“We need to go there. Now.”
They made it in a flash. A hundred, if not two hundred, students and faculty had poured through the open stadium gates across the track and onto the football field turf, glittering from the rising sun catching the melting frost tipping the grass.
As they approached, a buzz zinged through the mass, voices rising and falling as bodies maneuvered, stepped back, made way. All words fell to ash in Embry’s mouth as they grew closer, something compelling her not to ask what was going on, just to keep moving forward.
To see.
As such, the crowd parted, shifting until there was a direct line like an airplane landing strip connecting Embry with the point of interest on the turf.
A lump.
A body.Unmoving. Bloodied. Battered. And, strangely, clad in the blue tulle monstrosity that was Embry’s finalized Witch costume forInto the Woods.
That’s when Embry registered the person’s face: pale and blood-smeared, and framed with silver-blond hair and one perfectly placed streak of ruby red.
Oakley Riddle was dead.
Embry gasped, her hand flying to her mouth, her body immediately racked and trembling. Magda let out a scream and took off. But Embry was pinned to the spot, a pressure rising in her chest as she tried to make sense of it.
Oakley was a vampire. Yet there was no wooden stake protruding from her chest, no silver bullet, her head was still attached to her body.
But this was real. It had to be magic. Very powerful magic, something that…
Something that a witch could do.
Embry tore her gaze from Oakley’s form and read the crowd from left to right, a new page turning in her life as she watched the features of so many faces she knew flood not with sympathy for the girl’s friend, but with anger, accusation, certainty.
Then the thoughts behind those expressions poured into the crisp morning air, shouted in jumbled succession.
“Witches are the real Bitches.”
“She’s a jealous shrew, not a Bitch. Don’t sully our name!”
“Illegal spells aren’t illegal if your name’s Woodcross! Am I right or am I right?”
“I’m sure Oakley would’ve just given her the crown if she’d asked nicely. She didn’t care about material things.”
“Embry didn’t even take the crown. Girl just wanted revenge, not that mass-produced piece of crap.”
“It’s just a title; you didn’t have to kill her, Embry!”
Oakley Riddle was dead a second time over. And everyone here—hundreds of people who’d known Embry for all high school—had already decided it was her fault.
Embry held up her hands, placating, even as her voice quavered.
“I would never do this to anyone, let alone my friend. I would never—”
“Call afriendsome clueless homeschooler with Beetlejuice hair?”
Embry whipped around to find the speaker—Skye Wolverton. She stood with five Bitches at her back, meaty forearms crossed over all half-dozen chests.
“I—What? That was a joke!”
“A joke?” the werewolf parroted. “Or proof that Oakley wasn’t actually your friend, she was your rival?”
Skye produced a cell phone and stabbed the screen. A shadowy pair of people appeared and then came Embry’s own voice booming through the device’s speakers.
“… I mean, look at you! You’reliteral royaltyright now instead of some clueless homeschooler with first-period gym BO and Beetlejuice hair!”
