Liss was toweling her hair dry, bathrobe cinched around her waist, when her mother opened the door to her room.
“You promised to knock!”
“You think I care about seeing you in a towel?” Her mother tapped a manicured nail against the bulb of her wine glass.
“I care.”
“Where were you tonight? It’s a school night.”
“At Dan’s again.” Although tonight it was true, this was a lie Liss had been telling for months. Thankfully their parents weren’t close.
“There are so many good connections at St. Ignatius. Would it kill you to make some new friends?”
“It might.”
Her mother seemed to be considering whether Liss’s possible death was worth good connections. Liss suspected she’d decided that it was, but she hadn’t had enough wine to admit it. She always drank less when Liss’s father was home. “That’s charming, Elisabeth. Now, I heard from the college consultant today. He had a cancellation, so he’s fitting you in for a session to go over the final draft of your essay next Monday.”
“Amazing,” Liss said. “Now, can I change?”
Liss closed the door behind her mother and listened for the door of her parents’ bedroom to close too, and then a few more minutes to be safe, before she opened her laptop and pulled up a password-protected file: “AP Chem Notes Winter Final.”
It was not notes for her upcoming chemistry final.
She scrolled to the bottom of the document and entered the date, December 8. Johnny had been gone nearly ten months. She typed out the word success, then modified it (success?), then deleted it altogether and wrote instead made contact and entered the necessary details: coordinates of the creek bed where the spell finally worked, atmospheric conditions, time, the birds she’d observed.
Liss had long since memorized the spell, but still she scrolled back to the top of the document to her first entry from early August, where it was transcribed. Not for the first time, Liss congratulated herself for having the foresight to take meticulous notes on anything the Black Book gave them. Obviously, she hadn’t predicted that Dan would hold the Book hostage, but the Book was unreliable. It was almost impossible to find the same page twice, so when it gave you something good, you copied it down.
Liss had meant to review the spell’s steps, but instead her gaze snagged on the text at the top of the page: The Araxes Process for. A knot tightened deep in her stomach. She’d deleted the second half of the spell’s name months ago. Every time she’d seen it, it had taunted her—reminding her of all the things she’d done that couldn’t be reversed, things that would probably disqualify her from using the spell altogether.
But today it had worked. At the top of the page, Liss typed in the missing words: The Araxes Process for Speaking to Lost Love.
Just below was her first entry.
How much love is enough?
Now she knew the answer, at least in part. The spell had worked, and it had worked on her and Johnny. That meant irrefutably—verified by magic—that they loved each other and their love was, on a technical level, enough. Which, of course it was, Liss told herself. She’d been stupid to doubt that.
Liss realized she was frowning at the computer so intensely her chin was getting sore. She forced herself to smile, although there was no one there to see her. After all, she was supposed to be happy now, or slightly closer to happiness than yesterday.
Liss moved on through her notes of the last four months. The Black Book had given her and Dan this particular spell over a year before Liss first tried to use it on her own—back before she even knew who Johnny was. That summer, the singer of Dan’s favorite band, IronWeaks, had gone missing. Dan insisted they ask the Black Book for help; she wanted to talk to him and ask him to come home. That seemed a little invasive to Liss, but Rickey IronWeaks constituted at least 50 percent of the contents of Dan’s brain and around 90 percent of her heart. Then the news broke that Rickey had died by suicide, and they abandoned the spell before they’d made much progress.
This spell had been terrible to figure out. The right location for it depended on auspices. Liss had done enough auspicious spells to know the basics: the spell gave you a set of auspicious conditions and you found them. You might need wind speed, the level of the tides, the phase of the moon. Most of that information was online, or at worst, at the library. But this particular spell relied on the auspices of birds. Liss had never taken those before but knew they had to be observed directly—and she had to do it with no help from anyone. She’d looked for those stupid birds all over North Coast. For months, her evenings were spent hiking into redwood forests on barely marked trails or scrambling down cliffs during low tide, clunky binoculars hanging from her neck. All the while, her brain ground against the thought that she had set herself to an impossible, futile task.
She stopped on an entry from a few weeks ago.
I have to believe I am getting closer. But North Coast is huge, California is bigger, and after that, the world. How long can I keep looking for him alone?
Liss slammed her laptop shut and spun her chair away from the desk. It was the second question that had been answered today. She had a spell for speaking to a lost love, but not a spell for finding him, or rescuing him from an underground prison, or defeating whatever Kasyan and Mora were. She couldn’t carry on alone. She needed the Black Book. She needed Dan.
She could still hear Johnny’s voice saying her name, with such terrible relief and desperation, it had almost sounded like please.
Liss would not give up now. Johnny was out there, waiting for her, and she was going to save him. Dan would text her tomorrow, Liss was sure of it, and if she didn’t, Liss knew every one of Dan’s weak spots. What good was that knowledge if you didn’t put it to use?
Dan
Up in her room, Dan slammed the door and collapsed onto her bed.
It was as if she was being crushed very slowly by some very great weight. That was the Liss effect: she operated with a gravity that dominated everything in her world. You didn’t move unless she let you.
Dan took a shallow breath.
She wasn’t in Liss’s world now, Dan reminded herself. She hadn’t seen Liss in months. They’d barely talked over the summer, and starting in September, Liss had been commuting inland to St. Ignatius with the other rich kids from Marlena. Liss’s parents claimed she transferred to spend her senior year at a school with a stronger college admissions record, but that wasn’t the whole story. Everyone at North Coast High was sure that Liss had something to do with what happened to Johnny and that whatever happened to Johnny had something to do with her. Liss’s parents had barely tolerated Johnny; they would not permit his disappearance to damage their daughter’s reputation.