Spellcaster

  Then he let go of her and kicked downward. His Swiss army knife had been in the exact same pocket of his jeans pretty much every day for the past five years; his fingers found it instantly, and he flicked out blades at random, the better to hack at the seaweed. Slash, rip, tear—his hand around Nadia’s calf, the seaweed still trying to twist around her but increasingly unable to. Then Nadia finally wriggled free, and Mateo followed her, both of them racing toward the surface.

  When he broke the water, cold air slapped his face, burned his lungs. Next to him he could hear Nadia choking and gasping as she struggled to stay afloat without letting go of the book.

  That book—the way it gleamed, like it was made of liquid metal, the lone light in the dark sound—was both one of the most frightening and most beautiful things he’d ever seen.

  As was Nadia’s face, water beading on her full lips and flushed cheeks, still terrified but so determined, despite everything.

  Mateo slung one arm around her and began pulling them back toward the boat.

  Nadia sprawled on the floor of Mateo’s house, wrapped in his father’s heavy white bathrobe. She couldn’t go home with her hair soaked through—Dad might be preoccupied with his job or Cole, but he’d notice if she walked into the house wet as a drowned rat. But apparently the Perez men didn’t need a hair dryer. So she leaned back against the padded ottoman, hair streaming out behind her to take in the heat of their gas fireplace, as she propped Goodwife Hale’s Book of Shadows on one bent knee.

  Every page was dry and fresh; the binding showed age, but only the many years it would have belonged to Goodwife Hale, not the centuries between then and now. It crackled with a pleasant, warming energy; Nadia felt as if she were between two gentle fires. Although the handwriting was spidery and strange, with old-fashioned spelling that was sometimes difficult to read, already Nadia was getting the hang of it.

  The spells were going to be amazing, she could tell—but what she wanted most now was the history. And the Book of Shadows had it.

  “One cup of Aztec hot chocolate coming … up.” Mateo stood in the doorway that led from the kitchen, staring at her with an odd expression on his face.

  “Does the Book of Shadows look incredible to you?” vzyl She could only imagine what the world of magic looked like through a Steadfast’s eyes. Maybe this book could even teach her how it was possible for a guy to possess that kind of power.

  “I—uh—yeah.”

  Nadia suddenly realized how much of her leg he could see with her knee bent like that, and she tugged the robe around her snugly as she sat up and accepted the cup of hot chocolate. The water’s chill still clung to her despite the nearness of the fire, plus chocolate was always a good idea—but this stuff was amazing. There was a spiciness to it that made it utterly delicious. “Wow. Aztec?”

  Mateo shrugged as he sat cross-legged in front of her; the warm light painted his dark brown hair. “Aztec by way of my dad inventing the recipe. A little chili and ginger to add some heat—well, people at La Catrina like it.” His hand rested on one of the fluffy towels still wrapped around her foot. “This book—this is important? The kind of thing you were hoping to find?”

  “And then some. Goodwife Hale—she knew what she was doing. She has a lot of history in here, too; I’m looking through that right now. If she was a witch here when Captive’s Sound was founded, then there’s no telling what she might know.”

  “History? I thought you said this was a book of spells.”

  “It is,” Nadia explained, “but she has journal entries in here, too. Some witches only put spells in their Book of Shadows; others use them like diaries. Some people sketch. Most people do a mix. There’s no one right way. Luckily for us, Goodwife Hale was heavy on the diary entries. See, this talks about her fleeing Salem—this one mentions which shells she could use for spellcasting, which I definitely need to know—”

  Nadia straightened. Her hand froze at the place where she’d been scanning, and her eyes read the words over and over without being quite able to believe them.

  “What is it?” Mateo leaned forward to look, which spared her having to say it aloud.

  Together they read the name: Elizabeth Pike.

  From four hundred years ago.

  “So her family goes way, way back,” Mateo said, which seemed obvious, but Nadia could tell even he was freaked out by finding the same name yet again. “Well, what does it say?”

  “Let’s see.” Quickly Nadia skimmed through the words. “A witch of great power; led the coven here—I knew there had to be a coven once, but then—oh.”

  The scariest words in all of witchcraft were written there: the One Beneath.

  Mateo craned his head to look. “What does that mean?”

  “Elizabeth Pike’s husband was dying,” Nadia whispered. “No natural or magical means would save him. So she swore herself to the One Beneath.”

  “Who is that? The devil?”

  “Maybe you could call him that. I don’t know how ancient he is, where he comes from. All I know is that he’s the prince of black magic. The one who rules over the world of demons, which can never—and I mean, never, ever, ever—cross over with ours. He has no name, no laws, no limits. No witch can swear herself to him and share in his power. That turns her into something inhuman. Something … beyond evil.”

  Obviously Mateo had some trouble taking that in. Nadia had always tended to think of the One Beneath as something like a monster from a story—not anything she had to worry about. Yet here he was, woven into the history of Captive’s Sound.

  And maybe not just the history. Maybe he was part of the skin over the sky. The rumblings underfoot. Maybe the One Beneath held dominion here.

  “But she did it for a good reason,” Mateo said. “Elizabeth’s ancestor—she was just trying to save her husband.”

  Nadia shook her head. “There’s no good reason to swear yourself to the One Beneath. Whatever love or kindness or decency you had in you when you made the deal—he takes it. He hollows you out. Only the worst of you will be left behind.”

  Mateo didn’t look convinced, but he nodded toward the Book of Shadows. “So what happened to the first Elizabeth Pike?”

  “Her husband survived, but he became afraid of her. He wouldn’t live with her, and she didn’t seem to care.” Nadia’s fingers ran along each line of handwriting, and despite the nearness of the fire, a chill ran through her. “Then—over the years—she began to change. Her hair became less silver—her back unbent—and very slowly she became … younger.”

  The photographs they’d seen on Verlaine’s computer suddenly flickered in front of her eyes like film on an old-style projector. They weren’t several women with the same name; they were one person. One person growing younger, instead of older, with the years—with the centuries.

  Could a spell make someone live that long? Make someone become younger, ever so slowly, going on backward through the centuries?

  It was impossible. But it was also true.

  Elizabeth Pike was four hundred years old. Elizabeth was sworn to the One Beneath. She would be the most dangerous witch Nadia had ever heard of—maybe the most dangerous one there could ever be. She was a Sorceress.

  And she had her claws sunk deep into this town. She’d walked in Nadia’s house, spoken to her defenseless, unknowing father.

  She was using Mateo.

  Nadia looked up at Mateo; obviously he understood at least some of what she was thinking. “That can’t be the same Elizabeth.”

  “With dark enough magic, anything is possible,” she repeated.

  “But I remember growing up with her! Baking cookies. Climbing trees.”

  “Do you?” Elizabeth had suggested that people forgot what she wanted them to forget; maybe they also remembered what she wanted them to remember. Nadia asked, “What trees did you climb? Where? Were they in her yard? The park?”

  “I—I don’t know. Why would I know that? Nobody remembers everything from when they were five.
”

  “What about the cookies? What kind of cookies were they?”

  Mateo frowned. He was trying to remember, the effort written on his face, but the memories were empty of details. “What does that matter?”

  Nadia leaned forward, very close; this would be hard for him to accept—Elizabeth was someone he thought was one of his only friends in a harsh world. But he had to understand. “Of all the memories you have of Elizabeth, are any of them bad? Did you ever, I don’t know, fight over LEGOs? Did she ever puke on an amusement-park ride? Did she fall down and scratch her knees? If you’ve been friends your whole life, then you’d remember something about her that wasn’t perfect. Nobody’s perfect all the time. But if the memories are fake—if they’re just pretty pictures she put in your head—then they’ll all be ideal. And blank. And meaningless.”

  It was heartbreaking to see how hard Mateo worked to come up with one memory, just one, that was imperfect enough to be genuine. He found nothing.

  Instead he said, very slowly, “She always asks me about my dreams.”

  “You mean your visions—the ones that tell you the future.”

  Mateo nodded. “I thought she asked because she cared. But she doesn’t, does she? She knows the curse is real?”

  “Worse than that.” Nadia hated to say the next, but it was written there in Goodwife Hale’s spidery handwriting. “It says—it says that she cursed George Cabot and all his line so that she might know the future without suffering the consequences.”

  Mateo said something so obscene Nadia had never before heard it spoken out loud. “You’re telling me Elizabeth cursed my ancestor. My Elizabeth.”

  “That’s what it says.”

  “So she cursed all of us. Every one of the Cabots. Right down to me.”

  Nadia nodded.

  “Elizabeth did this to me. She pretended to be my friend, but she did this to me. And—Mom—” He swallowed hard. “Do you know how many years I’ve been angry at Mom for rowing out into the ocean? And it wasn’t her fault. None of it. It was all Elizabeth.”

  Mateo’s voice cracked, and Nadia remembered what he’d told her about his mother rowing out into the ocean to drown herself, leaving her young son behind. She’d done that because she’d been driven to insanity and despair, all so Elizabeth Pike could cheat time and fate yet again. Now the anger he’d felt toward his mother was cracking apart, leaving only the pain.

  He turned away, hugging his knees to his chest. Yet she glimpsed the firelight glinting off one tear tracing down his cheek. He wouldn’t want to be seen crying; guys usually didn’t. Nadia longed to comfort him, but what could she say? She couldn’t think of anything that didn’t sound empty or stupid. This was about his mother being driven crazy and killed by the person he’d believed loved him. No words could make that seem any less horrible than it was.

  Instead, she leaned against Mateo—her back to his back, so he had his privacy but knew she was here, that she hurt for him. After a moment, he let his head lean back onto her shoulder, but Nadia knew better than to touch him in any other way. Maybe it was enough just to be near.

  On the far wall, the firelight cast the shadows of the two of them together, as though they were one person with two faces, one looking forward and one toward the past.

  Finally, his voice hoarse, Mateo said, “That’s why Elizabeth asks me about the dreams. She’s using the curse to see the future without having to go crazy herself.”

  “Right.” Nadia hated adding this, but better for him to hear the whole thing at once. He’d been lied to so horribly; she wouldn’t hide the truth from him any longer. “I’d be willing to bet that pretty much every memory you have of Elizabeth is fake. She wouldn’t have had any reason to pay attention to you until you started having the dreams. Anything you remember that goes back further—it probably isn’t real.”

  “None of it,” he whispered. “I thought she was the only person besides my dad who cared about me. But there wasn’t anybody. Not in all this time.” His whole body went tense, like he was guarding himself against remembered pain.

  Nadia had to turn to him then. “You have … friends now. You have us. You know that, right?”

  What she really wanted to say was, You have me.

  It was a long moment before Mateo met her eyes.

  The betrayal there, the desolation, was almost more than Nadia could bear to see. How could he endure feeling it?

  Only then did she realize how much of that betrayal—that anger—was for her.

  He asked, “Is this what witchcraft is? One big trick you people play on the world?”

  You people. He didn’t see any difference between her and a servant of the One Beneath.

  “A witch isn’t the same thing as a Sorceress—”

  “Stop it! I don’t want to hear anything else about the—the First Laws or what a Steadfast is or any of it!” Mateo sprang to his feet. “Whatever it is you do, it’s part of what screwed over my whole life before I was even born.”

  “Mateo—Mateo, I’m sorry—”

  “For someone who’s so sorry to hurt me, you’ve done a really good job of dragging me and Verlaine into it. Who else’s life are you going to ruin?”

  That wasn’t fair. It wasn’t.

  Was it?

  Whether that was true or not, the worst part was—Nadia didn’t blame Mateo for being angry.

  Why would anybody trust a witch, any witch, after learning this?

  “I should go,” she said quietly.

  “Yeah. You should.”

  Mateo gave her a ride home, the same way he would have before, but he never spoke one word to her, not once the entire time. As he drove away, she wondered whether he ever would again.

  Verlaine had suspected that something was up for Nadia and Mateo tonight. What she didn’t know was whether it was a magical something, in which case she felt kind of left out and would consider going all the way to annoyed, or a dating something, in which case, fine, she could get all the details from Nadia tomorrow.

  She sighed as she rolled back on her bed. After years and years of being treated like a social pariah, Verlaine was still wrapping her head around the idea of having … okay, maybe friends was too strong a word. But they were people to hang out with. People she expected to tell her about their days, and people she found herself waiting to talk to. It was more than she’d had in far too long. So shouldn’t she be less lonely, instead of more?

  But now that she could dream of not being alone—all the dreams she had about finding love, about some guy finding her, had come rushing in.

  College, she’d told herself. I’ll find somebody in college. The guys won’t be such jerkwads then. They’ll be more mature. I’ll meet somebody awesome. Verlaine didn’t even know exactly what this awesome guy would be like; she imagined him looking a little like Jeremy Prasad but acting way, way nicer.

  Now, though, Verlaine was done with being alone. Done with being a patient good girl. Her life had started changing, and she wanted it to change completely.

  One thing at a time, she thought. Nudging her cat, Smuckers, to one side, she pulled her cell phone out from under him; it was warm and dusted with orange fur. Verlaine brushed it off, deciding that just texting Nadia to check in wouldn’t be too intrusive, even if she and Mateo were together—

  —which was when the screams started outside.

  Verlaine leaped up and ran for the front door, only a couple of steps ahead of her uncles in their bathrobes. “What the hell?” Uncle Dave yelled. “Are Claire and Bradford fighting again? If they damage our truck one more time, that’s it. We’re calling the cops. I don’t care whether Claire’s in anger-management therapy or not.”

  “That’s more than two people out there,” Uncle Gary replied. “Maybe they got their families in on it? Man, we live near some trashy people.”

  But then the ground shuddered slightly, and the three of them stared at one another. “What’s going on?” Verlaine whispered.

  Uncl
e Dave put his arms around her protectively while Uncle Gary ran for the door. When he flung it open, Verlaine saw—not fighting neighbors, not some summer-movie disaster, but Dave’s beloved truck.

  Buried halfway in the ground, tail end first.

  “Oh, no, no!” Uncle Dave hugged her even tighter. “What the hell?”

  Uncle Gary swore. “Not again! Not here! Dammit!”

  What had happened was another sinkhole—or so they called it, though to Verlaine’s eyes it looked more like a trench than a hole. This one went beyond any of the others in town, even the one that had nearly swallowed her car. The long, curving trench cut an arc through their street, ripping out yards, the Duxburys’ garage, and unfortunately for the truck, a big chunk of their own driveway. Everybody was running around in their pajamas, looking to see what had happened to their homes and their neighbors.

  “Do you have any idea what this is doing to our property values?” Uncle Gary said. Uncle Dave sighed.

  Her heart fluttered faster in her chest as she remembered what it had been like when she fell into one of these herself—the whole world tilting sideways, the blank, silent terror that had made her claw at the steering wheel to keep from tumbling downward. But Verlaine forced herself to stay calm. She had a job to do here.

  While Uncle Dave paced around the truck in horror and Uncle Gary called the insurance company, Verlaine went up and down the street with her phone, taking photos and footage to post on the Lightning Rod. Disaster in Captive’s Sound! That was a good headline. Here, a shot of yet another family freaking out. There, the hollowed-out street. The overall scene—

  —Verlaine lowered her phone and frowned.

  For some reason, every tree on the street had birds in the branches. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Lines and lines of crows peered down; a few perched on the eaves of houses or hopped around on the ground.

  “Beyond Hitchcock,” she muttered.

  One crow in particular hopped closer to her, cocking its head. But—what was wrong with its eyes—was it blind? They were gray, filmed over with some kind of webbing.