes, like she was a stranger. All Cate wanted was to be needed. “I’m all she has left,” I said again, softer this time. It seemed like the least I could do, to let her track me on an app and braid my hair like she had when I was little.
“That’s a pretty heavy burden to bear,” Vivi said. “Being everything for someone.”
“Yeah, well. Aren’t you lucky you don’t have to carry it.”
Vivi placed her hand in the middle of my back, between my shoulder blades. I felt the warmth of her skin through the silken fabric, felt the cord of power that connected us. Blood to blood, soul to soul. The knot of panic that had been tangling somewhere between my ribs and throat started to come undone.
“Come on, kid,” Vivi said. “Let’s get you home.”
We caught the Northern Line back to Golders Green, the late-night commuters drinking in my bare legs and collarbones with big, hungry eyes. I felt like a thing to be devoured, sucked down to the marrow. I shrank in my seat and tried to stretch my short dress a little farther over my thighs. The Tube rattled and squealed. The woman sitting next to me smelled of sweet alcohol, her breath a cloud of fruit and sugar. The curved windows on the other side of the train carriage reflected a strange beast back at me. There were two Irises: one my regular reflection, one upside down, both joined together at the skull. A creature with two mouths, two noses, and a shared pair of eyes, empty black ovals distorted and made huge by the curve in the glass.