Disey sits me down at about ten o’clock the next morning and tells me there’s been an incident at the hospital and they don’t know how it happened but Dave died.

She doesn’t say how. Just ‘He died’. Not ‘His head literally exploded, like he was one of the zombie cannon fodder extras in The Walking Dead’.

Maybe she’s protecting me. Maybe the hospital or the police or whoever hasn’t released the details. Maybe I damaged her so badly when I brainwashed her that she can’t remember how he died. I don’t know.

The water turned pink as I scrubbed furiously at my hair in the shower. I thought I’d got it all, but then there was a splat, and a chunk of – of – of something fell on the floor. It was too big to fit down the drain on its own and I had to break it apart with my toes, a slippery clot of gore.

That’s all Dave was, in the end. Blood. Bone. Brain.

‘Pearl?’ Disey asks. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I, um,’ I say. ‘I – um – I think I might go and lie down for a while.’

‘Okay.’

‘Will – w-will the police need to talk to me again?’ FFS, Linford, stop shaking.

Disey gives me an odd look. ‘Why would they need to? You weren’t there.’

‘He w-was my ex,’ I say. ‘I’m connected. I’m connected to all – all the bad things that h-happen.’

I want her to hug me more than anything, to wrap me up in her arms and tell me that I have nothing to worry about, that everything’s going to be all right, that I’ve done nothing wrong, but she doesn’t. ‘I’ll wake you up if they call,’ is all she says.

I can taste metal in my mouth. I’m somehow way too hot and freezing cold all at once.

Finn, I tell myself as I lie down. It’s because of Finn. I’m all right, it’s not me, it’s him, it’s the link between us – he’s asleep, he’s poisoned, he’s fading fast, and this is some of the kickback. I told him to hold on. Maybe he needs some of my strength to do that. Maybe that’s why I feel like this, why it feels like there are spiders walking all over me, hundreds of hairy little legs running back and forth over my skin.

I imagine him lying behind me, arm draped gently over me, his breath hot against my ear. I could lean back against him and he’d hold me tight, and the warmth of him, the strength of him, would stop me shaking. It’s all right, Linford, he’d whisper in my ear. You’re all right.

But it’s not all right, because even if Finn had been there he couldn’t have put Dave back together, and I shouldn’t even think about Finn being strong for me because I kissed him on the lips and said let me be the strong one and I have less than three days to take down the prince and there was so much blood so much blood everywhere everywhere everywhere.

The taste of it wasn’t the worst. It was the feeling. The saying is true. Blood is thicker than water. It’s thick, sticky, gooey, gluey.

Chunks of Dave slid down my throat with the dirty flower water.

If I don’t get this right, this is what the prince is going to do to Oyster. It will be her blood I’m covered with, her brains I’m picking out of my hair, tiny little shards of her bone I’m picking out of my skin. If I don’t take down the prince, I will have killed my own sister, and how will I ever look Disey and Shad in the face again? They don’t know about her, but how can they not know about her? Anyone in the world could do anything to me, try any form of mental torture they liked, but I’d never forget you, Pearl. They don’t know, but they must know, and – stop panicking, Linford, stop panicking, you don’t have time to panic!

But I can’t make it stop. I always thought it was a cliché when people said their minds were going a million miles an hour, but mine is going a million times faster than that and I can’t make it stop. It’s like a racing car going at impossible speeds, and at any second I could lose control, at any second I could crash, at any second my head could explode, all over the walls, all over the floor, all over my bed.

Three days. There’s no cushion of six weeks. Three days, and if it doesn’t work, he’ll kill everyone, and I only have three days to get it right, not even three days now, more like two, and how on earth do you outsmart someone like him in two days, and why am I wasting time when I should be thinking, working, doing anything but lying here paralysed?

My breath is coming in horrible, heaving wheezes. I sound – I sound like Dave, and it feels like there are razor-blades inside my throat, and every breath is tearing me apart.

It feels like I’m bleeding internally, and with every drop of blood goes another piece of me.

It feels like I’m a garden full of Venus fly traps, and their roots are running through my veins, digging into my heart and leeching everything out of me.

It feels like I’m covered in spiders, and they’ve all sunk their fangs into me, drinking my blood and replacing it with poison.

‘Hey,’ Phil says.

My eyes snap open with a start.

I don’t know when I fell asleep, but it must have been a while ago. Phil is kneeling beside my bed, the afternoon sunlight filtering in through the window and catching blonde highlights in her brown hair.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asks.

‘I – I’m – what are you doing here?’

‘I heard about Dave,’ she says. ‘Of course, I came.’

‘You didn’t have to do that.’

‘Um, yes I did. You think I’m going to let you deal with something like that on your own?’

‘Phil –’

‘If there’s anyone who has experience in dealing with sudden, violent death, it’s me.’

I don’t want to cry. I cry too much. I want to be strong. But the lump rises in my throat and the tears are hot on my face and I fling my arms around her neck and scream into her shoulder.

‘Tell me what happened,’ she says after a while. ‘You were there, right?’

‘Yeah,’ I say, pulling back and rubbing my eyes roughly. My whole face feels swollen and puffy, like one big mosquito bite. ‘I was there.’

I tell her the story. My performance, pretending to be wavering. The sense of triumph I felt, knowing the prince was buying it. Getting him to agree to my terms, to keep protecting everyone, to wake Oyster if I agreed to go with him.

Then, It is hard for children to understand things they are told sometimes. Sometimes, they must be shown.

‘You did what?’ Phil asks sharply.

‘It was my only option,’ I say. ‘There were so many people in the room. It happened so fast. The music was the only thing I could use.’

She sighs. ‘I don’t like this music shit, Pearl.’

‘What else was I supposed to do?’ I ask, wiping my eyes again. ‘If I didn’t sing my way out of there, I would have gone to jail, no matter what mojo the prince put on the police. It was worse than a smoking gun. His head was – was –’

‘I get it,’ she says. ‘And it’s not a criticism, I swear. It’s just … how do I put this? I get that you had no other option. All the times you’ve used that – that power the music gives you, you’ve had no other option. I get it. I really do.’

It’s not true, though.

I had other options when I did what I did to Disey, and I did it anyway.

Phil wouldn’t have. I know that. Because what I did was weak and cowardly and Phil is none of those things. She’s a rock, and she’s unbreakable, and she thinks before she does things, and she’d never have played around with her sister’s memories.

Until Marie died and I found out Finn was a fairy and everything went to shit, I used to tell Phil everything. Everything. Every little detail of my life, she knew. The good, the bad, even the ugly corners of my mind: she had a free pass into all of it.

I can never tell her what I did to Disey. Ever.

‘But it’s not your power, Pearl,’ she says. ‘It’s theirs.’

‘That doesn’t change anything, though,’ I say dully. ‘I need it.’

‘I know, but … it scares me,’ she says. ‘You’ve seen what happened to Julian. He used to be a whole person. Maybe he was a bit of a dick and I was a gullible idiot for not seeing it sooner, but he was a whole person. Then the fairies came, and they broke him, and now he isn’t. They’re parasites, and he’s the host, and they’ve eaten him up.’

‘It’s not the same situation.’

‘I’ve felt that music, Pearl,’ she says. ‘Having it in my mind even just for a few hours … it’s poison. It’s just as poisonous to us as those roses are to Finn. It’s theirs, and there are going to be consequences to you using it. Because that’s what fairies are to humans. They’re poison.’

‘Finn isn’t.’

‘Did you ask to be connected to him?’

I start picking at the thread on the doona cover again.

‘Did you?’

‘No. But –’

‘That’s awesome’ she says. ‘He hijacked your brain and you didn’t even get a say in the matter.’

‘Without that connection, we’d have no idea when Misrule was,’ I say fiercely. ‘We’d turn up on Valentine’s Day, and –’

‘Maybe that would have been a good thing.’

‘How can you say that? Even if Finn wasn’t an issue, my sister’s over there. I can’t abandon my own –’

‘When I heard someone had been murdered at the hospital last night, do you know what my first thought was?’ she demands abruptly. ‘I thought it was you, Pearl. I thought the prince had killed you. I thought you were dead. And I can’t – if you die – God, Pearl, I can’t lose anyone else!’

Philippa Kostakidis has never been a big crier. We’ve been best friends since we were two years old, and I can count the number of times I’ve seen her cry – well, maybe not on one hand, but definitely on two.

There have been movies we’ve watched together where I’ve been a tear-soaked mess and she’s had eyes so dry that she basically needed eye drops. I tied myself into knots over Dave and Cardy and the secret unspoken undercurrent that was that inexorable pull towards Finn and I cried on her shoulder time after time, again and again.

When I woke up from the coma after being elf-shot by Jenny and Kel, she sat by my bedside and her eyes got damp.

But now, she just straight-up bursts into tears.

‘But I didn’t die,’ I say. ‘I’m alive. I survived.’

‘That’s not the point!’ she sobs at me. ‘We’re sailing into battle in two days to take on a dude who can explode someone’s head with his mind, and – and all for some kids that you’ve never met and Finn Blacklin, who you didn’t even like until five minutes ago!’

‘Phil,’ I say. ‘If you – if you don’t want to be part of this. If you don’t want to come. If you want to just … stay here, I’d understand.’

‘No, you wouldn’t.’

‘Yes, I would,’ I insist. ‘You’ve been through so much, and you didn’t ask for any of it. If you want to just walk away, I would get it.’

‘You wouldn’t walk away.’

I’m silent.

‘You wouldn’t,’ she says. ‘That’s my move. You’re the girl who rides in to trade your life for mine. I’m the girl who treats you like shit for doing it.’

‘Don’t do this because you feel like you owe me. You don’t.’

‘I do, though,’ she says. ‘I owe you, because you chose me. I owe your sister, because you didn’t choose her, and – and I don’t like it, but I owe Finn, because you didn’t choose him. I can’t walk away.’

‘Yes, you can,’ I say. ‘If that’s what you want to do, you can walk away, and I wouldn’t think any less of you.’

‘I would,’ she says. ‘Because I owe the fairies so much pain for what happened to my mum.’

‘Oh, shit,’ I say. ‘Your mum.’

‘What about her?’

‘Phil, her burial. It’s on the sixth. Misrule. The day we – no. You’re not coming. I can’t let you.’

She raises an eyebrow. ‘Let?’

‘You know what I mean. I can’t ask you to risk your life and go on what might be a total suicide mission into an alternate dimension when your mother’s getting buried that day!’

‘So asking me to go on a suicide mission into an alternate dimension on any other day would be fine, then?’

‘Stop it,’ I say. ‘Stop deflecting. You know you can’t miss it.’

‘You need me, Pearl. I know I’m not going to get any freaky Misrule powers, but without me, who do you think is going to keep Julian under control?’

‘We’ll work it out. Maybe Tam –’

‘Oh, yes, because we should definitely be trusting the extremely trustworthy Tam with more things.’

‘Phil, you can’t miss your mother’s burial.’

‘Yes, I can. And I’m going to.’

‘You’ll never forgive yourself.’

‘You know what I wouldn’t forgive myself for?’ she says. ‘Sitting this out so I can go to an event I desperately don’t want to go to, while my best friend runs off and gets herself killed.’

‘Phil –’

‘I owe the fairies, Pearl,’ she says. ‘What do you think is a better use of my time? Crying over my mother’s grave, or getting some revenge?’

‘But –’

‘I can’t stop you being inexplicably obsessed with Finn,’ she says, ‘and you can’t stop me doing this either.’

‘Is it really so inexplicable?’ I ask Phil a bit later. ‘Me and Finn?’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘No. Maybe. Kind of.’

‘I love how specific you are when it comes to answering questions. Really, it’s one of your best qualities.’

‘Shut up,’ she says, elbowing me in the side. ‘I … I knew you thought he was hot. Tillie and I used to laugh about it sometimes, the way you’d watch him when you thought no one else was looking, and the way that you’d snark at him over nothing, as, like … compensating for it or something. But I didn’t see any of this our-love-is-pure-and-true-I-would-die-for-you star-crossed lover shit happening.’

‘What did you see happening?’

‘Honestly?’

‘Honestly.’

‘I thought you’d bump into him in a bar when we were all, like, twenty-six and have one spectacular night of hate-sex with him, and then never see him again.’

Maybe it’s because I’m exhausted and traumatised and running on nothing but the faintest whiff of adrenaline, but this somehow seems like the funniest thing anyone has ever said in the history of the world.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, wiping tears of laughter out of my eyes. ‘It’s just –’

‘What?’ she says. ‘He’s so amazing in bed that the thought of only one night is hilariously funny?’

‘No,’ I say. ‘Although, like, he’s pretty good. The boy’s got some moves. It’s – I don’t even know how to say it.’

She waits.

‘I know it’s only been a few months,’ I say, ‘but the thought that Finn and I could somehow go our separate ways – that after high school, we’d just … go in different directions, and never see each other, and not know what the other was doing until we ran into each other in some bar … that’s … God, I don’t know why I’m laughing. It’s not funny. It’s like … I can’t even conceive of it, you know?’

‘You know everyone says that about their high school boyfriend, right?’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know, but I think I have a solid case for an exception to the rule,’ I say. ‘What with, you know, all the life and death situations and the fairies and whatnot.’

‘Do you think it still would have happened?’ she asks. ‘If he wasn’t a fairy? If he didn’t have his powers? If he was just some guy at school with nice arms and a man-bun?’

‘Yes,’ I say honestly. ‘It might have taken us longer, but Finn and I were always going to happen.’

She exhales. ‘Wow.’

‘Yeah,’ I echo. ‘Wow.’