A Wicked Magic

by Sasha Laurens

  “Mysterious ancient witch stuff,” Liss provided. Alexa smirked at her. “If Kasyan knows the spell to free himself, he must have given it to Keith. He’s talked to him directly before, when he told him to set up Black Grass.”

  “Keith’s been in North Coast for months. Why not do it on the Summer Solstice or the Equinox?” Dan asked. “Maybe he’s still waiting for Kasyan to tell him where to do it.”

  Alexa froze. “Shit. The night of the car accident, after you ran after Johnny, I saw something too. There was a girl on the side of the road right where the accident happened—sort of like a ghost.”

  “You sort of saw a ghost and you’re only mentioning it now?” Liss asked.

  “It wasn’t the weirdest thing that happened to me that week, okay? I don’t even know if she was a ghost. She was all shimmery and silver, but she was dressed in like, a polar fleece and leggings.”

  Dan jumped up and started searching through a stack of mail on the counter. She pulled out a newspaper and slapped it down in front of Alexa. “Was this her?”

  Zephyr Finnemore’s face stared back at Alexa from the front page. “I knew she looked familiar.”

  “You think Zephyr’s ghost was looking for Johnny?” Liss said. “Zephyr’s dead?”

  “I don’t think so,” Alexa said. “She wanted me to tell her ‘what he needs to know.’ She said he had promised to let her go once I told her. I don’t think she meant let her go peacefully on to the afterlife.”

  “That night Johnny said something to me too,” Dan added. Before Liss could interrupt, she pushed on. “He said, ‘You’re the one?’ but he sounded sort of surprised to see me. I didn’t mention it because I thought he meant that he knew what I’d done, but he must have been looking for Zephyr. If we hadn’t been there, they would have been virtually face-to-face.”

  Liss nodded. “If Johnny was looking for Zephyr, that means Kasyan doesn’t have her. So who does?”

  “Keith,” Alexa said. “It has to be him. There’s no way he could figure out how to free Kasyan on his own. They must be using Zephyr and Johnny to communicate.”

  “Like a fucked-up game of telephone,” Dan said. “We saw them days ago. They must have connected since then.”

  “Then we are completely screwed.” Liss balled her hands into fists. “If Volunin didn’t know where he trapped Kasyan, the best we could hope was that Kasyan didn’t know how to direct Keith there either. But Johnny knows North Coast, and so does Zephyr.”

  “So Keith knows the where,” Dan said. “He’s waiting for the right when.”

  “Which is low tide today.” Alexa tapped at her phone. “That’s at 7:13 tonight. We have seven hours, forty-five minutes.”

  Dan grimaced. “Maybe we are a little bit completely screwed.”

  Liss

  They spent the next few hours at Dan’s clawing through every North Coast outdoor recreation guidebook her parents had, which was two decades’ worth of worn trail maps and water-stained coastal access listings, enough to store in a plastic tub. When Graciela called to remind Dan to head over to the pottery table, they were no closer to finding Kasyan’s prison. At Liss’s calculation, exactly four hours and thirty-seven minutes remained until peak low tide.

  “But actually we would need to arrive before 7:13. We should be turning back from wherever Kasyan is at 7:13, for maximum safety,” Liss told the girls as they lugged the tub of maps out to the pottery table. “So realistically we need to figure this out yesterday.”

  “We’re all on full alert, Liss,” Dan said as she flopped into a plastic chair behind the table. “Right, Alexa?”

  But Alexa was watching the parade. “This is . . . different.”

  “That’s the holiday season in North Coast for you,” Liss said. “No one’s putting up nativity scenes out here.”

  Liss had to admit, the Solstice Parade was a lot to take in if you hadn’t seen it before, and Graciela’s pottery table had a front-row view. It was never clear who was parading and who was just a North Coaster dressed for a fancy occasion. Every local, darryl, weirdo, normie, hippie, organic farmer, and spiritualist turned out for the parade, and brought their kids too. A man in oversized sunglasses roller-skated by, playing snare drum with a Halloween-store bone, followed by a troupe of gray-haired belly-dancing ladies in white bra-tops and bells looped around their ankles. Liss spotted old Mad Mags following, waving her hands to the music. Behind them, a contingent from the bird refuge wheeled giant papier-mâché puppets of blackbirds and gulls with flapping wings. Next up, a pair of dudes wearing feather-covered speedos came by, one spinning poi through the air and the other doing tricks with a light-up hoop.

  Liss ignored them and grabbed another guidebook, but as the afternoon wore on, even she had to admit they’d exhausted the maps. There were hundreds of beaches, and they had nothing to go on. All three of them were anxious now. Dan had run out of nails to bite and moved on to her cuticles, while Alexa’s knee had never stopped bobbing as she frowned at the parade. Liss had fixated on the timer on her phone, which she’d set to a countdown until low tide.

  Two hours, forty-one minutes.

  Dan picked through the popcorn topped with brewer’s yeast that Graciela had brought them for yeast-less kernels. (“Why couldn’t she just not put brewer’s yeast on it? Isn’t that easier?” Dan griped.) Alexa repeatedly reorganized the pottery they hadn’t sold, which was all of it.

  Two hours, thirty-nine minutes. Two hours, thirty-eight.

  “What do you think will happen when—if Keith frees him?” Dan asked.

  “Maybe the Wardens will deal with him,” Alexa said. “I hope they at least stop Keith from taking over the world or something.”

  “Kasyan might go somewhere with more people to menace,” Liss offered. “Hopefully these little middle-of-nowhere towns will be too small for him. I don’t want to imagine Kasyan wrecking Marlena or Gratton or Dogtown or any of this.” She gestured at the parade. A group of folks marched by playing drums made from trash cans and buckets, carrying signs that read DRUM CIRCLES FOR WORLD PEACE. Behind them, a bunch of little kids marched in flower crowns and butterfly wings.

  “No. He’ll stay here. I have a feeling,” Dan said darkly. “We have what he wants in North Coast. Everybody here’s a dreamer. That’s the exact thing Kasyan likes to destroy. It was that same when Volunin was around.”

  “Volunin seemed like a romantic,” Alexa said. “The way he talked about that woman—Maggie—and wanting to teach her to be a Warden and everything.”

  Liss looked up from her phone. “He said she was waiting for him. She was going to wait forever.” Something notched into place in Liss’s brain. She scanned the crowd. “What if she still is?”

  Liss grabbed a map and set off running, weaving through the crowd. Liss caught her near the path down to Dogtown Beach, already full of half-naked North Coasters getting ready to take the plunge. She’d woven some flowers into her mess of matted hair and stuck a few into the bodice of the same dress Kasyan’s magic had kept her in for one hundred and fifty years.

  “Mags!” Liss called. “Maggie—Maggie Kelly!”

  Mad Mags fell silent, her head cocked.

  Liss pulled her out of the flow of the parade. “Your name is Maggie Kelly, isn’t it? You’re waiting for Ivan?”

  Mags opened her mouth, but no words came out for long enough that Liss was beginning to think she’d been an idiot about the whole thing. This was their final, desperate chance. Still, part of Liss hoped she was wrong: that Mags was not being made to live forever by Kasyan, trapped in unending longing for her dead lover, and that she’d come by her crazy the way most people did—naturally.

  “I called him Vanya,” Mags finally said. Her voice was gravelly now, so different from the singsong she typically used. “Have you seen him?”

  “In a way,” Liss said. “He said you knew about the work h
e was doing.”

  “Kasyan,” Mags said.

  Liss nodded, though hearing Mags say the name sent a chill down her spine. “I’m trying to help him, but I need to know where Ivan wanted to trap Kasyan.”

  “Will you bring Vanya home to me?”

  Liss looked at Mags, those round, watchful eyes Liss had always thought were childlike. They weren’t childlike at all. They were tired, the irises ringed with milky gray and the whites flecked with brown. Her sun-leathered skin was wrinkled as a crumpled paper bag. A century and a half later, she had never given up hope that her love would come home. Never stopped watching, never rested. Never been allowed to change or move on. Trapped.

  “No,” Liss said. “He died in the cave with Kasyan a long time ago. But he still loves you very much, and he wants you to know he’s at peace. He wants you to move on if you can.”

  Mags let out a small sigh. “Better that he died all those years ago than to suffer. It’s been so long.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Liss said. “You both deserved better. Can you show me where he went?”

  Mags beckoned for the map. She dragged a shingle-like fingernail down the jagged line of California’s coast, then settled on an inlet. She brought her face close to the map and peered at the text.

  “They call it Heart’s Desire Beach now,” Mags said. “Head north. Watch the tide. It’ll kill you, if Kasyan doesn’t.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Dan

  They moved as fast as they could, but with the chaos of the Solstice Parade approaching the beach, that wasn’t as fast as they wanted. They hauled Graciela’s pottery back to Dan’s house without breaking any of it, and grabbed the Black Book and then their leftover Icaria gear from Liss’s car.

  Dan felt like the gears in her brain had ground to a stop, jammed by the enormity of what they were planning to do. Take on a cult. Fight a demon. Spend way more time in an easily flooded cave in an active earthquake zone than anyone in their right mind would.

  But then they were half running, half walking to Alexa’s house, because hers was the only car not hemmed in by Solstice Parade traffic and barricades. They were in the car and on the road to Heart’s Desire. As Alexa drove, Liss rattled off disheartening facts about the tidal patterns and the exact number of minutes remaining until low tide (one hour, fifty-eight minutes). Liss had found information about a hiking trail that led north from Heart’s Desire. The tides and the wave patterns made rescue of stranded hikers impossible, so the parks department warned people to avoid the area. Liss finished reading the post aloud, then fell silent. The sun sat on the water like an uncooked egg yolk while Dan’s heart hammered in her chest.

  “We’ll be fine,” she said, almost to herself, in the passenger seat.

  “What’s that?” Alexa asked.

  But before Dan could answer, they pulled up to the trailhead parking. A battered school bus, Dream Peace spray-painted on the side, was occupying four parking spots.

  “They drove here in a freaking hippie bus,” Liss grumbled as they got out of the car. “Where’s the originality?”

  “Quiet,” Alexa said. “I think I can hear them.”

  They crept toward the overlook of the beach. The sun dying out in the Pacific cast the beach in golden light and indigo shadows, the clouds a toxic pink in the distance. Black Grass’s seekers were lying in the sand, their bodies arrayed in an almost-completed circle facing the ocean. Some rested their heads on other followers’ bellies, others were holding hands, still others snuggling in pairs, but all of them were touching in some manner. Keith was moving among them, laying his hands on foreheads and shoulders, whispering into ears.

  “It’s a transcendental meditation,” Alexa whispered. “I saw him do the same thing the other night.”

  At the break in the circle, another figure was kneeling between a few cheap tiki torches, whose flames snapped in the wind. She was in a long white dress that was appropriately cultish. Her long curly hair whipped around her in the wind; she kept pulling it from her mouth with her bound hands.

  “That’s her,” Liss breathed. “Zephyr.”

  Keith had made his way around the circle and stood behind Zephyr. Dan thought she could see Zephyr shivering. Keith said something to her then gave her a shove, and she lay down in a strip of sand designated for her, so that the seekers nearest to her left and right were touching her shoulders.

  As she did, it was as if a circuit had been completed. The seekers, who had been lying quietly and still, began to writhe: some were moaning miserably, others grinding their bodies against the sand, still others (those who had been snuggling) began to kiss and grope. Dan’s mouth dropped open. “No one warned me that there was a sex part to this,” Dan said, looking to Alexa. “Are they going to free him with an orgy?”

  Instead of answering, Alexa’s face shifted into a look of horror, and Dan looked back to the beach.

  The bodies of the seekers were crackling with gray-violet electricity, flashes of lightning emerging from the friction at their points of contact or the caverns of their gasping mouths. Energy chased itself around the circle—until it arrived at Zephyr.

  “He’s charging her like a battery,” Liss whispered.

  “I think I heard him talking to her the night I was there,” Alexa said. “He called this the synergy. He was complaining that the seekers had released all this energy, but it just dissipated. I guess he figured out how to direct it. That must be why he didn’t let her go.”

  By the time the seekers stopped moving, Zephyr’s whole body glowed that otherworldly gray-violet. The bodies circled on the sand were still and silent again, but a different kind of stillness, one that made Dan cold all over.

  “Do you think they’re . . . dead?” Dan asked.

  “If they’re not, they’ll be a lot worse off if we can’t stop Keith,” Liss said.

  Keith had already fitted himself and Zephyr with headlamps and was hauling her off the ground. Her bound hands already made her unsteady on her feet. Keith fastened a rope to her wrists. Keith yanked her toward him, but she pulled back, wrenching her arms away from him. The tension caught him in the shoulder, and even from a distance, it was clear he wasn’t happy. He closed the few feet between them and without any warning, slapped her across the face. Liss flinched. The next time he tugged on the rope, Zephyr stumbled after him toward the jagged rocks of Heart’s Desire’s northern edge.

  The girls followed.

  * * *

  —

  Down on the beach, it was dark enough to feel treacherous. Liss went for her headlamp. Dan held out a hand to stop her.

  “It’s getting dark,” Liss said.

  “He’ll see us,” Dan said. “We should go without light as long as we can. Until we’re far enough along that he won’t have time to deal with us if he wants to time the tide correctly.”

  Liss nodded, but she didn’t seem reassured.

  The way was perilous, doubly so in the fading light that made all the shadows blend together. Where the cliff began, the beach gave way to a narrow promontory of jumbled rocks, tumbled smooth by the waves and slick with sea water, algae, and leathery kelp. The waves still pushed high enough to flood their sneakers with icy water almost immediately. If they waited too long to try to return here, the waves would slam them right into the cliff, then drag them out into the ocean. A wrong step or a wrong wave could do it even now. Dan, leading the way, already could barely see the next footfall, and she nearly lost her balance stepping into a pool that soaked her past her knee; she would have fallen altogether if Alexa had not shot out her arm to steady her.

  At least the churning water was loud enough to cover the sound of their stumbling.

  Up ahead, the headlamps and Zephyr’s purplish glow vanished around a curve in the cliffs, then reappeared. They weren’t moving fast—not as fast as Keith would likely want—given Zephyr’s
stupid dress and bound hands.

  To everyone’s relief, after what felt like way too long, the submerged promontory opened to a maze of granite slabs that were mostly above the waterline. The girls hung close to the shadows of the cliff’s edge. It was getting too dark to make out any of the coast’s features—black rocks on black water on black sky. But in the bright swoop of Keith’s headlamp, Dan spotted their next obstacle. The cliff jutted out into the ocean, forming a sharp point that cut off their route. A narrow keyhole passage was the only way through the rock. Thankfully, Liss had found a post about it on her phone during the drive: the passage was only four feet high, maybe two feet wide, and at least eight feet long. The main issue was that, toward the center, the rock pinched so severely that to pass you had to edge sideways on your knees such that your neck slid through the narrowest spot.

  On a good day, it was an easy place to get killed.

  Now, they watched the beams of light disappear into the rock, and crept toward the keyhole’s entrance. Inside was impossibly narrow and dark. They would have to get through as fast as they could, because Keith would be hurrying now. Dan reminded herself to be brave.

  “I’ll go first. I’ll tell you on the other side if you can use your lights.”

  Alexa and Liss nodded.

  Dan eased herself into the small passage.

  It was worse than she’d imagined inside. The rock was dripping with seawater, and jagged edges snagged her hair and clothes, and scraped her skin. The small space made the sound of the waves echo enormously into a constant roar. She tried not to think about the press of the rock against her chest, how close it was to her face in the dark, how a dislodged stone or a sudden tremor could trap her there until the tide came back in.

  And then she felt the place where the rock pinched further. She felt for the space her neck would slide through, then swallowed hard and carefully sunk to her knees.