Spellcaster

  Mateo finally said, “Do you think it’s possible Elizabeth’s in trouble?”

  Be objective, Nadia told herself. “It’s possible,” she admitted. “At this point, anything’s possible.”

  He didn’t hear the warning in her words. “Like you said, girls aren’t supposed to tell guys about witchcraft. So Elizabeth can’t tell me what she knows. And she couldn’t tell me if she were in danger from whatever is going on in this town.”

  “That could be completely true.” Nadia wondered how she’d feel if it really were true. The important thing was to keep an open mind until she knew more—but it was worth finding out how much Elizabeth herself knew. “Did you tell her? About your being a Steadfast, about finding out about magic? About me?”

  It was so easy to imagine—that clutch in the twilight, Elizabeth in Mateo’s arms as he confessed everything—

  But Mateo shook his head. “I wanted to. But—I know it’s not only my secret to tell. It’s yours, too. I think we can trust Elizabeth. You have to think so, too, though. When you’re sure, we’ll go to her together.”

  That seemed—epically unlikely. But Nadia remained focused. “We need to get more information first. About the curse, about witchcraft in this town, all of it. I’ve been meaning to dig into it for a while now. Really, I’d like to learn the history of your whole family, as far back as the curse goes. Do you have any older relatives who know more about it?”

  “My grandmother. And no, you don’t want to meet her. Trust me on this.”

  The suddenly haunted look in his eyes convinced Nadia not to argue, at least for now. “So what do we do? Hit the library?”

  “We search through the newspaper archives—with the help of the intern,” Mateo said. When Nadia gave him a questioning look, he pointed across the quad, where Verlaine was loping toward them. Her expression was still wary, but Verlaine was taking it for granted, by now, that they would all hang out.

  While it was still only her and Mateo, Nadia had to ask: “So, where’s Elizabeth today?” When Mateo frowned in apparent confusion, she added, “Since she wasn’t in class.”

  “Oh, yeah. I guess not.” The question just rolled over him; even though he was worrying about Elizabeth being in danger, standing up for her honesty and goodness, Mateo didn’t seem to take any note of whether she was there or not.

  Like he’s been told not to notice when she comes and goes, Nadia thought. Like he’s not able to notice. Like someone has stopped him.

  Elizabeth walked along the street, staring down at the pavement where the blood drops fell. A couple of times, she heard cars come up behind her, but they always slowed down, steered neatly around her, and moved on. None of the drivers would remember anything about it later.

  Overhead the crow flew, the beating of its wings entirely regular; the small cut she’d made should not have weakened it greatly. Even if it had, though, she’d commanded the bird to fly on, no matter what.

  The blood trailed off the main road, spattered onto the curb. Near someone’s front step.

  When she looked up, she stood in front of the house on Felicity, the Victorian that had been painted pale blue sometime in the past forty-five years. Even with Nadia at school, the outline of the building glowed slightly to Elizabeth’s eyes, a sinuous violet shade—the sign of magic at work.

  The mother, she thought. It can only be the mother.

  Nadia was too young to be a true challenge to Elizabeth, and yet already she showed signs of extraordinary power. Only a few possibilities allowed that to be true—and the most likely was that the greater power came from Nadia’s mother. She was the one who would have taught Nadia; she was the one who had tapped into her daughter’s potential.

  And she was the one who would have to be eliminated first.

  As the crow fluttered into a nearby tree to rest, Elizabeth went up the steps, noting the slight reverberations around her as she did so; the usual wards and charms were in place, but nothing else. Elizabeth expected no response when she rang the doorbell, as it was the middle of the day—but then heavy footsteps came close, and a man in his forties opened the door. He was tan-skinned, dark-haired, pleasant despite the rolled-up sleeves and absent expression that suggested he’d been working. “Can I help you?”

  “Are you Nadia’s father?” Elizabeth gave him her most endearing smile. “I’m a new friend of hers. From school. Elizabeth Pike.”

  “Shouldn’t you be in—” The question died on his lips as she brought him into her spell; from now on, Mr. Caldani would be no more likely than anyone else to question where she went, or when, or why. Nadia might be immune to that glamour, like other witches, but no one else could be. He grinned easily. “I’m glad to see that Nadia’s met so many people right away.”

  “Captive’s Sound is a really friendly town. Can I come in?”

  He didn’t ask why. Didn’t wonder why. He only stepped aside and let Elizabeth walk right in.

  Immediately she could tell that most of the spellcasting happened above her head—the attic, no doubt. Good. If the mother were up there, she wouldn’t be able to get past Elizabeth. She was enclosed. Trapped. Tilting her head, smiling sweetly at Mr. Caldani, she said, “Is your wife at home?”

  His face fell. For a moment he struggled to find words. “She … Nadia’s mother and I recently divorced. She lives in Chicago.”

  “Oh. I’m so sorry.” Elizabeth made sure her expression appeared sympathetic. It was best to give people the occasional real memory of her behaving in a thoughtful way; such memories reinforced her illusions. “I didn’t mean to pry.”

  “It was a natural question. You didn’t know. But don’t talk about—no. I won’t say that. If you and Nadia talk about it, be careful. Obviously it’s a painful subject for all of us.”

  “You want to protect her,” Elizabeth said. “Of course.” He was a kind man, and a sensitive one. She could use that, if it came to it.

  But she didn’t think it would. Without a mother to guide her, Nadia was all power, no progress. She would never be a serious threat to Elizabeth’s plans.

  Peculiar that the mother would leave at the most sensitive part of the daughter’s training—but most people were shortsighted. Elizabeth didn’t suffer from that particular handicap, not any longer.

  It would be simple now to go up to the attic and take Nadia’s Book of Shadows, all her ingredients, everything, but what would be the point? Best to go. “I stopped by hoping Nadia was home,” Elizabeth said. Mr. Caldani would never ask her, or himself, why Elizabeth would expect Nadia to be at her house during school hours, any more than he would again ask why Elizabeth was here herself. “I should go. Let you get back to work.”

  He managed a smile for her. “Well, it was nice to meet you, Elizabeth.” They parted at the door almost as friends.

  Swiftly she walked home. Would Mateo come by again tonight? He demanded so much time and care, and right now—when the dreams were still so unfocused—she was learning little.

  Soon it would all be worthwhile, though. Very soon.

  She walked into her house. The afternoon sunlight glinted on the broken glass on her floor as she paused, staring at the center of the room. There her crow shuddered on the floor, its wings beating desperately against the boards, twitching in its final throes. It had come back here to die, though not of its wound. The magic had strangled the bird, of course; it always did, sooner or later.

  When at last it went still, she touched one of her rings and went through the spell almost without thinking it; that one was familiar to her now. Instantly the crow disappeared in a flame that lasted hardly more than a second. Only the smallest scorch mark on the floor showed where it had been.

  Elizabeth reached amid her jars and pulled out the one filled with grayish liquid, the one where all the other dozens of eyes from the earlier crows still floated. She’d need it soon. Then she went to the windowsill, lifted up her arm, and made all the crows believe she was singing, singing to them, and it was only a qu
estion of which one came to her first.

  “Technically I’m an intern,” Verlaine said as they walked up the steps of the Captive’s Sound newspaper, the Guardian. “But there’s not that much to do here.”

  “Really?” Nadia looked askance at the dusty front office. “This seems like a town with a whole lot going on.”

  “Not anything normal people know about.” Verlaine took out the heavy key and unlocked the door; the musty smell was comforting to her by now. “The paper publishes once a week. They used to be more newsy back in the day, but the paper was bought by some out-of-town people who only care about putting advertising circulars in it. Not much actual reporting going on, and the editors never let me do any of it. That’s why all my work—and all the real news in town—goes to the Lightning Rod.”

  “The Lightning Rod?” Nadia looked confused.

  It was Mateo who answered. “The school’s news site. It was a paper until about six years ago. All the journalism students work on it.”

  “My honors project is making the back issues digital. Well, what back issues they have, thanks to that weird fire back in 1999.” Verlaine dimly remembered that. What were the odds of lightning striking the chemistry lab twice? Well, Captive’s Sound had a way of beating the odds. Now she finally understood why.

  This town really was as strange as Verlaine had always thought. It was incredible how vindicated she felt, how justified. Every creepy nook and cranny of Captive’s Sound was possessed by magic—the secret underlying the whole world, the element that proved wonderful, bizarre, impossible things could really happen.

  And the way people were always so mean to her—well, all right, maybe that wasn’t magic, but it wasn’t inevitable. It wasn’t the way her life would be forever. Only a couple of days into her senior year, and already it felt like her world had started to transform. She and Nadia … well, they weren’t quite friends exactly, but they told each other their secrets, which was as close as Verlaine had ever come to friendship. Through Nadia, Mateo had suddenly noticed her, didn’t seem crazy in the slightest, and seemed to like her just fine. After a life of near-total isolation, Verlaine found it almost dizzying to think of having not one but two people to spend time with.

  Plus they had a mission! A real, true magical quest or investigation or whatever you wanted to call it, which was one hundred percent more interesting than anything else Verlaine had ever done in her life.

  Of course, she’d probably have to give Nadia and Mateo some time alone occasionally. The way Nadia unconsciously bent toward him every time he talked—the light in his dark eyes whenever he looked at her—well, it was pretty obvious what was going on.

  Verlaine didn’t resent it. Not exactly. Or only a little. While she’d never been in love herself—had never even kissed a guy yet—she’d had plenty of chances to observe romance from the sidelines. People got incredibly stupid right before and right after they hooked up with someone they really liked, and that was all there was to it. If Nadia and Mateo were going to be way more into each other than they were into her for a while, she figured she could deal. Yes, she wished the first friends she’d ever had were more focused on her, but at least their absorption in each other wasn’t a way of rejecting her. Verlaine had learned pretty much all the ways to get rejected by this point, and that wasn’t what was going on. This was just hormone overload.

  Right now, though, all three of them were … questing. Or whatever you wanted to call it.

  So they got to work in the front office, aka the only office; the Guardian was old-fashioned enough to still have its printing presses in the back room. The front room was already a mass of papers and old photographs, the kind that had been printed on thick, shiny paper. They couldn’t make it any more disorganized than it already was. Verlaine tugged out the bound back issues and let them all start searching through.

  “What are we looking for?” Mateo asked, coughing as yet more dust drifted up in clouds from the back volumes.

  “Anything that could point to witchcraft, or magic.” Nadia began thumbing open the pages of Volume XI: 1865–1870. “In other words, anything weird.”

  “No shortage of that here,” Verlaine said.

  But it quickly became clear she hadn’t understood the half of it.

  The church fire in 1995? Not the first church fire in Captive’s Sound. Not the second, or third. It was the twenty-fifth. Verlaine knew more buildings used to burn down back in the days of dry timber and no fire departments, but twenty-five churches seemed … extreme, even over a span of more than three centuries.

  As for the sinkholes that had begun in town earlier this year—that had happened before, too. Only once, and that back in the 1810s, but sinkholes were almost unheard of in this part of the United States. (Verlaine had researched this for the Lightning Rod, which was way more on top of the issue than the Guardian—not that anyone paid attention.)

  The part that got to Verlaine was all the news about animals. She had a tender heart for animals—not just her beloved cat, Smuckers, but all of them, alpacas to zebras. Since age eleven she’d been a vegetarian. So her eyes blurred with tears every time she read about a mass death of crows, all of them found twitching and dying in a heap of feathers on the street. Or foals born with three heads, a bizarre genetic event that apparently happened in Captive’s Sound once every twenty years, like clockwork. Or a dog found without its head on the steps of City Hall. Who could do that to a dog?

  A witch, apparently. Not like Nadia. The other kind of witch, the one behind whatever was going on here.

  “I can’t believe we don’t know about more of this,” Mateo said after they’d all been at it for more than an hour. “I mean, they actually thought a ‘freak wave’ could pick up a whaling ship and just drop it in the middle of town? Even back in the 1700s, you’d figure they knew better than that.”

  “They probably did,” Nadia said absently. “But what were they supposed to report? The truth?”

  “Well, yeah.” Verlaine took journalism seriously, even if everyone else thought it was just tabloid stuff and spin. There was a place in the world for people who told the unvarnished truth. At least, she hoped so.

  “The part that weirds me out is the rain of toads,” Nadia said.

  At last, a question Verlaine could answer. “Oh, that’s actually not magic. Not even weird. Sometimes tornadoes pick them up, and they get dropped down through a rain cloud somewhere else.”

  Nadia shook her head. “It rained toads inside. In several of the houses on the Hill. All of a sudden, plop, toads rained from the ceiling.”

  “Ew.” Okay, Verlaine decided, that was definitely not tornado-related.

  Mateo cut in, “What about the Cabot house? Did it happen there?”

  Suddenly Nadia looked embarrassed—as though she’d like to sink into the ground to hide. Verlaine was very familiar with this feeling. “No. It didn’t. But they—well, they said there were questions about whether a Cabot was involved. Some people suspected a prank by the ‘eccentric’ Millicent Cabot—”

  “My great-great-grandmother.” Mateo leaned back in the creaky wooden chair, shutting his eyes too tightly, like someone with a headache. “She lasted for decades, crazy as hell—at least, according to Grandma. Most of us burn out after only a few years of the visions. Millicent ran mad for almost thirty years, until finally one day she—well, she hung herself from the rafters in the attic.” He tried to smile, but it was an odd expression, tense and tight. “Another reason I really never want to live in that house.”

  After a few moments of awkward silence, Verlaine tried to lighten the mood. “Hey, at least we weren’t here for the ice storm in July. Or the time everyone at a screening of How To Marry a Millionaire started bleeding from the eyes and they blamed CinemaScope.”

  “I have a feeling—before this fall is through, we’ll wish that’s all we had to deal with,” Nadia said, which in Verlaine’s opinion wasn’t helping the mood one bit. But Nadia remained focused. “What I
can’t get over are how many reports there are about witches, witchcraft, et cetera. All the reports are about rumors—‘town lore,’ that kind of thing—but it seems like witchcraft has been a pretty open secret here for a long time.”

  Verlaine pointed out, “Some of that is just New England for you. I mean, you have the Salem witch trials—women who fled Massachusetts because they were scared by the witch trials—that kind of thing.”

  “Right, of course,” Nadia said, “but this goes way past that. So there have to be other witches in town, besides me and—and Elizabeth.”

  As Nadia spoke, she glanced over at Mateo, but he didn’t argue. His arms were folded, and the expression on his face was strange—almost sad. He noticed both of them watching him and sighed. “I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that the curse is real. And looking through these records—do you see how often all the weirdness in town gets blamed on one of the Cabots? Not just Millicent. Any of us—almost all of us. Sometimes it was true, because of the curse. Sometimes it wasn’t true, because of the witchcraft. It’s like I have to rewrite everything I know about my family. About myself.”

  “It has to be rough,” Nadia said softly. “I’m sorry.” They gave each other a look then, one of those looks that seemed to raise the room’s temperature by a few degrees and make Verlaine feel like she ought to find an excuse to leave.

  Instead, she slid over the volume that read 1815–1820. “I only found one report about witchcraft, actually. This one.”

  “This is almost two hundred years old?” Nadia began turning the pages, but very gingerly.

  “A reproduction. The really old issues are too fragile now; they made copies of a lot of it back in the nineteen-fifties. But it’s all verbatim.”