“But imagine it with her neck all broken,” Riley says. “And the white eyes and the veins and all that shit. It’s pretty gross.”
“Yeah, we realized that we can see part of Riley’s skull in the right light.” Dayton beams. I choke down the urge to puke. This is definitely a dead-girl thing.
“You’ll feel when you’re far enough away, right?” June asks.
“Right,” I say. I can’t keep the touch of disappointment out of my voice. Not to sound like the Little Red Hen, but I made the potion, I found the murderer, and I don’t even get to be part of the scream team? That’s trash.
“We won’t let you miss out on the truth spell,” Riley promises. “We’ll use the walkies to bring you back once he’s thoroughly scared.”
Feeling a bit like I’m being kicked out of the clubhouse, I run back upstairs. Binx is nowhere to be found, although the decapitated head of his mouse is staring at the wall. Gross. The house isn’t big enough for me to get a hundred steps away, so I go out into the chill of the night and walk into the woods until I feel the snap of the thread connecting me to the girls. The air is cold enough to sting the inside of my nose. The waning gibbous moon is trapped on the other side of the branches over my head.
Bouncing up and down to keep warm, I watch as a bicycle kicks up dust all the way down the driveway. The dark outline of a person walks up the porch, scaring off a small raccoon. I assume he sees that the front door is boarded up, because he walks back toward his bike. I bite the inside of my cheek. I really wish I had Harry Potter–style magic, where I could point a wand and have the door magically open for him.
It seems to take an entire decade, but Caleb finally walks around the side of the house, whispering something I can’t hear. He sees the back door and goes inside.
I snap the elastic band at my wrist. I don’t know if I still need to wear it, but the snapping has become a habit. Tonight, it’s helping me stay alert when all I want to do is text Xander or run to the basement to watch Caleb getting his comeuppance. I can’t even hear his screams from this far away.
The walkie-talkie buzzes to life in my hand. There’s so much static that I can barely make out Riley’s voice calling me back.
I’m panting as I rush down the stairs to the basement again. This isn’t the most menacing entrance for the Grand High Witch of Cross Creek, but I don’t need to worry, because Caleb doesn’t notice me. His sandy brown hair is in front of his face, and he’s sobbing into his chest as Dayton ties his arms around the back of his chair with more of the white fabric torn from Riley’s burial dress. June is backed all the way against the wall, her hands splayed against the stones. Her face is ghostly white like she’s been haunted herself. The bruise on her neck is slow to disappear.
Caleb pulls in a rattling, vacuum-like sob. This might be the first time I’ve ever seen him not smirking or looking for someone to high-five. He doesn’t even seem to notice that his arms are being tied to a chair or that there are sigils under his feet. He only has eyes for June.
“I can’t believe it,” he says in between brays. “God, June, I’ve missed you so much.”
EIGHTEEN
“YOU MISSED ME?” June repeats. Hearing the roughness in her voice, she lifts a self-conscious hand to the disappearing bruise on her throat. Blood oozes out of her nail beds. Her eyes narrow. “You don’t miss me. Mila! Truth him.”
Normally, I wouldn’t hop-to when June barks an order, but I recognize the uncertainty in her tone. Something has gone wrong. She won’t stop making eye contact with Caleb. I move around the edge of the room, picking up the mason jar. The drowned acorn shells and floating green bits of herbs aren’t very intimidating. I shake them together roughly. The grimoire says that the mixture needs to be at a full froth to reach its maximum effectiveness.
“I knew you wouldn’t kill yourself,” Caleb whispers reverently to June. He’s actively working to stop crying as though that’s the thing making her yell at him. His heavy lips stretch flat. “I knew you would never leave voluntarily.”
Riley moves toward him, grabbing a fistful of hair from the top of his head and yanking it back until he has no choice but to look at her. “So you decided to make her go? You’re a sick fuck, Caleb Treadwell.”
“What are you talking about?” he asks, his eyes going wide. The scaliness that I spotted on his arm has started to crawl up the side of his neck. The skin around the silver chain is shredded and raw. “You’re the ones who faked your deaths.”
Riley lets go of him like his hair has caught fire. “What?”
“No, we didn’t,” Dayton says, placing an indignant hand to her chest.
“Yeah, you did.” Caleb frowns around the room. “You’re here. You’re alive. Aniyah’s writing an article about how this was all a hoax. Bitch is going to take the Rausch Scholarship in a sweep when it goes national.”
“Don’t call women bitches, you fuckface,” Riley says.
“Wait,” I say, holding the mason jar aloft. I should have thought to bring a colander. There’s a chance he’s going to choke on an acorn cap before we get the information we need. “What does Aniyah Dorsey have to do with this?”
Caleb tries to shrug but can only twitch his shoulders since his hands are tied. “She saw Dayton walking downtown the week after she supposedly died. There have been other sightings, too. At gas stations, at school. Angel, Sky, Diamond, and Dawn have been having meetings with the school shrink because they told everyone that June is haunting the cafeteria. I thought it was tabloid bullshit until I got the message from June. She was the only person who knew about the necklace, so it had to be her.”
Riley yanks at the ends of her hair, frustration vibrating around her. “You saw part of my skull and you think we’re just fucking with you? How would we even pull that off? Real life doesn’t have CGI.”
He shakes his head, his usual smile appearing. “It doesn’t matter. June is alive.”
“Stop saying her name like that,” Riley snaps. She yanks the mason jar out of my grip and throws the lid to the floor with a ringing clatter. She thrusts the glass against Caleb’s lip. A thin stream of the potion dribbles down his chin.
“Caleb,” June says tightly. “Drink it. Please.”
He shuts his eyes and chugs the frothing mass, sputtering when the acorn caps bump into his teeth. When he finishes, he has an airy white foam mustache. “Is that a new kind of kombucha? It needs fewer chunks.”
“How fast is it supposed to work?” Dayton whispers to me.
“No clue,” I whisper back. “I guess we’ll know when he starts admitting things.”
Caleb licks the foam off his lip and cranes his head toward June. “Are you mad I didn’t come looking for you sooner? I would never have guessed you were staying in an abandoned house. I thought maybe a hotel? Definitely somewhere with running water. You deserve so much better than this shithole.”
Riley looks over at me, one eyebrow raised. “That’s not much of a truth test. This place is the dictionary definition of a shithole.”
“Caleb,” I say loudly, “why don’t you wear jeans?”
“I don’t like how they press into my stomach,” he says automatically. “They leave lines in my skin that make me feel ugly.”
“Why don’t you like your stepmom?” June asks him.
“She never wanted kids,” he says. “After I go to college, I don’t think she’ll pretend to like me again. She wants to turn my room into a home gym.”
“Aww,” Dayton says. “You poor thing.”
“Fuck a duck, Dayton. Don’t pity the murderer,” Riley mutters.
“Why are you so obsessed with the Rausch Scholarship?” I ask.
“The winner of the Rausch Scholarship usually gets a bump in their popularity. I want people to like me. I even plagiarized my application to try to beat Aniyah.”
Above us, the ground rumbles. It sounds less like an earthquake and more like a thunderstorm. But the sky was completely clear when I was waiting in the woods.