“This is no ordinary cat,” Thomas says through his teeth. He is staring unblinking into Tybalt’s green eyes—green eyes that flicker to me and seem to say, This kid is a knob. His tail twitches at the tip like a fishing lure.

“Of course he isn’t.” I rifle through the cabinet to chew some aspirin, a habit I picked up after reading Stephen King’s The Shining. “He’s a witch’s cat.”

Thomas breaks eye contact and glares at me. He knows when he’s being made fun of. I smile at him and toss him a can of soda. He cracks it very close to Tybalt and the cat hisses and jumps off of the table, growling irritably as he passes me. I reach down to scratch his back and he whacks me with his tail to tell me he wants this scruffy character out of his house.

“What’re you going to do about Mike?” Thomas’s eyes are wide and round over the rim of his Coke can.

“Damage control,” I say, because there’s nothing else I can do. I’d have more options if I hadn’t been unconscious all last night, but that’s spilled milk. I need to find Carmel. I need to talk to Will. I need to shut them both up. “So you should probably take us to school now.”

He raises his eyebrows like he’s surprised that I’ve ceased attempting to ditch him.

“What did you expect?” I ask. “You’re in it. You wanted in on whatever this is, well, congratulations. No time for second thoughts.”

Thomas swallows. To his credit, he doesn’t say anything.

*   *   *

When we walk into school, the hallways are empty. For a second I think that we’re busted, screwed, that there is some kind of candlelight vigil for Mike going on inside every closed door.

Then I realize that I’m an idiot. The halls are empty because we’re in the middle of third period.

We make stops off at our respective lockers and evade the questions of roaming faculty. I’m not going to class. We’re just going to wait around until lunch, hovering near Carmel’s locker in the hopes that she’s here and not pale and sick and lying in bed at home. But even if she is, Thomas says he knows where she lives. We can make a stop there later. If I have any luck left, she won’t have talked to her parents yet.

When the bell rings it just about jolts me out of my skin. It does nothing for my headache. But I blink hard and peer through the crowd, an endless flow of similarly dressed bodies striding into the hallways. I sigh with relief when I see Carmel. She looks a little pale, like she might have been crying or throwing up, but she’s still dressed well and carrying books. Not terribly worse for wear.

One of the brunettes from last night—I don’t know which one, but I’ll call her Natalie—bounces up to her elbow and starts prattling away about something. Carmel’s reaction is Oscar-worthy: the cock of her head and attentive gaze, the roll of her eyes and laughter, all so easy and genuine. Then she says something, some diverting something, and Natalie turns and bounces away. Carmel’s mask slides off again.

She’s less than ten feet from her locker when she finally raises her eyes high enough to notice I’m standing in front of it. Her eyes go wide. She says my name loudly before glancing around and walking closer, like she doesn’t want to be heard.

“You’re … alive.” The way she chokes on the phrase speaks of how strange she feels to be saying it. Her eyes move up and down my body, like she expects me to be oozing blood or have a bone exposed. “How?”

I nod to Thomas, who is skulking to my right. “Thomas pulled me out.”

Carmel spares him a glance and a smile. She doesn’t say anything else. She doesn’t hug me, like I sort of thought she might. The fact that she doesn’t makes me like her more for some reason.

“Where’s Will? And Chase?” I ask. I don’t ask whether anyone else knows. It’s obvious by the demeanor of the halls, the way that everyone is walking around chattering like normal, that nobody else does. But we still need to settle things. Get our stories straight.

“I don’t know. I don’t see them until lunch. I’m not sure how many classes they’ll be going to anyway.” She looks down. She’s getting the urge to talk about Mike. To say something that she feels like she should say, like she’s sorry, or how he wasn’t really all that bad and didn’t deserve what happened to him. She’s biting her lip.

“We need to talk to them. All together. Find them at lunch and tell them I’m alive. Where can we meet?”

She doesn’t answer right away, fidgeting around. Come on, Carmel, don’t disappoint me.

“I’ll bring them to the football field. Nobody will be using it.”

I nod quickly and she walks off, glancing back once like she’s making sure that I’m still there, that I’m real and she hasn’t gone crazy. I notice that Thomas is staring after her like a very sad, loyal hound dog.

“Dude,” I say, and head off toward the gym, to go through it out to the football field. “Now’s not the time.” Behind me I hear him mutter that it’s always the time. I let myself smirk for a minute before wondering what I’m going to do to keep Will and Chase on a leash.

CHAPTER NINE

When Will and Chase get to the football field, they find Thomas and me sacked out on the bleachers, staring at the sky. The day is sunny, mellow, and warm. Mother Nature does not mourn for Mike Andover. The light feels fantastic on my throbbing head.

“Jesus,” one of them says, and then there are a whole lot of expletives that don’t bear repeating. The tirade finally ends with, “He really is alive.”

“No thanks to you dicks.” I sit up. Thomas sits up too, but stays slightly hunched. These jerks have kicked him around one too many times.

“Hey,” Will snaps. “We didn’t do anything to you, understand?”

“Keep your fucking mouth shut,” Chase adds, pointing a finger at me. For a minute I don’t know what to say. I hadn’t thought that they would be coming to try to keep me quiet.

I brush off the knee of my jeans. There’s a bit of dust on them from where I leaned against the underside of the bleacher. “You guys didn’t try to do anything to me,” I say honestly. “You brought me to a house because you wanted to freak me out. You didn’t know that your friend would wind up getting torn in half and disemboweled.” That was cruel. I admit it. Chase goes immediately pale. Mike’s last moments are playing behind his eyes. For a second, I soften, but then my throbbing head reminds me that they tried to kill me.

Standing beside them but down a bleacher, Carmel hugs herself and looks away. Maybe I shouldn’t be so angry. But what, is she kidding me? Of course I should be. I’m not happy about what happened to Mike. I never would have let it happen if they hadn’t rendered me useless with a board to the head.

“What should we tell people about Mike?” Carmel asks. “There are going to be questions. Everyone saw him leave the party with us.”

“We can’t tell them the truth,” Will says ruefully.

“What is the truth?” Carmel asks. “What happened in that house? Am I really supposed to believe that Mike was murdered by a ghost? Cas—”

I meet her eyes levelly. “I saw it.”

“I saw it too,” Chase adds, looking like he might throw up.

Carmel shakes her head. “It’s not real. Cas is alive. Mike is too. This is all just some messed-up prank that you all cooked up to get back at me for breaking up with him.”

“Don’t be so self-obsessed,” Will says. “I saw her arms reach through the window. I saw her pull him in. I heard someone scream. And then I saw Mike’s silhouette split in two.” He looks at me. “So what was it? What was living in that house?”

“It was a vampire, man,” Chase stutters.

Idiot. I ignore him completely. “Nothing was living in that house. Mike was killed by Anna Korlov.”

“No way, man, no way,” Chase says with increasing panic, but I don’t have time for his waves of denial. Luckily, neither does Will, who tells him to shut up.