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THE TWELFTH GIRL

by Malinda Lo

Harley was the kind of girl who could get away with anything. That was the first thing Liv learned when she arrived at the Virginia Sloane School for Girls in mid-October. It wasn’t only that Harley flouted the dress code and skipped class and ignored the curfew without ever being reprimanded. There was something disquieting yet seductive about her, like walking on the edge of a cliff while gazing down at the violent beauty of the ocean breaking below. Somehow it seemed as if Harley could jump—would jump—but instead of falling, she’d spread her arms and fly like a blackbird.

Liv had known girls who acted like Harley before, but never someone quite so successful at pulling it off. Harley was definitely the most interesting thing about the Sloane School, and from the first time Liv saw her—walking into class twenty minutes late, dressed in tight jeans and boots instead of the uniform, her black hair wind-tossed and wild—Liv didn’t know if she wanted to be Harley or if she wanted to kiss her.

Harley’s friends, too, seemed to benefit from her apparent invincibility. They lived together in Eleanor Castle Hall, a small, turreted fantasy of a dorm on the edge of campus. Castle had twelve rooms, all singles, each taken by Harley and her group. Everybody knew they went out dancing every night until three in the morning, and they never got caught, even though the campus gates were locked at 10:00 p.m., and every dorm had a resident advisor who knocked on your door if you even played your music too loud. The rumor was that Harley had a rich father who had given so much money to Sloane that Harley—and everybody she liked—was immune from the rules.

Liv wanted to be immune, too. Her parents had transferred her to Sloane after she got in trouble at her old school in New York City for missing curfew too many times. Liv was pretty sure her parents had chosen Sloane because there was nothing to miss curfew for in Middlebury, Massachusetts, the quiet town where Sloane was located. If Harley somehow got off campus to party every night, Liv wanted in, but neither Harley nor any of her friends seemed the least bit interested in getting to know the new girl. Their collective cold shoulder annoyed Liv, who was used to being noticed for all the right reasons, and it only made her more determined to figure out how they got away with what they did.

One afternoon about a week after she first arrived at Sloane, Liv walked into Middlebury to buy shampoo at the drugstore. As she approached the shop, she saw a pink neon hand in the window upstairs. The sign next to the hand read Madam Sofia’s Fortunes & Favors. Liv was gazing curiously at the sign—it seemed, almost, to beckon to her—when the door next to the drugstore that led upstairs opened. A girl dressed all in black barreled out onto the sidewalk, nearly smacking into Liv.

“Hey, watch it!” Liv cried.

The girl didn’t stop, tossing her only a brief glare before she continued down the street in the direction Liv had come from. She recognized the girl; it was Paige, one of Harley’s friends. Liv watched Paige disappear around the corner, then glanced at the door she had come out of. There was a small placard in the glass window. Sale: Five Minutes for Ten Dollars. Find Your Future Here. Impulsively, Liv opened the door and went up to the palm reader’s shop.

A gray-haired woman in a green velvet dress turned from the window overlooking the street when Liv entered. The woman’s eyes narrowed on her. “Can I help you?” she said.

“Are you Madam Sofia?” Liv asked, glancing around the shop. It was stuffed with knickknacks and baskets of trinkets.

“Yes.”

“I saw your sign in the window,” Liv said. “‘Five minutes for ten dollars.’”

An odd expression passed over Madam Sofia’s face; it reminded Liv of a key turning in a lock. “Follow me,” the woman said. She led Liv through the cluttered shop to a back room hung with curtains and furnished with a round table and two chairs. Madam Sofia sat down and took out a kitchen timer from beneath her chair. She set it for five minutes and placed it on the table. “Give me your hand,” she said.

Liv sat across from the fortune-teller and placed her hand in the woman’s palm. The instant they touched, Liv felt a strange sensation run through her, as if she were a marionette and the puppeteer had tugged on her strings. She watched as the woman bent over her palm, studying the lines in her skin. The rapid ticking of the timer in the background began to make Liv nervous, as if it were counting down the seconds to—well, Liv didn’t know what, but it was unsettling, and she had the sudden urge to leave.

As if she could sense Liv’s change of heart, Madam Sofia’s hand tightened over hers. “You want to know about the girl who was just here,” she said.

“How—how did you know that?”

“It’s my job to know what brings you into my shop.”

The ticking of the timer seemed to grow louder, and Liv had the disconcerting sensation that she was shrinking while the room around her was expanding.

“You should stay away from those girls,” Madam Sofia said, her voice sounding like liquid smoke.

“What girls?” Liv’s palm was sweating.

“The girls who live in the castle.”

Castle Hall. “Harley and her friends?” Liv asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“They’re dangerous. You should stay away from them.”

Liv hated it when anyone told her what to do. “I’ll hang out with whoever I want,” she said.

Madam Sofia gazed at her with small, dark eyes. Liv twitched under the scrutiny and tried to pull back, but the woman wouldn’t let go of her hand. “They are playing with forces beyond their control,” Madam Sofia said. “If you value your life, you’ll stay away from them.”

The cautionary words only stoked Liv’s curiosity. As that venturesome emotion snaked through her, she said, “I thought you were supposed to tell my fortune, not give me a warning.”

“I’m doing both,” Madam Sofia said, and she dropped Liv’s hand as if it had burned her.

Liv cradled her hand to her chest—it trembled now, free from the woman’s grasp—and stood. “You’re crazy,” she said, and turned to leave.

“Ten dollars,” Madam Sofia said, her voice ringing in the small room. “You don’t want to owe me a debt.”

Liv stopped, feeling as if the woman had grabbed her with an invisible hook. Liv reached into her pocket with her other hand—the one Madam Sofia hadn’t touched—and pulled out her wallet. She fished out a ten-dollar bill and tossed it at the fortune-teller. It caught in the air and fluttered to the floor.

Madam Sofia gave her a shrewd smile and said, “You’re welcome.”

* * *

Everything Liv learned about Harley was like finding another piece to a puzzle. The problem was, she had no idea what the puzzle was supposed to depict.

All the girls at Sloane had definite opinions about Harley and her friends. They were stuck-up; they were slackers; they were daddy’s girls. Beneath the criticism, though, was a palpable yearning to be one of them. To be part of that tight-knit pack of girls who prowled the campus like panthers, beautiful and cunning. To dance every night—no one knew where, but it had to be good—and come to breakfast with last night’s makeup on, leaning on each other and laughing about what they had seen and done until dawn.

Liv soon discovered that the only way to join them was to wait for one of the twelve girls who lived in Castle Hall to leave Sloane, and then hope that Harley chose you to take the vacant room. Two girls had left so far: Melissa Wong, last spring, and Andrea Richmond, at the start of the school year in September. It didn’t look like there would be any vacancies in the near future, which was why the sudden departure of Harley’s younger sister, Casey, was such big news.

Harley didn’t come to breakfast the morning that Casey left. She didn’t show up in public at all until late afternoon, and then her eyes had the unmistakable red rims of someone who had been crying.

Liv saw it up close and personal, because Harley was waiting for her after biology class. “You want to be the twelfth girl?” Harley asked, oblivious to the stares of the girls coming out of the classroom behind them.

Liv couldn’t believe this was happening. She didn’t understand why Harley had picked her and not one of the hundreds of other girls at Sloane. Girls who had been there for much longer; who had been campaigning for Harley’s affections for months. Girls who had more-powerful parents; who had private planes to fly Harley and her friends out of the country if they wanted. Liv’s family was well-off—she wouldn’t be at Sloane if they weren’t—but in comparison to the rest of the students, she fell squarely in the middle. Perhaps that was why Harley’s invitation gave Liv a sense of raw satisfaction, as if she had made this come true because of the strength of her desire, as if she had created a physical arrow from her craving and shot it straight at Harley. Now all she had to do was answer in the affirmative, and her every wish would come true.

“Yes,” Liv said, and Harley’s full lips turned up in the tiniest of grins, and she gestured for Liv to follow her outside.

The trees in the quad had shed half their leaves by now, and with the wind picking up, it was likely they’d lose quite a few more before the end of the day. Harley led her to a nearly bare oak tree in the center of the quad, and Liv understood that the first thing she had to do was survive the hungry gazes of all the students streaming out of the academic buildings around them. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and looked at Harley, trying to act like she didn’t care, even though her heart was pounding as hard as if she were sprinting toward a prize.

Out of the corner of her eye, Liv thought she saw a man standing nearby. His shadow stretched across the browning grass as though the sun was rising behind him, but the sky was slate-gray, and when she turned her head, there was no one there. Only Harley was watching her, her dark eyes fringed with long lashes as black as her hair. Liv wondered if she dyed it to attain that shade of midnight.

“These are the rules,” Harley began. “First, you will tell no one about anything I’m about to say. Do you agree?”

“I agree,” Liv said.

“Rule number two is that once you’re in, you’re in. There’s no backing out, no matter what happens. Do you agree?”

The curiosity that had lit within her at Madam Sofia’s shop only burned brighter. “Sure.”

“You have to say ‘I agree,’” Harley said, sounding irritated.

“I agree,” Liv said, puzzled.

“Good. Rule number three: You do what I tell you. We are not a democracy. But if you follow the rules, I’ll watch out for you. Agree?”

Now Liv hesitated. She didn’t like being told what to do. She thought she saw the shadow again, but this time she also saw wings unfolding from it. She blinked, and it was gone.

“Liv,” Harley said.

There was a feverish insistence in Harley’s eyes that made Liv’s contrary nature soften. She felt as if the only thing she had ever wanted was to make Harley happy. “I agree,” she said.

Harley’s shoulders slumped uncharacteristically, and for a second Harley didn’t look invincible; she only looked tired. But the moment passed as quickly as it had come. “Good,” Harley said. “Then you go back to your room and pack your things. Bring them over to Castle Hall before lights-out.”

“Tonight? Don’t I have to fill out some paperwork or something?”

“I’ll take care of it. It’ll take a couple of days to process, but you can still move in tonight. You can stay in my sister’s room.”

“Where’d your sister go?” Liv asked, but as soon as the words were out of her mouth she knew she shouldn’t have said them.

Harley’s face closed up and she looked away. “None of your business. Go get ready. We’re going out tonight.” She began to leave, heading toward the administration building.

“Wait,” Liv called after her. “What should I wear?”

Harley glanced over her shoulder but didn’t slow down. “Dress to impress,” she said.

A blackbird fluttered down from the branch of the oak tree above Liv’s head and landed on the ground a few feet away. It turned to look at her, and as it folded its wings along its body, Liv felt a deep, dark cold inside, as if she had made a bargain with someone or something she did not understand.

* * *

Casey’s room was on the third floor of Castle Hall, and she had left her sheets and blankets on the bed. The first thing Liv did was swap out Casey’s flowered sheets for her own yellow ones. As Liv changed out of her school uniform and into black jeans and a glittery black tank top, she had the unsettling feeling that the room wasn’t empty. It still smelled like another girl’s shampoo.

There was a knock on the door, and Harley called out, “Liv, you ready? Party’s starting.”

“Coming,” Liv answered, and she checked her makeup one last time in the mirror. She had always thought of herself as confident; she had never been a wallflower. Tonight, though, she was nervous. The anticipation of what might happen spread over her cheeks in a rosy flush. She didn’t need any blush.

The girls were all waiting in Harley’s room when she arrived. Harley said, “Say hi to Liv,” and they did, each one of them. Paige, Carmody, Ruby, Skyler, Devin, Sarah, Angela, Tara, Brooklyn and Kirsten. Liv was glad she had worn black, because that seemed to be their favorite color. Black jeans, black leggings, black tanks, black lace, black boots, black eyeliner, black nails. The only spots of color were on their lips and eyes—crimson and purple and blue—and in the jewelry each girl wore. Carmody had a shining steel cuff embedded with blue stones on her right wrist. Paige put up her blond hair with garnet pins. Sarah had a gold mesh bracelet studded with what looked like diamonds. Harley wore a gold ring set with a faceted black jewel on her left hand. Every time she raised her hand, it sparkled.

They passed around a bottle of vodka while they waited for midnight. “We don’t go out till then,” Paige informed Liv. Liv’s mouth grew numb from the liquor, and she wondered if she was going to be drunk before the party even started, but then Harley put the bottle away, and it was time.

“These are the rules,” Harley said to Liv as the girls stood up. “We have to return by three in the morning. No exceptions. And nobody brings anything back with them.”

Liv nodded, and then Harley did something very strange: she pushed her bed aside along well-worn grooves on the wooden floor, revealing a trapdoor. Harley lifted the door’s black iron ring and pulled it up, and Liv saw a flight of stairs descending into the dark. Liv wondered if she was seeing things because of the vodka. They were on the third floor of Castle Hall. Did those stairs go to the second floor?

Nobody questioned it, so Liv didn’t, either. As the girls began to troop down the stairs, Harley caught her eye and said, “Don’t forget what you agreed to, Liv.”

Warmth suffused her skin. “I won’t,” Liv said, and she stepped into the hole in the floor beneath Harley’s bed.

The stairs seemed to go on forever—well past the point where they should have struck the first floor. Liv gripped the metal railing as she followed the girls ahead of her, listening to them chatter about where they were going, who would be there, whether the music would be good. “It’s always good,” said one of them, and the others laughed in agreement, their voices throaty in the dim stairway.

Finally the stairs ended in a steel door like an emergency exit, and Paige pushed the bar to open it. They spilled out into a rain-slicked alley that smelled faintly of gasoline. As Liv looked around, the world seemed to spin. She didn’t understand how they could have climbed all the way down those stairs from beneath Harley’s bed to emerge in this alley in a city that was clearly not Middlebury.

“Where are we?” she asked, feeling dizzy.

Harley grabbed her arm, steadying her. “This way,” she said, and led Liv down the alley to another door. There was a flyer taped to it that depicted a stylized girl’s face with spiky hair and a big, full mouth. Across the place where her eyes should be were four letters: AARU. Harley reached for the handle of the door and pulled it open. Music blasted into the alley.

Liv and the other girls followed her inside. In front of a velvet curtain, a bouncer waited with a flashlight. Harley pulled Liv forward and said, “She’s new. The twelfth girl.”

The bouncer swept his flashlight over Harley’s hand, and her ring glowed. Then he turned the light on Liv’s face, and she winced at the brightness.

“All right,” the bouncer said, flicking the light away.

Harley grabbed her arm again. “Come on,” she said, and pulled her through the velvet curtain.

It was like stepping into another world. The music was overpowering, the bass so heavy it seemed to snake up her body from the floor to shake her from the inside out. The lights that strobed over the crowd obscured as much as they revealed: dancers in glitter and vinyl and fur, their bodies glinting with metal in places she would never think to pierce, their hair caught up in crowns and headdresses that looked like antlers. Instead of mirrored disco balls, there were trees made of glass rising from the floor, reflecting the lights. Crystal leaves hung from the clear branches overhead, making it seem as if the ceiling was heaving in time to the music.

The other girls slipped around Liv and Harley, disappearing into the crowd. Harley—who was still holding Liv’s wrist as if she were a child—leaned over to say, “This is the main room. There are two more. I’ll show you.” Then she began to lead Liv around the edge of the dance floor.

The next room seemed to be made of gold. The walls were hammered gold, and gold leaves hung from weeping golden willows while golden spotlights illuminated a dancer in a cage hanging above the crowd, her whole body painted gold. After that was the room made of silver: curving silver tree trunks; silver leaves that shivered in the warm, perfumed air; silver strobe lights that made every dancer’s skin look like platinum. Harley took Liv toward the bar in the silver room, and when Harley let go of her, she realized that sometime during their circuit of the club, Harley had switched to holding her hand.

Harley leaned close and said, “I have to go look for someone. I’ll come back for you before three. You should have a drink.” She pressed a goblet into Liv’s hand, and before Liv could object, Harley was gone.

The goblet was made of heavy gold and encrusted with jewels; it was the kind of thing you’d expect to see in a fairy-tale castle, not in a nightclub. Liv stared at the reflected lights in the shimmering liquid and sniffed it suspiciously. She still felt tipsy from the vodka and wasn’t sure if she should mix it with this...wine? She looked out at the crowd, wondering where Harley had vanished to so quickly, but she couldn’t find her. She couldn’t see any of the other girls from Castle Hall, either. She was about to put the goblet down—she had a sudden urge to look for Harley—when a boy appeared in front of her. He had spiky black hair and both of his arms were covered with full-sleeve tattoos. Liv couldn’t quite make out what the tattoos were—they seemed to swim in her vision—but she noticed that he was holding a gold goblet like hers.

“Hey, you’re new here,” he shouted over the music. He smiled at her, and she stared at him, unexpectedly transfixed. He clinked his goblet with hers and took a sip of his drink. Without thinking, she mirrored him. The wine was bracing—cool and sharp, as if she had inhaled a breath of winter.

She didn’t remember much of what happened after that, but she did remember him taking the empty goblet out of her hand and saying in her ear, “Dance with me.” His words slid like honey down her throat, and she let him lead her onto the dance floor beneath the silver leaves. He was lithe and beautiful and he tasted as icy as that wine when he kissed her. The music seemed to embed itself in her body beat after beat, and she felt as if she could dance with this unnamed boy forever and never be sated.

And then Harley was back, pulling her away from the boy and saying, “Come on, Liv. Time to go.” And Liv stumbled through the crowd, holding Harley’s hand, and she couldn’t remember why she had ever wanted to dance with that boy in the first place.

* * *

Liv awoke the next morning in Harley’s sister’s room, feeling like her head had been stuffed with cotton balls. She glanced at the clock and realized she had already missed breakfast and most of history class, but when she ran across campus and burst into the classroom, the teacher didn’t even notice.

It took almost all day for Liv to shake off her hangover. It wasn’t until she and the others were back in Harley’s room that night, passing the vodka bottle around again, that she felt as if she had finally returned to the real world—just in time to leave it.

At midnight, Harley reminded them of the rules: They had to return by 3:00 a.m., and nobody could bring anything back with them. Then she pushed the bed aside and pulled up the trapdoor, and once more a flight of stairs was revealed. Liv was prepared for a long descent, but tonight it was different. This time the stairs ended after only ten steps, delivering the twelve girls into a tunnel dug out of the earth. Liv didn’t understand how it was possible, because they should only be on the second floor, but there appeared to be roots growing out of the walls.

“It wasn’t like this yesterday, was it?” Liv whispered over her shoulder to Paige.

“Sometimes it’s different,” Paige said.

Liv wanted to ask how—or why—but she knew somehow that she shouldn’t. She was meant to accept this, the same way she had accepted the rules that Harley laid out. So she kept walking and swallowed her questions.

The tunnel ended in a short flight of steps that led to an ancient-looking wooden door. Harley lifted the latch on the iron handle as if everything was totally normal, and the door opened into the same city alley. The entrance to the club bore a different flyer tonight. It was printed with a black tree drawn like a tattoo, and gothic letters spelled out words Liv couldn’t pronounce: Magh Meall.

Inside, the club had changed in ways that made Liv wonder if she had simply remembered it wrong. The first room had trees of gold, not glass, and instead of a caged dancer hanging above there were aerial acrobats, bare legs wrapped around rippling golden silk. Liv gazed at them as the music thudded through her, and she decided that she wouldn’t drink the wine tonight, because tomorrow she wanted to remember this place.

She turned to look for Harley, but she was nowhere in sight. Liv began to push her way through the dancers, searching for her. Strangers’ hands brushed against her, their fingers sweeping over her arms, and when she looked down she saw trails of gold dust on her skin. A woman with long green ropes of hair caught hold of her, urging her to dance, and she smelled like the ocean, salty and clean. Although Liv wanted to stay with her, she forced herself to remember what she was after: Harley. She had to find Harley. Liv pulled away from the woman, whose face suddenly contorted into anger, and when she snarled at Liv, her teeth looked like fangs.

Recoiling, Liv’s gaze darted around the room, seeking anyone familiar who could explain what she had seen. Finally she glimpsed Harley slipping through the doorway into the next room. “Harley!” Liv shouted, but her voice was lost in the pounding music. She went after her, pressing against the walls so that she could avoid the dancers, but when she entered the next room—silver trees, lit with pulsing red-and-white strobe lights—she had lost her again.

Someone grabbed her elbow and she spun around, her heart racing. It was Paige. “You okay?” Paige asked.

“I’m looking for Harley,” Liv said. “Is it three yet?”

Paige shook her head. “We’ve only been here about fifteen minutes.”

That didn’t feel right.

Paige saw her confusion and said, “Let me get you a drink.” She led Liv to a curtained alcove along the wall—there were many of them, mostly full of couples—and pushed her inside. “Wait here.”

When the curtain fell, it muffled some of the music. The low red lights made the alcove feel like being inside someone’s heart. Liv’s skin itched, and she rubbed at her forearms idly until she realized something was sloughing off. She looked down in horror, but it wasn’t her skin; it was glitter.

Paige returned with two goblets—still gold and jewel-encrusted—and sat down beside her. “Here,” Paige said, handing her a drink. “You need this.”

Liv took the goblet but didn’t drink. “I think it gave me a hangover last night.”

“You get used to it,” Paige said, sipping from her own goblet.

“Where’s Harley?” Liv asked.

“Why? You have a thing for her?”

Liv’s face grew warm. “No.”

“It’s okay. Everybody has a thing for her at first.” Paige sounded resigned.

“Did you?” Liv asked.

Paige shrugged. “Sure. We were together for a while, but that’s over.”

“Do you know where she is?” Liv asked again. It was the only thing she could remember, as if her mind was stuck on repeat, and she didn’t know why.

Paige didn’t respond at first, instead studying her carefully. Liv clutched her goblet with both hands, the jewels digging into her skin, and she wished—she willed—Paige to answer her question. Finally Paige said, “Harley’s looking for her sister.”

Casey. “I thought she left school,” Liv said.

“No,” Paige said, and for a moment she looked frightened. She took another sip of her wine. “She came to the club with us a few nights ago, but we couldn’t find her before we left.”

“You mean she stayed here?”

“I don’t know. Harley thinks she can find her, but...” Paige took another sip, and the drink seemed to calm her. “Melissa and Andrea stayed, too, and we haven’t found them.”

Liv rubbed a hand over her forehead, trying to clear the fuzziness from her brain. “You mean all three of them stayed here? They never returned? How come nobody talks about that at school? Everybody says they just transferred.”

“They didn’t transfer,” Paige said flatly.

“Then what happened to them?” Liv asked. “Why would they stay here? I don’t understand.”

Paige sighed. “You’re not supposed to know this,” Paige said deliberately. “At least, not yet. You can’t tell anyone that you know. You can’t tell Harley.”

Liv was mystified. “Why did you tell me, then?”

Paige looked annoyed. “I don’t agree with everything Harley decides. And you’re one of us now—or you will be tomorrow. You might as well know.”

“What do you mean about tomorrow?” Liv asked. “Aren’t I one of you already? I promised Harley I’d do what she wanted.”

“Tomorrow everything will be finalized. Third time’s the charm.” Paige took another drink. “I shouldn’t have said anything.” She stood, her head nearly brushing the ceiling of the curtained alcove. “I’ll see you later. I have to dance.”

The way she said it—I have to dance—was so strange, as if she was being compelled to do it. Liv watched Paige leave, and then she put her own goblet of wine down on the floor. Bit by bit, like a knife scraping against the frost on a windshield, she was beginning to see.

This place. This beautiful, horrific place. What had she gotten herself into?

* * *

Liv woke to the repetitive screeching of her alarm at 7:00 a.m. She shut it off quickly. The rest of Castle Hall was silent; the other girls probably wouldn’t wake up for hours. Liv threw off her blankets and got dressed. She didn’t feel as hungover as she had the day before, but there was definitely something wrong with her perceptions. The real world seemed blurry.

She threw her laptop into her messenger bag and walked through the chilly late-October air to the dining hall. As she passed the quad, a flock of blackbirds took off from the oak tree, the beat of their wings loud in the silent morning.

The dining hall was beginning to fill with students. Liv poured herself a giant cup of coffee, took a seat alone at the table traditionally reserved for Harley’s group and opened her laptop. Three girls had stayed behind at that club. Melissa Wong, Andrea Richmond, and Harley’s sister, Casey. Liv searched for the girls’ names online, looking for evidence of how their disappearances had been reported. Melissa and Andrea both had Facebook pages, but Melissa’s was private, so she couldn’t read it. Andrea’s, however, was mostly public. Her page was filled with messages from people saying they missed her and were worried about her, but oddly, none of the messages appeared to be from any Sloane students. One was from someone identified as Andrea’s brother, and it said, “We’re looking for you, Ann. Please come home.” It took Liv a while to read through her timeline, but the last update she had posted had been back in August. “Can’t wait to party with the girls again!”

Where had Andrea gone? Liv thought about the flyers posted on the door to the club in the alley. She couldn’t remember how to spell the name that had been on the flyer last night, but she remembered the four letters from the first night: AARU. She entered the word into the search bar. It was a term from Egyptian mythology. A heavenly paradise where souls could exist in pleasure for eternity. Similar to: Elysium, Avalon, Magh Meall. She caught her breath and clicked on the link to Magh Meall and read, “From Irish mythology, a pleasurable realm able to be accessed by only a select few...a place of eternal beauty...occasionally visited by mortals.”

Liv stared at the screen, her mouth going dry. These places were myths, fairy tales. It wasn’t possible for them to exist. But it wasn’t possible for a stairway to open up beneath Harley’s bed, either, and lead to a city where there shouldn’t be one.

It had been real, hadn’t it? Liv thought about the dancers, the wine, the music. If it wasn’t real, she was coming unhinged, and that was even more disturbing than the idea that Harley had found a magical door to another world.

By the time breakfast was over and the students began leaving for class, Liv knew what she had to do. She put away her laptop and headed for the school gates. Technically, she wasn’t allowed to go off campus during the school day, but she knew no one would stop her. She was one of Harley’s now.

The walk into Middlebury cleared away more of the fogginess in her head. When she arrived at Madam Sofia’s Fortunes & Favors, she felt almost entirely real again.

Liv had wondered if it was too early for the shop to be open, but Madam Sofia appeared to be expecting her. “Welcome back,” the woman said as Liv entered the shop.

“I need to know what’s going on with Harley and her friends,” Liv said. “You told me they were dangerous. What did you mean?”

Madam Sofia didn’t seem surprised. “Come sit down.”

“What is that place that Harley takes us to?” Liv asked as they went into the back room. “It’s not this world, is it? How is that possible?”

Madam Sofia sat down at the table. “It is not our world, no.”

Liv felt a brief flush of relief to hear that Madam Sofia knew exactly what she was talking about.

“But it is entwined with ours,” Madam Sofia continued. “Harley has discovered a way to enter it.”

“How?”

“She has made some sort of bargain. I don’t know the exact details, but she will have agreed to something.”

“Does it have anything to do with the girls who stayed there? Melissa and Andrea and Casey?”

“There is a price to pay for entry to that world, and that is the traditional trade.”

“Are you saying that those girls were forced to stay there? That they’re...payment?” Liv was sickened. “That’s insane.”

Madam Sofia folded her hands on the table. “As I said, I don’t know precisely what Harley has agreed to, but she may be getting something out of it that we are not aware of. Nobody strikes this kind of bargain without a great need of her own.”

“What could possibly be worth kidnapping three girls?” Liv couldn’t believe it of Harley. She didn’t want to believe it. “Someone must be making her do it. How do I get her to stop?”

“She cannot stop on her own,” Madam Sofia said. “It is a curse now. There is only one way to break it.”

“Tell me how,” Liv insisted. “I’ll do it. It can’t go on.”

Madam Sofia nodded. “This is what you must do: You must take something dead from the other world and bring it to life in this one.”

Liv’s forehead wrinkled. “How am I supposed to do that? What do you even mean?”

“It is a riddle,” Madam Sofia said. “And it is a test. If you can decipher it, then you are the one who will break the curse. If you cannot decipher it...” She trailed off, raising one open hand as if she were letting something unseen fly away.

“Then the curse remains unbroken,” Liv whispered.

Madam Sofia leaned forward. “Tonight is your last opportunity to do this.”

“Why?”

“After tonight, you will have entered the other world three times. You will have sealed your own bargain, and you will not be able to break it.”

Liv remembered what Paige had told her, and she remembered that afternoon in the quad under the tree with Harley, saying “I agree” three times. She could practically feel the golden chains of that other world tightening around her.

“Tomorrow morning,” Madam Sofia continued, “if you have not broken the curse, you will be given your own talisman to mark your acquiescence to the curse.”

Liv remembered the girls’ jewelry—bracelets and necklaces and hair ornaments that all seemed to come from the same jeweler. Part of Liv still wanted to be one of them, but even as the idea of having her own otherworldly charm thrilled her, she was also repulsed by the fact that it would bind her to that place. “I’ll break it tonight,” Liv said. “Will Melissa and Andrea and Casey be able to return then?”

“I don’t know. They struck their own bargains when they stayed.”

“But they could return?”

“It depends on how deeply they’ve fallen for that other world, whether they have strong enough ties to this one. It’s possible, but it’s not up to you.”

Liv stood. “Okay.” And then she asked, “How do you know all this?”

Madam Sofia’s thin mouth turned up in a self-mocking smile. “I broke the curse myself, when I was your age. You girls are not the first to discover the allure of that other world, and you won’t be the last.”

* * *

The tunnel to the other world was the same that night, and the sign on the door in the alley said Magh Meall again. Liv wondered if they were truly entering that mythical world, or if whoever ran this nightclub thought of the name as a tongue-in-cheek joke. Inside, the club was as crowded as before, but tonight Liv could see that the dancers were not wearing costumes. What she had thought was clothing made of unusual materials was actually skin: skin covered in scales, skin erupting with downy feathers, skin rippling with spiny ridges the color of gold.

As the other girls disappeared into the cacophony of the club, Liv kept her eyes open, looking for anything that might solve Madam Sofia’s riddle. In the room with the crystal trees, there was a band playing on a stage Liv hadn’t noticed before. The lead singer was a woman with long white hair, her eyes outlined with the shapes of stars. Liv edged around the room, studying the crowd gathered at the bar. Most of the people were watching the show, but one of them, a man with tattoos of tiger stripes running up his wiry arms, had turned his back to the stage. He raised a cigarette to his mouth and plucked a matchbook from a glass bowl on the bar. The sight of someone smoking indoors startled Liv—they could do that here? she thought—and then she felt stupid. Of course they could. They could do anything here.

The tiger man tossed the matchbook back into the bowl after he had lit his cigarette, then vanished into the crowd on the dance floor. Liv crept into the gap he had left at the bar, taking the stool he had vacated. The glass bowl nearby held a whole bunch of matchbooks, and when she lifted one out, she saw that it was stamped with the words that had been on the flyer posted on the door: Magh Meall.

Liv didn’t have any pockets that night. She was wearing a tank top and leggings and boots, so she tucked the matchbook into her bra. It only took a second, but her heart began to accelerate the moment the matchbook’s sharp edges scraped against her skin. When she turned around, Harley was standing only a foot away from her, and Liv jerked in surprise.

Harley’s black hair was loose tonight, falling in thick waves over her shoulders. She looked suspicious. “What’re you doing?” she asked.

Liv thought fast. “Looking for you.” She slid off the stool and reached for Harley’s hand. Harley didn’t move; she only continued to scrutinize Liv’s face. “You want to dance?” Liv asked, and she pulled her toward the dance floor.

Liv hadn’t had anything to drink tonight—she had even avoided the vodka upstairs—but the music was intoxicating enough. There was something hypnotic about the woman’s voice, as if she gave Liv permission to do whatever she wanted, and there was something hypnotic about dancing with Harley, too. The movement of her muscles beneath the slippery fabric of her tank top; the warm flushed skin of Harley’s upper back; the tickle of Harley’s long black hair over her neck as Harley seemed to wind herself around Liv. After a while, it didn’t even feel like they were moving anymore. The dancers around them were moving; the bass from the band was shuddering; the lights above were flashing. But the two of them stood motionless, their bodies pressed together, and Liv closed her eyes so that she could feel Harley better, so that she could shut out the dream world all around them and make this real.

The voice in her ear seemed to come at her from a very great distance, the sound of it bubbling up from the depths of a dark sea, until she felt someone else’s hand—not Harley’s—on her shoulder, shaking her. “Liv! Liv! It’s time to go.”

She blinked her eyes open, and Harley peeled herself away, and beside them, Paige was shaking her head as if she had caught two children misbehaving.

“Come on,” Paige said. She glared at Harley. “You should know better.”

Harley’s cheeks were flushed and most of her lipstick had been rubbed off. She shook her head. “What time is it?”

“It’s time,” Paige said in a clipped voice.

Harley cursed. “Let’s go.”

Liv’s legs wobbled as she followed the girls out of the club. Harley didn’t even give her a second glance as she stalked through the crowd. Out in the alley, the night air was freezing on her skin. Still, Harley didn’t look back. She threw open the door to the stairs, and the other girls followed in drowsy silence. Only Paige gave Liv a meaningful glance as she pulled the door shut behind her, and then it was too dark to do anything but pay attention to where she was walking.

When they arrived back in Harley’s room, Liv headed for the exit with everyone else. She felt completely disoriented, and she could still taste Harley’s mouth. Harley had been drinking the wine.

“Liv,” Harley said. “Wait.”

Liv stopped. “What?”

When all the other girls had gone, Harley shut the door, and it was only the two of them. Harley turned to face her. Liv’s heart raced. This was the real world, she reminded herself. Whatever happened here...was real. It scared her, how much she wanted this to be real.

She had forgotten that she wanted to break whatever curse Harley was under. She had forgotten that Andrea and Melissa and Harley’s own sister might have disappeared because of what Harley had done. All she could remember was what it felt like to dance with her.

Harley went to her dresser and pulled a tissue out of the box, wiping off the remains of her lipstick. Then she went over to Liv, who was standing right where she had been when Harley asked her to wait, and kissed her.

Real: Harley’s full lips, slightly dry now, her tongue still tasting like wine. Real: Harley’s hands on the hem of Liv’s tank top, lifting it and sliding beneath. Real: Harley’s body against hers, warm and soft.

Liv reached for Harley’s slippery shirt and Harley raised her arms so they could peel it off. Harley had a tattoo of a blackbird over her heart, and Liv bent her head to kiss it, tasting the salty sweat on her skin. Harley’s breath was uneven as she pulled Liv’s tank top over her head. Her ring caught on the fabric, and Harley swore and took off the ring, letting it clatter onto her nightstand. Then Liv’s shirt was off, too, and something tumbled out of Liv’s bra and skittered onto the wood floor.

Liv froze.

“What was that?” Harley whispered.

“Nothing,” Liv lied, hoping that Harley wouldn’t notice.

But the matchbook had fallen into the circle of light cast by Harley’s bedside lamp, and the words printed on it practically glowed: Magh Meall.

Liv remembered the curse and the riddle. The sticky sweet desire that had made her dizzy only seconds before turned sour.

Harley jerked away from her. “What did you do?” Harley asked, fear in her voice.

Liv lunged for the matchbook a moment before Harley did. Liv’s knees banged against the floor. Harley’s nails scraped over her arms. Liv scrambled away, her fingers trembling as she opened the matchbook.

“Stop it!” Harley cried.

Liv didn’t stop. She tore out a match and struck it, and the flame flared into life.

Something dead from that world, brought into life in this one.

The smell of sulfur seemed to fill the room. The flame burned blue, and Liv saw it reflected in Harley’s dark eyes, full of horror.

“What did you do?” Harley demanded.

The ground shifted beneath them. The bed moved. Harley tried to stop it, but it rolled back over the trapdoor in the floor, and when Harley tried to push it aside, she couldn’t. She screamed in frustration, bending down to look beneath it, and then her shoulders heaved, and Liv knew that the trapdoor was gone.

The match burned out, scorching Liv’s fingertips, and she dropped it onto the floor.

Harley stood. Her face was hard with anger. “Why did you do that? You’ve screwed everything up!”

Liv’s heart was pounding so hard she was breathless. “I had to break the curse,” Liv said.

“You don’t know what you did,” Harley snapped.

The disgust in Harley’s voice made Liv angry. She scrambled to her feet. “I couldn’t let it keep happening! They couldn’t keep taking the girls.”

Suddenly Harley sat down on the edge of her bed, her shoulders sagging. “I never wanted them to take any girls, but that was the price.”

“For what? What was so important you’d let those girls be kidnapped? Your own sister!”

“I did it for Casey,” Harley snarled. “So she and I could stay here at the Virginia Freaking Sloane School for rich bitches. We would have been kicked out for not paying tuition if I hadn’t made that deal.”

Liv took a step back. “What do you mean? I thought your dad was loaded.”

Harley gave a choked laugh. “That’s what everybody thinks, but no. My dad was the janitor here. While he worked here, we got to come here for free, but after he died last year, that was it. We were going to be kicked out. But where would we go? To live with my deadbeat mom in the city? She has no money, and she spends what she gets on drugs. The only way I could keep Casey here—to keep her safe—was to make a deal with that guy. But now you’ve messed it all up. He said they wouldn’t take Casey. He said—” She broke off and looked at Liv furiously. “And now she’s gone, and I can’t find her. He’ll never make a deal with me again.”

Liv’s stomach fell. Had she made a mistake? “She might come back—Madam Sofia said—”

“Nobody comes back once they take them,” Harley interrupted. She looked utterly defeated.

“I’m—I’m sorry,” Liv whispered.

Harley wouldn’t look at her, and after the silence between them became too awful to bear, Liv snatched up her shirt and left. She couldn’t stop shaking, even after she climbed into Casey’s bed and buried her head beneath the covers.

* * *

Things began to change immediately. Harley was reprimanded by the headmistress for wearing boots to class. The paperwork that Harley said she had filed to move Liv from Sheffield to Castle turned out to be forged, and Liv had to move back to Sheffield. The other girls in Castle Hall began to be called in to teacher meetings to discuss their many absences.

Halloween came and went in a gust of wind and rain, stripping the last remaining leaves off the trees. Every time Liv walked by the oak tree where she had made her promises to Harley, she felt someone watching her, but it was only the blackbird that seemed to have made its home there. Once she thought she saw a tall, thin man in the shadows of the tree, but as soon as she noticed him the air itself seemed to shift, as if someone were pulling a shade closed.

Harley’s friends began to drift apart, too, turning inward and barely eating at meals. Rumors went around that they had been doing some serious drugs, and now their supply had been cut off and they were going through withdrawal. And everyone whispered the shocking news about Harley: that her father wasn’t some fabulously rich guy; that he had been the school janitor; that she might have to leave at the end of the semester because she had no money for tuition.

Liv felt bruised inside, as if she had lost something, not saved the lives of the other girls. For weeks, she went through the motions of school and homework in a daze, half awake, half still caught in that world she had visited three times. At night she dreamed of the glittering gold trees, the throbbing music and Harley.

All through November, Harley faded. She had been vivid before, unbreakable, and now she was more ghostly every day. Her skin, her eyes, her hair—pale, dull, limp. Liv realized that she might have broken the curse, but she had also broken Harley.

The day that Harley didn’t show up for breakfast, none of the students noticed at first. It wasn’t until lunch, when Liv heard others whispering about how nobody had seen Harley since the night before, that Liv began to wonder if something had happened. She walked across the quad toward Castle Hall, her feet crunching over the blades of browned grass. She passed the oak tree and saw that the blackbird was gone.

Inside Castle, the dorm was quiet and empty. Everyone was supposed to be in class, and Liv knew she would be reprimanded for skipping, but she was drawn up the stairs to Harley’s room just as she had been drawn to Harley from the beginning. Harley’s door was closed, and when Liv knocked, there was no answer. She put her hand on the doorknob, and it turned easily.

There was a creak behind her.

Liv spun around, an excuse on her lips, but the sight of the girl across the hall stopped her. She looked like Harley, but younger. Her face was gaunt, as if she had been living on nothing but air for much too long, and her eyes were too bright. “Who are you?” Liv asked, afraid that she already knew.

“I’m Casey,” Harley’s sister said. Her voice sounded just like Harley’s.

Liv’s skin crawled. “Where’s Harley?”

“She traded herself for me,” Casey said. There was a haunted flatness to her speech, as if she were a doll that had just come awkwardly to life.

Everything inside Liv went cold. She opened Harley’s door and barged into her room. It was empty. The bed was rumpled, and a pile of dirty clothes lay on the floor by the dresser. Liv ran to the bed and pushed it, but it wouldn’t move. She knelt down to look beneath it, and all she saw was dust.

Casey came into Harley’s room and went to the dresser, where she began to look through the drawers. She pulled out her sister’s shirts one by one, holding them up and then tossing them onto the laundry pile.

“What are you doing?” Liv asked.

“Looking for something to wear,” Casey replied in her odd, emotionless voice. “Harley always has the best stuff.”

Liv stared at her in shock. She had wanted Casey to come back, but she hadn’t expected she would be like this. Casey might be standing in her sister’s room, but she wasn’t all there.

Casey found a shirt she liked and laid it on top of the dresser, then took off the one she was wearing. The bones of her spine jutted out like teeth beneath her skin. In the mirror, Liv glimpsed a tattoo of a blackbird on Casey’s chest before she pulled on her sister’s shirt. She turned to face Liv, crossing her arms, and Liv noticed the ring Casey was wearing. It was a black stone set in a gold band.

“My sister told me about you,” Casey said.

Liv swallowed the rising panic inside her and met Casey’s feverish gaze. “Where is she?” Liv demanded.

“Someplace a lot more fun than this.” A cold grin crossed Casey’s face, and for one second she came alive—potent, forceful, just like Harley. An instant later she shriveled, once again more specter than girl. “We’re going there tonight,” Casey said to Liv. “You wanna come? Harley might be there.”

* * * * *