Steadfast

  There was nothing Nadia hated more than not knowing. Her ignorance was the reason Elizabeth could get away with this.

  Nadia thought things couldn’t possibly get worse until Verlaine ran in. Her expression as she looked down at Uncle Gary and realized what had happened—that was the worst.

  Verlaine sat in a plastic chair in a pale, white hallway. In the distance she could hear the beeps and clicks of medical equipment, the hushed voices of doctors and nurses saying things she probably didn’t want to hear. Around her, though, everything was silent.

  She hadn’t seen Mrs. Purdhy or Riley Bender collapse, but she’d listened to Nadia and Mateo’s descriptions. Black tar that burned like acid. Smoke rising from the floor. The look of panic in their eyes—

  “What’s happening?”

  Nadia’s voice shook Verlaine back to something like normal. She turned her head to see Nadia and Mateo hurrying toward her. It was only just after school had let out; they must have rushed over on Mateo’s motorcycle. Verlaine didn’t move, just watched them.

  They really wish they could care, she thought.

  “Is Uncle Gary okay? What’s happening?” Nadia repeated as they reached her. Maybe Verlaine looked even worse than she felt, because Mateo put a steadying hand on her shoulder as Nadia said, more gently, “Hey. Are you all right?”

  “He’s just like the others.” Verlaine’s voice was hoarse from the crying she’d done earlier; the words still seemed to stick in her throat. “He’s in a coma. They can’t wake him up. They don’t know why.”

  Her friends sat down on either side of her. Mateo said, “Where’s Uncle Dave?”

  “Talking to the doctors.” She coughed and wiped beneath her eyes, which were still damp from her tears. “When my parents died, Uncle Dave and Uncle Gary hadn’t been dating that long. And back then, lots fewer gay people had kids, so they’d never talked about it, you know? They were hanging out. Going clubbing. They were only about five years older than we are now. So when Uncle Dave got custody of me, he thought—well, that’s it. I’ve got a little girl now, and there’s no way this guy’s going to be up for that. But Uncle Gary stayed. He just kept showing up, and helping with everything, and changing diapers and taking me out in the stroller, like it was no big deal. Finally Uncle Dave broke down one day and was like, ‘Aren’t you going to leave me?’ Uncle Gary said he wasn’t ever leaving either of us. Not ever.”

  Mateo put his arm around Verlaine’s shoulders, and Nadia took her hand. They were trying so hard. But they didn’t get it. They couldn’t get it.

  They couldn’t see what it meant to lead a life where only two people in the world could really see you, really love you—because they loved you before it all went wrong. Everybody else got to have friends, parents, brothers or sisters, boyfriends or girlfriends, this entire universe of people who could love them. Verlaine got exactly two—her dads—and now one of them had been taken away.

  “This isn’t the end.” Nadia lifted her head, and she had that stubborn set to her chin that meant her mind was set on something. “I’m going to learn what’s behind this magic, and I’m going to undo it.” She paused before adding, “No matter what it takes.”

  “No matter what,” Mateo repeated, but the way he said it—well, it reminded Verlaine of the days before she’d really known Mateo, when she’d thought he was dangerous and potentially insane. The days when he’d scared her a little . . .

  A third voice said, “Verlaine?”

  She looked up to see Asa standing in front of her; once again he’d approached without making a sound. He still wore his coat, as if he, too, had rushed to her side. Why did a demon who seared anything he touched need a coat?

  “What are you doing here?” Mateo rose from his seat and stepped between Asa and Verlaine, as if he could protect her. It was a nice thought.

  “I didn’t know it would be him,” Asa said. “But I should have guessed. I didn’t. I’m sorry. For what it’s worth.”

  “It’s not worth much.” Verlaine leaned farther back in her chair. She felt tired, as though she’d been awake for days. Her temples throbbed from the crying she’d done, and all she wanted was to go into Uncle Gary’s hospital room and curl up beside him on the bed. Maybe if she did, when she woke up this would only be a horrible dream.

  Nadia got to her feet then to face Asa; apparently she was the only one here who had heard anything interesting. “What do you mean, you should have guessed?”

  “If you expect me to explain Elizabeth’s work, forget it. I’ve given you some very helpful suggestions—which you seem determined to ignore while she keeps going.” Asa folded his arms. The black coat he wore was long and lean, zippered in a sideways slash across his chest, with a sharp collar that turned up in back. He couldn’t look more like a demon without putting red plastic horns on his head, Verlaine thought.

  Yet the look in his eyes as they met hers didn’t seem demonic at all.

  “Wait,” Nadia said. She put up her hands as though she were holding something back, and her gaze turned distant. “Hang on. Elizabeth will keep going. She’ll keep taking people out.”

  “Is that not obvious?” Asa frowned. “I’d have thought at least that much would’ve sunk into your brains by now. I overestimated you.”

  Nadia didn’t seem to pay any attention. “But the people she’s chosen don’t have anything to do with witchcraft. They aren’t falling sick at one location or one time of day. So there’s another purpose behind what she’s done. It’s like—it’s like Elizabeth doesn’t care who she hurts—but she has to hurt someone.”

  Asa’s expression didn’t change, but Verlaine could sense that Nadia was on to something. “Keep going,” she whispered to Nadia.

  “She’s building on pain itself. There’s only one thing you build on pain. Only one. That’s not what she’s doing. It can’t be.” Nadia’s eyes were wide now, but not with exhilaration, even though she definitely, positively had to be on to something. Instead she looked afraid.

  Very quietly Asa said, “I take back what I said about overestimating you.” With one last glance at Verlaine, he stalked down the hallway; his shoes made no sound against the floor. Verlaine watched him go and thought the room was colder without him. There was no reason that should make her feel even more alone, and yet it did.

  Verlaine said, “He’s going because he can’t help you work against Elizabeth.”

  “No, he can help us against Elizabeth,” Mateo said, which surprised her. What did Mateo know about demons? “He just can’t help us against—”

  “—the One Beneath,” Nadia finished for him. “Oh, my God. He’s coming.”

  Verlaine shook her head. “The One Beneath can never, ever enter our world. You said so! Not without destroying every barrier between His realm and ours. Right? That has to be right.”

  “His realm is hell,” Mateo said. “You mean, we’re talking about hell on Earth?”

  “Stupid!” Nadia’s voice broke. “How was I so stupid? I should’ve seen it before. The road has three sections—but I never learned about it as a road. I learned about the three barriers between the One Beneath and our world. First He would have to break the boundaries of hell. Then He would have to create a bridge between His world and ours. Finally, He’d break through to our world and . . . end it.”

  Verlaine and Mateo exchanged glances. Even her misery about Uncle Gary was eclipsed by the dawning fear within them all.

  Nadia was certain now. Everything about the way she stood, the determination on her face, even the way she now stepped in front of them both, made it clear that no doubt remained. “That’s what Elizabeth did at the Halloween carnival. She broke the boundaries of hell. She completed step one. And now she’s hurting all these people, keeping them in pain indefinitely, because she’s using them for step two. She’s using them to build the bridge for the One Beneath.”

  Verlaine shuddered as Mateo repeated, “Hell on Earth.”

  14

  AFTER TH
EY LEFT VERLAINE AT THE HOSPITAL, MATEO had a crash course on the apocalypse.

  He went home with Nadia, luckily arriving there while her father and brother were out, so they could skip the fake small talk and head straight to her attic. Nadia quickly found the symbol in Goodwife Hale’s Book of Shadows and showed him the notes in her own that talked about the three barriers that stood between the world he knew and, as he put it, “total Ghostbusters-style, dogs-and-cats-living-together, mass-hysteria Armageddon.”

  “Pretty much.” Nadia had yanked her hair back in a ponytail, her eyes blazing with an energy that was part anger, part adrenaline. “It never occurred to me that Elizabeth would try this. I never thought it was something even a Sorceress would want. They draw their power from the demonic realm. Destroying the barriers means even destroying herself. She’s willing to die if it means she takes the whole world with her.”

  Mateo nodded. He knew now what he had to do, no matter how much it horrified him, no matter how hard it would be. “If she’s willing to die, well, that makes it easier.”

  Nadia was fishing around in the jar of Hershey’s Miniatures that sat in a row with her witchcraft supplies. “Makes what easier?”

  “Going after her.” Though he tried to say the words like it was a foregone conclusion, he knew he didn’t quite manage it: “Killing her.”

  For a moment Nadia didn’t answer him. She didn’t even move, just sat there on her knees staring at his face like she’d never seen him before. Then she said, “Elizabeth might die as a result of her own magic, I guess. I’m not worrying about that.”

  “That’s not what I mean.” Mateo couldn’t quite believe he was saying this, and yet he knew beyond any doubt this was the only way to win. “You want to stop her from working any dark magic, right? Well, there’s one way to make sure she stops. And I think we ought to consider it.”

  “Listen—you’re upset, you’re freaked out for Verlaine, I get that—”

  “I don’t think you get it at all. Come on. You thought you killed her on Halloween! Why are you getting squeamish about it now?”

  “I didn’t murder her on Halloween,” Nadia said. “She was the one who created the fire and stood in the middle of it. I just didn’t risk my life to rescue her. Big difference.”

  Obviously Nadia wasn’t thinking this through. “The point is, we’re not exactly worried about keeping her alive. In fact, the longer Elizabeth lives, the more people she hurts, and the closer the One Beneath gets to eating our world alive. So why wouldn’t we kill her?”

  “What makes you think we could? Just her Book of Shadows nearly killed me when I went into her house to look for you. The protective spells she knows, the enchantments around every single place she travels—it’s like she’s at the center of a fortress, Mateo. We’re not getting through that fortress without some high-level magic on our side.”

  “And that’s exactly what she expects you to do! Outspell her, whatever you’d call it. She wouldn’t expect us to just . . . take her out.”

  “You sound like you’re talking about a video game,” Nadia snapped. “Seriously, Mateo, what are you talking about? Stabbing her? Strangling her? Are you the kind of person who could do that to another human being?”

  That caught him off guard. Once, in the final horrible hours before Halloween, the magical snares Elizabeth had used to bind Mateo to her had weakened. He’d rushed at her; he’d meant to strangle her. He’d tried to. And in the end he hadn’t been able to follow through.

  The result was that Elizabeth had opened this door for the One Beneath, and Nadia had very nearly been killed.

  Instead of answering, Mateo said, “I’ve seen Elizabeth as she really is. You haven’t. She’s hardly even a human being any longer. I don’t think she counts. So maybe—maybe it doesn’t matter what we do to her.”

  Nadia shook her head and took Mateo’s hands in hers. A lock of her shining, black hair fell across her cheek, only emphasizing the beauty of her heart-shaped face. His anger gentled as she said, “I’m not as worried about what it would do to her. I worry about what killing her would do to you.”

  How did she do that? Look into his eyes, say a few words, and somehow say the thing that stopped him cold, spoke to his soul? Mateo didn’t know, but Nadia always seemed to find a way.

  He squeezed her fingers more tightly, and when she smiled at him, unsure but hopeful, he decided they could try to think of something else. What that “something else” could possibly be, he didn’t know, and he was pretty sure they’d have to come back to this conversation sooner rather than later. But maybe Nadia needed more time; maybe he did, too. For now, it was okay to just hear her out. “What other options are there?”

  “Well. There’s one possibility.” She paused, as though she didn’t want to say the rest. “I could tell Elizabeth I’m going to join her.”

  He jerked back. It was like she’d slapped him. “You didn’t—you wouldn’t, ever.”

  “Not for real. I mean, of course not. But if I just told her that I’d learn from her, work with her, I’d be able to find out what Elizabeth’s really up to.”

  “We know that now. She’s trying to bring the One Beneath to our world, which is apparently a thousand different kinds of bad.”

  Mateo’s voice had risen more than he meant it to, but before he could feel bad about it, Nadia started yelling, too. “I can’t stop her from bringing the One Beneath here if I don’t learn more about how she’s doing this.” She tossed her own Book of Shadows a couple of feet away, like it was useless instead of this priceless, secret thing. “Mom might have been a coldhearted bitch capable of leaving her whole family, but she wouldn’t have done anything like this, ever. She wasn’t able to teach me about magic this dark.” Finally, almost as a whisper, Nadia said, “Mom wasn’t this bad. No matter what, she wasn’t this bad.”

  It wasn’t as though Mateo couldn’t hear how badly Nadia was hurting. Or that he thought she wasn’t as scared as he was for Verlaine’s dad. Instead it was like those words—work with her—were pounding a drumbeat that drowned out everything else.

  Elizabeth had taken his mother. His grandfather. His chance at being accepted, ever, in this stupid, small town. She had blood on her hands and a demon on her side, and Nadia was willing to work with her?

  Elizabeth was going to take Nadia, too.

  “You say that now,” Mateo said. “You think you can learn some high-level magic, make yourself stronger, and get out. But there’s no way it’s that easy, Nadia. You think Elizabeth started out this dark? I bet she didn’t. I bet she believed it would just be a couple of spells, a little more knowledge, and then she’d be out. Next thing you know, she’s not even human. And this time it’s going to be you.”

  Nadia gaped at him. “You actually think I’d go dark? That I’d serve the One Beneath? How could you ever, ever say something like that?”

  It had been meant as a warning, not an accusation, but at the moment, Mateo didn’t care. His mind was filled with one horrible image: Nadia as the beastlike, inhuman thing he’d once seen as Elizabeth—golden, melting, ferocious, and brutal. If she changed, his Steadfast powers would force him to see exactly how quickly her humanity drained away. “I don’t know. You want more power, don’t you? You’re always talking about it. How little you know, how much you wish your mom had taught you. You went diving in the sound to get this other spell book even though it nearly killed you.” And then he said the thing he knew he shouldn’t say but couldn’t hold back. “You definitely want your magic more than you want me.”

  “What?” Her eyes went wide, like she had no idea what he was talking about. And she knew. She had to know. “Mateo, you’re not making any sense.”

  “Yeah, I am. I love you more than you love me, and we both know it.”

  “Mateo, please.” Nadia kept shaking her head no, which was meaningless, because everything he’d said was true. “Please, don’t.”

  “I have to get out of here.” He grabbed his backpac
k and headed for the door. Just as he pushed down the ladder, though, he hesitated. “I’ll bring the knife by tomorrow. If you can use it to help Verlaine’s dad, you should.”

  When Nadia nodded, he could see that he’d made her cry. Which made him feel like dirt—but he hadn’t said anything that wasn’t true. It didn’t matter. He felt awful anyway.

  Her voice shook as she said, “Did you just break up with me?”

  Dammit, now his own throat was tight. “No. Because I love you and I can’t help it. But I can’t be here right now.”

  The attic door fell shut behind him, like he’d slammed it. He hadn’t. Just sounded that way.

  From the higher branches of the tree next to the Caldani home, two witnesses watched Mateo get onto his motorcycle and roar away. One was the crow, which looked on with cobweb eyes, projecting every moment back to Elizabeth.

  The other was Asa, who lounged along one long, crooked limb, the wood smoldering slightly beneath him.

  “Damn, I’m good,” he said to the crow.

  The bird responded by flapping its broad wings and flying away. Asa sighed.

  He couldn’t see into the attic from this vantage point, and his myriad powers didn’t involve X-ray vision. But Asa was close enough to hear Nadia’s sobs. They told him all he needed to know.

  They’re further apart now. That makes each of them more likely to follow my suggestions. If even one of them succeeds, I rid myself of Elizabeth. And if they’re parted, the One Beneath is more likely to win in the end. Instead of owing His triumph to Elizabeth, He’ll owe it to me.

  Maybe then I could be free.

  He was lost in thought—rare for him, with his laser-like focus—but this dream was too precious to resist. If Asa were free, he wouldn’t have to suffer in hell any longer. He wouldn’t have to do the bidding of the One Beneath any longer . . .

  . . . but he wouldn’t be able to live in the human world, either. At least, not the human world as he now knew it. After the One Beneath’s triumph, there would be little difference between this place and hell. Good-bye, internet; good-bye, blue skies; good-bye, Burger King chicken sandwiches; good-bye, loving parents; good-bye, Celtics games; good-bye, joy and laughter and Verlaine’s smile—