Spellcaster

  They all gathered together, shoulder to shoulder, as Nadia found the correct issue. It took awhile to locate the story they wanted—newspapers were different then, with tiny type and vague headlines and no sections dividing the news by topic. But within a couple of minutes they had it:

  “‘The sailors met their mischance while diving off the lighthouse for so-called “buried treasure,” perhaps believing it brought by privateers returning from the Caribbean,’” Verlaine read aloud. “‘But such treasure is well known to be only the possessions of one Goodwife Hale, an early settler of Captive’s Sound. Rumormongers and gossips claimed she had fled the Salem witch trials, and to be sure, she was a peculiar character, known for home medicines and squirreling away odds and ends not valuable to any rational mind. Yet she was a poor woman who never owned the gold or jewels that the sailors boasted they might find. Compatriots in the tavern who overheard the doomed men’s braggadocio about treasure tried to tell them better, but they paid no heed—and have paid the price.’”

  Nadia sighed. “Gold. Jewels. The stuff a witch would have possessed—it would have been worth way more than any of that junk, at least to me.”

  “How do you know she was a witch?” Verlaine had studied the Salem hysteria in school; none of those people had really been witches.

  “Well, I can’t be totally sure,” Nadia admitted, “but it sounds right. The bit about the home medicine—that’s a clue. And keeping odds and ends that nobody else thought were useful? They could have been for spells. Plus, the article talks about her hiding stuff here and there, so—who knows? The sailors who died probably heard something third- or fourth-hand that was based on the truth. If she really did hide something out in the sound, it could’ve been … I don’t know. Something amazing. But it has to have washed away years ago.”

  Mateo straightened in his chair, an odd expression on his face. “Or maybe not.”

  “What do you mean?” Verlaine said.

  “After I became your Steadfast—when I could see—” He stumbled over the word before getting it out. “When I could see magic for the first time, I saw something shining up from beneath the water. Right around the lighthouse. Something brilliant green, and strong, like a spotlight.”

  “Green,” Nadia murmured. “That sounds good.” Apparently she could sense Verlaine’s confusion, because she added, “Different kinds of magic often hold different colors. Black magic—misused magic, evil—that’s usually a shade of red. Something green is either harmless or very, very helpful.”

  They all looked at one another. It was funny, Verlaine thought, how you could actually see an idea make its way around the room, illuminating each of their faces in turn.

  “What’s down there?” Verlaine finally whispered.

  “No idea.” Nadia started to grin. “But I intend to find out.”

  10

  THE MAGICAL POSSESSIONS OF A WITCH FROM MORE THAN three centuries in the past—what could they be? What had Mateo seen shimmering in the depths of the sound? There could be tinctures and potions in sealed jars or bottles. Her bracelet or rings, whatever materials she had used to help her cast spells, which over time would acquire certain glamours of their own. Or anything, really, once mundane but enchanted by the mysterious Goodwife Hale.

  By far the most tantalizing possibility, though, was that it might be Goodwife Hale’s Book of Shadows.

  The water burial would make sense. A Book of Shadows acquired too much power and individuality to simply be burned on a witch’s death, but was a dangerous thing to leave lying around. Most witches either willed theirs to a younger witch in her family or were buried with them. Goodwife Hale might have chosen another path.

  What would a centuries-old spell book look like? Nadia knew that most spells evolved over time, from community to community, from generation to generation. What would spells that ancient call for? How powerful must the book have been for it to need burial at sea?

  “You’ve got that look again,” Mateo said as he stood beside their table. They’d all decamped to La Catrina so he could be there for his evening shift, and she and Verlaine had made themselves comfortable in a far corner. But it was a quiet night at the restaurant, and instead of the bedlam she’d expected, they were surrounded by the murmurs of conversation at the few tables that were occupied, and delicious smells—black beans, roast chicken, fresh-cut tomatoes. Best of all was the way Mateo was smiling at her. “That gotta-have-it look,” he said.

  “It’s important,” she insisted. “Something extremely strange is going on in this town—a magical artifact from way back in its history could tell us a lot.”

  And if it is a Book of Shadows, it would teach me so much—maybe some of what my mother should’ve taught me and never will—

  “No arguments here,” Mateo said. “You know this stuff; I don’t. It’s like … it makes you light up. It’s cute.”

  He’d called her cute. Her cheeks felt warm. Nadia dropped her gaze from his face, bashful, but found herself staring at his hands instead. They were nice hands—square and solid, and she remembered how he had held them out to her on the terrifying night of the wreck—

  “Um, guys?” Verlaine glanced up from her laptop, which was currently atop their dinner table and casting a greenish light on her face. Her eyes were wide, and her voice shook. “I think you might want to see this.”

  “What is it?” Nadia said as Verlaine turned the laptop around so they could see.

  “Okay, last year everybody who got detention had to help scan and catalog all the school annuals going back to the first one in 1892. So now there’s an online version alumni can look through, stuff like that.” With a nervous look at Mateo, she said, “I thought I’d run a search on Elizabeth. If she’s a witch, maybe some people she spent time with the past couple of years might be witches, too, right?”

  Nadia nodded; given the signs she’d already seen of a long history of witchcraft in Captive’s Sound, it seemed unlikely that Elizabeth would be the only one. Although Mateo frowned and crossed his arms in front of him, he didn’t protest.

  Verlaine continued, “Look at the index.”

  She turned the screen around for them to see. Elizabeth Pike was pictured in last year’s Rodman High School annual. And five years before that. And three years before that. And on and on—Nadia scrolled down to see that the list of images went back and back, never skipping more than seven years, all the way to 1892.

  “It’s a family name, I guess,” Mateo said.

  “But look.” Verlaine flipped the computer around and started pulling up images. “Here’s from last year—she didn’t get an official picture taken, but there’s this—” A photo showed Elizabeth on the quad, drinking a soda, just one of several students caught in a random shot. “And there’s this from 1963.”

  The 1963 image popped up on screen, and Nadia gaped. The caption said it was “Liz Pike” standing in line for the new water fountain—but it looked exactly like Elizabeth. Her hair might have been in a little sprayed bubble and the clothes she wore might have looked like something out of a black-and-white movie, and maybe there was something about her face that made her look a bit older, but the resemblance was beyond uncanny.

  Mateo shrugged. “So that’s her grandmother. What about it?”

  Verlaine said, “And 1930.”

  This image was of some kind of school dance. Standing behind the punch bowl in a ruffled formal dress and a big corsage at her neckline was another Elizabeth, equally identical to the one they knew—“Betsy Pike,” maybe a year or so older than the one from 1963.

  “Now 1892.” Verlaine brought up one more image, a formal portrait. The caption again read “Elizabeth Pike”; the face was again unmistakably similar. Even with a lacy, high-necked shirt on and her hair caught atop her head in a prim bun, it was undeniably the exact same face. Only one change was obvious: The version in the earliest photo was the oldest. In 1892, she was listed as a teacher, not a student—a young one, perhaps, but no teenag
er.

  For a long moment, nobody could speak. Finally Nadia said, “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s a family name,” Mateo insisted. “Has to be.”

  “There’s no way four generations all look that much alike.” Nadia’s mind was working fast.

  She’d never learned any black magic—never wanted to. Once you started dealing with those kinds of spells, you were in league with demons, maybe with the One Beneath. But she knew enough about it to recognize it when she saw it.

  Something like this—it was darker, and stronger, and scarier than anything she’d even heard of before.

  “Elizabeth’s family has to have been a part of this for a very long time.” They would all have been witches, of course; the Craft was handed down mother to daughter.

  Verlaine said, “A part of what?”

  “Black magic.”

  Mateo’s eyes darkened; his lips pressed together into a thin line. After a long moment, he said, “You can’t know any of that from pictures in the yearbook. Come on.”

  “You’ve seen the pictures,” Nadia insisted. “The same as we have. That’s not a normal family resemblance, at all. It goes beyond that. It’s almost like Elizabeth … like she’s being born over and over …” But how would that even work?

  “Okay, I don’t know what the explanation is, but there has to be one,” Mateo protested. “A joke by the kids in detention, Photoshopping some of us into old pictures, maybe. That doesn’t mean she’s evil.”

  “But this isn’t as simple as Photoshop. I’m sure of it.” The memory of Elizabeth smiling at her coolly while the entire chemistry class had a meltdown burned in Nadia’s mind, constant as a gas flame, the one real proof she had that Elizabeth was far more than she seemed. What was going on?

  Mateo said only, “I’m tired of blaming Elizabeth all the time. Let’s just get this magic … thing you need and go on from there, okay?”

  Right then, his father strolled over to them; he had his son’s coloring but a pug-ugly face that suggested Mateo’s aquiline good looks came from his mother. “Mateo, it’s nice that you’re spending so much time with the lovely ladies, but you should also spend some time with your other tables. Especially table eleven, the nice men whose fajitas are ready?”

  “Sure, Dad. Nadia and Verlaine were just leaving,” Mateo said. He didn’t sound angry, exactly, but obviously he was glad to have an excuse to end the conversation.

  As Verlaine and Nadia walked away from La Catrina afterward, Verlaine said, “Is that possible, what you said? Someone being born over and over again?”

  “Well, I’m not sure. I never heard of a spell like that.” If she could only talk to Mom for five minutes …

  “If you never heard of that spell before, then why do you think that’s what’s going on?”

  Nadia shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable in the early fall chill. Dark visions drawn from her mother’s few whispered warnings about black magic swirled in her mind, and it seemed to her that underneath her feet she could feel the unsteady shifting of demon-haunted ground. An illusion, of course—but an illusion that might have meaning.

  To Verlaine she said only, “With powerful enough magic—anything is possible. Anything at all.”

  That night, Mateo fell into bed, exhausted, but he couldn’t sleep.

  As he lay there, stretched atop his covers with his jeans still on, his mind raced. Even walking down the streets of Captive’s Sound was different for him now; he knew the places he saw the glimmer were places touched by magic, knew the grime between him and the sky was proof that the entire town labored under some malevolent force. And even washing his face meant having to look again at the swirling, sickly blackness that haloed his head.

  His curse was as loathsome to look at as it was to endure.

  He shook a few extra Tylenol PM into his palm; he knew you could overdo these, and even trying not to have the dreams wasn’t worth frying his liver, but he’d looked up the maximum safe dosage online. With one fist he tossed them into his mouth, gulped them down with water, and hoped again to rest too deeply for dreaming.

  With his brain in complete overdrive like this, though, he didn’t see how even regular sleep was possible. Mateo thought he could handle everything he’d learned about magic and witches; it was the stuff about Elizabeth that churned his guts and made him want to be sick.

  No, Nadia’s weird theories couldn’t be true; he knew that. But all those pictures—all those generations of women named Elizabeth Pike—

  Why had Elizabeth never mentioned that she had a family name? That she looked just like her mother and grandmother? It was the kind of thing people brought up from time to time, or told jokes about. And he and Elizabeth were best friends. They shared everything.

  Slowly he took up his phone and hit her name on Contacts. As always, she answered on the first ring. “Mateo. What’s wrong? Did you have another dream?”

  “Haven’t fallen asleep yet.” He curled on one side, imagining—like he often did—Elizabeth lying next to him. It wasn’t a sexual fantasy, merely comforting—the idea of her so gentle and sweet and close.

  And yet now he envisioned her as “Liz Pike,” the sixties coed, or in old-timey Victorian clothes—

  “I was thinking about when we were little,” Mateo said. “All the fun stuff we used to do together.”

  “Those were good times, weren’t they? Maybe you can think about those while you try to fall asleep.”

  “What was your favorite? Out of all those memories.” He needed to hear that—to remember it through her, to know that she treasured those experiences as much as he did.

  Elizabeth said, “All of them, of course.”

  “Pick one.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  Why was she being so vague? It couldn’t be that she didn’t cherish those memories as much as he did—that was impossible. Elizabeth had proved, time and again, how much she cared about him. If Elizabeth could forgive him for being a freak, then Mateo could forgive her for keeping a few secrets she felt she had to keep.

  But I’m not a freak, he reminded himself. The curse is real. What happened to Mom, to all the other Cabots—that was something done to us.

  Her soft voice said, “You’ll call me if you have another of the dreams, won’t you? Right away. I don’t want you to worry.”

  If she is a witch, the way Nadia says, she knows the curse is real but won’t tell me about it. Not even to make me less afraid of going nuts and killing myself.

  “Okay,” he said. He couldn’t picture her lying next to him any longer. “Good night.”

  “Night,” she replied. Funny, how he’d never noticed before now that she never added the good in front.

  That night, despite all the Tylenol PM, he dreamed.

  The entire world was fire.

  Floor. Ceiling. Walls. Doors. Every breath burned in Mateo’s lungs. Red, yellow, orange: They all glowed and flickered around him, strangely alive, as if heat itself could hate him enough to kill.

  Nadia lay at his feet, her dark hair just another burn in the scorched world that now enclosed him.

  Mateo wanted to go to her—to save her, to hold her, something, anything—but he couldn’t, because he was in someone else’s arms.

  Why couldn’t he let go?

  From her place on the floor, Nadia whispered, “You shouldn’t have kissed me.”

  Desperately Mateo tried to reach her, but he remained held fast—those weren’t arms holding him, they couldn’t be—they were chains—

  He awoke with a start.

  Then swore.

  Then rolled over in bed, punching his pillow, to wait out the long, sleepless hours until dawn.

  “You’re positive?” Cole whispered, his covers drawn up under his chin.

  Nadia closed the closet doors. “Inspected it top to bottom. No monsters. Absolutely, one hundred percent monster-free.”

  He smiled a little, and she came to his bedside and ruffled his hair. As Cole r
elaxed, he said, “Can we have mac and cheese tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow is a pizza night. I won’t be here. But I bet Dad will order all the toppings you want. You should pick some crazy ones. Like—pineapple and anchovy!”

  “Ewww.” Cole wriggled in delighted disgust. “Where will you be?”

  Diving in the sound for God knows what. “Out with some of my new friends. I’m lucky to have met so many people right away. What about you, buddy? Do you like the kids at school?”

  Cole started telling her all about his new friends, and a birthday party he had this weekend; Nadia felt her phone vibrate in her pocket but ignored it, letting her little brother go on and on until his words came slowly, and his eyelids had begun to droop. He was worrying about the monsters less and less now. Maybe he was finally back to being a normal little kid. She hoped so. He deserved it. Mom had taken enough away from her and Dad—it wasn’t right if she took away Cole’s ability to feel safe ever again.

  Only when he was conked out and she’d shut his door behind her did she look down and see that she had a message from Mateo. Instantly she hit Call Back. “Hey. What’s up?”

  “Hey.” He sounded almost as sleepy as Cole had. There was something about his voice when it was sleepy—warm and not quite controlled. Nadia found herself leaning against the wall, making little circles on the floor with her foot. “Sorry we left things so weird. We seem to keep doing that.”

  Nadia forced out the next: “I don’t mean to say anything bad about Elizabeth.”

  “Listen, I admit—Elizabeth hasn’t told me the whole truth. I know she can’t. I get that. I also know you’re not making all this up. Before I can talk to Elizabeth, really talk about this, I have to know what she’s dealing with. The more I know, the more she’s likely to tell me. Right?”

  “Right.” Why did he have to be so focused on Elizabeth? Nadia focused on the most important thing. “I want to go diving near the lighthouse. To search. Tomorrow night, if I can.”

  She expected him to argue. Or hesitate. To come up with reasons they should ask more questions first.