her and grabbed her by the sleeve of her sweatshirt. I spun her around to face me, and instantly wished I hadn’t.
The last few days had robbed Isabel of all color. Her chapped, ash-gray lips were set in a grimace. Pencil-thick streaks of white ripped through her dark hair. The flesh around her cheeks and jaws stuck more closely to the bone. Her eyes, still raven-black, were huge, slick, and shimmering. Those eyes were once one of Isabel’s impenetrable defenses—hard like bricks. Not anymore. Not now. Now they were fathomless—twin pools of guilt and resignation.
“Isabel,” I croaked, “what did you do?”
“I . . . I didn’t . . . ” She lowered her head so that most of her face was obscured by her hood. “I’m sorry.”
Until then, I’d never believed someone’s heart could actually sink, but that’s what mine did. It loosened a little, grew sore and heavy, and then dropped.
“My daughter claims you have some sense, Mr. Knight, though I’ve yet to see you exercise it.”
Dr. Ford stood in his doorway. He, like my dad, had not fully come together after the night before. He was dressed again in a brown suit, though his jacket was off, and the top two buttons of his shirt were undone. Locks of graying hair fell across his forehead and formed tight curls.
My fingers went slack, and Isabel tore herself away from me.
“That’s better,” Dr. Ford said, stepping back from the threshold and gesturing to his entryway.
I glanced over at Isabel. Her body was tense and trembling; she was a girl set to boil.
“Your daughter is wrong,” I said, once again entering the house at the end of Calle Sol. I had no sense. It occurred to me I might end up dead and washed up on the beach, but I didn’t care. I followed Dr. Ford as he veered left into the dining room; Isabel trailed a few steps behind, her hands buried in the depths of the front pocket of her sweatshirt.
Dr. Ford took a seat and drummed the pads of his fingers against the top of the dining room table. The sound it made was like rain on a rooftop.
“I’m assuming you’re here because you saw something on the news this morning that confused you,” he said. “From what your father tells me, you’re an impetuous and also quite impressionable young man who makes poor choices and fails to listen to reason.” He glanced over at his daughter and then back to me. “Just because a couple of girls have an allergic reaction doesn’t mean . . . ”
Isabel cut off her father by slamming her fist down on the table. Both Dr. Ford and I watched the small object she’d been holding in her hand skitter and spin across the wood. Within seconds, it stopped, and that’s when I recognized the head of a wolf, rough hewn from pewter.
“Enough,” Isabel growled. “Where is the girl?”
“You know I don’t know,” Dr. Ford scoffed.
“I said enough!” Isabel’s voice rose into a near-feral screech. “Where is Celia? Is she dead like the others?”
Dr. Ford’s gaze was directed at the table, not to the pewter charm that lay inches from his face, but to the swirling wood grain he was tracing with his pointer finger.
“It was you?” I whispered. “What did you do to them?”
Dr. Ford didn’t look up. Instead, he made a sound, an exhale, like a huff, as if this entire conversation wasn’t worth his time.
It was then that everything snapped together: Isabel was sick and getting sicker. She’d told me her dad was trying to help her. Mara Lopez was right. Marisol and Sara didn’t drown. And even though Isabel could’ve killed them, she didn’t. The girls were dumped in the ocean after having been taken and poisoned and studied by someone whose life revolved around toxic plants and their effects on the human body.
“You experimented on them?”
I started toward the doctor, and he jumped to his feet. But before I could reach him, Isabel launched herself across the top of the table and landed between us. One of her hands flew up, stopping inches away from her father’s face. His eyes went wide, and he halted, tipping back slightly on his heels. The fingertips of Isabel’s other hand were pressed against my chest. Only a thin cotton layer separated her poison skin from mine.
My vision swirled. I slammed my eyes shut, and when I opened them a second later I saw that Isabel had taken her hand away