A Wicked Magic Read online

  Just below was her first entry.

  How much love is enough?

  Now she knew the answer, at least in part. The spell had worked, and it had worked on her and Johnny. That meant irrefutably—verified by magic—that they loved each other and their love was, on a technical level, enough. Which, of course it was, Liss told herself. She’d been stupid to doubt that.

  Liss realized she was frowning at the computer so intensely her chin was getting sore. She forced herself to smile, although there was no one there to see her. After all, she was supposed to be happy now, or slightly closer to happiness than yesterday.

  Liss moved on through her notes of the last four months. The Black Book had given her and Dan this particular spell over a year before Liss first tried to use it on her own—back before she even knew who Johnny was. That summer, the singer of Dan’s favorite band, IronWeaks, had gone missing. Dan insisted they ask the Black Book for help; she wanted to talk to him and ask him to come home. That seemed a little invasive to Liss, but Rickey IronWeaks constituted at least 50 percent of the contents of Dan’s brain and around 90 percent of her heart. Then the news broke that Rickey had died by suicide, and they abandoned the spell before they’d made much progress.

  This spell had been terrible to figure out. The right location for it depended on auspices. Liss had done enough auspicious spells to know the basics: the spell gave you a set of auspicious conditions and you found them. You might need wind speed, the level of the tides, the phase of the moon. Most of that information was online, or at worst, at the library. But this particular spell relied on the auspices of birds. Liss had never taken those before but knew they had to be observed directly—and she had to do it with no help from anyone. She’d looked for those stupid birds all over North Coast. For months, her evenings were spent hiking into redwood forests on barely marked trails or scrambling down cliffs during low tide, clunky binoculars hanging from her neck. All the while, her brain ground against the thought that she had set herself to an impossible, futile task.

  She stopped on an entry from a few weeks ago.

  I have to believe I am getting closer. But North Coast is huge, California is bigger, and after that, the world. How long can I keep looking for him alone?

  Liss slammed her laptop shut and spun her chair away from the desk. It was the second question that had been answered today. She had a spell for speaking to a lost love, but not a spell for finding him, or rescuing him from an underground prison, or defeating whatever Kasyan and Mora were. She couldn’t carry on alone. She needed the Black Book. She needed Dan.

  She could still hear Johnny’s voice saying her name, with such terrible relief and desperation, it had almost sounded like please.

  Liss would not give up now. Johnny was out there, waiting for her, and she was going to save him. Dan would text her tomorrow, Liss was sure of it, and if she didn’t, Liss knew every one of Dan’s weak spots. What good was that knowledge if you didn’t put it to use?

  Dan

  Up in her room, Dan slammed the door and collapsed onto her bed.

  It was as if she was being crushed very slowly by some very great weight. That was the Liss effect: she operated with a gravity that dominated everything in her world. You didn’t move unless she let you.

  Dan took a shallow breath.

  She wasn’t in Liss’s world now, Dan reminded herself. She hadn’t seen Liss in months. They’d barely talked over the summer, and starting in September, Liss had been commuting inland to St. Ignatius with the other rich kids from Marlena. Liss’s parents claimed she transferred to spend her senior year at a school with a stronger college admissions record, but that wasn’t the whole story. Everyone at North Coast High was sure that Liss had something to do with what happened to Johnny and that whatever happened to Johnny had something to do with her. Liss’s parents had barely tolerated Johnny; they would not permit his disappearance to damage their daughter’s reputation.

  In all those months of silence, Dan thought about Liss more than she wanted to admit. Mostly, she’d imagined Liss trying to apologize. She had played out ten thousand conversations where she told Liss in the cleverest possible way exactly how she’d been hurt. Imaginary-Liss would defend herself, but Dan would be strong against her—also witty, coming up with perfect little retorts, until Imaginary-Liss was begging for her friendship back. She couldn’t have it. The friendship had been ruined beyond repair, and it was Liss who did the ruining.

  Tonight had not gone like that at all. Dan had forgotten all her sharp comebacks and practically broken into tears, remembering what they did to Johnny. Liss had done nothing but roll her eyes, like usual.

  Liss said she wanted Dan’s help to find Johnny, but Dan knew better.

  What Liss really wanted was the Black Book.

  They had always kept it at Dan’s house, because her mom didn’t snoop like Liss’s did, but Liss definitely hadn’t meant to leave it with Dan permanently. Without the Book, Liss had no hope of doing real magic. No more real magic meant that instead of being a witch, Liss was just someone who used to be a witch. Dan was perfectly happy with that, but Liss absolutely could not bear being un-special. Magic made her special. Her disappeared-but-almost-certainly-dead boyfriend made her special. It was actually sort of pathetic how Liss clung to those two things, desperately enough to lie about talking to Johnny, when it was basically impossible that she could have done that spell on her own.

  Dan would have thought Liss made up Kasyan, if Alexa hadn’t been around to say he’d come up in Lorelei’s stories.

  Lord Kasyan.

  Goose bumps prickled down Dan’s arms. He certainly sounded like something out of a story, even if Dan had never heard of him. That wasn’t surprising: Dan was raised on stories about schools of fish celebrating diversity or happy foxes taking care of the environment. The creepiest things her parents told her related to the vibrancy of her aura and the overwhelming probability of extraterrestrial life, nothing about any kind of Lord of Last Resort.

  But the Black Book had taught them fairy tales were often based on nuggets of truth. If Kasyan was real, that could mean Johnny—no, Dan stopped herself. It meant nothing about Johnny, definitely not that he was alive.

  Still, to be sure, Dan typed kasyan fairy tale into the browser on her phone. The results page flashed a list of links, then went white and froze. Dan reloaded the page, but it crashed again, then again. Dan chewed her lip. That didn’t mean anything. The internet was always going down, although it wasn’t actually down at that moment, since all her other apps were working and the search results for just fairy tale, no kasyan, loaded just fine.

  She eyed her closet, which was vomiting a pile of clothes out onto the carpet.

  In all the months she’d had the Book in her possession, she’d never been tempted. Liss always thought that if they learned the right rules and recipes, magic would be predictable, controllable.Dan knew she was wrong. Magic wasn’t science. It wasn’t bound by laws and regularities that could be memorized. It ran on its own unknowable and treacherous pathways, and Dan had already come close enough to getting lost. She didn’t want anything badly enough to risk that again.

  But the idea tugged at her: Surely, the Book would know about Kasyan. She would only need to ask it the right way.

  Dan rolled off her bed and kicked aside the mound of stuff on the closet floor until she could reach a plastic bin wedged into the corner on the highest shelf. It was full of keepsakes—birthday cards and yearbooks and participation ribbons from the Marlena Beach Fourth of July Games. Underneath it all was an unremarkable shoebox that Dan eased free and carried back to her bed. Scrawled on the lid in thick marker was DAN + LISS TOP SECRET. Dan frowned. She’d written that a lifetime ago, right when they’d found the Book in the Dogtown Free Box and magic felt like an inside joke between them, before they’d even done that first spell that would change them forever.


  Dan had promised herself she wouldn’t try to use the Book without Liss. It hadn’t been hard, after what happened the night Johnny was taken. But now, running her fingers along the edge of the lid, she could taste the metallic tang of witchcraft within. It carried the Black Book’s distinctive scent, so stilling and satisfying. It was nothing she could describe—the space between leaving home and returning, between losing yourself and being found safe.

  But suddenly Dan was back at the crossroads, an eerie, fierce wind riffling the pages of the Book as it lay on the pavement, and that creature looking at the three of them like she couldn’t wait to gnaw on their bones, the moment her black gaze narrowed on Johnny, the way terror can burst like a nuclear bomb in your chest—

  No, Dan told herself again. If she let herself go back there, she might not survive it. She forced out the breath she was holding and shoved the box, unopened, under her bed. Her hands were shaking as she stripped off her sweaty T-shirt and turned the light off. Under the covers, she settled her headphones over her ears and pressed play.

  It was a ballad by her all-time favorite band forever, IronWeaks. This song almost never failed to make her cry, and tonight, tears felt appropriate. Dan turned the volume up to drown out the tinny ringing in her ears from the concert.

  Most of the song was given over to Rickey’s dirty velvet voice repeating, “Let me go, don’t you know, I’m never coming back?” In the days last year when she and all the other IronWeaks fans had just thought Rickey was missing, she listened to the song hundreds of times. She’d hoped so hard for him to come home that it felt like magic—an energy her body could barely contain.

  It had made no difference. Rickey was never missing. He had been dead the whole time. A few weeks after the band announced Rickey’s suicide, they broke up. “Without Rickey, the poetry’s gone out of the music,” they said.

  That was how Dan felt about magic after Johnny was taken. She didn’t have proof he was dead, but any hope that he wasn’t blew out so fast, it was like it had never existed. Dan felt horrible to think it, but things were better that way. If Johnny were alive it would mean that he’d spent all this time—nearly ten months—suffering, waiting, trapped, and Dan couldn’t live with herself if she’d done that to him.

  She could barely live with herself as it was.

  The song ended. Dan wormed her hand out of the covers and set it to repeat. “Let me go . . .” Rickey whispered. His face looked down at Dan from a poster taped above the bed. Even in the dark she could see his eyes rimmed in black, full lips, skin hugging tight to his collarbones and the curve of his jaw. Dan’s heart stuttered to think of a world without him.

  Dan had moved on from all of it—slowly, but she had. Of course, Liss hadn’t. Liss never put anything behind her or let anything go. She was precisely the kind of person who would wait in your driveway for hours, to remind you of the exact thing you were fighting to forget. The sooner Liss accepted that they couldn’t reverse what they’d done, the better it would be for both of them. And if Liss didn’t want to do that, well, she would have to respect that she wasn’t going to drag Dan back into the past with her.

  If Liss wanted to talk, they could talk. That didn’t mean it had to be the conversation Liss was expecting.

  Dan reached for her phone.

  TWO

  WINTER OF JUNIOR YEAR

  Dan

  Johnny was gone.

  One minute there had been three of them at the crossroads, then there were four. Johnny’s eyes had gone black and unseeing, his ears deaf to their screams, and he was taken into the night.

  Now they were only two, Dan and Liss.

  Something had gone sideways about the world, which was what happened when you saw an impossible—totally impossible—thing.

  Dan’s breath came in short bursts as she looked behind her, then behind her again, because Johnny had to be somewhere, he could not just be gone. Dan rubbed her eyes and looked behind her again, and she knew she was spinning around like a total idiot.

  “Shit, I broke the line,” she said, falling to her knees on the asphalt where they’d drawn a circle of salt. It was hopelessly scattered and bore the imprint of the sole of her Converse. In the middle of it, the Black Book lay splayed open, its pages fluttering in the wind, and Dan was hit with a wave of nausea.

  “Forget the line,” Liss snapped. “It didn’t work anyway and it can’t help us now.”

  “Are we going after him? We should find where that—that thing is taking him, right?”

  The crossroads was just over the border of a state park. The coal-black silhouettes of trees hemmed them in at all sides, clusters of redwoods stretching dagger-like into the moonless sky. Every direction looked the same. The idea of going into the woods to look for Johnny made Dan’s eyes literally go wide with fear, which was something she’d always thought was made up for movies, which made her think of fight-or-flight responses, and she absolutely could not remember what you were supposed to do in each of those responses, because what she was actually doing was kneeling in the middle of a road, shaking and trying not to vomit, which was not a plan at all and definitely not going to fix this horrible thing she’d done—

  “No.” Liss grabbed Dan’s arm. “We’re getting the hell out of here. Right now.” Dan gaped at her: Liss’s fingers digging into Dan’s flesh as she heaved her off the ground; the firm, even tenor of her voice; her cold rationality in the face of a world that had just revealed itself to be far stranger and more dangerous than either of them had ever imagined. “Get your car. We’re going to my house.”

  Liss released Dan’s arm and began gathering the remains of the failed spell.

  “I should never have—”

  “Later, Dan! Car. Now.”

  Liss knew what she was doing, she always did, and although Dan sometimes hated her for it, now relief washed over her. They didn’t have to go into the woods. They didn’t have to pursue the strange old woman, or cast the spell again and hope she’d return to let Johnny go. Dan didn’t have to think about what she had done, or why Johnny had been chosen, not one of them.

  Dan put her fate in Liss’s hands.

  Dan grabbed the Black Book off the pavement and found her keys, while Liss tossed any evidence of the spell into Dan’s trunk. Dan got into the driver’s seat. In the quiet of the car, Dan could hear the blood rushing in her ears. She was clutching the Book in both hands and all of a sudden it felt wrong. What was this thing they had been following—an enchantment, a distraction, a murder weapon?

  Liss slammed the trunk closed.

  Dan hurled the Book into the back seat and started the car.

  * * *

  —

  Dan took the curves toward Liss’s house as fast as she was able, but the drive was still over a half hour. “My parents are at a party in Gratton. They’ll be back around ten,” Liss had said. “We have to get there first.”

  But when they crested the hill that led down into Marlena, it was ten minutes till, and both their hearts were hammering with adrenaline. Dan turned onto Kingfisher Drive toward the beach, then into Liss’s drive and punched the key code into the gate. As the wooden gate swung inward, neither one of them breathed, waiting to see how many white BMWs were parked out front.

  No one was home.

  Liss sent Dan up the enormous curving stairs to her bedroom. Liss came up a few moments later with a bag of banana chips and two seltzers.

  “You seriously want a snack right now?”

  Liss dropped the bag of chips on the white carpet, then sunk down beside it and leaned against the bed. “Of course not. I’m one wrong move away from puking.” Liss yanked a textbook out of her backpack and flung it onto the bed toward Dan.

  “Liss, what are we doing?”

  Liss looked up at her with cold eyes. “We need an alibi. When my parents get home, we’ll say we’ve been here all night studyi
ng. I got some dishes dirty and left them in the sink so it’ll look like we had dinner here too. We hung out with Johnny after school for a while, then we got here around seven and we’ve been studying ever since, which they will see when they get home. Johnny said he was going on a drive. Sometimes he liked to drive around and get high, and I always gave him a hard time for that, because it’s dangerous. At around nine thirty, I texted him to check in and got no answer. Got it?”

  “Liss,” was all Dan managed to say, but that one word carried all of Dan’s concerns: Wasn’t this callous, wasn’t this wrong?

  “This is the plan. If you can’t do it, tell me right now,” Liss answered, and suddenly, Dan was afraid of her. She wasn’t sure if this driven, calculating Liss was all that different from the Liss she was best friends with, who helped her mourn Rickey and IronWeaks, who she confided in after Johnny kissed her. The Liss in front of her was dangerous. This Liss, Dan could tell, would accept nothing short of compliance with her plan.

  Dan pulled the textbook toward herself. “I can do it,” Dan said.

  With that, something about Liss softened. She was allowing herself to be scared, just a little. There was a needful, uncertain note in her voice when she said, “We’re going to survive this, right?”

  Dan said something she didn’t feel but that she wanted badly to be true. “Everything will be okay. We’ll be okay. I promise.”

  It was a promise she didn’t know how to keep.

  * * *

  —

  Johnny’s mother filed a missing person report as soon as she could, but the cops didn’t address the case with any particular urgency, so it was a few days before a police car pulled up at the entrance to North Coast High. Dan alerted Liss that she’d seen the cops on campus, and Liss pulled her into the Range Rover at lunch. They rehearsed their story again, until Liss realized they might sound too practiced once they were questioned and ended the session.