Page 55 of If Anything Happens To Me

And the boy I loved was evil.

I would never be the same again.

I stepped out of the bathroom. I had to stop thinking about Matt. Stop worrying about how I could have read him so wrong.

I had to look around, plan a way to escape.

The light from sconces on the wall was very dim, but I could make out a small card table, the splintered wooden rafters, the old rusty nails, the crumbling chimney bricks, and all the dead birds hanging from the ceiling that Iris had described to me.

There were a couple of windows, so opaque from salt spray I could hardly see out. It was starting to get dark. I pressed my forehead against a windowpane. Streetlights and harbor lights, four stories below, glowed through the murky glass. Shouldn’t Minerva have brought help by now?

Then it hit me: She had led us here, Iris and me. What if Minerva was working with Fitch and Matt? She had the gene—it was to her advantage for her cousin to keep going with his research, to find a cure. I felt despair, to think I might have been so wrong—not only about Matt, but about Minerva, too.

Then I felt a jolt of hope. If “the boy”—Fitch or Matt or even Chris—hadn’t grabbed Iris, could she have run away? But if that was the case, why hadn’t she sent someone to save us? Was she still scared to call the police? My mind was spinning in circles, an out of control merry-go-round.

I gazed at that filthy window, at the lights shining up from the street, and thought of life going on down there. All the cars, all the people out to enjoy the June night. And how no one passing by had any idea that Hayley and I were being held prisoner in the attic of the Miramar Hotel.

Iris had spoken of a brick chimney, and there it was, right in the middle of the attic. It must have served fireplaces on the lower floors, but all it did up here was block us from seeing directly across the space—there were no hearths to light, to warm the vast attic. As I rounded the brick column, there—leaning against the attic’s far wall—were the panels of the three sibyls: the same sisters depicted on the ghost sign down by the harbor.

I stopped and stared.

“The reason we’re here,” Hayley said, following my gaze.

“You know about the Sibylline sisters?” I asked.

“Yes, two of the three died of the family disease—the ones who had the same blood type as Iris and me. Fitch thinks genetics holds the key to finding a cure. To healing his sister,” Hayley said. She gestured toward the person asleep on the canopied bed across the room.

I’d known it had to be her. I walked over to the bed and stared down at Abigail Martin. I hadn’t seen her in a while, since she’d stopped going to school. Fast asleep, she was wearing a long white nightgown, like the dresses worn by the girls in the panels. Her skin looked dry and pasty, as if she had a fever. I felt her forehead with the palm of my hand; it was hot. She didn’t wake up at my touch. Standing beside her, I saw thin wires attached to the bed frame.

“What are those wires for?” I asked Hayley.

“He has a machine that monitors her sleep,” Hayley said. “It tells him when there are changes, and it’s supposed to jolt her awake. That doesn’t always work. When it doesn’t, he comes running.”

“Why?” I asked, not getting it.

“Because she dies in her sleep, sometimes,” Hayley said.

That’s what Iris had told me, but I still couldn’t believe I had heard right.

“She stops breathing,” Hayley says.

“And she literallydies?” I asked.

Hayley nodded. “It’s like sleep kills her,” she said. “If Fitch wasn’t paying attention, she might not be able to wake up. When she gets like that, I’ve yelled, shaken her, but she just lies there, not breathing.”

“But she eventually does breathe, obviously,” I said, gesturing at the sleeping Abigail.

“So far,” Hayley said. “The episodes don’t happen every night, but when they do, it’s so scary. I worry about her so much.”

“Is that the condition that Fitch is trying to cure?” I asked.

Hayley nodded.

“But what are we doing here? What do her ‘episodes’ have to do with us? With you and Iris? With Eloise?” I asked.

Hayley glanced up surreptitiously at the ceiling, where earlier she had indicated that there were cameras. Then she gently took my arm and led me back toward the corner, next to one of the windows. We stood there, our backs to the room.

“We have to be careful,” Hayley said. “You know he has cameras on us.”

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