A Wicked Magic

by Sasha Laurens

  “We just have to get through this,” Liss told her as she tapped her fingers against her thumb. Up to four and back. “Then we’ll try to find him. But we can’t do anything when the cops are around. You understand that, right, Dan?”

  She did. If Liss wanted to wait, she would wait. Maybe if they waited, it would not be so raw, so painful. The gnawing, black feeling inside her didn’t seem to be weakening with the passing days. Actually, the opposite was happening. It would wash over her like a wave of ice, bringing with it horrible little memories she didn’t want to know were hers.

  Like now, sitting next to Liss, who was watching a cop car across the parking lot and doing that nervous thing with her fingers, Dan remembered this:

  The way Johnny’s hands seized up into rigid claws the moment that the strange woman they had summoned chose him and how Dan had watched those same hands slip into Liss’s only a few minutes earlier, their fingers laced and palms pressed together.

  She remembered the absolute, void-like blackness of the woman’s eyes; her too-long, thin fingers and their thick yellow nails; how the night air swirling around her suddenly carried the scent of decay.

  Tears stung Dan’s eyes. She’d cried so much in the last forty-eight hours she thought the swelling around her eyes might never go down.

  “Jesus, I wish I could cry as easily as you,” Liss said as Dan yanked down her sleeve to wipe her eyes.

  And so Dan sat beside Liss, trying to hold back her tears as Liss tried to muster her own. “My boyfriend disappeared,” Liss whispered to herself. “My boyfriend disappeared,” over and over until her eyes were watery and she was sniffling. Then they got out of the car, which Liss locked three times in a row, took a few steps, then locked it three more times, like she always did, and went to the cafeteria so Liss could cry in front of an audience.

  * * *

  —

  They found his car the next day: a beat-up silver Volvo pulled off the road into the grass beyond the shoulder, at an intersection near Hare Creek State Park. There was talk of a candlelight vigil at the school, or at the North Coast Community Center, but it never came to pass. Liss told the police her story of Johnny’s plan to get high and go for a drive, and Dan told hers about doing homework at Liss’s. Johnny’s friends were cagey around the cops but agreed that that sounded like Johnny. They didn’t know if he was unhappy, if anything was troubling him, if he ever talked about hurting himself. He hadn’t been hanging around with them much since he started dating Liss. They didn’t know what he had been up to.

  The police labeled Johnny a “voluntary missing adult,” given that he was already eighteen, and marked his case low priority. By that time, an understanding of Johnny Su’s fate had emerged in Fort Gratton, in Dogtown, down in the mansions of Marlena. People went missing in the North Coast. Drifters floated in and out off Highway 1. Weed farmers operated in thousands of unmonitored acres of redwood forest. Local kids hitchhiked down to San Francisco or up to Portland, then called home when their money ran out, and middle-age parents moved into Buddhist retreats for weeks-long vows of silence. North Coasters lived off the land, wired solar panels to their camper vans, and microdosed hallucinogenic mushrooms in one of the thousands of pockets along the coast where cell coverage didn’t reach but the gray mist of fog did. Usually, they turned up again, though sometimes it was just their bodies, or worse, bones picked clean by the animals that called North Coast their home.

  Everyone knew Johnny was gone, at least for now. If he was coming back, it wasn’t because anyone could find him.

  THREE

  TUESDAY, DECEMBER 9, SENIOR YEAR

  Dan

  The day after the show, Alexa and Dan set up at their regular lunch spot at the back corner of the cafeteria, far from the soda machines (decommissioned by concerned parents) and the girls who giggled and shrieked at the boys throwing fries at one another. Dan examined her Tupperware without enthusiasm.

  “Yesterday’s quinoa with yucca,” she told Alexa as she doused a whitish chunk with hot sauce. “I thought it was impossible for Mexican people to make food this bland, but my mom’s under the impression that yucca’s an undiscovered superfood. And also under the impression that superfoods are a thing.”

  Alexa took a bite of her PB&J sandwich, which was a little smushed after spending the morning in her bag. “How are you doing, after last night? I thought you would text me.”

  “I’m fine,” Dan said mechanically. “I was super tired.”

  “Oh, good.” Alexa swallowed a mouthful. “Was worried for a second you might be upset by the whole nemesis-waiting-in-the-driveway-to-talk-about-her-boyfriend thing. But. Happy to hear you’re fine.”

  Dan let herself smile a little. She always said she was fine. It was a habit she couldn’t break, even when it was the furthest thing from the truth. She said it even as her eyes stung from holding back tears, and when her face felt like a hard mask, because she had somehow managed to sink to a place below feelings, where nothing reached her but sadness and the urge to sleep. Sometimes she said it with a savage desperation that others mistook for anger—that she had to be fine, because if she admitted to being something else, she would crumble.

  The funny thing was, Dan was never exactly sure if it really was a lie. Wasn’t she fine? Maybe sad was a bad way to be, but life was like that. It seemed foolish to expect more. After all, wasn’t that why everyone heard her say it—I’m fine—and whether they believed it or not, they accepted it? Even Liss, who had to have known when Dan felt so low it was like she had burned away to ash, never pushed her to say what was wrong.

  I’m fine was an agreement. It meant: I’ll never mention this, and you’ll never ask.

  Or that’s what it used to mean, until Alexa.

  Alexa never let her be fine. The first time it happened had been mid-September, only a few weeks into their friendship, and Dan had been so miserable and bleak, she’d been stabbing a paperclip into her thigh through her pocket to get through her morning classes without crying. At lunch, Alexa made it clear with an arch of her eyebrow that she didn’t buy Dan’s deflection. “But seriously?” she’d asked, her hazel eyes searching and her forehead a little tight with concern. “You seem down. What’s bothering you?”

  It was as if Alexa, with one glance, had seen through the person Dan pretended to be—the person everyone agreed she was. “Yeah, I guess,” Dan mumbled. “Kind of down. It’s just . . . stuff.”

  Alexa sighed sympathetically. “Stuff. I’ve got that too.”

  And even though it shouldn’t have made any difference at all, it was as if Alexa had found some back door to her heart by seeing her and not wanting to look away. It made Dan feel better, just a little. The feeling didn’t last, but a few hours of feeling close to okay was enough to get through the day.

  Now, Dan prodded a pale yucca-chunk and admitted, “It was weird to see her again. She didn’t expect you to be there.”

  “What, the Lizard thought you’d never make another friend?”

  Dan rolled her eyes. “Probably.”

  “You’re not going to text her, are you?” When Dan didn’t answer immediately, Alexa’s eyes widened. “You are not.” When Dan didn’t answer at all, they went even wider. “You already did? Jesus, Dan, not to put words in your mouth, but you literally told me you hate her.”

  “I don’t hate her.”

  “You said you wished you’d never met her and you called her a total garbage monster. All I mean is, you don’t have to do whatever she’s asking you to. You can just go on living your life.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Yes, it is.” There was a sudden hardness in Alexa’s voice. “She doesn’t care about you, Dan—she just wants to use you to get what she wants and then she’ll get rid of you.”

  “You don’t even know her.”

  “From what you’ve said about her, I don’t n
eed to. I’ve known enough bad people to recognize it when someone only cares about themselves, and that’s how Liss is. Fixing her damage is none of your business.”

  That Alexa hated Liss with iron certainty entirely on Dan’s behalf gave her an all-over warm feeling that seemed pretty similar to happiness. It made her want to promise Alexa that she’d never talk to Liss again, if that’s what Alexa thought was best. It made her want to trust Alexa with every secret.

  But not this one.

  This, Dan didn’t want Alexa to understand. She didn’t want Alexa to have to accept that Dan had messed around with magic, until she made a disastrous, unfixable mistake. She didn’t want to explain that feeling of transformation on the night that started it all in Liss’s bedroom and how it turned into something toxic.

  She wanted to go back to being the person she was before all that, the person who Alexa thought she was now: someone who didn’t know that there was magic in the world, real magic, and that it wasn’t a good thing.

  To call it magic didn’t even seem right. The magic most people knew was a lie, either magicians and card tricks or the fantasy novels that Alexa loved to read. What she and Liss had tapped into was more than that—not a deception at all, but the opposite, a tide of power that ran through the world totally unseen, a current that they could never understand, that had crashed over them when they had their backs turned and nearly dragged them under.

  Magic wasn’t friendly. It amazed you with its power to destroy, the same way the salt waves of the Pacific hammered cliffs into rubble, broke boats, annihilated beaches. Magic gave you gifts, but it took from you too, and although it had seemed fantastic and fun when she and Liss first tasted that world, they had learned better.

  Or at least Dan had.

  “It’s not about being friends again. We’re just going to talk one last time, for closure, and then we’ll be done, forever.” Dan stabbed another piece of yucca. “Anyway, I don’t think Liss’s damage is the kind that can be fixed.”

  Still, Alexa didn’t seem satisfied as she walked Dan to English class.

  “Tell Liss to be careful with this Kasyan guy, okay? Those stories Lorelei told me never ended well. They call him Kasyan the Unmerciful for a reason. Only a real weirdo would name himself after the Big Bad Wolf, right?”

  Liss

  That afternoon, Dan’s mom greeted Liss with a long, cozy hug. “You’ve stayed away too long! I missed your energy,” Graciela said. She pulled back and beamed at the girls, apparently failing to see that one of them was sulking and the other, with a bit more pressure, would snap entirely in two. “Beautiful. The power of female energy. It’s always such a strong presence in you girls.”

  “Seriously. Mom.” Dan’s cheeks flared.

  “Do you want some hot chocolate?” Graciela asked as she swept aside a piece of Liss’s hair that had come loose. “I just picked up some fresh goat milk.”

  “Mom!” Dan groaned, but Liss smiled. She loved Dan’s mom, but it hadn’t occurred to her to miss her until just now. Graciela was always there with a warm hug, a hunk of macrobiotic dark chocolate, or an unsolicited but shame-free talk about safely embracing sexual pleasure. Graciela always seemed shocked by their beauty and their maturity, not in the trivial way men sometimes admired Liss, but in a way that was rich with wonder and made her feel proud, as if she were on the brink of becoming someone amazing.

  Dan didn’t know how lucky she had it, to have a mom like that—a mom whose qualifications for wonderful you met by simply existing exactly as you were.

  Liss would have stayed there, safe in that warm kitchen with Graciela, even if it meant drinking goat milk hot chocolate, but Dan’s embarrassment was about to cause her to pass completely out of existence. They went up to Dan’s attic room, which was still the same old chaos of half-read books and IronWeaks posters and dirty laundry. Liss shoved aside a pile of Dan’s clothes and pulled her legs up under herself in the armchair by the window, the same way she’d always done. Dan climbed onto her bed and slumped against the pillows.

  Liss waited for a feeling of stillness and alignment to settle over her, now that she and Dan were both where they belonged again. Dan’s cozy room held more than memories of studying the Black Book, its magic pulsing in their fingertips. It was marathons of Brat Pack movies and sleepovers spent watching K-Pop music videos and stalking the social media accounts of all the boys Liss thought were cute. But still Liss felt that frizzing anxiety in her chest, as if every beat of her heart was a whispered not yet, not yet, not yet.

  She counted to four and back on her fingers and hoped that Dan didn’t see her do it.

  “So?” Dan asked.

  “Graciela won’t hear us?”

  Dan shook her head. “She’ll be in her pottery studio in the back. Tell me about Johnny.”

  So Liss told her: the spell she’d used, the birds, the weeks and weeks of failure until, finally, she reached Johnny.

  “So you saw him.”

  “That’s not really how it works. You don’t really see anything, it just gets into your head. I know he looks bad, like he hasn’t seen the sun since he was taken. He said he was underground somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  Liss rubbed her eyes. “Don’t you think I would have led with that information? He didn’t know, but he can’t get out of there by himself.”

  “So you’re saying he’s a prisoner.”

  “Kasyan’s prisoner.”

  “Do you know why they call him Kasyan the Unmerciful?”

  Liss made a mental note to add the Unmerciful to her notes. “Not yet. I’ve only just started the research on him. For some reason I haven’t had much luck online.” Liss paused and licked her lips. “But tonight we can start with the Black Book.”

  The Black Book. Like a sudden craving, Liss was aware of it, somewhere, in the room. In just a few moments she’d once again have the Book in front of her, its delicious electricity buzzing in her stomach and its crumbling pages promising to give you exactly what you wanted. This was the real reason Liss had let the Book stay with Dan: she didn’t trust herself around it. Her hunger for the Book was huge and inexplicable, like she wanted to devour it and for the book to devour her in return. She saw it in her dreams and woke up panting and desperate, her face screwed up in frustration. Liss knew she sounded like one of those people addicted to eating couch cushions—or she would have, if she had ever told anyone about it.

  Dan had been picking at a cuticle with rapt attention, but now she looked up. Liss wondered if Dan could see her trembling.

  “I don’t know,” Dan said.

  Liss flinched. “What don’t you know?”

  “The last time we used the Black Book, things didn’t exactly go as planned.”

  “This time will be different.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I know we can’t get Johnny kidnapped twice. Therefore, different.”

  “That’s not what I meant. I think we should try to move on and—”

  “Don’t you think I want to move on?” Liss snapped. “This is what we have to do to make that happen.”

  “This is what you think we have to do.”

  Dan rolled her eyes, and a sick bubble of desperation burst in Liss’s stomach. “Yes, I think we have to save Johnny. I think we owe it to him to try with everything we’ve got, Black Book included. But it so happens that what I think we have to do is what we actually have to do.”

  Dan glared at her. “You always have to be the one who decides.”

  Liss counted to four and back on her fingers. She would not lose Dan—she had been sure that Dan would throw herself at this, especially when Liss had already done so much on her own.

  Just then, she felt it like an open wound: she wanted her old life back. She’d lost the only person who knew the truth about Johnny, who had seen the oily eyes and long,
loose neck of the old woman who took him. Dan had been there in the moment they let magic tornado into their lives. She had to be there to find Kasyan too.

  But worse, Liss missed the time before Johnny had changed everything between them, when she and Dan would read each other’s tarot cards, trying to forecast their futures and fantasizing about the sprawling, bold lives they would live. They used to laugh at the idea of promising to be friends forever, because what ran between them was deeper than a promise—it was something that couldn’t be broken.

  She missed Dan.

  Liss forced herself to bring her tone back to something less acid. “You promised.”

  “Yeah, well.” Dan broke her gaze. “I made that promise because I trusted you.”

  “You don’t trust me anymore?” Liss sniffed.

  Dan made an incredulous, open-handed gesture around the room that seemed to capture everything between them, everything that had been said—that all of it was evidence of the answer to Liss’s question.

  “I can’t do this alone. I need your help with the spells. And I need the Book.”

  “Or, you could just not do any more spells.”

  Liss knew her voice was rising, but she couldn’t control it. “If that’s how you feel, give me the Book. It belongs to me too. I can do the spells myself.”

  Dan would know that wasn’t true where the Black Book was concerned: it needed the two of them there to tell them anything at all. “Why can’t you just let it go?”

  “Let it go?” Liss spat. “We can’t let it go when Johnny needs us. How can you say that when the spell was your idea in the first place?”

  Dan crumpled a little at this, but she pushed back. “It was your fault Johnny was there in the first place.”

  “Seriously? We were dating,” Liss said.