Each memory that came flashing back caused searing pain in my head. My eyes watered from the strength of it. “There’s something else, too. They have something to do with Aaron. Jamie, and I think maybe Basile, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. I just remember Aaron was the one who first introduced me to the guys. And Basile mentioned him a few times, though I don’t know how they could have met. He said something like ‘he believed in the Magic, too.’”
“Maybe Jamie and Aaron talked. Do you have Aaron’s phone? Maybe they texted each other?”
I didn’t have his phone, but I did still have a login to some of Aaron’s old accounts that I’d used after his death to close them out. In the months after his death, it was a tiny piece of him I could still hold onto. Now I pulled out my phone and logged into his email account. I did a search for “Jamie,” for “Basile,” for “the One,” for “Magic.”
And there, three hits. Email drafts to Robetresse and to his advisor:
To Whom It May Concern:
I have begun to suspect a group I’ve been spending time with is conducting experimental spells on students. I have reason to believe at least one of the people they tried it on died. I believe they should be shut down. The names of the individuals are as follows—
Max and I looked at each other, agape.
“It was never sent.”
I held my Christmas mug clenched around my fingers, my eyes growing hot. “What the fuck did they do to my brother?”
Max wrapped his arms around me. “Hey, hey,” he whispered. “You can’t fall apart on me now. I need you, champ,” he said, wiping my tears away with his fingers.
He paused, looking at me thoughtfully. “Do you think … you could use you being unbound to save Dani?”
“I’m not sure,” I said, my teeth chattering. “Maybe. But I still need your help.”
He nodded. “Then we need that third object. It was too much Magic for me, and too much for the telescope to take on its own. And I don’t know how to access the North Star.”
“She doesn’t have a third object. That’s what Dr. Strauss said.”
“She had to have at least another in order to summon this much power.”
“There was nothing in the records. I checked.”
“Maybe they went back through and deleted it? Or maybe she kept it a secret. But I’ll bet you if anybody knows, it’s the people who did the spell on her.”
“They’re not going to tell us anything.”
“Then we go look for ourselves. You remember what Jack said, right? That they do some fucked-up shit up in the canyon.” He turned around to the red hills behind us. “If I wanted to hide something somewhere it wouldn’t be found, that might be where I’d start.”
An hour later, we were hot, exhausted, and no closer to finding Dani’s third object. We’d headed due south from the brothers’ house toward the mountains. The clouds inched closer, a dark charcoal stain marring the sky.
“Over there.” Max pointed. “See how the grass is all tamped down? It’s got to be a trail. Someone’s been out here.”
Things kept resurfacing in my memories as we walked. In the days after completing Jamie’s spell, I felt my life sinking from me, control of my body and mind slipping away from me little by little. I was afraid of what was happening to me, taken in by the One while at the same time being drowned by it. I began to think only in symbols and left myself a cryptic trail, one that only I would understand, to save myself. Part of me broke through, but I was still not fully conscious of what I was doing. Like when I carved HELL IS HERE into my headboard. Or when I’d blacked out and drawn the number 1 all over my shower. It was only now I realized it was a way of telling myself that the One had taken me.
The One had used me as it pleased that final year at school, drawing from Max’s and my strength. When I set Luce’s car on fire, I was so numb I could barely feel anything. I shouldn’t have been able to set her car on fire—my objects were composed of water, leather, and porcelain. But while unbound, I was just a vessel for Magic. Magic took my anger toward her and turned it into intense, flaming power.
And the One was clever. After I left, it took me far from my dimidium, who the spell hadn’t disconnected me from after all, as we were not each other’s objects. But it wasn’t clever enough, because the only thing that saved me from drowning steadily from the drain of Magic was coming back here to begin with, to investigate how it took someone else. In the end, it was Dani who broke through.
The pages hold the truth, and the truth will set you free.She sent me to the source of it all, to the Book of Autumn.
But now? I could feel the foreign presence of the One twisting through me, as if it were peering right over my shoulder, entwined around my veins, as it had been all along.
We followed the trail down to an alcove and reached an outcropping of cliffs, but it was a steep drop to the bottom. Max slid his palm down the rocks.
“Is there another way down?” I asked.
