Undead Girl Gang(64)

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 . . .”