“Kasyan’s prisoner.”
“Do you know why they call him Kasyan the Unmerciful?”
Liss made a mental note to add the Unmerciful to her notes. “Not yet. I’ve only just started the research on him. For some reason I haven’t had much luck online.” Liss paused and licked her lips. “But tonight we can start with the Black Book.”
The Black Book. Like a sudden craving, Liss was aware of it, somewhere, in the room. In just a few moments she’d once again have the Book in front of her, its delicious electricity buzzing in her stomach and its crumbling pages promising to give you exactly what you wanted. This was the real reason Liss had let the Book stay with Dan: she didn’t trust herself around it. Her hunger for the Book was huge and inexplicable, like she wanted to devour it and for the book to devour her in return. She saw it in her dreams and woke up panting and desperate, her face screwed up in frustration. Liss knew she sounded like one of those people addicted to eating couch cushions—or she would have, if she had ever told anyone about it.
Dan had been picking at a cuticle with rapt attention, but now she looked up. Liss wondered if Dan could see her trembling.
“I don’t know,” Dan said.
Liss flinched. “What don’t you know?”
“The last time we used the Black Book, things didn’t exactly go as planned.”
“This time will be different.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know we can’t get Johnny kidnapped twice. Therefore, different.”
“That’s not what I meant. I think we should try to move on and—”
“Don’t you think I want to move on?” Liss snapped. “This is what we have to do to make that happen.”
“This is what you think we have to do.”
Dan rolled her eyes, and a sick bubble of desperation burst in Liss’s stomach. “Yes, I think we have to save Johnny. I think we owe it to him to try with everything we’ve got, Black Book included. But it so happens that what I think we have to do is what we actually have to do.”
Dan glared at her. “You always have to be the one who decides.”
Liss counted to four and back on her fingers. She would not lose Dan—she had been sure that Dan would throw herself at this, especially when Liss had already done so much on her own.
Just then, she felt it like an open wound: she wanted her old life back. She’d lost the only person who knew the truth about Johnny, who had seen the oily eyes and long, loose neck of the old woman who took him. Dan had been there in the moment they let magic tornado into their lives. She had to be there to find Kasyan too.
But worse, Liss missed the time before Johnny had changed everything between them, when she and Dan would read each other’s tarot cards, trying to forecast their futures and fantasizing about the sprawling, bold lives they would live. They used to laugh at the idea of promising to be friends forever, because what ran between them was deeper than a promise—it was something that couldn’t be broken.
She missed Dan.
Liss forced herself to bring her tone back to something less acid. “You promised.”
“Yeah, well.” Dan broke her gaze. “I made that promise because I trusted you.”
“You don’t trust me anymore?” Liss sniffed.
Dan made an incredulous, open-handed gesture around the room that seemed to capture everything between them, everything that had been said—that all of it was evidence of the answer to Liss’s question.
“I can’t do this alone. I need your help with the spells. And I need the Book.”
“Or, you could just not do any more spells.”
Liss knew her voice was rising, but she couldn’t control it. “If that’s how you feel, give me the Book. It belongs to me too. I can do the spells myself.”
Dan would know that wasn’t true where the Black Book was concerned: it needed the two of them there to tell them anything at all. “Why can’t you just let it go?”
“Let it go?” Liss spat. “We can’t let it go when Johnny needs us. How can you say that when the spell was your idea in the first place?”
Dan crumpled a little at this, but she pushed back. “It was your fault Johnny was there in the first place.”
“Seriously? We were dating,” Liss said.
“I know, Liss! You were dating, so he had to go everywhere you went. You were dating, so we couldn’t do the spell with only the two of us, without him. You were dating, so you got to be a part of this great tragedy of the missing boyfriend for months after he disappeared. Did it ever occur to you to leave him alone?”
“You said you weren’t interested! You don’t kiss a boy once and own him forever.”
“I know what I said, but that didn’t mean you had to—”
“When are you going to learn to actually tell people what you’re thinking? I’m not psychic. I can’t just magically guess your true feelings. We had that whole love spell lined up for you and you called it off. I asked if it would bother you if I went after him and you said it was fine. How was I supposed to know you meant the exact opposite of fine?”
“Because you were my best friend!” Dan exploded. “You were supposed to understand and you never even tried.”
There was a voice screaming in Liss’s head, warning her to bite her tongue. If she had to leave without Dan, she couldn’t leave without the Book. It was practically crying out for her, her only hope to find Johnny.
Liss couldn’t bring herself to listen.
“You don’t want to be understood, Dan. You want an excuse to be miserable.” Liss stood and marched to the door. Dan wouldn’t even look at her, her head in her hands. “We were in love. Did you know that?”
Dan tilted her head, parting her dark hair. Her eyes glinted with tears. “You didn’t love him. You slept with him for four months then destroyed him. It’s not the same thing.”
* * *
—
Speeding away from Dan’s house, Liss curled a fist around the steering wheel and cursed Dan—with conventional profanity, not magically—then cursed herself for being stupid enough to have left the Book with her in the first place.
So Dan was still jealous over Johnny, but was she willing to let him die just because he wouldn’t date her? It wasn’t anyone’s fault that Dan met Johnny first, and no one could help it that he’d fallen for Liss. Liss had honestly tried to help Dan, but Dan hadn’t been hungry for it, not like Liss was.