Tisper had never been one for hardship.

Half of her life had been sadness, the rest a regret for something that couldn't be helped; a will and a wish to change the way things were. To make everything superficial. Picture perfect.

Nothing was ever perfect, but there were ways to knit together a faux reality where, just for a while, she could pretend they were. So she immersed herself in her favorite colors, binged on all the possessions that made her feel nice. Tisper built happiness from the ground up and dragged it around with her wherever she went. Like everyone else in the world, Tisper filled the holes with things.

But it was as if the ground had opened around her and swallowed her entire universe. And all of the little things left behind, the things that once made her so happy were dust now. Useless, material possessions.

She wanted Jaylin back. She wanted him in her arms, alive and awake and speaking and talking and smiling the big gummy-grin she always teased him about. She wanted the search to come to an end. She wanted to sleep for what felt like the first time in two weeks. She wanted to sleep with Jaylin curled up her pink duvet he always hogged to himself. She wanted to sleep knowing that Julia Maxwell had stopped crying. She wanted to pass out in her own bed, knowing that she'd wake up with Jaylin's sleeping face stuffed in the pillows the next morning. That was all she wanted.

For the second time in her life, it felt like Tisper had lost the other half of her.

It'd been pouring for the past twelve hours, and most everyone else had taken it as a sign to withdraw from the search for the day. Everyone but Tisper, who cut through the dense mud in her polka dot rain boots, the knees of her jeans caked so heavy, she could hardly lift her legs anymore.

This was where they'd found his phone, smashed to bits with a missing sim card. It was the last piece of Jaylin anyone had seen in thirteen days. The rain would wash away whatever ghost of him was left. But it'd rained a lot in the past two weeks. For some reason, Tisper couldn't come to accept that.

"Tisper, it's been six hours." Matt crutched himself against the side-mirror of his wrangler, hands tucked away in his jacket pockets. "Come on. Please."

Tisper didn't look back. Instead, she wiggled her hands around in the mud. "I think I found something." When she drew them out and flung the muck away, the article in her hand resembled a pencil, long and cylindrical and clotted with dirt. When she wiped away the sticky paste, a scratch of yellow cloth revealed itself. "What do you think it is?"

"It's a marker flag, Tis. We've found like four of them. We're right on the property line."

Tisper felt her heart sink. It'd been sinking so often, she swore by now it was anchored down to the deepest darkest pits of her. "There has to be something here."

"What matters is it's not Jaylin we're finding under all that mud. No news is good news, right?"

"Not when it's been two weeks," Tisper snapped. She could see the faint try of a smile wipe from Matthew's face and she sighed. No news wasn't good news. But it was better than bad news. "Alright. Let's go."

She stomped through the mud, back to Matt's jeep, where he dropped a pair of black kicks onto the dirt ground and held out an empty trash bag. Tisper stripped herself of her heavy jacket, and peeled her mud-soddened jeans from the fresh leggings beneath, dropping every muddy item one at a time into the bag. Then she slipped on Matt's shoes.

It didn't matter if not a fleck of mud was left, Matt had the passenger seat wrapped in towels like he was swaddling a newborn child. Tisper had grown used to it since the search first started, and plopped herself down on his precious interior without a complaint.

She didn't flip down the visor like she usually would—she had no interest in learning what might gaze back at her. Whatever it was must look tired.

Tisper watched the endless evergreens pass them by until she felt a slight squeeze to her knee.

"How about one of those raspberry mochas you like?"

"I'm fine."

"He's alright, Tisper," Matt said. When Tisper looked to him, Matt's eyes were on the road, flittering across the dirt path in front of them. But never to her.

"How do you know?" she asked, tapping her foot against the floorboards. "How are you so sure?"

"I don't know." Matt removed his hand from her knee and clutched the wheel instead, cued by the aggression in her voice. "I just think—If Jay were to really, y'know, die. I think we'd feel it. I told ya before how it felt with my grandfather. Like a light bulb exploding. You don't have to see it, but you can feel it. And I haven't felt nothing like that."

Tisper laid her head against the window, ignored the way her skull bumped against the glass. She hoped, prayed with all her might that Matt's sixth sense was right.

-

Tisper didn't go back to her apartment. Instead, Matt dropped her off at the Maxwell's place, where she'd been staying to make sure Julia was well taken care of. She could nearly detect the stench of Aunt Petunia before she even stepped foot on the welcome mat.

Strawberry cigars. Tisper swore Petunia had taken more puffs from those things than she had breath from the air. She must have been smoking not long ago, because the smell hit Tisper's empty stomach like a tidal wave.

It was a quarter past noon when she walked through the front door with a muddy bag of clothes in her hands, her backpack and duffel bag still tossed by the kitchen island where she'd dropped them a week and a half ago.

Petunia sat on one end of the sofa, picking from a bowl of pretzels—and settled into the pillow on her lap was Jaylin's mother, fast asleep.

"Hey, babe," Petunia waved her over with one long, witchy finger. "Get me a beer. Jule's been passed out cold and my throat is parched."

Tisper slogged her heavy legs to the fridge and dug a can out from the bottom crisper, cutting a bee line to drop it on the table next to Petunia and make for the stairs. She'd be drunk by dinner, but maybe it was for the best if old Petunia clocked out early. Tisper had never been a fan of her, but it was being around Petunia and Julia that she found so unbearable. Seeing how well Petunia treated her sister—it was hard to relive that bond when you weren't a part of it. When it wasn't Phillip nursing her wrought emotions. She had to deal with them all by herself.

Then there was the sour reminder of why Petunia was around to begin with. Because Julia's physical health had plummeted in the time since Jaylin's disappearance. It'd been hard on them all, but it was as if Julia had just given up on anything that had ever been worth a penny or a minute of time. All she did was cry and sleep, now.

Tisper dumped the rotten air from her lungs with a sigh, and hiked up the steps one foot after another. She could smell candles at the top; wax melting and wick burning into the air. And then the quiet, lyrical hum of a voice.

"By air, by fire, by water, by earth: guide them as they roam..."

She gave the door a shove to find Sadie, seated on her haunches in front of a candle with a piece of paper in her hand. She lowered it, let the flame consume the farthest corner.

"Light the dark around their soul and bring my lost one home." As the fire ate away at the paper, Sadie shut her eyes. Her dark brows furrowed in concentration.

"Sadie, what are you—"

A simple raise of her hand made Tisper clamp her mouth shut. Sadie focused for a while longer, then she blew out the flame.

"What the hell was that?"

"A spell," Sadie said, reaching across the smoking wick to yank her laptop into her lap. "I found a bunch of protection spells online."

"Like...witch spells?" Tisper asked, creeping inside and planting herself down on the edge of Jaylin's bed. "Cool. Are they real?"

"I don't know, but I've done six of them. If there's even a chance of these things working, why not, right?"

"Isn't it kind of dangerous? You don't know first thing about being a witch."

Sadie sighed through her nose. "If I had time to learn about witchcraft, I'd do it right. I'd do anything at this point. But I'm not worried about that. Not while Jay's still out there."

"I know. Me too." Tisper gave a sigh and launched herself back in the sheets. "Stay the night again?"

"Yeah, of course." Sadie fumbled to her feet, bending down to retrieve her candle. She lit it again and reached over the bed to place it on Jaylin's window sill, then she clambered onto the mattress beside Tisper.

"How'd you meet?" she asked, bracing her chin in her hand. "Jaylin, I mean."

"He was Phillip's friend first—my brother," Tisper explained, "and back then, wherever Phillip went, I went." She shifted on her side to soak in Sadie's warmth. "Jaylin's quiet. You know, he's subtle. But there's something about him that makes you feel safe. Like you just know he wouldn't judge you—like he could never judge anyone. He just wasn't born with that instinctual hatred." The thought made Tisper's eyes sting. "He was more of a brother to me than the same person I shared a womb with. And when I was sent off to my grandma's and I came back that summer a different person—a different name, a different face. Jaylin was the only one that still waited for me at a lunch table with this giant smile, dying to tell me about all the things I'd missed since I'd been gone.

"Phillip changed schools just so he wouldn't have to share a face with me. But Jay, he was always there. Jaylin's always been here and now he's not. He's not here and I don't know what to do." She covered her leaky eyes with her long, slim fingers. Sadie pulled her into her shoulder, where she muffled her sad little hiccups.

"He's okay, Tis," she whispered, working gentle fingers through her hair. "He's gotta be okay."

-

For a long while, Sadie laid there beside Tisper until she'd fallen asleep with red cheeks and swollen eyes. Then she pulled herself up and crawled forward to the window to blow out the 

flame of the little flickering candle. 

The moment the yellow light went out, Sadie found herself staring into another. Another yellow light off in the distance, and one just beside it.

She squinted at the dark of night, the yellow orbs with blacker-than-black slits, sliding back to match her gaze. The canine shape beyond them lifted from the damp ground and rocked back on its padded feet. Sadie watched the strange creature stalk off into the neighbor's yard, its scraggly black tail flicking behind it.

Maybe it had only been a stray dog, maybe an overgrown rat. Maybe she was just so sleep deprived, she'd imagined it all. But for some reason, Sadie couldn't scratch the nagging itch that this wasn't the first time she'd stared into those eyes. It wasn't the shape or the color that left her drunk on Deja Vu. It was the way they communicated. They'd spoken to her once before, she knew it. She could feel it like an icy chill, tumbling down the edges of her spine.

Those eyes had told her things.