“Keith’s story is that he founded Black Grass when he heard a calling. He was driving down Highway 1 and literally heard a voice telling him to stop near Dogtown.” Alexa read from the pamphlet. “Our Lord promised me exclusive access to unparalleled fulfillment. We seek a better future for the world.”
“How do you access fulfillment?” Liss said.
Alexa shot her a side-eye. “Join a cult and the answers will be yours.”
Dan was chewing on a fingernail. “Keith wasn’t just hearing voices. It had to be Kasyan. That seems a lot more likely than a tech bro discovering a forgotten demon who’s locked up in the middle of nowhere, right? We could barely find anything about Kasyan, and we were really looking.”
“That’s no accident,” Alexa added. “It’s the Wardens. Swann basically told me they’ve been eliminating information about Kasyan for years.”
“So Kasyan speaks to Keith sometime in March and he sets up Black Grass. Johnny was taken at the end of February,” Dan continued. “What if Kasyan used Johnny, somehow, to put all this in motion?”
“It makes sense,” Alexa said. She almost didn’t dare to look at Liss. When she did, Liss’s lips were pressed into a thin line, and her brow was pulled low. Liss’s pulse flickered in her neck.
“So Kasyan’s been waiting this whole time for someone stupid enough to do that exact spell on that exact day.” Liss’s voice was taut.
“We didn’t know,” Dan ventured. “It was an accident.”
Liss smashed a fist against the table. “We should have known. How did we think nothing would ever go wrong? We were so fucking stupid, Dan.” She was trembling. “I think about it and try to forget it and then I end up going over it again anyway until I feel like I might explode. I keep trying to make it better and it just keeps getting worse. What we did keeps getting worse. We’re just as bad as Keith or Kasyan.”
Alexa held her breath, watching Liss, then Dan. Alexa waited for Dan to speak but she was barely moving, save for the tears welling in her eyes.
“You’re not as bad as them,” Alexa said. “Not even close.”
Liss ran a hand through her hair. “You don’t know. You don’t know how this feels.”
Alexa felt the blunt, bright truth of it: you could know that trusting other people was dangerous and decide to do it anyway.
“I do know. Lorelei’s like this . . . because of me. She was dying right there, and it was happening so fast. I was desperate.” Alexa thought of how over the last few days she’d watched Lorelei’s lips dry and blacken, and the skin over her jawbone fall away to expose stringy, greenish muscles underneath, and how still she’d sat by Lorelei’s bed every evening and told her about her day, told her everything about Dan and Liss, the break-in and the car accident, in case Lorelei could still hear her. Lorelei had always been the person she wanted to talk to. That hadn’t changed. Alexa wondered if it ever would. “She gave me her power, and I must have done some kind of spell, because then she just wasn’t dying anymore. Or she’s still dying, but more slowly. I should have just let her go. Can you imagine how much pain she must be in? I don’t even know if her mind is still working—I can’t tell if I hope it is or not. But it’s like Dan said yesterday, you wouldn’t have done it if you’d known what would happen.”
Liss was looking at Alexa with her mouth open and her eyes round. She was horrified, probably, at what Alexa had admitted, and regret curdled Alexa’s stomach: she had said too much. But then suddenly her face was buried in Liss’s blond hair, her glasses crushed against Liss’s shoulders, and Liss’s arms were fiercely tight around her. And then Dan was there with them, the three of them in a hug.
“What happened to Lorelei isn’t your fault, Alexa,” Dan said. “The same goes for you, Liss. Kasyan is a trickster. He’s taken things from us and made us blame ourselves. But we’re making it right, or as close to it as we can,” Dan said. “Tomorrow, the three of us, Icaria: one way or the other, it’s the beginning of the end.”
Alexa broke away. “About that—I have a plan. We’re going to get answers the Black Book doesn’t want us to have.”
TWENTY-ONE
Liss
She heard her parents fighting before she closed the front door. Liss had been hoping to sneak in unnoticed after Alexa’s, so she waited in the hall—perfectly still, perfectly silent, her keys pressed into her palm—and listened.
“How dare you!” her mother squealed in a pitch that always made Liss’s heart beat faster.
“I’m not daring anything. I have to spend the weekend in Sacramento for work,” her dad emphasized.
“I know what you’re up to down there.”
“Of course you know, I just told you that I’ll be working. Do you think I like spending so much time away from you and Liss? I love you.” This last part, he groaned in an unloving and angry way.
“Then I’ll go with you.”
“I won’t be able to spend time with you because I will be working.” Liss clutched her keys so hard the metal teeth dug into her flesh. Her father was already hopelessly exasperated. “And someone needs to be here with Liss.”
“Maybe we should all move to Sacramento and then you’ll never be able to get away from us.”
“We agreed not to move until Liss is in college.”
“That might never happen.” Her mother paused, Liss knew, for a swig of wine. “You have no idea what’s going on with your daughter.” A lump rose in Liss’s throat as she crept closer to the kitchen. “I had to ground her until she finishes her applications. And where is she right now?”
“She’s probably with her friends.”
“She can’t be with her friends because she is grounded. She’s so irresponsible it drives me crazy. First this runaway druggie boyfriend, now this thing with the applications. We’re lucky she didn’t go after him, did you ever think of that?”
Liss needed to make it upstairs to her room. She could pretend she’d been at home since school ended. It would obviously be a lie, but they might go along with it to avoid another fight.
“Are you saying our daughter doesn’t want to apply to college?” Liss’s chest grew tight at the concern in his voice.
“That’s what it looks like! She’s procrastinated until the last minute. She hasn’t even shown me a draft of her personal statement yet.”
“Writing’s never been her strong suit,” her father added.
Her father’s words, out of everything, were the ones that hit Liss like a punch to the gut. He barely took an interest in anything she did, but she’d never gotten less than an A in English—even the semester Johnny went missing.
She didn’t need to hear this. She would go to her room.
But then her phone rang.
Liss cursed silently and frantically searched the pockets of polar fleece for her phone, but it didn’t matter. Her parents were in front of her now, hard-eyed and angry.
“Hi, I’m going up to my room—”
“Oh no you aren’t,” her mother cut in.
“Is this true about your applications?” The disappointment in her father’s face made Liss feel like she was shrinking down into nothing. Less than nothing.
“It isn’t true that writing’s not my strong suit. I’m pretty good at it. My SAT verbal was in the ninety-second percentile.”
“Don’t be a wiseass,” he said. “Where were you?”
“At the library.”
“It’s past ten o’clock at night. If she says you’re grounded, that means you are at school or at home—not at the library, not with your friends.”
“I have to work on a group project tomorrow!” Liss protested. She couldn’t let this interrupt the trip to Icaria.
Her father’s gaze was steely. “You are here, nowhere else. That personal statement better be in your mother’s hands by the time I’m back on Sunday night.”
&
nbsp; Her mother nearly dropped her wineglass. “We agreed you weren’t going.”
“You’re putting words in my mouth,” her father spat as her mother stormed back into the kitchen and Liss had played the role they needed her to in their fight.
Up in her room, she traded her uniform for sweatpants, and only sometimes heard her father’s voice raised (“I’m a lawyer, I know what I said!”). Liss sat at her desk and stared into the blank document on her computer. It’s just an essay.
There was an energy in her that wouldn’t still, even as her fingers counted up to four and back. She would not think of Dan or Alexa, poor Lorelei’s deeply disgusting body, or Johnny’s abduction. She would not think about Icaria’s dark past, or Mora’s shardlike teeth, or Kasyan, whatever he might be. Liss’s will had never failed her before, and now she would turn it to this, the most important essay she would ever write and the only thing standing between her and an un-grounded Saturday doing magic in a cursed ghost town.
My junior year I unleashed a demon. I spent my senior year trying to fix it, Liss typed. Please let me into your college.
Liss pressed delete and the line vanished.
It was amazing that something as simple as a white rectangle could ruin someone’s entire life.
Downstairs the door slammed and one of the BMWs—probably her father’s—pulled away. A minute later, that theory was confirmed by footfalls on the stairs.
“So now you’re hard at work?” Liss’s mother stood in the doorway to Liss’s bedroom clutching an overfull glass of wine.
Liss closed the laptop and stood to face her mother in the doorway. “You’re supposed to knock.”
“Your father’s gone.” From the sharpness in her tone and the way she was sucking down her wine, her mother was more than halfway to nasty-drunk. Liss hated being alone with her when she was like this, and she only got this way when Liss was alone with her.
Her mother started in. “You have no appreciation for what your father and I have done for you.”
Liss didn’t say anything. It stung, but in the same way the last ten thousand cuts her mother had given her stung. You sucked in the pain, didn’t let yourself feel it, and you didn’t give her the satisfaction of seeing you hurt.
“We’ve given you so much, and sometimes I think it’s all been an absolute waste.”
“It’s not my fault that you passed on an abortion when you had a chance.”
“Don’t be disgusting, Elisabeth.” She took a big swallow of wine. “Your father’s gone.”
“You’re being dramatic,” Liss said, but her mother’s words made her nervous. He wasn’t gone gone. He’d said a dozen times he was going to work, but that was before her mom had really lost it. He wouldn’t leave Liss alone here, even if he already did it a few days a week. Liss had to say something she knew was true intellectually, because she didn’t feel it, not even a little. “If Dad’s unhappy, I feel bad for him. I feel bad for both of you. But it isn’t my fault.”
“That’s a nasty, hurtful thing to say.”
“You say nasty, hurtful things to me all the time!”
Liss’s mother lunged forward and slapped her hard across the face.
“Shut up!” her mother screamed, then pulled her hand back and brought it across Liss’s face again and then again, until Liss at last remembered she could step back. She stumbled away from her mother, back toward the desk.
Her mother was spewing words, but Liss could hardly hear her. The shock made the world white and quiet—her cheek was numb, then hot as it blossomed into real pain.
Liss had never been hit like that.
Her mother started back at her, panting, like all that spinning and yoga she did hadn’t adequately prepared her for the exertion of slapping her daughter. There was a horrible look in her eyes: she wanted to take Liss apart completely, and she’d do it with her words or her fists or whatever she could.
“Fuck you,” Liss said, her voice ragged. “I hate you. You’re a pathetic drunk—”
“Do not talk to me like that.” She moved toward Liss and raised her hand again, but Liss moved first. She caught her mother by the wrist and pulled her forward. She stumbled into the desk, knocking the laptop onto the floor and dumping her wine onto the carpet.
Liss didn’t wait. She dashed down the stairs, grabbed her jacket, and shoved her feet into sneakers. She stumbled out of her house, through the gate, and onto the empty street. She felt like an explosion of needles, and somehow the pain wasn’t even focused in her cheek and her jaw, where her mother’s hand had fallen, but was all over her body: her skin, her lungs, her stomach, her heart, every one of her muscles was scorched with it. The night was cold and dark and the fog was close and damp against her skin and it did nothing for the pain.
Liss ran. She ran down Kingfisher Drive to where it dead-ended in a clear swathe of sand, and then she ran into the beach, the dried-out shells of tiny crustaceans crunching under her sneakers. She ran, although the wind off the ocean stung her eyes, although her mother would never have followed her. She ran down the beach, away from the lights of Marlena, until her legs gave out and she tripped in the sand. She wanted to go until she collapsed, because her heart was racing from the damage her mother had inflicted on it, and if she didn’t do something with that energy she would explode. She heaved herself up again, but she was gasping for air.
Liss realized she was crying.
She was crying hot, giant tears that were coming so fast they weren’t really tears at all but streams, and she was shaking and there was a great gob of mucus in her throat and she was making this horrible, pathetic moaning-wailing sound that she’d never heard herself make before, not even when Johnny went missing, not ever. She sank to her knees in the sand.
Her parents hated her, just like everybody else did.
It was an crushing, undeniable truth painful enough to splinter her ribs.
She blew a slug of snot from her nose directly onto the sand, which was disgusting and she just didn’t care. She wanted—no, needed someone. Someone who would make her feel less like she was starving to death at the bottom of a pit. She pulled out her phone to call Dan but stopped herself. Dan’s house practically reeked of her parents’ love for her. Dan wouldn’t understand this kind of sadness. For someone who always acted like misery was her own special thing, Dan was terrible at recognizing it in others.
Then there was Alexa. Liss had tried, that afternoon, to be kind to her. Maybe Alexa would do the same for her now. Alexa’s mom was such a problem Alexa couldn’t even live with her, so maybe she’d get it. Liss had almost pressed Call before she realized how awfully pathetic it was. Alexa had made it perfectly clear she thought Liss was some kind of monster.
She was right.
Anyone could see it—her parents, the only two friends she had in the world. It didn’t matter how hard she tried to be good, she couldn’t escape what she was: self-obsessed, destructive, unlovable.
The only person who had ever been convinced otherwise was Johnny, and it had been a lie.
She had stood on a beach like this, one she picked for the name—Heart’s Desire Beach. October had just begun, and the water was ice-cold against her ankles where the tide broke. She had felt like she was standing on the edge of the world as she cast the spell to make Johnny fall in love with her.
The Black Book had given it to them for Dan, but Dan had refused it. Dan worried that they didn’t know what it would do, but Liss didn’t care. For weeks, she had it copied into her notebook—“An Incantation for Love”—and it had nagged at her. A spell that would finally satisfy her hunger. She couldn’t resist it.
The stupidest thing was, she did it when she already had him in her sights. She had already seen the interest in his eyes while she hung around at Achieve!, he was already messaging her silly GIFs and videos. But it was the night before their first date and she had bee
n nervous. She wanted him to want her, and the Book had given her something that meant she didn’t have to take any chances.
The spell was so simple, simpler than any other they’d done, and it definitely could be done alone. She stood with her feet in the ocean and the sheet of notebook paper in her teeth as she washed the long-handled bell in the salt water. She read the incantation’s words, then rang the bell and said his name, then again. She hesitated before the final time but forced her hands to move, forced herself to speak, and then there was a dull sense of relief, a silence inside her, an assurance that Johnny would be hers as long as she wanted him.
It had been the loneliest moment of her life.
Until this one.
Liss sobbed into the sand, her hair whipping her face in the freezing wind.
Mora should have spared Johnny and taken her instead.
“Hey!” a voice called. “You good?”
Liss whipped her head around. “Who’s there?”
“Over here!” A flashlight clicked on a few dozen feet away. “I was going to warn you about the rocks if you keep jogging that way—Oh, you’re that girl from Zephyr’s school. Liz?” Liss squinted until the flashlight’s owner turned the beam on himself.
“Brodie?” Liss picked herself up and smeared away her tears. “What are you doing out here in the dark?”
“You’re the one in the dark. I was coming out of a meditation when you jogged up and took a spill.”
“Yeah, I’ll be more careful. I thought you lived around Dogtown.”
Brodie ducked his head and gave an embarrassed smile that, in the flashlight beam, made him look closer to Liss’s age than his own. “Just camped out here for a minute. I thought the beach would be nice, but it gets real cold at night. I’m kind of between places right now.”
“Same,” she said.
He pointed the flashlight toward a sheltered place by the cliffs and a bright orange tent. “I’ve got a six-pack. Wanna chill?”
Liss arranged her face into something less pathetic. The firestorm inside her resolved, just a little, as that energy found another target. Chilling with Brodie was exactly what she needed.
A Wicked Magic Page 26