The car ride is anything but stable, the backroads littered with potholes and sharp curves that make Lillie's stomach churn. Lillie alternates her eyes between Felix, laying on his back across the backseat with his head resting in her lap, and Nao, driving in near perfect silence. As for Moses, she can only see the back of his head. His neck is tense.
Lillie swallows, hovers her hand over Felix's chapped lips. A sputtering, featherlight breath brushes her palm like a soft breeze. Despite Quincy's observation, he is breathing, but for how much longer?
"Careful."
Lillie looks up, her eyes catching Nao's in the rearview mirror. They are the sort of eyes that catch you from a museum wall and never let you go, a soft coffee brown in the tangerine light of the setting sun. He goes on, "I meant it when I said not to touch his bare skin. It'll get you, too."
"What is it?"
Nao pushes out a harsh exhale, drumming his fingers along the steering wheel. There's three black bands tattooed onto his pointer finger, like rings sunk beneath his skin.
"What the hell is happening?" Lillie adds, as once the tide of her exasperation has broken she has no choice but to let it all go. "Who are you?"
"I'm Nao. Not that it matters," he answers curtly. His eyes shift away from hers, focusing back on the winding road ahead of them. "You must have been real desperate to go to Shay, by the way. She ain't a real witch. Just heard one of her faraway ancestors might've been one and started getting some lofty ideas."
Moses chuckles, but it's a dry sound. "I could've guessed."
"Only reason I know her at all is 'cause her father's one of my oldest clients."
"Clients?" Lillie asks.
"I don't run nothing out of a barn like Shay does, you get it? If you really know something about magic, you know how dangerous it is to just...advertise it like that."
It takes Lillie a moment to say it out loud. It doesn't feel real, but if she's honest, nothing about this day does. "You're...some sort of witch?"
Nao looks at her, then away again. He says, "Close enough."
Felix tenses in Lillie's lap and makes a horrible noise, a hacking, body-shattering cough that sounds like it rattles his ribs.
"Felix?" Lillie cries, and as he coughs again, two small, crumpled leaves fall from his mouth and into her lap. "Felix? What—"
"Shit." Nao steps on the gas, the truck lurching forward suddenly enough that Lillie almost rams her face into the seat. "If it's already in his lungs, we're fucked."
In another two minutes, they pull up to an old ranch house with gray wood peeking out from beneath the white paint, vines climbing up the house's siding as if in a warm embrace. Nao and Moses hop out of the car, and Lillie carefully squeezes out from under Felix so they can take him again. He's still coughing, and his lips are beginning to turn a faint shade of blue.
Lillie pauses, watching Quincy's Subaru and her own sedan pull up into the driveway, headlights splitting the settling night.
"Ponytail!"
Lillie turns at the sound of Nao's voice.
"The door, would you, sweetheart?"
She runs to meet them at the front door, and has to tug it a few aggressive times before it opens. "It's Lillie," she says once she has her breath back.
"Lillie. Right. You'll have to forgive me; I've been a little focused on saving your boyfriend's life."
"He's not—" Lillie starts, but Nao has already moved on, he and Moses swinging right to take Felix into the living room, and depositing him there on the floor with a less than graceful thump. On one of the sofa chairs is a short-haired cattle dog, who immediately picks up his head at the commotion and emits a concerned bark.
"Is he going to be okay?" Moses asks, faintly out of breath, frowning at Felix.
"Give me a second," Nao says, and gets to his feet again, going straight for the kitchen. The dog hops from the chair and follows him without a second thought. "Good boy, Hoshi."
Quincy bursts inside then, Mira not far behind her. They dance around the maze of potted plants at the living room's mouth, Quincy shouldering a coffee table aside to crouch next to Felix. Her skin is pale beneath her freckles, the tiny hairs at her hairline stuck to her forehead with sweat. Lillie notes the exasperation in her face, the restless energy fizzing behind her eyes, a constant worry that she isn't doing enough.
"How is he?" Mira asks.
Quincy adds, her eyes never leaving Felix's face, "He's...still alive, isn't he?"
Lillie nods, mopping sweat from her own face. The air is cool and only growing cooler, yet the oppressive heat of anticipation sits upon them all like a wave of summer humidity. "He's still breathing, very shallowly. Nao's working on it."
"Space," Nao bellows, reappearing from the kitchen and motioning them all away from Felix's supine form. Lillie does as he asks, taking Quincy's arm and gently guiding her backwards. Nao has brought a mason jar from the kitchen, brimming with a thin amber liquid that could be beer or apple juice or urine, for all Lillie knows. In the back of her head, she's acknowledging how crazy all of this is, allowing a stranger to more or less abduct her injured friend. She looks up and catches Mira's eyes, and knows the same thought has crossed her mind, too.
"Come on, Felix," Nao mutters, his voice soft. He sets the mason jar on the coffee table for a moment to work latex gloves onto his hands, then tips Felix's head up, moving his lips to meet the jar's rim. "Drink for me. Come on, now. More than that."
Lillie watches Felix's throat move as he swallows, some of the liquid dribbling down his chin. Nao pulls his sleeve over his knuckles and wipes it away, then sits back in silence, frowning.
"Well?" Quincy demands. "Is he—"
Felix coughs, and keeps coughing, his chest caving with every successive fit. His eyes flash open then, and though it's subtle, Lillie notices Nao recoil. A moment later the hesitance is gone, and he braces a hand behind Felix's shoulder, helping him sit up.
"Felix?" Quincy exhales. "How do you—?"
"Nope," Nao interrupts. "Not yet. Lillie, hand me that trashcan. Very quickly, if you can."
He points at a plastic trashcan in the corner, and Lillie kicks it over to him, just as Felix begins to retch.
Lillie only watches for long enough to see the first vine dangle from his throat, and she closes her eyes as he vomits up the rest, though the sounds will be enough to keep her awake tonight anyway.
When she opens her eyes again, Felix is back on the floor. Panting, wide-eyed, alive.
Quincy lets out a cathartic breath of relief and falls to her knees.
The storm outside abruptly softens, rain a soft kiss upon the roof. Nao's gaze shifts out the window, his brow wrinkled in confusion.
"Let me know when he starts talking again," he says, scrubbing a hand over his close-shaven hair. Then he steps out, the front door shutting a moment after he disappears from the living room.
Nao's front porch overlooks a wide, grassy field, the circular drive cut right through it like the edge of a dime. Wind stirs the acres and acres of sloping yellow-green grass, heavy gray clouds looming over it in a thick shadow. There is no sun or moon in sight. The way the sky looks, it's easy to forget either one ever existed.
Lillie leans against the door frame in silence, its old wood scent in her nose. Everything and everywhere is the scent of existence much older than hers: packed soil, dampened tree bark. The only thing new or unnatural is the sweet cigar smoke emanating from Nao's direction.
He's sitting cross-legged on a hanging bench, and though there's no cigar in sight, a thin trail of incense rises up to the porch roof from where it sits on the small table beside him. The sleeves of his green flannel are rolled up to his elbows, his jeans big enough to pool around his ankles.
"Kamiya," Lillie says, once she knows he's sensed her. "That's your last name? I saw it on one of your business cards on the coffee table."
"So?"
"My grandmother was from Nagoya," Lillie says. "She immigrated here by herself when she was eighteen."
At that, Nao looks up, as if seeing her in a new light. "Have you ever been?"
"To Japan?" she asks, and Nao nods. "My brother and I spent a few summers there when we were kids, yeah. Have you?"
He shakes his head. "My family's been here, on this exact farm, since I don't even know when," he says, his accent softening the words, rounding them off at the edges. "Still, my mom always said she'd take me—that it'd be good for me to see where we came from, at least once—but she kept putting it off. Eventually she ran out of time."
Lillie considers it, the stillness of this house, this farm, Nao himself. She decides not to clarify.
"You're gonna ask me to help you," Nao says then. "That's why you came out here, right?"
"I—"
"I'm sorry, but I can't. You got lucky this time 'cause I was already at the Redwines' place for business, and that botched incantation Shay did on y'all was an easy fix," Nao elaborates. "But if you're gonna ask me to do something about whatever the fuck's wrong with that man's eye, I'll let you down easy now. I can't."
"Nao, please," Lillie says, approaching him, the porch creaking beneath her boots. "We can't do this ourselves. Not just Felix's curse, but mine, too. We need someone who has some expertise in this."
"The expert was my mother, Lillie," Nao snaps. "My mother was the one who could keep up a protection ward over damn near forty acres of land. My mother was the one who could curse your cheating, no-good ex-boyfriend into tasting nothing but frog slime in all his food for three weeks. My mother was the one who was made of magic. And now that she's gone all I can do is try to scrape shit together with the few pieces I have left."
Lillie says nothing, just watches as Nao sinks his head into his hand, his middle finger and thumb straddled across his forehead.
"I ain't a witch, just a witch's son. All I have is dust. You understand?"
She doesn't. Looking at the tense expression baked into Nao's face, she doesn't think she could ever understand something so complicated, so she won't pretend to.
Instead, Lillie tells him, "Whatever you are, you saved Felix's life. Thank you for that, Nao."
He raises his head, his eyes meeting hers for a moment. Within them there are a million questions, yet none of them she's sure are meant for her.
The front door creaks open behind Lillie, and she turns to find Mira with one foot on the porch, one foot in the vestibule.
Mira's eyes graze Nao curiously before settling on Lillie again. "Felix's...aware now. He's asking for you."
"For me?" Lillie asks.
Mira nods.
Lillie glances back at Nao once more, but his eyes have returned to the vacant field ahead of him. Mira holds the door open for her, and Lillie returns inside.