So I tell her stories borrowed from Hawthorn and Lelia and June and Rush, even Haven. Ones about the girls at school who wear her wards in tiny bottles around their necks. Ones about the witch who beckons water and the girl who summons loyalty from people’s stubborn hearts. Imogen, who wore black and white even though her personality blazed in every color, like the rainbow stones on her fingers. I give her the places she came from: the split-level house with no door, the town that’s in danger of shrinking back to normal size without her. I give her the people she came from: the family that never built her a safe home, the friends that became an entire world. I give her the stories I found when I was looking for her. I give her back to herself, beautiful and confusing and more than anyone could possibly take in at once, the way the far side of a redwood can only be guessed about from where I’m standing.

Imogen listens. She starts to interrupt, telling me details that I don’t remember or never knew. The more she speaks, the more solid she gets. Loose curls and wide, intent eyes emerge from the mist, followed by the angles of her jaw, her high cheekbones, her pointed chin. I can’t wait any longer. “When you disappeared,” I say, “you were looking for a girl named —”

“Emma!” The way she says that name turns it to wildflower honey. “Emma, Emma, Emma.”

Another wisp draws across the woods, dotted and incomplete. It finds Imogen and clings to her palm, dances around her fingertips like a tiny moon. Imogen murmurs her name again and again.

Emma has been lost for so long that I bet it takes a lot to remember.

Emma takes shape, broad shouldered and fog bodied, and she smiles. First at Imogen. Then at me.

“This is Danny,” Imogen says.

“I thought you might come,” Emma says.

I hold up my arm. The map is there, faded but with the X still visible. Emma nods, her eyes two mistlights, the pupils so large from the darkness of this place that they’re orbs of black ringed with silver. She puts up her hand, and I match it to mine. Our fingertips kiss. I think this is how people say hello here.

“Why aren’t you in the trees with the rest of the spirits?” I ask Emma.

“Magic.” She sighs.

“You did a spell to keep yourself like this?” I ask.

“No,” Emma said. “Magic keeps me apart from the rest. The bits of me that were alive are gone, but magic . . .”

“You stayed this way because you’re a witch,” I say. It makes a strange sort of sense. Magic makes life different — why wouldn’t it make death different? “And Imogen found you because she’s a witch, too.”