Dan was jostled from her thoughts when Alexa hit the next turn. The tires shuddered as they fought to hold the pavement, and Dan gripped the door handle against the force of the curve.
“Aren’t you going kind of fast?”
Alexa gave a little sneer in response. Her jaw stayed clenched.
“Seriously though.”
“You can drive next time,” Alexa said.
“Unless we go over the cliff and there is no next time.”
“Calm down.”
“You’re the one driving like a maniac. People do go over the cliff, you know.”
Alexa didn’t answer.
Fuck you too, Dan thought sullenly. She chewed on a fingernail. The road would even out soon—they were approaching Heart’s Desire Beach, halfway between Gratton and Dogtown, where the cliff flattened out into a rough hill and the road ran a bit inland to accommodate the beach.
Dan exhaled as a sign announced the turnoff for parking at Heart’s Desire. Soon they’d pass the trailhead, then one more turn and Alexa’s driving would only be deranged, not life-threatening. Dan watched the quicksilver line of the moon on the waves rolling into the beach and tried to tell herself she was nervous for nothing.
Someone was standing at the trailhead
A boy was there, standing as still and glittering as the reflection of the moon on the water. He was staring out into the road like he was waiting for something. The certainty of him crashed into Dan, full force, even before she fully made out the black hair, the hunch in his shoulders, unblinking eyes, and the same ratty jacket he’d thrown on the couch in the Achieve! break room a hundred times.
Johnny.
Dan screamed.
FOURTEEN
Alexa
Dan screamed, and she didn’t scream a little bit: she screamed with a life-or-death kind of terror that made Alexa slam her foot on the brake without thinking twice.
Without thinking even once.
The Toyota screeched out in agony, tires whining and the whole chassis shaking. It would have been fine if they’d been going straight, but they hadn’t been, and the back tire slipped off the pavement, caught on the dirt, and sent the car into a spin back toward the direction they’d come. Now Alexa was screaming, they were both screaming, and Alexa tried to hold on to the steering wheel as it pulled in the spin. When they finally came to a stop, the car was straddling the double yellow line and Alexa’s body was so glutted with adrenaline her first thought was that she couldn’t believe she’d gotten behind the wheel when she was so high.
Her second thought was, where the hell was Dan going?
Dan had leapt from the car the instant it came to rest, then started running, leaving the passenger door hanging open. Alexa’s heart was beating like a battering ram as she got out of the car and went after her.
“Dan! What are you doing?”
Alexa stumbled after her on the dark road. The Toyota’s headlights were pointing in the opposite direction, and without them, the night was shadowed and strange—the huge, unknown darkness of the coast.
“Dan!”
Alexa got as far as the trailhead, always calling after Dan, but she couldn’t see anything or anyone in the night, and she doubted Dan could hear her over the crashing of the waves. “What the fuck?” she groaned into the night. The accident had been scary—Alexa’s heart was still racing—but you didn’t deal with a car accident by running hysterically into the wilderness.
If Dan could hear her, she wasn’t answering. Alexa needed to move the car. The roads were nearly empty, but the sharp turns meant it would be nearly impossible for another driver to avoid hitting the Toyota.
Alexa slammed Dan’s door closed then slid into the driver’s seat. It was a strange feeling, the car pointing sideways on the road like that, as if she was going to drive it directly down onto the beach. It made her uneasy.
She turned the key in the ignition, and the engine produced a wheezy grinding sound. She twisted the key again. This time, the engine added something like a cough to the grinding, but it still didn’t turn over. She tried again, gritting her teeth against the sound—she didn’t want to hurt the poor Toyota, but even if it was dead, she needed to get it to one side of the road. Without some help she had no hope of pushing it to a turnout.
Alexa smashed a fist against the dash. She knew she’d been going too fast, but she’d done it anyway. Had she forgotten that the margin for error on her life at this point was practically zero? She pulled out her phone and started looking up the number for a tow, but the phone blinked in and out of reception. The connection wasn’t strong enough for the search results to load. Now the adrenaline was ebbing into a kind of panic, the sick realization of how totally screwed she was, how badly she wanted to get the hell out of there.
Alexa started to cry.
When she heard the noise, she assumed Dan had come back and wanted to actually help her get out of this mess. She wiped the tears from her cheeks and shrieked.
There was a girl.
Something like a girl.
She was standing at the roadside, in the space between two young redwood trees, and she was glowing. Not glowing like she went heavy on highlighter, glowing like she was actually made of moonlight, or one of those bioluminescent sea creatures. She was Alexa’s age, and dressed in what looked like yoga pants and a polar fleece—not at all how Alexa imagined ghosts, although why shouldn’t they be comfortable?—but her curly hair was limp and almost matted. She had a sharp chin and high cheekbones. Her face might have been more familiar if Alexa studied it more, but she couldn’t distract herself from the ghost-girl’s eyes.
They were entirely black, like her pupil had expanded to swallow her whole eyeball. They were black in a way that was blacker than the night around them, than the shadows of the trees she stood among. It brought to mind a baby doll Alexa had had when she was six. She’d accidentally pushed the doll’s eyes into her plastic head, where they rattled like marbles, the doll’s gaze a dark void.
Alexa didn’t dare move. She could hardly even breathe.
As a strategy to avoid the ghost-girl, it was totally ineffective, because she was actually walking up to the car now, her movements not jerky or floaty like a ghost’s, but sort of trudging and exasperated like any regular girl’s would be. A few feet away, the girl stopped. She said something Alexa couldn’t hear. When Alexa didn’t react, she put her hands on her hips and tried to say it louder.
Being a witch was fucking terrifying.
Alexa forced herself to get out of the car. The girl appeared relieved.
“Um, hello,” Alexa said, because some kind of greeting seemed appropriate.
“Is it you?” the girl asked in a weak voice.
Was this a way ghosts greeted witches? “Yes,” Alexa said un-confidently.
“But you’re so . . . regular.” The girl frowned. “Why are you helping him?”
“Helping who?”
“Never mind. Just tell me what he needs to know.”
Alexa took a step forward. “What who needs to know?”
“Is this like, a riddle? Look, he said he’d let me go once you told me, so please.”
“Who would let you go? I don’t know anything about—about anything,” Alexa said.
The girl’s black eyes went wide as a look of horror transformed her face and her voice shifted to something desperate. She stepped backward, retreating into the roadside trees. “Oh no, it isn’t you at all! Oh, you have to help me! He has me, and—”
“Who has you?”
But the girl’s voice was growing weaker, her glittery silvered figure flickering and fading, and then it winked out entirely.
Alexa plunged into the bushes, up toward the redwoods where she’d first seen the girl, but there was no trace of her, nothing at all. That was strange. It was extremely strange. But Alexa had
bigger problems than taking care of some ghost-girl. All she could do was mention it to Swann, in case it was important.
Alexa turned back toward her car and swore under her breath. The Toyota was straddling the lanes right after the turn, and now the headlights had gone out, which meant something electrical.
Alexa stumbled back down toward the road.
She barely heard the truck before it collided with the Toyota.
* * *
—
After the accident—the second accident—everything was a blur. The woman at the wheel of the truck was dazed from the airbag, and Alexa was helping her from the car, and somehow Dan was by her side again, disheveled but pretending she’d been there all along. But the other driver wasn’t hurt, just in shock. All three of them were shaking, but the woman remembered what Alexa hadn’t: they immediately put on the emergency flashers and waited safely off the road until the highway patrol arrived.
The driver’s side door had caved in on impact. Alexa couldn’t stop staring at her crushed soda can of a car, even watching it from the corner of her eye as she spoke with the highway patrol. She tried to tell him as little as possible. Accident report, insurance information, proof of registration, claims to file. Had either of them been drinking or smoking? Why had the car spun out in the first place? She didn’t know, she’d lost control, she wasn’t used to these roads, and Dan nodded along, agreeing.
Even though there was nothing to hide about the accident itself, Alexa could hear Kim’s voice warning her that once you involved the law, you lost control. You talked to anyone, you lost control.
Then the tow truck came to haul the car away, and Alexa gathered the CDs Dan had burned for her from where they’d scattered onto the back seat, her textbooks from the trunk, stuffing them into an old tote bag. They’d take it to a mechanic, but Alexa could tell that her little car was a lost cause.
She called Lorelei’s cell again and again—no answer. Her aunt was a heavy sleeper, Alexa explained, was it absolutely necessary for her to come? It wasn’t, the highway patrol officers admitted, but giving girls rides home wasn’t strictly in their purview. At last Graciela showed up. Alexa hadn’t even realized Dan had called her. Graciela hugged Dan close. Alexa had to turn away and bite her lip, until she felt a hand on her back and she turned and buried her face in Graciela’s warm shoulder and she splintered entirely, crying so hard she shuddered and choked into Graciela’s sweater jacket.
The drive home, Alexa kept waiting for Graciela’s anger to fall on them. For all Graciela knew, Alexa had nearly killed Dan in a car accident, every North Coast parent’s worst nightmare. She should have made her walk back, although Dogtown was miles away, or at least screamed, the way Kim would have.
“You were so lucky out there. These roads are really dangerous, especially for young drivers. I was worried absolutely sick.” The last part Graciela repeated a dozen times, although by the time she knew she should have been worried, they were both already safe.
Alexa said Yes, ma’am and I’m sorry as often as she was able—any time Graciela paused. In the front seat, Dan didn’t say anything at all. Less than that, she didn’t even look at Alexa, just chewed her nail with her eyes glued to the window.
Graciela pulled over in front of Alexa’s house. When she turned back to look at Alexa, shadows had caught in every line of her face, which was normally so smooth, the kind of face kept young by smiling. Graciela wasn’t actually mad at all: she was scared, the same as Alexa was. Scared like they weren’t quite out of danger yet and they might still be hurt—like they’d maybe never be entirely out of danger or safe from harm. Alexa braced herself for Graciela to insist on speaking to Lorelei, but instead, she reached awkwardly behind the seat to grab Alexa’s hand. “Are you all right, sweetheart?”
Alexa was not, but she knew they both sorely wished she was, so she said, “Just shaken up. I’m so sorry you had to deal with this. I know Lorelei will really appreciate it.”
Graciela made a clucking sound. “We look out for each other out here.”
Alexa shut the car door, and her eyes met Dan’s through the glass of the passenger-side window. Dan hadn’t offered any explanation or apology for her scream or the way she’d run off and left Alexa alone, and there was no hint of it in Dan’s expression now. What Alexa found instead was dark and brooding and seemed to pierce through her unseeing, as if she was a ghost.
Then Graciela shifted back into drive and they both were gone.
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 17, SENIOR YEAR
Dan
Dan’s mom spent Wednesday morning fawning over her. There was no way Dan was going to school, but she got up early because Graciela made chilaquiles with eggs for breakfast, and she even grilled up a plate of bacon on the side. Dan and her dad were speechless. Had Graciela been hiding bacon in the freezer this whole time?
Yes, she had been, for special occasions. A little something extra to help Dan recover from her “tough night.”
Dan’s tough night: that’s what her parents called it. As if it would be bad luck to call it what it was—a car accident. Or maybe that’s not what it was, because Dan hadn’t been in the car when it happened, and actually, she hadn’t even been close enough to see it, although her parents didn’t know that. Maybe it was bad luck to talk about near misses, about things that almost went a lot worse than they did. That sounded like the kind of thing Graciela would believe.
Dan’s father cleared his throat. “Your mom and I want to talk to you, Dan.”
Dan set down her second helping of bacon to quickly check that her sleeves were pulled down and none of the thin little scars were visible.
Her parents exchanged uncertain glances, then her dad pressed on. “When we got your call, we were a little surprised because we thought you were in your room. I don’t know if we just didn’t hear you leaving, but you shouldn’t be going out like that without telling us. You know, a girl from Marlena went missing last week.”
“Zephyr Finnemore. This wasn’t anything like that.” As Dan spoke, she realized the opposite was true. Zephyr had been out on the roads at night and stopped in the middle of nowhere for no one knew why. It wasn’t so far off from what had happened to them. “I was with Alexa the whole time.”
“Be that as it may, given that situation, it’s time to make sure we’re being really responsible and thinking about the consequences of our actions.”
Her dad fiddled with his wedding ring. Dan gaped at him. Was he disciplining her? Dan’s parents’ correctives were usually along the lines of telling her they knew Dan was disappointed in herself because everyone knew she could do better—verbal acrobatics that made nothing anyone’s fault. Dan couldn’t remember a single time when they’d come out and told her she’d done something wrong.
Graciela picked up where he left off. “We’ve always valued giving you your space and letting you grow into this beautiful person, Daniela. But for us to respect you, we need you to respect us.”
“Are you grounding me for getting in a car accident? I wasn’t even driving.”
Her mom’s brow wrinkled. “Ground you? Oh, no. We would never limit you like that.”
“But you need to let me or your mom know where you’re going at night,” her dad said.
Graciela gave him a stern look and added, “But if you can’t tell us exactly where, letting us know that you’re going out is enough. We understand you have your own life.”
“Oh. Okay.” Dan picked up her fork again. Why was she nearly disappointed? “That’s it?”
“That’s it!” Graciela brightened. She reached across the table and cupped Dan’s cheek. “We love you so much, honey.”
* * *
—
Back in her room, Dan fell onto her bed and played last night over in her head.
There wasn’t a doubt in Dan’s mind that the boy on the beach was Johnny, but she was
n’t sure how to reconcile that with the fact that the boy hadn’t actually been real.
She had bolted after him, but the silvery light he’d been catching flickered into darkness as he disappeared down the steep path to the beach. Dan didn’t hesitate. She barreled after him, stumbling down the rough stairs cut into the dirt, nearly twisting both her ankles half a dozen times. But Johnny was a dark thing in a mess of things just as dark, and Dan’s eyes couldn’t keep hold of him.
She caught up to him on the black sand of the beach at the waterline. The skinny half-there shape of him, a gray face made of shining smoke, or moonlight.
“Johnny,” she breathed. “How do we find you?”
He looked right at her. His eyes: maybe she couldn’t see them properly, or it was the bad light, but they looked black, as they had the day he’d been taken. No iris, no white, darker than the sky on a new-moon night. Dark as nothing at all. He seemed almost afraid of her.
“It’s me,” she said. “Dan.”
Something like recognition flickered in his face.
“You’re the one?” he said.
She hadn’t figured out how to reply before he was fading, the vapory glow of him vanishing, blown out to sea. “Johnny, don’t go! I am, I’m the one—tell me how to find you!”
She stumbled down the beach, screaming his name and begging him to come home. The ocean ate her words and she screamed them again. She called for him until her throat burned, until her Converse were filled with salt water and black sand.
She was midway back up the trail when she heard the accident.
You’re the one . . .
Was it a question or a statement, asking or telling?
And the one what? She wanted to think he was asking if she’d be the one to save him, or telling him she already was—like in that Chosen One fantasy trope that Alexa had educated her about. She didn’t feel particularly heroic or day-save-y. The hero was being played by Liss. She was the one who had worked tirelessly and with unshakeable faith and no care for her personal safety.
A Wicked Magic Page 18