In all those months of silence, Dan thought about Liss more than she wanted to admit. Mostly, she’d imagined Liss trying to apologize. She had played out ten thousand conversations where she told Liss in the cleverest possible way exactly how she’d been hurt. Imaginary-Liss would defend herself, but Dan would be strong against her—also witty, coming up with perfect little retorts, until Imaginary-Liss was begging for her friendship back. She couldn’t have it. The friendship had been ruined beyond repair, and it was Liss who did the ruining.
Tonight had not gone like that at all. Dan had forgotten all her sharp comebacks and practically broken into tears, remembering what they did to Johnny. Liss had done nothing but roll her eyes, like usual.
Liss said she wanted Dan’s help to find Johnny, but Dan knew better.
What Liss really wanted was the Black Book.
They had always kept it at Dan’s house, because her mom didn’t snoop like Liss’s did, but Liss definitely hadn’t meant to leave it with Dan permanently. Without the Book, Liss had no hope of doing real magic. No more real magic meant that instead of being a witch, Liss was just someone who used to be a witch. Dan was perfectly happy with that, but Liss absolutely could not bear being un-special. Magic made her special. Her disappeared-but-almost-certainly-dead boyfriend made her special. It was actually sort of pathetic how Liss clung to those two things, desperately enough to lie about talking to Johnny, when it was basically impossible that she could have done that spell on her own.
Dan would have thought Liss made up Kasyan, if Alexa hadn’t been around to say he’d come up in Lorelei’s stories.
Lord Kasyan.
Goose bumps prickled down Dan’s arms. He certainly sounded like something out of a story, even if Dan had never heard of him. That wasn’t surprising: Dan was raised on stories about schools of fish celebrating diversity or happy foxes taking care of the environment. The creepiest things her parents told her related to the vibrancy of her aura and the overwhelming probability of extraterrestrial life, nothing about any kind of Lord of Last Resort.
But the Black Book had taught them fairy tales were often based on nuggets of truth. If Kasyan was real, that could mean Johnny—no, Dan stopped herself. It meant nothing about Johnny, definitely not that he was alive.
Still, to be sure, Dan typed kasyan fairy tale into the browser on her phone. The results page flashed a list of links, then went white and froze. Dan reloaded the page, but it crashed again, then again. Dan chewed her lip. That didn’t mean anything. The internet was always going down, although it wasn’t actually down at that moment, since all her other apps were working and the search results for just fairy tale, no kasyan, loaded just fine.
She eyed her closet, which was vomiting a pile of clothes out onto the carpet.
In all the months she’d had the Book in her possession, she’d never been tempted. Liss always thought that if they learned the right rules and recipes, magic would be predictable, controllable.Dan knew she was wrong. Magic wasn’t science. It wasn’t bound by laws and regularities that could be memorized. It ran on its own unknowable and treacherous pathways, and Dan had already come close enough to getting lost. She didn’t want anything badly enough to risk that again.
But the idea tugged at her: Surely, the Book would know about Kasyan. She would only need to ask it the right way.
Dan rolled off her bed and kicked aside the mound of stuff on the closet floor until she could reach a plastic bin wedged into the corner on the highest shelf. It was full of keepsakes—birthday cards and yearbooks and participation ribbons from the Marlena Beach Fourth of July Games. Underneath it all was an unremarkable shoebox that Dan eased free and carried back to her bed. Scrawled on the lid in thick marker was DAN + LISS TOP SECRET. Dan frowned. She’d written that a lifetime ago, right when they’d found the Book in the Dogtown Free Box and magic felt like an inside joke between them, before they’d even done that first spell that would change them forever.
Dan had promised herself she wouldn’t try to use the Book without Liss. It hadn’t been hard, after what happened the night Johnny was taken. But now, running her fingers along the edge of the lid, she could taste the metallic tang of witchcraft within. It carried the Black Book’s distinctive scent, so stilling and satisfying. It was nothing she could describe—the space between leaving home and returning, between losing yourself and being found safe.
But suddenly Dan was back at the crossroads, an eerie, fierce wind riffling the pages of the Book as it lay on the pavement, and that creature looking at the three of them like she couldn’t wait to gnaw on their bones, the moment her black gaze narrowed on Johnny, the way terror can burst like a nuclear bomb in your chest—
No, Dan told herself again. If she let herself go back there, she might not survive it. She forced out the breath she was holding and shoved the box, unopened, under her bed. Her hands were shaking as she stripped off her sweaty T-shirt and turned the light off. Under the covers, she settled her headphones over her ears and pressed play.
It was a ballad by her all-time favorite band forever, IronWeaks. This song almost never failed to make her cry, and tonight, tears felt appropriate. Dan turned the volume up to drown out the tinny ringing in her ears from the concert.
Most of the song was given over to Rickey’s dirty velvet voice repeating, “Let me go, don’t you know, I’m never coming back?” In the days last year when she and all the other IronWeaks fans had just thought Rickey was missing, she listened to the song hundreds of times. She’d hoped so hard for him to come home that it felt like magic—an energy her body could barely contain.
It had made no difference. Rickey was never missing. He had been dead the whole time. A few weeks after the band announced Rickey’s suicide, they broke up. “Without Rickey, the poetry’s gone out of the music,” they said.
That was how Dan felt about magic after Johnny was taken. She didn’t have proof he was dead, but any hope that he wasn’t blew out so fast, it was like it had never existed. Dan felt horrible to think it, but things were better that way. If Johnny were alive it would mean that he’d spent all this time—nearly ten months—suffering, waiting, trapped, and Dan couldn’t live with herself if she’d done that to him.
She could barely live with herself as it was.
The song ended. Dan wormed her hand out of the covers and set it to repeat. “Let me go . . .” Rickey whispered. His face looked down at Dan from a poster taped above the bed. Even in the dark she could see his eyes rimmed in black, full lips, skin hugging tight to his collarbones and the curve of his jaw. Dan’s heart stuttered to think of a world without him.
Dan had moved on from all of it—slowly, but she had. Of course, Liss hadn’t. Liss never put anything behind her or let anything go. She was precisely the kind of person who would wait in your driveway for hours, to remind you of the exact thing you were fighting to forget. The sooner Liss accepted that they couldn’t reverse what they’d done, the better it would be for both of them. And if Liss didn’t want to do that, well, she would have to respect that she wasn’t going to drag Dan back into the past with her.