The Lost Coast

by Amy Rose Capetta

  Once she’s tossed that card, all I can do is climb onboard. My toes skim gravel as I wrap my hands around Rush’s waist.

  “Ready?” she asks.

  Yesterday, I would have said yes without thinking. Today is different. Today Sebastian isn’t the only dead person in Tempest. Two bodies since I arrived in town, and I found both of them. If there was any question left about whether I have finding magic, it’s officially blown to bits.

  “Just go,” I say.

  The motorcycle shocks to life. Trembles between my legs. Rush steers us out of the parking lot, onto the highway, and the wind undoes me. Hair whips my face. My clothes feel like they’re flying off. Wind touches me everywhere, except the places that press against Rush.

  The trees keep us company as we ride. They keep our secrets, and we never even have to ask. Maybe that’s why the Grays love them so much. Maybe that’s why girls like me are always in the woods.

  June’s house is on a downslope filled with split-level ranches. Kids who look like her — the same wide cheeks and black hair and visible happiness — run around one of the yards. They’re yelling at each other in a mix of English and Spanish and a third language that I don’t recognize, which might be Tagalog. The whole scene has such a normal, comfortable afternoon feeling that I almost forget why we’re here.

  Lelia knocks around in the bag with the skull inside and pulls out her phone. She sends a quick text, and June comes out a minute later, shouldering her flowered backpack. “You owe me twelve favors,” she tells Lelia. “My parents wanted me to watch them all night. Lina came home early, which is basically a miracle.” She flings herself on the bike and attaches herself to Lelia without any of the drama that I stirred up with Rush. June even has her own helmet, deep purple and glittering in the light. She sees something in our faces that makes her immediately ask, “What’s wrong?”

  There are no words for what we’re doing. What we’ve done.

  Our silence tells June the degree of trouble we’re in.

  We roar north and turn sharply, heading into the pitch and heave of the mountains. Soon we’re skidding up unpaved streets. Lelia and Rush slow down, down, down, until we’re crawling along a road with a few trailers lining it. And then we reach a farmhouse that stands both proud and ramshackle, painted a light blue that serves as a sky-like background for a thousand varieties of weeds and herbs and wildflowers.

  I can picture them at home now. Lelia in one of those gorgeous glass-skinned houses that people in California seem to have instead of mansions. June in a nest of middle-class normalcy, brothers and sisters swirling around her. Hawthorn here, set among the brambles. The only ones I can’t see in their natural settings are Rush and Imogen.

  When I picture them, they’re together, in one of the Tempest Gardens cottages, Rush’s cleaning products forgotten, Imogen poised over her in a brass bed, Imogen’s eyes not misty but perfectly clear. She dips low, red curls pooling as they kiss.

  Rush brings the motorcycle to a stop just as I realize what I’m thinking about. I ease my arms off her waist. Slide away. Rush turns, still straddling the seat. “We’ll have to save the dowsing rod for another day.” She dismounts and heads into the knee-high weeds, singing to herself as she ruffles the flowers. The idea of Rush with a girl who is infinitely prettier and more powerful than I am should probably make me jealous, but mostly it makes me want to know more.

  We leave the motorcycles on a dusty path and walk to one of the outbuildings. It takes me a second to realize that everyone else is following me. I know where Hawthorn’s going to be, or maybe my feet know.

  I’ve brought us to a little shed, open to the elements on one side. We gather along that side, waiting for Hawthorn to notice. It feels like the bones are obvious, like she should be able to feel them. But she just keeps working over an honest-to-goodness cauldron, wearing a rubber apron.

  “What are you making?” I ask, stepping forward to look into the depths of the black pot, crusted with age.

  “Lemon-thyme soap,” she says, ladling the heated mixture into a cast-iron mold set on a sawhorse. “Ora sells it at the farmers’ market.”

  “We have a problem,” Lelia says, her words weighted with the proper amount of We’re in deep shit. “Our dowser dug up something.”

  “Not literally,” I add, because I want it to be clear to Hawthorn that I did not exhume these bones.

  Lelia opens her messenger bag and holds out the skull. It’s exactly what every replica of a skull looks like, except it’s more solid and delicate at the exact same time. June gasps so hard that the butterflies in the weeds outside take off in a fluttering tide.

  Hawthorn sinks to her knees, the apron she’s wearing stiff underneath her, the backs of her legs bare. She’s wearing ancient Chuck Taylors. I don’t know why, but that lodges in my brain. Barefoot witches in the woods are one thing. Teenage girls who help their moms make soap after school should not have to deal with this.

  Lelia says, “We thought maybe Ora could —”

  “No,” Hawthorn says, cutting her off.

  “Hawthorn,” Rush says. “If she could help . . .”

  “Ora would think we’re too young to handle it, okay?” Hawthorn says, stripping off her apron. “She’d want to bring in her whole coven. And some of them are really normal people in their daylight lives. Someone would call the police.”

  “We’ve already touched the bones,” Lelia says. She looks to me and Rush. “All three of us.” Guilt closes in on us like night falling. “We need to know who the fuck that is,” Lelia says, nodding down at the skull.

  “Right,” Hawthorn says. “Let’s go to the High Point.”

  June takes the skull and stares right into it, through its hollowed-out eyes. “This isn’t like finding Sebastian,” she says. “That looked like a coincidence. This looks like . . .”

  “Like we’re part of it,” Rush says.

  “Aren’t we?” I ask.

  The Grays close ranks, giving each other very important stares, none of them willing to offer me one. I think about turning around and leaving Hawthorn’s farm before another body turns up, but I know I’m a part of this, even if the Grays don’t consider me part of them.

  We head out into the simmering gold afternoon. Hawthorn leads us toward the High Point, whatever that is. I look ahead of me, at the line of retreating backs climbing toward a rise, boots and sneakers and sandals swishing through the long grass, hips swaying, hands gripping bones.

  I don’t believe that any of the Grays would kill someone. But I didn’t believe in ravens yesterday, and I was staring right at them.

  Lelia sets to work, picking up the bones, putting them into some kind of order, giving them the shape of a body as best she can.

  Danny dances back and forth, the kind of nervous ballet that makes Hawthorn want to brew some rose-hip tea and makes Lelia want to bash her own skull against a rock.

  “What is it?” Lelia asks tightly.

  “You seem to know a lot about human bones,” Danny says. “But you said that your magic doesn’t include people, right?”

  Hawthorn holds up a palm. “Just because you’re a dowser doesn’t mean you’re invited to dive around in our personal lives.”

  Danny cringes, a recoil that the Grays notice a little too late. They don’t mean to keep pushing her away; they’ve just been a group for so long that it’s bound to happen sometimes. Especially when Danny whips out something that sounds so much like an accusation.

  “So there is a reason Lelia knows so much about this,” Danny says, standing with her back to the ridge known as the High Point. She looks less interested in the view than in glaring at the Grays.

  “You should stop talking,” June says, inserting herself between Danny and Lelia. June doesn’t look like an imposing physical presence — until she does. She’s bigger than all of the Grays except for Rush, with significant muscle under her soft skin and fluttering dress.

  Lelia looks up from the slim, snappable bone
s of the rib cage, taking one more glimpse of Danny before she tells her. “I was obsessed with anatomy freshman year. It lasted exactly as long as my mom dying.”

  Danny shuts up.

  The Grays were Lelia’s friends before cancer did its evil, predictable thing. Lelia’s not that much of a witch, and she knows it. She likes making little piles of stones and spending her spare time pressing and drying moss and petals, and hanging out with ravens instead of people, but that’s not the same as having big-time magic. Being a Gray keeps her connected. To the world. To humans she doesn’t hate.

  Which is why she needs to figure out what’s going on, what kind of trouble won’t leave them alone. People are turning up dead, and she can almost smell how unnatural it is. Salt water in the woods. Bones in the tourist shop. This could eat up her friends the way cancer ate up her mother, ate up her life, made it impossible to be around people without them looking at her with a weird mix of pity and pure selfish fear, as if what happened to her might be something they can avoid if they don’t stand too close.

  Danny can’t keep quiet. “I shouldn’t have said . . .”

  “No,” Lelia says. “You shouldn’t.” She slides the last rib into place, forming a slender cage. “But you get points not for giving some mealy excuse.” She looks up at Danny, the blush already scraped off her cheeks, the glow of her magic dimmed by so much death. “I can see how much it’s bothering you.”

  “Saying the wrong thing?” Danny asks.

  “Being the one who finds them.”

  “We need to ask the bones who they belonged to,” Hawthorn says.

  Heads swivel. Eyes pin. The Grays are all looking at Danny as she dances back and forth. Finding a lost name sounds like a job for their dowser. “You make that sound like a thing,” she says, “that a person can just do.”

  “You have to come up with some kind of . . . correspondence,” Hawthorn says. She hasn’t started with the basics of magic since the Grays were first learning. It feels like taking a thousand steps backward and then working her way forward through thick mud. And then there’s the fact that everything she taught the Grays was supposed to make their lives better, and now she feels like she’s patching together survival tactics. “Every element in a spell stands in for something else. You’re building a metaphor, then bringing it to life. Like, when Rush sings, every note has meaning. The mode she chooses . . .”

  “That’s like the key . . .” Rush adds, her voice a shimmering overlay.

  “That means something, too,” Hawthorn finishes.

  “Your songs are spells?” Danny asks, staring at Rush with an amazed, hopeless intensity that the other Grays pick up on right away.

  “What did you think they were?” Lelia asks. “Top forty witch radio?”

  “Everything we do has intention,” Hawthorn says. “Most magic doesn’t change the world. It’s about being in the world. Appreciating its gifts.” The words sound rote, even to Hawthorn. She grew up believing them. But two dead people are not exactly what she would call gifts.

  Danny is light on her feet, and watching her pour herself into the work is a bit of shine against black clouds. This girl is a silver lining come to life. Gray turned bright and beautiful.

  She picks up bones and puts them back down. She hummingbirds around the skeleton. It took them long enough, but the Grays finally start paying attention to the girl in front of them.

  This is how the Grays fall in love. This is how the Grays do everything.

  In the weirdest possible way.

  This is how they go down.

  Together.

  Ican feel the Grays watching me, eyes at my back, but I can’t think about them right now.

  This is between me and the bones.

  Here is the curved plate of a skull. Here is the ridge of a collarbone. Here is the tiny, impossible bone of a fingertip.

  I look over each one until I’ve oriented myself. Like staring at the stars until they form constellations. Those stars are the bones of the universe. Dead and gone, but they still shine white, white, white.

  “What happened to you?” I ask.

  The bones are silent. Their secrets don’t budge. This isn’t how spells work, according to Hawthorn. I can’t talk to a person who used to be there. It’s like trying to walk in the front door of a house that doesn’t have one anymore. I need to find another way in. I need to craft a bridge. I need to build a spell.

  But I’m not a singer like Rush, and I can’t read the world like Lelia. I don’t have a dark knife like June or a lifetime of magical knowledge in my pockets like Hawthorn. I’m not Imogen with her bottomless well of power.

  All I have is the ability to follow bizarre whims. To dance after people I barely know. To reach for what I need most and hope I don’t come up holding air.

  I touch the bones. Palm to the place where a palm goes.

  I hold a hand that isn’t there.

  A fleshed-out feeling comes. I am in the woods, dancing with a girl. Her wide brown cheeks spotted with a blush.

  My hand pressed to her hand.

  June.

  This is a memory.

  I come back to the High Point, dizzy with what I’ve figured out, nervous at how much I still don’t know. The Grays are a blur around me, moving to get a better view of what I’m doing, Hawthorn writing it all down in the chronicle. Her pen scratches and scratches at white paper.

  I feel pressure, like a hand at my throat.

  I need the Grays. I can’t go back to a world without magic, a world without them.

  I stand over the body. I touch my foot to the bones of feet. Some of the toe pieces, the little white stubs, are missing.

  I get a glimpse of bare feet on dark earth.

  I look down at the feet from above, an angle that means mine. They’re planted wide and confident, settled into the dark space of a burned-out tree. They might feel like they’re my feet, but they clearly belong to someone else. The toes are long and squared, the nails half-mooned with dirt.

  I come back to myself again, the Grays all around me, murmuring. Rush sings a full-throated song. The same one she was singing the night I first saw her. Or maybe that was morning. It’s all a dizzy blur.

  I get on my knees at the foot of the skeleton and crawl my hands out, careful not to disturb the bones. The heels of my hands catch on prickly pine needles and imprint with sharp stones. I lower myself over the slender cage of ribs, the birdcage of bones. I hover, holding myself up.

  My heartbeat triples.

  I hear someone saying a name. It’s blurry, under water. It must be raining. I smell the release of the woods, a deep green sigh unlocked by the rain.

  “Neil.” The voice is so washed out by the sound of water that it’s almost not there at all. “I’m sorry.”

  Water rises past my feet, swallows my waist. This is not just rain. There are panels of darkness on both sides of my vision, and in the center, a view of the woods, a single long splinter of daylight and trees. I’ve seen this view before. I’m inside a redwood. And the space is flooding.

  I try to leave, but I can’t move.

  And then I feel hands all over me, pulling me back into my own body. Lelia and Rush and Hawthorn and June.

  I grab on to their names, hold them like lifelines.

  They drag me away from a sharp, broken shard of the past. Their hands are warm and everywhere. My arms, my back, my legs. They give me a quick review, a reminder of what is me and what is not.

  My eyes snap open, and I hack the air into pieces with coughing. Water comes out of my lungs.

  The Grays step back.

  I roll onto my knees and cough until there’s nothing but salty strings of spit that I have to wipe away, my back caving as my lungs empty. I look up at the Grays, my body still twisted around someone else’s pain.

  “Who’s Neil?” I ask. “And how did he drown in the woods?”

  The first time the Grays met the hermit, he was still called Neil.

  He was exactly
the kind of tourist that seemed to be magnetized to Tempest. June noticed him first, biking down the highway, sweating enough to fill a small lake. He wore a bandanna, ragged shorts that looked like they’d been bitten by a wild animal at the bottoms, and the kind of backpack that probably cost four hundred dollars when it was new.

  “Oh, look,” June said, pointing as if she’d noticed an interesting cloud formation. “A boy.”

  Imogen turned, and the Grays followed the line of her eyes. Everything they lit on become important, even if it was only for that second. “Yours,” Imogen said to Hawthorn, waving a hand and dismissing the whole thing.

  The Grays lingered at the side of the highway. Tourists were busy cranking their necks to take in the view. Motorcycle packs flocked from the Bay Area like this was a natural migration route. The Grays had seen at least four since that morning, including a beautifully weathered all-lady group. They had talked about how that could be them in fifty years.

  “No motorcycles,” June had said with her nose scrunched.

  “I’ll get you a sidecar, baby,” Lelia said, wrapping her arm around June’s shoulder, melting her back into a happy state.

  They talked about what their motorcycle gang should be named as they walked in a slow trickle toward the diner. Hawthorn and June were both set on Bel’s Hells.

  “Okay, but not enough people know that Bel is a Celtic god,” Lelia said. “They won’t know how good that is.”

  “We’ll know,” June argued.

  Now that Imogen had stopped looking at the boy, he was just scenery. But he skidded to a halt right next to them and drawled in an unexpectedly southern way, “Hey, there. Can you point me to the nearest campground?”

  “You can’t really camp in the redwoods, except in a few special places,” Lelia said. “They’re protected.” The Grays heard the rest of the sentence, the part that was too heavily implied to even bother saying: They’re protected from tourists and fancy backpacks and people like you.

  Imogen twisted her lips, considering something that the rest of them couldn’t even see.