Undead Girl Gang(44)
Riley lights the candles, whispering in a familiar rise and fall as she invites the Goddess into the circle. June picks up Binx and sits on the bottom stair, watching as I pack the heart with salt and charcoal and a chunk of tiger’s-eye stone. The rest of the cast-iron pot is filled to the brim with dried herbs and spices. I find the big box of fireplace matches. It sticks to the blood on my hands.
“Open the window,” I say to Riley.
Setting the grimoire on the ground, she drags the wooden chair under the window and balances on the seat. Teeth digging into her lip with concentration, she pushes open the small window. Cold air whooshes inside, and the stink of blood lifts.
I make a shooing motion with my hand, and the girls all back up against various parts of the wall.
I take a deep breath, strike a match, and light the kindling under the heart. Smoke pools lazily in the bottom of the pot. Sparks crackle. The herbs light. And then it’s a fire. A roaring, snapping fire that swallows the heart and everything inside it. I need to talk fast.
“Enemy of mine,” I say, pitching my voice low for effect. Magic is real, and the Goddess provides, and blah blah blah, but I also want it to look as impressive as it is. “The evil inside of you rots you. For the deeds you have paid no penitence, let that which rots you mark you. For the hurt you have brought others, let that which rots you mark you. For the acts you have committed in defiance of the Goddess’s will, let that which rots you mark you. For the lives you have taken and those left behind, let that which rots you mark you.”
I pour another handful of salt into my palm.
“So mote it be.” I throw the salt at the pot. The flames lick higher, almost touching the ceiling in a huge orange column, a hundred times wider and stronger than it was a second ago.
The girls jump. I do, too, when Riley looks at me through the flames. Her eyes are white. Then the giant flame shrinks as quickly as it started and burns down to embers. The only thing left in the pot is a smoking nub of tiger’s-eye stone. Riley blinks at me, and her eyes are hazel again.
Did I imagine they were otherwise?
There’s silence except for the susurration of the candles at the corners of the room eating through increments of wick.
“What happens now?” June asks nervously.
As cold as I was a minute ago, there’s sweat building at the nape of my neck now. “We hope that it did something.”
Dayton reaches into her pocket and lets a handful of confetti fly over our heads. “We did magic!”
“Fuck a duck, Dayton,” Riley says, plucking a piece of confetti off her own cheek. “Did you steal this much when you were alive?”
Dayton blinks at her. “Yeah. Duh. How did you get stuff?”
FIFTEEN
IN THE REVERB of the third-period bell, backpacks swish against bodies, feet pound against the cement, and classroom doors slam shut. In an instant, I am standing alone in the middle of the hallway behind the main office.
I follow the long line of cream-colored lockers down the wall, watching the numbers grow. All the hallways at Fairmont are like cement tunnels, making my footsteps echo. I catch myself tiptoeing and force my feet to act normal, my spine to straighten.
It’s hard not to look sneaky when you’re sneaking.
I’ve never really bothered with my locker. It’s all the way across campus, near the gym. If I get tired of carrying my books in my backpack, it’s easier to get them out of my car than to try to run from one end of Fairmont and back between periods.
But June’s locker is prime real estate—a stone’s throw from the student parking lot, halfway between the main building and the cafeteria. She stole it from a freshman the first week of school by putting her own combination lock on it and then convincing that kid he was crazy for thinking it was his to begin with.
I know this because she told the story in painstaking detail yesterday before I left Yarrow House. She was delighted with her own “ingenuity.” I told her it sounded sociopathic.
“You don’t have to pathologize everything, Camila.” She sighed at me heavily. “Now, do you want my combination or not?”
I check my phone for the number again. I could probably pathologize how impersonal it is. It’s nothing symbolic in June’s life, like a birthday or an anniversary. Just the number the lock came with.
This is as much a favor to June as it is a fact-finding mission. She convinced me to get hit with a tardy slip so that I could dig through her stuff for clues and also see if anyone left her any postmortem presents.
Dayton couldn’t remember her locker combination, and Riley never even bothered to keep a lock on hers since she never used it. So June is our only chance.
Luckily, June was also the most popular of the three of them. Not that I would ever give her the satisfaction of pointing that out.
Even before I’m in front of the locker, I can see paper sticking out of the vents cut into the door. I hold my breath and spin the lock to the appropriate, randomly assigned numbers. As the door swings open, I have to catch falling notebook paper that says, I hope you found peace in tearstained cursive. It’s from Angel. I wonder if it was written before or after June accosted her by the dumpsters.
In front of a neat line of textbooks, there’s a heap of Post-its and old Starbucks Treat Receipts and a tiny folded piece of lined paper. A mini-memorial.