It’s around my entire body, cloaking me.

I can’t see myself anymore. The distraction of my skin is gone, and I’m melting away. Whatever I thought of as Danny is suspended in droplets. Still there but loose, different.

I don’t know how I’m supposed to find my magic. Or how I’m supposed to use that to find Imogen. So I think about what I do know. The Grays, who connect me to her, a living tether, making it feel like she’s here with me. As present as the sky. As everywhere as sky.

It feels the same as when I walked out of my classroom last year and made it to the highway. The floating certainty. The haze of need. But this time, there are no rules trying to hold me in place.

The Trees: Now

A new magic is awake.

The trees feel it. The trees feel everything.

Some secrets stay close to the trunks of the redwoods. Others have been carried away. Like the bones. The bones are gone, and the trees fear that an important story left with them.

Too much has been hidden, and here is finding magic.

The trees reach with long branched fingers. The one who carries fresh magic looks up as they clamor and crowd. But she is too busy with her fog, wrapped in its clammy embrace, and they do not know how to reach her.

Words are not the way they speak. There are other languages, though. Weather, sky, soil. Wind and time.

They look for a new way to whisper. They pick another magic-girl, the one with a song always trapped in her throat.

And they make the forest play for her.

They curve wind, creak wood.

She opens her mouth and lets out three notes, stepping-stones from here to somewhere else. She sings them as though she is running her fingers over smooth bark, mindless and soft, over and over.

Danny: Now

Iwalk through fog until my body dissolves and my feet are cloud. I spill toward Imogen. Her presence is strong, a pulse throbbing under skin.

But feeling her near and reaching her are two different things. I push forward, my breath straining and my heart going wild. I have no boundaries, only blood and magic racing, building, trying to reach her. And something larger than her.

I am close.

I am close.

And then . . .

I lose that sense of nearness, that delicious, infuriating almost.

The fog spits me out, just like Hawthorn said it would.

The Ravens: Six Weeks Ago

One day, copper-girl goes into the woods alone, and when she comes out, she is changed. Dull. Water sits flat as she walks by, does not whisper in eddies and curls. Her hair still shines red, but it is a flat shine.

The glow they seek comes from inside, burns through.