I want to find out everything about her, not just gawk at her while she eats muffins. “When you were staying with Lelia, that’s when she decided you’re a rebel?” I ask.
Rush laughs. “I also babysat June’s brothers and sisters and learned how to make desserts from the Philippines with her mom.”
“What about Hawthorn?”
“I was on the farm for a few weeks, but it didn’t feel right to stay long. Ora is . . . a force,” Rush says. “She wanted to train me as a chanter. I loved waking up early and sitting with Ora and drinking this tea she makes, with dandelions and a thousand different herbs in it. But it wasn’t easy for Hawthorn, I think.”
“She probably just didn’t want to lose you,” I said.
“It’s a good thing Ora hasn’t met you,” Rush says, giving me an all-over look. “I think she’d claim you for her coven.”
“Why?”
Rush blinks at me as though she can’t believe I’m making her say it out loud. “You’re powerful.”
“Not like Imogen,” I say without thinking.
“Why does it have to be a competition?” Rush asks. “Maybe we need everyone’s power, not a fight over who has the most.”
“Sorry,” I say. “It’s just . . . I’ve never been around other people like me before.”
Rush isn’t letting up with the intense blue staring, so I look at the ground, but that’s no real relief because there are dead people down there. Can they feel the echoes of what’s happening above them? Does it trickle through soil and caskets? Do they remember what it’s like to be alive? To want too much?
You’re going to get hurt.
“So you still come here and play?” I ask, sitting down in the grass, sliding closer to Rush. I follow in Imogen’s footsteps. I follow my hard-beating heart.
“Yeah,” Rush says. “Secret playing.”
“The Grays have never heard you?”
“Only one of them. Once,” she says, and I don’t have to ask which Gray it was. The last of the birds above us slide away, leaving the sky empty of everything but sunset. “My music used to belong to my parents. Sometimes I want to have things that don’t belong to anyone else. Not even the Grays.”
I have two thoughts.
The first is that I’ve been working so hard to do the exact opposite of Rush, to have things that aren’t just mine.
The other is that Rush played for me. She broke her own rule. Or maybe when she lets me listen, the rule stays magically intact. Maybe the music stays hers in a way that it wouldn’t with other people.
That idea is way too tempting, so I run away from it at top speed. “But you’re sharing with all of these lovely people.” I open my arms, flourishing them at the graves. I grab Rush’s bow, spring up, and start pointing it at headstones, reciting names. Valerie Moore. Elizabeth Livingston.
At first I’m doing it to put on a show, but with every etched name, the show becomes more serious. The bow feels right in my hands, like a piece of fruit that’s reached the perfect ripeness. It tugs me over toward the little patch of graves with the stark matching headstones.
“Don’t,” Rush calls out. “Nobody goes over there.”
I spin around, drawing a circle in the air with the bow. “Why not?”
“Those are hollow graves.”
“What do you mean hollow?”
Rush gives the patch a sideways glare. “No one’s buried in those. They’re markers for people who’ve gotten lost in the woods and didn’t come back.”
I keep walking. I tell myself that it’s the bow leading me forward, pointing the way. I step over a line of stones on the ground, and the air changes. It feels dense here, colder. My skin ripples. It must be the sun going down.
I move the bow from grave to grave, focused on the empty space between the horsehair and the wood. Before, I was shouting names, flinging them toward the sky. Now I’m whispering, cold as fog.
Evelyn Stuttgart
Rosa Ramona Díaz
Matthew Blackall
Emma Hart
Rush can’t believe the name was there the whole time, only a few yards away, waiting for her to find. She’s been afraid of it for so long — wanting to know who it belonged to, and not wanting to know, both forces dragging her down. She crouches to touch the writing on the headstone, carved so the actual letters are just hollow space.
Emma Hart
Danny touches Rush’s back but doesn’t say anything. She gives Rush a second to process, even as her own mind sprints from one strange truth to the next. Maybe when she found Rush over and over, she was dowsing. Maybe it had nothing to do with Danny’s oversize crush. Her impatient heart. Rush led Danny to hidden pieces of the story, pieces no one else had.
Together, they ended up here.
Stuck on that name. Breathing it in. Letting it out.
Emma Hart
The whole world narrows down to the size of that name on a headstone, and then it starts to ease open. Rush can hear the wind again, lacing through the trees. Danny watches darkness flirt with the edges of the sky.
“Do you think that’s why Imogen left?” Rush asks. “Because of . . . her?”
Danny can’t answer that. She doesn’t know Imogen’s heart. She only knows her own, and it’s starting to hurt. She helps Rush to her feet but tries not to look too deep into the shifting blue of her eyes. Danny holds out the bow, pressing it forward, trying to hand it back to Rush.
“Keep it,” Rush says, putting her hand over Danny’s and pushing the bow back toward her. “I think it’s supposed to be yours.”
Danny knows Rush wants her to have a dowsing rod, to find Imogen — but maybe Rush also wants Danny to have her own power. Danny touches the silk of the horsehair bow, sticky with rosin. She doesn’t fight back against the sudden tide of Rush’s generosity. She’ll take anything Rush will give her.
She’ll give anything Rush will take from her.
Rush’s hand is still on hers. Their bodies turn before their thoughts catch up. In a second, they are softly aligned, touching their mouths together, testing to see if either of them will stop this.
One touch. Two.
Neither girl backs off.
Danny has been trying to reason it away, and Rush has been afraid to let herself feel this again but it rolls over both of them as their lips open and a secret warmth passes between them. The dull, obvious reasons they shouldn’t do this still exist, but there is no room for them as Rush’s hands claim Danny’s hips, and Danny’s fingers slide over the pink silk ribbons of Rush’s cheeks. She sinks fingers deep into the earthy brown of Rush’s hair.
Danny thinks, wildly, that she is finding one more thing that she needs, even if she has to keep it a secret, even if it never happens again, even if no one else cares.
This matters. They matter.
Rush and Danny kiss and kiss so they don’t have to talk about Imogen or Emma. They kiss and pretend, for a minute, that they are the only ones who matter. They kiss as night coats them in a first, thin layer of darkness that feels like it could be peeled off with careful fingers.
But it’s only going to get darker.
When I spin away from Rush, I’m aware of so many things.
The first is that she kisses like a wave breaking.
The second is that if I don’t stop, now, I might never be able to.
The third is that every cell in my body is awake, and when I feel like that, magic can’t be far behind.
“I need to dowse,” I mutter, running toward the Deathmobile.
“Now?” Rush asks, close at my heels.
“That kiss . . .” That kiss was a million things. It was everything I needed and wanted and shouldn’t have done. But I don’t tell Rush any of that. “I’m pretty sure it gave my magic a boost.”
When I get to the car, I grab my bag and pull out the dowsing rod. I untie the black string holding the raven feather, careful not to ruffle it. Then I settle the feather into the crook of the bow, messing up the knots be
cause my fingertips have gone numb and stupid at the touch of Rush’s skin.
Rush comes up behind me, slipping her cello back into the trunk. After she bangs the lid of the trunk down three times to close it, she offers me a soft black case that matches the bow.
“Thanks,” I say, pinching the final knot into place.
I want to grab her again and kiss her until our minds drain of every thought, every memory of dead boys and lost girls. Instead, I hold up the new dowsing rod, and power sings through me.
“It’s a few miles,” I say, as confidently as if I’m looking at a map. I point past the cemetery, away from Tempest.
“Can you feel her?” Rush asks, leaving Imogen’s name unspoken. “Did she send another message?”
“I don’t know yet,” I say, still supercharged from the combination of dowsing and Rush’s soft kiss. “But this is important.”
We get back into Rush’s car and she drives north, following the curves of the highway as slowly as she can so we don’t miss whatever is calling my name.
“There,” I say, and she spins a sharp turn into a gravel parking lot. There’s a low building on one side with a massive cross section of a redwood in front of it. I’ve never been inside it before, but I’m pretty sure this is the Tempest visitors’ center.
The same one Haven mentioned when she told me that story.
I’m out of the car before Rush can bring it to a full stop, running to the door. The hours stenciled in white on the glass are 9–5. I don’t need to check my phone to know that we’ve missed the cutoff.
Rush leaves the Deathmobile in the middle of the lot, right next to the ancient chunk of redwood, not even bothering with a real parking spot. She runs up and starts knocking on the door.
“What . . . ?”
“You know how to dowse,” Rush says. “But I know Tempest.”
A woman in a woodsy-green polo looks out with a frown. “Closed,” she says, muffled by the glass.
“Please,” Rush says. “We have to do this research project and we both had work. . . .”
There’s a long pause, and then a longer sigh as the woman comes around the desk and unlocks the door. “I’m not turning the lights back on. Close the door behind you when you’re done, Rachel Downing.”
Rush’s lips tighten with a fake smile as the woman disappears behind the desk and then through a door into some back room. Rush gives me a real smile, gathering dusk along her lips. “Small towns do have their benefits.”
I almost kiss her, but she turns away.
I wonder if that’s something I get to do again, or if it was a one-time deal. All the certainty I felt in the graveyard is gone. Except, of course, for knowing that I want to be closer to her, touching if at all possible.
I follow Rush through the metallic trees bearing T-shirts and sweatshirts in green and purple and red. The colors look different in the low light, as if their cheerful daytime saturation was a lie.
I bring out the dowsing rod and spin a circle in the center of the space. It pulls me into a nature room for kids — a table covered with redwood pinecones, another bearing sculpted leaves from various native plants. A table filled with very real bones that belong to the animals that live here, and a little game to match them up to species names.
What does this have to do with Imogen? I want to ask.
But the dowsing rod is tugging. At the very back of the visitors’ center, under a few streams of pitiful light, I find a room that looks more like a historical society than anything else, with little exhibits and large stacks of binders and record books. There’s a display about the worst flood on the Eel River, the one that washed away a whole town. Prospero, California, according to copies of articles about the flood sitting under shiny glass. There are tiles from the roofs of houses that people ran up and stood on when the floodwaters rose. There are pictures of the rooftops, small unnatural islands in the swirl of water.
“Did you know about this?” I ask.
Rush nods in a vague way. “Everybody knows about the flood.”
I turn from the exhibit to the record books. I slide the dowsing rod over the stacks, and everything feels smooth and normal and there’s nothing strange here, nothing worth a second look.
Then I feel a snag, like a stitch that doesn’t line up with the others.
I slip the dowsing rod back into its case and pick up the brown leather book that caught the rod’s attention. The book feels good in my hands, perfectly weighted and solemnly right, so I turn back the cover. It opens clean in my hands, like someone cracked the spine to a certain page a long time ago.
It’s from the year of the Eel River flood: 1926. Most of the page is taken up by pictures of the relief efforts. The bodies of houses washed up far down the river, wrecked on the shores. My eyes keep moving until they reach a tiny paragraph at the bottom.
A young woman was declared missing: Emma Hart, daughter of James and Laura Hart, engaged to Robert Mason. She disappeared shortly after the flood, after the waters stopped rising. It was believed she ran off into the woods. There’s no reason given, no source for the strange certainty, when she just as easily could have fallen into the still-high waters of the river. That’s the whole story. Next to it is a picture, clearly taken before they started telling everyone Smile for the camera.
Robert Mason has a face that I’ve forgotten before my eyes have traveled all the way across it. But Emma — Emma has a hurricane of dark hair and a stiff white shirt. Her body fights the tightness of her blouse. The color of her eyes is impossible to tell, but they stare through the thin yellow paper, through the years between us that suddenly feel thin, too.
She looks at me the way the Grays do. Like I might save the world or I might be a complete disappointment.
The Eel River rose and rose. It was swollen and angry and it wanted everything. But Emma’s house remained strangely untouched. Her beau was in the parlor, watching the engorged river with a fascination that made Emma’s stomach turn.
She sneaked to the kitchen door, choosing to leave behind every concern about her parents, what they would think of her, how much they might worry. She ran all the way to Ada’s house. It was right on the riverbank. It was dry as a bone.
Emma waited in the bushes outside Ada’s house. When Ada didn’t appear, she smacked Ada’s window with pebbles, too hard, cracking the glass. Then Ada came out and shouted at Emma. “Go home. You need to stay safe.”
“We don’t have to fear anymore,” Emma said, the water rushing by her feet without so much as touching her stockings. “If we lived through today without being touched, we must be a miracle.”
Ada brought Emma inside and tried to warm her up by the fire.
“I’m not staying here another day,” Emma said. The words wavered slightly, so she said them again, to turn them solid. “I’m leaving, and you should come with me.” She pounded up the narrow stairs to Ada’s room and grabbed Ada’s favorite drawing brush and ink. Then she drew a map on Ada’s arm, as she had when they were little girls playing at being prospectors. She formed a big black X at the spot where they were supposed to meet.
Ada held her breath. She watched Emma as if she wanted to believe all of this was real, and not just some game concocted by a nervous, dramatic girl.
She watched Emma as if she didn’t believe it at all.
That night, Emma spun through the dark woods. She waited at the place she’d marked on Ada’s skin. Emma was alone for hours, and then days, but Ada did not come, and the world grew cold.
She stayed in the woods, only she didn’t have her black shiny shoes anymore, or her heartbeat, or the hunger that had killed her.
At first, she clung to the spot where she’d died, an uneven basin where a mighty tree must have lived at some point. She thought staying there would help her move to the next thing, to pass to heaven or, more likely, hell, considering everything she’d been taught in her church pew on Sundays.
But she didn’t pass on to any kind of after. And the long
er she stayed, the more she came to understand that she wouldn’t be leaving. Sometimes, Emma could feel other spirits thickening the air. They became part of the fog, drawn into the trees, a resting place for those without graves.
Emma stayed separate, different.
The years passed with the sticky crawl of molasses. Emma did not grow older, and she never tried to find her way home. There hadn’t been anything there for her, except Ada. Without Ada, she was lonely. When living girls wandered past Emma, she took to saying hello. Most of the girls looked up for a moment and then went on their way.
One day, Emma saw a red-haired girl walking with her shoes off. After decades of mostly silence, Emma’s own voice sounded odd in her ears, like the rustle of dry leaves. “Hello? Hello!”
This girl’s head snapped up. This girl didn’t stop searching even after she’d looked over every inch of the grove. She called, “Who is that?”
Emma started talking, and her words flooded the woods. This girl, this Imogen, heard her, followed her, nipped at her heels. Asked her a hundred questions and then heaped on a hundred more.
Imogen’s life and Emma’s death wove together. Emma was older than Imogen at first, and she thought of her as a sweet playmate, a lively spark in a cold world. But as Imogen grew, her beauty and wildness wove together, too. Emma noticed. Imogen started asking Emma new questions. “What did you look like, when you were alive?”
“I had dark hair, I think. I never could get it to stay put.”
Imogen laughed. “I can picture that. What else?”
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