The color returned to her face, Bellflower lets out a final laugh, sharp as dog rose thorns. “See you around, Lucy,” she says, and in a flash, she’s joined the other girls, the three of them skipping together to a cream-colored Volkswagen bus parked across the street.

Tittering, they climb inside, and I already know where they’re going. Headed up the 101. Headed back to him.

I dodge toward them, but the crowd is too thick, the restless bodies pushing me back a step, just enough that I can’t reach the girls before they start up the creaking engine.

I rasp out a scream and nearly dash out into traffic, when a hand suddenly catches my arm and pulls me back. Bee, standing at my side. Jane’s with her too, and together, we watch the girls in the van vanish from the Haight.

“Do you know them?” I ask Jane, testing her.

She hesitates. “Yes,” she says finally, as though she hardly wants to admit it to herself.

Bee helps me back to the car, my muscles like sludge, nothing in me bouncing back the way it should. I’m too hungry, too tired. But I know what we need to do, and with one look at Bee, she knows too.

The Buick roars to life, and we’re off, crisscrossing through traffic, following them. Bee’s behind the wheel, Jane up front next to her, me curled in the back seat, almost too exhausted to move.

“You shouldn’t have come back for me,” Jane keeps repeating, her voice splitting apart, her entire body shaking.

Bee grips the steering wheel tighter. “Please stop saying that,” she whispers, but I’m starting to wonder if that’s what Jane really wanted. To be left alone.

It’s long past rush hour, but traffic’s thick tonight, and we’ve already lost the pale Volkswagen on the highway. It doesn’t matter. We just keep going, across the Golden Gate Bridge, the ocean obscure in the evening mist.

It takes less than an hour to get there. It might as well be an eternity. Up ahead of us in the dark, they could have already broken the urn. They could have done anything.

“Those girls are toying with you.” Jane’s wheezing now. “We should just disappear. Forget about them.”

I grit my teeth, my cheek pressed against the crumbling leather seats. “It’s not that simple,” I say.

On a narrow back road, we take a sharp corner, and the house materializes before us.

Dahlia Hall.

I’m expecting another party, another serpentine line of cars twisting down the driveway. Only, there’s no one here. No music seeping through the glass walls, no voices either, everything quieter than a graveyard at dawn. If we hadn’t been here just last night, I would think this whole place had been abandoned for months.