I SHOW UP to Yarrow House with another load of fast food—Chipotle today—and a pad of paper. We need to game-plan the spells we’ll need to find the killer and coerce a confession out of them. The girls promised to spend the school day digging through our magical library.
I don’t think it’s been long enough to hazard a visit to Lucky Thirteen. The way Toby freaked out on me—was that only a week ago?—makes me uneasy to go back and try again. What if she sniffs out what I’ve done or what I’m planning to do next? I’d rather face her when I have fewer secrets.
June and Riley are sprawled out on opposite ends of the living room, faces buried in books. In the stretch of floor between them, rune stones and tarot cards are spread out in various piles. I set the bag of burritos next to a cross of Goddess tarot, and I have to balance carefully to keep from crushing polished quartz.
“I tried to teach them divination,” Riley says, rolling her eyes. One of her eyebrows twitches, and she kicks aside the red grimoire that brought her back. “Turns out trying to read the future isn’t that fun when you don’t have one.”
“You should have seen that coming,” June says. She’s on her stomach, her feet almost inside the fireplace. She licks her finger and turns the page in The Teen Witch’s Book of Shadows. “Mila, did you bring the highlighter I asked for?”
I pull a single yellow highlighter out of my jacket pocket. It’s Izzy’s. I’m not a highlighter person. June snatches it from me without looking up from her book.
I nudge a Ten of Swords card out of my way and sit down on the bottom stair. The candlelight doesn’t reach the top of the staircase, but if I squint, I can see where the light goes pale near the broken window in one of the upstairs bedrooms, letting in just a hint of sun.
“Where’s Dayton?” I ask, aiming the question at Riley.
She scowls at me. “Out somewhere. I’m not her babysitter.”
“She can’t just go wandering!” I say, imagining zombie Dayton skipping around, scarring children and causing accidents with her blue-cheese-veined face. “What if someone sees her?”
Riley combs her hair over one shoulder, her fingers deftly braiding it as her face stays unruffled. “They’ll gain a new appreciation for how connected their heads are to their necks?”
“I can hear you,” June says.
Riley tips her head closer to her shoulder, so that her joints pop as she continues to braid. “Like you aren’t jealous of my neck.”
The back door bangs open. The dusty floor is audibly scuffed by Dayton’s skipping step. At least, I think it’s Dayton. She’s bundled up like the Invisible Man in Riley’s Giants hat and a super-thick black scarf that she unwinds with one arm, the other clutching a large bottle of blue Gatorade to her chest.
“Is that new Gatorade?” I ask.
Dayton examines the bottle, giving the contents a swirl like it’s a fine wine. “Yes! I went to the gas station. But no one even questioned my monster face.”
“I doubt that,” June says. “You look ridiculous.”
“Ridiculously hydrated!” Dayton says with undeterred cheeriness.
I can’t stop myself from smiling back at her. There’s something infectious about Dayton’s unrelenting positivity.
“We haven’t found much in these spells,” June says, uncapping the highlighter with her teeth. I forgot how intense she gets about studying.
“We haven’t found dick,” Riley says.
“That’s not true,” Dayton says. She plops down on a tarot spread and unscrews the top from the bottle of blue Gatorade. When she smiles again, her teeth are tinged the same color her skin turns when she zombies out. She bends in half with a stream of frenetic giggles. “We found out that there are spells for orgasms. Bibbidi-bobbidi-ooh! Isn’t that hilarious?”
June makes an uncomfortable amount of eye contact with me, the corners of her mouth twisting up like there’s an Allen wrench ratcheting up her maliciousness. “Only if you aren’t the one in need of magical assistance with your sex life.”
I glare at her in return, wishing I had enough magic to burn her with the heat of my annoyance. If she tells Riley about my crush on Xander, I swear that I will have to hurt her. Maybe I’ll stay one hundred and one steps away from her until Sunday night so that she has to spend the rest of her time on Earth with her neck all lopsided.
“Riley came up with the bibbidi-bobbidi part,” Dayton admits, wiping happy tears from the corners of her eyes. “Has she always been this funny?”
I cast a glance at Riley, who stays sheepishly focused on finishing her braid. I don’t know how comfortable I would be taking compliments from my childhood bully either.
“Yeah,” I say. “She has been. You’ve been missing out.”
“We haven’t found any spells for revealing foul deeds,” June says with a note of seriousness. Studying is not a joke to her. “We could make someone fall in love, have better luck with money, or have boundless and plentiful orgasms—”
Dayton bursts into giggles again.
“But,” June says, raising her voice, “there’s nothing about revealing a murderer. There are some small truth spells that we might be able to fashion together into one giant spell, though. But Riley says there’s a chance that could kill them.”
“I’m willing to risk it,” Riley says. “They killed us first.”
“Mila, can I use your phone?” Dayton asks pertly. “I can’t remember the last time I was on the internet. Think of how many Snapchat filters I’ve missed!”
I frown at her. “I don’t have Snapchat. And you can’t take pictures of yourself or talk to anyone.”
“But I could read all the posts people have been writing about how much they miss me,” she says, batting her lashes. “What if I promise to leave only footprints and take only memories?”
With a sigh, I take my phone out of my pocket and pass it to Dayton. She rubs it against her face the same way a cat rubs itself on plants it likes. She opens the web browser and types rapidly with both hands.
“That’s the stuff,” she says with a sigh of relief.
“You’re such a weirdo,” June says with a snort.
Dayton ignores her and holds her free hand out to me. “Headphones?”
I hesitate, unsure of what exactly is lurking in Dayton’s ears. Sure, she looks pink and clean right now, but I know that a couple of minutes ago she was literally rotting. But it’s rude to discriminate, even against the sort-of dead.
I unwind the headphones from their perma-ball in my pocket. Dayton pops them into her ears and hunkers down. Binx trots down the stairs, squeezing past me to sniff the Chipotle bag before wandering into the kitchen, presumably to find something more alive to eat.
“She always ends up on her phone instead of studying,” June says, inclining her head at Dayton. “She’s better at study breaks. I had to ask her to stop coming to our meetings at Starbucks. She was too distracting.”
I frown at her. “You kicked your best friend out of your club?”
June highlights a line in her book with one long swipe. “I don’t rank my friends, Camila Flores. I have a lot of them. None are better than the others.”
“The best in best friends isn’t a quality judgment,” I say. Leave it to June to make everything a race to be first in her heart. “The best is for the closest. The person you trust the most. The person who”—I can’t help but look at Riley—“who you’d bring back from the dead.”
Riley glances over at me, her face expressionless but pinker around the edges. “Don’t expect June to understand loyalty. She was born an ice queen and will die an ice queen. Twice. The night she died, no one even knew where she was. Not one of her friends. She was sneaking around, and no one will ever know why.” Her eyebrows shoot up, almost knocking into her brown roots. She touches her lips like they’re infused with magic. “Mila, I—”
I gasp. “You remembered something! Something recent!”