She jerks away from me, turning back into a corpse. “Then you screwed up! You’ve screwed up before!”
“I didn’t screw up so bad that I made him murder June and Dayton! I guess you can thank your parents for that.”
“Fuck you!” she spits. “He’s my brother, Mila! He’s the first friend I ever had. I know him better than you ever could. He wouldn’t do something like this. You’re wrong. You think just because you did one big spell that you’re good at this, but you’re not. Everything you’ve touched has gone to shit! Look at what you did to me!” She holds her arms out, showcasing her broken bones and bloated skin. “You think this makes you a good witch? You should have left me in the fucking ground. You should have left all of us alone. Don’t ruin Xander, too.”
Her chest shudders and heaves. She looks so pitiful, and I hate her for it. She’s chosen to protect her brother rather than be on my team. She’s leaving me alone, again. Only this time it’s on purpose.
“The coven was right,” I say softly. “You’re an abomination. My best friend—my real best friend—wouldn’t protect a murderer. So whoever you are—whatever you are—you can go straight to hell. Because you aren’t the Riley Greenway I wanted to bring back.”
I leave her crying in front of the house she’s not welcome in anymore, the gash in her forehead spreading wider and wider the farther away I get.
* * *
I don’t sleep.
Fully dressed and with a belly full of Pepto-Bismol to keep the panic-pukes to a minimum, I sit on the edge of my bed, looking for the number for the police department. But even after I’ve found it, I keep scrolling. Googling. Checking other sources. I wind around the internet in a Fibonacci spiral until my mind quiets to a cool gray fog. Only then can I call the police department with an anonymous tip that Alexander Greenway was seen in Aldridge Park the night of the Fairmont Academy double suicide. I give the skeptical voice on the other end of the line Xander’s license plate number and his exact height and weight.
I let my family see me while they eat breakfast and feed them lies about studying at Starbucks as my excuse to leave. I don’t care if any of them believe me. Izzy asks for a Frappuccino she knows that I won’t bring back.
Denim jacket on. Boots laced. Back in the car.
I don’t know where to look for June and Dayton, so I start in the woods again. The trees are less oppressive in the daylight. I find scars in the bark of a trunk hit by a gunshot blast, but there’s no blood or brains around it. The house is empty. The white fabric that bound Caleb’s arms is in a heap on top of the useless sigils. Even Binx is nowhere to be seen. He must have slunk out during the invasion last night. The red grimoire is missing.
I drive around town, parking at random and walking into places I know that June and Dayton used to frequent. Starbucks. A fancy sandwich restaurant. Overpriced clothing stores where the employees smirk at me for even daring to walk through the doors.
I get hungry. I buy a fancy sandwich. It tastes like sawdust. Everywhere I turn, I’m scared that Xander will pop out or that the coven will find me or that June’s and Dayton’s bodies will be lifeless by the time I get to them. Have the cops already been to the Greenway Funeral Home? Has Toby’s coven found June and Dayton? Is Caleb still pouring out non-murderous secrets?
Caleb.
Caleb isn’t the murderer. He is an asshole and apparently not above academic fraud, but he’s not a murderer. Fuck. I owe him an apology. Or a charm bag? He was so thrilled to see June last night, maybe he’ll know where she is.
I pull out my phone and navigate to Caleb’s Facebook. He has no updates today. I send him a message.
ME: Are they with you?
I’m pretty sure that having spent an evening together with a group of zombies, I don’t have to clarify who “they” are.
My phone beeps as Caleb’s response comes through.
CALEB: At my house. Come by whenever. 824 Frentz Street.
Even as I’m entering the address into my maps app, I know this could be a trap. Caleb and Xander could have worked together. Weren’t they both in honor society? They could be waiting to slip a noose around my neck as easily as they did to June and Dayton. But I have to take the chance—I owe June and Dayton that much. I’m the one who took them out of the ground.
Frentz Street isn’t as fancy as I would have expected. The houses are mostly one-story and squished sort of close to one another. Caleb’s is a white house with a pointed roof and a blue door. It might actually be a dollhouse that wished to be a real house. I park across the street in case I need to make a run for it.
As I raise my hand to ring the doorbell, a shudder runs through me. The girls are here.
The blue door swings open, revealing a smiling Dayton. The bruising on her neck has been covered by a thick pink pashmina that I’ve seen Ms. Chu wear to school before. The color almost offsets the marbling of her corpse skin.
“Oh, thank God!” she coos. Her face turns pinker the second her fingers wrap around my wrist, pulling me inside. The veins on her face pop right back into place when she lets me go to lock the door. My magic is only working in defibrillator blasts now. “We were so worried that those old ladies found you last night. They were driving in laps around town, looking for all of us. It was so scary. Luckily, Caleb was able to free himself from the basement before they searched the house. He found me and June walking over the bridge and brought us back here. His parents are out of town for the weekend, so we have the whole place to ourselves. I slept in the principal’s bed last night! I never in a million years thought I’d say that!”
“How do you know you’re safe here?” I ask.
“One, we’re already dead. And two, we asked. Truth spell, remember? We asked all kinds of questions about us being murdered, and he doesn’t know anything.”
She leads me through the narrow hallways of the house. There are mass-produced paintings of flowers and pictures of babies in buckets on the wall. In the living room, there’s a large canvas printed with a picture of Ms. Chu and her husband on their wedding day. Ms. Chu is in a white blazer with a matching skirt. Caleb is in none of the pictures.
“Go ahead and make yourself comfortable,” Dayton says, gesturing to the least comfortable-looking couch I’ve ever seen. Its tufted back seems to be glaring at me. She skitters into the kitchen, throwing open a glass door and calling into the backyard, “Guys! Mila’s here!”
I can’t help but imagine how normal this would be if everyone involved were alive. June and Caleb walking in from outside, their hands nervously entwined. Dayton bustling around, passing out sodas and bottled water. Just four normal teenagers taking advantage of an empty house. Except that two of us have broken necks. Only one of June’s eyes has color, the other wiped clean. I try not to stare at the white one, even as it narrows at me.
“Riley isn’t with you?” she asks, sitting daintily in a gray wingback chair like it’s her zombie throne. She also has a scarf looped around her neck. Hers is blue and tied tightly enough that her neck doesn’t wobble.
I take a long drink of water from the bottle Dayton handed me. The cold floods down my throat, pricking at my spine. “No. I need to talk to you guys about that. Last night, Riley said that she got some of her memories back. Have either of you recovered what happened to you the night you died?”
“I don’t remember personally,” June says slowly. She aims half a smile at Caleb, who is sitting in the stiff wooden chair beside her. “Caleb helped fill in some of the details, though. I was here that night.”
I must look as puzzled as I feel, because Caleb sets his soda between his knees and steeples his fingers. “June and I are dating. I mean, we were before she . . .”