Haven had the house to herself on the night Imogen took her backpack and went for the woods. Mom and Dad were on a trip to the Bay Area to get “real sushi” and spend the night with the friends they actually liked, the ones who thought living in Tempest was a bad joke.

Haven watched videos of a band she didn’t really like on her phone so she’d be able to talk about them on Monday morning. If her friends quizzed her, she was ready. She did her homework and triple-checked the answers so nobody could say she wasn’t trying hard enough. Then she erased a few of the answers so Imogen couldn’t claim she was trying too hard. Right before Haven got into bed, she made a list of all the things she wished she had done instead and burned it with a single match.

Imogen wandered in around two in the morning — pretty normal when Mom and Dad were gone. Haven woke up for a few hazy seconds and then fell back asleep. It was when she got up in the morning and found her sister with two dark but misty pieces of sea glass where her eyes used to be that things got interesting.

The Grays: Six Weeks Ago

The day after Imogen went missing, they waited like nervous little kids. They showed up to their classes and jobs, but inside, June was seven years old, hiding under the dining-room table next to a cherry-dark stain. Hawthorn was six, in the farthest corner of the hayloft, where the walls pinched down to a point. Rush was even younger, the taste of the word four as bitter as greens straight from the garden, so young that when she saw monsters, she didn’t bother asking if they were real. Lelia was older — fourteen — sitting at her mother’s side, holding her fingers below the white-tipped nails, afraid of the moment she let go.

On the second day, Imogen hadn’t come back. The Grays stood outside her bedroom window, which had gone as empty-dark as she had.

The next four days, they were a fever, rushing through the town. They visited each other on their breaks, biking along thin margins of mountain road. Rush drove her unfortunate car all over Tempest. They talked to Imogen’s parents, her sister. They tried to visit the hermit, but he wasn’t around — he’d probably gone on one of his backpacking trips to Mount Tam or Mirror Lake. They picked at the story of what happened before Imogen disappeared, because that story was a scab, and even though it hurt, they worried the edges, needing to see the bloody scrape beneath.

On the sixth day, they knew Imogen wasn’t coming back without their help.

On the sixth day, they took to the woods.