But this? Was this just another crazy irresponsible thing adults did?
Lorelei’s spasms were getting worse, her spine arching concave then convex and her legs pedaling into the bedclothes. Alexa swore she could see the black stuff spreading up Lorelei’s forearms, finding bigger, thicker veins that would carry it into her chest—her heart, her lungs, her brain. Even the air around Lorelei had gone strange—stinging and staticky and charged.
“What should I do? What am I supposed to do?”
Lorelei’s hand twisted painfully into a claw to beckon her, and Alexa went to her side. The blackness was seeping into the skin around her lips and tongue, making her mouth inky.
“Everything’s fine,” Alexa whispered, but she knew her voice sounded small and shaky and terrified. “You’re going to be okay.”
“No,” Lorelei managed through clenched teeth as another tremor passed through her. Her eyes rolled back so far Alexa could see the spindles of black against the whites.
Maybe she should have called someone—maybe she should now. Could an ambulance even get here in time if she did?
“You don’t need to talk. You’re okay,” Alexa said.
The tendons of Lorelei’s neck strained as she struggled to keep her eyes on Alexa. She put a hand to her throat—Alexa’s eyes went wide at the swollen blackness of Lorelei’s fingers. They were bloated, the joints and knuckles almost indistinguishable. Her fingers were searching for the necklace she always wore, with a charm of an evil eye, but she could barely bend them. Still, when she found the charm, a sense of calm seemed to settle over her, or maybe the spasms were passing, Alexa didn’t know. Her skin—all the skin that Alexa could see, at least—was riven with black lines. They fell across her cheeks and forehead, her chest and arms, but it still seemed to be spreading.
Another spasm rolled through Lorelei’s corrupted body. She strained against herself, and the hand she’d woven under her necklace snapped the chain. She pulled it free and pressed it into Alexa’s hand. The charm was hot against Alexa’s skin. It smelled acrid, like burning hair, and as Lorelei pressed it to her, the energy seemed to be draining from her even further.
“I love you,” Lorelei said in a way that set free all the panic Alexa had been keeping at bay, because that could not be the last thing Lorelei said, Lorelei could not be dying, just because she wasn’t moving anymore, just because her eyes were rolling back without the lids closing and her limbs were all rigid and dark and Alexa wasn’t sure if she was breathing at all—she could not be dying, not like this. Tears rolled down Alexa’s cheeks as she grabbed tight to Lorelei’s mangled hands, the chain of the necklace laced between them.
“No, no—Lorelei, can you hear me? You’re going to be okay.”
A slow hiss of air was coming from her now, the last air leaving her lungs, and something imploded in Alexa.
A hysterical, furious certainty caught like the flashover of a fire and charged through her. Lorelei could not die. Lorelei was too good, had done too much for Alexa when she had no good reason to help her at all, and Alexa loved her more fiercely than she’d ever loved anyone. It was a debt Alexa could never repay, but it meant the world owed her. It meant at least that Lorelei deserved her life, which meant she had to live.
“Don’t go, don’t leave me.” Alexa wasn’t sure if she whispered or screamed, but it felt like a prayer. The air was snapping and hissing around her. “You can’t die—you can’t, Lorelei, please!”
It was senseless and she knew it and she let herself feel sure of it anyway. Death was a fact, not a matter of belief or desire, and it didn’t care anything for what she believed. But at the same time, that certainty was the same thing as loving Lorelei, and Alexa knew from all the novels she’d read that love wasn’t the kind of fire that could be blown out, just like that.
But Lorelei wasn’t breathing anymore, not even in that thin hissy way. She wasn’t moving. Her muscles had frozen in a contorted pose, as if she’d been running for something and gotten stuck midstride, but any minute she might move again.
Alexa’s tears—she thought they were her tears—darkened Lorelei’s blue sheets.
“Don’t leave me like this,” she whispered. Alexa closed her eyes, her hands still laced with Lorelei’s, and her tears not slowing at all. “Don’t be dead.”
At first, Alexa thought she was imagining it, but the staticky air seemed to tighten and shift around them, picking up into a breeze, then a real wind, blowing papers from Lorelei’s bedside table and whipping her hair against her face. From the other room, the front door slammed against its frame—and still, Alexa couldn’t let go of Lorelei’s hands.
Just as suddenly, the air stilled.
Lorelei shuddered out a breath. Then another.
And another.
EIGHT
Liss
Dan checked her phone for the twenty-five-millionth time, which Liss had already told her to stop doing because a really good way to be able to see absolutely nothing at night was to shine a bright light directly in your own face. Dan didn’t seem to care.
Obviously Dan was waiting for a text from Alexa, because she wore the same rag-doll look whenever that happened, which was pretty ridiculous considering that it wasn’t like Alexa was her boyfriend or anything. At Liss’s suggestion, Dan had told Alexa that she was feeling down after Zephyr’s thing and wanted to chill at home. Dan had said she doubted Alexa would be satisfied at that, but it looked like Liss had been right after all.
They were sitting on a bluff overlooking the gloomy Pacific. A few feet from their position, the dry, blond grass gave way to a steep, sandy slope that two hundred feet below opened out into a locals-only beach in Dogtown.
They’d tailed the darryls in the Range Rover after the vigil broke up. It had not panned out as Liss had hoped, for one because Dogtown Beach wasn’t exactly a macabre witches’ lair and didn’t point to anything in particular about Zephyr’s location. For two, the rolling of the waves made it virtually impossible to follow the darryls’ conversation, which was being held around a campfire down below at the beach. For three, she and Dan had been crouching in the grass for nearly forty-five minutes, and all the darryls had done was display pretty poor fire-starting skills and smoke several bowls of weed. Willow had just left the three dude-darryls to spray-paint a tribute to Zephyr on the retaining wall along the beach.
“We have to go down there,” Liss said. “I can’t hear anything from up here, so unless they actually start casting or something this is a total waste of time.”
“Go down there and then do what? Ask if they accidentally sacrificed Zephyr to Kasyan and spotted Johnny while they were at it?”
Liss took a moment before she answered to divert the current of anger Dan’s words had released. She kept her voice even. “Johnny’s alive, so Zephyr might be too. I’m not out here trying to find a dead body.”
“Yeah, our luck’s not that good,” Dan said.
Liss stood and brushed the burrs from her skirt. “I’ll go down there on my own if you don’t want to come.”
It wasn’t too dark to see the bitterness in Dan’s eyes.
* * *
—
Liss’s least favorite thing about St. Ignatius was not the long commute or the mandatory weekly mass, but the stupid skirts they had to wear—no leggings or sweatpants underneath, white or navy tights allowed but discouraged—which left your legs absolutely freezing and meant you had to shave basically every day. It was one thing to prohibit any expression of individuality, but did they have to be so freaking cold at the same time? Still, Liss forced herself to take off her polar fleece and leave it in the car.
Liss picked her way down the unlit steps to the beach. Dan as usual followed her a few paces behind. The fog was thin enough that the half circle of a moon was actually visible in the sky, and its faint blue glow made the sand look like rippling alien terrai
n. Smoke from the darryls’ fire blew toward them from down the beach.
Dan jumped off the last stair onto the sand. “What exactly is your plan?”
Reflexively, Liss rolled her eyes, although her back was to Dan. “There are three dudes down there who’ve been getting high, and at least one of them has a documented interest in high school girls.”
“Oh, seriously?”
Liss held herself a little straighter. “Yes, seriously. We’re going to flirt.”
Dan had always been shit at flirting, as if being in the presence of a boy made her forget all normal modes of human communication. No amount of Liss’s coaching had ever corrected it.
“Gross,” Dan whined. “Aren’t they like, twice our age? And they never shower!”
“As if I don’t think flirting with the darryls is gross?” Liss hissed under her breath. “It doesn’t matter! If we’re going to get Johnny back, we have to use every advantage we have.”
Liss pulled up her knee socks and smoothed the pleats of her skirt. She didn’t want to see the look of disgust on Dan’s face. Liss already had to deal with her dad’s coworkers making comments about how grown up she was looking when she saw them at wine-soaked dinners, with men in Gratton complimenting her body as she walked to her car, with creepy strangers on Instagram who you couldn’t block before they messaged you, and all the other shit older men threw at a teenage girl. If you couldn’t escape it, you might as well put it to good use, even if doing that felt gross and wrong.
“No, we don’t.” Dan’s arms were crossed. She looked like she’d rather crawl in a hole and die. “If you don’t want to flirt with them, we can just . . . not do it.”
Liss felt the blood rush to her cheeks. That was something else Dan didn’t understand—and Liss didn’t either. Sometimes she liked that kind of attention, even if at the same time there was something disgusting about it; sometimes she worried she liked it too much. The way men looked at her made her feel like she wasn’t a person at all and only a body, like she was actually as worthless as she sometimes felt, but they didn’t mind. Sometimes she wanted that feeling so badly it scared her, even though at the same time she despised it.
Liss flipped her blond hair back. She ignored Dan’s suggestion. “Do your best, okay? We’ll get out of there as fast as we can. It’ll be easy, I promise.”
* * *
—
As Liss had predicted, it had not been hard to gain seats in the darryls’ circle. She’d walked up to them half shivering in her St. Ignatius uniform (that part hadn’t been an act), Dan trailing her like a shadow, and told them they’d come from the vigil too. She sat beside Brodie on a driftwood log that served as a bench. He smelled like weed and sticky sweet clove cigarettes, and before long she was leaning against him, just a little. She could practically feel his eyes on her thigh where she’d let her skirt ride up. Part of her cringed at what she was doing—he was so old it was like trying to hit on one of the teachers from her high school—but it helped a little that he was the cutest of the darryls by a long shot, although that was a low bar. Dan sat across the fire, sharing a log with Scratch and Goober or whatever their names were. Willow was a few yards away, outlining an enormous butterfly in spray paint on the retaining wall. Every so often, when the waves fell quiet, Liss could hear her crying.
“It’s so crazy,” Liss said to Brodie. “What do you think happened to her?”
Brodie fixed his gaze in the distance and let out a long slow breath. She got the sense that he wanted her to watch him contemplating, so she did, pouting her lips a little, while she contemplated how stupid it was to wear a backward baseball cap after dark.
“It’s hard to think about it, you know?” he finally said. “Zeph wouldn’t run off like that, leaving her phone and everything, so I guess she had to get in someone’s car or something. But who would do that, you know?” He adjusted his ball cap with both hands. “I didn’t think things like this could happen out here. Girls getting snatched up and all that. Like, they even questioned me. It’s crazy, you know?”
Liss pouted a little more dramatically, her eyes growing a little wider. “Yeah, I know what you mean.” She did know what he meant, and it was hard to respect. So Brodie had come to the tough realization that North Coast wasn’t some paradise where he could fuck a high school girl who was “so freaking gorgeous and amazing” without worrying about getting prosecuted for statutory rape or any of the other crimes he’d probably stumbled into. Well, life was like that, wasn’t it?
“I just keep thinking I see her. Like, I’m not crazy, I just keep expecting her to show up. Honestly I almost thought you were her. You’re wearing that same outfit she always had on.”
“Our school uniform?”
“Yeah, you know? I’m checking my phone like she’s gonna call me up. This is so much worse than getting dumped. Like I want to try to get her back, but I don’t even know where she is. How fucked up is that? She could be with another dude and I wouldn’t even know. You know?”
It really was a repulsive way to think about Zephyr, if she had actually been abducted, but Brodie was obviously high out of his mind. Liss looked over to Willow. She’d put the finishing touches on her butterfly and moved on to a large Z. Johnny’s friends had painted the same wall after he’d disappeared—mostly references to the Golden State Warriors and video games and skating. Liss had come to see Johnny’s mural, just once. She’d sat there in the sand, alone, and finally let herself consider, seriously, what she had done, whether their love could be trusted or if he was just under her spell. What if Dan was right, and all the hope and guilt and pain and work she’d put in didn’t have to mean anything at all?
“Damn, Willow’s still at it?” Brodie mumbled. “She’s gonna have some wicked-colored snot tomorrow.”
Liss chose to ignore this. “It really is like the worst breakup ever. You keep expecting them to come back, somehow. You feel like you did something wrong and you might not be able to fix it.” She leaned a little more of her weight against him. “My boyfriend went missing last year—Johnny Su.”
“Shit, I’m sorry.” Brodie slipped his arm around her. “You can’t think like that. There’s nothing you could have done. Whatever’s out there—fate, god, all beliefs are cool—it’s gonna do what it wants, and we’re just here living in it. No control.” He made a wave motion with his hand. “Like little boats out on the water.”
Liss imagined herself adrift on the frigid Pacific, alone. She wasn’t pretending to be sad anymore. “But if that’s true . . . that sucks,” Liss said in a small voice.
“That’s why you gotta live for the moment, man,” he agreed. “Make yourself happy.”
With his arm around her, she was enveloped in the cloying smell of the cloves he was dragging on, the campfire smoke, his sweat. The heat of his body had stopped her from shivering enough that she could feel the solidity of his chest where she leaned against him.
He didn’t know where Zephyr was.
She hadn’t been this close to anyone since Johnny disappeared. It had been so long, and she had been so alone, and if the world was as cruel and careless as Brodie made it out to be, then didn’t she deserve this?
It was like a compulsion, something in her pulled taut and tense, near to snapping, and if she didn’t kiss him in exactly that moment, she might cry or starve or shatter, and he was the only one who could save her, even if he was the worst possible candidate for the job.
“I’m so lonely without him,” she said, curling her body closer to his.
He looked down at her with a puppy-dog look. He already had what he wanted and he was only now realizing it. “You’re really pretty,” he said, almost to himself. Liss gave him an embarrassed little smile, a fragile, precious look of appreciation that made it seem that no one had ever told her that before, when in fact she’d been hearing it her whole life.
She let her eyes se
arch his, her lips parted. It was her kiss-me-now face that let the guy think he was making the first move, and it had a demonstrated track record of success.
He did kiss her, his mouth dry and bitter from the weed and his skin cold. She let him push his tongue into her mouth and slide his hand over her bare thigh below the hem of her skirt but no higher. It was pathetic, but it resolved something inside her when he kissed her like that. It made her feel whole, special, less like a rattling bag of the broken pieces of a good person. He wanted her, and even if he only had her for these few minutes, he would think about her later, remember the time he got lucky enough to kiss a beautiful girl on the beach, and that made her want him even more. She slid her hand down his chest, across his stomach, and the muscles of his wiry frame hardened beneath her palm.
Dan called her name and Liss ignored it. Probably, Dan wanted to lecture her about how this was a really stupid and disgusting idea, but Dan wouldn’t understand that Liss needed this. It seemed like Dan never did, not with Johnny or any other boy before him. And anyway, Dan could never appreciate that something might be a bad idea and you could decide to do it anyway—not everyone was so eager to run and hide from their own lives.
“Liss!” Dan said again. “Let’s go.”
“Christ, I thought you girls were here to party,” one of the other darryls said, laughing.
“Don’t touch me!” Dan yelped.
Now Liss broke away from Brodie. Dan was standing off to the side, away from the fire, as if she’d tried to get as far from Scratch and Goober as she could without actually leaving the beach. Her hair had come undone and was whipping around her face in long black tendrils, and she was clutching herself against the cold wind from the ocean. Her lips were pressed tightly together, her eyes round. Liss recognized the look: Dan was scared.
“What happened?” Liss asked. Brodie’s fingers were still in her hair.
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