The Lost Girl

CHAPTER ONE
Treasure Hunters

The two sisters were alike in every way, except for all the ways that they were different.
Iris and Lark Maguire were identical twins, and people who only looked at the surface of things could not tell them apart. Same long bushy black hair, same pale skin, same smattering of freckles around the cheeks, same bright hazel eyes and open face.
But Iris and Lark had no patience with people who only looked at the surface of things, when what lay beneath was the stuff that truly mattered.
Because the girls were identical, but not the same.
Iris was the one who always knew where she’d left her shoes. Iris was the one who could tell you what the collective nouns were for different animals and that Minnesota was
home to the world’s largest ball of twine. Iris always knew when her library books were due.
Lark always knew when their parents had been arguing. Lark could tell you what the consequences for stealing
were in different fairy tales, and that the best bad guys had interesting backstories. Lark always knew which books she wanted to check out from the library next.
No, they were not the same. But Iris always knew when Lark was feeling too anxious to speak in class, and Lark
always knew when Iris’s anger was getting the better of her. Iris always knew when Lark was too busy daydreaming to pay attention, and Lark always knew when Iris was too reliant on finding order when things were in chaos. Iris talked for Lark. Lark talked down Iris.
This is the way it was.
No, they were not the same. But yes, they were twin sisters, and for Iris and Lark that meant something, something far deeper than what lay at the surface. They each knew the monsters that haunted the shadowy parts of the other’s mind, and they knew how to fight those monsters.
That was the remarkable part, if you asked Iris and Lark.
Though no one ever did.
Instead strangers treated them like a spectacle. People on the street stared at them openly, sometimes pointed and whispered, as if their surfaces were all that they were. As if the girls were just something to be seen and not actual human people and would not notice. The girls always noticed.
And when I saw them, I stared too.
I could not help it.
(Though they did not notice me.)
But not because they looked identical. I stared at them because I can see beneath the surface of things. I stared at them because I wanted to know their story. And maybe
because, somehow, I sensed how it would end.
This is a story of a sign and a store. Of a key. Of crows and
shiny things. Of magic. Of bad decisions made from good
intentions. Of bad guys with bad intentions. Of collective nouns, fairy tales, and backstories.
But most of all this is a story of the two sisters, and what they did when the monsters really came.
I first noticed them on a hot August afternoon. In Minnesota, winter was just two months away, and soon the more sensitive birds would begin the long journey south. But today, summer reigned. The sun stretched its beams across the sky and discarded change glistened on the sidewalk. Here in the shop-lined streets of this Minneapolis neighborhood, people fled for the air-conditioned stores and the comfort of the library carrying sweating plastic cups from