The next day is awful.

The first thing I notice when I wake up is my healed shoulder, but that feeling of surprise and awe and triumph – it really was Finn that found me, it wasn’t just some phantom of my exhausted brain, they can take him to a whole other universe but they still can’t tear us apart – lasts about two seconds, because then I realise what’s woken me up.

‘Where’s Pearl? Where’s Phil?’ I hear Shad ask the cops in the living room. ‘Are they okay?’

I look wildly around the room. My eyes fall on the pile of clothes in the corner, Phil’s and mine from last night – including her mother’s blouse! – crusted with blood.

I nearly reinjure my shoulder with the speed and force I dive at them.

I’ve only just managed to throw them under the bed when the tap comes at my bedroom door.

‘Pearl?’ Shad calls. ‘Pearlie, can I come in?’

The blood-spattered leg of my jeans is still sticking out. I shove it under hurriedly. ‘Yeah,’ I call back.

I’m terrified that the two cops will be behind him – ‘You don’t mind if we search your room, do we? It’s just procedure,’ they’ll say, and they’ll be very polite until about two seconds after they reach under the bed – but it’s just him, my big brother, who would refuse to believe I killed someone even if he literally saw me stabbing them.

‘Oh Pearlie,’ he says softly.

I put my finger to my lips. ‘Phil’s asleep.’

He nods and offers me a hand up. I take it, and he yanks me from the ground directly into a hug, a move that probably would have torn my arm straight off if Finn hadn’t healed me. ‘Are you all right?’ he asks. ‘When Dise called – God, Pearlie.’

‘I’m all right,’ I say.

We go out into the kitchen, where Helena is busy chatting to the cops. Her tone is bright and airy, and a spark of anger ignites in the pit of my stomach.

How dare she talk like that? How dare she ask them if they want milk and sugar in their tea? How dare she, when she – unlike everyone else in this room – knows what I went up against last night?

I only get angrier when, later, after Disey and Ms Rao have arrived and Shad is busy chatting with them and the cops, Helena pulls me aside. ‘What happened?’ she whispers. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I broke apart the Riders,’ I say. ‘But not before they killed Phil’s mother.’

Her brow furrows. ‘Riders did this?’

‘Well, not the bit about throwing her in the creek. Matilda did that. But –’

‘You got Matilda involved?’

Helena looks aghast, and that only makes me angrier. ‘Who else was I supposed to call?’ I hiss. ‘You?’

‘No, but –’

‘No,’ I repeat. ‘That’s exactly what I thought. Heaven forbid I call my own sister-in-law to help me with a problem she basically got me into in the first place.’

‘This is not my fault, Pearl.’

‘Really? You’re the one who sold me out to the Unseelie, Helena. Remember that? Remember telling the eternal enemies of the Seelie that I was the Valentine? Remember how that ended up with Jenny and Kel taking Phil? That’s the whole reason Phil got so furious that the Riders chose her to be their ironheart. Maybe it’s not all your fault, but you started this. Phil’s mum is dead and some of that is on you.’

Helena turns white. I know I’m probably being unfair, but the anger is a fire in me, and it swallows the apology on my lips whole.

That anger carries me. It keeps me anchored hard and fast to the world as I tell the same story again and again, to my siblings, to the cops, to assorted members of Phil’s family when they start arriving. ‘Phil came over,’ I repeat. ‘We’ve been fighting recently, for a lot of reasons, but we made up. We’d only just gone to bed when Disey called me.’

Phil sleeps until after midday. I guard the bedroom door fiercely, petrified that the pile of bloody clothes will somehow burst out from under the bed, a flashing neon sign screaming these are the killers.

But I can’t guard her when she finally wakes up, can’t protect her from the living room full of her family who all want to hug her and kiss her and tell her it’s okay, they’ll look after her. ‘It’s all right, Pippa,’ her aunt Efghenia says, wrapping her up in what must be the millionth hug of the day. ‘You won’t be alone. We’re here.’

‘I know,’ Phil says, her voice dull, dead.

Going down to the police station that afternoon is almost a relief in some ways, because at least it’s quiet there. They separate Phil and me to ask us questions, and I end up in the same room where Finn and I sat, in what feels like a hundred years ago, when we went searching for Marie and found her shoe at the old stables. But it’s Disey beside me this time, sitting in the cheap plastic chairs.

‘You’re underage, they can’t ask you questions without a guardian present,’ she says.

I’ve repeated the story so many times by this point that I’m almost comfortable with it, so I’m not prepared when one of the cops slides a photo across the table. ‘Do you know this woman?’

My breath catches. ‘I – um – maybe?’

Disey pulls her reading glasses out of her bag so she can look at it too. She swears under her breath.

‘Maybe?’ the cop asks.

‘Well – the photo quality isn’t that good,’ I hedge. ‘It could be anyone.’

It’s not a lie. It’s a grainy photo taken from a CCTV camera. I know which one, too – they put it up randomly near a block of public toilets on the nature reserve between the creek and the beach because they thought it would stop people doing drugs in there. We had a long discussion about it at a student leader meeting at school, and we decided it was a stupid idea, because how can you tell the difference between someone going into the toilets to pee and someone going in there to shoot up? We ended up writing a letter to the council about what a ridiculous waste of money it was.

If only councils took letters from high school student groups seriously. If only we’d actually taken that letter seriously, instead of filling it with the best zingers we could think of. If only we’d actually cared more about getting that stupid camera taken down instead of laughing about how bad the council’s logic was.

‘It’s Matilda Taufa,’ Disey says. ‘Her boss.’

‘Your boss?’ one of the cops says, in a tone that means, ‘Well, isn’t that interesting?’

The anger in me starts hardening into fear. ‘I work at OverWrought. Her shop. On Saturdays.’

‘How long have you worked there?’

‘A couple of months.’

Both cops jot something down on the paper in front of them.

‘But I know Matilda. She wouldn’t do this. She’s kind. She helps people.’

‘Pearlie,’ Disey says, ‘she’s carrying a body.’

‘She’s carrying a bag! I know it looks bad, but there could be anything in there. Maybe it’s – I don’t know, fishing gear!’

‘Is there any reason why Matilda Taufa would hold a grudge against Eleni Kostakidis?’

‘No,’ I say firmly. ‘They didn’t know each other.’

‘You can’t know that, Pearlie,’ Disey says gently.

‘Matilda didn’t do this. No way.’

‘You understand that we have to pursue all avenues of investigation,’ one of the cops says.

‘Then why aren’t you out there pursuing Jenny and Kel?’ I demand. ‘They’re the ones that killed Marie! And they tried to kill Phil once before! They’re the ones you should be –’

‘One of the neighbours reported seeing a car leaving the Kostakidis residence at about four in the morning,’ one of the cops says. They address themselves to Disey, obviously deciding that I’m too hysterical to be spoken to any more. ‘It matches the description of the car registered to Matilda.’

‘Another neighbour reported seeing a different car leave about an hour earlier,’ the other cop says. ‘A white one.’

Disey’s car is white.

They’re setting me up. This has been a slow play, and now they’re closing the net. They’re going to whip out another CCTV photo of Phil and me driving off, and a cage is going to descend from the ceiling and they’re going to lock me up and throw away the key.

‘But it’s all on-street parking there, so it’s tricky to know if a car is leaving a specific residence,’ the first cop says.

‘So it could all be a coincidence,’ I say. ‘This could all be a big coincidence, and you’re wasting your time on it instead of getting out there and searching for Jenny and Kel.’

‘They have to look into everything, okay?’ Disey says, reaching over and folding her fingers around mine.

‘It’s Jenny and Kel,’ I repeat. ‘It has to be Jenny and Kel.’

‘Pearlie,’ Disey says, then hesitates. ‘Pearlie, Jenny and Kel ate the people they killed. They didn’t just stab them and throw them away.’

‘Maybe they didn’t have time!’ I say. ‘Maybe whoever was in that white car, and the car that looks like Matilda’s, though you can’t prove it was Matilda’s, maybe they interrupted them. Maybe –’

‘We arrested Matilda Taufa an hour ago,’ the cop says.

The world stops.

‘What?’ I say faintly.

‘She had an unconscious man in her car,’ the cop goes on. ‘He appears to have sustained some quite serious injuries that match the ones suffered by Eleni Kostakidis.’

My thoughts feel slow and woolly, like someone’s set off a smoke machine in my brain, so I only put it together the split second before she tells us who the man was.

Hunter. Matilda went to find Hunter – Hunter, who I abandoned, bloody and unconscious in the bush – and she got arrested for murder.

They ask me more questions, and I answer them, but it’s like some other Pearl is operating my body, and I’m hovering outside it, an insubstantial presence in the air that could blow away in the mildest breeze.

I register a few things they say. They have Matilda in custody. She’s being held without bail. Hunter’s unconscious in hospital under police guard. No, I can’t see her. No, they strongly advise I don’t see him.

I register a few things they don’t say. Matilda is my boss. Hunter is my music teacher. Mrs Kostakidis is my best friend’s mother, and Marie was my friend, and every single time something terrible has happened in this town in the last six months, there’s been a link back to me.

‘I think that’s enough for now,’ Disey says to the cops at last. ‘She’s had a long, tough day.’

‘You understand that –’

‘That you’ll need to ask her more questions, yes,’ she says. ‘This isn’t the first time we’ve been through something like this.’

One of the cops nods. ‘We’ll give you a call if we need her to come in again.’

It hits me like a punch in the stomach.

Call. Phones.

I called Matilda in the middle of the night, and begged her to come and help me. How long until they work that out? How long does it take to get hold of phone records?

And – oh no, what did I say?

I asked her to help. I asked her to please help me.

Can they get recordings of phone calls?

‘Come on, Pearlie,’ Disey says, taking my arm and steering me out of the room. I don’t know if she realises that she’s the only thing holding me up.

We have to wait for Phil. Every second we spend is somehow both a hundred years and the blink of an eye.

I’m waiting for the shout. For some cop somewhere in the building to check Matilda’s phone records and yell, ‘Eureka!’ For them to slam me up against the wall and cuff my hands behind my back. Disey and Shad will be yelling but the cops won’t care. They’ll take a mugshot, and it’ll be splashed across all the newspapers, and they’ll interview people who have been on board the Killer Girl Pearl train from the start about how they knew I was a killer.

They’ll interview Julian, won’t they?

‘She held me down in the bush in the middle of the night and tried to cut my heart out,’ he’ll say. ‘She’s a murderer. And that boyfriend of hers, he’s a murderer too.’

Maybe Finn is safer in fairyland. He can’t take the fall for murder out here. That’ll be all Tam.

But if he were here, Finn could fix this.

He would look everyone in the eye, and use that voice of his which says, ‘I am a fairy prince, and you must listen, and you must believe,’ and he would command everyone to disregard the evidence.

And they would do it. They’d let me go. They’d let Matilda go. They’d forget they ever suspected either of us.

But Finn’s not here. He might be able to appear in my dreams and heal my stab wounds, but he can’t fix this.

No one can. Especially not me.

Wait. No. There’s one person that might be able to fix this.

But a) she’s the worst person I’ve ever met in my whole life, b) she’s currently out of commission, what with the being wrapped in iron chains, and c) I have no idea where Holly hid her.

No. No. I am not seriously considering freeing Emily. Not a chance.

What would her reaction be if I woke her up and was like, ‘Rise and shine, Em, I need a favour! I need you to brainwash a whole bunch of people so I don’t go to jail for murder! BTW, can you save my boss too? The one that made the iron chains we wrapped you in?’

She probably wouldn’t even bother with the #1 fairy pastime of laughing at me. She’d just murder everyone I’ve ever met. And then that’d probably get pinned on me too.

There’s no one who can magic me out of this. I’m completely and utterly on my own.

We have to go to the funeral home after the police station, and even though it’s about eleven million degrees, the sweat dripping off me is cold.

Keep it together, Linford. Think.

Okay. If – when – they look at my phone records, and see that I called Matilda in the middle of the night, I’ll just deny everything. Phil was with me, after all. We’re each other’s alibis. ‘No, she didn’t call Matilda,’ she’d say. ‘We were watching Netflix, and –’

No, that’s a bad lie. They can probably tell when you’re watching stuff on Netflix.

‘We were talking,’ Phil could say.

‘Then how do you explain this call?’ the cops would say, angrily.

We’d look at each other, wide-eyed. ‘I don’t know,’ I would say.

Phil would groan. ‘Oh my God. Remember when you rolled over onto your phone and we couldn’t find it for like fifteen minutes? It must have been a butt dial.’

‘A butt dial,’ the police would say incredulously.

‘It must have been,’ I’d say, putting on my best upstanding face, the one I use when I have to represent the school at something.

Yes. I can sell this. Butt dial. I can make them believe that me calling Matilda was a mistake. A terrible coincidence.

And then, when I get Finn out, I can get him to brainwash everyone and no one will even think she’s guilty any more, and it will all be moot.

Provided they don’t look any deeper. Because if they look at my browser history, I’ll be in so much shit. They wouldn’t even ask any questions about all the fairy websites I visit. They’d see that my most recent searches include a whole bunch of medical articles and YouTube videos of surgery about how to cut someone open to get at their heart, and they’d throw me in the deepest darkest dungeons they have.

Why didn’t I ever listen to any of Shad’s rants about internet privacy? Why did I never go, ‘Hey, having a legit tech genius for a brother would be a fantastic opportunity to learn mad skillz at his knee in case I ever have to dodge a murder charge’ instead of, ‘Hey, now I can avoid having to learn a ton of complicated stuff because Shad will do it for me’?

And then there’s the fact that I have to get Phil to co operate if I want the butt dial defence to work, and in some ways, she’s even further away than Finn.

The funeral home is cold and sterile. They’ve tried to make it cheery and welcoming, but it’s like they haven’t quite worked out what cheery and welcoming means, and the only thing they know that fits the bill is flowers. The place is covered in them, bunches of daffodils and carnations and irises and gerberas on just about every flat surface they can find. But the flowers don’t hide anything. Even just standing in their office, with its beige carpet and the sun streaming through the window highlighting dust motes floating through the air, you can feel the stainless steel and the chemicals and all the death, death, death echoing through the walls.

There’s a whole bunch of people packed into the funeral director’s office – me and Phil and Disey and Shad, and Phil’s yiayia and pappou and her aunts Efghenia and Christina and her uncle Marcos. Phil greets them all with that facial expression and tone that isn’t quite a smile, the one that says, I’m glad you’re here, but I don’t want to be, not now, not ever.

I try to listen to Phil’s family organise the funeral, but I can’t focus, not even when Phil’s pappou totally breaks down when the funeral director mentions that they’ll have to have the funeral later than they might like because they have to wait for the coroner to release the body. He’s sobbing, and Phil’s aunts are trying to comfort him, and her yiayia is gripping the hand of her uncle Marcos so tightly her arthritic knuckles are turning white, but all I hear is that word coroner, and my mind starts turning even faster, trying to work out how long coroner stuff takes and what they can find out.

I don’t even really know what a coroner does. I wondered exactly the same thing at Marie’s funeral, and I never bothered to find out.

But it’s the least of my worries. I feel like I’m in one of those spinning teacups they have at Disneyland, and in there with me is all my anxiety about Phil and all my fear about being arrested, and Finn is so far away and I promised I would get him back and how am I going to do that and who knows what Tam might do to get Emily back and I haven’t even thought about the fact that I have a twin sister and what if Finn is stuck in fairyland forever – what if what if what if – how will I get Matilda out of jail then?

‘I don’t want a wake,’ I hear Phil say.

‘We have to have a wake, Pippa, it’s tradition,’ Marcos tells her, before turning back to the funeral director. ‘Now, can we have that here, or –’

‘I don’t want one!’ she exclaims. ‘She was stabbed to death! She was torn apart! They threw her in the creek! They – who knows what the fish did to her?’

‘Philippa!’ her aunt Christina gasps.

‘Do you want to see her like that?’ Phil demands. ‘Do you want to stand by her casket and look at her like that while some priest who didn’t even know her stands there and prays?’

‘Of course, the priest knew your mother!’ Marcos snaps, at the same time as the funeral director says, ‘we don’t have to have an open casket wake.’ I think his tone is supposed to be comforting, but it feels about as real and genuine as Tam’s soothing voice.

‘I don’t want a wake at all!’

Marcos sighs. ‘Pippa, do you think Pappou could take it if we put his daughter in the ground without a proper funeral?’

‘What do you want, Phil?’ Disey asks her.

‘I want small. Quiet. Over and done with as quickly as possible, and I don’t want to have to look at her.’

But Phil gets none of these things, except the last one. Marcos and the funeral director plan a full enormous funeral over the top of her head.

‘Don’t worry, Pippa,’ Marcos says, putting a hand on her shoulder after we leave the office. ‘It’ll be closed casket. You won’t have to look at her.’

Phil shrugs his hand away.

‘And your friend will play piano,’ he goes on. ‘That classical piece your mum liked. That’ll be nice.’

Did I agree to do that? I can’t remember. I can’t remember anything, except how afraid I am about literally everything.

‘I’ll come and pick you up later tonight,’ Marcos says. ‘We’ll pack some things for you and you can come and stay with me and your cousins until your dad gets here, all right?’

‘No.’

‘What?’

‘No, I don’t want to come and stay with you, Uncle Marcos.’

‘Pippa, you can’t stay in that house by yourself. Yiayia and Pappou are staying with Aunt Christina for now, and the place is still a crime scene. You need to be with the people that love you.’

‘Can I stay? Please?’ Phil asks Disey and Shad.

‘Of course you can,’ Disey tells her. ‘As long as you want.’

‘I don’t like this,’ Marcos says, looking straight past Disey and addressing himself to Shad. ‘She should be with her family.’

‘Mate, you don’t need to worry, all right?’ Shad says, taking Marcos by the shoulder and steering him away from us. ‘We’ll look after her.’

‘Thank God,’ Disey mutters under her breath.

‘I’m sorry about him,’ Phil says. ‘He’s just – you know how –’

‘Philippa Kostakidis, you don’t need to apologise about anything right now, all right?’ Disey says. ‘You can stay with us for as long as you want. There’s no point having a spare room if we don’t use it, right?’

‘Isn’t that Tam’s room?’ Phil asks.

Disey blinks. ‘Who’s Tam?’