It wasn’t as if she could cast any elaborate spells right here in the middle of class. But something basic might be effective, if Mateo’s problem was what she suspected.
If he was cursed—truly cursed, the inheritor of a dark magic hundreds of years old—then that meant he might potentially react to magic in a different way. Nadia wasn’t exactly sure how that would work, but it seemed plausible.
And a basic spell of liberation might make the magic … unstick.
Well, it was worth a shot, anyway.
Nadia’s fingers found the small ivory drop at her bracelet, and she put the ingredients together:
Helpless laughter
.
Washing away what cannot come clean
.
A moment of forgiveness
.
The first two were easy —
Her thirteenth birthday party, when they put a pair of Cole’s Pull-Ups on her best friend’s Boston terrier and they all got hysterical, rolling on the floor
.
Taking her first shower in the new house, three in the morning after the wreck, mud under her fingernails and a piece of car glass in her hair, feeling like it would never, ever all rinse clean
.
But forgiveness? Nadia dug deep.
Weeks of wondering if Dad had driven Mom away, if there had been an affair or something Nadia hadn’t known about, all ending the moment she tiptoed to the kitchen late at night and glimpsed her father bent over the table, his head in his hands, so miserable that she knew, just
knew,
he hadn’t seen any of this coming
.
It was enough. She felt the spell swirling outward, invisible but powerful—
—really powerful—
“You know what?” Jeremy said loudly. “I’m sick of this.” With that he shoved all the lab equipment off their table; it fell to the floor with a crash.
“You know what I’m sick of?” The Piranha put her hands on her hips. “You. All of you. This entire school. I could be in yoga right now instead of trying to pour information into the sieves you call your brains.”
Several students started laughing. One girl started crying. Another reached around her own back and unfastened her bra through her sweater, groaning in relief as it went slack.
What the—
Another girl and a guy started making out. So did two guys in the far corner. Jeremy started tearing up his chemistry book, ripping pages out in hanks, then shredding them one by one. The Piranha kicked off her shoes and took a one-footed position that Nadia remembered from her own yoga class as Tree Pose.
Mateo sat up straight. “What’s wrong with people?”
“I don’t know,” Nadia said. But she was starting to put it together. A spell of liberation could make people feel a little, well, uninhibited. But that was normally a minor side effect, enough to maybe give someone the giggles, not to make an entire roomful of people completely forget where they were. The spell had been more powerful than usual—no, more powerful than
ever
.
That wasn’t the effect of whatever lay beneath this room. If anything, that would have dimmed the spell, not enhanced it.
That—that was the kind of boost you could only get from a Steadfast.
Verlaine was nowhere near here, and besides, Nadia already knew the spell hadn’t worked on her. Which meant the only option—the only possibility—
It can’t be true
, Nadia thought wildly. Everything she knew about magic was built on a few fundamental principles, and the most fundamental principle of all was that men couldn’t hold magic. A curse was one thing—you didn’t hold that; it held you. So men could be cursed. But being a Steadfast should be as impossible for a man as the sun circling the Earth.
“What’s going on?” Mateo said. He was clearly unaffected by the spell—another sign. Steadfasts weren’t as susceptible to simple magic. Then he turned toward Elizabeth—who remained still by his side—and gasped out loud. “Oh, my God. My
God
.”
Mateo started backing away from Elizabeth, and the expression on his face was the last thing Nadia would have expected to see: utter horror.
Elizabeth made a swift, fluttering gesture with one hand; for the first time, Nadia noticed that she wore little rings on each finger—rings made out of the same materials Nadia wore on her bracelet. Mateo swayed once on his feet, then snapped out of it, turning again to Nadia. “What’s going on?”
All around them, the kissing and laughter and even singing continued unabated. The Piranha, instead of calling for order, was on the floor in Low Cobra Pose. Nadia didn’t look at any of it; she could only stare at Elizabeth. Meanwhile Elizabeth held her hand out over the floor—parallel to it—almost as though she were trying to calm an animal or a very small child.
Or
, Nadia thought,
something buried beneath the school
.
That was ludicrous, wasn’t it? Surely it had to be. Probably Nadia was freaking out because her spell had spun so wildly out of control, and because she’d just learned the incredible truth that Mateo was her Steadfast. Her imagination was running away with her.
But she wasn’t imagining Elizabeth’s reaction.
Elizabeth didn’t look confused by any of this. Instead she took a gulp from her water bottle, and then her sweet, clean-scrubbed face shifted into a smile that was anything but sweet.
It felt more like—a dare.
Nadia’s stomach dropped as she realized that Elizabeth wasn’t any other girl in her class.
She was another witch.
CLASS ENDED WITH THE SECURITY GUARD TALKING ONE
girl down from the top of the file cabinets, demerits for almost everyone, the Piranha on report, and people starting to complain of headaches or blush as they realized what they’d been doing. Nadia grabbed Mateo’s arm to hustle him out of there as fast as possible.
“What just happened?” he said, his mouth so close to her ear that she could feel his breath.
“Let’s get out of here first, okay?” Nadia hurried out, Mateo by her side. She glanced over her shoulder to look for Elizabeth, who stood there in the middle of the mayhem, very still, watching them go. A small smile played on her lips.
She knew that Nadia knew. And she didn’t care whether Nadia knew or not.
As they went down the hallway toward the cafeteria, she muttered, “Tell me this. What did you see when you looked at Elizabeth?”
“What are you talking about?”
“When you looked at her, right after everybody lost it. You seemed—panicked, almost.”
Mateo frowned even as he pushed the door open for them both. “I don’t remember looking at Elizabeth once. There was a lot more to see.” He started laughing. “The Piranha’s—really bendy. And Erik’s been out since sophomore year, but I had no idea Charles was gay.”
He’d forgotten; whatever Elizabeth had done to him to make him stop seeing had also made him lose his memory of it. She had acted quickly, and her counterspell had been completely effective.
With a rush of horror, Nadia thought,
The dark magic in town—it’s her! It’s Elizabeth; it has to be
.
But no. How could Elizabeth be behind everything happening in Captive’s Sound? According to the increasingly worried Google searches Nadia had been running lately, the problems here seemed to go way back—since long before Elizabeth would even have been born, much less practicing magic. Plus, she and Nadia were about the same age, which meant they were only just now coming into their power.
Still—any other witch would have reached out at that moment. When Elizabeth saw that Nadia’s spell had misfired, she should have helped to quiet it, and sought Nadia afterward. The secrecy that bound the Craft didn’t extend that far.
Instead, Elizabeth had given her that cool, appraising smile, covered her tracks with Mateo, and slipped away.
So maybe she wasn’t the cause of everything going wrong in Captive’s Sound. Yet Nadia knew, deep down, that whatever it was twisting things here up in knots—Elizabeth was in the thick of it.
As they got into the cafeteria line, Mateo said under his breath, “Okay, either you were cooking some kind of drugs that can make the whole school start hallucinating at once, or something else seriously strange is going on. Because I did
not
imagine that. Are you going to explain what this has to do with what happened last night?”
She reached for her tray on autopilot, thinking fast.
One of the First Laws was to never, ever reveal the secret of the Craft to a man. Any man.
Every principle of the Craft also said that it was impossible for a man to be a Steadfast. Yet she couldn’t deny that this was exactly what Mateo had become.
Nadia might never understand how that was possible, but as long as it was—then he had to be told. It was wrong that this had happened to him without his knowledge or consent, wrong that someone already so troubled had been forced to carry that burden. The least she owed him was the truth.
“I’ll tell you,” she promised, feeling almost light-headed. It was like skydiving, terrifying and liberating at once. “I’ll explain everything.”
Elizabeth went home.
Her teachers would remember her being in class, whether or not she attended. Really, going to Rodman was something she did only to be near the Chamber once in a while, and these days also occasionally to keep Mateo Perez soothed and unquestioning. Today she finally had something new to think about.
Nadia Caldani was a witch. Elizabeth had suspected as much, given the family’s arrival in town immediately after the night of the storm, when her barrier had torn and shrieked as it was pierced through. What she had not suspected was that Nadia would possess such extraordinary magic.
Powerful—but undisciplined. Elizabeth had to smile as she remembered the ridiculous scene in chemistry class. Nadia must have suspected some magical hold on Mateo Perez; her crush was so painfully obvious, the way her eyes flickered over to him countless times during their lessons. Had she thought to free him with a spell of liberation?
The curse on the Cabots was far too old and too strong to be shaken loose by such feeble methods. She smiled around the rim of her water bottle.
And what ridiculous overkill. Clumsy, stupid, to have cast that spell with such force that it affected the entire class. Obviously Nadia was raw and new to the Craft. Her inherent abilities weren’t matched by technique.
Yet she had, however briefly, somehow allowed Mateo to glimpse Elizabeth’s true hold on him—and that wouldn’t do. Elizabeth wasn’t quite done with him yet.
Elizabeth reached the pale gray house, opened the door, and went inside. When one of her rare guests came here—Mateo, or the delivery service with her cases of bottled water—they saw whatever it was they expected to see. Mateo had commented once on the paintings; his mother had always talked about how soft the carpet was underfoot.
In reality, the creaking wooden boards of the floor had long ago been painted blue, and they were overlaid with decades worth of shattered glass.
Her feet wove through the shards easily; the gaps for her steps were as familiar to her as everything else in Captive’s Sound. The yellowed plaster walls were all but bare; one held a mirror, draped with heavy old red velvet, which she could rip away in case of emergency. A few pieces of furniture from various centuries slumped against the walls, their wood crumbling, their upholstery threadbare. Elizabeth had no idea whether any of them could still bear her weight. In one corner was the old cast-iron stove, which as always glowed with a heat that was bright and constant, even beautiful, in the same way that a spectacular tropical bird could be beautiful even when kept in a cage too small for its wings. Between two of the walls hung the rope hammock, piled high with quilts and coverlets. The most powerful spells of imprisonment always worked from the ground up, and Elizabeth did not intend to be caught while sleeping.
On every surface sat empty bottles—water bottles, mostly, though there were some for soda, some for the green tea that seemed to be popular these days. Once every few months or so, Elizabeth would get rid of them, but she accumulated them so quickly that it was pointless to throw each out in turn. The thirst—the terrible thirst—it cracked and dried her from within every single moment, as it had for almost as long as she could remember. Even now she tossed aside the bottle that had seen her home and took up another one, gulping the water down desperately.
She’d tried drinking almost anything over the years, to see what might help. She’d drunk mud. She’d drunk wine. She’d even tried blood a few times, before she realized it was too salty to be any help.
Not long now
, Elizabeth told herself. It was her only comfort.
Her hand rested on the knob of the door to the back room, the only room of her house she no longer really considered hers. That room belonged to something else.
Elizabeth looked inside. She felt as though her Book of Shadows looked back at her.
It shook free of the cobwebs with difficulty; it had been a long time since Elizabeth had consulted its pages instead of merely drawing upon its inherent power. For a moment she wondered whether it had become illegible, whether it had finally become a book no longer, but the fragile pages fell open to the correct page instantly. Her Book of Shadows still wished to do her bidding, no matter what.
Mateo sat at the cafeteria table, pizza untouched on his tray, staring at Nadia Caldani, who had turned out to be even crazier than he was.
Beautiful. Persuasive. But nuts. She was telling him stuff nobody could ever believe was real.
And yet he believed her.
“I’m sorry about you becoming my Steadfast,” she said yet again, stabbing at her lasagna with her plastic fork like it was somehow responsible for this. “If I’d had any idea it could affect you—any man, ever—I’d never have cast a prophetic spell in my own house. And I still don’t understand how it could be you.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, repeating the words she’d been over a couple times already, like he was on autopilot. “No man conceived of woman can hold magic. I remember that part.”
“It’s like finding out that every action doesn’t have an equal and opposite reaction,” Nadia protested. “But, still. Here you are. You’re my Steadfast, and that’s a pretty powerful bond, so we’re going to have to learn to work with it.”