Dan and Liss knew better. Johnny wasn’t just missing. He’d been taken into the cold February night by something the girls didn’t understand. But magic gone wrong wasn’t the kind of thing you explained to the police, or to anyone else.
Not when you didn’t know what kind of creature had stolen him away, where they had gone, or whether Johnny was alive or dead.
Not when you’d just stood there and let it happen.
And especially not when everything, in the first place, was your fault.
ONE
MONDAY, DECEMBER 8, SENIOR YEAR
Dan
The singer howled into the mic, and a strange body slammed into Dan’s shoulder. She careened into a set of unfamiliar hips, shoved herself off a sweaty back, until someone else crashed into her. Their bodies churned against one another, and Dan let them carry her.
Arms up.
Watch out for your face, nose especially.
Fists up at the chorus. And always, always singing, until your throat was dry and vocal cords wrecked, but it didn’t matter, because you couldn’t hear yourself anyway, not over the music, the music, the music.
The guitars groaned out into silence as the singer shouted his thanks to the crowd. The lights came up and Dan found herself undeniably at the Fort Gratton Teen Oasis, which was not cool at all. The sweaty, bruised kids made the wall-size mural of a tropical island look even more pathetic than it usually did.
Dan pushed her hand through the snarls of her wet hair, tied it up into a bun, and pulled her sticky T-shirt away from her skin. Her heart was beating all over her body, keeping time to the now-vanished song as her breathing came back to steady. This was only some band from an hour inland. Dan didn’t even really like them. It didn’t matter: at the end of each show a part of her that felt alive and vibrant with the pulse of the music and the sheer here-ness of throwing herself against others darkened.
She shrugged herself together, stretched her shoulders, and turned toward the emergency exit at the back. She navigated through the couples holding hands and past the tiki-themed hut selling water and juice (no soda; parents had protested), and made her way to the pool of red light under the exit sign.
Her mouth pulled into a smile at the short girl in cat-eye liner and round glasses.
“Have fun up there?” Alexa held out Dan’s sweatshirt to her. “You look like a total wreck, so I’m guessing yes.”
Dan yanked on the sweatshirt. When she looked up, Alexa was grinning at her. “What? Did you meet a cute girl or something?”
“You know I never actually meet cute girls, right?” Alexa laughed.
They walked out to Alexa’s car. The fog was lying heavy, casting a halo around the single orange light in the parking lot. Alexa pulled her oversized cardigan closer around herself.
“Did you have a good time?” Dan asked. “I mean, their songs are kind of dumb, but it was fun, right?”
“Yeah, I’ve never been to a show like this before,” Alexa answered. “You got so into it.”
Dan pulled her sleeves over her hands against the chill in the air and shoved them into her pockets, then glanced at Alexa, unsure. This was Alexa, Dan reminded herself. There wasn’t any malice in it. “I just like it, you know? It’s like it helps you forget, for a while.”
“Forget what?”
Dan shrugged. “Everything. Yourself.”
Alexa cocked an eyebrow at her but nodded as she unlocked the car. She leaned across to let Dan into the passenger side, then dug around in her bag for Dan’s phone. “By the way, your phone’s been ringing. The same number’s called like six times.”
Dan slid into the car and grabbed her phone. She glanced at the screen, then shoved it into her pocket. “Whatever.”
“Whatever,” Alexa agreed sternly.
The engine shuddered to life. Dan flipped through the CDs she’d burned for Alexa when she found out her battered Toyota had no digital input. Dan slipped a CD into the player and the car filled with music.
“God bless The Cure,” Dan said as Alexa steered the car onto Highway 1, back toward Dogtown.
* * *
—
The coast road unwound before them, just a few feet at a time of white and yellow lines caught in Alexa’s feeble headlights. There were places where the road ran inland, the sharp turns smoothing and solid ground on both sides, but for most of the way from Fort Gratton back to Dogtown, the asphalt clung to the cliffside in near-switchback turns so sharp the headlights illuminated barely anything of the road. To the right, there was nothing but the flimsy guardrail, crumbling sienna and ochre rock, and a long, steep drop into the ocean. Tonight the fog was thick enough that Alexa flipped the wipers on every few minutes to clear the mist.
“I hate these roads at night,” Alexa said. “Especially going south.”
“Want me to drive?” Dan’s feet were perched on the dash, her head resting against the window.
“Lorelei says I have to get used to it. When we moved out here, she gave this little speech. The most important thing about living in a small town is being able to get away. I think she got me the car because she felt bad. No more buses for you, she said.”
Dan snorted. “There are no buses out here.”
They crested a hill and Dan looked out at the Pacific, or what would have been the Pacific if there had been any light to see by. It was beautiful during the day, but at night, she’d never liked the ocean. So much darkness, the water the same black as the sky. Some nights it was like a curtain had been drawn closed around them, separating the tiny, scattered towns of North Coast from the rest of the world.
Then the road veered inland, away from the cliff, and they hit a pocket of cell coverage. Dan’s phone lit the car up white.
Call me Dan seriously please
She shoved it back into the pocket of her hoodie.
“That’s the same number?” Alexa asked. “What do they want?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.” Dan pulled her knees in to her chest, catching the heels of her sneakers on the seat. It wasn’t comfortable, but it stopped her from checking her phone every few minutes.
She wasn’t going to answer. Even if you were asked nicely, you didn’t have to do everything you were told.
* * *
—
The Dogtown exit wasn’t marked —just a hard turn off the highway onto a narrow road. A year ago, some magazine anointed Dogtown the quintessential California coast town: a little grocery with the Free Box on the porch where Dogtowners left stuff they didn’t need for whoever wanted it, a few artists’ studios, an old nondenominational church (now decorated with a peace sign for the Winter Solstice). But Dogtowners weren’t interested in entertaining tourists. Signs marking the exit turned up in the Free Box. Now, you either knew the turn or you kept driving south to the fancy waterfront mansions of Marlena Beach, which was what you probably wanted anyway if you needed a sign.