Spellcaster

  Poor thing, Verlaine thought, but in an instant it had taken off and flown away.

  “Hope I didn’t interrupt anything important,” she said to Nadia on the phone twenty minutes later, as she finished coding the breaking news update for the Lightning Rod. “But I was wondering whether this was witchy stuff or just, you know, bad roads.”

  “I wouldn’t be able to tell—I mean, it looked normal to me that first time, when your car fell in. Mateo could, maybe, if he—” Nadia sighed. “Nobody got hurt, right?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “And what did you mean, interrupt anything important?”

  “You know. You and Mateo. You guys were together tonight, right?”

  “I didn’t mean to leave you out.” Nadia sounded apologetic, so Verlaine decided not to get irritated about it. Well, not more irritated, anyway.

  “Don’t be stupid. Of course you did. I get it. You and Mateo want some alone time.”

  “It’s not like that,” Nadia said, surprising Verlaine. “We’re just friends—maybe we could’ve been more than friends, and I thought we might—until he found out—well. You should know what he found out.”

  And that whole set of revelations was so astonishing that Verlaine had to stop typing and just hang on to her phone and listen for a long time. At last she said, “Holy crap.”

  “Mateo’s really crushed, obviously. So be careful how you talk about it with him.”

  “Elizabeth—she’s dangerous. Seriously, seriously dangerous. That’s what you’re saying.”

  “Yeah. She is.”

  “Then would you go to the Lightning Rod site? Because if she’s behind this, and my yard is already caving in? I want to know.”

  Verlaine had already charted tonight’s craziness on a map of all the various road and bridge collapses around Captive’s Sound in the past year. Most people thought that the roads commission must have hired bad contractors or pocketed the money for themselves; everyone in town knew there had to be a problem.

  But what she saw now was a pattern.

  “Are you clicking on it?” Verlaine enlarged the image on her screen. “Do you see what I see?”

  “Concentric circles.”

  “Mouse over each spot—that gives you the date.”

  “It looks like the circles are tightening as time goes on.” Nadia’s voice sounded like she was trying very hard to remain calm, but the taut edge of her words gave Verlaine chills. “That space in the middle—you know Captive’s Sound better than I do. What is that?”

  “It’s Swindoll Park.” Why would the park be so important? “Nothing’s there. Just, you know, trees and a duck pond and the carousel. They have a cookout on the Fourth of July. The Halloween carnival. That kind of thing.”

  “Did you say Halloween carnival?”

  “Yeah. How does that matter?” It was mostly a costume contest rigged in favor of the mayor’s kids and games like bobbing for apples, which was just about the stupidest so-called “fun activity” Verlaine could think of.

  “Halloween is an important night for witches. That’s one thing the movies don’t lie about.” Nadia was thinking it out as she said it, but she sounded terrifyingly sure. “If these circles are drawing close to this location—this place where all these people are going to be on Halloween night—”

  Verlaine bit her lip. “What’s going to happen?”

  After a long silence, Nadia said, “I can’t say for sure. But some spells—the darkest spells, those that serve the One Beneath—they require more than magic. They require blood.”

  “Halloween,” Verlaine said. “That was—two months from when you did the fortune-telling spell.”

  “Exactly.”

  It’s like a target, Verlaine thought as she looked at the map. And we’re in the bull’s-eye.

  12

  AT FIRST NADIA THOUGHT THEY’D WORK IT OUT AT school.

  Mateo had to show up for classes, and they shared chemistry together, so meeting up was inevitable. He’d be furious for a few days, but sooner or later he’d want to talk this out—right?

  But he cut class the next day.

  And the next.

  And the next.

  When the Piranha marked down that third absence, she quipped, “Looks like Mr. Perez is dying to repeat his senior year.”

  Unable to resist any longer, Nadia raised her hand. “What about Elizabeth Pike?”

  The Piranha frowned, genuinely confused. “What about her?”

  “She’s out, too.” Just like she had been ever since that last confrontation they’d had in the hallway—a week now? More? Nadia found it difficult to remember, for some reason.

  For a moment the Piranha thought about that, dismay creeping over her face … but then her eyes went kind of misty as she smiled. “Elizabeth’s absence is excused. Her parents sent a note. And maybe you should mind your own business, Miss Caldani.”

  People giggled. Kendall glanced over her shoulder and muttered, “How come you’re telling on people?”

  “I was just mentioning it.” Nadia tucked her hair behind her ear. She could feel her cheeks flushing hot.

  Jeremy leaned across their shared lab table. He was a tall guy—lean and lithe—with sharp cheekbones that looked like they could cut glass, tawny skin, and dark curly hair that was as long as it could be and still look great instead of messy. All at once she totally got how this guy could get to Verlaine … if you only ever saw him at a distance, wow…

  Then he said, “God, you’re a tight ass.” Grinning, he added, “I like a tight ass on a girl.”

  “Too bad for you I don’t like slime on a guy.”

  His black eyes glinted with anger—real anger—but he just turned away from her to surreptitiously text someone. Even from where she sat, Nadia could read the words stuck-up bitch.

  Nadia wondered whether there really were spells for turning men into toads. Probably not. But thinking about it helped.

  “Maybe we should go check on him,” Verlaine suggested after school.

  Nadia shrugged. “I don’t think so.”

  “But why are you assuming he’s cutting class? I mean, Elizabeth could have confronted him—or he could have confronted her—and he could be, I don’t know, a hostage in her house. Imprisoned!” In her mind, Verlaine saw this scenario as something suspiciously Disneyesque—Mateo seemed to be wearing a cape, even—but there was a black cave and bars over the windows and plenty of scarier elements that seemed totally like they might be Elizabeth’s modus operandi.

  “No, he’s okay. He was working his shift at La Catrina last night.”

  Verlaine paused, the keys in her hand hovering just short of her car door’s lock. “Wait, you saw him? You guys talked?”

  Awkwardly Nadia said, “Well, I saw him.”

  Through narrowed eyes, Verlaine said, “You’re spying on people again.” Nadia didn’t deny it. “Remember how I said that was maybe not such a great idea?”

  “You were the one who said we should check on him! That’s what I was doing. Just … covertly.”

  Verlaine shook her head as she unlocked the car. Her old land yacht might be beaten up and ancient and slightly stinky, like French fries were always in the glove compartment, but at least it was a little bit of a haven away from the rest of the school. When they were both inside, doors shut, Verlaine said, “You just spied on the restaurant?”

  “Yeah. I sat in front of the barbershop across the street. Hey, does the woman who works there—is she not friendly?”

  “Oh, that’s just Ginger. She never talks.” Verlaine didn’t let herself get sidetracked. “What about his house? Did you spy there, too?”

  “No. Give me some credit, okay? I just wanted to know he wasn’t in danger from Elizabeth. More danger, I mean.” Nadia raked her fingers through her black hair, and Verlaine realized her hands were shaking. Whoa. She’d known Nadia was worried about Mateo, but not that she was truly scared for him. Seeing Verlaine’s face, Nadia sighed. “Elizabeth
said—she told me Mateo was hers to control, anytime she wanted. She said she could make him love her, even believe that he’d always loved her. Which—I hate that idea, I hate it, but I’d rather think about him being with Elizabeth than the alternatives.”

  “What alternatives?”

  “Think about it. She can control him, if she wants to. What if she’s making him—do something crazy, even criminal, so everybody turns against him? Or she could have turned him into a puppet, somebody who’s just sleepwalking through life while she waits for him to have another dream. Elizabeth could even tell him to kill himself.” Nadia’s voice trembled. “Think about it. His mother did, right? We’ve been assuming that’s because the visions drove her crazy—but what if going crazy meant she just wasn’t useful to Elizabeth anymore? Elizabeth might have tossed her aside. Wadded her up and thrown her away like scrap paper. She could do it to Mateo, too.”

  Okay, all of that sounded … extremely bad. But also extremely theoretical. “Hey. Mateo was at La Catrina last night. So none of that scary stuff has happened. It’s going to be all right. You know?”

  “No. I don’t know that.”

  “Yeah, Elizabeth’s a powerful witch, but now you’ve got this badass old spell book, and your own magic, and we’ve figured out where and when her big plan is going down—”

  Nadia snapped, “But we don’t have any idea what it is, and even if we did—Verlaine, what do you think I can do about it? My magic is nothing compared to hers. Nothing. She’s hundreds of years old! By now her Book of Shadows could probably take me out by itself. If she figures out that we’re trying to get in her way—you get that this is dangerous, right?”

  “Hey, don’t bite my head off, okay?”

  “Sorry.” Nadia breathed out, then said it more like she really meant it. “I’m sorry. I’m just scared for Mateo. For all of us.”

  Fear curled up inside Verlaine’s belly, cold and slithery. She remembered the map she’d posted on the Lightning Rod website, where anyone could see it (but, of course, no one ever looked). Again she thought about the target and envisioned herself standing in the center of it, looking up at an arrow swooshing down at her out of the sky.

  But there was no running from what was coming. It was aimed not just at Verlaine, but at her uncles. Her house. Her closet. Smuckers. Everything she held dear and everything she hated—everything she knew.

  What else was there to do but try to fight?

  It seemed obvious to Verlaine, but as she watched Nadia curling up in her car, pulling on her headphones to try to shut out the world, she wasn’t sure Nadia remembered that right now.

  Mateo didn’t blow off his shifts at the restaurant. The last thing he needed to deal with was Dad freaking out at him.

  But other than that—he was free. At least until the school called his father, Mateo was free to do whatever he wanted.

  And what he wanted to do was find out exactly how badly Elizabeth Pike, his supposed best friend, had screwed him over.

  He started at home. It was easy enough to head back to the house after Dad had left to start getting ready to open La Catrina for lunch. Harder to go into the storage space beneath the house where Mom’s few remaining possessions were boxed away in a corner, behind Mateo’s old bike and a few sombreros left over from the restaurant redecoration seven years ago.

  Mateo stood staring at the boxes, a crooked tower of cardboard. They were dusty. Nobody had ever opened them, not since the day his father had crammed them down here. As fondly as Dad remembered Mom, he never went through her old things; that wasn’t his way. Mateo had thought it wasn’t his, either. But now he began opening the boxes, one by one.

  For the most part, they didn’t tell him much. He’d been hoping for a diary, something like that. Instead he found Mom’s clothes—neatly folded once, but now crumpled almost past recognition. And yet he remembered that green dress—she would wear it to Christmas parties. The pink sweater … Mateo had no one specific memory of it, but he knew he’d hugged her while she wore it.

  Hesitantly he lifted the sweater to his face and inhaled. But it didn’t smell like Mom any longer, not even her perfume. It just smelled musty, like the back room at the Goodwill.

  There were a few other things: some junky pieces of exercise equipment—she’d always had a bad habit of ordering them off television commercials, then never using them. A box filled with her costume jewelry. A folder filled with drawings he’d made for her when he was little; Mateo had to laugh at the crayoned image of him, Mom, and Cookie Monster all hanging out at the beach.

  Mom had kept every one.

  He hadn’t learned anything by going through the boxes, but for a moment, Mateo thought it didn’t matter. Being surrounded by Mom’s stuff had been comforting rather than painful—a reminder that her life hadn’t been all bad. Most of it had been great. How long had it been since Mateo let himself remember the good times instead of the awful end?

  Just as he started repacking the final box, though, a card fell to the floor.

  Mateo stooped to pick it up. It was in a lilac-colored envelope, and at first he assumed it must have been a Mother’s Day card he’d sent her. But then he saw his mother’s handwriting on the envelope: just one word, a name. Elizabeth.

  Slowly he opened the envelope. Inside, a brightly colored card with glitter around the letters read FOR A VERY SPECIAL GIRL! Mateo read the inscription in Mom’s cursive:

  I’m so glad we’ve become friends this year. Nothing has ever made me so proud as the day that you said I was like a mom to you. Well, you’re like a daughter to me! I hope we’ll always be this close.—Lauren

  The date was only two weeks before her suicide. Maybe she never got around to sending the card. Maybe she forgot about it, because Elizabeth had wanted her to forget.

  She hadn’t just made Mom crazy. She’d made Mom love her. Some of the love that should have been Mateo’s had been stolen away by a girl who was “like a daughter.”

  Mateo looked down at his pile of pictures that he had colored for Mom long ago. None of them had made his mother as proud as the illusion of something Elizabeth was supposed to have said.

  They were friends. At least, Mom had thought they were friends—the same way he had. Elizabeth must have been hanging around the house all the time when he was little, but Mateo and his dad didn’t remember a bit of it … because Elizabeth wouldn’t let them.

  Damn her. Damn her.

  Stuffing everything back in the box, Mateo prepared to confront Elizabeth at last.

  He tore out of the house, got on his bike, and sped toward Elizabeth’s neighborhood. It was a gloomy day—the sky dark and low with rain that wouldn’t quite fall. Mateo felt as though night had been draped over the daytime to blot out the sun.

  Elizabeth’s house stood out in the darkness. He could see magic now, and wondered how he hadn’t seen this before. How could anybody not see that this house was deeply, sickeningly wrong? It glowed—no, flickered—it was like firelight, in a way, but not comforting or warm. Instead it looked … the way fever felt. Hot and sickly and inescapable.

  The words Mateo wanted to say kept bubbling up inside him, but they changed from moment to moment, contradicting one another over and over:

  You killed my mother. You ruined my life.

  I thought you were my friend. Make me understand.

  I’m going to destroy you if it’s the last thing I do.

  Can you shut this Steadfast thing off? Please just end the curse and leave us alone.

  If I were ever going to murder any human being, it would be you.

  Were any of my good memories of you real? I want at least one to be real, so I know I had at least one real thing.

  I hate you. I never knew what hate was before, but now I do.

  By the time he’d reached her front steps, he still didn’t know what he wanted to say. Standing this close to her house was like standing within a bonfire; the sickly hot light surrounded him now. Mateo tried to imagine it bu
rning the halo away, but he knew that wouldn’t work. In fact, it seemed to him that he could almost feel the halo now—the circle of thorns cutting into his flesh—

  “Mateo.” Her voice came from within the flames. He couldn’t actually see Elizabeth yet. She sounded as gentle and sweet as ever; of course, she wasn’t in school either. “I’ve been worried about you.”

  All at once, he remembered Nadia so strongly that it was like she was right there with him—close enough to touch. She’d told him that he’d reacted to Elizabeth, that his Steadfast abilities had allowed him to see something unearthly in her. Something true. But when he’d reacted to that, she’d made him forget.

  Don’t react this time, he told himself as the hallucinatory flames flickered and parted. No matter what Elizabeth looks like. No matter what she really is. Don’t react.

  Elizabeth stepped closer to him, and he saw her—really saw her, for the first time.

  She wasn’t the aged, withered thing she ought to have been after four hundred years. No, her body looked like hers—if anything, she was even more beautiful.

  But she was hardly even human.

  Her skin seemed to be made of molten gold, shining and swirling and dripping along her bare limbs. Her curly chestnut hair was now a truer fire than the imaginary flames that surrounded him. Smoke swirled around her, forming her garment and her shroud. The lines of her face—while recognizably hers—were altered, with the nose almost flat and the cheekbones higher; the eyes were too large, and tilted like a cat’s. It was as if she were half-transformed into some kind of animal—a hunter, a predator. He could imagine blood dripping from that smile. Nothing he had yet seen as a Steadfast—not the scum over the sky, not the strange horned beast in the alleyway behind La Catrina, not even the halo of soot and blades around his head—had disgusted him as much. Or frightened him as much.

  Mateo didn’t react. His face remained totally expressionless, and he kept his voice even. “I’m sorry I haven’t called. It’s been—scary.”

  “You know you can always talk to me.” In her voice he could hear the rustling of dead leaves, the slithering of snakes. Her wet-gold hands cradled his face, and Mateo had to fight not to flinch. Yet she didn’t burn him; her touch felt just the same. “Tell me about your dreams.”