House of Hollow

by Krystal Sutherland

I was ten years old the first time I realized I was strange.

Dark, dangerous things happened around the Hollow sisters.

We weren’t sick, it was decided: We were just strange.

I had witnessed the repercussions of being beautiful, of being pretty, of being cute, of being sexy, and of attracting the wrong kind of attention, not only from boys and men but other girls, other women.

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.

Of course I remember. I remember everything. You just wouldn’t believe me if I told you.

We’re . . . tethered, or something. We’ve always been able to find each other. In the dark, across town, even over oceans. My feet bring me to you if I want them to.”

There was no emergency, after all. No crime scene anymore, no body. Just a burned-down apartment and a missing girl—and girls went missing every day.

My mother was crying. It was not a new sound. It had been the backing track for much of my life. The house moaning in the wind and beneath it, my mother crying.

I followed your sister somewhere I wasn’t supposed to go, and I paid the price. When I came back, I wasn’t . . . right. It ruined me. Now all I dream about is dead people. When I wake up, I can still hear them whispering to me.”

“Carrion flowers,” Vivi said as she picked a bloom and twirled it in her fingertips. “The punkest thing I learned in high school science. They smell like rotting flesh to attract flies and bugs.”

Heat and flame. Blood and fire. Was there a link?

“Some people go missing because they want to; some go missing because they’re taken. And then there are the others—those who go missing because they fall through a gap somewhere and can’t claw their way back.”

my sister was something more, something crueler, the thing in the dark.

You can bring them to their knees, if that’s what you want. You can make them pay.”

Even like this, even sick and sallow and shaking, Grey was beautiful.

“I’m going to keep you safe,” I whispered to her, just as she had whispered to me every night when she tucked me in. “Forever. I promise.”

Sometimes the veil between the living and the dead grows thin. Sometimes the dead speak to the living and lure them through.”

“If you were near a ruined door, perhaps you heard the dead calling. Perhaps you followed.”

“A door that used to lead somewhere, but now leads somewhere else.”

You must understand, by now, that you are different. Why are you so beautiful, do you think? So hungry? So able to bend the wills of those around you? You are like the death flowers that grow rampant in your wake: lovely to look at, intoxicating even, but get too close and you will soon learn that there is something rank beneath. That’s what beauty often is, in nature. A warning. A disguise.

“Runes written on my skin in your sister’s blood. The rune for death.” Agnes took my hand and drew a shape on my palm with her finger: a line with three prongs at the bottom in the shape of an inverted arrow. “The rune for passage.” Agnes drew the shape of a capital M. “The rune for life.” This time, she drew the inverse of the first rune: a line with three prongs at the top. “Grey figured it out. I don’t know how. An incantation in blood and language to allow the dead to slip through to the world of the living.”

“Gabe,” I said quietly through my fingers. Gabriel Hollow. My father.

“It means . . .” I looked up at him. “I’m not Iris Hollow.”

“There are three little girls in a grave wearing necklaces with our names on them. What if, in the story Grey tells about what happened to us, we were not the three little girls?” I said. I met Tyler’s eyes. “What if we were the monsters?”

Grey Hollow was the thing in the dark—but as much as I loved her, wanted to be her, I wasn’t like her.

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.

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

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.

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.

“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.”

We’re linked by what we did, by the lives we sacrificed. Linked by blood and death and magic. I found my way back to the door that led to my kitchen. Here. You helped lead me home.”

My sisters. My blood. My skin. What a gruesome bond we shared.

I was not Grey Hollow. I was not Iris Hollow, either. I was something stranger. Something stronger. For the first time, I felt the power of what I was coursing through my veins, and it didn’t scare me. It made me feel . . . alive.

For a moment, a door between this world and the next opened. We stepped through.