“En guard!” cried Maddi as she attempted to strike Mary with her sword, which was actually just a long stick she was pretending was a sword.

  But Mary was ready for her. Not only had she had spent countless hours learning about sword fighting and practicing her thrusts and parries, she’d even managed to talk her mother into letting her take fencing lessons.

  Maddi stood no chance.

  Mary defended the attack with ease and wasted no time in striking back. Maddi, who was more used to holding a paintbrush than a sword, shrieked in the face of such ferocity, turned tail and ran all the way over to the edge of the forest that boarded Ally’s backyard.

  Jojo, seeing an opportunity, dove in from the side to try and take Mary out. She didn’t have Mary’s skill but she was more than a match for her in enthusiasm and the pair fought their way back and forth in front of the swing set with smacks and whacks and the occasional yelp but no sign of slowing.

  Maddi, threw herself on the ground by the swing set where her other friends sat and proclaimed dramatically, “I nearly died. I think I need more practice.”

  “You should get back out there then,” encouraged Ally from one swing.

  Maddi shook her head where it lay on the ground, her brown curls spayed out over the grass then she pulled herself upright. “I think I will just watch for now.”

  Lily watched the fight from the other swing with wide eyes. “I don’t know how Jojo can just take so many hits.”

  “That’s because she’s tough,” said Perri with a hint of envy. She sat on the ground under one leg of the swing set. She was wearing long sleeves as usual, and she fiddled with the ends of them.

  Lily was also wearing long sleeves but it wasn’t so weird today given the temperature seemed to have dropped in the last few days. It was close enough to winter now that she thought she should be able to get away with it for awhile, although a part of her wondered if she would even get to see summer. Her skin had been getting worse and after a bit of research in the school library she thought she understood a lot more about what she was. It made it hard to think about other things and even the happier moments felt like a lie that could be revealed at any moment.

  Amanda had said they would help her, and for a time the spell that had been done had seemed to work. But her skin was getting worse again and she understood that whatever it was Amanda had done, it was only temporary. She also understood that if anyone knew how to fix her then they probably would have done it already. Besides, all the books said it was impossible. Worse than that, they said she was illegal, malformed, wrong, and dangerous. ‘All zombies should be shot on sight and then burned.’ That’s what one of the books she’d found had said.

  No matter how much Lily wanted to forget about what she had read and just join in her friend’s games, she couldn’t. Her thoughts wandered to her father. Where was he? Was he looking for her? She knew that he was the one who had done this to her and she knew that it was probably because she had died. It was a weird thing to think about. She couldn’t remember any of it nor could she remember what her powers had been, and she must have had some but not a single memory could she find where she had used them or someone had mentioned them. And yet it didn’t feel like her memories were incomplete. She remembered many things from her life vividly. Sure, nobody remembered every moment of every day. That was normal. But she remembered enough to feel like she remembered her whole life and who she was. Logically things must be missing but this was only based on observation of others around her and what they told her. The nature of the world she lived in now told her she must have had powers. But how could she be sure? How could she know what she had forgotten if she’d forgotten it?

  She sat silently on the swing, keeping back from the action, much in the way Perri often did. She watched and she observed and no one said anything. Ally must know her thoughts. Ally could read minds, but if she did, she thus far had said nothing. She simply sat with them and kept them company until her mother stuck her head into the backyard and called out.

  “Who wants to help me make brownies?”

  Maddi and Perri were on their feet in an instance. Their rush inside was quickly followed by Jojo and Mary, leaving only Ally and Lily out on the swings.

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  Along with the return of her skin condition, Lily had begun feeling more tired lately too. Even the walk inside felt like it would take some huge amount of effort. And a part of her was afraid. Afraid that if she spent too much time close to her friends that she might end up hurting them.

  “I’m not afraid of you you know?” Ally said from the swing beside her.

  Lily kicked gently at the ground, making the swing move ever so slightly. “Maybe you should be,” she mumbled.

  “No way. And I don’t think you’re a zombie cause I can read your mind and I can’t read the minds of the dead,” Ally declared confidently.

  Lily paused in her swinging. Could that be true? Maybe what she thought was wrong with her wasn’t what was wrong with her after all. “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Sure I’m sure,” Ally replied with the confidence of one who has never been wrong in her short life.

  Lily smiled. “Okay, let’s go make brownies.”

  The afternoon passed by in a blur and Lily did her very best to ignore the itching of the skin on her arms.

  Evening fell and soon all the others had either been picked up or called back home.

  “I’ll get Pan to drop you off, dear,” Ally’s mum told her.

  “I wanna come for a drive,” declared Ally.

  Ally’s mum nodded and returned to her current cleaning of the mess they’d all made in the kitchen.

  “Hang on, I just need to get something.” Ally took of running toward her room.

  Ally’s mum handed Lily a small package wrapped in sandwich paper. “Some brownies for the road,” she told her.

  “Thank you,” Lily said politely.

  “I’m back. Let’s go,” Ally declared.

  “April, have you seen the car keys?” Ally’s dad called from the front hallway.

  “Where did you leave them last?” Ally’s mum called back.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you check your jacket pocket?”

  While they looked for the keys, Ally held something out for Lily. “I got you a present. I thought it might cheer you up. If you’re worried that someone might hurt you, all you need is a lucky dagger. All good pirates have one you know. Plus this one suits you. It has flowers on it, kind of like how your name is a flower. That makes it extra lucky.”

  Lily looked down to see what Ally was giving her. It was a knife, a real one. The blade was ever so slightly curved and covered in some kind of sheath. The handle was the prettiest thing Lily had ever seen. It was sliver and gold and shaped just like a flower as Ally said, a daffodil to be precise. Lily took it gratefully. “Thank you,” she said, too enamored with the blade to ask where Ally had gotten it from.

  “It’s a friendship knife,” Ally said proudly.

  “But I don’t have anything for you,” Lily worried aloud.

  “Don’t worry, friendship is about gifts, not trades,” Ally declared wisely.

  Lily kept the knife tucked beneath her packet of brownies during the ride home.

  Ally’s dad had the radio turned on the whole way but he didn’t listen to music, it was some kind of sports game described by two men who laughed a lot.

  In hushed whispers, Ally performed her own rendition of their commentary, much to Lily’s amusement.

  She’d almost forgotten her earlier worries completely and for a while there things seems almost normal, like she was just another kid being driven home from her friend’s place.

  Suddenly, Ally’s dad swerved off the road and stopped the car not far from a blind corner.

  It surprised Ally enough that she stopped her mock commentary, and both girls looked up to see what was going on.

  Initially it seemed like nothing was happening. Ally’s dad simply sat there looking at the road ahead. And then suddenly, a car came speeding around the corner, taking up both sides of the road, its headlights blindingly bright. It barely missed them, even though they were hardly on the road.

  For a second as the lights of the other car filled their small cab, Lily was somewhere else, staring into a different set of blinding lights on another road, ones coming straight for her. And then just like that they were gone. But the memory remained, seared into the back of her eyelids so brightly she could have sworn that if she shut her eyes she was there, sitting beside her mother, staring down death.

  “Idiots,” mumbled Ally’s dad, as he got the car moving again and pulled back onto the country road. “Just cause hardly anyone drives out this way, they think they own the road.”

  With a shaking hand he switched off the radio and continued on more slowly than he had before. Even Ally was quiet the rest of the way to the Byrn’s house.

  They passed by a few people on horseback but saw not one other car.

  The sun was setting as Lily walked up the long drive to the Byrn’s house. The windows of the three stories up ahead were well lit and felt somehow both welcoming and distant at the same time. She had her own room now. Bobby had reclaimed his and she’d been moved up to the very top floor, a little room that Amanda had cleared out of boxes and things and in which she’d set a bed up in. A room with a ceiling that slanted down at an angle until it met the little box window that looked out the front.

  She could see her window as she walked up the path, dark compared to the other rooms. Dark and on a different floor from the rest, but it was cozy up there and it felt a little bit more like her own space, like she could belong here. But as she looked up at that little dark window that was now hers, that promised her a place, she could still see those two spots of bright light layered right on top of it, indistinguishable from all that that was real and promised, and completely impossible to escape. For no matter where she turned her head, those headlights were coming straight toward her.