Winter grabs my arm, fingers squeezing down. “What the fuck?” she whispers harshly.

  Her nails nearly pierce the skin. “Ow!” is the only thing I manage. “I see it too,” I say, just before I realize that I can’t see Sev any longer at all.

  A small crowd of morning stragglers crosses in front of us. When they pass, Sev-and his cart-are gone.

  Winter’s grip tightens, and now I’m pretty sure she’s drawn blood. “You saw him, right?”

  “I saw him.”

  “Where’d he go?” The air still smells like him, like gym bags and the ocean.

  I turn my head to one side, and speak over my shoulder. “Did you see him?”

  “Yeah,” Wrath says. “I don’t like this.”

  “No shit.” Winter’s already texting one-handed, faster than I type with two. A moment later, my pocket vibrates. I open it to find a group chat started with the two of us, Nico and Isaac. Zombie sighting! Severn Reilly is IN THE LIBRARY right now.

  It only takes a few seconds for the replies to appear.

  Nico replies How?

  Tell him I said hi! Isaac says, followed immediately by No, don’t. He doesn’t know who I am.

  “Should we go look for him?” I ask Wrath and Winter, neither of whom is quick to answer. Rather than dwell on the question, and the rising tide of fear that’s only growing stronger, I head deeper into the stacks. The library isn’t huge, just a few floors above and below ground.

  At the spot where we saw Sev, the air reeks ofstale chips, cigarettes, and sea water. But he’s gone. I continue through the stacks, making a circuit of the first floor, but there’s no sign of him. We emerge in the entrance area, with an open space above that allows views of the upper floors.

  “There!” Winter claws my arm, pointing up. On the third floor, a muscular figure pushes a cart. The light above him flickers blue as he passes, like static behind glass. By the time we reach the third floor — “we don’t have time for the elevator, Theo!” — he’s gone.

  We stand at the balcony and scan the rest of the library, but there’s no sign of him.

  “Okay, we didn’t hallucinate twice,” Winter says, though she doesn’t sound as confident as I think she intends.

  No one else in the library seems perturbed, but I do see more of the collegiate zombies, far too early in the semester for such things. Closer to midterms or finals would make sense, but even the freshmen who run screaming from their program with bloody tears make it through the first month.

  By the time we make our way to the exit, Isaac and Nico are walking up, though one of them looks incredibly eager while the other looks pensive.

  “Did you talk to him?” Isaac asks eagerly. “No wait, don’t talk to him. You didn’t, right? I haven’t met him yet. I was thinking I could do something when the play finally launches. Maybe arrange a meet cute when they bring in the animals for the sacrifice? What do you think?”

  “What version of The Secret Garden involves ritual slaughter?” I ask automatically.

  “The one everyone knows,” he says blankly. “Why?”

  Before school even started, I saw him dragging in an Egyptian sarcophagus in as a prop, and now animal sacrifices?

  “Maybe he’d be interested in playing Nikolai Tesla’s experiments. I know they were looking for a lacrosse player or two to get up on stage, but a wrestler is basically the same thing,” Isaac muses. “Muscles and brain damage. Do you think I should ask him?”

  “You should…” Winter trails off, looking uncomfortable. “Maybe wait until we’re a bit further into the semester.” At least she didn’t say wait until we confirm if he’s alive.

  He nods happily. “That makes sense.”

  “You’re sure it was him?” Nico asks tersely, his jaw tight. He pulls me off to one side while Isaac focuses on Winter and his plans for an animal sacrifice meet cute. Normally, I would say that stranger things have happened in Hollow Hills, but I don’t know if they have in this case. The school play might just set a new threshold. Also, wouldn’t it be a “meat cute” then?

  “We saw him twice,” I say quietly. Nico glances back into the library, and I can tell he wants to go see for himself, so I continue. “I don’t think he’s there anymore. We chased him up from the first floor up to the third, but by the time we got up there he was gone. He didn’t show up again.”

  “How could he be here?”

  I shrug. “We never actually inspected the body, right? It could have been some weird sort of illusion. Maybe he got hired to do it.” I stop. “But there was this… smell.”

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  “Smell?”

  “Yeah, same smell both spots. Seawater and staleness. I’m pretty sure he’s in a frat, but normally they just smell like Drakkar Noir and desperation.”

  “Not rot,” Nico considers. “Yeah, that makes sense. So you think he’s… what?”

  “Still don’t have the answers. And the library’s not going to have them, either.”

  “Yeah, Winter and I met up over the weekend and tried. We found a few more books about zombies, but they were literary critiques.”

  “You can’t tell me that there aren’t books about actual zombies on campus,” Winter huffs. She crosses her arms in front of her and glares back towards the campus.

  Wrath hums uneasily in my backpack, but doesn’t offer a counterargument. I can’t say I disagree with Winter. Hollow Hills University is supposed to be a step down from Miskatonic, where all the insane academics go to search for evidence of the supernatural. The ones who don’t get in generally settle for HHU instead, and many of them are buried right here on campus. Undergrad mortality rates are… fickle.

  Eventually we head towards class, not one of us settled by what had been going on lately. When we arrive in the building, though, we approach an argument already in progress. Freddie, our faithless TA, is in some kind of verbal spar with an utterly forgettable man in a tweed suit, balding hair combed over poorly from one ear to another, and a thick pair of glasses that make his eyes huge.

  “I told you I’m going to need it to finish my thesis,” Freddie shouts.

  Winter, who is in the lead, slows and holds out a hand, prompting us to stay back. Freddie’s back is to us, he doesn’t notice us yet, and the other man has no interest in a random batch of co-eds.

  “And as you were told, Mister Kaye, your application was not accepted,” the man says primly. Not only does this not sound like a conversation that he’s comfortable having again, he’s definitely not enjoying having it out in public.

  “I’m the most prolific TA in this department,” Freddie hotly retorts. “There hasn’t been a senior faculty who has asked for help that I haven’t jumped in a hole for. So you’re telling me that’s all for nothing?”

  Jumped in a hole? What did the faculty have him doing?

  “I’m telling you that your application was not accepted,” the man repeats. “If you’re looking for other sources then I suggest the campus library.”

  “So there is another option,” Winter whispers, apparently to herself.

  “If I could get what I needed from the garbage dump you call a library, I would have done it already, Dean. I need more. You should know how important this is. There were zombies on campus! I need the appropriate access to finish my research!”

  Each of the academic areas had a Dean, so it wasn’t clear which one this was referring to, but the fact that one of them was out and around on campus, and not hidden behind ostentatiously unreasonable office hours was surprising. I knew that the Dean of my program was only available for questions when submitted in advance in old Aramaic written on actual papyrus scrolls that were sealed with bodily fluids collected under an autumnal blue moon.

  So Freddie knew about the zombies. But he seems to be talking about something other than the ones that showed up to my house. Unless maybe he watched the same episode of Nec-Romance that we did, and he recognized Sev Reilly.

  “Mister Kaye, the academic board is getting tired of your constant petitions,” the dean continues, “and frankly, this inability to understand the meaning of a single-syllable word is rather illuminating. I believe I’ve heard through the graveline that there was a disturbance on campus just before school started. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”

  Freddie huffs out a sound and turns away, and in the process spots us eavesdropping. “Of course,” he says, gesturing broadly. “Of course it’s him. He’s the reason, isn’t he, Dean?”

  I somehow know automatically that he’s talking about me. His hatred of me has never had a direct cause, but I wonder if I’m getting closer to knowing the reason.

  “Hello, Mister Morecroft,” the Dean says-not unpleasantly, just unprepared to see us. “And friends,” he adds, the words now grating.

  Mister Morecroft again. My stomach lurches. The Morecroft name hangs around my neck like a cursed lanyard. I sigh, but I don’t even acknowledge the greeting at this point. Instead, I focus on the outrage on Freddie’s face.

  “You think I don’t know you’ve been out for my spot?” Freddie snarls. “Showing up to all my classes. Trying to make me look stupid.”

  “I don’t think he needs to try anything,” Winter says evenly. The Dean nods almost as though he agrees, and then immediately schools his expression into blankness.

  “Stop by and say hello sometime, Mister Morecroft,” the Dean says, passing us by. “I’m sure we’ll have a most illuminating conversation.”

  Freddie snarls and then strides down the hall and towards his classroom.

  “What was that about?” Nico whisper-asks.

  Winter allows a faint smile to crease her lips for only a moment. “It means that wherever the real library is, Freddie doesn’t have access to it. Which means that someone else does.”

  “Did you hear what the Dean was saying about a disturbance?” Nico continues. “Do you have any idea what he was talking about?”

  Each of us shakes our head after a moment or two of deliberation. “What kind of disturbance, though?” Isaac asks.

  “Could be anything.” Nico glances at me. “You don’t think it’s related to the thing at your house, do you?”

  It takes me a moment to realize that he’s talking about Pox. The Doom Clock and the way the house battened down the hatches when Pox started waking up.

  “I don’t think so, if I’m being honest. The Dean made it sound like something happened at the school, and that only happened at the house.”

  “What are you guys talking about?” Winter asks, peering between the two of us. She gets a saucy expression and says, “Keeping secrets?”

  It’s enough to make me flush just a little. Unfortunately, it’s not the sort of secret that Winter is looking for, so I just shake my head. “Unrelated.”

  ***

  By the time we make it to the classroom, Freddie is arguing with someone at the front of the room, which seems to be a key trait of his today. “Just hit Play when everyone gets here,” he snaps to one of our fellow students, and then gives the four of us a hard glare as he storms out of the room.

  “Mister Kaye won’t be here today,” the guy he yelled at says woodenly when we come into the room. “We’re supposed to watch a movie.”

  When class finally starts, he hits a button on the television and the screen lights up with the Dreadflix logo. In the reflection of the television, I see all of us. I raise a hand. My reflection waits - deciding- then raises its hand back.

  I have a bad feeling in my gut before the show even starts up, and sure enough, it’s Nec-Romance. This time, instead of the slow title card, a steady drip-candle-wax or honey, it’s hard to say- slides down the inside of the screen. Unreadable names crawl past in the flow.

  “What language is that?” Nico whispers.

  I’m pretty sure it’s demonic in origin, but Wrath doesn’t say anything one way or the other.

  Then the show starts. And this time, the character it focuses on is…

  It’s me.