A Wicked Magic

by Sasha Laurens

  Dan laid on her bed and listened to Rickey IronWeaks until she cried. Then she told herself she was stupid for crying and then well, she was stupid so she might as well just fucking cry, although who even cried over something like this? So your best friend and her boyfriend went out on Valentine’s Day, obviously they did, it had nothing to do with you at all, actually it had so little to do with you that you could completely disappear right now, like vanish or die or something, and nobody would care.

  She couldn’t stop the thoughts until she dug out the razor blade hidden in a breath mint tin from the back of the bottom drawer of her desk. She kept it there so it would be harder for her to get when she wanted it—although she could still get it whenever she wanted it, so that wasn’t really a working strategy. Once she was done, she wasn’t crying anymore. She only felt numb.

  No matter what happened with Johnny, she and Liss would always have magic. Their bond was magic, and she could use magic to get it back. Dan would think of a spell to ask the Book for that Liss wouldn’t be able to resist.

  It was called Volunin’s Frame, Dan told Alexa. Although Liss was strictly speaking too busy to be doing much magic, with Johnny and the pressure her parents were putting on her, she agreed to it. It was the kind of spell you said yes to. It was written like a brainteaser. You needed a spot where two roads crossed at a right angle, and you needed to be there the last day of the month. The spell often failed, for reasons the Book called idiosyncratic, which they took to mean were basically random. If it went right, they would find themselves in a game of chance, which of course the Book provided no details on. What they stood to win was a wish, and not just any wish: a wish big enough to transform your future. “Beware the risks,” the Black Book said, which was pretty generic as far as warnings went. At the time it had seemed low stakes: probably the spell would fail, but if it went right, who knew the limit?

  It did not go as planned.

  First, Liss brought Johnny, Dan said. That complicated things, like where was he supposed to stand and was he going to laugh at them and break their concentration and in all honesty, Dan was actually a little annoyed that Liss hadn’t even given her a heads-up, if she couldn’t be bothered to ask. They agreed Johnny would wait in his car and was strictly forbidden from taking pictures.

  What Dan did not say was: when she saw Johnny’s car instead of Liss’s Range Rover pull up on Escondido Road, she thought she might actually throw up. She even started sweating, the way you do right before you’re sick. They parked in front of her and then made out for a really unnecessary amount of time. The longer it went on the harder she wished Johnny was gone—away, anywhere but here with her and Liss.

  When they all finally got out of their cars, Liss kept running the back of her hand over her mouth, as if she were wiping off his spit, when there wasn’t anything there anymore, she had wiped it away already, and was she actually just trying to draw Dan’s attention to the fact that Johnny’s spit, and therefore also tongue and lips, had been all over hers a minute ago? Because Dan was already acutely aware of that fact.

  With the two of them there, she was more alone than when she was by herself.

  Dan pulled Liss aside. “What’s he doing here?”

  “I thought he could come watch,” Liss said.

  “What does he think he’s watching?”

  “I told him it’s a Wicca thing. Besides, if the spell goes like we expect, then he shouldn’t see anything. It’s mostly in our heads.”

  “If you had to bring him you could have at least told me. We could have done it another time.”

  “Yeah, the last day of next month. What’s the issue? He doesn’t care.”

  “I care, okay?” Dan snapped. “It’s weird having someone else here. We’ve never done that before. I thought this was our thing, you know?”

  Liss’s expression melted into something condescending and sweet. “Aw! It is our thing. But Johnny’s here too now, and obviously, we can’t just tell him to leave.”

  The understanding in Liss’s voice sliced Dan in two. Liss knew—she had to know, was too smart not to—how badly she’d hurt Dan. How badly she was still hurting her.

  But Liss didn’t care.

  “Fine,” Dan said. “Let’s get this over with.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  Dan didn’t say that the whole time they were setting the spell, Johnny was all she could think about, Johnny and Liss, Liss and Johnny, wishing that he would just go away, just gone. She hated the feeling that he was watching the two of them doing this. Last summer was forever ago, their September kiss from another lifetime. It felt sometimes like it had all happened to Liss, and not to Dan at all.

  Dan cursed Johnny under her breath.

  * * *

  —

  Dan told Alexa how they set the spell. Liss insisted they use a guardian line drawn in salt where they’d stand. Just outside the salt perimeter lay the three vertebrae from a swan that Dan had ordered online.

  Thankfully the roads weren’t busy, because they had to set up right where they crossed. Dan glared at Johnny, who was perched on the trunk of his Volvo messing with his phone, and suggested he might make himself useful and keep an eye out for any cars that might squash them.

  Liss rolled her eyes. “He doesn’t think any of this is real.”

  “Is that supposed to be reassuring?” Dan said.

  The two of them stood shoulder to shoulder inside the salt circle, said the words, said them again. Dan felt her focus narrowing, closing in on the spell, the air simmering, the goose bumps on her skin. They began the incantation a third and final time when Johnny interrupted.

  “Yo, this actually looks pretty cool. Can I get in on it?”

  They dropped their hands and the magic faded.

  “You were going to wait in the car, babe. We agreed,” Liss said. Dan could tell now she was annoyed too.

  “Come on, I can say whatever you were saying. I’m a fast learner,” he answered, and kissed Liss on the cheek.

  Liss smiled. “Dan? What do you think?”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t care anymore.”

  The three of them crammed inside the line, saying the third incantation. The hair on the back of Dan’s neck stood up, and it might have been coincidence, but it felt like the wind picked up.

  All at once, a woman was there.

  She was hunched as an old woman might be, but there was something tightly coiled about the way she held herself, so that it was more like her body was hiding something than that she had a natural stoop. Her rough, anemic skin reminded Dan of an old rope line abandoned on a dock. She wore what appeared to be a matching jogging suit from the 1980s, a visually offensive mashup of pale pink and teal. On top of that, her neck was circled by some type of fur scarf that seemed to be strung together from the pelts of small woodland creatures—rabbits, squirrels, mice—with their little feet and heads still attached. Her hair was colorless and nestlike, but beneath it her face had a pointed look, the features sharp and gathered too close together, and her eyes were a disconcerting black, with no white at all.

  Dan exchanged a horrified glance with Liss. They’d never summoned a person—or something this personlike—before.

  “Oh, awesome,” Johnny breathed.

  The woman looked at each of them in turn with wet eyes. Her skinny lip twitched in and out of a sneer, and when it did, they could see something darkish and very not teeth-looking in her mouth. Dan had always thought that the expression her blood ran cold was a metaphor, but now she realized that could literally happen.

  She was terrified.

  The woman stooped and scooped up the three vertebrae and rattled them around in her grimy hand like dice.

  “The game is Likho,” she said in a rough and phlegmy voice. She picked a vertebra out of her hand and held it pointy side up between two thick
, yellow nails. “Evens,” she said, then reversed the bone so the pointy side was down. “Odds.” Her track suit rustled as she tapped her sternum.

  Then she hiked up the legs of her tracksuit and squatted back on her heels. The three of them followed suit, kneeling in the street. She rattled the bones in her knob-knuckled hand again, then cast them into the triangle.

  One pointy side up, two pointy side down.

  The woman grinned, and they could see her teeth for real. Drippy little stubs of things, narrow and sharp and red-brown. They could smell them too; Dan was struggling not to gag. “Odds. For me.”

  “Our turn?” Liss asked, and the woman nodded. “We play as a team.”

  “You know how this game works?” Dan hissed at her.

  “I think it’s like odds and evens. She got more odds than evens that round, so she won. I’ll roll for us first.”

  “This is crazy, babe,” Johnny whispered. Liss’s expression devolved into grave annoyance as he kissed her on the cheek, for luck. Dan caught her eye and nodded her encouragement.

  Liss closed the bones in her hands, rolled them against her palms, then cast: all three, pointy side up.

  The woman grumbled something unintelligible in response, collected the bones, and cast again. Evens took her cast as well.

  “Dan goes next,” Liss said, although Johnny was next in line, between them.

  Dan took a breath to steady her nerves and gathered the bones. She tried to focus on something else, something good, but all she could think of was how the spell had failed, and even when they got out of there, it wasn’t going to do anything to help her and Liss, because now Johnny was here, Johnny was ruining everything. He was rocking on his heels like this was going to be a sick story to tell his friends.

  She cast the bones: odds.

  The woman celebrated with another gruesome grin and without hesitation cast the bones herself. Odds again.

  “It’s three to two. We have to roll evens to tie now,” Liss breathed. Her voice buzzed with anxiety. “We cannot lose.”

  “What happens if we lose?” Johnny asked.

  Liss swallowed hard. “Whatever it is, it’ll be bad, okay?” She rubbed a hand across her forehead and gave them both a desperate, fearful look. “I don’t like this.”

  Johnny put an arm around her. His other hand held the bones. “I got this. Trust me.”

  Johnny looked at the woman straight in her inky dark eyes, breathed on the bones for luck, then rubbed them in his palms.

  Dan didn’t breathe. She was pretty sure Liss didn’t either. The only one who carried on was Johnny, like what he was doing wasn’t dangerous at all. He was having an adventure, buoyed along by that same Johnny confidence he always had. He wore the same look when he skateboarded in the street: it wasn’t exactly safe, but he was pretty sure that it was all going to be cool anyway.

  He cast the bones.

  Dan heard Liss let her breath out before she looked down, and she thought for a second that that meant they’d tied. But Liss’s eyes were wide, her mouth hanging open a little, and Johnny’s brow was wrinkled the way it was when he got to a Spanish phrase he couldn’t translate.

  Dan looked down.

  All three bones lay odd-side up.

  The woman screeched.

  She lunged at them from across the field of play. Dan screamed, and they all fell back, scrambling to their feet. The woman sprang up too, surprisingly sprightly, and making a sound disturbingly like a growl.

  Liss held on to Johnny’s arm. They stood in a little huddle inside the guardian line. At some point a cold February wind had picked up, and it seemed to press them closer together. Liss’s hair came loose—a blond smear across the night.

  “What do you want?” Dan managed to ask.

  The woman’s face cracked into a bark of gruesome pleasure. She licked her thin lips—then her teeth. “Now I take.”

  “Take what?” Johnny’s voice had a staccato edge of panic.

  “One of you!” she cackled.

  “Hell no! We’ll play again. Double or nothing!” he said.

  “No!” both girls cried at once. Dan’s heart was beating almost out of her chest. There must be some way to reverse it. The Black Book lay out of reach, beyond the guardian line. Somehow it was splayed open, fingers of wind leafing through its pages.

  The woman edged a toe toward the line and hissed as she tried to cross the salt.

  “We’re safe in here,” Liss said. “Maybe we can wait her out.”

  Dan looked down. Already the wind had thinned the line, sweeping the salt out into the night.

  But then the woman’s neck started to—uncoil. That was the only way to describe it. It came loose from itself like a tumbled coil of rope and unwound, in the undulating wave of a swan’s neck or an elephant’s trunk.

  “The fuck?” Dan heard Johnny say.

  Dan couldn’t say anything at all.

  The woman’s head bobbed toward them, easily crossing the line, her face coming close to each of them in turn, sniffing them out and something more—sniffing for something, testing for something. She was evaluating them—but for what? As she slithered toward and away from Dan, she could hear the intake of air, smell the woman’s rank breath. She knew if she stepped outside the line, she’d be the one who was taken.

  Once she’d examined them all, her head waggled back and forth in front of them on its long, prehensile neck. She was weighing them, deciding which to pick.

  Then her neck swiveled to a stop. She bore those horror-show teeth in a smile.

  Dan’s mouth went dry.

  Johnny.

  “No,” Liss gasped, but Johnny didn’t say anything at all, for the woman’s head had already snaked closer to him, and she was whispering in his ear. He dropped his arm from Liss and stepped out of the line, kicking open the circle of salt as he did.

  “No!” Liss screamed. “Johnny, stop!”

  But his eyes were already blown-out black like the woman’s were. He couldn’t hear Liss as she begged him not to go. His face was expressionless and vacant, as the woman hobbled through the now-broken line to his side. She patted him on the stomach, then, with surprising flexibility, wedged a foot against his hip and swung herself up so that she was crouched on his shoulders like a bird on a branch. She was nearly Johnny’s height, but he didn’t sway under her weight. His back was stiff and nail-straight.

  She muttered something to him and he began to walk.

  Just like that, the sickening tower of them was gone into the night.

  Dan didn’t tell Alexa how badly she’d wished it would be Johnny or that part of her flooded with relief that it had been him and not her or Liss. Not that she had wished him harm, not at all, but how else could she feel, when she realized she’d been spared whatever terrible fate awaited him?

  Liss was gaping at the dark and terrible night, her eyes white and round. “He’s gone,” Liss whispered.

  And Dan realized what her wish had done.

  EIGHTEEN

  Dan

  “What the actual fuck?” Alexa said when Dan was done. “That’s horror-movie-level messed up.”

  “Horror movies usually have happier endings than this,” Dan said.

  “We are not in a horror movie,” Liss protested. “We’re in, like, a very disturbing rom-com, and we’re going to get our happy ending if we have to pry it from Kasyan’s cold, dead hands.”

  “His hands are always cold,” Alexa corrected. “I mean, in Lore’s stories. Because he’s not, you know, human,” she quickly added.

  “So this is why we need your help,” Liss added. “You and Lorelei are the only people we can find who know anything about Kasyan. He’s real, and he has Johnny, but we’ve got almost nothing to go on. I’m not exactly excited to try tonight’s spell again.”

  Alexa’s forehead wr
inkled. She was silent for what felt like a very long time, all of which Dan spent imagining various scenarios in which Alexa told her she was delusional or awful or otherwise undeserving of help. Then Alexa said, “I’ll tell you what I know—what I can remember right now, but it’s just bits and pieces of things. And I don’t want Lorelei hearing anything about this, so we’re never meeting up at my house, okay?”

  “Absolutely,” Dan said. “Liss?”

  “Fine by me.”

  “Some stories say he’s a saint gone bad, who got kicked out of heaven. Sort of like how Satan is a fallen angel.”

  “I don’t love that comparison,” Liss said.

  “That’s not the only theory. In other stories he’s more like a mythic figure. People say he chains the winds, he has eyelids so long they reach the ground, and he can kill a field of crops with one glance.”

  “Gross! Does he have to like, move the eyelids aside to do that?” Dan asked.

  “Yes.” The unhesitating tone of Alexa’s answer chastened Dan: that would be a terrifying thing to see. Something about the way Alexa had pulled her cardigan close around her suggested she was thinking the same thing. “He can take many forms. That’s just one he particularly enjoys.”

  “You’ve heard all the stories, so give us your opinion,” Liss said. “What is he? Saint, not-saint, tiny devil, other magical entity?”

  “I guess you would call Kasyan a trickster demon,” Alexa began. “He’s not as evil as a demon-from-hell kind of demon, if that makes sense. Like, he’s not out there eating babies or anything.”

  “That’s a relief,” Dan muttered.

  “Kasyan grants wishes, but only if he feels like it.” Alexa’s brow tightened, which forced her glasses to slip down her nose, and when she spoke again it was with a new certainty, despite the faraway look in her eyes. “Kasyan doesn’t care about good and evil, which makes him unpredictable. He feeds off burning desires, I guess you’d call them. Things people want badly enough they’d do anything to get them, even if they don’t really understand why. Kasyan is who you beg to when appealing to the good spirits or gods or whatever failed, and you’re desperate. That’s where the name Lord of Last Resort comes from. The thing that makes him really dangerous is, what he loves most is turning a wish against you: giving you your greatest desire and turning it into a punishment.” A chill flowered up Dan’s spine. “That’s where the second name comes from: Kasyan the Unmerciful.”