One thing I never knew about grief was that it was exhausting.

Or maybe I did know. Maybe I realised when I was four and my mother died, or when I was nine and my grandmother died, or when I was seventeen and my friend Marie was killed and eaten by carnivorous water monsters. Maybe I did know, and I forgot. Kind of like what they say about childbirth: you forget how awful it is so you think you’re strong enough to go through it again.

Maybe that’s why, when you hear awful news or see awful things, you freeze. It’s all that exhaustion hitting you at once. System overload. Shutdown.

When Phil and I get back to her place, when we see the blood smeared down the front hallways, all over the walls, all over the floors, that’s what happens to me. Not shock, not horror, not fear. Just nothing, except a dull, blunt weariness.

Phil’s reaction isn’t the same. She freezes for a second, perfectly still, like a statue. Then she’s an explosion of movement, running from room to room, yelling names.

I hear her scream – an awful scream – and I want to move faster to get to her, but my body won’t obey me. Everything is heavy. It’s like someone has turned gravity up a few extra notches, and I’m being pulled down into the earth.

When I find her, cradling her mother’s body in her arms, I expect to feel … more.

I’ve known Phil’s mum basically my whole life. She’s … not like a mother to me, but definitely like an aunt.

And she’s lying on the kitchen floor, covered in horrible rivers of blood, splatters and streams of red all over the cabinets like the most horrifying children’s painting ever, and a gash in her neck so deep I’m amazed her head is even still attached to her body. Phil screams and screams, but all I can feel is exhausted.

We have to call someone.

And it has to be me who acts.

I dig out my phone with fingers that feel huge and clumsy and heavy.

The picture on the lock screen is me and Finn. There’s an unread text from him, sent – when did he send this?

If you’re reading this, we made it out alive, babe.

‘Mum!’ Phil screams. ‘Mum, please! Please wake up!’

My fingers slip as I dial the first two zeroes of Triple 0, the blood dripping off me smearing the screen. We made it out alive, babe. But I pause before I dial the third zero, breathing heavily, the air tasting like metal and death.

What happens if I call the cops? They come here, they see the two of us covered in blood, me with a stab wound in the shoulder and Mrs Kostakidis a mess of knife wounds on the floor, and they go, ‘Hey, I know Pearl Linford got sent on that publicity tour a while back for heroically rescuing people, but there’s a solid chunk of people who think she’s actually a murderer and here she is looking extremely murdery. And so is her friend.’

Somehow I don’t think, ‘No, no, you don’t understand, we have an alibi, I was off destroying a magical death cult called the Riders who wanted to eat Phil’s heart and make her their queen, they’re the murderers you’re looking for and, oh, also we were in fairyland and my boyfriend is a fairy prince and his terrifying brother made me choose whether I wanted to keep him, Phil, or the twin sister I never knew I had and – please don’t make me answer any more questions, I’m so tired, I’m so tired’ is going to cut it.

Iron. That’s what the air tastes like. Iron.

There are no words in Phil’s sobs any more, just wordless, violent, wracking explosions of sound. I know the whole world is ridiculously well-trained to ignore car alarms and things, but how long will it be before someone hears her screaming?

I can’t call the police. I didn’t save Phil from getting her heart eaten and a lifetime of being the prisoner of Finn’s sociopathic fairy-prince brother for both of us to go to jail for murder.

But I have to call someone. I can’t do this alone. I can feel the world slipping away from me and I can’t save anyone else tonight.

I want to call Disey. I want my sister to wrap me up in her arms and wipe the blood from my face and tell me, ‘Don’t worry, Pearlie – I’ve watched a lot of crime shows, I know what to do.’ And she and Shad would come here and wrap up the body, and they’d put her in the boot of the car and drive away, and never tell me where they buried her. And sure, maybe there’d be an investigation of what happened, of where Mrs Kostakidis had disappeared to, but they’d never work it out, because when they’d buried her, Disey and Shad would come back and together we’d scrub the house, top to bottom, with bleach and chemicals and all the right things, so that it smelled like a hospital and not like iron.

But I can’t call Disey, because I made Finn mess with her girlfriend’s mind and whisk her away. I can’t call Shad, because I bullied his girlfriend into doing the same thing.

And the one other person who might be able to help – the fairy prince with the healing hands, my fairy prince, the Valentine, my valentine – is further away from me than I could possibly ever imagine, and he’s there because I left him there.

I made the wrong choice. I made the choice I thought I could live with, but it was a bad choice. When the prince asked me who I wanted to take back to the human world with me, I should have chosen Finn.

I should have chosen him not because I love him, but because he can do things. He’s powerful. And he’s valuable to them. The fairies wouldn’t have hurt Phil while I had their long-lost changeling prince, because who knows what he might do.

Phil throws up.

I focus on the acid smell of vomit, cutting through the awful metal smell of the blood. Maybe I made the wrong choice, but it’s done now. I don’t have Finn. I don’t have my siblings. So what do I have?

Friends. Kind of. I have Holly and Cardy.

Or maybe I don’t. I sent Holly off into the night dragging the barely alive body of Finn’s fairy fiancée Emily wrapped in iron chains. What if Emily gets loose? And what if Tam – oh God, Tam! – catches up with them? Finn commanded him to walk away from us in the bush with that voice of his that cannot be disobeyed, but he didn’t say where to, and if Tam catches Holly with the ashy remnants of his fairy mistress, he’ll kill her.

And I sent Cardy off with Julian. Julian, who has been the eyes and ears and hands for Finn’s brother. Julian, who the fairies have driven mad. Julian, who, on the rare occasions when he’s in his own mind, thinks I’m a murderer – something I somehow doubt I fixed when I tried to perform heart surgery on him in the middle of the bush.

Will Julian remember that Cardy was the one who stopped me? Or will desperation and fear fill him with adrenaline and rage? And what if Finn’s brother gets back in his head? What might he do to Cardy?

No Cardy. No Holly.

Just me. Only me.

I start scrolling through my contacts with my slippery, bloody fingers, desperate to find someone, anyone who can help me. The names of so many school friends fly by quickly, smeared with blood as I go faster and faster.

I pause briefly at Mr Hunter. Should I call him? He was a Rider. He did this. He should clean it up.

But I left him unconscious in the bush, covered in blood, my mother’s name tattooed across his chest.

Everyone I know is covered in blood.

When I come to her name, I don’t feel relief, exactly. It’s not even hope, because I don’t know if you’re allowed to feel hope when your whole world has turned into a symphony of blood and screaming. But it’s something, a tiny something that makes my fingers shake and slip even worse as I call.

She answers quickly, because maybe there’s a threshold for how many things can go wrong and I’ve reached it. ‘Pearl?’

‘Help,’ I croak.

‘Pearl, where are you? What happened? What did he do?’

‘Matilda, I need you,’ I say. ‘I need you. I need help.’

‘I’m coming,’ she says, and there’s a calmness in her voice that uncoils something in me, and suddenly I’m crying, tears pouring out of my eyes, rushing down my face, and it feels like they’re rushing up my throat too, choking me. ‘Where are you?’

‘I’m at Ph– Phil’s.’

‘Where is that? Give me the address.’

I manage to stammer it out.

‘I’m coming,’ she says.

Then maybe she hangs up, or maybe she says something else, but I don’t know, because the phone slips from my nerveless fingers to the floor.

I force myself to breathe deep. My knees are trembling and there are black spiders starting to crawl at the edge of my vision so I close my eyes. I put one hand against the fridge to steady myself. In. Out.

Oh God. Phil’s mum. Phil’s mum.

In. Out.

Everything hurts. I was stabbed, I recall vaguely. A Rider stabbed me in the right shoulder. I’ll heal you in a minute, Finn had said, but we didn’t have a minute, and now he’s gone.

The collapse is coming like a wave. All my joints are trying to fold in on themselves. I want to melt away, dissolve in an ocean, swim down until I can’t see the light any more.

But I can’t. I won’t.

One breath. Two breaths. In and out, right down to the diaphragm. Slow your heart rate, Pearl. The faster it beats the more blood you lose, right?

It’s not your turn to fall apart.

‘Phil,’ I say.

She doesn’t answer. Her sobs have turned to choking.

‘Phil,’ I say again, forcing the air out of my lungs with all the strength I can muster. ‘Come on. Come away.’

‘No.’

‘Phil –’

‘I’m not leaving her!’

I make my legs carry me forward. I’m relying on the kitchen cupboards to keep me upright, leaving more bloody smears on them as I stagger closer. I want to sit down beside her but if I sit I won’t be able to stand again. ‘She wouldn’t want you to see her like this.’

I reach my hand out. She slaps it away, hard – so hard I nearly lose my balance. Or maybe it isn’t hard at all, because I’m at the very end of my strength. ‘Phil, come away,’ I say, but she doesn’t reply, and I’m not sure if I said the words aloud or just thought them.

I know how long it is until Matilda finds us. I focus on the blinking time on the microwave clock to keep me conscious. Thirteen minutes after Phil slaps my hand away, I hear footsteps. They echo through the house and I worry for three blinks of the clock that it’s fairies come to finish us off or the Riders have changed their mind or worst of all that it’s Phil’s yiayia or pappou and that I’ll have to – but then Matilda comes around the corner and I’m suddenly more in danger of falling than ever.

She doesn’t look shocked or upset or scared. She looks from me to Phil to the room, her eyes surveying everything, and it’s the look of someone who knows what they’re doing, that same look she had the first time I ever walked into her iron shop, the look that says, ‘I know more than you, and you don’t want to be on my bad side.’

‘Who did this?’ she asks.

‘Riders,’ I rasp.

‘Who did they take?’

‘They didn’t take anyone. They – wanted Phil. But I stopped them.’

An emotion crosses her face, and it’s, of all things, surprise. ‘You stopped them.’

‘I – Finn and I – we brought the sixth Rider back to life. Hunter. It was Mr Hunter. My music teacher. I found his heart. I cut him open. I put it back. And Finn –’

‘Started it again?’

I nod shakily.

‘When a Rider is destroyed, those that called them find a replacement,’ she says. ‘But he’s not destroyed. He’s alive.’

I nod again.

‘There’s six of them, but there’s not six of them,’ she says. ‘You trapped them in a paradox. You broke their bindings. You clever girl, Pearl.’

‘Please help,’ I say. My voice is high and shaky as a little girl’s, and I’m crying again, tears salty in my mouth.

‘Of course I’ll help,’ Matilda says, and catches me just before I hit the floor.

I don’t lose consciousness. Not all the way. I know that if I let myself go under I’m not going to resurface for days. I’m awake enough to be aware of what she’s doing – to feel her lay me down on the kitchen floor, take off my shirt and bandage my shoulder, so tight it makes the fingers of my right hand feel cold and heavy. I hear her talking to Phil, low and comforting, though I can’t make out the words, only the tone.

But I’m asleep enough to drift, to doze, to dream.

I dream in flashes. Silver trees. A starry sky. Vines, rich, deep, green, covered in purple berries. The taste of the berries as they force one between my lips, and another, and another, until the juice is running down my face, dripping onto my skin.

I spit the berries out. They land on the ground in sticky dark splotches that look like blood. They’re laughing at me, and his fingers tangle in my hair and pull my head back.

You will eat, little brother, he says. You belong to us.

Liar, I want to spit in his face, but Matilda is shaking my uninjured shoulder, telling me to come on, come on, Pearl, miles to go before you sleep.

‘I’m awake,’ I manage.

‘Can you sit?’

I brace my left hand on the floor and force myself upright. My right arm is throbbing, an ache that I can feel building up to a crescendo.

‘Drink this.’

The lip of the glass clinks against my teeth. I drink it slowly at first, and then gulp it down. Matilda refills the glass twice for me and it’s still not enough.

‘Careful with that arm,’ she says, as I take the glass from her again. ‘Your arm needs stitches, and that bandage will only do you good if you keep it still.’

‘Where am I going to get stitches?’

‘You’re resourceful. You’ll work it out.’

She sounds so calm and so certain that I believe her.

‘Here’s what we’re going to do,’ Matilda says. ‘Are you listening?’

‘Yes. Yes. I’m listening.’

‘Do you have a car?’

‘Yes. We took Disey’s car when we –’

Oh God, what if we’d taken Finn’s car? We almost did. We debated over whose car to drive when we went from Finn’s place down to the Summer Door. I’ll drive, he said, and I said, no, I’ll do it, and a slow grin spread across his face and he was like, if I didn’t already know that you liked to be in charge, Linford, then – and I said, please don’t finish that sentence, and he kissed me instead.

What if he’d insisted? Phil and I would have stumbled out of the Summer Door, and we wouldn’t be here now, at her house, with her mother, because all there would have been was a car we couldn’t unlock because the keys were in Finn’s pocket in another universe.

Who would have fainted first? Her or me? How far would we have made it? Who would have found us? Julian? Tam? Fairies?

I can feel their fingers around my neck. I can feel them squeeze, feel myself crushed beneath them, feel –

‘Pearl,’ Matilda says, grabbing my chin and forcing me to look at her, ‘stop panicking.’

I can’t get any words out. They’re choking me.

‘You’re all right. You’ve done a great thing tonight, a brave thing, and you need to be brave a little while longer.’

I swallow. ‘I’m all right,’ I repeat. ‘I’m all right.’

‘You’re going to get in your car,’ she says. ‘You’re going to take Phil with you. You’re going to drive her to your house. If anyone asks you where you’ve been tonight, that’s where. There, together, alone. You’re going to clean her up and put her to bed. You’re going to clean yourself up and go to bed too, but not before you lock every window and every door. You’re going to wear all the iron you have, save the pieces you put on her. And whatever you do, don’t let that fairy boyfriend of yours inside the house.’

‘I couldn’t even if I wanted to.’

‘What?’

‘He’s gone,’ I say. ‘They took him.’

‘The Riders took him?’

‘The Seelie. His brother. The Crown Prince. He –’ I set the glass down before I drop it and it smashes everywhere. ‘He gave me a choice. Finn, Phil, or my sister. Not Disey, I mean – my twin. The one they took when they swapped Finn and Tam.’

‘Pearl, look at me.’

I do.

‘Are you telling me,’ she says, her eyes dark and serious, ‘that in the space of one night, you’ve broken apart the Riders and sent the Valentine – that changeling prince who’s brought all of this down on our heads – back to where he belongs?’

‘Finn doesn’t belong there. And none of this is his fault.’

But I don’t think she’s listening to me, because she laughs. ‘Whoever told you not to listen when someone said something is impossible did a wonderful job.’

‘Stop laughing. Please.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I shouldn’t laugh, I know, not here, not in a place like this. But I don’t think you understand the magnitude of what you’ve done.’

Oh God, what have I done?

I don’t know if Matilda had some kind of contingency plan for what would happen if I got pulled over by the cops driving back to my place or if she was just so certain we wouldn’t that it changed the universe, but we make it home. I have a death-grip on the steering wheel with my one good hand, and the only reason I don’t crash the car is because Matilda told me that I wouldn’t.

My house looks the same as it always does as I ease into Disey’s usual parking spot. It should feel comforting, but it feels wrong, because how can things be the same when Finn is gone, and I have a twin, and Tam might have killed Holly, and Julian might have killed Cardy, and what if Emily got loose? And the Riders tore Phil’s mother apart, and there was so much blood, and – keep it together, Linford, keep it together.

My hand makes a ripping sound as I peel it off the steering wheel, the sound you get when you sit on a leather couch with bare legs in summer and stand up too fast. ‘Come on, Phil.’

She doesn’t answer. Her head is leaning against the passenger-side window, fingers curled loosely around her seatbelt. There’s nothing in her eyes, a deep, horrible nothing, and I worry for a second that she’s gone into total shutdown like she did after that night at Miller’s Creek, when she was catatonic in hospital for a week.

The night she woke up screaming. Screaming when she saw my face, because of what I’d done.

I get out, slamming the door hard. There’s a squawk and the sound of flapping wings in the trees and I brace myself for the tearing claws of Unseelie birds, furious that I thwarted their big plan to kill Finn, but they don’t come.

If there are Unseelie birds, I tell myself, they wouldn’t be frightened by a little thing like a car door.

It says a lot that in this particular moment the thought is comforting.

‘Out,’ I say to Phil, pulling her door open.

She doesn’t move.

I pull down the neck of my shirt and show her the seeping red stain on the bandages on my shoulder. ‘See this? I got stabbed tonight. I’ve lost so much blood that I don’t know how I’ve got any left to lose. Everything hurts. But if I have to, I will drag you bodily out of the car. Now come on.’

‘Take it off.’

‘What?’

‘That shirt.’

‘You want me to take off my shirt?’

‘It’s not yours!’ she screams. ‘Take it off!’

I look down. The shirt Matilda put on me is one of Mrs Kostakidis’s work blouses.

‘I’ll make you a deal,’ I say. ‘You get out of the car and come with me into the house, and I’ll take this shirt off.’

Phil fumbles with her seatbelt and then lunges towards me so violently she nearly knocks me over. I manage to stagger out of the way, and she falls to her hands and knees. ‘Take it off!’ she yells.

I back towards the verandah. She scrambles to her feet. She catches me just as I unlock the door and we tumble inside together, her on top of me. Her hand hits my injured shoulder and the noise that’s ripped out of my throat is inhuman, the pain like a sonic boom through my whole body, but it gives me the rush I need to kick her off me.

I tear the shirt over my head with my good hand and throw it as far away from me as I can. ‘There. It’s off. Are you happy?’

She doesn’t answer me, just scrambles towards it.

I exhale through pursed lips. I’m annoyed, I realise. Her mother is dead – torn to pieces like a piece of meat – and I’m annoyed at her. That’s awesome. I’m awesome.

But at least annoyance is not grief, and it gives me something to cling to, a life raft in an ocean of exhaustion.

I force myself up. I lock the front door. I check all the windows, close all the curtains. I find new clothes for me and Phil and lay them out on my bed, turning them inside out. God help me, I put the kettle on.

Phil just sits on the floor of the living room, the same floor we’ve sat on together a thousand times talking and laughing about school or friends or TV or a million pointless things.

But she’s not talking now. She’s gone silent again, clutching her mother’s blouse to her chest.

‘Do you want some tea?’ I ask.

I don’t expect an answer, but she says ‘yes’ quietly.

‘I’ll make some. But let’s get you into the shower first.’

‘No.’

‘Yes,’ I insist. ‘Come on, Phil.’

I have to undress her like a child, pulling her clothes over her head one-handed. She’s wearing a dress, and this strikes me as weirdly funny, the way little things become intensely hilarious when you’ve pulled an all-nighter and are sustained by caffeine alone. A group of horrifying monsters wanted to rip her heart out while she was wearing a sleeveless summer dress with little flamingos on it.

‘Hot or cold?’ I ask her.

‘Hot,’ she says. ‘Please.’

I turn the water on. She just stands there.

I sigh and unbutton my jeans. This is probably the worst thing in the world I can do for my shoulder – you’re not supposed to get open wounds wet, are you? – but the world feels like it’s ending and I don’t have any options. ‘Come on.’

This time, she doesn’t slap my hand away. Both of us in our underwear, she lets me pull her into the shower.

The water that runs off us is red – dark red at first, and then gradually getting lighter, until it’s almost pink. Awkwardly, roughly, I try to wash the blood out of her hair, although I don’t do a very good job because I only have one hand. I do an even worse job on my hair, but it’s so short that hopefully it won’t matter much.

The water turns cold before it turns clear. I see her shivering – we’re both shivering – but better cold than covered in blood.

‘Come on,’ I say, when at last there is no more red. ‘Let’s get you out.’

I fumble for a towel and start to dry her like I undressed her – like a little kid – but she takes it from me. ‘I can do it.’

I dry myself too, but I can’t dry my bandaged shoulder. The cotton – are bandages made of cotton? Why don’t I know what bandages are made out of? Surely that’s a thing I should know – is a heavy damp weight against my skin. I can feel it sticking and I hope it’s wet because of the shower and not because I’m still bleeding. I’m running on pure adrenaline right now and I probably already need seventy-four blood transfusions without adding a seventy-fifth.

I’m going to collapse soon. I’m going to fall in a heap, adrenaline or not, and I need to make a plan for what I’m going to do when that happens.

Phil disappears into my room to get dressed. I wrap Disey’s bathrobe around myself, pick up my jeans with my thick, heavy fingers, and dig my phone out of my pocket, where I felt Matilda put it when I was half-asleep on Phil’s kitchen floor.

There’s a thin spider web of cracks across the screen from where I dropped it. The centre of the web is right over Finn’s left eye.

My shivering gets even worse.

I make myself breathe and steady myself.

I need you to come to my place asap, I text to Cardy and Holly. Please.

Then I take another deep breath and tap lightly on my bedroom door. ‘Phil?’

She’s standing at my window. The curtains are open and she’s staring out into the night, that vacant stare back in her eyes.

‘No no no no,’ I say, yanking the curtains closed. ‘Away from the window. Trust me, all kinds of things have turned up out there and we’re not equipped to deal with any of them right now.’

Her fingers curl into fists and then uncurl again, but stay tense, like she might lash out with her fingernails at any moment. ‘Just leave me alone, Pearl.’

‘No. I’m not leaving you alone. Not a chance. So sit down – or better yet, lie down and get some sleep.’

‘I want to be alone.’

‘No.’

‘Get out!’ she screams. ‘Get out get out get out get out get out get out!’

‘No.’

She shoves me, hard, in the good shoulder. I stumble backwards, and she shoves me again, sending me sprawling out the door. I try to protect it, but my bad shoulder crunches into the hallway wall and lightning flashes across my vision and it’s a summer storm, Valentine, a summer storm! the skies are singing because you have returned to us and I’m bleeding again, hot wetness seeping into the bandages and Phil’s saying something something something you never listen why do you never listen and the door slams with a crack like thunder and it’s black, everything is black, and everything is quiet, except the singing of the sky.

It takes me a long time to peel myself up off the floor. My legs don’t feel like they have the strength to hold me, but it’s not like I can crawl with my shoulder the way it is, so I stand up shakily, using the walls to support myself. I worry that I’m leaving smears of blood on the wallpaper as I lurch down the hall, but then I remember that no, I had a shower, my hands are clean.

But there was so much blood.

We studied Macbeth in Year Nine. Is this what Lady Macbeth felt like?

How am I thinking about school right now?

I go to the kitchen, because I don’t have anywhere else to go. I put the kettle on, because I don’t know what else to do. I keep standing, because I don’t know what will happen if I let myself fall.

Shad always complains about his joints when he shuffles out of bed in the early evening. I’m like an old man, he moans. Listen to that creak, Pearlie. That’s my knees. That’s what you have to look forward to.

My joints aren’t creaking. They feel … gelatinous. They feel like the results of some disastrous dessert on MasterChef or My Kitchen Rules, where they were supposed to be frozen and solid but they didn’t set right.

My bones could turn to water and I could melt at any moment.

No. I looked the Crown Prince of the Seelie fairies in the eyes. He is a fairy and he can’t lie but I told him he was a liar. I will not melt.

I looked Finn in the eyes too. I saw how frightened he was.

And I turned around and left him there.

I left him … where?

How am I going to explain that Finn Blacklin has quite literally disappeared off the face of the earth?

Of course I’m shaking, so of course I burn my hand when I pour boiling water into my mug. I run it under cold water, and the tears are running down my face again too, because apparently there is still something left in me to lose.

I think I’ve imagined the knock at first. I’m on the verge of a spectacular crash, and the pulsing of my blood and the beat of my heart is starting to feel like someone’s hitting my head with a hammer.

It comes again.

I turn the tap off.

A third time.

I exhale. Cardy and Holly made it. They’re alive.

I stagger to the front door. Once they’re here, I tell myself, all of this is going to be someone else’s problem, because I am done. I am so done. I am done to the nth power and the infinite degree and every other formula in my maths textbook.

There’s just enough coherent thought in me to check my iron ring is in place and press my eye to the peephole before I open the door, because it would suck to have come this far only to get assassinated by some random fairy.

And then I’m not done any more, and there are more tears left to cry, hot and salty, because it isn’t Cardy or Holly that’s come knocking.

I open the door and fling myself at the most beautiful boy in the world.

Finn catches me, and his arms fold tight around me, and it’s the best thing, the best, best, best thing. ‘You’re okay,’ I say, pressing my lips to his neck, his jaw, his lips, any part of him I can reach. ‘You’re all right. You got out. I’m so sorry I left you there, Finn, but I couldn’t leave Phil, and I –’

He takes my shoulders in his hands and peels me off him. ‘Where is she?’

I look at him. He looks back at me, coolness in his green eyes, a cold, deep ocean.

That’s when I realise I’ve made a terrible mistake.