A Wicked Magic

by Sasha Laurens

  Alexa told her everything she knew. The last few hours had been fertile with gossip. Kids from St. Ignatius took rumors home to Marlena or Dogtown, text messages circulated unrestrained by no-phones-during-school-hours rules, the police department issued a statement, and everyone overheard parents whispering into their phones.

  The missing girl was Zephyr Finnemore, seventeen, of Marlena Beach. Her father was a tech entrepreneur, which meant no one really knew how he’d gotten rich, and her mother was returning as fast as possible from a trip to Palm Springs. It was suspected that Zephyr disappeared on the way to meet up with her boyfriend, who was a darryl—North Coaster slang for derelict (Dan had explained), which referred to the dudes and occasional lady who traveled up and down the county looking for odd jobs, a place to crash, and a friend to share some good herb. There were good darryls and bad darryls, but everyone thought Zephyr’s darryl, whose name was Brodie, was basically an all right guy. Alexa had no idea how that consensus had emerged, since he was thirty-one years old—fourteen years older than Zephyr, which was super disgusting and for sure illegal—and he slept on a massage table he carted around to construction sites where he worked as a carpenter. Apparently being okay with that kind of situation was a North Coast thing (Dan had explained), although Alexa still thought it was extremely nasty.

  Zephyr’s car had been found a mile past the turn to Brodie’s current home/work site with her phone still in it. The police were looking for tips on Zephyr’s whereabouts and wouldn’t say if Brodie was a suspect. Most people seemed to believe this wasn’t his kind of thing, which made Alexa wonder whose kind of thing people thought this was, if not a full-grown adult who was basically homeless and got down with high school girls.

  Lorelei’s face grew increasingly drawn as Alexa recounted her gossip, with a deep wrinkle slicing between her eyebrows. When Alexa was done, Lorelei got up and lit the small candles in the altar she had set up in the defunct fireplace. It was a quirky array of precisely positioned items that Lorelei often reconfigured: chunky crystals or dull rocks, dried plants or fresh flowers, candles in any color of the rainbow. Alexa never asked why; she assumed Lorelei’s spirituality was private.

  Kneeling on the floor, Lorelei blew out her match. “I’m going to finish this assignment and then we’ll get out of here, okay? We’ll go back to LA. It was better for you there, right?”

  Alexa thought about North Coast’s too-damp weather and how the nearest actual nonfrozen-pizza place was forty-five minutes away and the strange reality that it was almost impossible to find food that wasn’t organic. Sometimes the yellow sun of LA felt like a liquid gold dream. But then she thought about Dan, and crawling out onto the roof from her bedroom window and singing along to the music in her car during the forty-five-minute drive to that pizza place and how Dan could with just one look make Alexa crack up entirely during history class.

  Maybe Alexa’s life in North Coast wasn’t quite normal. It certainly wasn’t a life she could have imagined for herself when things with her mother had gotten so bad that Lorelei suggested Alexa come stay with her. But North Coast was the first place Alexa didn’t feel like an afterthought—a place that finally felt something like home.

  “I don’t know,” Alexa said. “Dogtown’s growing on me.”

  Lorelei leaned against the fireplace lintel. She seemed more relaxed with the candles now flickering, but Alexa could tell she was a little surprised. “Then we’ll talk about it. I’ll finish the story as fast as I can and we’ll figure it out. But until then, just . . . be safe, okay? Stay away from creepy darryls—stay away from everything creepy. Promise?”

  “You’re sounding awfully maternal.”

  “I’m not kidding, kid. You’re too smart to go around doing stupid things. Promise me?”

  “I promise,” Alexa said.

  SIX

  THURSDAY, DECEMBER 11, SENIOR YEAR

  Dan

  Thursday’s block schedule meant Dan had her last period free, and today she spent it holed up in the library, logged in to the most out of the way computer she could find. She was meeting Liss after school to try to recast the spell that had reached Johnny, as soon as Liss could get from St. Ignatius to Gratton. Dan didn’t know how to feel. She couldn’t ignore the tremors of excitement she felt at the prospect of doing magic again, even though the Black Book was still hidden under her bed and she hadn’t gotten up the nerve to look at it.

  Then there was Liss. Dan had practically promised Alexa she would keep the Lizard at arm’s length. She had definitely not been honest about the fact that she was seeing Liss after school. As much as Dan dreaded seeing her, there was a part of her heart that still answered to Liss, that had never stopped missing her.

  Plus, if she was honest, she was curious too.

  The magic Dan knew had always been about spells, charms, and incantations. Dan didn’t know how they worked, only that they did. But magic wasn’t creatures—or it hadn’t been, until that terrifying woman who stole Johnny away. Now Liss wanted her to believe there was a demon-lord-whatever named Kasyan hiding underground and keeping Johnny captive. She wouldn’t have believed at all if Alexa hadn’t mentioned the fairy tales. Was Kasyan made up or not?

  It was time for some research.

  Dan opened an incognito browser. It had been months, but she still remembered the URLs and her log-ins. Of course, the witchboards all looked exactly the same. Most of the message boards had never updated their original aesthetic of purple and black, that hideous basic-HTML blue for every link, and clipart that was older than Dan was. She checked all the usual sites: Occultists Anonymous, Spellshare, ~*~The Unknown~*~. She could practically hear Liss sneering, “Why does everyone on the witchboards have to be so lame?”

  There wasn’t much of anything on Kasyan. On the first board, the few threads on him had been wiped by the moderators. All that remained were cryptic subject lines.

  Kasyan Lord of Last Resort—seeking any info!!! [7 replies]

  Question for an occult lexicographer on Kasyan/Cassian/Kashus [23 replies]

  lord kasyan + blood plagues [4 replies]

  U will NOT believe this! **Kasyan** [46 replies]

  Dan frowned. It didn’t seem that the posts violated the community guidelines, but if they’d been deleted anyway, she had to move on.

  The other witchboards were no better. On one, searches for Kasyan and all variant spellings turned up exactly zero results, which was unusual.

  Dan typed the name into a regular search, hoping for better luck. This time they loaded, but even ten pages deep into the results, all she’d done was scribble down a half dozen conflicting interpretations that had the feel of rumors. Dan chewed the end of her pen. You didn’t usually come across hard facts when researching the occult, but typically knowledge and experience congealed around a consensus. Kasyan wasn’t like that: there was barely enough information to bring together at all.

  Dan was about to give up when she followed a link to a site that collected “dark popular beliefs.” She didn’t know what “dark popular beliefs” were, but the site had pages on everything from Cthulhu to the Tunguska Event to the Knights Templar, combining things that were obviously made up with things that had actually happened, and lumping in outdated superstitions and folklore with real religious beliefs. Dan rolled her eyes. She didn’t expect the site to be helpful, but she clicked onto the page for Kasyan anyway.

  KASYAN

  * * * PROCEED WITH CAUTION * * *

  Also Known As: Lord Kasyan—Lord of Last Resort—Kasyan the Unmerciful—Kasyan the Merciful

  Type: Trickster, Wish-Granter

  Kasyan is famous for misguided kindness. He grants wishes to serve himself more than the wisher.

  Dates Associated: February 29

  Sightings: None recorded

  One tale survives of a village that worshipped Kasyan, in exchange for good
harvest, until Kasyan abducted all the village’s unmarried girls. Villagers moved his Saint’s Day to the leap day in retaliation, a tradition that spread when

  The entry cut off. Dan reloaded the page, but the missing text never appeared. She even navigated to a few others (La Llorona, Bigfoot) to check that they loaded just fine.

  Dan glared at the page. Kasyan couldn’t really grant wishes—nothing could do that. Probably nothing could do that.

  But the date was right.

  “Is that an assignment for Coding?”

  Dan jumped at Alexa’s voice behind her and hurriedly closed the browser window. Unfortunately, behind it, she’d left ~*~The Unknown~*~ open in all its garish royal purple glory. The page was decorated with rough jpegs of hexagrams and black cats, which was cheeky and stupid when Dan was alone, but totally humiliating for someone else to see.

  “Are you on a message board?” Alexa asked.

  Dan closed the window and flipped her notebook shut, but she knew she was blushing. “Uh, yeah, it was . . . about IronWeaks. There’s a rumor about some unreleased songs.”

  Alexa dropped into the chair at the computer next to Dan and began to spin herself in slow circles. “Want to do homework at SmoothieTown? I don’t have to be home until dinner.”

  “Actually I think I can’t today?” Dan’s voice edged upward, like she was asking Alexa’s permission. “I mean I definitely can’t, I have to stop by Achieve! My old manager wanted to talk to me.”

  “I can wait while you do that, no problem.”

  Dan’s face wrinkled up in a way that certainly didn’t make her lie any more convincing. “It could take a while, I don’t know? You can go home. If you want to.”

  “Good to know that I can go home. If I want to,” Alexa said.

  “I just meant I can’t hang out, that’s all.” Dan shoved her notebook into her backpack and signed out of the computer. “But I have to run or I’ll be late.”

  Her cheeks on fire, Dan headed out of the library, leaving Alexa slowly spinning in a computer chair alone.

  Liss

  When Liss walked into Aroma Café on Main Street in Gratton, it took her a minute to find Dan. First, Mad Mags was occupying the front of the cafe, pacing back and forth in front of the window so that bits of newspaper and little feathers and a whole lot of odor swirled in her wake.

  “Hi, Mags,” Liss mumbled.

  “I’m waiting, I said I’ll wait, I’ll wait right here.” Mags chattered nonsense in reply. “He’s the very best at what he does!”

  Mags was a North Coast fixture, spotted anywhere from Jenner up to north of Gratton, where civilization petered out. She’d been around for as long as Liss could remember, wearing the same long and ratty skirt, which Liss hoped was as Victorian as it looked, because then Mad Mags would have a petticoat under it, rather than a large volume of stinking newspaper. Her hair hung down to the small of her back, in greasy, gray-brown hanks that seemed to contain their own ecosystem. But as unclean and mentally unsound as Mags might be, she was a North Coaster. She was welcome in almost any business, and there were a number of homes where she had standing invitations, in case of bad weather. Dan once told Liss that kids in Dogtown had a superstition, that it was bad luck not to say hi to Mad Mags when you saw her. Liss thought that was ridiculous, but then couldn’t help herself from doing it.

  Second, Dan was sitting in a corner all the way at the back of the coffee shop, slurping the whipped cream off a coconut mocha and casing the place like she was about to rob it and needed quick access to the exits. There was only one reason why Dan wouldn’t want to be seen at a coffee place she went to literally every week. Liss pursed her lips against her smile and wondered what Dan had told Alexa she was up to.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Dan said the minute she saw Liss.

  “Hello to you too,” Liss said. “Why are you in such a hurry? I want to get a chai.”

  * * *

  —

  They followed the swing of the road north in the red Range Rover. It was a half an hour’s drive, but they barely talked. Dan was curled into a ball with her feet on the dash (which was not a clean or safe thing to do, but Liss decided to ignore it). Whenever Liss glanced at her, Dan looked away or had her eyes glued to the window. Sure, the drive up Highway 1 was psychotically beautiful, with the slate-gray Pacific and deep green pines shrouded in a fairy mist of fog, every switchback of the road revealing a little inlet where the waves crashed into the cliffs or washed up on narrow beaches. It was beautiful, but Dan had seen it before, thousands of times, and what she had not done in weeks and weeks was talk to Liss, her best friend.

  Once Dan texted her, Liss put the fight behind them. She’d assumed Dan had done the same—thus the texting. Liss hadn’t really wanted to hurt Dan, but the rules of the game were different when you were fighting: the whole point was to hurt the other person. Then later, you got over it and forgave them. So she’d already forgiven Dan for the cruel things she’d said about her and Johnny. If Dan hadn’t done the same, why had she agreed to help?

  Liss took her eyes off the road and peeked at Dan. She couldn’t tell if Dan was sulking or only tired. Liss didn’t know how she’d expected Dan to be. She would have said something like normal, but Dan was never exactly a ray of sunshine.

  It was one of Dan’s best qualities.

  The fight probably went differently for the winner (herself) and the loser (Dan). After all, she’d gotten what she wanted: Dan gave in. Liss was sympathetic—giving in was a feeling that she especially hated, and she knew its sour taste could linger. But giving in to trying to save someone’s life didn’t earn you a lot of pity points.

  Liss rolled her eyes.

  “You’re being taciturn,” Liss said.

  “The SATs are over.”

  “Put some music on.” Liss tossed Dan the cord.

  * * *

  —

  They parked on the shoulder about a hundred feet from the trailhead into Digger’s Gulch State Park, and Liss threw open the back of the Range Rover.

  “You came prepared,” Dan said.

  “Yeah, well, if I have to spend all my time hiking out into the middle of nowhere, I don’t want to die out there too.”

  The trunk was crammed with a mix of backwoods survival gear, magical equipment, and Liss’s school stuff: Mylar blankets and first aid kits alongside a plastic case Dan recognized as Liss’s crystal collection and a chemistry textbook. An eyeshadow palette had cracked open and glitterized a copy of the St. Ignatius Jesuit, the school’s newspaper, with two huge pictures of Zephyr Finnemore on the front page: her senior class portrait and a candid, celebrating a victory with the softball team she captained.

  Liss tossed the paper aside to rifle through her stuff. She grabbed two flashlights with extra batteries, two bottles of water, a whole box of wet wipes, and a rope, along with some candles and a lighter, and last, the mirror, and shoved it all into a backpack that she slung over her shoulder.

  Liss locked the car three times in a row.

  “Ready?” she asked Dan.

  Dan nodded, Liss locked the car again, and they headed into the park.

  * * *

  —

  The hike wasn’t long, but it was dismal on account of a fire last summer that had burned through a hundred of the park’s acres. They hiked out through nature that was either half dead or half living, depending on the angle you looked at it. Tiny, hardy plants began staking their claim to the place not so long after the fire, but it would be a long while before they obliterated the burnt-out husks of trees. It looked like the world with the scab picked off, which is why Liss had thought to check its auspices in the first place. That, and it was unpopular with hikers and joggers, which made the place creepy in a “life after people” way and therefore perfect for uninterrupted magic.

  Dan followed Liss in a silence that me
ant that she was always one step closer to complaining about how far it was. Dan hated hiking, an outcome of Graciela’s idea of quality family time and the uncool look of tall socks and hiking boots. Liss told her they were almost there three times, one of which was definitely a lie and one sort of a lie and the last one she quickly followed with, “I can literally see it from here,” which to Liss’s relief was basically true.

  Dan peered over the edge of the bank. “Jesus, Liss, how’d you get down there?”

  The banks of the gulch were steep, and although there was barely a trickle of water running through the bottom now, one good storm here or farther inland could raise the water level quickly, flooding the gulch with a fast-moving current seeking an outlet to the ocean. But Liss was fairly confident, based on her reading of the Doppler radar in that particular moment, there was low risk of a flash flood. The banks of the gulch were all exposed roots, rocks, and earth the color and texture of red clay, with few obvious footholds. Dan chewed her lip, eyeing the descent into the gulch uncertainly, and Liss knew what Dan was thinking: it wasn’t safe for her to have come out here alone, to have slid down into the gulch by herself and hoped she could scramble out again, in an empty state park where the cell reception was spotty at best and nonexistent on average. She could have gotten hurt, she could have gotten lost or stranded, she could have been just another North Coaster who dropped off the map.

  It felt good to see Dan like that—realizing how scared she was to lose her.

  Liss shrugged and dug around in the backpack for the rope. “Yeah, it was dangerous, but I was careful. What was I supposed to do, not go down there when the auspices were right? Someone had to.” Liss knotted the rope around a sturdy-looking tree on the bank and tossed the loose end into the gulch. Dan peered over the edge of the gulch. “Climbing down’s the easy part. It’s not that steep. The rope’s to make sure we can get out.”