Page 144 of An Oath at Midnight

Bram looked at me, and he didn’t need to say a word. I nodded. We couldn’t just stand here while she started chopping limbs, we needed to do something.

Bram and I stepped out from behind the shelf, and Maria’s head swung our way. Fury filled her eyes. “Emmaline, Marcel come to me.”

They were the names of her brother and sister, the ones who’d died while Maria had been away at boarding school.

Another scrape came from the corner, and what walked out turned my blood cold. Bodies, but not human, not anymore, stitched together like Frankenstein’s monster.

“How?” I gasped.

“Dark magic, Magnolia, the kind you’re all too familiar with.” She ran the backs of her fingers down the side of “Emmaline’s” patchwork cheek. “Their spirits were lost, so full of rage they refused to cross over, so I worked out a way for them to be with me all the time.” Emmaline seemed to have all her body parts. Marcel, on the other hand, was still missing an arm.

“You cut up your friends and the people they loved to use their organs, their body parts, to turn your brother and sister into zombies?” Because that’s what I was looking at. The undead. This wasn’t reanimation, this was shoving a couple of lost and angry spirits into vessels and hoping for the best.

But to create them, she would’ve needed more…parts than the ones we knew about. She’d killed others to create these monsters.

“That’s not what they are,” she spat. “It’s Emma and Marcel. I have them back.”

“No, you don’t. They stopped being your brother and sister a long time ago. Spirits that refuse to pass over become angry.” I held her wild stare. “And you know what the undead need to stop their bodies from decomposing.” Blood, flesh. Human flesh. And if they hadn’t developed a hunger for it yet, they would very soon. “You killed others, you had to have. Where are they?”

She waved a hand. “They’re not important.”

No, she made sure only the prom committee and their loved ones were found, so they knew they were being targeted.

Emmaline turned to me and I jerked back when I realized whose eyes Maria had used when she’d created Emmaline. They were Margot’s. They were dull and lifeless, but they were my friend’s eyes. “Why did you do this?” I choked out.

She strode over to Robert, crouching down in front of him, and fisted his hair. “You know, don’t you, Rob?”

He shook his head, eyes wide.

“Rob here doesn’t understand the word no, do you, Robert? And when you cornered my baby sister in the library one day when no one else was around, and she said no, you didn’t listen then either. No, you took what you wanted.”

Robert’s mouth opened and closed, true horror filling his eyes. “I thought…I didn’t know…”

Maria turned to me. “We were going through some of Emmaline’s things a few months ago, and I found her old diary. You can imagine my horror, my utter disgust to learn the people I loved and trusted were the reason I no longer had my brother and sister. I’d let them touch me, fuck me. I scrubbed my skin raw that night.”

“What happened?” I asked, feeling sick to my stomach.

“It started off with bullying, a lot of it. My brother and sister, the rest of the poetry group as well. First Clara pretended she was interested in Marcel. Her acting skills really paid off, didn’t they, Rob? She made him fall in love with her. She said she wanted everyone to know, that they should go on a date, and when he got there, Clara and her friends laughed at him, mocked him, humiliated him.”

That explained the poem Marcel wrote. “That’s why you chose Red when you attempted to murder Chase, to expose them, to humiliate him, all of them, the way they had Emmaline and Marcel.”

Her eyes narrowed on me. She wanted me dead as well, it was written all over her face. I’d gotten in her way, I’d killed Ryan.

“Ryan was Marcel’s best friend,” Maria said. “And he’d been dating Emmaline for six months. He loved her.” She shoved Robert’s head back and stood. “Marcel and Emma were close, only a year apart, more like best friends as well, and after Robert forced himself on my sister, she withdrew, stayed in her room. I never knew why, not until I found her diary, but it was all there. Everything they did to both of them.”

It was all clicking into place. “What did they do?”

“They made a suicide pact. They came here to this chapel, where no one would find them, and hung themselves from those beams, right there,” she said, pointing to a spot above her. “Robert and Jemma, Chase and Clara, and Calvin and his bitch cousin Katana, they tortured my sister, bullied and tormented my brother, until they couldn’t take it anymore.”

“You showed Ryan the diary, didn’t you? And he agreed to help?” I guessed.

Ryan had been in the poetry group as well, another of the prom committee’s targets, no doubt.

“He was more than happy to help me, and he relished taking his pound of flesh.” I bet it was Ryan’s idea to carve judgment into each victim as well. “He wanted Emma back like I did. We wanted them both back, and with Isaac’s help, and his little enchantment spell, of course, it wasn’t hard convincing everyone it was Willow running around killing everyone.”

Which was why Leah’s murder had been different. Maria had been forced to kill Leah herself with Ryan dead. “Why Willow? Why me?”

“I never meant for you to become the prime suspect, that just kind of happened.” She strode to Isaac and gripped his jaw. “Isaac wanted to believe it was Willow so badly that he didn’t think twice when I suggested he tip the scale and help her get convicted faster.” She shoved his head aside. “As for why? Because it was easy, because I had Isaac in my pocket and he hated your sister, and because your family is powerful and hoard that power, keeping it for themselves. Willow was strong, even back then, and she did nothing. She let those monsters roam the halls and terrorize people weaker than them, than her, and she did nothing to stop them. She’s Keeper of her coven—she strolls around this city like she fucking owns it—but she’s just the same as the rest of them.”