“Call 911, you fucking hag!” I scream, tackling my sister to the ground, wrestling the fork away from her. “Get an ambulance!”
Evelyn doesn’t move.
Billy’s sobs transform back into giggles. The fork falls out of her fingers, then she’s grabbing fistfuls of mashed potatoes off the floor. I’m so shocked, I don’t think to stop her…until I see the blood.
It mixes with the mashed potatoes slathered over her lips, turning the mess pink, then red. Only when I hear the crunch of glass between her teeth does my flailing mind realize what’s happened.
Billy doesn’t notice…or doesn’t care.
She keeps chewing, tears streaming as she stares desperately up at me.
…don’t have a choice…I don’t have a choice…
“Please,” I beg, looking up at Evelyn. “Please help her.”
But I should have known better than to seek sympathy from the demon who birthed us.
Evelyn snatches the broom from behind the kitchen door, teeth bared as she advances on us. “Five! Four!—”
I jump to my feet, dragging Billy up behind me.
“—Three! Two!—”
Evelyn follows us up the stairs. I haul Billy inside our room and slam the door in The Witch’s face, throwing my entire weight against it in case she tries to follow us in.
In the beat of silence between my haggard breaths, I hear the key turn in the lock.
Then Evelyn’s voice.
“I hope this experience was as illuminating for you two as it was for me.”
Chapter 50
Bastian
The window is our only exit, and it’s a two-story climb to the overgrown garden below. I desperately want to scale the drainpipe and race down the street and try to get Billy some help.
But I can’t leave my sister like this.
She’s sitting on our bedroom floor, covered in food and blood, her eyes staring at nothing. The puncture wounds on her arm and thigh are bleeding sluggishly. The cuts on her face look horrific, but at least they’ve coagulated.
Now she’ll have physical scars to match the countless emotional ones Evelyn gave her.
“Come on.” I keep my voice gentle. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
She doesn’t respond. Doesn’t even blink.
I sigh and go to fill the tub with warm water, adding the lavender bath milk Billy rescued from Evelyn’s bathroom trash. I’m guessing our mother didn’t like the smell, but it quickly became Billy’s favorite. She keeps it for special occasions—like the first rain of the season, or if she spots a double rainbow. Thebath milk turns the water white, and I wrinkle my nose at the smell. It doesn’t mix well with the mildew inside the bathroom.
I fetch the bar of antibacterial soap from the basin and set it on the rim of the tub.
When I come back for her, she hasn’t moved.
“I’m going to pick you up now,” I tell her. “Okay?”
There was a chapter in one of Evelyn’s books about crisis response, and how the voice matters as much as the action. Calm and steady. Like you’re talking someone back from a ledge. I practiced it on Sybil once, when she had a nightmare so bad she didn’t know where she was.
It worked then. I sincerely hope it works now.
