XXXII

A FEW DAYS AGO

UNIVERSITY OF MERIT

Serena threw her arms around her little sister.

“Look at you!” she said, dragging her sister inside. “You’re growing up.”

Sydney had barely grown at all, actually. Less than an inch in the year since the accident. It wasn’t just her height, either. Sydney’s nails, her hair, everything about her crept forward. Slowly. Like melting ice.

When Serena teasingly mentioned her still-short hair, Sydney pretended the look had simply grown on her, implied that it had nothing to do with Serena anymore. Still, she wrapped her arms around her sister, and when her sister hugged back, Sydney felt as if broken threads, hundreds and hundreds of them, were stitching the two back together. Something in her started to thaw. Until a male voice cleared its throat.

“Oh, Sydney,” said her sister, pulling away, “I want you to meet Eli.”

She smiled when she said his name. A boy, college-aged, was sitting in a chair in Serena’s apartment—one of the ones usually reserved for upperclassmen—and he stood up at the mention of his name, and stepped forward. He was handsome, with broad shoulders and a firm handshake and eyes that were brown but alive in that glittering, almost drunk sort of way. Sydney had a hard time looking away from him.

“Hi, Eli,” she said.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” he said.

Sydney didn’t say anything, because Serena had never mentioned Eli until the phone call, and then she’d only called him a friend. Judging by the way they looked at each other, that wasn’t the whole truth.

“Come on,” said Serena. “Put your stuff away and then we can all get to know each other.”

When Sydney hesitated, Serena pulled the duffel from her sister’s shoulder and walked away, leaving her alone with Eli for a moment. Sydney wondered why she felt like a sheep in a wolf’s den. There was something dangerous about Eli, about the calm way he smiled and the lazy way he moved. He leaned on the arm of the chair he’d been sitting in.

“So,” he said. “You’re in eighth grade?”

Sydney nodded. “And you’re a sophomore?” she asked. “Like Serena?”

Eli laughed soundlessly. “I’m a senior, actually.”

“How long have you been dating my sister?”

Eli’s smile flickered. “You like to ask questions.”

Sydney frowned. “That’s not an answer.”

Serena came back into the room holding a soda for Sydney. “You two getting along?” And just like that the smile was back on Eli’s face, broad enough that Sydney wondered how long until his cheeks would start to hurt. Sydney took the drink and Serena went to Eli and leaned against him, as if declaring allegiance. Sydney sipped the soda and watched as he kissed her sister’s hair, his hand curling around her shoulder.

“So,” said Serena, examining her little sister, “Eli wants to see your trick.”

Sydney nearly choked on the soda. “I... I don’t—”

“Come on, Syd,” pressed Serena. “You can trust him.”

She felt like Alice in Wonderland. Like the soda must have had a little drink me tag and now the room was shrinking, or she was growing, or either way there wasn’t enough space. Enough air. Or had it been the cake that made Alice grow? She didn’t know...

She took a step back.

“What’s the matter, sis? You were pretty eager to show me.”

“You told me not to...”

Serena’s brow furrowed. “Well, now I’m telling you to do it.” She pushed off Eli and came up to Sydney, wrapping her in a hug. “Don’t worry, Syd,” she whispered in her ear. “He’s just like us.”

“Us?” Sydney whispered back.

“Didn’t I tell you?” cooed Serena. “I have a trick, too.”

Sydney pulled away. “What? When? What is it?” She wondered if that had been the thing stuck in Serena’s laugh the night she told her about raising the dead. A secret. But why didn’t her sister tell her? Why wait until now?

“Uh-uh,” Serena said, wagging her finger. “Trade you. You show us yours, and we’ll show you ours.”

For a very long moment, Sydney didn’t know whether to run, or feel elated that she wasn’t alone. That she and Serena... and Eli... had something to share. Serena took Sydney’s face between her hands.

“You show us yours,” she said again, smooth and slow.

Sydney found herself taking a deep breath, and nodding.

“Okay,” she said. “But we have to find a body.”

* * *

Eli held open the front passenger door. “After you.”

“Where are we going?” asked Sydney as she climbed in.

“On a road trip,” said Serena. She got behind the wheel and Eli took the backseat, directly behind Sydney. She didn’t like that, either; didn’t like that he could see her but she couldn’t see him. Serena asked absently about Brighton Commons as the university buildings beyond the car gave way to smaller, sparser structures.

“Why wouldn’t you come home?” asked Sydney under her breath. “I missed you. I needed you and you promised you weren’t gone but—”

“Don’t dwell,” said Serena. “What matters is that I’m here now, and you’re here, too.”

The structures gave way to fields.

“And we’re going to have a ball,” said Eli from the backseat. Sydney shivered. “Isn’t that right, Serena?”

Sydney glanced at her sister, and was surprised to see a shadow cross Serena’s face as she met Eli’s gaze in the rearview mirror.

“That’s right,” she said at last.

The road got narrower, rougher.

When the car finally stopped, they were at the seam between a forest and a field. Eli got out first, and led the way out into the field, the grass coming up to his knees. Eventually he stopped and looked down.

“Here we are.”

Sydney followed his gaze, and felt her stomach lurch.

There, tucked amid the grass, was a corpse.

“Dead bodies aren’t that easy to come by,” explained Eli lightly. “You have to go to a morgue, or a cemetery, or make one yourself.”

“Please don’t tell me you...”

Eli laughed. “Don’t be silly, Syd.”

“Eli shadows over at the hospital,” explained Serena. “He stole a cadaver from the morgue.”

Sydney swallowed. The corpse was dressed. Weren’t cadavers supposed to be naked?

“But what is the body doing out here?” she asked. “Why didn’t we just go to the morgue?”

“Sydney,” said Eli. She really didn’t like the way he kept using her name. Like they were close. “There are people in a morgue. And not all of them are dead.”

“Yeah, well, we didn’t have to drive half an hour away,” she shot back. “Aren’t there any fields, or abandoned lots, near the college? Why are we all the way—”

“Sydney,” Serena’s voice cut through the chill March air. “Stop whining.”

And she did. The complaint died in her throat. She rubbed at her eyes, and her hand came away with black smudges from the makeup she’d put on in the cab as it wove its way toward the University of Merit. She’d wanted to impress Serena by looking grown up. But right now, she didn’t feel grown up. Right now, she wanted nothing more than to curl into a ball, or to crawl out of her own skin. Instead she stood very still and looked down at the corpse of a middle-aged man and thought of the last time she’d been with a body (she didn’t count the dead hamster in school because no one even knew it had died and it was small and furry and didn’t have human eyes). The memory of the morgue, of the cold, dead skin against her fingertips. The chill like taking a large gulp of ice water, so large that the shiver ran down to her toes. It had been harder to make them dead again. She’d panicked. The woman in the morgue had tried to get up off the table. She hadn’t thought about what to do next so she’d grabbed the closest weapon she could find—a knife, part of an autopsy kit—and driven it down into the woman’s chest. She had lurched, then slumped back to the metal slab. Apparently raising the dead didn’t mean they couldn’t be killed again.

“Well?” said Eli, gesturing at the body like he was offering Sydney a gift, and she wasn’t being very grateful.

She looked to her sister for answers, for help, but somewhere between the car and the body, Serena had changed. She seemed tense, her forehead crinkling in a way that she’d always tried to avoid because she said she didn’t want wrinkles. And she wouldn’t meet her sister’s eyes. Sydney turned back to the body, and knelt gingerly beside it.

She didn’t see what she did as raising the dead, not really. They weren’t zombies, as far as she could tell—she didn’t have prolonged exposure to her subjects, aside from the hamster, and she wasn’t sure how a zombie hamster’s behavior would differ from that of a normal one—and it didn’t matter what they’d died of. The man under the sheet in the hospital hall had apparently suffered a heart attack. The woman in the morgue had already had her organs removed. But when Sydney touched them, they didn’t just come back, they revived. They were okay. Alive. Human. And, as she found out in the morgue, as susceptible to mortality as they’d been before, just not the form that killed them. It perplexed Sydney, until she remembered the day on the frozen lake when the ice water had swallowed her up and she’d reached for Serena’s leg and been a fraction too late, too slow, to catch it—come back, come back—and how badly she’d wanted a second chance.

That’s what Sydney was giving these people. A second chance.

Her fingers hovered over the dead man’s chest for a moment as she wondered if he deserved a second chance, then chided herself. Who was she to judge or decide or grant or deny? Simply because she could, did that mean she should?

“Any day now,” said Eli.

Sydney swallowed and forced herself to lower her fingers onto the dead man’s skin. At first, nothing happened, and panic swept over her at the thought of finally having a chance to show Serena, and failing to do it. But the panic fell away when, moments later, the ice-water chill flooded through her veins, and the man beneath her shuddered. His eyes flew open and he sat up, all so fast that Sydney went stumbling backward to the grass. The once-dead man looked around, confused and angry, before his eyes locked on Eli, and his whole face contorted with rage.

“What the hell is—”

The gunshot rang in Sydney’s ears. The man fell back into the grass, a small red tunnel between his eyes. Dead again. Eli lowered his gun.

“Impressive, Sydney,” he said. “That’s quite a unique gift.” The humor, along with that horrible false cheer and fake smile, was gone, wiped away. In a way, Eli wasn’t quite as frightening, because she’d always been able to see the monster in his eyes. Now it had finally stopped hiding. But the gun, and the way he held it, made him scary enough.

Sydney got to her feet. She really wished he would put the weapon down. Serena had retreated several feet, and was toeing a patch of frozen wild grass.

“Um, thank you?” said Sydney, her voice wavering. Her feet slid backward through the grass without her meaning to. “Are you going to show me your trick now?”

He almost laughed. “I’m afraid mine lacks the showmanship.” And then he raised the gun, and leveled it at her.

In that moment, Sydney felt no surprise, no shock. It was the first thing Eli had done that seemed right to her. Genuine. Fitting. She wasn’t afraid to die, she didn’t think. After all, she’d done it once. But that didn’t mean she was ready. Sadness and confusion coiled in her, not toward him, but toward her sister.

“Serena?” she asked quietly, as if maybe she didn’t notice her new boyfriend was pointing a gun at her little sister. But Serena had turned away, arms crossed tightly over her chest.

“I want you to know,” said Eli, fingers flexing on the gun, “that it is my grim task to do this. I have no choice.”

“Yes, you do,” whispered Sydney.

“Your power is wrong, and it makes you a danger to—”

“I’m not the one holding a gun.”

“No,” said Eli, “but your weapon is worse. Your power is unnatural. Do you understand, Sydney? It goes against nature. Against God. And this,” he said, taking aim, “this is for the greater good.”

“Wait!” said Serena, suddenly turning back. “Maybe we don’t have to—”

Too late.

It happened fast.

Shock and pain hit Sydney in one loud blast.

Serena’s voice had stolen her a moment, a fraction of a moment, and as soon as she saw Eli’s fingers tighten on the trigger Sydney had cut to the side, lunging for a branch as the gun fired. She had the broad stick in her grip and swung into Eli before she even felt the blood running down her arm. The branch knocked the gun to the ground and Sydney spun, and ran for her life. She reached the edge of the forest before the shots started again. As she tumbled through the trees, she thought she heard her sister calling her name, but this time she knew better than to look back.