It had to be the hardest thing, even if he’d never known it himself – to accept that the ones you loved would find their own way home.

She had seen it done. Wherever they glittered in the afterlife – flying among the high rafters of heaven, swimming with her mother in an undersea cave – she hoped the tigers had known it, and roared.

But this dagger – this was her first. Her favorite. The same one that had sliced off the boy’s toe on the beach and sent it rolling through the sand.

She had a weird, fleeting thought that she wanted to eat her sister, like a sorceress in a storybook – gobble her down into her belly, keep her safe.