As I listened to her voice, I heard only genuine compassion. I saw it in her eyes, too. But Pamela didn’t. The hatred scorched through her.

Your fault. It’s your fault. You did this to her.

The nurse was fae—I was certain of that. Whether Pamela knew it or not, she could see though the mask and knew it as a mask, and it filled her not with fear but with a loathing I wouldn’t have thought possible for a girl her age. One that chilled me to my core.

“Come see your aunt,” my grandfather said.

His hands went around Pamela, and she squirmed, her hate liquefying into fear, making her protest and her father whisper, “Please, Pamela. For Mommy.”

He lifted her up, and I saw the figure in the bed, and I recoiled, a scream exploding in the corner of Pamela’s mind that was still mine, a scream that mirrored her own, the one screeching through her head as we both saw the figure.

It was the old woman from the hospital. So thin she seemed a skeleton wearing skin and a nightgown. Her eyes were covered with a thick bandage, but I knew what I’d see if that bandage was removed. Empty sockets.

Hair fanned out over the bed. Gray hair streaked with dark, and when I saw it, I saw another woman here, in the hospital. A woman rising from the murky water of a deep tub. A woman straitjacketed in a chair. A woman with bloodied bandages over her eyes and a mouth with no tongue . . .

The nurse squeezed Isolde’s bird-thin arm and the old woman’s chin jerked, as if she was waking.

“Daere is here to see you,” the nurse said. “With John and little Pamela.”

Isolde’s mouth opened, and she made a sound. A garbled sound, like speech but not, and from where Pamela hung, in her father’s arms, I could see into her mouth, the stump of her tongue—

Pamela shrieked, her scream joining the one echoing through my head. She fought, and I seemed to fight with her, clawing and scratching, then hitting the floor and scrambling up and running as fast as Pamela’s small legs would take us, that scream still resounding in her head, all but drowning out the cries of her parents behind her.

Pamela turned down one corridor after another, zigging and zagging as the footfalls behind her grew distant, her parents missing her turns. Finally, she threw open a closet and flew in, slamming the door behind her and huddling in the dark, knees drawn up, gasping for breath as she shook uncontrollably.

Footsteps passed but kept going. Then the door creaked open and the nurse stood there, her body shimmering with light, features morphing. Pamela shrunk into the shadows, but the nurse only smiled and bent to the girl’s level.