But Liss was insistent, so Dan agreed to let her hang out while she and Johnny closed at Achieve!
It did not go as Dan had imagined.
Liss slunk in, wearing oversized sunglasses. Casually confident, she kissed Dan on the cheek as if they did that all the time, although they did it exactly never, then draped herself elegantly into a desk chair and began tapping something into her phone. Apparently she was practicing some new policy of don’t speak until spoken to, and it was highly effective. Neither Dan nor Johnny could take their eyes off her for long as they went about the business of closing.
“Your name’s Liss, right?” Johnny finally asked.
Liss shifted her sunglasses down her nose, as if they were the reason she’d barely heard him. Instead of looking ridiculous, as any normal person would wearing sunglasses inside at sundown, she looked sophisticated.
“Yes.” She didn’t elaborate.
“I’m Johnny.”
“I know,” she said with a little smile that managed to be at once pretty and dismissive. She went back to her phone. Johnny stood before her, grasping for something else to say for a second too long. Dan smirked with a perverse pride, that Liss had managed to make Johnny small with only two words.
“You like the Misfits?” He eyed the enormous skull on Liss’s T-shirt. She’d cut the neck open so the thin fabric draped below her collarbone.
“Would that be surprising for someone wearing a Misfits shirt?” she said, although she had never heard the band until Dan forced her to listen to them after she bought the shirt.
Johnny didn’t know what to say.
Dan went into the back to change out of her uniform and returned to find the two of them chatting, Liss still slouched dramatically in the desk chair as if it were a chaise longue, and Johnny fidgeting, aware that Liss was always on the verge of ignoring him.
When she saw Dan, she did.
Liss slipped her phone into her pocket. “Ready?”
“Ready,” Dan confirmed, and followed Liss out, leaving Johnny to lock the doors.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Doesn’t matter. Just look like it’s very important.”
They walked three blocks to Aroma Café, ordered a pair of coconut mochas, and stationed themselves at their regular couch at the back.
“Dan, be honest with me. Are you into Johnny or not?”
Dan slurped the whipped cream off the top of her mocha.
“I guess—I mean . . . Honestly? I sort of can’t tell.”
Liss scrunched up her face. “You can’t tell like probably not or like probably yes?”
Dan pressed her lips together. She wanted to say yes—she had the sense that this was the answer she was supposed to have, the feeling she should be feeling—but she wasn’t sure if it was true or not. She wasn’t sure if she was just scared or not, and if she was, what she was scared of and whether it was a fear worth listening to or a fear worth ignoring. She wasn’t sure what Liss wanted her to say. So instead of answering, she asked, “Why does it matter?”
“Just checking.” Liss slouched back in her chair. “You’re sure you don’t want to do the love spell, right?”
“I’m sure,” Dan said. “I don’t want to talk about that stupid spell anymore, okay?”
“Okay,” Liss agreed.
* * *
—
It wasn’t until her next shift with Johnny a few days later that Dan understood what Liss was playing at that day at Achieve! At a lull in the shift, Johnny leaned against the wall beside Dan at the back of the room.
“Hey, can I ask you something?”
She wanted to say You already have, but that was childish. “Sure.”
“Would it be cool if I asked out your friend Liss?” Dan’s eyebrows popped. When she didn’t answer right away, Johnny added, “Your friend who was here the other day?”
As if Dan—or anyone—might forget Liss. “I know who you’re talking about.”
“I wanted to check with you, because I know you guys are friends and like, you and me . . .” He gave a sideways kind of smile that meant what exactly? That Dan was a bad kisser and a little too fat? That Johnny had only been looking to hook up with Dan but he wanted Liss as a girlfriend? That he’d only kissed her because of some weed-induced psychosis that was finally clearing? “I’m not trying to make it weird.”
Dan soured at how open and hopeful and good Johnny looked as he said this. He truly did not want to make it weird—who ever did?—and he thought he was doing the good-guy thing by asking her before he moved on Liss. She also understood immediately what Johnny didn’t: there was no way she could say no. It wasn’t the first time a boy had asked her about Liss. It happened at house parties, at school dances, everywhere, because Liss was like a match burning in the dark: you couldn’t look away from her, because somehow everyone else looked dimmer in her presence. Liss reveled in that attention in a way Dan couldn’t, like she wanted to spend her whole life in the electric moment when a boy wanted her.
“It wouldn’t be weird,” Dan heard herself say. “It’s completely cool. But be careful. She eats guys like you for breakfast.”
Johnny eased into his sheepish grin, as if being devoured by Liss was exactly what he was looking for.
ELEVEN
MONDAY, DECEMBER 15, SENIOR YEAR
Liss
The Range Rover shuddered as Liss sped from Marlena to Gratton.
What was wrong with Dan? Liss had offered her a chance to make things right, and Dan was still bitter that she hadn’t ended up with Johnny.
Liss stepped on the accelerator as she pulled out of a turn.
This wasn’t the Dan she was used to. Dan was there when Liss needed her. When her mother had offered her fifty dollars to lose five pounds and Liss was so hurt she barely knew what to do, Dan talked her through how to say no. When she needed to go up to Ukiah for an appointment at Planned Parenthood and didn’t want to do it alone, Dan skipped school to go with her. When her anxiety had gotten so bad she insisted on taking her car in for service four times in one month, Dan had given her rides everywhere she needed to be.
Dan stood by Liss like a sister—better than a sister, because they’d chosen each other, and that choice was a promise to stand by each other forever.
But now that had changed.
I never want to see you again.
Liss hadn’t been lying: She had forgiven Dan, and it had taken months—months remembering the moment Dan suggested the spell, how she pushed for them to do it even though Liss was busy and if she was honest, less interested in magic now that she was with Johnny. In those damp January days when it seemed like it was always thinking about raining and never really did, and the clouds over the Pacific were so dense and gray it felt like North Coast had been shoved under the bed and forgotten, Liss had felt trapped. Leaving for college felt impossibly far away, and not even a fun fantasy, because imagining it meant imagining SATs and SAT Subject Tests, AP Exams, personal statements, additional extracurriculars, and most importantly preparing herself for the actual rejections she’d be getting. She could already hear her mother sneering, “Oh, Liss,” as she received a rejection from one of her dream schools. She didn’t know what her father would say. Hopefully something.
Even Dan had driven her crazy that winter. Every weekend she wanted to hang out, every night she texted Liss to say hi, like they hadn’t just seen each other at school, or send her little jokes. Apparently she had been oblivious to the fact that Liss was in an actual relationship now, which took effort to maintain, and effort required time and energy, which she did not have an infinite supply of. Even if Dan didn’t understand that simple formula, Liss still couldn’t comprehend how Dan had failed to see that Liss was so frayed with anxiety, any little thing might break her, and that one such thing could even be Dan herself, if she did not get off Liss�
�s case and just let her breathe.
But then Valentine’s Day with Johnny came and went, and Liss started feeling a little more stable. And Dan suggested they ask the Black Book for a spell she couldn’t resist.
“Wouldn’t it be cool if the Book gave us a spell that let us change our future? We’ve never tried something like that before. Even if it was just something small, that would be so awesome.”
“You think it would really give us a spell like that?” Liss asked. “I’ve read on the witchboards that those spells are crazy difficult.”
“The Black Book misses us,” Dan said. “I can feel it.”
I never want to see you again.
Now Dan was set on keeping the Book from her, when rightfully Liss was entitled to joint custody. After all, they had found it together, just sitting in the Free Box outside Dogtown Grocery. They’d gone because Dan wanted ice cream, although the May afternoon wasn’t warm enough for it, and they always checked the Free Box. You never knew what you’d find: a still-viable cactus, decades-old National Geographics, old rubber Halloween masks that they’d worn for a whole day. Technically, Liss had seen the Book first, been the first to grab it, the first to crack its spine open. The pages had been blank then, save for the first few pages: “A Spell for the Making of Naive Witches.” Dan just thought the Book was strange, but Liss had sensed something more.
The first time she’d touched the Book, it had felt like the promise of something: a future she didn’t have to wait for, the power to have it now. She’d never have another weekend feeling lost and anxious in North Coast, where a Friday-night trip to the beauty section of the CVS in Gratton might be the only notable event.
The Book had been waiting for them. It had given them magic, the power to transform their lives, their very selves.
Now Dan wanted to take that from her.
I never want to see you again.
If Liss hadn’t been so angry she would have cried. This was true every day of Liss’s life, but it was especially true as she wrenched the Range Rover into a parking space outside Fault Line Tattoo.
* * *
—
The Fault Line Tattoo Shop sat at the end of Gratton’s main street, the last storefront before the old rail yard. The peeling paint of the narrow Victorian made the little building look its 125 years. Even the poster declaring Zephyr Finnemore MISSING looked ancient, although she’d only been gone a few days. Liss pulled open the red door. Inside, framed sheets of tattoo flash covered the walls—mermaids and anchors, clipper ships and pinup girls—and a tattoo machine droned from the other room. A burly man, thick arms scrawled with ink, hunched over a magazine behind a glass case of studs and hoops and gauges for piercings. She cocked her head defiantly at him when he raised an eyebrow at her school uniform, and headed for the doorway hung with a crimson velvet curtain in the corner of the room. Above it hung a half-legible sign that once read MADAME SWANN, but the gold glitter glue had begun to crack so that it looked somewhat closer to MA AME SVARN.
“She’s with someone,” the tattooed man called as Liss pushed aside the curtain.
“Don’t care,” Liss replied, mostly to herself, as she stomped up the creaking, narrow stairs to the second level of the house.
The smell of the hall half choked Liss. The air swam with hippie incense and holiday spice candles burning on a side table beside a dish of potpourri, but beneath their scent was something moldering that wouldn’t be obliterated. Another handmade sign hung on the door:
MADAME SWANN
FUTURE-TELLING, TATTOOING, PROPERTY MANAGEMENT
VISIT MY ETSY SHOP MADAMESWANN14
Liss counted to four and back, four and back, and knocked. She counted to four and back and tried the door.
In a moment, the lock clicked and the door cracked open, and the lithe, long figure of Madame Swann filled the small space.
“May I help you?”
“I’m looking for a book.”
“We have an excellent public library.”
“I know you sell the kind of book I’m looking for.”
Madame Swann’s pale hand curled around the edge of the door. Her long, pointed fingernails were painted an opalescent white; her white-gray hair hung in long waves around her face. She swiveled her long neck and leaned forward toward Liss. “I am engaged. You must return another day.”
Liss put a hand on the door. “I’m here now. It can’t wait.”
Madame Swann surveyed Liss, unmoved. Her eyes were a brown so dark they were nearly black—the only dark thing about her. “I don’t trifle with lost little sparrows and love spells.”
Liss was about to argue when a girl’s voice from behind the door said, “I should get going anyway.”
Swann swiveled her elegant head back toward the voice and loosened her grip on the door. “Already?”
“I have to grab Lorelei some cold medicine on my way home. I’ll have her call you as soon as she’s feeling better.”
At this, Madame Swann relented. The door fell open, revealing Madame Swann’s strange den. The floor was laid with oriental rugs and stacked with pillows—Madame Swann preferred lounging to sitting. Along one wall, curio cabinets held jars of dried plants, rough chunks of crystals, mortars and pestles, candles of all shapes and sizes. Another wall hosted photos of Madame Swann’s favorite tattoos. By the window stood a padded tattoo table and a chest of inks, gloves, and tattoo machines. The ceiling was strung with fairy lights, giving the small and cluttered space an undeniable feeling of lightness.
And in the middle of it, slinging her bag over her shoulder, was a girl with a rough-cut black bob and a hard frown.
“What are you doing here?” Alexa said.
Liss’s eyes narrowed. “What are you doing here?”
“Got lost on my way to church,” Alexa said, then pushed past Liss toward the stairs.
Of all the places to run into Dan’s new friend.
Dan had assured her that Alexa had no idea about magic or their quest and yet somehow, here she was, having tea with North Coast’s only psychic/tattooer/landlord.
And Dan thought she was the one doing the lying.
I never want to see you again.
Liss waited until Alexa’s footfalls could no longer be heard on the stairs, then leveled her gaze on Madame Swann.
Madame Swann folded her arms against her ropey body. Her arms were painfully thin: all knobby joints and sinew. “Now that you’ve scared off my client, are you going to make it worth my time?”
“I’m looking for a Black Book.”
“For a black book?” Swann answered. “That’s a touch vague.”
“It’s a book of spells.”
Madame Swann’s thin eyebrows arched sharply. “Then why didn’t you say that you were looking for a book of spells? I might have a few books on folklore, and a few on Wiccan rituals, although there are other shops nearby that cater to Wicca specifically—”
“That’s not the kind of book I meant,” Liss interrupted. “It’s a book of spells that work. You don’t have to pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. I already have one and I’m looking for another.”
Swann’s eyes grew large. “You have one and you’re looking for a second?”
“I guess technically I had one. I sort of lost it.” I never want to see you again. “It was handwritten, but I assume it was a copy of another book.”
Swann chirped out a small and pitying laugh. “Little sparrow, I cannot simply sell you a Black Book.”
Liss ran her tongue over her lips; her mouth had gone dry. She had been an idiot to wait for Dan, and now an idiot twice over for having assumed that Swann would have another copy—that if she couldn’t have their book, at least she could have her own. “I’ll pay whatever you want.”
“You misunderstand me. Black Books almost never come up for sale—a
lthough if I had one, I would not sell it to you. The one you had isn’t a copy of anything; each book is unique.” Swann cocked her head. “Do you know why that is?”
A shiver scampered down Liss’s spine. “No.”
“A Black Book holds the records of an individual’s forays into magic. Some say the books themselves are magic.”
Liss could see it in her mind: the yellowed pages, stained brown at the edges, and the time-faded lettering that slanted across each page. Full of magic, made from magic, the knowledge of someone powerful and brave and anonymous. Of course it wasn’t the kind of thing you could find—it found you.
“By that I mean, these are simply stories and legends that have made Black Books highly collectable!” Swann added. “It goes without saying that magic does not exist.”
“If they’re so valuable, I’ll have to get back the one I had.” Liss hoped she’d disguised her visceral and delicious satisfaction. “One more thing: Do you have anything on someone called Kasyan? He’s also called Kasyan the Unmerciful. Or the Lord of Last Resort.”
“No,” Swann answered without hesitation.
“Just . . . no? You don’t want to check?” Liss gestured to the bookshelves lining the room. Swann pressed her lips into a tight line before spinning on her heel to make a quick study of the glass-fronted cabinets that held her collection of spell books, grimoires, texts of occult philosophy and practice. Swann tapped a long nail against her teeth, producing a very grating click-click-click, then sighed extravagantly and spun back toward her.
A Wicked Magic Page 14