I started spending every second I could with everyone I knew that was magic. No one taught me any spells, obviously, but I tried to catch a glimpse whenever I could. Eventually Fiona gave up hiding her rituals, so I was able to sneak into the garden at midnight and watch her. I didn’t understand what she did or said, but I felt the magic. It was a similar electricity to when I tried to open Killian’s door.

“What did it do?” I asked when she was done.

“That was a ritual for anonymity. It keeps our home hidden from anyone who wants to hurt us,” Fiona said as she gathered her things; her spell-book, black candles, herbs, a stone bowl with fine powder in it that glittered in the moonlight.

Everyone kept telling me that hanging around magic wouldn’t make it come to me any sooner, but I did it just in case. There was nothing in the world that I wanted more than knowledge — I wanted to know how it all worked, what more there was out there, and most importantly what exactly had happened to my mother.

Uncle Killian barely stepped out of his office, but at least he kept his door open now. Mind you, it sometimes swung close when I approached, but every now and then I was able to go inside and watch him make notes on newspaper clippings and write longer and longer paragraphs into his journal.

A month before summer vacation, a new face appeared in school. He was in Amelia’s year, so I saw him when we met up after the English class she had with him. It took me a moment to realise it was the surfer I’d seen at Ocean Beach with Amelia; he was wearing more clothes now, a leather jacket, jeans and a silvery dangling earring. He was cool.

Amelia didn’t agree with me, though. “There’s something off about him,” she grumbled when we went to lunch, trailing after the gaggle of students that surrounded the new guy. Charon, Amelia had told me his name was. Charon Demetrias.

I couldn’t tell there was anything wrong with Charon, exactly, but it was a little weird how popular he got as soon as he arrived. Not the same kind of new kid treatment that I’d received; the one when people talk to you for a couple of days until they realise you’re not very interesting at all. No, he skyrocketed up the school hierarchy without lifting a finger. He didn’t go out of his way to hang out with the popular kids, either. They came to him.

By the end of the school year, everyone knew Charon by name and as far as I was aware (thanks to Amelia, who against all stereotypes loved gossip), he had been invited to six parties already. He had declined all of them.

Amelia and I were never invited to parties. Me, because I wasn’t friends with anyone in my year, and Amelia because she only hung out with me outside of school. However, the previous night she had informed me that Dennis was out of town and she had finally learned the spell that unlocked the liquor cabinet.

“There’s not a lot there,” she added. “Just cheap rum and some vodka. We can buy something to mix it with on the way home, though, so it should be fine.”

Killian hadn’t batted an eye when I told him I was going to be staying at Amelia’s for the night. He had been on an important looking call, his brows knit together in a frown. I half-hoped for him to say ‘no’ because the only time I’d had a drop of alcohol had been awful.

My last class, which was history, ended early so I went to wait by Amelia’s English class for it to end. It was on the other side of the school, so by the time I arrived, the quickest students were already leaving the class hollering and chatting, ready for summer.

Once the biggest rush was over I was able to catch a glimpse of Amelia. She was staying behind to chat with Mrs. Larson. The teacher pulled out her five inch thick planner, which meant it was going to take a while. Mrs. Larson liked to take her time with things.

I took a seat on the floor a few feet away from the door and leaned against the wall. I took out my math homework, but ended up just doodling things in my notebook.

A couple of minutes later, someone sat next to me. It was Charon, who had somehow managed to slip away from his fan club. For a second, he looked at me with his head tilted like he was looking for something behind my eyes. I just stared back.

“Cool drawing,” he said finally. I looked at my notebook. It wasn’t a cool drawing. It was a phallic chicken.

“Thanks,” I said anyway, just to be polite.

He didn’t say anything, just fiddled with a ring on his thumb. It looked like a crest of some sort, but I couldn’t tell what it depicted. If I didn’t know he was so popular, I would’ve thought he was shy.

“Any summer plans?” I asked. If there’s one thing my dad taught me before he died, it’s how to keep a conversation going.

“No, just staying home. Looking after my little sister,” Charon answered.

“Cool,” I said.

“What about you?” he asked.

“Hanging out with my friend. I’m just waiting for her now.” I nodded towards the classroom.

“I see,” Charon said. He leaned his head against white-painted bricks. It seemed like he was content just sitting there with me and not talking, so I continued my doodles. It was nice, actually. He was an awkward guy, but he was easy to be around, if that made sense.

Eventually a pair of legs emerged in front of me. Amelia grinned down at me and offered a hand to help me up. I stuffed my things back in my bag and she hauled me up. I hesitated for a moment before I told Charon: “See ya.” He looked a bit surprised, so we were already walking away by the time he raised his hand to wave.

“What did he want?” Amelia asked once we were out of his earshot.

I shrugged. “Nothing. We just hung out.”

“O-kay,” she said, really dragging out the ‘o’. “Ready to go?”

We bought a six pack of coke and snacks on the way to Amelia’s. We took turns on my skateboard; we had decided that we had shared custody of it. Well, her. Amelia named her Jodie.

To my surprise, when we got to the apartment, Amelia abandoned the plastic bag by the door and made a beeline to the tiny spare room Dennis used as an office. I’d never actually been inside (to be fair, I wasn’t sure more than one person could fit in there) but this time curiosity took the lead and I followed Amelia.

A large part of the room was taken up by a safe. It looked like a perfectly normal safe to me — and by normal I mean human — but Amelia didn’t bother with combinations. Instead, she unfolded a notebook page she’d kept in her back pocket, and started reading it out loud. I didn’t recognise the language, but I felt the strange electricity I had learned to associate with spells.

“Whoa!” I said and grabbed her shoulder. She paused. I hissed: “What are you doing? I thought we were gonna have a sleepover!”

“We are! After I’ve unlocked this thing,” she whispered back. Why we were being so quiet even though there was no one else in the apartment, I had no idea.

“Why?” I demanded. Sweat prickled my forehead.

“I didn’t ask you why when you called me to help break into your uncle’s study,” Amelia said and raised an eyebrow.

“That’s a good point,” I admitted.

“Killian isn’t the only one who keeps a journal,” Amelia muttered.

Her brows furrowed in concentration and she started chanting again. Her hand hovered over the safe’s lock. About three rounds of the spell in, my hair stood up. The lock and Amelia’s hand had a barely visible blueish glow.

She chanted one more time, now louder than before. There was a hollow click, and the safe door creaked open.

“Holy shit, it worked!” Amelia shrieked.

“You didn’t know it was gonna work?” I asked. I wasn’t sure if I was impressed or scared.

“I just looked it up a couple of days ago,” Amelia said and shrugged.

Amelia opened the door all the way. Inside, there were two books. A spell-book, which looked and felt newer than ours, and a thin journal. Amelia and I looked at each other. She grinned, and I would be lying if I said the excitement didn’t spread to me.

Amelia grabbed the journal. “He only started writing a couple of weeks ago, so there’s not going to be much. But it’s something,” she explained.

“Well, what are we waiting for?” I asked.

We sat down on the floor, which was a challenging task with the space we had. We had our backs to opposite walls and our knees were pressed together in a way that was probably going to make our legs fall asleep within minutes.

At that moment, though, we were too interested in the journal. Amelia opened the latest entry and read out loud:

As much respect as I have for Killian, it seems like he’s losing his touch. He insists that California remains untouched, even after all the evidence I’ve showed him. He calls them isolated cases, as if a whole pack of sirens hadn’t made a home right on his street.

California is being infested — it has been, for a few years now. I just don’t know how to make him believe. Have I not been by his side all this time? Have I not told him a million times that I would do anything for him?

What worries me the most is what I saw last night. I did my rounds in Dolores Park, kept an eye out for anything out of the ordinary. It was well past three in the morning. Usually I spot at least some homeless people, but last night the whole park was deserted. The closer I got to the centre, the heavier I felt, and the darker everything looked.

I could barely see the statue when I reached it. Only its silhouette against the sky. And under the statue, there was a shadow. I say shadow because I don’t know how else to describe it. It wasn’t really there, at least not all the way. I felt like if I walked up to it and tried to touch it, the shadow would simply vanish.

The shadow was dressed in a black cloak made of smoke — or at least it looked like smoke. I couldn’t see its face. It floated a few inches above the ground and whispered. I wanted to get closer so I could hear it, but I was frozen still. And maybe that was a good thing, because I don’t know what the shadow would have done had it seen me.

The shadow kept whispering for at least ten more minutes. It must have been some sort of a chant, but when it was done nothing changed. The shadow lowered itself and the moment its feet hit the ground, everything was back to normal. The air felt like air and the darkness lifted.

The shadow, which looked much more human now, walked away like nothing happened. I wondered if I dreamt the entire scenario, but the tremble in my body said otherwise. There was dark magic right in the middle of San Fransisco that night.

Amelia shut the journal gently. Her hands were trembling, and she was as pale as a sheet. The thrill was long gone; she was deathly scared.

“How can he be so sure it was dark magic?” I asked her hopefully.

“Back in Virginia, where we used to live… There were a lot of old necromancy sites. They hadn’t been used since the 1600s, but you could still feel the magic.” Amelia shivered. “If there’s one thing my brother recognises, it’s dark magic.”

“Oh,” was all I could say. I looked back at the journal and chewed the inside of my cheek. I thought about the crow I’d seen the night Uncle Killian came to Elvira and Fiona’s.

“This is way worse than I thought… San Fransisco is supposed to be safe, that’s why we moved here,” Amelia said. She sounded more frustrated than worried, now.

“What do you think that shadow thing was?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve never heard of anything like it. Except…” Amelia hesitated.

“Except what?” I asked.

“I read about it in one of your uncle’s books once. When a witch overestimates their power by a long shot, they can become… well, a ‘shadow’ of their former self. I don’t know if they meant it in the literal sense, though,” she explained.

“Do you think that’s what that thing was?” I asked.

“Who knows. I’m not sure if that’s ever happened to anyone, at least not in a long time. Usually people just die if too much magic channels through them,” Amelia mused.

“How reassuring,” I said.

“It should be,” she said seriously. We fell into an uncomfortable, heavy silence. I could almost hear her brain ticking away.

“Ames… I saw something like that a few months ago,” I said finally. If there was one person I could tell, it was my best friend.

“Like the shadow?” she said, frowning.

“Yeah…” I told her the story of the crow the best I could. How it looked like it was pure smoke, how it talked, and how everything was pitch black when I saw it.

“That could’ve been just a vision. Witches have them sometimes, they’re usually just warnings,” Amelia said, but she sounded unsure.

“Could it have been a warning about this, then? Rather than about just my uncle,” I said.

“I don’t know… Visions are tricky. If you spend all your time trying to make sense of them, you’ll just drive yourself insane.” Amelia sighed, hugging her legs. She looked incredibly small.

“Should we just go to sleep and forget we ever opened that journal?” I suggested.

Amelia smiled tiredly. “I think that’s a great idea.”

The soda and the booze were left untouched.

—

As if it knew about that night’s conversation, the crow appeared in my dream as soon as I fell asleep. It soared through the sky, and I followed it. Harsh wind blew through my hair and droplets of water stabbed me in the face like frozen needles, but I continued to fly after it. It was leading me somewhere.

We were above a city, but it wasn’t San Fransisco or Los Angeles. The crow approached a tall building that overlooked a busy street, and eventually landed on the sill of an open window near the very top. I joined it.

The room was big and decorated in what I vaguely recognised as art deco. A familiar-looking bald man sat behind a desk and looked through documents with disinterest. It took me a while to remember where I’d seen him before. He was Ewart, head of my uncle’s coven.

Something chittered on the ground by the desk. If I hadn’t been in a dream, I would’ve fallen backwards to my death when I saw what it was; a knee-high scorpion with its tail high in the air, rubbing itself against Ewart’s leg like an affectionate cat.

There was an old-fashioned phone on the wall behind Ewart, and the second I noticed it, it started ringing. Ewart scowled as he stood up and picked it up. The scorpion followed him closely.

“Finally,” he greeted bluntly.

I couldn’t hear what the caller said, so the conversation was one-sided. It went like this: “Have you talked to him yet?… You’d had time, and we’re running out of it… If Sibyl is right, and she always is— Don’t lecture me on prophecies… Listen— Listen to me! I’ll give you eighteen months. You have until the November new moon. One way or another, both of you better be here by then.”

Ewart slammed the phone back on the wall angrily. One of the papers on his desk caught on blue fire, but he flicked his wrist and a half-empty glass of water fell on it before it could spread. He slumped back on his seat, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

The door opened, and an old woman walked in. She was small and withered, but carried herself like someone fifty years younger. Her eyes were as white as her hair, and she wore what looked like a belt of goat horns around her waist. She was Sibyl, the prophet.

“She is right, you know,” Sibyl said. She sat on a blue sofa across the room and lit a long pipe. The smoke was a hazy purple colour and swirled in an almost hypnotising way around her.

“About what?” Ewart asked impatiently.

“Visions are rarely what they seem,” Sibyl said. And she looked straight at me, like I was really there. Ewart glanced my way as well, but he must not have seen anything out of the ordinary.

“You don’t have visions, you tell prophecies,” Ewart said, but he sounded unsure of himself.

“If you say so. You’re the boss here.” Sibyl shrugged.

“Quit acting like you’re a prisoner. You chose this coven,” Ewart spat.

“My destiny lies here for now. But once it’s done…” Sibyl blew smoke, and it took the form of a cruise ship. Dream-me suppressed a laugh.

“Get out of here. I have work,” Ewart muttered defeatedly. He blew on the paper he’d ruined earlier, and the water and the scorch marks vanished.

“Suit yourself. I only came here to see our guest,” Sibyl said slyly and got up to leave.

Ewart glanced at the window again. This time he saw the crow, cursed under his breath and shoo’d it away. The last thing I heard was Sibyl cackling lightheartedly.