And I stand up, spilling homework everywhere. I look until I find the not-very-creative spot where Mom hid my phone in a drawer. I grab my bag and slip the dowsing rod inside. Rush doesn’t seem to care what happens to her cleaning cart. I leave a note for Mom.

I’m alive.

It’s never felt this true.

I follow Rush, one stone at a time, down the path. She looks up at the trees, down at her feet, working them out of her sneakers, hanging those sneakers from one hand so she can feel the slate on her arches, the mulch between her toes, the hard kiss of the parking lot as she leads me toward her car. The Deathmobile. Her hair swings darkly, back and forth like a metronome, keeping its own time and not anyone else’s. The way she walks, at home in her skin, with all the doors open wide, is what I want. She turns back to me and smiles.

Rush wants me with her, and she doesn’t have to cast a spell to convince me.

She is the spell.

Emma and Imogen: Five Months Ago

Emma Hart loved the Grays, though she sometimes felt as if she were on one side of a thick-paned glass staring in at them. Outside in the cold as they talked and danced and chanted and kissed.

Their kissing started out as innocent as anything else. It made Emma happy to see the Grays so free with one another, love flowing around them in eddies and swirls, never trapped in their hearts with nowhere to go.

Then Rush and Imogen started looking at each other in a way that Emma knew painfully, perfectly — from the inside. She was the first to understand what was coming next. She saw it from a mile away, a storm on the horizon.

The first time Rush and Imogen kissed in the woods, Emma vowed never to speak to Imogen again. It was best for both of them.

“But that’s not what I want,” Imogen said, her stubbornness putting small cracks in Emma’s resolve.

“What do you want?” Emma asked.

“For you to be with me,” Imogen said. “Always.”

Emma remembered someone else telling her they would always be together, a very long time ago.

It hurt just as much the second time.

Imogen visited Emma as much as ever — more, even — but sometimes she came fresh from kissing Rush, her lips swollen and cinnamon pink.

It was the worst when Imogen tried to talk to her about kissing Rush. Imogen thought that Emma was only sad about the past. As if seeing her with Rush could fill the emptiness of what never happened with Ada.