Steadfast

  Asa turned his head toward her as though he’d never seen her before. And then, in his dark eyes, she glimpsed something that had never been there when this was Jeremy Prasad.

  No. Something that had never been there when anyone looked at her, ever. It was as though—as though he could see her, but he didn’t mind what he saw—

  “Don’t waste your pity,” Nadia said. “Asa can only be here because Elizabeth brought him to do her bidding. I never thought they could walk in our world like this, but apparently there’s some kind of spell to put a demon inside a dead body.”

  “A spell that involves digging out the eyes.” Mateo’s face was ashen, and Verlaine remembered the horrifying story he’d told them about having to stand there motionless, bound by Elizabeth’s magic, watching her slice into Jeremy with the serrated edge of a seashell. “The big question is why you’re telling us all this.”

  Verlaine half raised her hand. “Actually, I think the big question is how he stopped time. And also why.”

  Asa stepped closer to them, and Verlaine imagined that she could feel a kind of heat radiating from him . . . but it wasn’t her imagination. It was as though he were running a fever, one so high no human could ever have survived it. “I stopped time and told you who and what I am because I thought it would be much less annoying than listening to you whispering and guessing and carrying on. I only get so long here on Earth. I intend to enjoy it.”

  That wasn’t all. It couldn’t be all. Verlaine sensed that much.

  Apparently there was also something about saying his real name, whatever it was. He found it difficult.

  “We know one thing,” Mateo said, folding his arms. “You don’t like Elizabeth much more than we do.”

  “Are you honestly surprised? With that charming personality of hers.” Asa just smiled. “Still, I never forget: She’s the boss.”

  With that, he clapped his hands together—and time began again, everyone rushing past them in the hallway like before. Nadia had stepped right into that cheerleader’s path, and she huffed and said, “Excuse you” before sweeping by the three of them.

  The assistant principal glanced over her shoulder at them. “Move along. There’s nothing to see.”

  “How wrong she is,” Asa whispered in Verlaine’s ear. His breath was so hot—like steam against her skin.

  He walked away, quickly blending into the crowd.

  Mateo turned to Nadia. “Demons?”

  “What do they do?” Verlaine asked. “What is Elizabeth going to use him for?”

  Nadia shook her head. “I—I don’t know. There’s too much I don’t know.” She bit her lower lip, so obviously troubled that Verlaine didn’t have the heart to ask her any more questions. “I’ll dig into Goodwife Hale’s Book of Shadows tonight. Go over my own materials. See if I can find anything else. But demons . . . that’s arcane magic. High-level magic. The kind of stuff I don’t know nearly enough about.”

  Well, that wasn’t encouraging. Mateo responded to Nadia’s disquiet the way he responded to her happiness, or her absentmindedness, or anything else these days—by hugging her tightly.

  Verlaine was sure of only one thing: The situation had just gotten worse.

  Elizabeth opened the door to her back room. She had not entered it in years, but knew that until very recently, it had not looked like this.

  Spiderwebs shivered as the wind blew through the room behind her, ruffling her chestnut curls. The room was thick with them, corner to corner, floor to ceiling. The one chair in the corner was nothing but silver white now, as though it were made of wool instead of rotting wood. Some chips of the remaining paint dangled in the webs, wrapped in cocoons as though they were prey. Elizabeth stretched her hand forward, her long fingers breaking web after web; spiders skittered along her skin, and she paid them no mind.

  Here her Book of Shadows had attempted to trap Nadia Caldani—and had failed.

  The webs thickened, breaking across her face, sticking to her hair. Elizabeth bent to kneel on the floor; through the misty grayness of the webs she could see the Book of Shadows. She smiled, almost fond. If Elizabeth had ever had a friend, she had long since forgotten what that felt like. The affection she felt for this book, and the primal, unthinking loyalty it gave her in return, were the closest Elizabeth would ever come to friendship again.

  “I would have thought you could hold her,” Elizabeth murmured. She knew the book did not hear, but she spoke gently all the same. “There is something uncanny about her power. Something I must understand.”

  Her fingers closed around the Book of Shadows. Its leather was dark with age, but not brittle in the way any ordinary binding would have been after nearly four hundred years. Instead it felt rough, too thick—like scar tissue that had never quite healed. When she lifted it from the floor, she could see the rectangular space where it had long been, free of dust or cobwebs. But one long-legged spider, as large as her palm, scurried into the spot as though to fill it up.

  Elizabeth folded the book close to her chest. For so many years she had not consulted it, only drawn on its power.

  But this close to the completion of her great work, she could not allow anything to go wrong. She would have to draw on every resource she had. Permit no interruptions. No mistakes.

  She walked back into the area of the house where she spent most of her time. For a moment, Elizabeth saw it as a human would have seen it, were they free of her glamours: a derelict place, furnished with only a few threadbare chairs and a sofa that had not been sat in for decades and probably would no longer bear weight. Faded walls. Water bottles left over from the terrible thirst that had so long racked her but had now departed along with her immortality. (Elizabeth found that she still drank from them often, but it was now merely a matter of habit.) Her old stove, the same one that had once burned wood in the nineteenth century, which now glowed with a very different kind of flame. Broken glass strewn along her blue floor, the shards so familiar to her that she stepped through them easily, without hesitation.

  Nadia would have had to wind her way through all this to reach the back room.

  Elizabeth sat cross-legged in the middle of her floor, book in front of her, then unbuttoned her dress far enough to allow the shoulders to slip down her arms. The burned flesh there stuck to the fabric, and she had to tug it away; the pain was as meaningless as the stray spider at the hem of her skirt.

  Without her having to speak, or even consciously think of what she wanted, the Book of Shadows fell open to a symbol she had drawn there long ago. The One Beneath had showed her this more than a century past, pooling a victim’s blood into the precise markings He needed. She had pressed this page against the symbol, and the maroon stains still held every line perfectly.

  She held two fingers to the symbol, checking the sweep of those two lines—then lifted her hand to her upper arm. Yes, the arc and angle were correct. Although Elizabeth knew this by heart, when it came to this, she wanted to make utterly, completely certain.

  The front door opened.

  Elizabeth was only startled that so much time had passed without her realizing it, but communing with her Book of Shadows could have that effect. “Enter, beast.”

  “You know, if Asa doesn’t work for you, you could just call me Jeremy.” The demon sauntered in as if she were to do his bidding, instead of the reverse. “Beast is rude.”

  She flicked her hand toward him, calling up spell ingredients without even having to ask, the malachite ring around her finger automatically providing the grounding. Asa staggered backward, gripped by pain of some nature she didn’t bother to recall. As he slumped against the wall, she said, “You let your human guise deceive you. Don’t believe that you have their freedoms. Their souls. It will hinder me and hurt you, when once again you face the truth of what you are.”

  “How kind—of you—to remind me,” he gasped. But already he was straightening; the pain had been vicious but had not lasted long. She had gauged it well. “Name your task.” r />
  “For now I only want you to stay close to Nadia Caldani and her friends.”

  “Difficult, seeing as how Mateo remembers Jeremy Prasad’s death. And Nadia’s more than far enough along in her training to know a demon when she sees one.” Asa lifted his chin, attempting to display a bit of his earlier nonchalance; it would have been more convincing if his skin weren’t still shiny with the cold sweat of pain.

  “Do what you can,” she said. “I still don’t understand how Nadia made him her Steadfast. No man should be able to hold that power. They’re trying to learn more about the fate of the Laughtons, which is meaningless on its own, but could lead them too close to things they cannot discover.”

  Asa’s eyes darted over to the stove, to the unearthly glow that flickered through the narrow slits of its door. He understood. Good.

  “Eventually they’ll think they can use you to get to me.” Elizabeth slid her dress back on her shoulders, once again felt the distant sting of pain on her arm. Probably she should bandage that. Though her earthly body only needed to serve a brief time longer, there was no point in being weakened by illness or injury when the One Beneath’s work had to be done. “Maybe you’ll think so, too. But we both know how this ends.”

  “Yes. We do.” Asa looked down on the symbol in blood; the two lines she’d already drawn on her flesh had begun to glow slightly. Elizabeth felt the answering heat on her skin.

  5

  THE TOWN HALL FOR CAPTIVE’S SOUND WAS IMPRESSIVE, for a small town—almost too impressive—so much so that the contrast drew comic attention to itself, like a balding, middle-aged man with a red sports car. In the middle of this small, dreary town was an enormous, white Palladian creation with pillars and a dome. Nadia thought it looked more like the Supreme Court than the venue for a community chat about how the Halloween carnival had gone wrong.

  “Thanks for coming to this with me.” Verlaine was scowling down at her phone as they walked through the square, trying to get her Voice Memo app to work. “Not even a paper as lazy as the Guardian can ignore the haunted house burning down in the middle of town. And of course, the Lightning Rod will be the source for real news, if anybody ever reads it.”

  “Oh, come on. Someone has to read it.”

  “The week before I went into the hospital? We got fifteen hits, not counting my own log-ins. Eight of those clicked straight through to find out when Shangri-La was having two-for-one drink specials.”

  “Shangri-La?”

  “The local nightclub.”

  Nadia was still new to town, but she would have thought she’d have heard of this place, if only because sources of fun here were so rare. “I can’t believe Captive’s Sound has an actual nightclub.”

  “You can’t believe it because we don’t. You have understood our Podunk nature perfectly. But Shangri-La’s just in the next town over. They don’t card.” Verlaine paused. “At least, I hear they don’t card. I never had anybody to go with, so I don’t actually know for myself.”

  “We’ll go,” Nadia promised, really without thinking about it. But when she saw how Verlaine lit up, she felt guilty for how much Verlaine needed to hear that.

  Remembering the dark magic that screened Verlaine away from the rest of the world was a constant challenge, and tonight it had been one of the last things on Nadia’s mind. Mostly she had come to the meeting to learn precisely what people had seen the night of the Halloween carnival—whether they would mention details that just seemed odd to them but might, for Nadia, be recognizable as signs of magic. Those signs could give her some clue as to what Elizabeth’s master plan really was.

  But I have to remember Verlaine, Nadia thought as they went up the steps, falling in with other people coming to the meeting. Verlaine’s gray hair was now in a sloppy bun held back by two cloisonné chopsticks; the hairstyle revealed her neck, and showed just how thin she was, how fragile. She needs me and Mateo. She doesn’t have anyone else.

  The meeting hall had rows of seats not unlike those of a theater, the fabric a little shabby in comparison with the high ceilings and big paintings of what Nadia assumed were famous people from Rhode Island history, though none of them was famous enough for her to recognize. For Verlaine’s audio to work, they had to sit in the very front row, dead center. Nadia felt a little self-conscious and glanced around—just in time to see the Prasads come in, Asa behind them.

  “Demon in the house,” Verlaine said. “Crap. What is he doing here?”

  “Right now he might just be pretending to be Jeremy,” Nadia said. The Prasads obviously hadn’t realized anything was wrong. Mrs. Prasad was even now affectionately pushing Asa’s hair out of his eyes. “But Elizabeth brought him here to help her. So we can’t ever trust him or anything he does. Remember that. Demons can make it hard to deny them.”

  Verlaine just kept looking down at her podcast equipment; apparently the phone app was just for backup. “Is his body dead or alive? Like, after a couple of weeks, will he get sort of—zombie-esque?”

  “I don’t know. But I doubt it.” Nadia watched the way the Prasads kept talking to the thing they thought was their son. She was repulsed to see the evident love his mother felt being poured out to a demon, a servant of the One Beneath, who was actually using her child’s corpse to do Elizabeth’s bidding. “It’s sick. It’s wrong. I can’t even stand it.”

  “Uh-oh—that sounds bad,” said Faye Walsh as she took her seat a few chairs down in the front row; she was chic as ever in a white trench coat and large hoop earrings. Nadia realized she must have looked stricken, because Ms. Walsh held up her hands. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”

  Which was probably the truth. But Faye Walsh was one of those guidance counselors who expected to actually counsel, who wanted you to pour out your soul before you took the college brochures. She was already “concerned” about Nadia because of Mom’s vanishing act; the last thing Nadia wanted to do was attract even more of her attention. And while Ms. Walsh might not be trying to pry, she was sitting so close that there was no way she couldn’t hear.

  Flustered, Verlaine said, “I, uh, what was that? Sorry. AV equipment gets all, um, tangled, with the cords, and then I lose track of things.” Her eyes widened as if to say, Sorry that wasn’t more believable.

  Of the ninety thousand things Nadia had to worry about, was even one of them completely normal? There had to be something she could say that would sound like a completely ordinary problem. She blurted out, “I can’t believe my dad’s already thinking about dating again.”

  “Ewww.” Verlaine wrinkled her nose. “Really?”

  “Yeah, really. Well, maybe really. Apparently an old friend of his in New York—female friend—tried to ask him out while they were there. Nothing happened, but still, he must be thinking about it.”

  “Even if he’s not, they’ll be after him soon.” Verlaine nodded, like she’d seen it coming all along. “Every single, divorced, or widowed woman in Captive’s Sound between the ages of twenty-five and fifty probably already has him in her sights. They’re just trying to figure out the line between ‘too soon’ and ‘too late.’”

  “But why? There have to be other single men in town.”

  “First of all, not so much, seeing how small Captive’s Sound is. And second, your dad’s hot.”

  Nadia made a face. “Oh, gross, Verlaine.”

  “I don’t mean hot hot. I mean dad hot. Listen.” Verlaine started counting off points on her fingers. “He hasn’t gotten fat, he still has his hair, he has a job, and it seems like he looks in the mirror when he gets dressed in the morning. After forty, that’s all hot is.”

  Okay, that was disturbing. Before Nadia could think any more about it, mercifully, the meeting began with the banging of a gavel. A half dozen people seemed to make up the city council—including Mr. Prasad, which was probably why his family was here. All of them seemed grumpy in the extreme, though Nadia couldn’t blame them once the questions got going.

  “Why wasn’t there a
fire extinguisher in the haunted house?”

  “Well, if there was an extinguisher, why didn’t anyone use it? Isn’t that someone’s job?”

  “First the roads start collapsing from the sinkholes, and now this? What exactly is the city council spending the infrastructure funds on? We demand an audit!”

  “All I know is my salary pays for the fire department of this city, and if the fire department can’t find a damn three-story house ablaze in the middle of town in less than twenty minutes, they’ve got a problem!”

  “For once,” Verlaine whispered, “this is almost interesting.”

  Almost—but the novelty wore off fast. Within a few minutes, Nadia was back to staring over her shoulder at Asa—at the demon—with the woman who believed she was his mother.

  She was just so loving. So much so that any real kid of hers would have been annoyed. Mrs. Prasad kept petting his arm, glancing over at him, smiling . . .

  Mom had acted that way with Nadia and Cole sometimes—when Cole had gotten done singing a song with the rest of his kindergarten class at their “graduation” ceremony, or when Nadia had managed to cast a really tough spell that day but Mom couldn’t say anything directly because Dad and Cole were around. Instead she just did that thing Mrs. Prasad was doing now, radiating pride, so much that you almost hated it but didn’t really.

  All at once Nadia couldn’t stand it any longer. It was wrong—beyond wrong—for Asa to sit there soaking up love he didn’t deserve. He was working for Jeremy’s murderer. This was sickening, and it couldn’t go on any longer.

  She has to know, Nadia thought, looking at Mrs. Prasad. She has to at least understand that something’s seriously wrong with her son. I want her to look at him and see that something’s not right.

  So. A spell of revelation.

  Never taking her eyes from Mrs. Prasad, Nadia’s fingers found the pearl charm on her bracelet. For a moment she wished Mateo were here with her instead of on shift at La Catrina; still, she shouldn’t need a Steadfast’s power for this. It was a stronger revelation spell than she’d ever used before. She’d never had the emotional ingredients for it until now.