“You girls come down to the beach and smoke our weed, can you blame us for thinking you wanted to have a little fun? Brodie’s getting his.” Liss couldn’t remember if this was Scratch or Goober talking.
“I didn’t smoke any of your weed,” Dan said coldly. “And it shouldn’t matter if I had.”
“Well, excuse me for thinking you were down,” the darryl said.
“Liss, let’s go,” Dan pleaded.
“What the hell are you doing, Brodie?” Willow had gotten wind of the argument and marched back to the fire, spray paint can still in hand. She was glaring daggers at Brodie and Liss. “What are you going to tell Zephyr when they find her? You couldn’t go three days without cheating on her!”
Brodie disentangled himself from Liss. The cold air filled the spaces where his body had been, and she shivered. “It’s not like that,” he told Willow. “I don’t even know what happened. She was just there.”
“Excuse me, what the fuck?” Liss stood and straightened her skirt and blouse. “I’m not some piece of trash you found lying around.”
“Come on.” Brodie blew her off. “You know what I mean. It’s like Rodrigo said, you girls came to party, right?”
Liss’s stomach was on fire, acid rising in her throat.
“Liss, let’s go,” Dan begged.
“Nah, girls, stay. Willow’s mad because she thought Brodie and Zephyr were in love, and that’s why Brodie didn’t want to give it to her no more.” This was the darryl who was not Rodrigo, who had nasty hair mats he was trying to pass off as dreadlocks.
“Yeah, I love her,” Brodie said, but there was something in his voice that made Liss think he was still getting used to saying it out loud. “I definitely love Zephyr.”
“Yeah man, you love high school girls,” Rodrigo laughed. “Me too. Only they don’t love me back.” He made a kissy face at Dan.
Dan’s mouth warped in disgust, but she ignored him. “I’m leaving, Liss. You can stay.”
“Of course I’m not staying,” Liss answered, and she and Dan left them on the beach: Brodie with his head in his hands, his two friends laughing their asses off, and Willow, stony-faced, repacking the bowl.
* * *
—
Back at the Range Rover, Liss pulled her polar fleece back on and cranked the heat. “So what happened? Dumb and Dumber didn’t know anything, right?”
“You don’t even care what they did?”
“Obviously I do, thus the question, what happened?”
“Honestly—” Dan began, then faltered. She began concentrating hard on her cuticles. “Those guys aren’t doing any fucking magic,” she finally said.
“That’s exactly what I thought. Did you hear how Willow said ‘when they find her’? So she obviously believes that the police can find her. Brodie was really broken up.”
“Same with the other darryls. Everyone was really broken up. Just a bunch of really super sad people.” Dan’s voice was flat and cold.
“It doesn’t totally disprove the theory, but I think we need to stay focused on Johnny. Zephyr is someone else’s problem.”
“Sounds great.” Dan pulled up the hood of her sweatshirt. “Can you drive me back to my car now?”
“I thought you were going to spend the night.” The familiar craving stirred in Liss’s stomach. “What about the Book?”
“I just remembered, my mom is . . . having a thing. In the morning. So I have to go home.”
So Dan was mad at her, which took the form of being very quiet. It wasn’t fair. Liss had done what was necessary, Dan hadn’t gotten actually hurt, and the whole thing was going to be a funny story someday. But Liss did as Dan asked and drove south so she could pick up her car from Taubmann.
As they passed the last house in Dogtown, Dan slumped low in her seat and looked away from her window for what would be the only time in the whole drive. There was only one thing she’d be avoiding, and Liss made sure to take a look.
All the lights were on at Alexa’s house, and a car was parked right in the middle of the yard. Liss decided to be pleased with the fact that Dan was hiding. It meant she hadn’t come clean to Alexa about any of this, which meant it was still their secret.
Which meant that even if Dan hated her, Dan was still hers.
NINE
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 13, SENIOR YEAR
Alexa
Somehow the night had passed, which Alexa filled with hours of crying, a bit of throwing up, and punching the wall once or twice, which really freaking hurt. When the dishwater dawn arrived, it felt like it might bring some kind of relief, but nothing had changed. Now it was almost twenty-four hours since the accident. Alexa was fairly certain she hadn’t slept—unless she was asleep right now and this was a nightmare, although the chances of that felt slim. Every time she’d stepped out of the increasingly rank bedroom to use the bathroom or to try to force herself to eat something, she’d rushed back to Lorelei, the wings of panic beating in her chest, certain that she would have gone still and cold.
Well, stiller and colder than she already was. She wasn’t ice cold, but cold enough that when Alexa touched her, she felt like a body, not a person. Cold like a window pane or the seat of her bike when she’d left it outside overnight. Like something that had never been and would never be again and definitely wasn’t right now alive.
Now night was falling again, and the moment it began to turn dark outside, Alexa turned on every light in the house, then went back to Lorelei’s bedside.
There, she kept only the dim bedside lamp lit. The feeble light made the blackish mottling of her skin less obvious. The wet breaths Lorelei sucked in sounded like a soaked towel dropped on the floor, and Alexa gagged into her T-shirt.
At least she was still breathing.
It wasn’t enough, but Alexa was thankful for it.
Domino hopped up on the pillow beside Lorelei. He leaned down, and Alexa could hear the roughness of his tongue against Lorelei’s skin. When he raised his head, a dark patch remained on her cheek where he’d been licking.
“Jesus, that’s disgusting,” Alexa said, stifling another gag. But then Alexa could almost swear she saw Lorelei’s eyelids flutter, heard the mucky sound of her breathing quicken, as if she’d somehow woken from sleep.
Domino glared at her.
“Okay, sorry,” Alexa said.
All at once, she was overwhelmed with a memory: when Alexa first came to live in LA, she’d been terrified that she would say or do the wrong thing, she’d break whatever spell Lorelei was under and get sent back to Kim. She stammered out apology after apology, as if she were apologizing for her very existence, until Lorelei had sat her down and told her not to apologize for things that weren’t her fault. On top of that, Lorelei had said that she loved having Alexa around and she’d rather celebrate that than have anyone feeling bad about it.
“I’m not sorry like that,” Alexa whispered, then pulled Domino off the bed so she could check the affected areas.
The affected areas: hands, feet, arms, legs, left ear but not the right. The flesh gave off a greasy, sweet odor with strong undertones of sour rancidity that smelled straight-up wrong, like something you should be wearing a medical mask if exposed to. It was probably the way a zombie apocalypse smelled when it was just getting started, the kind of smell that could take over a world and annihilate it.
At least the blackness wasn’t spreading, which, of all things, made Alexa feel a little better for not having called an ambulance. Any regular person would have called an ambulance right away, even if it couldn’t have gotten there in time to make a difference. It made her ashamed to think of it, but Alexa had learned growing up if you called for an ambulance, the law wasn’t far behind, and you didn’t call the law unless you were ready for the consequences—the police poking around your house, your mother’s boyfriend’s rage, victim’s advocates or chi
ld protective services checking in.
Who could she call now? It was too late for an ambulance. What was she supposed to tell her father, who she barely spoke to—that his sister had been cursed into a fairy-tale coma?
Alexa twisted the charm on Lorelei’s evil eye necklace around her neck. She shouldn’t call it a curse, although that’s how she’d been thinking of it.
The way the room crackled with energy, the heat of the necklace that Lorelei gave to her literally blistering her skin, the wind that felt like it chased evil from the room, as if it were granting the wish she’d made to keep Lorelei alive.
But if that was a wish, it must have gotten stuck halfway, because Lorelei wasn’t dead but what she was doing couldn’t strictly be called living, either.
A curse, a wish—it sounded ridiculous but it felt right, which was almost weirder.
Domino rubbed his jowls against Alexa’s ankles, his tail curled around her shin. In the two and a half years Alexa had lived with Lorelei, the cat had barely warmed to Alexa. He must have sensed that something was wrong.
That wasn’t exactly hard to sense.
“I know, babe. I’m worried too,” she said to the cat. “But she’s going to get better. We need to give it a few days.”
But even as she said it, tears were stinging her eyes and she felt her throat getting tight. But what if Lorelei didn’t get better? She was still a minor, which meant they could send her back to Arizona if they found her in the middle of nowhere hiding a rotting human body in her house, although there were other places she might end up—like prison, because she felt certain that something she was doing was illegal.
She wouldn’t let herself cry, not again. Alexa flung herself out of the chair and went to the kitchen to chug a glass of water. She needed to focus. She needed to keep it together.
She needed to remember to move Lorelei’s car to someplace behind the house where it couldn’t be seen, or one of many other seemingly endless and surprisingly banal concerns of this waking nightmare. How had Lorelei paid the electricity bill and the rent? How convincingly could Alexa forge her signature? Alexa needed to figure out how to check Lorelei’s bank balance, what to say when the phone was for her, what to do if Black Grass called because she hadn’t shown up.
At least Alexa was experienced in keeping up appearances while the adults in her life were unavailable for parenting or even regular adulting. Living with Kim had taught her that much: how to pretend everything was normal although your mother had decided she was “too good” to keep her job, then spent her last paycheck on vodka instead of groceries.
Alexa could manage to take care of herself when no one else would. The best way to get through was practical: you did what you had to do to protect yourself, and hopefully there was something left over so you could try to be a little bit happy.
With Lorelei, Alexa had never needed to worry about protecting herself.
Alexa could finally admit to herself that she’d been naïve enough to believe that North Coast and Lorelei could be her future. That she could have a normal life in this little house, a true place where she was safe and wanted and home.
Alexa straightened. She wasn’t ready to lose all that. Lorelei could get well. Alexa just needed to keep it together, even if that seemed to require superhuman strength. She forced herself to address the pile of unopened mail on the counter, searching for anything that looked like a bill.
Domino mrowed from his seat on the windowsill.
“You got your dinner,” Alexa mumbled.
A red envelope slipped free and slid to the floor. The return address wasn’t one she knew, but she could identify that handwriting anywhere, with the childish bubbles topping each i.
Suddenly, it was if the smell of decomposition vanished, and the stink of her mother’s menthol cigarettes and cheap flavored vodka and blond hair dye filled the house instead. Alexa’s teeth pressed closed so tightly her jaw ached as she grabbed the letter from where it had been wedged under a cabinet.
She nearly ripped it in two as she tore the envelope open. Inside was one of those glossy printed cards with hideous curlicue writing spelling out Merry Christmas—obviously they wouldn’t have gone for the more diplomatic Happy Holidays. And there they were: Kim, smile slathered in pink lip gloss she was too old for; her husband, Todd, with an enormous cross tattooed on his forearm and his face leathery from the desert sun; and the twins, three years old now but with the same white hair and flat gazes. They were standing by a pool Alexa assumed was someone else’s, all of them wearing tank tops in the bright sun. Todd’s forehead was glistening under a Santa hat. Kim had said she never wanted a card like that with Alexa—they were expensive, and they didn’t need to rub the whole single-mom thing in everyone’s faces, especially not her boyfriends’. Her boyfriends shouldn’t be thinking of her as a mother at all.
Kim certainly didn’t. Or she hadn’t, until the twins.
Alexa bit her lip to keep from screaming and flipped the card over to see the inscription to her and Lorelei.
There was nothing there. No special words for the daughter she hadn’t seen in months, or for the ex-sister-in-law who’d finally taken Alexa off Kim’s hands, like Kim had always wanted.
Now Alexa really did scream—an awkward, strangled howl of rage and heartbreak and the stupid, misguided hope that things could ever get better. The sound erupted from that buried part that held the feelings she wouldn’t let herself have. It brought angry, hot tears with it—tears that slid right off the glossy surface of the Christmas card as if they’d never been there at all.
Domino meowed again, more forcefully this time.
“Oh, leave me alone!” Alexa cried.
Get out.
Alexa froze. There was a voice inside her head.
He’s coming—get out and hide, now.
Domino switched his tail, his green eyes wide as saucers. His hackles bristled into a ruff, and suddenly Alexa understood.
She grabbed her bag and ran for the back door. Domino darted through before the screen banged closed, and they both hustled into the unlit overgrown brambles behind the house. It wasn’t like in fairy tales; bushes weren’t meant to be walked through. Dry branches tugged at her shirt and scraped her skin, but she pushed on. She filled herself with a kind of pleading—hide me, let me in, hide me, please—and finally she found herself in a space where the twigs were less dense, the gnarled branches describing a kind of clearing, deep in the bramble, that was exactly her size. Alexa dropped to her knees and watched the house. Her heart was beating all over her body, a fearful throbbing. Whatever she was doing was crazy, part of her argued, but that part shrank and shrank until it didn’t matter at all what the voice of reason wanted to say—something was coming, she felt the warning in her bones.
The lights, hurry.
Inside the house, the lights were on—living room, kitchen. Should she go back in there to turn them off?
No, from here, just try.
And so she did—she imagined the lights snuffed out, gone into hiding like she was hiding in the bushes now. She warned the lights to hide, and as she did, it was as if some force was building in her, something dammed, like holding your breath so long until finally your cheeks hurt. Alexa pushed whatever it was out of her, with a final plea for the light to scatter now—
And the house fell dark. More than dark: cold. It looked and felt like a house that had been abandoned, the kind of place where you’d find molding newspapers on the stoop and a fridge full of rot.
Only a few seconds later, the car pulled into their driveway. Its headlights were off, which was kind of pointless since the gravel drive made a stealth arrival impossible. Alexa heard the car door slam, the creak of the porch stairs, a tentative knock.
“What about Lorelei?” she whispered breathlessly. “We left her.”
Enough talking! Just think.
; Beside her, Domino was a blacker spot in the darkness.
From the other side of the house, the sound of glass shattering, then the whine of the hinges on the front door. Through the kitchen window, Alexa could see the bluish beam of a flashlight scanning the living room and moving toward Lorelei’s bedroom.
What does he want? she asked. Will you look?
She looked down for Domino, but he was already gone. She spotted him a moment later, skulking toward the house looking for all the world like a hungry stray. The occasional thud came from inside the house, each sound making Alexa bite her lip a little harder, until she tasted blood and stopped herself.
It felt like an eternity passed before Alexa heard the car’s engine start again. This time, the headlights came on: whoever it was had been convinced that no one was home. Still, she waited a few more long minutes after she heard the tires kicking up gravel on the driveway before she made her way out of the bramble and back to the house.
Throughout the house, the lights were flickering back on, but she rushed past the dark shape of Domino sitting on the kitchen counter to Lorelei’s bedroom.
Her heart didn’t stop racing, even once she was sure that Lorelei was fine—or if not fine, at least that nothing had happened to make her condition worse. Alexa dropped into a chair, head in her hands.
Domino padded into the room after her.
“It was Keith, wasn’t it?” Alexa looked at Domino from behind her hands. His head twitched in assent. “If he already thinks she’s dead, what else does he want from her?” Suddenly, Alexa’s chest got tight as her breathing quickened. The curse, Lorelei’s body, the cat—was she hallucinating? Was she losing her mind? “I’m talking to a cat. This isn’t really happening, is it? This is—this can’t be real.”
For all those fantasy books, you have a low tolerance for the unusual, Domino sulked. Before a panic attack distracts you, you may wish to have a look at the living room.
Alexa forced herself to take a deep breath, then followed Domino into the living room.
A Wicked Magic Page 12