“Didn’t I tell you?” cooed Serena. “I have a trick, too.”
Sydney pulled away. “What? When? What is it?” She wondered if that had been the thing stuck in Serena’s laugh the night she told her about raising the dead. A secret. But why didn’t her sister tell her? Why wait until now?
“Uh-uh,” Serena said, wagging her finger. “Trade you. You show us yours, and we’ll show you ours.”
For a very long moment, Sydney didn’t know whether to run, or feel elated that she wasn’t alone. That she and Serena … and Eli … had something to share. Serena took Sydney’s face between her hands.
“You show us yours,” she said again, smooth and slow.
Sydney found herself taking a deep breath, and nodding.
“Okay,” she said. “But we have to find a body.”
*
ELI held open the front passenger door. “After you.”
“Where are we going?” asked Sydney as she climbed in.
“On a road trip,” said Serena. She got behind the wheel and Eli took the backseat, directly behind Sydney. She didn’t like that, either; didn’t like that he could see her but she couldn’t see him. Serena asked absently about Brighton Commons as the university buildings beyond the car gave way to smaller, sparser structures.
“Why wouldn’t you come home?” asked Sydney under her breath. “I missed you. I needed you and you promised you weren’t gone but—”
“Don’t dwell,” said Serena. “What matters is that I’m here now, and you’re here, too.”
The structures gave way to fields.
“And we’re going to have a ball,” said Eli from the backseat. Sydney shivered. “Isn’t that right, Serena?”
Sydney glanced at her sister, and was surprised to see a shadow cross Serena’s face as she met Eli’s gaze in the rearview mirror.
“That’s right,” she said at last.
The road got narrower, rougher.
When the car finally stopped, they were at the seam between a forest and a field. Eli got out first, and led the way out into the field, the grass coming up to his knees. Eventually he stopped and looked down.
“Here we are.”
Sydney followed his gaze, and felt her stomach lurch.
There, tucked amid the grass, was a corpse.
“Dead bodies aren’t that easy to come by,” explained Eli lightly. “You have to go to a morgue, or a cemetery, or make one yourself.”
“Please don’t tell me you…”
Eli laughed. “Don’t be silly, Syd.”
“Eli shadows over at the hospital,” explained Serena. “He stole a cadaver from the morgue.”
Sydney swallowed. The corpse was dressed. Weren’t cadavers supposed to be naked?
“But what is the body doing out here?” she asked. “Why didn’t we just go to the morgue?”
“Sydney,” said Eli. She really didn’t like the way he kept using her name. Like they were close. “There are people in a morgue. And not all of them are dead.”
“Yeah, well, we didn’t have to drive half an hour away,” she shot back. “Aren’t there any fields, or abandoned lots, near the college? Why are we all the way—”
“Sydney,” Serena’s voice cut through the chill March air. “Stop whining.”
And she did. The complaint died in her throat. She rubbed at her eyes, and her hand came away with black smudges from the makeup she’d put on in the cab as it wove its way toward the University of Merit. She’d wanted to impress Serena by looking grown up. But right now, she didn’t feel grown up. Right now, she wanted nothing more than to curl into a ball, or to crawl out of her own skin. Instead she stood very still and looked down at the corpse of a middle-aged man and thought of the last time she’d been with a body (she didn’t count the dead hamster in school because no one even knew it had died and it was small and furry and didn’t have human eyes). The memory of the morgue, of the cold, dead skin against her fingertips. The chill like taking a large gulp of ice water, so large that the shiver ran down to her toes. It had been harder to make them dead again. She’d panicked. The woman in the morgue had tried to get up off the table. She hadn’t thought about what to do next so she’d grabbed the closest weapon she could find—a knife, part of an autopsy kit—and driven it down into the woman’s chest. She had lurched, then slumped back to the metal slab. Apparently raising the dead didn’t mean they couldn’t be killed again.
“Well?” said Eli, gesturing at the body like he was offering Sydney a gift, and she wasn’t being very grateful.