For the first time since he was six, Rabbit was purposely ignoring his sister. They still spent plenty of time together, exchanged funny stories about the stupid s**t they'd overheard throughout the day, and ate dinner side by side, but he didn't linger, always finding something else to do right as her eyes got that curious glint that meant she was poised to ask questions about the time he'd disappeared. He kept telling himself that he would know when he was ready to talk about that morning, but as the days passed he began to realize that he would never do so on his own, no matter how noble his intentions. Luckily—or unluckily, depending on which side of the equation you were on—the choice to share was taken out of his hands by a complete p***k.

Two weeks after he'd opened their apartment door into another world, Rabbit emerged from his room to find the flyer he'd picked up on that fateful day spread flat on the kitchen counter. Liv sat not five feet away eating her cereal, in the perfect position to witness his reaction, which was nothing short of marvelous if you were into watching people mentally s**t themselves. He had always been a pretty crappy liar, and the way he froze up and grasped for an innocuous opening to the conversation made it clear he had something to hide.

"I heard people talking about these," Liv said, gesturing at the wrinkled sheet with her spoon. "I wrote them off as something a couple of college kids threw together as a prank, but I don't think Rider-Waite teaches heebie jeebies. You can feel that, right? When I touch it, it's like there's something watching."

"Don't touch it then," Rabbit muttered, stifling his own shuddering reaction to the piece of paper as he folded it and stuffed it into his pocket. "I thought I hid this. Where'd you even get it?"

"p***k brought it to me."

At the sound of his name, the cat raised his head from where he napped on the couch and prrped a question. Barely awake or not, Rabbit thought the stupid b*****d looked pretty damn pleased with himself. As was his custom, he briefly gave p***k the finger.

"Yeah, okay. I can feel it too. It's why I brought it home. That and what it said. That day was..." He sighed. "I know I've been avoiding talking about it. I just... believe me when I say that heebie jeebies flyer is low on the list of weird s**t I ran into."

"You disappeared. I'm not exactly the heaviest sleeper and when I woke up, you were completely gone."

"You disappeared," he countered. "I know that's not what happened now, but at the time... I woke up and you and p***k were the ones who weren't here. So I left."

"Where did you go?"

Rabbit sighed, squeezing the bread a little too hard as he untwisted its bendy tie and pulled out his breakfast.

"I was looking for you, but I found a woman by herself. Brie. And then something started calling us?" He took his dry bread over to the couch, taking a seat on the middle cushion as he ripped the first slice in two and shoved half into his mouth. p***k, temporarily displaced, circled two or three times before flopping beside Rabbit. Olivia left her empty bowl in the sink and followed, rolling her chair to a stop directly in front of him.

"Something? Not someone?"

"I never met anyone there who could have sounded like that. I mean, the bird maybe, but I don't know how he would have pulled off the marshmallow throat—"

"Rabbit." She waited until he turned away from the door and looked back at her, barely meeting her gaze. "You can tell me anything, you know."

There was a long moment of silence before he laughed, quietly at first but soon going full hyena. "I promise I wasn't high, if that's what you're worried about. I am telling you, it's just all really, really weird. That's why I've been stalling in the first place."

She nodded, leaning back and visibly relaxing. "All right. Something called you. Then what?"

"You sound like a therapist." His sister smirked and lightly slapped at his leg. "After it called us, it said 'come and see.' So, we did."

"Brie heard it too?"

"Yeah. We saw some more weird s**t and then we ended up somewhere else. In a blink." He snapped his fingers. "Like a dream."

It was only after he had already unconsciously omitted both the severed foot and the vision detailing its removal that he realized what he had done. Without Heliodora's presence, the whole thing might have been some odd dream caused by a hunk of bad cheese. But implying he'd seen a missing girl who was now suddenly thousands of years old was a whole new level of Twilight Zone. Rabbit chewed and swallowed the other half of his first slice of bread and continued the story... minus one Heliodora Winters.

"The clearing had a deer in it. And a bird. But the deer had, like, six green eyes and the bird had the body of a dog. They could talk. The deer had a fight with one of the guys there, a really weird fight with green fire. And then the bird said we could go. That he would send us back. And he did. I ended up on Marble Street with a bunch of flyers."

Now it was Olivia's turn to be silent. She looked at him. She looked at p***k. She looked at the door.

"This wasn't what I expected. You were acting all guilty, so I thought you'd done something..."

"Not on purpose. It wasn't a dream. I wasn't the only one there, I swear."

"I know. Do you think you could talk to someone else you saw? Compare notes?"

"I did. Autumn, one of the stylists from work. She's all happy about it though, and I kind of never want to see that place again." He still had too many questions to completely dismiss the idea of speaking to Pax or Smol again, but the rest of that s**t could stay right where it was. He curled his legs in closer to his chest, a compact ball of angles. "She took a deer selfie."

"A deer selfie?"

Shaking his head, Rabbit leaned over and grabbed his sister's phone from the end table, tapping in her password and navigating to Autumn's Instagram.

"A deer selfie." He held out the phone, grinning around his second piece of bread as he waited for her reaction.