“Hi, Harrison.”
“Oh no—Harrison, I completely forgot,” Prue said, hersmile disappearing. “Georgina, I’m so sorry, I promised Harrison I’d go out with him again after the festival.”
“Looking for Annabella,” Harrison explained a little impatiently. “I thought all the lights and sounds might attract her. Plus the fried dough. Hep Shackman told me shelovesfried dough, but he also talks to his binoculars, so I was taking that with a grain of salt.”
“I’m sorry,” Prue told me. “I promised.”
“It’s totally fine,” I assured her. “Honestly. I should get some sleep, anyway. Long day.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow?” she asked, as Harrison sort of hopped up and down on the balls of his feet, looking like he was contemplating whether it would be okay to take her hand and pull her away.
“Definitely. See you tomorrow,” I said.
I waited until they had walked back up to the house and veered off down the side of Bottle Hill before I went inside. The inn was empty and so was my sister’s room, her bed made sloppily and her pajamas thrown in a pile on top. I collapsed in my own bed, feeling the edges of sleep already pulling me down, the gentle yelling like some sort of lullaby.
The gentle yelling?
I opened my eyes to pale sunlight filtering in through the roses vining past my windows.
It was morning already? I must have fallen asleep more quickly than I thought.
And it was quiet now so the yelling must have come from my dreams—
Except, no, there it was again. Someone in the inn was yelling. Multiple someones, a clash of voices that reached all the way up to my attic bedroom.
I got myself out of bed and pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and, rubbing sleep from my eyes, I walked down the short hallway and pushed Mary’s door open.
Her bed hadn’t been slept in. It was exactly as I’d left it last night.
I felt a thrill of fear as my brain struggled to put the two things together: the many rising voices downstairs and my sister’s empty bed. Had something happened to Mary?
I ran down three flights of stairs and found myself in a lobby filled with people—birdheads, Aggie, my mom, and—
Relief flooded through me as my sister appeared out of nowhere, grabbed my hand firmly, and pulled me around the corner and into the library.
“What’s going on in there?” I asked, but she just kept pulling me, into the dining room and around the back of the house to the back porch, down the stairs and onto the grass. She was wearing the same outfit she’d worn to the Fowl Fair. There was a small tear in her shirt. She hadn’t slept, and her eyes were big and wide. Her hair was escaping her braids and falling down around her face. “Mary, what is it?”
“I was here last night. Got it? I had too much to drink, and I fell asleep like this,” she whispered hurriedly.
“What? What are all those people—”
“Georgie, got it? Do you understand?”
“Fine, yes, obviously I’ll cover for you, can you just tell me—”
“She’s dead,” Mary said.
“What—who?” I asked, and all of these faces cycled through my head, all of the girls and women of the island, starting with Vira and Eloise and Shelby and Abigail and Prue and—
“Annabella,” Mary said. “They found her, and she’s dead.”
“No,” I said. “That’s not true, Mary, she’s not even here yet, she’s not even here. Why would you say that?”
But she couldn’t reply. I saw her words catch in her throat and I saw her swallow them back down and I saw the tears begin to fall down her face.
I pulled her toward me and felt her heart beat against my chest, a broken beat, something shattered and taped back together.
And as we stood there—
