“No!” I try to rush forward to get to Aniyah, but Xander meets me halfway, his hands wrapping around my forearms. His lips curl into his most disarming smile, the one that makes his eyes sparkle like sapphires. But that sparkle means nothing. It’s just glitter with no substance.
“Mila,” he repeats. He pushes my hair out of my face so hard that I can feel strands breaking. “Riley told me everything. She told me it was an accident. I’m not mad. You’ll fix it. I’ll help you fix it. I know you didn’t mean to bring them back. You didn’t know what you were doing. I told you that I’m not mad about”—his eyes flick down to his chest, but he looks away quickly, his jaw tense—“any of it. I saw that you took June’s lip gloss out of Riley’s room that night I gave you the necklace. I’m not mad about that either. You didn’t know it was special. Just like Riley didn’t know not to take my shoe. I should have told you sooner what the lip gloss meant to me. And what you mean to me. You wouldn’t have had to do this on your own. I should have been there to help.”
The lip gloss. I can only faintly picture it now. Too fancy to be purchased in Cross Creek. The plastic melted down to a goo before the grave swallowed it.
It was June’s. And if Dayton had ever borrowed it, it would have her DNA, too.
Stomach acid splashes all the way up to my front teeth. I yank my arms back.
“You can’t help me,” I say. “You killed June and Dayton.”
“That’s what you’re mad about?” He goggles at me and spreads his arms wide. “Jesus Christ, Mila. Look at me!”
The floorboards squeak. Xander turns to see June and Dayton leaning over Aniyah, trying to help her to her feet.
“Get away from her,” he warns, taking a threatening step. I see something red glinting in his pocket. The handle of the ceremonial dagger, bobbing. It isn’t sharp enough to tear through the deep fleece pockets, but with enough force behind it, it could draw blood. I wonder if he meant to use it against Aniyah. Was he going to bother staging her death as another suicide?
Riley jumps in his way, putting her hands up to stop him but not actually touching him. “Let them leave,” she pleads. “Just let them go. You don’t need them.”
“Shut up, Riley,” he sneers, maneuvering around her. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You spent a week living with them!”
She circles around him again, her voice breaking. “You were friends with them for years!”
Dayton holds her hands out to help Aniyah get to her knees.
“I said leave her there!” Xander snarls. I’ve never noticed the vein in his temple, how it leaps up and down when he talks. There’s another one pulsating in his neck. He reaches for the closest taper and throws it into the kitchen. It misses the girls but lands among the shattered glass. The essential oil erupts into flames, a perfect line of fire that slices across the kitchen and licks at the doorframe.
Of course. He’s too smart to not have booby-trapped the exit. He meant for Aniyah to die here.
And now we all could die here.
“Xander!” Riley says, wrapping her arms around her stomach. It’s hard to tell since she can’t actually turn colors, but she seems queasy. “What are you doing?”
What’s left of the cabinets in the kitchen crackles and pops as the fire starts to eat up the walls. Herb brushes and twig pentagrams that I strung together hiss before they catch fire and fall to the floor. Dayton, June, and Aniyah rush away from the flames, knocking over some of the empty Gatorade bottles in their wake.
“Mila,” Xander says evenly, as though he can’t taste the greasy smoke. “You need to get out of here. Now.”
“Where am I supposed to go?” I yell. “You just lit the motherfucking kitchen on fire!”
“And you’re trapped here, too!” Dayton says, putting herself between me and Xander. She thrusts her hands on her hips. “Do you hate us that much?”
He examines her face, almost surprised that she’s there. “I don’t hate you. You don’t exist to me anymore.”
Sweat builds in my palms and pools in the small of my back. For now the heat is bearable, making Yarrow pleasantly warm, for once. But it won’t take long for the living room to catch. This whole place is a stack of kindling. Smoke is starting to gather against the swollen ceiling like slimy brown ghosts. It’s being sucked upstairs to the window that Riley pulled the boards off of.
The window that is now the only way out.
“I should have done it sooner. I shouldn’t have wasted so much time. There would have been less cleanup before. Before the scholarship and the attention. Before we had friends to lose,” he says, shaking his head. He runs his fingers through his hair, making his mushrooms flex. “It was never going to stop. All they did was cause pain. Undermining and cutting everyone down. Hurting so many people.” He looks over at Riley, not seeming to care that her skull is glistening in the candlelight and her white eyes are leaking tears onto her gray skin. “I had to stop them. It was killing you, Ry.”
She shakes her head, a hand coming up to cover her mouth. “No. Oh God, please, no.”
Aniyah takes a step back, toward the kitchen fire. I can see my own need to run reflected behind her glasses. I catch her eye, make her look at me for long enough to see how very serious I am about getting her out of here alive. I jerk my head toward the stairs. Her mouth slants up on one side to say, Are you fucking serious? I widen my eyes—because, yes, this is the most serious I have ever been in my life—until she takes a breath and starts to inch away.
“Every time you thought it was going to get better, it started all over again,” Xander says to Riley. “The ballet lessons you couldn’t take and the parties you weren’t invited to. Even when your name was on the shortlist for the Rausch Scholarship, Dayton started telling people that the committee wouldn’t vote for you because they’d be too scared of what you’d pick as the theme. She said maybe you’d choose witchcraft or dead bodies.”
“I heard Dan Calalang say it first!” Dayton protests.
“Then maybe he needs to be next!” Xander snaps. The vein in his neck throbs, a balloon close to bursting. He stares daggers at Dayton, and when he speaks again, his voice quivers. “We have a family business here. We provide a service that everyone needs. We’re supposed to live here forever. I’m supposed to take over the business from my dad. But how can we survive living across the street from people like you? Trying to live our lives when people like you will always whisper about us in the grocery store and keep us out of the PTA and make sure that everywhere we go, people know that we’re freaks. Because no one was ever going to stop you. They didn’t stop you when you had Riley kicked out of ballet. They didn’t stop you from having your parents change my Rausch gala theme from science to luau.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I see Aniyah freeze in fear, her foot about to reach the first stair.
June must see her, too, because she folds her arms over her chest and gives a theatrical scoff, flipping her hair so hard that it makes her neck bulge on one side.