Undead Girl Gang(62)

Please, God, no.

The words fall out of my mouth as I throw on Mr. Greenway’s robe and roll off the mattress, not taking my eyes off Xander or his fungi.

“That which rots you marks you.”





NINETEEN



“MILA, IT’S OKAY,” he says, his voice even and calm, like there’s nothing wrong, like there’s nothing growing on him. “I didn’t want it to come up like this, but I meant it when I said that I don’t want to hide from you. It’s magic, right? This is the thing you fucked up tonight? It’s okay.” He stresses it hard and puts his hands up, trying to calm me like I’m a cornered dog. “I don’t know what you were trying to do, but it’s all going to be okay. I know you can get rid of them.”

I can’t. You can’t cut the rot out of someone’s heart.

I grab my boots and my jacket and start running, tying the robe closed as I go. Xander’s footsteps follow me down the hall, down the stairs, through the showroom. He calls my name, but I don’t turn around. My hip knocks over an urn, which bounces on the carpet behind me. I throw open the side door and almost run into Riley.

Her eyes are white. This must be the perfect lighting, because the blackened gash in her head dead-ends in a swath of bone. Her skull.

She really isn’t bouncing back as fast anymore.

Behind me, Xander’s scream rips at the night’s silence.

My boots knock into Riley as I push past her and keep running.

The ever-blooming green grass in front of the funeral home scratches my bare feet as I scramble toward my car. Even with my pulse in my ears like a drum, I think I can hear Xander or Riley behind me. I have to move faster. I have to get away. I need time to think. I need time to figure out how this could be anything but what I know it is.

Xander couldn’t have murdered June and Dayton and Riley. There’s no way. June and Dayton were his friends. Riley was his sister, for fuck’s sake. They liked each other way more than I like my sisters. He couldn’t have drowned her in the creek.

The spell must have misfired. Just like the resurrection spell. Just like Riley not being able to cast spells anymore. It’s a mistake. My mistake, like he said. Or something else entirely. A curse put there by someone else. Toby. Dr. Miller. Riley, getting back at him for something minor that happened before she died that she never had a chance to put right.

But if I really believed any of that, I wouldn’t be running.

I’m just getting to my car when I hear the roar of an engine. The hearse speeds backward down the driveway and screeches up the street, leaving black marks in the road.

Innocent people don’t run, right?

Riley walks across the front lawn, her shoulders hunched and her white eyes sparkling with tears. I didn’t know she could cry in her corpse form. The cut in her forehead is starting to stitch itself shut.

“What are you doing here?” I ask, although I’m scared that I already know.

“I followed you out of the woods,” she says.

“Tell me you didn’t know about Xander,” I say as she steps onto the sidewalk across from me.

She takes a step forward, and I stumble back. “Mila, please listen.”

“Tell me he didn’t kill you!” I shout. I don’t care if I wake everyone on Laurel Street. Everyone in Cross Creek. “Tell me he didn’t kill all of you.”

“No one killed me,” she whispers.

“What are you talking about?” I snap. “Xander has mushrooms growing out of his skin. Did you see them? If that isn’t the rot coming out of his heart, then what the fuck is it?”

She looks up at me, and I can almost see the outline of where her pupils would be if her body would finish healing itself. “I need you to listen to me now, okay? Let me get all the way to the end. Can you do that?”

I swallow, hugging my boots and my jacket to my front. I wish I could put the jacket on, but I don’t think it’ll fit over the plush sleeves of the robe.

“I really didn’t remember when you first brought me back,” Riley says, her voice as delicate as it gets. It still carries its natural roughness even when she’s fragile. “Everything was a blank. But I’ve been getting pieces. Normal stuff, mostly. Homework I never turned in and texts that I got from you. There were some glimpses of what I thought was the creek. Rocks. Water sounds. But I didn’t want to remember dying. I thought it would make me more scared of having to face it again on Sunday.” She hugs her broken wrist, rubbing the white makeshift bandage between her thumb and forefinger. “I guess it didn’t matter if I wanted to remember or not. It came back.”

“You remember dying?” I ask, matching her whisper. I don’t even know if I want to hear the rest, but we’ve always shared our heaviest secrets with each other. That’s what best friends do, help bear the weight of existence.

“I remember everyone at school talking about Dayton. About how when my dad went to get her body, she was only wearing one of her shoes. People in my trig class tried to find a formula for how hard her body would need to fall to create the force to lose a shoe. But it didn’t make sense. June’s and Dayton’s wounds weren’t consistent with a long drop. Dad said they suffocated to death. You can see it in the burst veins in Dayton’s face.” She reaches up, unconsciously tracing patterns in her cheeks. “When Xander was at June’s funeral reception, I went into his room to steal his phone charger. It was plugged in behind his nightstand. But when I reached down to unplug it, something was in the way. I pulled the nightstand away from the wall, and this little black sneaker fell out. It was so small, I thought it was a kid’s shoe.”