* * *
—
Up at the tent, they sat in the sand. Liss winced as he opened a bottle of beer with his teeth and handed it to her.
“Thanks.”
They knocked the necks of the bottles together in a toast. Liss took a swig. The beer was exactly the same temperature as the chilly beach air.
“So what’s a girl like you doing wandering the beach at night?”
The beer was bitter and it made Liss’s voice small and rough. “You don’t know what kind of girl I am.”
“I guess not.” He liked that answer, she could tell. “What kind of girl are you?”
She took a long swallow of her beer. It was already half gone, and the alcohol was loosening the strings that bound Liss tight.
There were a dozen truthful answers to his question, and none of them could be said without crying. It didn’t matter. She didn’t need Brodie to know who she was and she didn’t want him to. What she needed was something else to feel, a place to hide from this crushing self-disgust. He could give her that.
She set her beer bottle in the sand. In the feeble light of the lantern, she could see his face was weathered and he was watching her, a little hungry and a little wary.
“Why don’t you find out?” Liss said.
His mouth pulled into a quick O of surprise, but he recovered quickly. “C’mere.”
She moved closer to him. He slipped his arm around her and tilted her chin up with his knuckle, so their faces were only a few inches apart. He smelled like sour beer, greasy hair, and sweat, and Liss thought she might gag if he didn’t kiss her exactly then.
But he did.
Liss squeezed her eyes shut, willing herself to get lost in it—waiting for that upsurge of intensity that made her want his hands all over her, her hands everywhere on him, the beginning of that vacant feeling where you were only a body and nothing else. Brodie’s tongue chased Liss’s around her mouth, his lips sloppy and over both of hers at once. She hadn’t noticed it earlier, but Brodie kissed the way toothless babies gummed pureed carrots.
Liss wanted him to go further, even though she already knew she’d never tell anyone about this, that every time she remembered it she’d hate herself for it, that she would have lectured anyone else about how unsafe it was to trust strange men on the beach. It was pathetic that getting groped by a man nearly twice her age on the beach was the only way she knew how to take care of herself.
But if she was awful and this was awful too, then it was at least appropriate.
Brodie paused. “This okay?”
Liss opened her eyes, which were stinging and swollen from her tears. It was the correct question, but the answer was stupid obvious: nothing about this was okay. Before she could answer, he edged back from her.
“Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but crying girls freak me out,” Brodie said.
Liss raised a hand to her cheek. It came away wet. “Sorry, I’ll stop.”
She reached for him again, but he rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m just looking to have a good time, you know?”
“We are having a good time,” Liss pleaded, although she hated herself for saying it. “Don’t stop.”
Brodie grimaced awkwardly and grabbed two more beers. “To be straight with you, I’m a romantic guy, and crying’s a boner-killer.” He passed a beer to Liss. “Let’s just be cool.”
Not even Brodie wanted her like this.
“Does it look like I know how to be cool?” Liss whispered as she wiped her tears on the back of her hand. “I’m a fucking mess.”
“Hey now.” He moved to put his arm around her, then reconsidered when she snorked up a glob of snot. “You know what always makes me feel better?”
“If you say meditating, I’m leaving.”
* * *
—
Liss followed Brodie’s flashlight to an outcropping of rocks at the tide line. He handed her one of the empty beer bottles from the six-pack he held and pointed at the rock.
At first, Liss fumbled, but then she felt the satisfying crack of glass shattering, and the pleasure of destroying something that wasn’t herself. She broke bottles against the rocks until the sand glittered with glass, catching the thin moonlight like shattered bits of dead stars, and though she knew the comfort it gave her wouldn’t last, it helped a little, at least for now.
TWENTY-TWO
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 20, SENIOR YEAR
Dan
When the red Range Rover pulled up outside Dan’s house Saturday morning, Dan was ready, which was basically never true of Dan in the morning. Yesterday had been hard, but it felt like a good kind of hard. For the first time in a long time, when Dan had turned the lights out to go to sleep, she hadn’t wanted to listen to IronWeaks. She didn’t need Rickey’s sadness to dampen what felt undeniably like excitement.
Alexa was already sitting shotgun, so Dan slid into the back seat. The windshield wipers were on against the cold drizzle. Liss tossed her the cord for the music as she navigated north out of Dogtown. “Alexa wanted it, but I told her you have seniority.”
Alexa twisted around in her seat as Dan scrolled through her music. Alexa’s eyes were puffy, but Dan was relieved to see that under her glasses, she was wearing her signature cat eyeliner again. “Did you find a geode?”
“My mom had a bunch in her studio,” Dan said. “I got a hammer too.”
“That’s everything, right?” Liss said to Alexa. Liss was glaring at the road from behind her oversized sunglasses, which the weather did not at all require; then again, Liss wasn’t a morning person.
“That’s everything,” Alexa confirmed.
“Kasyan better watch out,” Liss said in a flat voice. “Witch-gang is armed with basic household items, and we’re coming for him. Not even this shit weather can stop us.”
Dan and Alexa laughed, but Liss just adjusted her sunglasses and acted like she hadn’t made a joke at all.
All of a sudden, Dan felt good, in spite of everything. The three of them, together, felt right. Maybe things didn’t need to be back to the way they were before. They were each fucked up and desperate and tragic in their own way, but together, they could begin to make some kind of sense. As if Liss teasing Alexa for liking the music that Dan had picked was evidence that magic could come within an inch of destroying your life and you could survive it—they had survived it. Dan could almost imagine a future where all this was gone but not forgotten, a time the three of them could look back on together with pride instead of shame, and the thought made her heart feel too large for her chest.
They stopped at the 7-Eleven outside Fort Gratton for additional supplies. In the parking lot, Dan ate a s’mores Pop-Tart edges-first while she and Alexa waited for Liss. The sugar made her heart throb, and she remembered the night she had come here with Johnny, the single kiss that set all of this in motion.
“That’s the missing girl from Liss’s school?” Alexa pointed at a flyer taped to the store’s window: the poster of Zephyr that community volunteers had stuck up all over North Coast. “I never met her, did I?”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“She looks kind of familiar.”
“Her face has been everywhere for like two weeks.”
“Her story’s kind of like Johnny’s, isn’t it?” Alexa asked. “They just found her car abandoned by the side of the road.”
“That’s where the similarities stop, we think,” Dan said.
Alexa was still staring at the poster. “It’s a weird coincidence, is all.”
Liss emerged from the store with two sugar-free Red Bulls. She cracked one open and guzzled it in practically one go.
“Didn’t sleep last night?” Alexa asked her.
“I’m fine.” Liss tossed the empty can into the trash. “Let’s go.”
They sped through Gratton,
which was still asleep in the rain, then up Highway 1, where the wind off the Pacific rattled the car and Liss kicked the windshield wipers into overdrive. North of Gratton, the towns were few and far between. Eventually, the settlements were so small you couldn’t tell by looking at them if they were inhabited or not: just a few broken-down barns with moss growing on their caved-in roofs, a pile of rusted car parts, a propane tank or trailer hidden among the redwoods or coastal pines. The land became green and wild. Dan watched the reception on her phone waver, then disappear completely.
The spell they were planning was Alexa’s idea. Or it might be more accurate to say it came from Alexa. Alexa was basically a living, breathing library of Black Books. Last night she had made it clear she was serious that doing the spell their Book turned up would kill them.
Dan believed Alexa, but still, it was hard to take in. The Book had been their only conduit to magic for so long. They’d spent who even knew how many hours with the thing. It was unthinkable that it could be trying to kill them. But Dan conceded that even if the Book’s spells always did something, that wasn’t the same as working. Actually, they had no idea how it worked or why, only that it had led them to some pretty catastrophic failures recently and Alexa hated being physically near it.
“Just because it’s the only way you’ve ever accessed magic doesn’t mean it’s the only way that exists,” Alexa had argued. “Other witches can train you.”
“Are you offering?” Liss had asked.
It helped that Alexa’s idea was a killer.
Alexa had spent nearly five minutes pacing the small, stinking house, her face set in serious concentration and Domino at her heels, every so often muttering comments like, “We’d never catch one in time.” Alexa had looked more like a mad genius than a witch, in her oversized cardigan and round glasses and her hands weaving through the air. When she finally yelped “That’s it!” Dan and Liss were legitimately unsure if she was addressing them.
When Alexa was done explaining the spell, there was no doubt in Dan’s mind: they didn’t need the Black Book, because Alexa was definitely a mad genius, and also a witch.
“We just passed the vista point,” Alexa said, tracing their path on the road atlas. “The turn should be coming up on the right.”
Liss almost missed it anyway, like she hadn’t heard the warning. She cut the wheel so hard that Dan and Alexa were both flung against their seat belts. A few dozen yards in, the paved road turned to gravel and slippery mud, and veered inland and uphill. Soon, the scrubby windblown vegetation that lined the headland gave way to straight, soft-barked redwoods growing clustered in rings and tall Douglas firs, their trunks speckled with tufts of electric-green moss. Tendrils of fog wound through the trees, snagging on branches.
“This is looking more Hobbit-y than demon-y so far,” Alexa said.
“We’re not there yet,” Liss said. “Although I don’t know how much farther we can take the car.”
Liss was right. Soon after, what little was left of the road was blocked entirely by a fallen redwood.
“Now our hike begins,” Alexa said as Liss pulled the car to a stop.
The fallen tree had an ugly gash running down it that split the trunk in two, and what should have been reddish wood was blackened and dark. Dan leaned forward from the back seat for a better view. “Is it some kind of lichen?”
Alexa squinted at the tree. “It looks off to me.”
Alexa got out of the car and immediately pulled the neck of her shirt up over her nose. She grabbed a stick and tentatively prodded the tree trunk. Suddenly the black stuff rose into the air, and Alexa yelped and ducked: a cloud of black flies. Alexa swatted them away, although it made little difference, and peered into the crevasse of the trunk. She was coughing as she came back to the car. “Something’s dead in there—some kind of animal, I can’t tell. Maybe a couple of animals.”
Dan shuddered as she got out of the car. “This is a good idea, right? I mean—what if he’s here? What if we’re walking straight into Kasyan’s lair?”
Liss slammed the door closed and set about locking the car repeatedly, the way she always did, although this time it seemed to take longer than usual. Dan hadn’t realized that hidden behind her sunglasses, Liss’s eyes were veined with pink. “That’s the whole point of looking for him, Dan,” Liss said—not cruelly, but not exactly with kindness either.
* * *
—
The hike was long, and not made any more pleasant by the rain. Dan immediately felt soaked, in spite of her waterproof layers. The road narrowed into something overgrown that was barely a road at all, and then just a dirt track, and thick mud clung to Dan’s boots. The hike took them up to the top of a ridge, after which the towering, pin-straight redwoods and firs cleared to a plateau of smaller bishop pines, the cypress that grew everywhere in North Coast, and smooth-barked manzanitas, then through another uphill slog over another ridge. At the top, the girls stopped for water and to check their map. The rain had finally eased off, and they pulled down the hoods of their jackets. Hundreds of feet below them, the slate-gray Pacific and the relative safety of Highway 1 seemed impossibly far.
“We’re close,” Liss said, scrutinizing the map.
As they headed down the far side of the ridge, the nature around them began to change. The first thing Dan noticed was the silence. Now that the rain had stopped, they should have heard bird calls, animal grumbles, but instead she heard—nothing. The ground was littered with fallen branches and dull, rust-colored pine needles, and where it wasn’t, there were standing pools of water that were placid and lifeless; not even a bug skittered across the surface.
It wasn’t until Alexa asked, “What’s with these trees?” that Dan noticed how undersized the trees had become: the pines and cypresses that should have been dozens of feet tall were barely a foot or two above Dan’s head. Some of them were as short as shrubs, yet clearly they were trees, with stunted, contorted trunks and gnarled, sinewy branches. The forest was a gray bramble. Many of the misshapen trees were ash-colored, with dead sun-bleached needles, but strangely other driftwood-gray branches hosted a few living green twigs—as if the rest of the tree had died so those little twigs could survive. Rippling olive-gray or whitish skins of lichen were clinging to the bark. Elsewhere, nearer the ground, the lichens were bulbous and white, studded with bright red, glistening dots.
“It’s a pygmy forest,” Liss said. “These trees are the same as the ones we were just hiking through, and they’re probably decades old. They come out stunted like this when there aren’t enough nutrients here for them to grow to their full size.” She glanced back at them. “What? I did a report in seventh grade. Extra credit.”
“Why build a town in a dead zone?” Dan said.
“Was it a dead zone before Kasyan?” Alexa said.
It was a place easy to get lost in. As they went on, the path began to wind, zigzag, and at least once looped over itself. There was no other way to go, but Dan was getting nervous. As it stood, they couldn’t see the horizon line over the last ridge they’d crested, and that ridge looked almost indistinguishable from the next. Dan felt dizzy: for the first time in her life in North Coast, she wasn’t sure which way the ocean was.
“If we don’t find it soon, we should turn back,” Dan finally said. The sun, still hidden behind the thick cloud cover, wasn’t going to help orient them at all, and the thickets of pygmy plants were too dense, too short to provide any landmarks. “I don’t want to get lost.”
Alexa was up ahead, looking at a grouping of oddly shaped rocks. “You guys, I think we’re here.”
Liss glanced at the nothing around them. “This can’t be it.”
“It’s a grave marker.” Alexa tentatively touched the inscription cut into the worn stone. “This is all that’s left of Icaria.”
* * *
—
There were no decrepit old bui
ldings, no overgrown road, no ramshackle sign marking the town that once was. All that remained of Icaria was the small graveyard, fewer than twenty markers and nowhere near the number that had perished here. Instead of grass, strange scaly patches of bluish white lichen topped the bare dirt. Dan shuddered to think of the old skeletons just a few feet down in the hard-packed earth, scarred by Kasyan’s touch.
The spell took a long time to complete, the three of them sitting knee to knee in a triangle while they each took turns at a different component. Dan wasn’t sure if it was that the spell hadn’t come from the Black Book or that three of them were casting rather than two, but the magic felt different: more anchored and stable, less like a wild thing about to slip free.
When Liss brought the hammer down on the geode, cracking it in two and revealing its crystalline center, the air stilled around them. Dan pulled her jacket tighter around herself.
“Did it work?” Liss asked cautiously.
“I think . . .” Alexa began. The way her face lost all color and her mouth was hanging open, she didn’t need to finish. Dan’s stomach was already in her throat as turned toward what Alexa was staring at.
There was a man—what looked like a man—in the graveyard. He was moving slow and stumbling among the grave markers, like he was unused to walking. He wore a thick beard touched with gray and a heavy black mustache that, in neater times, might have been waxed into curls at the end, and he was dressed in a way that reminded Dan of those tourist places where you could have your picture taken in gold-rush-era outfits—hat and vest and pocket watch.
“We actually did it,” Alexa murmured. “We summoned a freaking ghost.”
“He looks so real,” Liss said, and she was right. He was far from rosy-cheeked, but he looked more like he’d had a hard night than been dead for nearly one hundred and fifty years. He looked as substantial as someone with an actual body, which made it all the more disconcerting when his leg passed cleanly through a gnarled, stunted cypress tree.
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