If Liss wanted to talk, they could talk. That didn’t mean it had to be the conversation Liss was expecting.
Dan reached for her phone.
TWO
WINTER OF JUNIOR YEAR
Dan
Johnny was gone.
One minute there had been three of them at the crossroads, then there were four. Johnny’s eyes had gone black and unseeing, his ears deaf to their screams, and he was taken into the night.
Now they were only two, Dan and Liss.
Something had gone sideways about the world, which was what happened when you saw an impossible—totally impossible—thing.
Dan’s breath came in short bursts as she looked behind her, then behind her again, because Johnny had to be somewhere, he could not just be gone. Dan rubbed her eyes and looked behind her again, and she knew she was spinning around like a total idiot.
“Shit, I broke the line,” she said, falling to her knees on the asphalt where they’d drawn a circle of salt. It was hopelessly scattered and bore the imprint of the sole of her Converse. In the middle of it, the Black Book lay splayed open, its pages fluttering in the wind, and Dan was hit with a wave of nausea.
“Forget the line,” Liss snapped. “It didn’t work anyway and it can’t help us now.”
“Are we going after him? We should find where that—that thing is taking him, right?”
The crossroads was just over the border of a state park. The coal-black silhouettes of trees hemmed them in at all sides, clusters of redwoods stretching dagger-like into the moonless sky. Every direction looked the same. The idea of going into the woods to look for Johnny made Dan’s eyes literally go wide with fear, which was something she’d always thought was made up for movies, which made her think of fight-or-flight responses, and she absolutely could not remember what you were supposed to do in each of those responses, because what she was actually doing was kneeling in the middle of a road, shaking and trying not to vomit, which was not a plan at all and definitely not going to fix this horrible thing she’d done—
“No.” Liss grabbed Dan’s arm. “We’re getting the hell out of here. Right now.” Dan gaped at her: Liss’s fingers digging into Dan’s flesh as she heaved her off the ground; the firm, even tenor of her voice; her cold rationality in the face of a world that had just revealed itself to be far stranger and more dangerous than either of them had ever imagined. “Get your car. We’re going to my house.”
Liss released Dan’s arm and began gathering the remains of the failed spell.
“I should never have—”
“Later, Dan! Car. Now.”
Liss knew what she was doing, she always did, and although Dan sometimes hated her for it, now relief washed over her. They didn’t have to go into the woods. They didn’t have to pursue the strange old woman, or cast the spell again and hope she’d return to let Johnny go. Dan didn’t have to think about what she had done, or why Johnny had been chosen, not one of them.
Dan put her fate in Liss’s hands.
Dan grabbed the Black Book off the pavement and found her keys, while Liss tossed any evidence of the spell into Dan’s trunk. Dan got into the driver’s seat. In the quiet of the car, Dan could hear the blood rushing in her ears. She was clutching the Book in both hands and all of a sudden it felt wrong. What was this thing they had been following—an enchantment, a distraction, a murder weapon?
Liss slammed the trunk closed.
Dan hurled the Book into the back seat and started the car.
* * *
—
Dan took the curves toward Liss’s house as fast as she was able, but the drive was still over a half hour. “My parents are at a party in Gratton. They’ll be back around ten,” Liss had said. “We have to get there first.”
But when they crested the hill that led down into Marlena, it was ten minutes till, and both their hearts were hammering with adrenaline. Dan turned onto Kingfisher Drive toward the beach, then into Liss’s drive and punched the key code into the gate. As the wooden gate swung inward, neither one of them breathed, waiting to see how many white BMWs were parked out front.
No one was home.
Liss sent Dan up the enormous curving stairs to her bedroom. Liss came up a few moments later with a bag of banana chips and two seltzers.
“You seriously want a snack right now?”
Liss dropped the bag of chips on the white carpet, then sunk down beside it and leaned against the bed. “Of course not. I’m one wrong move away from puking.” Liss yanked a textbook out of her backpack and flung it onto the bed toward Dan.
“Liss, what are we doing?”
Liss looked up at her with cold eyes. “We need an alibi. When my parents get home, we’ll say we’ve been here all night studying. I got some dishes dirty and left them in the sink so it’ll look like we had dinner here too. We hung out with Johnny after school for a while, then we got here around seven and we’ve been studying ever since, which they will see when they get home. Johnny said he was going on a drive. Sometimes he liked to drive around and get high, and I always gave him a hard time for that, because it’s dangerous. At around nine thirty, I texted him to check in and got no answer. Got it?”
“Liss,” was all Dan managed to say, but that one word carried all of Dan’s concerns: Wasn’t this callous, wasn’t this wrong?
“This is the plan. If you can’t do it, tell me right now,” Liss answered, and suddenly, Dan was afraid of her. She wasn’t sure if this driven, calculating Liss was all that different from the Liss she was best friends with, who helped her mourn Rickey and IronWeaks, who she confided in after Johnny kissed her. The Liss in front of her was dangerous. This Liss, Dan could tell, would accept nothing short of compliance with her plan.
Dan pulled the textbook toward herself. “I can do it,” Dan said.
With that, something about Liss softened. She was allowing herself to be scared, just a little. There was a needful, uncertain note in her voice when she said, “We’re going to survive this, right?”
Dan said something she didn’t feel but that she wanted badly to be true. “Everything will be okay. We’ll be okay. I promise.”
It was a promise she didn’t know how to keep.
* * *
—
Johnny’s mother filed a missing person report as soon as she could, but the cops didn’t address the case with any particular urgency, so it was a few days before a police car pulled up at the entrance to North Coast High. Dan alerted Liss that she’d seen the cops on campus, and Liss pulled her into the Range Rover at lunch. They rehearsed their story again, until Liss realized they might sound too practiced once they were questioned and ended the session.