“We actually went out in sixth grade for, like, a month,” June interrupts brightly. “But we reconnected in honor society. It was sort of concurrent with me and Xander, though, so we kept it quiet.”
“Wait,” I say. “If you were dating Caleb for months, then why would you help us investigate him? The spells, luring him to the house, keeping him hostage. He was—is?—your boyfriend.”
She flicks her wrist. “My memories were foggy. I remembered that we were sort of together, but I also remembered telling him that I wasn’t ready to tell anyone about us. Since we weren’t, you know, the same level of popular. I wanted to take some time to boost his rating on campus. It’d really help if he won the Rausch Scholarship. Everyone wants an invite to the gala.” She takes her lower lip between her teeth. “It was a total dick move on my part. So, when you had all this evidence that he’d killed us, I assumed it was because of something I did. People say that I push them too hard.” She winces a smile in Caleb’s direction. “He was sort of guilty until proven innocent. Especially since I didn’t remember giving him my necklace.”
“The night they died, we had just told Dayton about us,” Caleb says, nodding toward Dayton, who beams at being mentioned. “She volunteered to pick June up from here and have a sleepover, so June wouldn’t get in trouble for missing curfew.”
“I never had a curfew,” Dayton says primly. “My parents trusted me to make good choices.”
“But after they left here, I don’t know what happened,” Caleb says. He slurps soda from the lip of his can. “The next thing I heard, they were found in Aldridge Park.”
I arch an eyebrow at him. “And you decided to pretend to be super fine with your new girlfriend committing suicide?”
He smiles at me in return, his usual snide baring of teeth. “What was I supposed to do? Cry in class? June didn’t want people to know about us. I honored that. I talked shit when everyone else was talking shit. I was wrecked when I thought she was gone. But Aniyah started asking questions, and Angel, Sky, Diamond, and Dawn started missing honor society meetings so that they could talk to the school shrink. Five people thinking that June and Dayton were still alive was too many to be a coincidence. And it wasn’t. They are alive.” His head droops. “Sort of.”
Dayton leans over to me, whispering loudly. “We explained the Sunday-deadline thing last night. He’s sad about it.”
“Can’t you do something to fix it?” Caleb asks me. He grips one of his knees until his knuckles blanch. “You were powerful enough to bring them back. Why don’t you do it again with a better spell?”
June fingers the tasseled end of her scarf. “Caleb. Stop. We talked about this. We’re not meant to be here longer than seven days. It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine,” he says through clenched teeth. Spit bubbles pop in the corners of his mouth. “You’ve had time to make peace with this, but I haven’t.”
“It’s not your choice,” she bites back.
“My death, my choice,” Dayton says to no one.
“I don’t want to live on more borrowed time,” June says. “My body is rotting. Even having Mila here isn’t putting us back together anymore. I don’t want to see how much worse it gets. And where would we live? A week in an abandoned house is more than enough. Sunday night is our time to go. We were only here to get revenge anyway.” She reaches over and steals one of Caleb’s hands. “And we shouldn’t have kidnapped you. It was a misunderstanding. So, now we have two days to say goodbye with nothing else to worry about.”
“Actually,” I say shakily, “there is something else to worry about.” I take a deep breath. “I’m pretty sure Xander killed you.”
“Okay. Xander Greenway killed us.” June titters in that popular-girl-pacifying-a-loser way. Her mocking smile mirrors Caleb’s. “You also thought Caleb was the murderer, so your track record as a detective is not great.”
“But you are an excellent witch,” Dayton adds quickly. “The truth spell lasted for hours. Caleb just kept telling us the funniest things all night.”
Caleb shrinks into his chair and hides his face behind his soda.
“I’m serious,” I say. I explain what happened when I left the woods. The mushrooms on Xander’s back. Him stealing his parents’ hearse and running away. Riley’s confession that her death was an accident.
“She basically admitted that she knew Xander was responsible, but she wanted to blame me anyway,” I say, wiping my nose on the back of my hand. Hot tears slide down the curve of my cheeks. “He had Dayton’s shoe. The one that was missing from the crime scene.”
“You said it was just a little black shoe,” June says. “It’s not like Dayton’s mom wrote her name in it. He could have a shoe fetish. That doesn’t make him a killer.”
Dayton pats my knee, very briefly recovering her living appearance. “You and Riley had a fight. That’s all. Friends fight all the time. June and I fought over who should wear what scarf this morning. She said the blue would make my face veins look worse, and I got super mad at her. But, in my heart”—she sets a hand on her chest and pats it twice—“I knew she was right.”
“This isn’t a fight about a scarf,” I say. “Riley wasn’t murdered. The spell was only supposed to bring back the wrongly dead. That’s why it brought back you guys. You were killed. She wasn’t.”
“And even if Xander was the one who hurt us,” June says, the if as heavy as a stone, “you’ve already called the cops. There’s nothing else you can do now, Mila. I know you want to do this superhero-witch thing and save Cross Creek from evil, but you also need to chill.” She bats her eyelashes at Caleb. The effect is odd with her mismatched eyes. “Do you think we could order a pizza? Let’s be normal for the day.”
I want to feel normal. It’s one of the last things I said to Xander. One of the last things I’ll ever say to him.
Dayton lets me curl up in her lap and cry.
TWENTY
A COUPLE OF hours later, I wake up alone on the uncomfortable couch in Caleb’s living room. The shining black screen of the TV mounted to the wall reflects my body, twisted into the back of the couch. The sun is starting to set, leaving the living room dim and dreamlike. Tomato and garlic and chocolate fill the air, and my stomach rumbles, remembering the pizza and lava cake the girls insisted I eat before I passed out.
I drag myself off the couch. I can hear June’s voice in the backyard and the splash of water in the kitchen. I ache like I’ve been repeatedly punched. Which I have been—by the ground in the woods, by the worst couch on earth, by the truth of how close I was to a murderer last night. How safe I felt with him until the laptop illuminated his back.
Mushrooms. God, that spell is so fucked up.
Dayton is standing in front of the sink. Opalescent suds cling to her bruised skin up to the elbow. Her hands are scrubbing a dish in a wide circle, but her focus is on the window facing the backyard. Through the glass door, I can see June and Caleb playing with a small mound of fluff on legs. The dog wags its tail, overjoyed as June tosses a tiny ball for it to fetch.
“You don’t want to join them?” I ask Dayton.
She looks over her shoulder at me and scrunches her nose. “They deserve some private time, and playing with the dog is about as close as they can get. I think they were sleeping together when June was alive, but it wouldn’t be right if they did it now. We’re technically corpses, so, you know, necrophilia and all that.”
“Right.” I cringe.