Undead Girl Gang(18)

I don’t think before I blurt out, “I can’t. It’s Riley’s.”

“If my parents find it,” he says patiently, “they’ll throw it out again. I can’t hide it forever. Riley would want you to have it.”

I don’t know if that’s true. Riley wouldn’t want to know that she had been parted from her necklace. She showered in it. She slept in it. She would have wanted to be buried in it. But I’m touched that Xander saved it for me. That he thought of me when he definitely didn’t have to.

He takes my silence as consent and unclasps the necklace. I start to panic as his fingers brush my hair away from the collar of my jacket. He flourishes the chain around my neck. I can feel his breath slipping over the tip of my ear. Despite the warmth of his exhale, my spine breaks out in almost painful shivers.

The rose quartz settles above my cleavage. It looks smaller against my chest than it did on Riley.

“There,” he whispers, one more puff of air against my skin. “It needed a good witch to keep it safe.”





SEVEN



CREEK WATER MAKES my socks squish. I expected my boots to be more waterproof, but as I balanced on a wide rock, one arm of the Cross Creek flooded between my shoelaces and pushed past the leather tongues, drenching my feet. Shock almost made me lose hold of the mason jar I’d brought down to the shore. I can hear it sloshing inside my backpack, and I pray to the universe that none of the water spills onto the red grimoire. Or drowns the moths. Or washes the spit off the toothbrush.

I’m really wishing that the spell didn’t call for “steel from the blade that felled him.” Water could really fuck this thing to hell. Plus, now my clothes smell like creek.

I left my car at home. I couldn’t risk the roar of the old engine waking up my parents. After days of planning and gathering up the ingredients, something as stupid as a long walk won’t stand in my way. The streets of Cross Creek are empty. The waning gibbous moon turns everything I walk past a shimmering silver-white.

The cemetery gate is locked. Thankfully, Riley and I snuck out here for Samhain last year, so I easily find the short kissing gate hidden behind a willow tree. For a small town, Cross Creek has a lot of dead people. The cemetery lawn rises and falls in hills that don’t feel like much in a car but have me sweating under my jacket by the time I make it to Riley’s plot on the left side of the lawn. The horizon dips downhill, another couple hundred headstones standing between me and the back gate.

There is no tombstone for Riley yet. The dirt is slightly hilled and stark brown against the grass that surrounds it. It looks exactly the way fresh graves look in the movies, poised to have an undead hand shoot up through the soil.

Oh God. I hope her hand doesn’t shoot up through the soil.

Skin close to steaming, I slide off my jacket and fold it neatly to the side. I carefully pick up and set aside a giant bouquet of wilted lilies left behind from the funeral, accidentally snapping off a brittle petal when I place my backpack on the ground beside them. I have plenty of time to set up, so I take a second of silence. The stars wink at me as I hold on to the rose quartz pendant at my neck.

“Okay, Ry,” I whisper into the ether, “get ready to come home. We really need you here.”

The wind slides through my hair, lifting wild strands like black flags. It feels like a sign to get started.

With the grimoire propped open to the page with the Lazarus spell, I start unpacking my bag. Curved honeysuckle branches unfurl in my hand and I set them in a circle on top of the grave dirt. I pour salt inside the circle from the big Morton’s container we keep at Yarrow House. Salt is integral to most spells. Four brand-new beeswax candles—lights from a local hive—are planted at the north, south, east, and west corners of the branches. I empty the sandwich bags of Riley-ness at the north quadrant of the circle—a mass of hair and lip gloss and a toothbrush and an old piece of gum, lumped together like the nastiest bird’s nest. A pair of flip-flops—Izzy’s, since her feet are smaller than mine—rest at the south quadrant. Shoes to guide a rearward journey. The full-moon wildflowers, spiderwebs, the iron rose hematite. A handful of pebbles, the pillowcase I cried on when I found out about Riley’s death, a small mirror snapped off a foundation compact facedown in the dirt.

The big jar that normally holds change in the living room now contains moths beating their dusty wings against the glass. Nora truly earned her Pua doll. The moths are huge and have been successfully kept alive for days. I set them down carefully next to the creek water.

The sound of my phone’s alarm makes me jump.

Midnight. The witching hour.

I light the candles, calling down the four corners as I walk the circle. “I light this flame in the name of the North, grant me the blessings of the Earth. I light this flame in the name of the East, grant me the blessings of the Air . . .”

This I know. This is day-one stuff. Calling the corners, thanking the Goddess for her time, making my intentions clear. It’s the same whether casting a spell for luck on a math test or resurrecting the dead.

I take out the velvet bag that, a couple of days ago, held Toby’s mourning charm. Now it’s full of herbs I need for the gardening portion of tonight. I sprinkle them inside the circle, reciting a chant I found in one of the books at Yarrow. “Let the soil be loosened, let the roots spring free, deliver what’s underground unto me.”