She thought that finding Emma meant losing the Grays forever.
She was beautifully wrong.
When I leave the faerie ring, the Grays greet me with a trembling kind of need. I don’t know what to say. Where to start. Everything has changed inside of me, but the world looks exactly the same.
Including Imogen, walking in a circle, blank-eyed.
I run to her, a burning deep in my stomach. I grab Imogen by the shoulders and try to remind her what whole feels like. Remind her that she did the same thing for me, in a place that is very far away and probably right where we’re standing.
I push forward, toward her pale lips. I tip my breath into her mouth, and I tell myself that I will stop in less than a second if this doesn’t work. But her lips come awake against mine. Automatically at first, then slowly, knowingly, she dives into the kiss until she’s taken everything she needs from me.
Then she leans back, holding me by the arms.
Imogen is red-haired and dark-eyed, with cream-top skin and a way of twisting her lips that makes the feelings flood deep inside my chest. She is everything that everyone has told me.
But it doesn’t make me feel like less to stand so close to her. Maybe this is part of her magic, or maybe this is just part of Imogen, or maybe there’s no need to draw a firm line between the two. When she smiles, everything good in me rises to the surface and stays there, shimmering in the light. In the first second of seeing her, I want to know her forever.
Imogen touches my lips with two fingers, thanking me for what I did. Then her smile pricks deeper.
“It’s nice to finally meet you,” she says.
Haven took her sister into the woods the day after Sebastian died. She walked to the hermit’s tree, the one that looked like it was always screaming. Imogen had told her that the hermit could figure out things about people that no one else could. That’s what made him the hermit instead of a dirty college dropout living in a tree.
“Can you tell me how to get her back?” Haven asked, pushing Imogen in front of her. But the hermit was staring at Haven, swerving to fix her with his long-lashed southern-boy eyes, which was weird because nobody looked at Haven. It made her angry that it was finally happening now, at the exact moment she didn’t want it to.
The hermit always wore shorts with a rat’s nest of white strings at the bottom, let his hair grow out until it was one stupid inch past his shoulders, and even then he was pretty. Haven hated how pretty he was. She hated how he paid so much attention to Imogen.
“You did something wrong,” the hermit said. “How could you do that, Haven?” He kept talking even though Haven desperately wanted to shut him up. To control the vomit of words coming out of his mouth. “You know it was wrong,” he said. “But you went right on and you took from your sister and you called up that wind.”
Haven wondered if this was Mom-and-Dad wrong or Imogen wrong. Had she finally found something that was both? The one thing they would agree on? That made her laugh. A wild sound, one that scared her, but when she tried to put it back in her mouth, shove it down her throat, she couldn’t. She’d been keeping it down too long.
Now it was all going to come out.
Haven grabbed her sister by the wrist, too hard, making Imogen sway. She tugged her down and said, through another laugh that was also a sob, “Make him stop.” But that wasn’t enough. “Make it so he can’t tell anyone what he knows.”
The salt water of the tears that Haven didn’t want to cry ripped away from her eyes. It swirled and grew. The hermit backed up until he was standing in the nook of his tree, safe and dry, but Haven didn’t want that. The water rushed in after him, and Haven finally stopped laughing and crying as it covered his face, pushed its way into his mouth.
Imogen snapped out of her nowhere state for a single second. Neil, the boy she had convinced to stay in Tempest, was dying. She fought against her own magic.
She told the hermit she was sorry.
But if Imogen was really sorry, Haven thought, she wouldn’t do this. She would stop it somehow. This was her magic.
Besides, Haven was sorry, too.
But she couldn’t take it back.
The second after Imogen comes back, the Grays flock to her, crowd her on all sides. They fling their arms around her waist, hold her close as if they’re trying to absorb her.
“Hi, witches,” Imogen says, pulling Lelia into her side even though her elbows are too sharp, running one hand through June’s grown-out hair. “How long have I been gone?”
“Fifty-six days,” Hawthorn says.
“Forever,” June hurries out.
Imogen scowls, but both answers must be true, because the Grays can feel them at the same time.
“Where were you?” Rush asks, finally demanding the truth that she should have asked for a long time ago. She gives Imogen a hug but then flits over to Danny, quick and certain.
“I promise I’ll tell you, but only after I eat seventeen plates of pasta at the diner,” Imogen says. She starts across the grove, only making it as far as the dark lump of earth. Haven’s burial mound rises from the grove like a tumor.
Imogen kneels and touches the earth. It feels muted, silent. “I want to do a spell to bring Haven rest. When we’re away from the faerie ring, though.”
“Why?” Hawthorn asks, touching the frames of her glasses the way she does whenever she’s off balance. It brings her back to herself. She can learn how to understand this magic, even if it’s not part of what Ora taught her.
Maybe this is her rebellion.
“Magic brings the worlds closer for a second,” Imogen says, biting her lip.
Danny closes her eyes, lids crushed. “That’s why you came back when Haven . . . used you.”
“And when we cast the spell that broke your ward?” June asks.
Imogen nods. “I felt it. I knew Haven might come after you again, and there was nothing to keep you safe this time. And she was getting worse. I could think again, just for a little while. I didn’t know what would happen, but I had to leave Tempest. So she couldn’t use me against you.”
That was how Imogen ended up here, circling and circling Emma’s redwood, drawn to the place where her spirit was trapped. That was why she almost died in the woods — to keep the Grays safe.
Instead of walking back to Tempest, we hike the last ten miles to the coast. It’s closer, and the smell of salt is as tempting as anything at the Tempest Diner. June pushes the rest of her granola bars at Imogen so she’ll be able to make it out of the woods. Hawthorn and Lelia take turns helping June keep her weight off her right leg. We walk and walk, and then we’re standing on the edge of a cliff, at the edge of the world.
Lelia looks down at the churn of white against rocks below us and a deep pool just beyond. The water looks clean and cold, and it holds a dark mirror to the stars. “I don’t do up,” Lelia says, bouncing on her feet. “But down works.” Lelia leaps off the cliff, and my heart flies with her.
She bobs in the water far below, screeching, slicking back her short pale hair. “Come on! The water is amazing! I mean, it’s really fucking cold! But that feels amazing!”
The rest of us work our way down a sandy cliff path with ice plant on both sides. Lelia joins us when we make it to the beach, jumping to warm herself up. I hold the ocean in sight, a tiny patch of it, and I try to imagine the rest. The water stretches out, away from me, and I know that this is only where it starts.
Emma has never seen the Pacific before. Every time I stare, she asks me to stare a second longer. It’s a sort of gentle nudge inside of me, strangely polite. I haven’t told the others about her yet. Imogen knows, of course. But I don’t want to keep secrets from the rest of the Grays. And Emma doesn’t want to live a half-life.
“I brought her back with me,” I say.
“You really did it,” June says giddily.
Hawthorn and Rush and even Lelia grin at me — they think I’m talking about Imogen.
“Emma,” I say.
“I brought Emma Hart back from the place where Imogen was trapped.”
“What?” Rush asks, suddenly nervous. She stares down Imogen, like it must be her fault. But this was my idea.
I take Rush’s hand, carefully, matching her fingers to mine. “I couldn’t leave Emma there. She’s like us. I wanted a chance to be happy, and she deserves that, too. I had to try.”
The water runs up the sand and kisses Imogen’s toes. “Danny is carrying Emma.”
The Grays stare at me. Was this the way I looked at them when we first met? But it’s not that bizarre. I’ve seen how the Grays carry the ones who came before them, the ones who looked and felt and fell in love like us.
“So is this like the hermit all over again?” Lelia asks. “He . . . controlled you.”
“No,” I say. “She can’t control me. She’s just with me.” It’s a truth that I can feel all the way through my body.
Imogen kisses my cheek. “I’m so glad it worked,” she says, and the words seem to travel deeper, all the way to Emma.
Her spirit flutters.
Rush is still holding my hand.
“Are you okay?” I ask Rush.
She nods. Slowly. Carefully.
“I wanted to tell you about Emma a long time ago,” Imogen says, and now she’s reaching out, one hand on Rush’s shoulder. Seeing them touch doesn’t have the sting I thought it would. We stand like that, all of us joined for a long, awkward minute.
I don’t know how this is going to work: me and Rush and Imogen and Emma. I don’t know where this will lead us, but I’m the one who finds things. Hidden things, desperately needed things, paths no one else would notice. I can find us our way.
Water rushes in fast, covering our feet, breaking the moment. Imogen gives us a smirk, and I wonder if that was her magic at work.
We head down the beach, a long thin line that follows the bottom of the cliffs. The sand is gritty, harsh, and Emma loves the way it scrapes against my toes. We all strip down to our underwear, and the rest of the Grays run straight for the water, but I stand at the exact spot where the waves can’t quite reach. I sink my feet into the sand until I hit water. And then Lelia comes up behind me and shoves me into the ocean, and I’m stinging in places that I didn’t know were bloody, where the sticks of the faerie ring must have bitten into me.
I feel a soft tap on the chin. It could be the wind, or it could be Emma asking me to look up at the moon. I do, falling backward until I’m floating. I let the water carry my body, the words of the Grays breaking around me.
Rush swims over, slicked with water and coated in starlight. Her drenched camisole clings to her in all the same places I want to. The flush that fills my body is only mine. It doesn’t belong to Emma or the Grays or anyone else.
I kiss her, and she kisses me, her legs sliding against mine under the water, and we kick to keep ourselves afloat, spinning and grabbing on to each other, and I can feel the future coming for us like waves gathering far, far offshore.
I swim with the Grays and let Emma feel the soft hold of the water, and when I’m too cold to stand it, I head toward shore. Waves break against the backs of my legs, pushing me gently toward the beach. The Grays get out and stretch out on the beach in their underwear and bras and tank tops, soaking in the moonlight like the weirdos they are. They wave at me and shout as they get covered in sand. I run over and join them — they’re my weirdos.
Hawthorn gets up and starts drawing something in the sand with a long stick.
“What is this?” I ask as I get closer.
It looks like a bottle.
“Lie down inside of it,” June commands, and when I do, they press in around me, standing above me, their salty-wet seaweed hair dripping, their smiles crowding out the moon.
“What am I supposed to do?” I ask.
“You’re supposed to pull everything about this moment in and keep it,” Hawthorn says.
“That’s what Grays do,” Imogen informs me.
She’s telling me that I’m one of them. They’re all inviting me in. I breathe those words in deep and add the feeling of the sand under me and the water drying on my skin and the smell of California, balmy and soft.
“What if I don’t get to stay?” I ask, thinking of Mom and her threats.
“You’ll still be magical if you’re in Michigan,” Lelia says.
“And you’ll still have us,” June promises.
“But you should stay,” Rush adds, in that raw voice of hers that doesn’t even try to hide what she needs. I love that voice. I don’t want it to be a fading memory at the other end of a long-distance phone call.
I scramble to my feet. “I’ll be right back,” I say, already running down the beach. I reach the small pile of my clothes, and my skirt drinks in salt water as I pull it over my legs and find the lump of a cell phone in the pocket. It feels like a guilty swallow that I started taking hours ago, one that’s been stuck in my throat all night.
There’s something I need to do.
I take it out, turn it on, and start dialing the only number I know by heart.
“Mom?” I say, tears streaking my voice. “I’m alive.”
“Danny,” she says. “Danny, Danny, Danny.” And it keeps going, her voice reminding me who I am, and she doesn’t stop for the longest time.
When I was a teenager, I moved three thousand miles away from everything I knew to live in the redwood forest of Northern California. To everyone I knew during that wondrous time — thank you.
This book is for everyone who is finding out who they are, where they belong, and who they belong with. This book is for the different ones, especially those who live where it’s very hard to be different. I see you. I think you’re magic.
My heart is indebted to all the people who make LGBTQIAP folks safer and happier and help us find one another. In particular, I’d like to shout all the way back to Michigan, to Tirzah Price, who literally made me cry when she told me about a new GSA and an upcoming Pride parade.
Lily Anderson, you befriended these witches when they needed you most. Allyson Capetta, you read and gave notes when you probably should have been planning your wedding. Writers of the first Rainbow Workshop (aka Queer Pete), you are the squad I’ve always hoped for. Let’s all be Grays together.
Sara Crowe and the Pippin team, I’m so proud to work with you.
Thanks to the Vermont College of Fine Arts community, especially Nova Ren Suma, who inspired me to embrace the ghosts when they showed up in my book, and Will Alexander, who gave me the organizing principles for a complicated story — and this quote from Charlie Jane Anders: “Every spell is a manifesto.”
Big love to the Candlewick team for embracing this book with all their thoughtfulness and care. Matt Roeser, you designed the cover of my dreams, and Sherry Fatla, your interior designs are perfectly lovely. Betsy Uhrig and Hannah Mahoney, you copyedited and somehow wrestled a time line out of my manuscript, which makes you champions. Jamie Tan, working with you is a total delight. Allison Hill, and Jamie, thanks for your help with June. Christine Engels, thank you for your help with the beginning. Hilary Van Dusen, thank you for your help with everything!
Miriam Newman, you believed in this story before the first word was written. This book is deeper and weirder and even less linear because of your brilliance. I feel like we’ve been summoning this one together.
Cori McCarthy, I’ll always remember that long night drive to the Lost Coast. We found the town that became Tempest, and the entire story spilled out from there. We found each other, and everything changed. You are what I was searching for.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or, if real, are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2019 by Amy Rose Capetta
Cover photograph copyright © 2019 by
Yamgata Sohjiroh/EyeEm/Getty Images (color texture)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted,
or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, taping, and recording, without prior written permission from the publisher.
First electronic edition 2019
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2018962036
Candlewick Press
99 Dover Street
Somerville, Massachusetts 02144
visit us at www.candlewick.com
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