Now, Dan prodded a pale yucca-chunk and admitted, “It was weird to see her again. She didn’t expect you to be there.”
“What, the Lizard thought you’d never make another friend?”
Dan rolled her eyes. “Probably.”
“You’re not going to text her, are you?” When Dan didn’t answer immediately, Alexa’s eyes widened. “You are not.” When Dan didn’t answer at all, they went even wider. “You already did? Jesus, Dan, not to put words in your mouth, but you literally told me you hate her.”
“I don’t hate her.”
“You said you wished you’d never met her and you called her a total garbage monster. All I mean is, you don’t have to do whatever she’s asking you to. You can just go on living your life.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Yes, it is.” There was a sudden hardness in Alexa’s voice. “She doesn’t care about you, Dan—she just wants to use you to get what she wants and then she’ll get rid of you.”
“You don’t even know her.”
“From what you’ve said about her, I don’t need to. I’ve known enough bad people to recognize it when someone only cares about themselves, and that’s how Liss is. Fixing her damage is none of your business.”
That Alexa hated Liss with iron certainty entirely on Dan’s behalf gave her an all-over warm feeling that seemed pretty similar to happiness. It made her want to promise Alexa that she’d never talk to Liss again, if that’s what Alexa thought was best. It made her want to trust Alexa with every secret.
But not this one.
This, Dan didn’t want Alexa to understand. She didn’t want Alexa to have to accept that Dan had messed around with magic, until she made a disastrous, unfixable mistake. She didn’t want to explain that feeling of transformation on the night that started it all in Liss’s bedroom and how it turned into something toxic.
She wanted to go back to being the person she was before all that, the person who Alexa thought she was now: someone who didn’t know that there was magic in the world, real magic, and that it wasn’t a good thing.
To call it magic didn’t even seem right. The magic most people knew was a lie, either magicians and card tricks or the fantasy novels that Alexa loved to read. What she and Liss had tapped into was more than that—not a deception at all, but the opposite, a tide of power that ran through the world totally unseen, a current that they could never understand, that had crashed over them when they had their backs turned and nearly dragged them under.
Magic wasn’t friendly. It amazed you with its power to destroy, the same way the salt waves of the Pacific hammered cliffs into rubble, broke boats, annihilated beaches. Magic gave you gifts, but it took from you too, and although it had seemed fantastic and fun when she and Liss first tasted that world, they had learned better.
Or at least Dan had.
“It’s not about being friends again. We’re just going to talk one last time, for closure, and then we’ll be done, forever.” Dan stabbed another piece of yucca. “Anyway, I don’t think Liss’s damage is the kind that can be fixed.”
Still, Alexa didn’t seem satisfied as she walked Dan to English class.
“Tell Liss to be careful with this Kasyan guy, okay? Those stories Lorelei told me never ended well. They call him Kasyan the Unmerciful for a reason. Only a real weirdo would name himself after the Big Bad Wolf, right?”
Liss
That afternoon, Dan’s mom greeted Liss with a long, cozy hug. “You’ve stayed away too long! I missed your energy,” Graciela said. She pulled back and beamed at the girls, apparently failing to see that one of them was sulking and the other, with a bit more pressure, would snap entirely in two. “Beautiful. The power of female energy. It’s always such a strong presence in you girls.”
“Seriously. Mom.” Dan’s cheeks flared.
“Do you want some hot chocolate?” Graciela asked as she swept aside a piece of Liss’s hair that had come loose. “I just picked up some fresh goat milk.”
“Mom!” Dan groaned, but Liss smiled. She loved Dan’s mom, but it hadn’t occurred to her to miss her until just now. Graciela was always there with a warm hug, a hunk of macrobiotic dark chocolate, or an unsolicited but shame-free talk about safely embracing sexual pleasure. Graciela always seemed shocked by their beauty and their maturity, not in the trivial way men sometimes admired Liss, but in a way that was rich with wonder and made her feel proud, as if she were on the brink of becoming someone amazing.
Dan didn’t know how lucky she had it, to have a mom like that—a mom whose qualifications for wonderful you met by simply existing exactly as you were.
Liss would have stayed there, safe in that warm kitchen with Graciela, even if it meant drinking goat milk hot chocolate, but Dan’s embarrassment was about to cause her to pass completely out of existence. They went up to Dan’s attic room, which was still the same old chaos of half-read books and IronWeaks posters and dirty laundry. Liss shoved aside a pile of Dan’s clothes and pulled her legs up under herself in the armchair by the window, the same way she’d always done. Dan climbed onto her bed and slumped against the pillows.
Liss waited for a feeling of stillness and alignment to settle over her, now that she and Dan were both where they belonged again. Dan’s cozy room held more than memories of studying the Black Book, its magic pulsing in their fingertips. It was marathons of Brat Pack movies and sleepovers spent watching K-Pop music videos and stalking the social media accounts of all the boys Liss thought were cute. But still Liss felt that frizzing anxiety in her chest, as if every beat of her heart was a whispered not yet, not yet, not yet.
She counted to four and back on her fingers and hoped that Dan didn’t see her do it.
“So?” Dan asked.
“Graciela won’t hear us?”
Dan shook her head. “She’ll be in her pottery studio in the back. Tell me about Johnny.”
So Liss told her: the spell she’d used, the birds, the weeks and weeks of failure until, finally, she reached Johnny.
“So you saw him.”
“That’s not really how it works. You don’t really see anything, it just gets into your head. I know he looks bad, like he hasn’t seen the sun since he was taken. He said he was underground somewhere.”
“Where?”
Liss rubbed her eyes. “Don’t you think I would have led with that information? He didn’t know, but he can’t get out of there by himself.”
“So you’re saying he’s a prisoner.”