“Crunchies is all the way in Gratton. It’s kind of late for that?”
“I know.” Lorelei winked at her, which didn’t feel entirely appropriate. “But I’m in the mood.”
Alexa wasn’t. She wanted to ask why Keith had come to their house, and whether Alexa was really the only thing stopping Lorelei from moving up to Black Grass like she needed to. She wanted to ask what Lorelei thought would happen when Alexa turned eighteen. But it made her sad to think that she only had a few months left in this cozy little house, so Alexa reached for her cardigan.
“Watch over the house while we’re gone, Domino!” Lorelei said as she locked the door.
* * *
—
On the drive to Gratton, Lorelei played her favorite Fleetwood Mac album. She sang along to every song, and when she wasn’t singing, she was asking Alexa questions about school and college apps and Dan and whether they were going to the Winter Formal (they were not). She kept it up until they got to the counter at Crunchies.
Lorelei dropped her sample spoon in the little trash can on the counter and said, “I just remembered, while we’re out here, I need to check something with the property management company—I’ll just drop by and see if Swann is there. Order me a toffee almond fudge cone?” She passed Alexa a ten-dollar bill.
“It’s like nine o’clock. Aren’t they closed?”
“Swann literally never sleeps, and her office is in Fault Line Tattoo. It’s next door. I’ll be right back.”
Alexa waited in Crunchies as the only employee—probably a kid from North Coast High—wiped down the counters and put lids on the ice cream tubs. Her ice cream was long gone, and Alexa could tell he was about to ask her to leave when Lorelei breezed back in.
“Sorry!” she chirped. “Took a second longer than I thought.”
“Is something wrong?” Alexa held out Lorelei’s mostly melted cone. She’d had to stick it in a cup.
Lorelei shoved a drippy spoonful into her mouth. “Now that I’ve got ice cream there isn’t!”
Alexa wasn’t sure she believed her.
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 12, SENIOR YEAR
Dan
Friday at sundown, North Coasters congregated in the parking lot of the Taubmann Nature Conservancy, a mile north of Marlena. It was two days since Zephyr’s disappearance, and a poster-size version of her senior yearbook portrait stood next to a podium with a microphone and two TV cameras.
Someone handed Dan an unlit candle and a paper cup with a hole punched through the bottom to catch the falling wax. Half of North Coast must have been there: virtually the entire populations of Marlena and Dogtown, every little town’s mayor, the teachers from North Coast and St. Ignatius, the volunteer fire brigade, even Mad Mags mumbling to herself as she wandered through the crowd. To her horror, Dan spotted her parents talking to their friends from Dogtown Solstice Parade Committee and gave them a wide berth.
Dan had rarely seen Zephyr since high school started. Zephyr had enrolled at St. Ignatius instead of North Coast, but she had gone to the tiny Dogtown-Marlena School, same as Dan and Liss and every other local kid. The school had fewer than one hundred kids, spread between kindergarten and eighth grade. She and Zephyr weren’t friends anymore, but that didn’t mean Dan didn’t know her. Dan would have been at the vigil even if Liss hadn’t insisted that the circumstances of Zephyr’s disappearance felt a little too familiar.
Dan scanned the parking lot for Liss. There were several groups of girls wearing ultra-down or polar fleece jackets over St. Ignatius’s uniform of pleated skirts and sailor shirts with little scarves as ties. A few were wearing jackets from St. Ignatius’s softball team; Zephyr had been the captain. Within each group, the girls were parceled into pairs: best friends with arms slung around each other, heads resting on shoulders, holding hands with fingers laced together tight, so they wouldn’t be the next girl lost. Dan bristled. Like the girls had been assigned a pair and in pairs they would survive this terrible thing, with both girls intact and perfect and happy on the other side. But there were always girls left alone, asking why her friend let go first, hating everything, most of all herself, and still wondering if she should have held on tighter.
Dan found Liss on the far side of the parking lot. She was nestled into a group of girls, but Dan could tell immediately by the way Liss held herself—arms folded awkwardly over her chest, phone clutched in her right hand, and on her left, fingers counting up to four and back—that they weren’t really her friends. They were what she had instead, girls to stand with at an event like this where it would be weird to be alone.
As Dan watched, the girls bunched together to pose for a few frowny-faced selfies (the vigil had its own hashtag), and Liss joined in, trying to play along with the way the other girls’ foreheads crinkled up with worry.
What did these girls see when they looked at Liss? A pretty girl, a smart girl, who maybe was a little strange because she locked her car too many times and fiddled with her fingers. They didn’t see how being a pretty girl was as much a compulsion as it was a stroke of genetic luck, that what was half the time intelligence was the other half a brain that would never just shut up, and that her skin crawled if she tried to lock the car just once.
They didn’t know her at all, not the way Dan did.
Liss spotted Dan and untangled herself from the St. Ignatius girls. She met Dan at the hot beverages station that someone had set up in the bed of a pickup truck.
“Can you believe all this?” Liss huffed as Dan served herself a cup of hot chocolate.
“What are you talking about?”
“Everyone’s so upset. Even the local news is here, and they only come out to Marlena if it’s Fourth of July or there’s some kind of apocalyptic storm.”
“Oh, that . . . Yeah, I can believe it.” Dan plopped marshmallows into her drink. “A girl’s missing, Liss. People care.”
Liss was hard-eyed, surveying the crowd. “They didn’t when it was Johnny.”
“Johnny’s not a girl. Zephyr’s pretty, white, and her family’s rich.”
“Johnny’s mother’s a dentist.”
“You know what I mean. They’re not rich like the Finnemores. And he’s Chinese.”
Liss glared at her. “What difference does that make?”
Dan wondered if that possibility had ever crossed Liss’s mind before: that Johnny’s case hadn’t gotten more attention because of anything she’d done, but because of things that were beyond her—and his—control. But Dan didn’t have the energy to explain to Liss why the world cared more about white girls than anyone else, including brown girls like Dan. She shifted topics. “They don’t think she ran away. She left her phone.”
It was this particular detail—the leaving of the phone on the driver’s seat—that disturbed people the most. It was cited as the top piece of evidence that Zephyr hadn’t simply gone, but had been taken against her will, because obviously even if she was going to leave behind her whole life, she would never willingly have left behind her phone. For a teenage girl to physically exist in the world separate from her phone—it was hard to stomach.
There was other evidence against the runaway theory. Zephyr hadn’t taken anything from her room, and obviously she had left her car, which Dan thought would be a lot more useful to a runaway than a phone. It couldn’t be a Romeo and Juliet thing, because her boyfriend, Brodie, had no idea where she was. He was in attendance at the vigil and was dramatically grief-stricken. In the short time Dan had been there, before any of the speakers had addressed them or they’d sung any of the songs they’d received the photocopied words to, he’d wept openly twice. There were other darryls there to comfort him with bear hugs as he cried: Chas, who was always trying to get his white-boy dreadlocks to take; Rodrigo, who was born in a cabin in the woods and didn’t get a birth certificate until he was five; and a red-haired girl-darryl, Willow, who manned the coffee
cart that was Marlena’s only source of caffeine.
Now, Willow was telling a teacher from St. Ignatius—and anyone else who would listen—about how crazy it was that she’d sold Zephyr coffee every morning and how that made Zephyr like a sister. Willow had been the one who’d introduced Zephyr to Brodie in the first place. “She wouldn’t just run away and leave him behind,” Willow said again.
Liss frowned and muttered to Dan, “Johnny left his girlfriend behind. And his phone. That didn’t stop everyone from saying he was a runaway.”
“We didn’t want them asking questions, remember?” Dan said under her breath.
“Still would have been nice if they’d tried a little harder.”
Dan wondered who Liss was angry for—Johnny or herself? Liss would have loved to be up there, forcing a tear or two out in front of a crowd, finding out how she looked on TV when the segment aired on the news at eleven.
Liss finished her surveillance of the crowd and turned to Dan. “That one little thing notwithstanding, the similarities are stupid obvious, right?”
“Not really,” Dan protested. Liss had sent her approximately ten thousand text messages outlining her theory in the last two days, so Dan had her rebuttal ready. “Yes, they found Zephyr’s car by the side of the road with nothing missing or stolen, which is the same way they found Johnny’s, but the highway patrol finds like, hundreds of abandoned cars a year out here. That’s point one. Point two, there isn’t a right-angle crossroad on Highway 1 for miles near where her car was parked. Three, it wasn’t the last day of the month. Four, they didn’t find any candles or salt or anything like that.”
“That we know of. And they didn’t find that in Johnny’s car either, remember? Because we took it all with us.”
“So who was she doing the spell with? You think the softball team is some kind of coven now?”
Liss briefly returned her attention back to the pack of girls she’d left. “No. I’ve been trying to figure out if any of the other girls have anything magical going on, but they’re all very . . . regular.”
“And five, everyone agrees she was going to meet her boyfriend,” Dan said. “You think she pulled over to try a spell real quick in the middle of road, all by herself?”
“You’re right,” Liss said.
“I am?”
“She could have done it with the darryls. Willow’s a crystal hunter, and you never know about people like that.”
“Which tells us what, exactly? She’s tapped into teenager-kidnapping evil?”
Liss considered this a lot more seriously than Dan had intended it, then raised an eyebrow at her. “I think we should follow them. See where they go after this thing is over.”
“We can’t follow them. What are we even looking for?”
“Anything out of the ordinary. You said your research on Kasyan didn’t turn up anything more than mine. We need any lead we can get. And you should stay at my place tonight, and we can ask the Black Book.”
“I told Alexa we’d hang out later.”
“Well, gosh, Dan, I guess you’ll have to think of an excuse to ditch her.” Liss’s blue eyes were steely. “Alexa can survive one night without you.”
“I’m not going to lie to Alexa for you.”
Liss cocked a knowing eyebrow at Dan. “Whatever.” Then she fished a tissue out of the pocket of her St. Ignatius polar fleece and turned toward the podium. “The speeches are about to begin. Keep an eye out for anything suspicious.”
Alexa
The sun was setting. It would probably be an hour or two until Lorelei got home, which meant it was the perfect time to work on The Quest of the Axials, which is what she had decided to name her story about a girl warrior-gang after she realized they all carried enchanted battle-axes. But even though she had the map she’d drawn of Flintowerland and her notebook and her favorite pen and her cup of tea, she couldn’t concentrate. Dan was supposed to text her to make plans to meet up after the vigil thing, but it was getting late and she still hadn’t.
Dan had been weird again at school that day. Or maybe she wasn’t being weird at all and Alexa was just paranoid. Well, she was definitely being paranoid. Every time she checked her phone and Dan hadn’t texted her, she practically choked on the certainty that Dan was never going to text her again. Dan had probably decided that she was over Alexa, and maybe hadn’t even really liked her in the first place anyway.
It sounded crazy, but Dan was only human, and most humans couldn’t be trusted.
Alexa took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes.
Out the window, the sun had sunk into the Pacific, and darkness was hemming in the house on all sides—the kind of darkness that existed nowhere in LA, and not even out in the desert in Arizona, where tree cover was hard to come by.
Then Domino, who was sitting on the windowsill as usual waiting for Lorelei to return, jumped to the ground, his hackles raised, and a hiss crackled through the room.
“Dude,” Alexa said. “Chill.”
Domino did not chill.
Instead, he darted over to Alexa and began skulking back and forth in front of her, his eyes on the front door and his tail switching.
Alexa could hear a car was coming, and glanced out the window. Headlights.
“That’s her, you can relax,” she said to the cat, and reached out to scratch him behind the ears. She snatched her hand back when he hissed at her.
“Dumb cat,” Alexa whispered. “Never liked me.”
The ruff of Domino’s neck bristled into a kind of mane as the headlights got closer. The car turned into their driveway.
And drove directly into the house.
* * *
—
Thank god for the porch, Alexa was thinking. Of all things, she was thinking thank god for the porch so that the car had hit that, even clearing the columns that supported the porch’s roof, and only damaging the railing, because this meant that she hadn’t driven into the living room—into the room Alexa had just been sitting in, blanket-wrapped and cozy on the couch. It also meant the landlord was less likely to kill them and that Lorelei was probably fine.
She was probably fine.
The car’s nose was wedged into the side of the wooden steps onto the porch, but Alexa could tell Lorelei had managed to turn the engine off. It was making that tssk tssk tssk the Subaru made when it was cooling down. The headlights were still on, casting a too-bright light that amplified the darkness around them. Alexa couldn’t see into the car, but Lorelei still hadn’t gotten out.
She was probably fine, she wasn’t even going fast enough for the airbag to go off, Alexa told herself as she ran to the driver’s side door. Ignoring the fact that she felt it in the tingling in her fingers, the bristling at the back of her neck: something wasn’t right.
“Lorelei,” Alexa said—she deliberately kept her voice even and low—as she opened the door. “Are you okay?”
Lorelei was slumped over the steering wheel, her arm slung across the top and her forehead resting on it. Her long hair wasn’t tied back, and hung into her face, some stuck in her mouth. The other arm hung limply at her side, but she was clearly breathing, sucking in quick, rattling breaths.
Alexa switched from asking to telling without waiting for Lorelei to answer her question. “You’re okay, you’re okay,” she cooed, as she took Lorelei by the shoulders and gently leaned her back onto the seat. “It’s probably just a broken nose. It hurts a lot, but you’re okay.”
But there was no blood, not anywhere—at least not that Alexa could see in the car’s weak overhead light. There was something shuddery, twitchy about Lorelei, as if she was flinching every time Alexa touched her, and even when she didn’t. “Did you hit your head? We should go to the hospital.”
At this suggestion, Lorelei seemed to shiver. She gripped Alexa’s arm, balling the sleeve of her sweater in her fist. “No hos
pital. Not—not my head.”
Then Alexa saw it. The skin on the back of Lorelei’s hand where it gripped her sweater was a spiderweb of black. It started at her fingertips, her nails rimmed in something dark, then crawled down the veins between her knuckles, the thin capillaries across the back of her palm, and up into her forearm.
Lorelei hadn’t been hurt in the accident.
“Inside,” Lorelei heaved. “Get me inside.”
* * *
—
She could barely walk, her joints seemed too loose to hold her up, her limbs clacking against each other, and Alexa practically had to carry her up the porch stairs. Inside, Domino was hysterical, running circles around them with his ears back flat, as Alexa half dragged Lorelei into her bedroom.
Lorelei collapsed onto the bed like a marionette with its strings cut.
“You’re okay, you’re okay,” Alexa repeated. Could Lorelei even hear her? Her eyes were open but it was more like she’d forgotten to close them than she was using them to see. She was still breathing and she was still twitching, the way she had been in the car, and if anything it was worse, coming in waves of full-body spasms. She almost kicked Alexa in the head as she pulled off her shoes and socks.
Alexa gasped, a sock dangling from one hand. The black was creeping from Lorelei’s toes into her foot, over the knob of her ankle and up into her leg. But Alexa would not let herself panic. Constitutionally, she wasn’t a panicker. She’d dealt with adults doing all kinds of irresponsible things—Kim had called her drunk and hysterical from bars, had once gone on a week-long cruise and left her alone in the house with a few boxes of powdered mac and cheese and forty bucks, had brought home boyfriends who punched holes in the walls to make a point. Alexa kept it together. Alexa solved problems. She had learned not to call the cops or paramedics or anyone unless someone told you to, which they never did.
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