The Lost Coast

by Amy Rose Capetta

  Imogen.

  She is the promise.

  I keep walking forward.

  I try to keep track of which way I’m walking and for how long, but apparently being a spirit means that I have to leave those kinds of certainty behind. My body is probably still caught in the faerie ring, as blank as Imogen’s. I look down at my hands. They’re made of something less solid than skin but more than mist. The dowsing rod slipped out of my hands at some point, and now I don’t have the athame or Rush’s bow or the raven feather to point my way. I only have the moon — the same as our moon, a bright pin keeping the two places together. The dark sky is clear, glassy and black despite the towers of fog, but there are no stars here.

  There is a strange claustrophobia to this place, one that plunges me inward. I still have my heartbeat, faint but louder than anything in this wordless, muted place. Or maybe it isn’t my heart at all. Maybe it’s a different pulse, a whispered truth.

  She’s here.

  She’s here.

  She’s here.

  When I find Imogen this time, there is no question. There is only a wisp of fog, different from all the other wisps.

  Imogen’s spirit is wandering, and I know that feeling. We’ve all been acting like she must be in danger, or dangerous — not lost. The Grays worship Imogen so much that they can’t see that she’s like me, stumbling and searching, always looking for more, not always sure where to turn next.

  “Imogen?” I ask.

  When the wisp hears its name, it springs into a girl-shape, a vague and beautiful notion. She holds up her hand, and I match it to mine. Our fingertips kiss.

  “Tell me a story,” Imogen says. It’s the voice from the hermit’s death. It’s the voice from the moment before Haven tried to kill me. I try not to be afraid.

  “A story about what?” I ask.

  “About Imogen,” she says.

  At first I don’t understand. But she’s looking down at her shape like it’s hollow and meaningless. She needs to fill it. She needs to remember who she is.

  So I tell her stories borrowed from Hawthorn and Lelia and June and Rush, even Haven. Ones about the girls at school who wear her wards in tiny bottles around their necks. Ones about the witch who beckons water and the girl who summons loyalty from people’s stubborn hearts. Imogen, who wore black and white even though her personality blazed in every color, like the rainbow stones on her fingers. I give her the places she came from: the split-level house with no door, the town that’s in danger of shrinking back to normal size without her. I give her the people she came from: the family that never built her a safe home, the friends that became an entire world. I give her the stories I found when I was looking for her. I give her back to herself, beautiful and confusing and more than anyone could possibly take in at once, the way the far side of a redwood can only be guessed about from where I’m standing.

  Imogen listens. She starts to interrupt, telling me details that I don’t remember or never knew. The more she speaks, the more solid she gets. Loose curls and wide, intent eyes emerge from the mist, followed by the angles of her jaw, her high cheekbones, her pointed chin. I can’t wait any longer. “When you disappeared,” I say, “you were looking for a girl named —”

  “Emma!” The way she says that name turns it to wildflower honey. “Emma, Emma, Emma.”

  Another wisp draws across the woods, dotted and incomplete. It finds Imogen and clings to her palm, dances around her fingertips like a tiny moon. Imogen murmurs her name again and again.

  Emma has been lost for so long that I bet it takes a lot to remember.

  Emma takes shape, broad shouldered and fog bodied, and she smiles. First at Imogen. Then at me.

  “This is Danny,” Imogen says.

  “I thought you might come,” Emma says.

  I hold up my arm. The map is there, faded but with the X still visible. Emma nods, her eyes two mistlights, the pupils so large from the darkness of this place that they’re orbs of black ringed with silver. She puts up her hand, and I match it to mine. Our fingertips kiss. I think this is how people say hello here.

  “Why aren’t you in the trees with the rest of the spirits?” I ask Emma.

  “Magic.” She sighs.

  “You did a spell to keep yourself like this?” I ask.

  “No,” Emma said. “Magic keeps me apart from the rest. The bits of me that were alive are gone, but magic . . .”

  “You stayed this way because you’re a witch,” I say. It makes a strange sort of sense. Magic makes life different — why wouldn’t it make death different? “And Imogen found you because she’s a witch, too.”

  “We’ve been friends for the longest time,” Imogen says, glowing at Emma. “She’s like us.”

  I try to smile at Emma, but guilt smothers it. I don’t know how much she knows about me — but she knew enough to lead me here. “I’m sorry I thought you were trying to hurt Imogen. Or the Grays.”

  Emma nods and closes her eyes with a calm smile, as though she’s absorbing my apology.

  But Imogen looks troubled. A memory is working its way into her, one painful breath at a time. “Emma wasn’t hurting people. Haven was hurting people. The last time I saw you . . .” She gasps like I pricked all of her fingers at once. “What happened to my sister?”

  I wince. “She’s gone.”

  Imogen hangs her head, and her edges blur. I’m afraid she’ll disappear back into the fog. “Imogen!” I cry. “Imogen, I tried to stop her. The Grays tried. They wanted to help her, but she was . . .”

  There is a sound around us, like great bones breaking. Imogen takes my hand, and her memories of Haven slide into me. She was so small, so contained, so angry and sad. “I ran away so she wouldn’t be able to hurt the Grays,” Imogen said. “It was all I could do. It wasn’t enough. People are dead, aren’t they?”

  I nod.

  “Tell me,” Imogen says.

  I realize that I left out all those bits of the story, the truly bad ones. I push my hand through Imogen’s, and I push the story at her. I feel it pass into her like a river flowing into an ocean.

  “Your wards protected the Grays until we found your message in the hermit’s tree. And then . . . and then we tried to protect each other.”

  “Your friends,” Emma says, smiling at the thought. “I never had those. I had . . . someone I cared for . . . but I didn’t have friends.”

  I didn’t have friends either, before the Grays. That word was an empty outline until they filled it in. “I’m sorry,” I say, and it feels like I’m crying, even though there are no tears in this place. If there were, it might be an ocean.

  Emma purses her lips and steps into me, overlapping me, so I can see her truth without anything standing between us. Two girls, holding hands along the banks of the Eel River, wearing high-buttoned dresses and crow-black shoes, everything about them proper except the look they are passing back and forth.

  One girl, about to be married off. When she looks at the man she’s meant to love, nothing happens in her heart. Our heart. We’re overlapped, every emotion doubled. It’s overwhelming, but I don’t step away.

  A flood.

  The memories come faster, harder, sweeping me under. I am drowned in her past, years and years of pain.

  And then Imogen. She was the first good thing that Emma Hart ever found. Imogen is the happiness she waited for, years and decades.

  Almost a century.

  I step back from Emma, finally understanding why Imogen risked so much to find her. Imogen lays her head on Emma’s shoulder, and Emma runs a hand over Imogen’s hair. I’ve found the heart of another secret: the Grays are always touching and kissing each other because so many before us couldn’t. Each kiss carries the weight of so many kisses that never were.

  Every touch is an invisible battle won.

  “I first thought I might be able to bring Emma back when I saw the cut that June’s athame made,” Imogen says. “And then . . . and then after what happened with Rush, I
didn’t know if I should try it. But it always felt like Emma should be right there with me. Even when I wanted to kiss Rush, even when I dreamed of leaving Tempest someday. There was a space for Emma that wasn’t for anyone else.”

  Emma looks at Imogen like she’s the moon, shining hard enough to light the whole dark world.

  Imogen gets lost in that look for a second, and then she comes back to me. “It took time to build the spell. I had to find Emma’s name. She’d lost it a long time ago. It would have been easier to tell the Grays, to have them help me, but . . . I didn’t think they would understand. Or they would, and then they’d be mad at me for keeping so much of my life a secret.”

  Imogen kept parts of herself hidden. Imogen did magic by herself.

  Imogen was not the perfect girl the Grays needed her to be, and she knew it.

  But Hawthorn was right: Imogen should have trusted them. She could have shown them every so-called imperfection, every strange longing and rough patch in her heart. They would have loved her anyway. Maybe they would have loved her better if they knew all of her.

  “Why are you still here?” I ask. “If the whole point was to bring Emma back?”

  “Blowback.” Imogen hesitates, and I nod at her to keep going. I know what blowback is, thanks to Hawthorn and the failed wards. “The spell brought me here, to Emma, and I thought I would be able to carry her out with me. But I couldn’t. My magic wasn’t enough, or it wasn’t the right kind, and I just . . . couldn’t.”

  Emma gives Imogen a pained smile. She turns to me with a prim set to her features that I realize is worry. “We needed a witch with just the right ability.” I look down at my arm. Haven’s storm washed away most of the map, but the last smudges are there, a faint but visible X lodged in the softness near my wrist.

  Emma brought me here for a reason. Me, not one of the others. “You think I can help you leave.”

  Imogen looks at the map on my arm. “I didn’t know you did that,” she says to Emma.

  Emma looks down at the ground, and when I follow her gaze I see that it isn’t earth but a shiny black mirror. “I was afraid you would tell me not to.”

  “You’re right,” Imogen says to Emma, and then she spins to me. “It was dangerous for you to come. You have to go home before you get stuck here, too.” She’s staring at me as if it makes all the difference whether I make it back — and that look brings her fully to life, just for a moment. I want to see Imogen walking down the main street of Tempest or standing on the mother tree, blazing red-haired, leaving magic in her wake like a trail of coins dropped from her pockets. I don’t want to leave Emma behind either. She waited even longer than I did to find the Grays.

  “Come on,” I say, holding out a hand for each of them. “We’re leaving this party together.”

  How did you plan to do it?” My words sound tissue thin. The breaths I’m taking barely dent my lungs. Or maybe I’m just remembering breathing; maybe I don’t breathe at all in this place. “How were you going to bring Emma back with you?”

  “I was going to offer her a place in my body,” Imogen says.

  I nod, gulping air that feels like frosted glass.

  “It didn’t work,” Imogen adds. “I wanted to do it, but that’s not the same as being able to. I guess it’s not the kind of thing that any witch can do. I thought . . . I thought that loving Emma would be enough.”

  I try to find something inside me, something that I can shine up and call bravery. If I want to get all three of us out of here, I need to offer them both a place. Find space for them. And if I carry them out, Emma still won’t have a body, and Imogen won’t be able to carry her spirit.

  “You would have to stay with me,” I say to Emma.

  Emma bows her head quickly, keeping her eyes — her truth — hidden. “I want you to save Imogen. That’s all.”

  But she’s been stuck here for lifetimes.

  I think of all the loneliness, all of the nights when I went looking for a feeling that was less empty. Maybe this is the reason the Grays’ spell pulled me here, of all the possible witches, all the dowsers in the world.

  “Would you give me some time to, um, be alone? If I needed it?” I’m already thinking about Rush, about making sure that I’ll be able to kiss her and know that she’s comfortable and safe and happy.

  Emma looks up at me and nods, her eyes eager. They flicker as a stream of fog rolls over us. “Ada,” she whimpers. “Ada, where are you?”

  “Emma,” Imogen soothes. “Emma, Emma, Emma.”

  We need to leave. I remember that. The rest of it, though, is starting to slip away. I remember thinking this place was strange when I first stepped out of the faerie ring, but what if the place I came from is the strange one? What if sunshine and two-thousand-year-old trees and skin holding you separate from other people are the things that don’t make sense?

  The faerie ring is missing, and my dowsing rod is gone, and I have found so much, but I still don’t know how to get back to the Grays safely.

  This is the thing I’m worst at.

  I don’t tell Imogen and Emma. I find something inside me shaped like confidence, and I spin it into a bridge that’s not really solid but might be solid enough for three girls who aren’t fully there. Our feet pound over it, as the fog pours in all around.

  It rolls over me, stealing memories.

  Mom. All her hope, all her sadness. The ways I’ve let her down filling the air between us, making it harder to breathe every day. I see her in that little cottage in Tempest Gardens, making phone calls and talking to herself about how I’ll come home soon and shaking until she can’t stand up.

  I run faster, but it’s nowhere fast, the kind of speed that eats itself up and then dies. I’m forgetting everything. My life is slipping through my fingers like water, and then my fingers are water, slipping away from me.

  “Stay with us, Danny,” Imogen says. She runs beside me. She grips my arm. She keeps me whole.

  I’ve known this whole time that the Grays love Imogen, but now I finally feel why — and I get the first inkling that maybe I could love her like that, too. Maybe this was about more than just bringing her back to the Grays. Maybe I get to keep Imogen, too. If we both make it out of here.

  I turn in a full circle once, twice, no way to dowse now that I need it more than anything. I have no direction, no tugging inner compass or hidden magnetic lines. I can’t find my way back to the faerie ring, back to my body.

  I’ve lost the one thing I always had.

  Myself.

  The Grays will forget about me soon, and then I might as well be gone.

  I remember the Grays even as I’m losing the rest of myself. Rush, Lelia, Hawthorn, June. I let myself believe, at least for a second, that I’ll get to keep them. That there will be other nights in the woods, howling and dancing and drinking and kissing. That there will be gold days soaking into us as we string together new spells.

  I hear a voice lifting through the fog. Just a tiny sliver of it, half muffled like it’s pushing through the crack in a door. It’s sweet and wild and high, and it tastes like October sunlight cooked down until it’s as sweet as caramel.

  It tastes like Rush.

  I know this song. She was singing it in the graveyard when I pretended I wasn’t there and she pretended not to see me. This isn’t Imogen’s song. I couldn’t hear the truth before because there was too much in the way, but in this spirit-made world, the song comes clear. It scrawls a picture for me, a picture of a girl with her skirt caught in a strong wind, her hand to her forehead. She’s searching for something. Always searching.

  Danny.

  Rush has taken me into her lungs and turned me into music. She’s taken me into her mouth and melted me into song.

  I hold on to Rush’s voice and pull myself along that rope. I drag Imogen with me, and she drags Emma. The dark mirror of the ground slips beneath us, grows treacherous. But I can see the faerie ring, and Rush is just outside of it, Rush is here, Rush is singing m
e home.

  Danny takes a deep breath and inhales the wisp that is Imogen and the wisp that is Emma. They slide, loose and slippery, down her throat. They settle into her heart. Their weight changes the way Danny steps. Imogen feels how hard it becomes for Danny to keep moving, but she doesn’t falter. Danny learns how to carry them with her. She takes them through the door, into a strange, terrifying, beautiful world.

  They emerge from the grip of the faerie ring, past the cracked branches. The moonlight hits Danny’s skin and goes deeper. Emma looks up at the trees with a dreadful sort of wonder. The woods killed Emma once, but it wasn’t their fault. She was alone then, and no one should come this deep into the woods alone.

  Danny, a girl who hardly knows her, agreed to bring her back. To share an entire life with her.

  Candles flicker near Danny’s feet, throwing unsteady shadows.

  Imogen can feel Emma curled beside her, not quiet, a sort of ecstatic presence — the feeling that comes with a first kiss. There will be endless firsts for Emma now that she’s part of Imogen’s world. Imogen always loved this place, but loving Emma grew and grew until she couldn’t imagine getting through life without Emma in lockstep, like two girls walking alongside a river. Now the fight that she’s been raging against time, against two worlds, goes quiet, a river settling back into its banks.

  The Grays are waiting for Danny.

  A ring of them, eyes wide and pained with hope. Hawthorn has her arms crossed tight, as if she doesn’t want to let this moment in. June staggers forward a single step, pain clawing its way over her hopeful expression, and Lelia holds her up with a linked arm. Rush is running toward Danny.

  Looking at Danny the way she used to look at Imogen.

  Guilt and jealousy and relief flicker through Imogen, all at once.

  Rush is the first one to speak. Rush is never the first one to speak. “Did you . . . ? Was she . . . ?”

  Imogen can feel it in that moment, stretched long with anticipation. They haven’t stopped missing her. They haven’t let her go, even though she kept so much of herself as close and quiet as a secret.