I don’t know how I’m supposed to find my magic. Or how I’m supposed to use that to find Imogen. So I think about what I do know. The Grays, who connect me to her, a living tether, making it feel like she’s here with me. As present as the sky. As everywhere as sky.
It feels the same as when I walked out of my classroom last year and made it to the highway. The floating certainty. The haze of need. But this time, there are no rules trying to hold me in place.
A new magic is awake.
The trees feel it. The trees feel everything.
Some secrets stay close to the trunks of the redwoods. Others have been carried away. Like the bones. The bones are gone, and the trees fear that an important story left with them.
Too much has been hidden, and here is finding magic.
The trees reach with long branched fingers. The one who carries fresh magic looks up as they clamor and crowd. But she is too busy with her fog, wrapped in its clammy embrace, and they do not know how to reach her.
Words are not the way they speak. There are other languages, though. Weather, sky, soil. Wind and time.
They look for a new way to whisper. They pick another magic-girl, the one with a song always trapped in her throat.
And they make the forest play for her.
They curve wind, creak wood.
She opens her mouth and lets out three notes, stepping-stones from here to somewhere else. She sings them as though she is running her fingers over smooth bark, mindless and soft, over and over.
Iwalk through fog until my body dissolves and my feet are cloud. I spill toward Imogen. Her presence is strong, a pulse throbbing under skin.
But feeling her near and reaching her are two different things. I push forward, my breath straining and my heart going wild. I have no boundaries, only blood and magic racing, building, trying to reach her. And something larger than her.
I am close.
I am close.
And then . . .
I lose that sense of nearness, that delicious, infuriating almost.
The fog spits me out, just like Hawthorn said it would.
One day, copper-girl goes into the woods alone, and when she comes out, she is changed. Dull. Water sits flat as she walks by, does not whisper in eddies and curls. Her hair still shines red, but it is a flat shine.
The glow they seek comes from inside, burns through.
The birds fly over the woods in case copper has dropped something, hoping they might pluck a shiny soul from the ground and bring it back to her. They search and search, and one day they find a girl walking, a copper girl whose eyes flash dark.
The birds land and look at her, shifting on their pebbled legs.
Not the same girl.
She glares at the birds. Then she tries giving them a smile, buried bright, her shine covered with dark earth. The birds want to dig at her until they have the rest. They are hungry for shine.
They fly toward her. She screams at them.
The ravens consider leaving Tempest. One of their witch-flock has gone dull, the others are leaking sorrow. But when they circle the edges of town, they do not want to untie themselves. They are part of this knot. They cannot leave without letting the witches go.
The witches are known.
The witches are good.
The birds scream at one another.
Help. Help.
I’m looking around in circles. I lost her. It’s like Imogen was swept away by the fog, while I was dumped out here.
Why?
The question breaks into pieces as the Grays run toward me, a tumble of skin in four different shades.
They’re naked.
If there was any bit of fog left in my body, it clears as I stare at the Grays. I drink in curves and angles. I blush at unforgiving beauty. And then I wince away, like I’ve been staring too long at the sun.
I close my eyes, and in the darkness, I hear music. It takes me a second to realize that Rush is singing.
The same three notes, over and over.
June hops up and down, clapping her hands. “Danny followed the exact path we did the last time we were in the woods with Imogen. She came to the spot where we saw her before . . .”
Before they lost her.
This is where I lost Imogen, too, or at least the feeling of her. But not entirely. There’s still a trace. I describe all of that, as best as I can, with words that feel like they can’t possibly contain the whole truth.
Lelia is wearing her eternal frown, but Hawthorn pinches the stem of her silver glasses, which I guess she gets to wear even when she’s skyclad. She looks at me like I’m something rare.
“You’re a dowser,” Hawthorn says.
It’s a word I’ve heard before but never really paid attention to. “Don’t they find water?”
Hawthorn takes a deep breath and looks set to give the definition, but Rush beats her to this one, words tripping to get out. “Dowsers have searching magic. They find what’s hidden, precious, out of reach. A lot of the time that means water. Some look for oil or gemstones. Forgotten graves.”
That last one sends a swarm of imaginary spiders over me.
June touches my arm lightly. “What’s the thing you’ve been looking for?”
In Michigan, it was girls to kiss. Then I started going farther, searching harder. Looking for something that I’ve only caught in gasps: the first time I said Tempest, when I tipped my neck back to take in the redwoods, when the Grays stare at me like I am something they need. When Rush stares at me like I am something she needs, even if it’s for all the wrong reasons.
The feeling of Imogen in the fog, so close.
“Dowser,” I say.
And the word shakes.
And the world shifts.
They were the climbers, always headed up, bark under their bare feet, a not-falling prayer on their lips.
June knew that she had to look carefully if she wanted to find the right trees. Most redwoods resisted the idea, their branches starting a third of the way up massively tall bodies. She and Imogen made a map of beginner climbs, trunks with low access and evenly spaced branches. Soon they were testing much larger trees. “Way out of our league,” as Imogen liked to describe them. June loved that moment when her toes reached a branch they had no business reaching. Most days, that was enough. Most days, they didn’t believe they were going to make it to the sky.
But every time June came back to the ground, it got harder to stay. She didn’t really fit there. Not with her family, even though she loved them. Not with her girlfriend, who started their relationship with a flood of all-night kissing sessions before her interests narrowed to one thing: a move to San Francisco, where they could find a cramped apartment and live on the glory of takeout and parties. Not even with the Grays, who seemed deeper into their magic than June was, wading around in power while she played with a very cool-looking but essentially useless black knife that she’d found at a tea-and-tarot shop in Santa Cruz and picked up like it was a missing piece of her body.
She tried to carve sigils with it, but that felt like passing notes to the universe and hoping it paid attention. June wanted magic to tease the universe apart, to show her the parts of it she didn’t already know. She wanted to cut and see the muscle and blood, the slippery organs, the parts that most people wouldn’t look at.
Maybe June insisted on looking deeper because she’d been sick when she was younger, the kind of sick that required long hospital stays. A rare West Coast case of Lyme disease had taken two things: the concept that June’s immune system would fully recover, and her patience for everything but the most honest parts of life.
She broke up with her girlfriend and spent the next week wandering around the woods in a haze of disappointment — until one day Imogen led her to a spot with a riot of birds and squirrels high overhead. “There’s a whole other reality up there,” Imogen said, pointing at the thick weave of branches that closed above them, creating a sort of blanket, only letting through a mist of li
ght. “In the tops of those trees. A canopy world.”
“I want to see it,” June said.
“Of course you do,” Imogen said, like that had been the whole point.
June used a flowery headband to strap her athame to her thigh. It was too big to fit into a pocket, too dangerous to keep in hand.
Imogen understood why June was bringing the athame. She was the one who always said June had a strong, clear third eye. She encouraged June when she talked about the possibilities of that knife, when she carted it everywhere, waving it in a slow, careful dance. Imogen believed in June, in the deep parts of her that no one else saw.
The tree they had picked was the definition of impossible. It stretched so wide at the base that it made June’s mouth fall open. It tapered and tapered almost to a vanishing point above their heads.
“Look,” Imogen said, pointing to a sapling next to it with a crown that reached the lowest branches of the massive tree. The one June had started thinking of as hers.
June knew that if she waited too long, she would never let herself climb. She took a running start at the small tree, free-climbing hand over hand, her feet scrabbling at the bark, chips flying. The little tree swayed with her weight, bending as if she were leading a dance. And, just like when she was dancing with a pretty girl, the rest of the world blurred around June, leaving only what was directly in front of her in sweet, sharp focus.
She leaped, and for a single second, she was flying. But she met the massive tree too hard. Her right hand didn’t find the hold she’d expected. Her fingers ripped bark, and it splintered into the white spaces under her nails. She got a single second of lift by pushing with her toes. Her legs glimmered with pain. She reached up for a branch, but she must have misread the distance. Nothing waited above.
While June was falling, her knife sliced the air, and her pinned-open eyes caught a glimpse of another place, a murk-and-mistlight place filled with dark towers made of fog where the trees should have been.
June met the ground. The only thing that existed was pain. It was loud and simple. Not like what she’d seen the moment before, a whisper of a place that she was already convincing herself didn’t exist.
“It’s okay,” Imogen said, and at first June thought that Imogen was talking about her leg, which was not okay. But then Imogen was looking into June’s eyes, her dark ones sparking with fever, and saying, “I saw it, too.”
After the fog dance, I thought everything was going to change. When I wake up, the world is even more aggressively normal than before.
I glaze my eyes and make it through my classes with minimal trouble before it’s time for my first shift at the after-school job I promised Mom I would get. My workplace, a little shack off the highway called Coffee Gods, is only two parking lots down from the school. The manager hands me a green half-apron. Last night, I was swimming naked through fog. Now I’m learning how to wrap day-old muffins and where to find the almond milk.
“Most of our customers drive up,” says the manager, a girl who looks half a second older than I am. “If you get a walker, don’t make them wait too long even if you have a line on the other side.”
The other new hire, Courtney Something, nods as if the universe hinges on this information. As if planetary orbits will be interrupted and stars will fizzle out if we forget.
“Do you think you’re all set?” the manager asks.
Courtney nods. I’m less sure. I’ve only been half listening. There is something buzzing in my head.
The feeling of milky air on bare feet, bare everything.
The slipping-away of Imogen.
That word.
Dowser.
Would my entire life have been easier if I’d known about that word? Would I have figured it out on my own, or would I have pushed through without it? The questions make me dizzy, like I’m standing on the cliff’s edge of some other version of my life, looking down.
My phone buzzes. I reach for the open mouth of my bag.
“No phones,” the manager says automatically.
“Yeah, that’s not going to work,” I say. “I have to check in.”
“With your parole officer?” Courtney asks.
I can’t tell if she’s joking or if she actually thinks I’m a juvenile delinquent.
“My mom.”
Mom is upset about the time I spent in the woods without checking in, the time lost to the fog. Last night, after I got in, I told her that my phone lost its charge faster than I thought it would. I reminded her that I hadn’t come home late, and I’d stayed in Tempest the entire time.
Mom let out a hard exhale, like she was trying to chase the paranoia out of her chest. She told me she was overreacting.
I agreed.
Which officially makes me the worst daughter in California.
The manager tells me that I can check in with my mom, but all other texting will be punished. Who else would I text? I can’t imagine the Grays using cell phones. They probably write letters to each other in old-timey script.
The manager leaves us to deal with the afternoon crowd. With only two people in the little shack, it’s easier to move. Courtney spins around seamlessly in black yoga pants, packing fruit and ice into the blenders, while I scoop dark-brown grit into filters, the smell traveling straight past my nose, waking up my brain.
It wafts past the memory of last night and sticks on the sight of Sebastian, blood soaked through his T-shirt, eyes staring up at nothing when they should have been looking at me.
A glossy black car pulls to the window, and I take an order for two mango sunrise smoothies.
This is fine. This is doable.
Less than an hour later, I hear two motorcycles pull into the parking lot. When I look out through the walk-up order window, I see that they’re the old-fashioned kind with a skeletal look to them, mostly metal with a kiss of chrome. One of the riders is welded out of sharp angles, the other full-blown curvy. Fingerless leather gloves grip handlebars. Two pairs of boots — one studded and leather-tasseled, one that would look more at home on a long hike — crunch into the gravel. The taller girl pulls off her helmet, revealing red cheeks stuck with blond hair.
“Lelia?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “I’m Lelia’s slightly-less-evil twin.”
I wait for her to smirk, confirming that this is a joke.
“You have a motorcycle license?”
She rolls her rich green eyes. “And a dad who never grew out of collecting toys. Can we move on?”
My eyes slip to the other rider. Rush, I think, right before she pulls away her helmet in a one-handed motion, shaking out her long dark hair and proving me right.
“Our girl here does not have a motorcycle license,” Lelia says as she throws her arm around Rush’s shoulders. “She has something even better. A rebellious streak.”
Rush burns bonfire red, but she doesn’t deny it. I hadn’t thought of her as the rebellious type. Or the blushing type.
“I thought you drive that old car,” I say.
“The Deathmobile?” Lelia asks in a way that makes it perfectly clear the Grays have baptized it. “Yeah, we don’t let her drive anyone around in that thing.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my car. But these are more fun,” Rush admits. She gestures to the bikes.
“So. Uh. Can I get you something? A mango sunrise? Some muffins for your joyride? I’ve heard it’s not a real joyride without muffins.”
I wince. Courtney looks at me like there might be something medically wrong.
“We think you need a dowsing rod,” Lelia announces. “To find Imogen.”
I can’t believe Lelia came right out and said that in public. But there’s something satisfying about the way Courtney leaves us alone now that she thinks we’re up to something witchy.
“A dowsing rod?” I ask. I have a vague idea of what that is. “You mean a big tuning fork to wave around?”
“Something like that,” Rush says.
“It was Rush
’s idea,” Lelia adds, like she can hear the surprise rattling around in my skull. “But I have somewhere we can go to get started with it. I guess I couldn’t wait.” She puts her fingerless gloves on the counter, hard, startling Courtney, and leans through the order window, sticking her head inside of Coffee Gods and looking around with a proprietary kind of stare, like she might buy the place later. Or rob it.
“Do you get off work soon?” Lelia asks.
I glance over at Courtney, who is dutifully combining frozen strawberries from several plastic containers. They thud, thud, thud as she gives me a tight-faced look.
I want a dowsing rod.
I do not want to lose this job, the last shred of Mom’s trust, and possibly the whole new life I asked for.
“Not really,” I say. “Two more hours.”
Lelia and Rush nod at each other like this is what they expected. They’re going to leave me here. I can feel a trapdoor plummet open in my heart. Maybe they won’t bother to come back.
Lelia stomps to her motorcycle, showing me the back of her leather jacket, scratched with white letters: The Witch Your Mother Warned You About.
“I’ll take one of those muffins,” Rush says.
She inspects the list of baked goods by the order window, peeling off her own ancient leather jacket. No mottoes splashed across the back; instead it’s got moon phases stitched in silver. Rush works her way out of a green flannel layer, tying the sleeves around her waist, a quick knot tugging at her white tank top. It becomes a very not-innocent version of hide-and-seek as I take in her plum-colored bra straps, the first dip of her breasts. The fabric rides up on one hip, exposing a spot above her jeans.
Stop running your eyes all over Imogen’s girlfriend.
I’m supposed to bring Imogen back. I know Rush wants her back. This is every flavor of wrong.
Yet I can’t unglue my attention from that spot on Rush’s hip. I’ve waited forever to meet a girl who doesn’t treat her body like a natural enemy. Someone who moves through the world like there’s more than the troubled surface.
The Lost Coast Page 6
