The Lost Coast

by Amy Rose Capetta

  Danny doesn’t look peaceful even when she’s sleeping. It hurts Rush to see her like this, eyes tracking behind her closed lids as if someone is chasing her through a dream.

  “Danny,” Rush whispers, and her mouth fills with a tousle of ripe flavors. Strawberry, lemon, mint.

  It’s dangerous, how good that tastes.

  She can’t bear to say Danny’s name again, to think she might get to keep it. Rush didn’t want to tell Danny about Imogen and Emma — not because she was scared to be honest with Danny about the feelings she’d had for Imogen. It was more a wretched attempt to avoid remembering how Imogen didn’t feel about her. How easy Rush was to move on from.

  She flutters a hand on Danny’s shoulder. If she lets herself touch Danny with pressure and purpose, she might not be able to stop.

  Danny’s breath slices in half, quarter notes to eighth notes.

  She wakes up with the heavy work of dark-brown lashes and touches her mouth, confused. Does she think Rush had to kiss her to wake her up? Her lips are glossy, smooth, unkissed.

  Rush says, “Let’s go.”

  When the mother tree comes into sight in all of its rotting, life-giving glory, Hawthorn dumps out the bag.

  “Hey!” June shouts. “Be careful with those.” She kneels, and I can see that pain follows her down as she touches Imogen’s possessions, pushing her lips together and keeping her face smooth by force.

  “Do you want help?” Lelia asks.

  “No,” June grits out.

  Lelia steps back. From what I can tell, Lelia’s hardness is mostly bluster. June’s is not.

  But I can’t stay away from Imogen’s ward makings. I’m drawn in by a clock with a broken face. A bundle of white sage. Red string and melted-down wax. Lots of tiny bottles, each one filled with water. “So how is this stuff different from what you already have?” I ask. “Or what Ora keeps in her magical barn?”

  “Have you ever looked at something and had an affinity for it?” Hawthorn asks.

  “Like, a pull that felt completely out of proportion?” Lelia translates.

  My eyes dart to Rush before I can stop them.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Sure.”

  “Those things can be prepared for spellwork,” Hawthorn says. “But it takes time. Moon phases. And then whatever you put all of that energy into is primed.”

  “So these have Imogen’s magic in them,” I say, touching the piles like I might be able to pick up on it. “And she used these to make wards?”

  “Imogen has a big, bleeding heart,” Lelia says. “She mostly made wards for the same girls who stare at us in school like we have tentacles where our heads should be. They would hear that Imogen could get rid of a guy who was bothering them, and all of a sudden they’d always been friends.”

  “Why water, though?” I ask. “I mean, I know Imogen has a connection to it, but what turns water into a ward?”

  “Moving water can stop an enemy,” Hawthorn says. That word, enemy, simmers in the heat as Hawthorn stirs her fingers through the bottles. “Imogen collected these everywhere she went.”

  “Which one do you think we should use, dowser girl?” Lelia asks.

  I arrange the tiny mismatched bottles into a lineup and run my fingers over them, like playing scales. My interest spikes when I hit a diamond-shaped bottle. I look up at Hawthorn, eyebrows raised. “This one is powerful.”

  Hawthorn works her lips into a frown. “Eel River water. It’s tied to Tempest, but it’s unpredictable. It might bring on calm, or it might be ferocious and unforgiving. Depends on the spell and the water sample. We need something deep. Dependable.”

  I don’t like that I picked wrong the first time, but I go back to the bottles, quickly pulling down a few from the original lineup and creating a new one. I run my fingers over the four bottles in that group. Each is strong in its own way.

  I pick up a round green glass bottle with a tiny cork stopper.

  “Pacific Ocean,” Rush says. She doesn’t need to check the labels. She probably helped Imogen bottle most of these herself. I picture it quickly, two girls at the shore, red hair dipping toward waves, Rush kneeling in the surf. I feel like I’m there with them for a second — and then remember that I wasn’t, and I could drown in the shallow water of my jealousy.

  Hawthorn nods, approving my choice. “Now we have to make a likeness of each of us.”

  “You mean like a doll?” I ask, deeply creeped out.

  Hawthorn lets out a long breath. “Just . . . something that stands for each of us. It helps if you add a piece of yourself.”

  I look down at myself and scowl. “What kind of piece?”

  “A symbolic one,” Lelia says. “When are you going to get the fact that we don’t do blood and body parts? This is magic, not a horror movie.”

  “Blood is powerful,” Hawthorn admits. “It’s just not very creative.”

  “Watch,” June says. She cuts off a swatch from the end of her hair and lays it in the dirt, combining it with silver string from Imogen’s bag, setting down the shape of her body. Rush takes a small round cake of amber from her pocket. It takes me a second to figure out what it is — rosin from this cello she plays, even though I’ve never seen her with one. She borrows the small wood-handled knife from Imogen’s collection and carves the rosin, one sharp nick at a time, until there’s a crude version of her curves worked in it.

  Hawthorn takes the flowers out of the spread of her hair, picking them carefully so the delicate pieces stay intact. She lays them down, constructing a person, all petals and sepals and circles of grass around her eyes to stand for the glasses. Then she adds mica-flecked rocks as her hair.

  Lelia spits in her hands and combines it with the crumbly dark dirt under her feet and some wax from a black votive in Imogen’s pile, working it until it is a kind of dark clay. She makes a mound at the far end of the mother tree, shaping it into a tiny Lelia.

  I could stay here for days watching them work magic like this — like a dance they know by heart — but when it’s my turn, I freeze. “What am I supposed to do?” I ask, feeling more lost than the morning they first saw me.

  The Grays look at me. They look at the pile of spell bits Imogen left behind. Rush picks out a set of rubbed-down oil pastels in forest colors. They immediately leave their mark on her hands. She sits down at my feet, staring up at me. The world narrows, until all I see are her Pacific-blue eyes.

  “How much do you care about these shoes?” she asks. “Would you call them a piece of you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can I . . . ?” She sets a finger to the canvas, and I freeze up.

  These are the shoes that carried me all over Michigan, the ones I was wearing when I almost left in a stranger’s car. These are the thin rubber soles that brought me to California, the heels I sank back on when I kissed Hallie Carpenter. Rush wants to know if they’re part of my story, when they could probably tell the whole thing.

  “Go for it,” I say.

  Rush starts to draw on the canvas, and I try to crane around the view of her dark hair, but it doesn’t work. I have to wait. June gets the idea and picks out one of the pastels. “Hey, let me,” Lelia says, grabbing the dark green. Hawthorn crowds in last, picking up my soles one at a time so she can draw on those, too.

  I wobble.

  I wait.

  When they kneel back, I pick up my feet and inspect what they’ve done. Here is a girl, more or less flying. Her clothes are a dark blur. Her short, unevenly chopped hair is yet another blur. There are redwoods, and sky, boiling blue day shading into night, stars everywhere. The Grays, below her, are waiting. When I pick up the soles of my shoes there’s Imogen. She’s with me, every step of the way. One dark eye with a strong brow staring out from each shoe.

  “That’s me,” I say, my voice thawed by wonder.

  Hawthorn knew every single place in Tempest that could offer a thirteen-year-old some privacy. Alone didn’t really exist in her mom’s world. Ora wanted to put her h
ands in her daughter’s life up to the elbows.

  So Hawthorn disappeared a lot. Not in a big, showy, gone-forever sort of way. Little trips to various nowheres. The High Point was good enough when she couldn’t leave the farm. But her favorite spot in the world was the mother tree, so that’s where she took the new friends she was making.

  Hawthorn didn’t know how this was supposed to work. She had been homeschooled most of her life, until Ora cast her into the deep end of eighth grade. Hawthorn got the sense it was her grandparents’ idea. They were the furthest thing in the world from witches — lawyers. Ora’s rebellion had started with a spellbook purchased at fifteen and lasted the rest of her life. It became Hawthorn’s life, too. Her first and only real rebellion was finding friends and not immediately telling Ora everything about them.

  “Why did you bring us all the way out here?” Lelia asked, panting from the hike, her face and neck and the backs of her arms stung an angry crimson.

  All five of them sat on the fallen tree’s trunk, their feet off the ground. “The coven never comes here,” Hawthorn said. “They call the mother tree a place of death. They think the energy’s too dark.” Her voice swirled with excess drama.

  “What about you?” Imogen asked.

  “White magic, black magic,” Hawthorn said, her hands flying. “That’s the kind of stuff people make up to sort us into piles.” What witches could do wasn’t good or bad. It just was.

  “Well, I love it here,” Imogen announced, reaching her fingers out as if she were trying to grab the whole woods.

  It hadn’t escaped Hawthorn that Imogen had raw potential for magic. She smiled at someone, and they were happy for days. When she frowned, the world inverted. And there was the water. No way of saying if Imogen was drawn to the water or it was drawn to her, but Hawthorn took note of how the Eel River pulsed on the days when Imogen was upset. How the school’s sprinklers went off unexpectedly the day that Imogen wore black lipstick and declared that the world was completely fucked.

  “Hey,” Hawthorn said. “Let’s do a spell. To bottle up this feeling.”

  She wasn’t trying to start a coven. Spells were just what she did, the way that some kids played sports and others took dance lessons or learned French or played every video game in existence. And she wanted to remember this moment. It was the first day she’d felt not-alone since she was little. Which made no sense, because she was always surrounded by Ora. Ora’s magic, Ora’s friends, their feral kids.

  “A spell?” June asked. “My parents would not like that.”

  “We’re not asking your parents,” Lelia said. “We’re asking you.”

  “So that’s a yes?” Hawthorn asked Lelia, just to be sure.

  “I’m up for anything,” Lelia said with a shrug of her razor-blade shoulders.

  Hawthorn dumped out her bag and stirred through the selenite wands and scraps of leather for her boleen, the small knife her mother had given her when she turned twelve, the one she used to trim wicks and slice through knots and whittle shapes out of soft-skinned pieces of redwood.

  She used the knifepoint to draw the outline of a human-size bottle into the dirt, and then lay down on top of it, fitting her body to the drawing. “I invite you in, I invite you in, I invite you in,” she said to everything around her. She looked up at the whole sky and waited for it to shrink down inside of her.

  Imogen went next, and then they each took turns lying on top of Hawthorn’s outline and drawing the day into them. The other four hovered over the one inside the bottle and let her drink in the sight of them. Their nervous, excited faces.

  “That was weird,” Imogen said in a way that made it clear she approved. She stretched her arms way up, like she might accidentally stay bottled if she wasn’t careful. “Can we do more stuff like that?”

  The second Hawthorn heard the question, she knew it was the one she’d been hoping for.

  Imogen gave them a secret kind of smile. “I do things like this when I’m alone sometimes. Go to graveyards and touch every grave to see if any of them feel different. Or, when it rains, I catch the drops on my skin and if they make a shape, that shape will be a message about what’s happening in my life, some kind of secret. My parents don’t know what to do with me,” she added with very specific intonation, as if quoting something they said a lot. “They think I’m a bad influence.”

  “On who?” Lelia asked with a snort.

  “Haven.” That was Imogen’s little sister. The group had met her when they picked Imogen up from her house. Haven had red curls and cream-top skin. She had wanted to talk, so they all sat around the kitchen island for an hour, letting Haven be precocious for as long as they could stand. It had been almost impossible to peel Imogen away from her little shadow.

  “So what?” Lelia asked. “We’re witches now?” She ran her fingers over the ferns on the mother tree where she was sitting.

  “I want a name that’s ours,” Hawthorn said.

  Imogen nodded with a grave sort of understanding. Everyone else watched closely, in case she leaked something brilliant.

  Then Rachel leaped in, her voice soft and unsure. “Magic tastes like a spoon dipped in honey. Solid and liquid, silver and gold. Witch, though . . . It’s like when you go to the beach and the sea is gray and the sky is gray and you can’t tell which gray is which. That’s how witch tastes.”

  “What are you babbling about?” Lelia asked.

  “Rush has synesthesia,” Imogen announced proudly.

  “Is that contagious?” Lelia asked.

  “Who’s Rush?” June added, looking hungry for the secrets that Imogen and Rachel shared.

  “That decides it,” Imogen said. “We’re the Grays.”

  “What do we do?” June asked.

  “Anything,” Hawthorn said.

  “Everything,” Imogen said at the same time.

  “We live,” Lelia shouted, standing up on the tree, stretching her body up toward the sky.

  “We die,” Hawthorn bookended.

  Lelia tipped her thumb down. “Booooo.”

  “You can’t live unless you’re willing to die,” Hawthorn parroted, not even knowing they were Ora’s words until she’d already dressed them up in her own voice and passed them off as her opinion.

  “What if there are other options?” Imogen asked, kicking her shoes off, anchoring her feet in the bark.

  What if alive and dead weren’t the simple choices everyone acted so sure about? The Grays were really thinking about it now, their eyes slick with possibilities. They all knew people who were technically alive but weren’t bothering to live. They knew people who were dead on paper but whose memory lingered like sharp perfume after someone leaves a room.

  Imogen closed her eyes. “If I turn into a ghost, I’m going to haunt you all so much.”

  “Fuck that!” Lelia shouted.

  June laughed, hiding from the swear behind crosshatched fingers.

  “Really?” Imogen’s eyes snapped open, and the rest of the Grays focused on her pupils, slivered thin against the sun. “I thought it was a compliment. We’re friends now. I would never give you up just because I was dead.”

  She smiled, and the line of her lips was a thread, binding them.

  Danny slips out of her shoes and stands in her bare feet, adding her likeness to the other four. They gather in a circle around the pile, but not in the usual way. Now the Grays spin outward, their backs to the center, arm pressed to arm, protecting everything inside that circle.

  Rush sings a song that is made of thorns. Of Don’t come closer.

  Hawthorn weaves words through the notes, stitching together a warning as she sprinkles water from the Pacific vial on top of the shoes and the rosin, the flowers and the wax and the hair. Her fingers shake, but her voice is steady. “You will not touch what is not yours.” She passes the vial, and they all dip their fingers in the water and sprinkle it, repeating the words. “You will not touch what is not yours. You will not touch what is not yours.”
<
br />   Even though sunset is hours away, darkness drops. The Grays have time to share one panicked look before the water they’re dribbling catches fire, and the fire eats everything it falls on. The Grays are pitched out of the circle, away from one another. Danny cries out, her fingers singed. Hawthorn catches herself on her palm, bloody where it hits a rock. June falls, her leg twisted beneath her. She gasps, but the wrench is too sudden to feel how bad it is at first.

  And then, it’s a thousand hornets stinging. It’s having your leg fall asleep hard and wake up harder, the pins and needles staying hours or days past the time when they should have faded.

  This hurt is going to stay with her.

  The unnatural darkness lets up, leaving the Grays in the standard blue of late afternoon. When the Grays put themselves back together, they turn to find that, where the likenesses were a minute ago, there are only five marks of scorched earth, like dark sunbursts.

  “Did it work?” Danny asks.

  June takes Danny by the arm, even though she’s the one limping, and says, “Magic tells you when it’s working.”

  “So what was that?”

  The Grays look at one another, trying to nominate someone to give Danny the bad news. But there’s no obvious choice this time.

  “Blowback,” they say, tripping over one another.

  “Sometimes it’s because you’re trying a spell you don’t have the power for,” Hawthorn adds carefully.

  “But you don’t think that’s what happened,” Danny says.

  Hawthorn touches the burn marks on the ground and winces. The Grays know that sometimes it’s a gift to be read and understood, but just as often, it feels curse-like. There is no hiding when someone truly knows you. The lies you can tell narrow down, and soon nowhere is safe.

  The only way to keep a secret safe is to say nothing.

  “We couldn’t do the spell because it had already been cast,” Lelia says.

  “Imogen?” Danny asks. “She put a ward on you?”

  The Grays nod. They should have known. They’d felt Imogen every minute since she left, but they thought that was just a natural by-product of her being gone. A missing so strong that it filled every minute.