“Time isn’t the only way to know someone,” Rush says, the wind tugging at her hair, the words trickling into her heart.

Imogen had been in their lives since middle school, but if you measured it that way, it sounded like any other friendship. Like it was just a matter of having someone to sit with at lunch or go to the movies with on the weekend. Loving Imogen made everything brighter and deeper, like staring down into the sea and finding a world layered with strangeness and beauty. Losing her turned the world shallow.

The girls sit down in a circle. “So . . . how do we do this?” Danny asks.

Hawthorn takes the lead, and the Grays take it for granted that she will. “Normally I would say that you should start with whatever sort of working calls to you, try a bunch of different types until you build your own. I guess I should get this out of the way. There’s a reason we’re called the Grays and not the Wicca Club of Tempest High School.” Hawthorn rushes through her explanation, pausing only to summon more breath. “It’s not like we make everything up ourselves. But the craft is a braid of traditions, and a lot of those are tied to the places they came from. The way I see it, you can’t swap out one for the other and expect it not to matter. Every place has its own rules, and Tempest is highly specific.” Hawthorn lays her palms against the dirt, like she wants the ground to give her strength, like she might even ask it to speak.

“All right,” Danny says. “So what happens next?”

But the Grays don’t know, because Imogen would be the one to answer that question if she were here. She was good at schemes. Always leaping to meet new challenges and take the universe’s dares.

“We thought you would come knowing your abilities,” Lelia says.

“Be nice,” June says.

“Not in my repertoire,” Lelia shoots back. “And that’s why you love me.”

June rolls her eyes, although the Grays know that she really does love Lelia for her bristle, her bravado, her absolute lack of fucks.

Danny nods back and forth between Lelia and June. “Are you two . . . together?”

“Grays don’t date each other,” Hawthorn says, and Rush stops breathing.

“I don’t date anyone,” Lelia adds.

“I have an idea.” June scrambles out of the circle and goes to her flowery backpack, which she dropped at the base of a tree. She tugs the zipper, shoves aside a few schoolbooks, pulls out a knife as long as her forearm, grips it by the redwood handle, and rushes back to the circle. The weight and darkness of the knife draw everyone’s eyes. The sharpness forces Danny’s breath into a new shape.

“Whoa,” she says. “I don’t go in for blood rituals.”