I push forward with the dowsing rod, and June’s athame catches on something. Then it slides through clean, sharp, fast, stabbing this midnight and spilling its gray blood. The world doesn’t just fill with fog; it becomes fog, overwhelming my senses without giving me a single solid thing to hold on to.

I step out of the faerie ring. I should come out in the same place I entered — there was only one opening. But it’s different here.

For one, the redwoods are gone.

Instead, there are towers of fog, each one the sum of the fog that a tree would need to breathe over hundreds of years to stay alive. They form a forest of wispy columns that stretch from ground to sky.

I’ve been holding my breath, and when I let it out and take in a new one, I learn that this place has secrets instead of air. I pull in regrets and partial truths, betrayals and hopes that never came to pass, wishes that never left anyone’s lips, so thick that they go down like syrup, making me cough. None of these feelings have names or lives attached to them. They’re in pure form — floating — everywhere.

I think I would choke if it wasn’t for the joy.

The falling-star plummet of first love, a slow wade into a long warm friendship, babies cracking the secret of how to smile, art being coaxed out of hiding places, hope brewed from nearly nothing, and stories brought to life, told on dark nights around a candle or a fire or any kind of beautiful glow.

The spirits in the fog of the Lost Coast are here with me. But even as these spirits wander, lost, I feel them tugged toward the towers of fog that, in my world, are trees. The redwoods have found ways to carry the dead, to invite them into their skin, to offer them rest.

But Emma Hart isn’t resting.

I leave the tower of fog that used to be the tree with the faerie ring, walking farther into a land that I have no way of mapping. And all of a sudden now feels like a lonely place to be, without the past reaching out to hold my hand and keep me company, no future glinting with promises that keep a person walking forward.

Imogen.

She is the promise.

I keep walking forward.