Vivi and I walked home together along our well-trod path, past the red double-decker buses at the station exit, along a long, straight street lined with low houses with darkened leadlight windows. We had always come this way even though the route to our house was faster through the backstreets, because the main road was brightly-lit and busy. We knew all too well what could happen to girls on poorly lit streets at night, because it had happened to us.
Then again, all girls knew that.
Tonight, that old danger felt close. We checked behind us every few paces to make sure no one was following. An old woman in a nightdress and coat stood smoking on the balcony of an apartment block, watching us with sunken eyes as we passed. Would she remember us if we ran into the horned man between here and our house and never made it home? What would she tell the police if they came knocking, looking for witnesses? They seemed agitated. They were underdressed for the weather. They were in a hurry. They kept looking behind them, as though they were being pursued. What did they expect, dressed like that?
We turned left, then looped back onto our street. It was darker than the main road and lined with skeletal trees that looked monstrous in the low light.
The man, whoever he was, knew the route I ran through Hampstead Heath in the mornings.
He knew where I went to school.
He knew where Vivi’s show was.
He knew, I was certain, where we lived.
After we locked the door behind us, I messaged Cate to let her know I was safe while Vivi checked all the windows and doors were secure. We changed out of Grey’s gossamer clothes and into pajamas—harsh against our skin after designer silk and wool—then sat cross-legged on the kitchen island, eating pasta from a bowl Cate had left in the fridge. Sasha meowed from the floor, begging for more food even though she’d already been fed.
We still hadn’t heard from Grey. I called again—nothing—and sent another message that went undelivered. We decided to give her the night before we called the police. There were no signs of a struggle at her apartment, and besides, she was a jet-setter; she could be on a yacht in the Caribbean for all we knew, her phone out of service.
Just because a creep was stalking us and just because a man with black eyes who smelled like death had been asking after her didn’t mean something bad had happened to Grey.
I am the thing in the dark, she had said once, and in that moment, I had believed her.
“Why do you think we’re so strange?” I asked Vivi as we ate. “Why do you think we can do the things we can do?”
“Like what?” Vivi said around a mouthful of pasta.
“Make people do what we want them to. Other things.”
“That doesn’t feel strange to me. It feels right.”
“Other people can’t do what we do.”
“Sure they can. Other people can do weird stuff too, you know; they just don’t talk about it. There have always been people like us, Iris. Look in any history book, any folklore: witches, mediums, Wiccans. Whatever you want to call it. We’re connected to the world and to each other in a different way. We might be peculiar, but we’re not new.”
I shook my head. “There’s something wrong with us. I feel it sometimes. Something rotten on the inside.” It was why I buried myself in books on coding and robotics and titration, so the wrongness had less room to seep in. I was certain that others—people like Justine Khan and Jennifer Weir—could feel it too. Maybe they were right to be cruel to me. Maybe I let them get away with it because some part of me believed I deserved it. “Do you think that thing—the guy in the skull—do you think he has anything to do with what happened to us? Do you think he’s back to finish what he started?” I reached out to trail my fingers over the scar at my sister’s throat, hidden now beneath a twisted vine of ink. “Who cuts little girls’ throats?”
Vivi chewed her mouthful slowly, her eyes boring into me. “I think it’s time we went to bed.” She slid off the kitchen bench and left without another word.
I brushed my teeth, tried to catch up on some of the classwork I’d missed that day, then went to find her in her old bedroom, curled up in her childhood single bed. I crawled in next to her. The stink of the perfume had faded, and Vivi’s natural scent—sylvan, milky—passed through now. I wiped some smudged eyeliner from her cheek and watched her while she slept. None of us were attractive sleepers. All of the sharp angles that made us striking when we were awake gave way to slack jaws and puddles of drool the moment our heads hit pillows. We’d once spent an entire month seeing who could take the most hideous sleeping pictures of the others.
I stroked Vivi’s cheek and felt a pang of longing for her, and for Grey, for the years we’d been inseparable. Not yet split apart by countries and time zones and careers and lives.
I pressed my fingertips lightly to her throat, right at the point where her heartbeat sprang beneath her skin. It was how we’d slept as children, our finger resting on one another’s pulse points, a cross-hatched thicket of wrists and necks and hands. For a long time, years, I couldn’t sleep deeply unless I felt the heartbeat of both my sisters thrumming beneath my fingers. But they had grown up and left home, and I’d realized there were scarier things in the world than the monsters that lived in my nightmares.
Grey, I thought in silent prayer, knowing somehow that, wherever she was, she’d hear me. I hope you’re okay.
* * *
I woke before dawn, as I always did, and messaged my mother, and checked my Find Friends app, and ran through Hampstead Heath, cursing the Romans for settling in such a damp, miserable place. It was raining again, because it was London. The weirdness of yesterday felt washed away, but I still stuck to the busier paths and avoided the wooded area where I’d seen the man yesterday. I ran until it hurt to breathe and my body begged me to stop, and then I ran some more. I held my phone in my palm the whole time, willing it to vibrate with a message from Grey, but every time I looked, there were no new notifications.
When I got home, Cate was cooking breakfast in her scrubs. Vivi was sitting on the kitchen island again, her long tattooed legs dangling as she plopped cherry tomatoes into her mouth.
“Look who I found,” Cate said when she saw me.
“The prodigal daughter returns,” Vivi said, opening her arms wide and staring off into the distance like a Renaissance painting of Jesus.
“You know the definition of prodigal is ‘wastefully extravagant’?” I said as I went to the fridge in search of milk.
Vivi put her arms down. “I thought it meant ‘favorite,’ and I’m going to stick with that. Pour me one too,” she said as I set out a glass.
“Please,” Cate said out of habit.