Prologue
SPRING OF SOPHOMORE YEAR
The May before Johnny Su kissed her, Dan and her best friend, Liss, rolled back the rug in Liss’s bedroom. Dan marked straight lines with white chalk on the hardwood, while Liss compared her work to a drawing in a musty book.
“The angle should be ninety degrees.” Liss drummed her fingers against the book’s cracked black cover. “We need to get this exactly right.”
Dan sat back on her heels. The symbol was two feet wide and looked something like an asterisk, or two K’s stuck together back-to-back. “Is this okay?”
Liss scrutinized the page, then Dan’s work. “Better than okay—perfect,” Liss declared. “Now the candles.”
Dan sat on Liss’s bed and rubbed chalk from her hands, while Liss went about positioning the six candles: two red, two white, two black. They had worked all week carving other symbols copied out of the book into the wax. Neither of them knew what the symbols meant, and they weren’t exactly something you could type into Google.
“Should we be doing this outside?” Liss looked up from the book with a conspiratorial smile. “What if we unleash some crazy power, and there’s like, a magical explosion and we craterize all of North Coast?”
“Then I don’t think being outside would help.”
“That was a joke, Dan.” Liss shot her a look that said Don’t ruin my fun.
Liss had started talking about doing the spell the minute they found the book. Of course it wasn’t actually a spell, because that kind of thing wasn’t real, but the book made it easy to pretend it could be. The book had this fetid, mushroomy smell that was clearly gross, but was also so alluring that Dan had once stopped herself from burying her nose in its spine. Even weirder, most of its pages—which numbered in the hundreds, after the spell at the beginning—were blank, except for water stains and the occasional smear of ink. Dan had the uneasy feeling that the book wanted them to do this spell, which was definitely creepy and definitely not something she was going to admit to out loud. But creepy or not, there was next to nothing to do in sleepy, foggy North Coast, California, and Dan and Liss had a whole weekend to kill.
Why not cast a spell to turn themselves into witches?
“You still want to do this, right?” Liss asked. It sounded like an instruction.
Dan fiddled with the backing of a pin from her jean jacket, running the sharp part across the pad of her thumb. “Obviously,” Dan answered.
Liss compared her work to the open page beside her. Across the top, neat cursive letters spelled out “A Spell for the Making of Naive Witches.” Then she looked up at Dan. Liss’s blue eyes were hungry and sparkling. She flicked the wheel of a lighter, springing a tiny flame to life. “Then let’s do some magic.”
Dan sat on the floor across from Liss. The white candle she had carved stood in front of her, the red to her left and black to her right. She grabbed the other lighter, and they began.
They spoke an incantation as they first lit their red candles, then their black. Already Liss’s bedroom felt strange and somber, darker than it had been moments ago despite the light from the candles. Dan shivered, and the feeling lingered in her fingers and toes and deep in her chest, as if some energy in her body was waiting, trembling.
Magic wasn’t real, Dan reminded herself; nothing bad was going to happen. Nothing was going to happen at all. She and Liss took up their black and red candles, and brought them together to light the white.
The white wicks caught.
Immediately the air in the room was moving. It started as a slow churn, then kicked up into vicious gusts of wind that snaked around them. Adrenaline punched Dan’s heartbeat into high gear. The wind roared in her ears, her mouth, her nose, heaving like the waves of the nearby Pacific Ocean. Across from her, Liss’s eyes went wide with fear. The wind pressed against them, ropes holding them in the whirlwind, yet somehow neither of them broke off the words of the spell, as if something beyond them were pushing them on, pushing the very words into their mouths.
The candles blew out and an absolute darkness filled the room.
The ground slid out from under Dan. She was careening, falling, then borne up by that wind, raging and playful and thunderous. She was a leaf carried by a gust, she was a bird in a storm, she was dust in the air. She was carried off in darkness, deeper and deeper.
Something was changing inside her, growing and blooming, expanding until it pressed up against the boundary of her skin from within. It squeezed the air from her lungs, the blood in her veins and arteries throbbed against it. It was too much—too much power, more than she was built for, and if she couldn’t contain it—
But just in time it was retreating, the pressure collapsing. Whatever it was that had been growing was now folding in on itself, smaller and smaller, as if this new strange force was concentrating itself inside her. The wind was dying too, and everything began to still.
Dan was afraid to open her eyes. When she finally did, she was sitting on the floor in Liss’s bedroom, the rug rolled back. Her heart was racing and jaw clenched, and Liss was there, out of breath. It was moonlit dark in the room, but the world felt stinging and bright, distilled in a way that was almost nauseating. Dan was sure, all at once, that every star in the sky was staring right at them, that the world was paused for them, its breath held, waiting and watching for what they would do.
Between them, the book was splayed open. Its pages turned lazily, petals from the head of a dying flower caught in the waning wind. They had been blank but were now crammed with text, diagrams, lists. Dan turned to the first page. Where the text of the spell they had just done should have been, it read The Black Book—IIV.
Dan raised her eyes to Liss. Slowly, they both began to grin.
“That might have actually worked,” Dan whispered.
* * *
—
All summer, Dan waited for magic to change her life. She and Liss had transformed themselves, together, so Dan expected to feel different—better. As the long days went by, if anything she felt worse.
Then, the first week of September, Johnny Su kissed Dan in the parking lot of 7-Eleven. Pressing her up against the dull silver paint of his thirdhand Volvo, Johnny smelled like weed and Doritos and a particular kind of shampoo, and Dan wondered if she could learn to like that strange combination, or the strange feeling of his tongue in her mouth. It was her first kiss. It lasted only a few moments, but as they pulled apart and he laughed his bashful, charming laugh, Dan wondered if maybe it wasn’t magic that would change things. Maybe it was this.
She had been halfway right.
By the middle of October, Liss was dating Johnny.
Four months after that, Johnny was gone, his car abandoned where Hare Creek Road crossed Escondido in a perfect X. The police called him a runaway or maybe a suicide.