The world slows to a standstill and speeds up so fast I’m amazed we don’t all get flung off the earth into space when she says those two words. Who’s Tam?

I have nine million thoughts in the space of a single nanosecond, but they can be boiled down to two:

1) Oh no, the fairies are still here.

2) Thank God, the fairies are still here.

If someone is going around brainwashing people into forgetting Tam ever existed (well, un-brainwashing them, because they brainwashed everyone into thinking he was my cousin in the first place) then there are Seelie fairies in this town. If it’s Emily – if she’s somehow got free – then I am so screwed, but surely the first thing she’d do if she got free would be to make me watch as she killed people I cared about, right?

You have rid me of the Riders, and now I may ride through mortal lands all I please. The Crown Prince said that to me. What if he or one of his little buddies availed themselves of that opportunity right away?

And if they’re here, I can find them.

I can follow them. All the way back to fairyland.

I can get Finn back, and he can fix –

He can’t fix this. Not the fact that Phil’s mother is dead. He might be able to heal people, but he can’t raise the dead.

But he can fix so much. Matilda. Emily. Tam.

Tam, who no longer exists.

‘Can you drop me at Finn’s on the way home?’ I ask Disey.

‘It’s been a long day, Pearlie. Don’t you want to go home and rest?’

She looks sideways at Phil, a pointed glance that delivers a long monologue on how I shouldn’t be so selfish and how I should take care of my friend.

‘I’m fine,’ Phil says hollowly.

‘Phil, no one is expecting you to be fine,’ Disey says.

‘I don’t want to be around anyone,’ she says. ‘Pearl can do whatever she wants.’

I take all my emotions, box them up tight, and shove them into a deep dark corner of my brain to deal with later. I just need to focus on breaking into fairyland and getting Finn back. If I can get him back, I can make everything all right.

‘Are you sure you want to be out tonight, Pearlie?’ Disey asks.

‘I need to see Finn.’

It’s somehow both the truest and the closest thing to a lie I’ve said to one of my siblings since I made my not-New Year’s resolution.

There are no lights on in the Blacklin house when Disey drops me off – which leads to a whole other round of ‘Come on, Pearlie, forget your boyfriend, don’t you want to be home where we can wrap you in cotton wool and hide you away from the world’ and I’m like, ‘Ugh, no, why do you have to be so unreasonably protective, I’ve only been mysteriously mixed up in multiple murders in the last six months.’ Everything about the house says that nobody’s home, but after the taillights of Disey’s car have disappeared into the distance, I knock on the door: not a gentle knock, but the kind that cops do in movies, the kind of knock that says, ‘Open up, or I’ll kick this door down’.

There’s no answer.

I knock again.

Still no answer.

I refuse to believe that Tam’s not here. He’s clearly not pretending to be my cousin anymore, and he wanted Finn’s life more than anything. Why wouldn’t he swoop right in and take it?

I knock again.

Nothing.

I take a few steps back and survey the house. The only car in the driveway is Finn’s, parked the same way we left it, so straight you could use it to do trigonometry, P-plates attached at perfect right-angles. Unless his parents and little brother returned and whisked Tam away on some kind of Blacklin family Christmas adventure, they’re still gone. Everything looks just the same as it did when Finn and I left last night (how can it only have been yesterday?) to go face down the Riders at the Summer Door.

But Tam has to be here. Whoever’s brainwashing people into forgetting his existence made sure he has nowhere else to go.

Unless … he’s out with that fairy, helping with the brainwashing.

Or searching for Emily.

Or the fairy that’s doing the brainwashing is Emily, and he’s out carrying her skirt for her or something while she screws with the minds of everyone in the whole town.

And maybe they’re almost finished. It’s not a big town. How long could it take? Maybe they’re on their way back here right now, so Emily can roll up her sleeves and put on her best murder outfit. Maybe she’s behind me right now, and her fingers are reaching for my neck, and –

I wheel around. There’s no one there.

Chill, Linford. Breathe. Think.

Okay. Even if Tam’s not here right now – and maybe he’s off doing something as innocent as, I don’t know, buying milk, not everything has to be a disaster, Pearl – surely he has to return. And I can wait for him.

I head for the lattice around the side. I dry my sweaty hands on my shirt as best as I can, wedge my wallet and phone in the back pocket of my jeans and my keys in my bra, and climb up to Finn’s window.

If Tam was smart, he would have locked it, or jammed it, or covered the window-ledge in spikes and broken glass or something, but he hasn’t. He hasn’t even put the flyscreen back in. The window’s closed, but it slides open easily when I shove at it.

And I know immediately, even though the window-ledge wasn’t covered in spikes and broken glass, and even though I didn’t set off a million Tomb Raider–style booby-traps, and even though a giant net didn’t swallow me up and suspend me from the ceiling the second I put my feet on Finn’s bedroom floor, that Tam’s been living here, because he didn’t make the bed.

Finn Blacklin is the neatest person in the entire world. He always, always makes the bed.

I recognise the sheets. They’re the same ones Finn and I slept on that one night we had together, navy blue with little white pinstripes. I laughed at him as he stripped the bed and shoved the sheets in a ball into the washing machine. We’re going to go and fight some unholy hell monsters tonight and you’re doing laundry, I said.

I’m not going to be the kind of guy that brings his girlfriend home after a long night of hell monster fighting and asks her to sleep with him on dirty sheets, he said, closing the washing machine with his foot and leaning over to kiss the corner of my mouth before pouring the detergent into the little compartment.

It was such a small thing. Such a simple little thing. But for a second, I wanted to cry, because this boy – this boy …

I hope you’re prepared to be doing a lot of laundry then, I said lightly, and he turned around and smiled, and I reached up to kiss him, and he kissed me back, and then his hands were on my waist and he lifted me and set me on top of the washing machine, and I wrapped my legs around his hips and tangled my fingers in his hair, that impossibly beautiful long dark hair of his, and somehow he got a hand free and turned the machine on, and I laughed into his neck as it vibrated beneath me, and said I can’t believe I’m so bad at this that you can still think about laundry, and he said Trust me, Linford, you’re not bad at this, and …

Tam must have come back here, after he was done threatening me and stitching up my shoulder. Or maybe even before that. Maybe when Finn commanded him to walk away he walked all the way here, and while I was in fairyland choosing Phil and calling the prince a liar and abandoning the best boy in the world, he was here, taking the sheets out of the washing machine.

He must have put them in the dryer. He wouldn’t have had time to hang them on the line. Then he must have brought them upstairs. Made the bed. Taken a nap.

Taken a nap on the sheets that belonged to Finn and me and no one else.

And then he didn’t make the bed.

I’ve torn the sheets off before I’ve even realised what I’m doing. I fall to the floor and I press them to my nose, desperately hoping that somehow they still smell like Finn, but they don’t, they smell mostly like detergent, and why does Finn have to be so neat? Why does he have to be so good at things like laundry when I just want to be able to smell him and feel like he’s here with me?

Is sobbing on the floor of Finn’s bedroom while clutching his sheets to your nose getting you anywhere, Pearl? Is it going to help you get Finn back?

No. Pull yourself together.

I peer into rooms as I walk down the corridor. Finn’s parents’ room and Matty’s room look untouched. The bathroom isn’t – Tam’s hung his towel to dry over the top of the shower screen, but left the bathmat crumpled on the floor, just like he used to do when he was living with us, which drove Shad absolutely up the wall – and there’s a couple of muddy footprints on the hall carpet and the stairs.

I’m trying to decide where the best place to wait for him is when I hear it.

I wait a few seconds, and I’ve almost entirely written it off on my imagination when the sound comes again, a loud thump, coming from outside.

Not sure whether I’m being completely ridiculous or not, I slide the biggest knife out of the block in the kitchen and clutch it in my fist. I crane my neck to see if I can see anything out the kitchen window, but either I’m too short or the design of Finn’s house has too many walls, or –

‘Don’t move,’ Tam says from behind me.

He’s so close I can feel his breath on my neck. Finn’s breath, really, because it’s Finn’s body he’s wearing now, but I have never, ever, in the entire time I’ve known Finn, even when I hated him, felt frightened to be around him.

I’m scared now, though. My heart is pounding so loud it sounds like a drumbeat in my ears.

‘I just want to talk,’ I say.

‘Put down the knife.’

‘How about if you back up a few paces, and let me turn around, and then I’ll put it down?’

Tam grabs my wrist and bends it back so sharply that I’m not sure if the crack I hear is the knife hitting the floor or the bone breaking. ‘You will do what I tell you to do,’ he says. ‘Is that clear?’

His hands travel briskly down my body, patting me down for weapons. ‘Scared I’ll hurt you?’ I say. ‘A big dude like you scared that I’ll come at you and I’ll win?’

‘I have not survived by being proud. I know what you are capable of. Turn around.’

I obey, my hips bumping against his. I’m not tall enough to stand nose to nose with him, and he looms over me, his arms steel brackets around my body as he rests his hands on the countertop on either side, trapping me.

‘Why are you here?’ he asks.

‘I came to talk.’

‘There is nothing you can say that I am interested in hearing.’

‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Maybe I wanted to ask a question, and I thought that, given you lived in my house for three months and pretended to be my cousin, you’d do me the courtesy of answering. Why does no one remember who you are?’

‘They do remember who I am,’ he says. ‘I am Finn Blacklin.’

I’m momentarily so filled with rage I can’t even form words. It’s only the last vestiges of self-preservation which keep me from headbutting him in the teeth.

‘No,’ I say at last. ‘No, you’re not.’

‘This is the life that was meant to be mine,’ he says. ‘These are my parents that live here, the father that sired me, the mother that gave birth to me, before I was snatched away by the Seelie King and a fairy changeling was left in my place. The child that lives here is my brother, my blood, not his. I am Finn Blacklin. Tam Linford never existed.’

‘You one thousand per cent existed. I was there. I remember. You lived in my house. I saw you and I heard you and God, did I smell you, Tam. And so did Disey and Shad, so why don’t they remember you any more? Who’s taking those memories out of people’s heads?’

‘I owe you nothing,’ he snarls at me. ‘No answers. No loyalty. You and yours have done nothing but take and take from me and here you are to ask for more.’

I might be angry, but Tam is furious. He’s practically pulsating. If he were a cartoon character, he’d be bright red and steam would be coming out of his ears.

I swallow.

‘One answer,’ I say. ‘I just want you to answer one question, and then I’m gone, Tam. I’m gone, and you never have to speak to me ever again.’

Silence.

‘Or – or maybe you do want to speak to me again,’ I venture. ‘Maybe we can make a deal. There must be questions you want answered, right? You’re living Finn’s life now. I’m his girlfriend. No one knows him better than me. I can tell you the things you want to know, and –’

‘I have no need of you for that.’

‘Tam –’

‘I have no need of you at all.’

‘Will you be saying that when Matty’s birthday rolls around?’ I improvise wildly. ‘When he’s crying because you forgot, will you still be saying you don’t need me? I know you’re angry with me, Tam, and I don’t blame you, but we can be adults about this. Last night you said we could work together, and I said no, and I was wrong, and I’m sorry. You were kind to me, and I should have listened to you.’

‘Yes. You should have.’

‘Just answer my question – just tell me who’s making everyone forget about you – and I’ll tell you anything you want to know. I promise.’

I could write a catalogue of Finn’s smiles, if someone decided that was a thing that the world needed. Smiling seems like such a simple action, but he has infinite variations on a theme. There’s the mischief-managed smile that used to irritate me so much at school when he and his mates would pull some stupid prank. There’s the oh-hi-nice-day generic smile that means hello, the forced smile in student leader meetings when that one kid in Year Ten decides to monologue for a million hours, the hopeful smile I see sometimes in his eyes when he wants something, the smile that he smiles against my lips when we’re halfway through kissing, the slow lazy smile that spreads across his face whenever I remove any article of clothing – smiles and smiles and smiles for days.

But I’ve never seen Finn smile the way Tam does, a smile so casually cruel.

‘I said,’ Tam says, ‘I don’t need you,’ and grabbing me by the scruff of the neck, he drags me outside.

I trip over the lip of the screen door as he hurls me out onto the patio, but he has hold of the back of my shirt and hauls me upright, the material bunching tight around my neck and choking me. The strange thump sounds again as he drags me past the pool – I think he’s going to throw me in for a second and everything goes white, because even though I might take a few steps into water when Finn is there waiting for me, I can’t be alone in deep water, not after Miller’s Creek – but then we’re past it and he kicks open the door of the shed at the bottom of the yard and throws me bodily inside and –

‘Holly!’ I exclaim.

‘Help me,’ she croaks, her voice raspy and broken.

‘You can help yourself, Holly-Anne,’ Tam says. ‘Tell me where you hid the Silver Lady, and I will let you go.’

‘Go to hell,’ she spits at him.

She might already be there, because she sure looks like hell. Tam’s tied her to one of the loungers the Blacklins keep next to their pool, hands and feet bound with cut-up sections of garden hose. She’s filthy, and her lips are dry and cracked, blood crusting at one corner.

She looks like she could pass out at any moment, but her face curls into a snarl and she yanks so hard at her bindings that she lifts the whole lounger up on one side. It thumps hard as it hits the ground. ‘You’re free, idiot,’ she rasps at Tam. ‘Emily’s gone, and you’re free. You should be thanking me for getting her out of your head.’

‘The Silver Lady did you a great honour, taking you as her handmaiden,’ Tam says. ‘You betrayed her, and she does not easily forgive, but she has forgiven before. I will intercede for you. I will tell her you were misguided and misled and bewitched by the Valentine, and she will forgive you. Just tell me where she is.’

‘No,’ Holly spits back. ‘Never.’

‘She will break eventually,’ Tam says to me, an infuriatingly calm note in his voice. ‘It has not even been a day yet. Thirst breaks everyone in the end.’

I try to wheel around to face him, but he still has hold of my shirt and I end up almost suspending myself off the ground. His arm doesn’t move, because of course his muscles are made of whatever substitute they use for iron in fairyland. ‘You could kill her!’

‘I would prefer not to. But she has been intransigent. All this could be over if she told me where she hid the Silver Lady.’

‘Tam, what if Finn’s – your parents come home? What if they come home, and they’re like, “Oooh, time to get working on some of those summer handyman projects I’ve been meaning to do” and they come in here and they find out you’ve turned their shed into your own personal torture chamber?’

‘She will break long before that.’

‘You don’t know that. Finn sent your parents away, but he’s in magical fairytale land now. What if it … there’s probably some magical fairytale term for it that I don’t know, but what if it wears off, that thing where he told them to get out of town? What if they’re pulling up outside right now? What if they’re opening the front door? What if –’

‘Pearl,’ he says, his hand tightening on the back of my shirt, ‘stop.’

‘Or what if the cops come? I’m a person of interest in Phil’s mum’s murder. What if they decide they need to question me again? If they can’t find me, how long do you think it’ll be before they go, “Oh wow, how about we check her boyfriend’s place?” and come here looking for me and find this? Is that how you want to spend your new life as Finn? In jail?’

Tam’s face remains the same, impassive, totally devoid of emotion.

‘And I assume Holly is the one you think will tell you every little detail of Finn’s life so you can impersonate him? Because that’s hilarious, Tam. Really.’

He doesn’t say anything, but I know I’m getting somewhere, because there is no human alive on this earth that can read Tam’s silences better than me.

‘It doesn’t have to be like this,’ I say. ‘You’re not in fairy land any more, Tam. You’re here, in Haylesford, with humans, and this is not how this works. If you want to be Finn – if you really want to be Finn, to live his life, to be a real boy – then you can’t kidnap people and tie them up in your shed. You do that, you get arrested. But I can help you.’

More silence.

‘Just tell me who’s making everyone forget about you,’ I say. ‘Tell me that, and I’ll help you be Finn.’

Holly-Anne thumps her chair and coughs pointedly.

‘Oh, and you need to let Holly go,’ I add. ‘Obviously.’

Tam’s lip curls. ‘You say you have one thing to ask of me, and yet you ask two,’ he snarls. ‘If I acquiesce, it will be a third, and a fourth, and you dare to ask this of me when you have already taken everything!’

‘Tam, I’m trying to help you!’ I say. ‘Do you think this is easy for me? Do you think it’s going to be easy for me to see you take Finn’s place? It’s going to kill me. But I’ll help you do it, if you do these things for me.’

Pulsating, furious silence.

‘You want even? I’ll give you even,’ I say. ‘You tell me who’s erasing the memory of you from everyone’s minds, and I promise I’ll help you be Finn. You let Holly go, and I’ll promise she won’t go to the cops and have you arrested for kidnapping. All right, Holly?’

‘Yes,’ Holly croaks.

‘Do we have a deal?’ I ask Tam.

He’s silent for a long time. (Silence #14: Processing.)

‘You want to know who is making people forget about Tam Linford?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘That’s all. Just tell me who’s making people forget, and I’ll help you.’

He smiles, another awful dark smile that looks completely wrong on Finn’s face. ‘I would also like to know where to find her,’ he says, and looks at Holly.

Oh no.

‘No,’ Holly spits at him.

‘No,’ I repeat. ‘That can’t be right. We tied her up in iron chains, Tam! There’s no way Emily Houdini’d her way out of that and is going around town making people forget who you are!’

‘I have served the Silver Lady my whole life,’ he says. ‘I have been loyal. I have been faithful. And she has rewarded me. You saw her change my face. You saw her give me back the life that was mine. You may have chained her, but she is stronger than the mountains and more cunning than the river. Do you not think she would ensure the way was smooth for me?’

Something inside me dies.

There are no Seelie fairies left in Haylesford. It was all … I don’t know, some ticking time bomb or some mental trigger that Emily planted in everyone’s minds.

They’ve got Finn, and now they’ve left.

They’re gone, and they’re not coming back.

Finn’s not coming back.

Tam kneels down and unknots the garden hose tying Holly’s ankles to the lounger. She tries to kick him, but he immediately straddles her, sitting on her legs so he can untie her hands. ‘I will uphold my bargain,’ he says. ‘I will free you, Holly-Anne, and I will trust that you will tell none that I held you captive. But you will tell me where the Silver Lady is. If I must hound every step you take for the rest of your life, you will lead me to her.’

Holly slaps him across the face.

It’s a truly impressive slap – like, you would not guess that Holly just spent nearly a day with her hands tied to a pool lounger, probably cramping to hell – but Tam just smiles his cruel non-Finn smile and leans in closer. ‘I will even keep my promise,’ he says to her. ‘I will intercede for you with the Silver Lady. I will lie to her for you, if you tell me where she is.’

Holly bares her teeth. Her gums are bleeding.

Tam turns to leave, then looks back at us both at the shed door. ‘And please know,’ he says, ‘that I have no desire to hurt either of you. I understand your desires and your feelings, but I am bound and I have a duty. If either of you knocks on my door again, and the first words out of your mouth are not the Silver Lady’s whereabouts, know that I will levy a price in blood.’

‘Tam,’ I say softly, ‘Lesson One in being a real boy. You can’t do things like that here.’

‘I will not go to jail, Pearl,’ he says, ‘because they will never find where I will hide the bodies.’