“No,” I say, unwilling to turn this moment into another magic lesson. The Grays are holding something back, and I’m not going to let this stay unspoken. I clutch the smoky quartz harder, almost hoping that Hawthorn’s mother rushes out of the barn, takes this mess right out of our hands.

But no one comes to save us.

“If Neil really did die in that tree, it wasn’t a natural death,” Hawthorn says, tugging at a tiny braid that runs through her curls.

“Do you think someone used magic to kill him?” I ask. There’s no point in dancing around it.

Hawthorn shakes her head. “Witchcraft and murder don’t cross paths,” she said. “If for no other reason than the cost always comes back to the witch who cast the working. It would be easier to kill someone outright.”

“And risk being caught?” I ask. “What if someone was upset enough, and they didn’t care about the price?”

The sky glows, a flashburn that means the day will be over soon. The flare of life that comes right before death. I think about Sebastian in the tree, living at the very edge of his comfort zone. I was the thing that he reached for, right before death. And I barely noticed how important that moment was. I was trying so hard to find the Grays, even though I didn’t know it yet.

Did someone want Sebastian dead? Neil, too? What about Imogen?

Hawthorn is sighing up a storm. “If someone really did want to kill people with magic, they would have to find a way to do it that diverges from every legitimate form of witchcraft. We don’t make spells for this.”

“It’s against every law of nature,” Rush whispers.

“But the laws of nature are breaking,” Lelia says. “Or at least severely cracking.”

“Neil is dead,” June says. “Our Neil.”

“At least his bones are buried now,” Lelia says to Hawthorn. “And not in that creepy store.” The Grays put the bones to rest in the woods near the High Point as I watched, still trembling and coughing up the last of my vision.

“Are you okay?” Rush asks, and I think it’s for me — but she’s talking to Hawthorn this time.

Lelia sets a hand to the back of Hawthorn’s neck as she hangs her head low, working the muscles there, releasing a tightness that must have been building since we first found the water in the hermit’s tree. “Get Danny home. We can’t have her mom stopping us now.”

Hawthorn drives me in her mother’s truck, and this time I leave the silence between us untouched. It starts to rain quietly, unexpected drops cutting across the sky, as sunset glazes the town and the trees.