I had to get out of here.
I took a shaky breath and stepped onto the porch, and then I looked down. There were wet footprints here, the impressions of rubber sneakers. Had Mariana been wearing sneakers, or had her feet been bare? Who had been standing on the porch with wet shoes? The tracks led into the grass, which was tamped down where someone had walked on it. The droplets of rain were disturbed in a path leading toward the trees and around the house.
Everything had been too strange for too long, and nothing mattered anymore. I stepped off the porch and walked onto the lawn, following the footprints through the trees.
In a moment, the wet, stark, black trees thinned and the vista behind the house opened up in front of me, the bare grass, the drop, the gray sky. It had the same effect it always had: It was awful and hypnotic at the same time, like the view looking down from a great height. I wanted to walk toward it; I felt the draw. I made my feet stay still, and I locked my gaze with Lily Knowles’s at last.
She was standing in the middle of the lawn, her sneakered feet in the cold grass. She looked to be in her twenties; she had the narrow face I’d seen in the Christmas photo with a few more years passed, though in person—was this in person?—she was more beautiful. She was wearing jeans and a coat of army green, and both items hung off her frame, as if she’d either borrowed them from someone bigger or lost weight. Her blond hair was down around her shoulders, and it lifted in the wind as if she were really here.
“You’re finally here,” Lily said. Her voice was unreal, an echo. And yet I knew it was her real voice, coming from wherever she was.
And for a minute, I wasn’t terrified. I was just standing on the lawn, looking at Lily Knowles, who was the reason I’d come. She was the reason I’d come from the beginning, though I hadn’t known she existed at the time.
“You died,” I said to her.
Lily, who wasn’t real, who wasn’t alive, shrugged in that way I instantly recognized from her half sister. It was the way I’d learned to shrug, too: Maybe what you say is interesting, and maybe it isn’t. “Everyone dies,” she said, her voice echoing.
“Why are you still here?”
“I’m waiting for Beth, and she knows it.”
“Tell me why,” I said, because I was looking at a serial killer, and I had no idea how much time I had. “Please, just tell me why.”
“There’s no why,” Lily said. “There’s only what happened. There’s only what I did.”
I shook my head. There had to be more. There had to be. “I don’t understand.”
The wind gusted up, hard and cold, and Lily held out her hand. She was standing a few feet away, out of reach, but I still felt the fear begin to grip me again as I looked at that hand. There was no way I was going to take it. “What are you doing?” I asked her.
“You came back here for a reason,” Lily said.
“No.”
“Yes, you did.” Her hand was still held out, and it held the same fascination and repulsion that the view over the drop had. I had the impulse to step toward it, and yet that was the last thing I wanted to do.
“Come with me,” Lily said.
“No.”
“It’s too late. You’re already here.”
I knew I should run, but I couldn’t. I moaned in terror as I tried to make my legs move, but they wouldn’t obey me. “No,” I said again.
“Come with me.” It was a hiss this time, harsh and furious, and then Lily’s hand grabbed mine. I hadn’t moved; I hadn’t seen her move. But she had me, and her grip was icy and so hard, like concrete or bone. Her fingers crushed mine.