Undead Girl Gang(39)

“Traitor,” Riley whispers to the cat as he head-butts her knee.

Dayton turns the phone around so that the rest of us can see it. She has paused a video on Facebook. The image is grainy and dark, but I easily recognize my lab partner’s face. Caleb is frozen onscreen, his mouth open and his hair mussed under a bulky video game headset. He’s wearing a black T-shirt with a picture of a red-and-white umbrella on it. Dayton points one of her bitten nails at his neck. It’s hard to see since the video is so small on my phone screen, but I can just barely make out a silver chain peeking out of the collar of his shirt. On the end there’s a tiny charm, a heart-shaped lock.

“Oh my God,” June breathes. “Is that my monogram necklace on Caleb Treadwell?”

“How many Tiffany J necklaces do you think there are in Cross Creek?” Dayton asks.

“Isn’t that a serial killer thing?” I ask, winding the rubber band around my wrist as my heart speeds up. “Keeping a trophy from the victim?”

Caleb has never been secretive about how much he wants the Rausch Scholarship. As the principal’s kid, Caleb must have attended a dozen of the awards galas, watching other people getting lauded while he got hungrier and hungrier for the spotlight.

Why did Caleb know so much about what happens to a body after a hanging? Did he stand under June and Dayton as they tried to kick their way down to solid ground again? Did he hold Riley underwater?

He said that the road was clear for him now. Did he clear his own way?

“What is this video?” June asks. “What’s he doing? Did he say anything about me?”

“He’s playing video games,” Dayton says. “It was a livestream. It started autoplaying, and I saw the necklace—oh my gosh, were sweatpants the last thing we saw?”

“No,” June says, staggering backward away from the phone. The heel of her off-brand Keds crushes the corner of a loose sheet of paper containing a luck spell that Toby handwrote. June shakes her bangs and squeezes her eyes shut. “Just because he has my necklace doesn’t mean that he killed us. Look at Mila! She’s been wearing Riley’s little pink necklace. That doesn’t mean she killed her.”

Riley settles Binx into her lap. Loose white fur spreads over her black jeans instantly. “She is holding it hostage.”

I reach up and wrap my thumb and forefinger around the spike of rose quartz. The stone is the same temperature as my skin.

“I’m not holding it hostage,” I say. With every ounce of magic and determination in my body, I will my cheeks not to burn. “Xander gave it to me. Your parents threw it out before your embalming. He saved it for me.”

“Oh, how sweet,” June says, her eyes vibrating with barely contained mania. “You’ve been saving something for him, too, huh?”

“What?” Riley asks.

“Shut up, June,” I snap. “Dayton, what’s the date on that video?”

Dayton swipes and magnifies and checks the calendar built into my phone with a few pinches of the screen. “Sunday, October eighth.”

I rub my hand over my lips, feeling the same sense of divine intervention that I had when the grimoire showed up on the porch. Except Riley is here, watching me through narrowed eyes rather than on the other side, giving me hints.

“That’s the day after you two were found. I’m sorry, June, but how else would he have your necklace? It’s not like you were friends.”

“This is exactly what I didn’t want,” June says, her voice quivering. “I don’t want to think about him taking things off my body. I don’t want to know what he did to us before we were dead.”

“But this could be why the Nouns thought you guys were sleeping together,” I say calmly. “You die, and then he starts going around with your signature piece of jewelry? It’s not like he’d say, ‘Oh yeah, I pulled it off her corpse.’”

“That was just a rumor!” June squeaks. “And why would it just be my necklace, huh? Why nothing of Dayton’s or Riley’s? If he killed me, then he had to kill all of us!”

“Oh,” says Dayton, “I don’t normally wear jewelry. We can’t wear anything in the water during swim practice, so I just fell out of the habit. I wonder what he took off of me?”

“How intact does your hymen feel?” Riley asks darkly.

The color drains out of Dayton’s face. “Oh God. I don’t know. Could I feel it before?”

“Riley!” I say as disgust and fear march over my skin. “For fuck’s sake. No, Dayton, you can’t feel your hymen. According to the news, your body was missing a shoe.”

“Riley is being a textbook Scorpio,” June says. “They always want to push your buttons. Don’t listen to her, Dayton.”

Riley shoves Binx out of her lap. Tears rise in the corners of her eyes, but she drags them away with the back of her wrist. “That’s not true! We literally don’t know what happened to us. We don’t know anything except now there are trophies and serial killers and we’re running out of time to get revenge. You might not want to know what happened to you, June, but I promise you it’s so much worse than you’re imagining.”

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” June screams, covering her ears.

“No!” Tears leak down the sides of Riley’s face, but her voice is steady. “You can try to hide from it, but he loved killing you so much that he is walking around openly wearing something he stole from your corpse.” She reaches out, shoving June’s shoulder. “So what are you going to do about it? Stop sitting back and waiting for everyone else to do the dirty work for you. You aren’t a princess. You’re a walking, talking dead girl. And the sooner you get angry about that, the sooner you can do something other than read through spells you don’t even fucking believe in!”