On Beltane night, Dr. Maggie Linden always drove the long way around the Wilds to the bonfire on the beach. It took nearly forty minutes, but the last thing she wanted was to run into someone she knew—gods forbid a student—at the festival closer to campus. In fact, all she wanted tonight was to forget everything in her life and get lost in music, in fire.

Up and down the shore, big bonfires sent sparks into the sky, and a nearly full moon set white, downy clouds aglow. Maggie and her best friend, Dahlia, stood in a short line that wound through the dunes leading down to the beach. That afternoon Maggie and Dahlia had woven fragrant flowers into each other’s hair and dabbed morning dew on their cheeks, like they were girls again. Now, a woman dressed in a diaphanous lavender gown handed them each a delicate mask constructed of moon-colored hawthorn petals, palm-sized hazel leaves, and sticks green with new growth. Beneath each mask’s right eye, set like a teardrop, was a rune carefully carved into a leaf.

The woman curled her lips into a smile. “Let known become unknown,” she cooed, her voice theatrically mystical. “Let truth be revealed.”

Maggie and Dahlia exchanged grins as they put on their masks, waiting to see what magic the rune contained. As Maggie adjusted it over her eyes, the world shifted in a subtle way that she couldn’t quite pinpoint until she looked in Dahlia’s direction. She knew her friend only by the coronet of hazel blossoms she had laid on top of Dahlia’s curls that morning. Everything else about the planes of her face beneath the mask became unrecognizable.

“What a cool spell.” Even Dahlia’s voice was slightly strange to Maggie’s ear.