All five of them sat on the fallen tree’s trunk, their feet off the ground. “The coven never comes here,” Hawthorn said. “They call the mother tree a place of death. They think the energy’s too dark.” Her voice swirled with excess drama.

“What about you?” Imogen asked.

“White magic, black magic,” Hawthorn said, her hands flying. “That’s the kind of stuff people make up to sort us into piles.” What witches could do wasn’t good or bad. It just was.

“Well, I love it here,” Imogen announced, reaching her fingers out as if she were trying to grab the whole woods.

It hadn’t escaped Hawthorn that Imogen had raw potential for magic. She smiled at someone, and they were happy for days. When she frowned, the world inverted. And there was the water. No way of saying if Imogen was drawn to the water or it was drawn to her, but Hawthorn took note of how the Eel River pulsed on the days when Imogen was upset. How the school’s sprinklers went off unexpectedly the day that Imogen wore black lipstick and declared that the world was completely fucked.

“Hey,” Hawthorn said. “Let’s do a spell. To bottle up this feeling.”

She wasn’t trying to start a coven. Spells were just what she did, the way that some kids played sports and others took dance lessons or learned French or played every video game in existence. And she wanted to remember this moment. It was the first day she’d felt not-alone since she was little. Which made no sense, because she was always surrounded by Ora. Ora’s magic, Ora’s friends, their feral kids.

“A spell?” June asked. “My parents would not like that.”

“We’re not asking your parents,” Lelia said. “We’re asking you.”

“So that’s a yes?” Hawthorn asked Lelia, just to be sure.

“I’m up for anything,” Lelia said with a shrug of her razor-blade shoulders.

Hawthorn dumped out her bag and stirred through the selenite wands and scraps of leather for her boleen, the small knife her mother had given her when she turned twelve, the one she used to trim wicks and slice through knots and whittle shapes out of soft-skinned pieces of redwood.

She used the knifepoint to draw the outline of a human-size bottle into the dirt, and then lay down on top of it, fitting her body to the drawing. “I invite you in, I invite you in, I invite you in,” she said to everything around her. She looked up at the whole sky and waited for it to shrink down inside of her.

Imogen went next, and then they each took turns lying on top of Hawthorn’s outline and drawing the day into them. The other four hovered over the one inside the bottle and let her drink in the sight of them. Their nervous, excited faces.