And that voice wasn’t my father’s.

Gears turning, I decided to hide the notebook back in the closet, then headed downstairs. My sister was at the kitchen counter quietly eating her cereal.

Slipping in beside her, I took the coffee Shanti held out with a smile. Not my favorite source of caffeine, but it’d do in the morning.

“Good morning.” I tugged on one of Pari’s pigtails.

Her head stayed down.

When I looked at Shanti, she gave me a tight smile, then prepared another cup of coffee. Black, two sugars. My father’s preference. When she left to deliver it, I took the chance to send a couple of texts to my friend Thien. We’d met at university, where I was kicking around doing a half-hearted attempt at an arts degree, and he wasn’t doing much of anything—though he’d honed the skill of getting people what they wanted.

Today, I asked him for a favor, offering him three hundred bucks for his trouble.

Four, he messaged back. It’s goddamn raining.

Thien was a friend, but he was also mercenary as fuck. We got along great.

I didn’t try to speak to Pari until after we were in the car on the way to school. “You heard Dad last night, huh?”

A nod I caught out of the corner of my eye.

“He was drunk and you know he gets extra mean when he’s drunk.” Never would I leave my sister unprotected—even if that protection was by knowledge. “Stay out of his way when he gets like that.” He’d never laid a hand on me, but I was male. I didn’t know if he’d offer his daughter the same courtesy.

“After I move back out, you call me if he ever starts hurting either you or your mum.” Shanti had never given any indication that my father was physically violent, but Shanti also believed that a husband should be treated as a god.

Yeah, my father had definitely gotten what he wanted the second time around.

“How come he’s so mean and you’re so nice?”

The plaintive question had a laugh building in the back of my throat. Maybe my mother hadn’t been the only person who’d ever loved me. Stopping in front of the school, I thought about what to say that wouldn’t shatter her illusions. She had the right nickname, my kid sister. Pari, pronounced close to how the French pronounced “Paris,” had a fantastical meaning: fairy, sprite.

It suited her far better than her full name, Parineeti. And even my twisted soul couldn’t bear to dull the sweet magic that glowed inside her. For Pari, I’d wear another self, the self that was a good, caring brother. “Because I made a decision to never be like him.” True enough; she didn’t have to know I hadn’t wholly succeeded.

Paige’s terrified face flashed into my mind, bloodless, eyes stark. “You need help, Aarav. The rage you have inside you . . . it’s poisonous and it scares me.”

“Are you like your mum?” My sister’s high voice merged with the memory of Paige’s trembling one. “I want to be like my mum.”

I swallowed to wet a dry throat. “Yes, I’m like my mum.” Full of secrets and lies and a broken ability to love. “Go on. You don’t want to be late.”

I watched after her until she disappeared safely behind the school gates. Then I drove out, heading back to my mother’s grave through a misty rain. But I didn’t go along the main road—I turned off into a rough parking area in front of a sign advising that I was at the start of an open walking track. Beside it stood a large sign warning trampers about kauri dieback disease and stating the attendant rules.

Flipping up the hood of the sweatshirt I’d put on before I left the house, I got out into the cold, cane in hand.

The outside world ceased to exist within minutes, the forest closing its wet green arms around me. Moss crawled up the mass of tangled branches. Those branches created bushland that would shred me if I tried to blunder through. Above me hung the fronds of a huge tree fern dotted with beads of water.

Hard to believe I remained in the heart of the country’s biggest city.

The farther I walked, the bigger the trees, their canopies touching the bruised sky.

People got lost in this dark and cool landscape even with the signs dotted around. Then there were those who came to the “Waitaks” to bury their secrets. I’d been nineteen, twenty, when a visiting speaker at the university made the dry comment that more bodies were buried in the Waitākere Ranges than in most cemeteries.

I’d been far more intrigued by that comment than by the criminal investigation techniques she’d been describing as part of her open-to-all guest lecture. My ensuing questions had made her raise an eyebrow and joke that she might have to report me to the police for suspicious behavior.

I’d sent her a copy of Blood Sacrifice after it first came out.

My debut novel began with body parts found in a city forest.

16

I wondered if the cops were analyzing every word I’d ever written. What were the chances I’d randomly write about a mother killed by a serial predator who gets away with it in the end?

Could be I was just screwed up in the head because of my own mother’s disappearance, could be I was a psychopath—that’s what they’d say. I stopped, resting my back against the rough bark of a tree I couldn’t name. My leg pulsed with heat, and my lungs wheezed far more than they should. I’d have to tell Dr. Binchy about that, too.

It took me three more minutes to get going again . . . but I only had a short distance to go. There, hidden off the side of the track, stood a rugged quad bike.

“Thien, you resourceful bastard.”

Grunting, I used the cane for balance as I retrieved the key hidden in the ground exactly one foot from the back tire, under a small fallen branch.

Uninjured, I could’ve hiked to the site in under an hour, but with one leg currently out of commission, I’d have to break the rules and use the vehicle. It wouldn’t be easy going even on that; the trail was made for walkers, not quad bikes.