“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” June screams, covering her ears.
“No!” Tears leak down the sides of Riley’s face, but her voice is steady. “You can try to hide from it, but he loved killing you so much that he is walking around openly wearing something he stole from your corpse.” She reaches out, shoving June’s shoulder. “So what are you going to do about it? Stop sitting back and waiting for everyone else to do the dirty work for you. You aren’t a princess. You’re a walking, talking dead girl. And the sooner you get angry about that, the sooner you can do something other than read through spells you don’t even fucking believe in!”
“Fine!” June whirls into action, moving in a blur across the room. She grabs the red grimoire off the floor and slaps the pages aside. With the candlelight coming from the mantel beside her, her face looks like a demented mask. Her whole body is shivering, even though the air is thick and unmoving.
“This,” she announces, swinging the book around. Her fingertips are bleached white where they dig into the brown pages.
The spell she’s holding up to us is almost as long as the resurrection spell. The heavy-handed calligraphy across the top reads: Draw the Rot Out of the Heart of Your Enemies.
“I saw it when we looked through the book on our first night back.” She is having a hard time keeping her voice steady as her jaw continues to tremble. “We can do a truth spell to force the confession we need to call the cops. But this”—she taps the book four times in quick succession—“this is what I want. This is the revenge I need.”
“Okay,” I say. The bloodlust in the room is as palpable as the candle smoke and Binx’s dander. Revenge has hovered over all of us since the girls came back, but suddenly it has direction and a name. We will draw the rot out of Caleb Treadwell. We will stop him before he kills anyone else. I squint at the list of ingredients. “Let’s figure out where to get a calf’s heart, then.”
Dayton claps her hands together. “From a baby cow!”
FOURTEEN
DUST KICKS UP under all four wheels of my car until it looks like I’m dragging a dingy fog with me down the driveway to Yarrow House. Thankfully, the paint on the car is already beige, so it won’t be any more noticeably dirty when I get home than when I left for school this morning. Not that I think either of my parents would actually ask me where I’ve been. That would require them making eye contact and speaking to me.
I jam my elbow into the horn. I know there isn’t a clock in the abandoned house, but the girls haven’t had anything to do today except gather acorns for the truth spell we patched together yesterday. I had to fight after-school traffic all the way through town, and I still managed to be on time.
I roll down my car window and stick my head out.
“Let’s go!” I shout. I toot the horn again.
There’s a glimpse of short hair and visibly veined skin around the side of the house. Spotting me, Dayton rounds the corner of the porch, waving her swollen fingers wildly. Her corpse form is truly horrifying in the daylight—one of her opaque eyes looks ready to fall onto her cheek, the bruising on her neck is a rainbow of gruesome colors—but I force myself to smile at her as widely as my inner cringe will allow.
She turns and shouts to the others before dashing down the broken stairs of the porch. Riley and June appear behind her, moving as quickly as their wounds will allow. I can see a bone jutting out of Riley’s broken left wrist that snaps back into place as she hits the dead grass at the end of the driveway. June’s neck wobbles as she jumps off the porch but straightens out once she lands.
Dayton whips open the passenger door behind me and slides in. Her skin smooths out to peachy cream, and her eyes realign into brown irises and pinpoint pupils under long lashes. She beams at me in the rearview mirror.
The other doors open and close hard enough to rock my little Toyota back and forth. Riley settles herself into the front seat as June buckles in behind her.
“Where are we going?” Dayton asks, clapping her hands against her knees.
“Somewhere no one will recognize you guys,” I say. “Buckle up!”
Riley’s eyebrows pull together sardonically under the folded brim of her gray beanie. “Why? We’re already dead. We don’t feel pain anymore.”
“Yeah,” Dayton agrees eagerly. “I had a nail go all the way through my foot this morning, and I didn’t even notice!”
“Um. Cool, I guess?” I say, holding back a shudder. “But if you fly through my windshield, my parents will be super pissed.”
“Fair point.” Riley straps the seat belt across her chest. The second I hear the buckle click into place, I throw the car into reverse and speed back down the driveway.
We take the back roads out of Cross Creek, following the border of woods as it curves around the edge of town. The trees have started to turn colors, flagging the route of our escape in golds and reds. No one talks, so I turn the radio on low. It’s still set to the pop station that Izzy insists on listening to when I have to take her somewhere. June hums along softly in the backseat. Riley’s fingers keep time against the curved armrest built into her door.
Dayton has her face pressed to the window like a giant puppy. I hold my breath as we pass other cars. They last thing we need is to be seen by anyone’s parents or Aniyah Dorsey, kid reporter. I take a couple of detours so that we don’t drive past any of the bridges over the creek or Aldridge Park. I don’t want to ruin a perfectly good outing with reminders of where the girls died.
We pass over the county line and drive alongside the train tracks. It’s not as scenic here as it is in Cross Creek, but no one from Cross Creek would bother driving half an hour to run their errands, so this is our safest bet. Unless they, like us, needed to stop into Mercado del Valle, which is unlikely since Cross Creek is one of the whitest places on earth. I don’t think most people in town even know that we live within driving distance of a Mexican grocery store.
“What do we need from here?” Riley asks as we climb out of the car.
“Candy!” Dayton says, bouncing around to the front of the car. “And more Gatorade.”
“A cow’s heart,” I say. “And some charcoal.”
“Then can we draw the rot out of Caleb’s heart?” June asks, folding her arms over her chest. Of the three girls, she’s the only one who seems determined to turn her limited wardrobe into multiple outfits. Today, she’s wearing her black leggings with the mustard cardigan she was buried in. It’s cute and effortless in a way that makes me think about strangling her before I remember that Caleb Treadwell already did.
The grimoire is pretty vague about what drawing the rot out of a person actually does. Personally, I hope that it’ll take the shitty murderous part and leave behind the sliver of good in Caleb. That way he can march down to the police station and turn himself in. Otherwise, we’ll have to move on to phase two of the plan: luring him into the basement and force-feeding him the truth spell that, for some reason, is made mostly of acorns.
“Yes,” I say to her, leading the way through the parking lot. “We can draw the rot out of his heart when we have a heart to start with.”
“Magic is so stupidly literal sometimes,” Riley says.
We pass through the automatic sliding doors. Inside, hospital-bright lights hover over our heads, and the sound system blares as Selena sings “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom.” Unlike the grocery stores in Cross Creek, everything smells delicious, thanks to the taquería housed at the other side of the building.
“You guys can look around, if you want,” I say to Dayton, June, and Riley. “I have to go to the meat counter. There’s a bakery against the back wall if you want to grab anything to take back to the house.”
Dayton’s face lights up. I can almost see the cookies dancing in her eyes. She immediately darts toward the bakery.