Spellcaster

  Verlaine realized she didn’t get a vote on whether or not Mateo got to come back on board. For one, he was the Steadfast, which meant he brought some mojo to the table. For two, he was the one Elizabeth had cursed to see the future, which both made him Victim Number One and added to said mojo.

  Still, he’d totally ditched them for a whole week. Instead of working on the huge enormous crisis threatening their whole town, he’d been—well, okay, he’d been dealing with massive personal betrayal and renewed grief for his dead mother. Which was actually a valid distraction.

  But Verlaine? She’d been working. Carefully she’d put together a file of her findings about the sinkholes, complete with a PowerPoint presentation, and sent it to the city council; even without any mention that magic was responsible, they ought to be able to figure out that something was seriously wrong, something centered on Swindoll Park. Maybe that would be enough to get them to cancel the Halloween carnival or at least move it. But she hadn’t heard anything from the council office. Apparently reading mail from high school students wasn’t their top priority. Idiots.

  Besides, now that Mateo was here in the Guardian offices with them, ready to be productive again, Verlaine was ready to give the guy another shot. Then again, was he even here to be productive?

  Because he wasn’t going through the records she’d spent all weekend pulling. No, he was staring at Nadia all rapt and gooey, like he was seeing a rainbow for the first time, or something about that sappy. And, of course, he was currently engaged in the oh-so-important task of drawing something in pen on the side of Nadia’s sneaker—a tree, maybe. Verlaine was torn between thinking it was completely irritating and feeling the familiar ache of wishing that some guy, any guy, would look at her that way.

  Anything can change, she reminded herself fiercely.

  “Okay,” she said. “The big question here is, how do we stop Elizabeth in her tracks?”

  Nadia and Mateo shared a look; apparently they hadn’t realized that Verlaine intended to take over the meeting. Well, that was what happened when certain persons were too busy being twitterpated to concentrate on the business at hand. Certain other persons had to seize control. And put together the PowerPoint presentations.

  She turned her laptop around so that it showed a white screen with the header: Operation Stop Elizabeth. That slide dissolved into the next, which had three columns: A—Face her directly. B—Secretly undermine her plans. C—Provide alternate action/distraction.

  “As you can see, Option A has serious shortcomings,” Verlaine said. “Mostly because Elizabeth is powerful enough to squash us all like bugs.” The next slide revealed a clip art cartoon she’d found of a smushed bug, complete with xs over its eyes and a tongue sticking out of its mouth. “Which means we need to look at Options B or C.”

  Nadia raised her hand, then stared at it, like she couldn’t believe she’d just asked permission to talk. “Uh—I think Option C is a no-go.”

  Verlaine shook her head. “No, think about it! We get her to believe there’s some other powerful witch just out of town, or—maybe a magical artifact she’d like to get her hands on. I don’t know what that would be, but you can come up with something, right?”

  Still Nadia looked unenthused. “Whatever it is Elizabeth has planned for Halloween night—it’s big. It’s important to her. And she’s been setting this up for a long time. I don’t know whether we could think of anything capable of distracting her. I’m not even sure something like that exists.”

  Well, so much for the next slide, which had all Verlaine’s ideas about Option C, her personal favorite. Her disappointment must have showed, because Mateo quickly said, “Hey, that leaves us with Option B. We concentrate on what we can do, not what we can’t. Right?”

  “Right,” Nadia said. Mateo smiled at Verlaine, like she had been really smart to bring them to this point. Maybe he was okay after all.

  Of course, she hadn’t come up with as many choices for Option B—

  Then an idea came to her. “Hey, you said a Book of Shadows has its own power, right?”

  “Right,” Nadia said, looking up at her. Mateo never glanced away from Nadia.

  “And the stronger the witch, the stronger her book.”

  “Eventually, yeah.”

  Verlaine grinned. “So why don’t we steal Elizabeth’s Book of Shadows? I mean, she’s four hundred and something years old, so her book has to be, like, the most powerful ever.”

  “No.” Nadia held out a hand, as though she were physically going to stop Verlaine from trying. “Don’t ever, ever suggest that again. Don’t even think about it.”

  “Why not?” Mateo looked as startled as Verlaine felt. “It sounded like a good idea to me.”

  But Nadia shook her head as she rose and paced across the room, Mateo’s little sketch still only half-finished on her shoe. “Both of you—you have to listen to me. Everything Verlaine said is true. Which means a Book of Shadows that old, that powerful—it probably has power beyond anything we can imagine. It might have … consciousness.”

  Verlaine bit her lip. “You mean, it would know we were there?”

  “Possibly. I can’t be sure.” Nadia raked a hand through her black hair, which gleamed in the afternoon light filtering in through the dusty Guardian windows. “Certainly Elizabeth will have protected it, and probably it protects itself. If we go after it, it could hurt us. Physically, mentally. Mateo, you should never even look directly at it. I don’t know what it might do. No matter what Elizabeth’s doing, going after her Book of Shadows isn’t worth the risk.”

  Mateo considered that in silence, but there was something hovering beneath the surface—Verlaine could see how badly he wanted to speak. Finally he said, “What if we just destroyed the book?”

  “How would we do that without finding it?” Verlaine said.

  He shrugged. “I could burn her house down. I … might have thought about that anyway.”

  Nadia put one hand on his arm. “Don’t.”

  That was all she said, but the anger seemed to flow away from him.

  Did they not know yet that they were crazy about each other? Verlaine had to wonder. But her curiosity was only a little moth darting about in her mind, around this great big flame that felt a lot like fear.

  Elizabeth was evil and ancient and up to no good, and all they had to go up against her with was Nadia’s power and Mateo’s Steadfastness or whatever you would call it, and Verlaine’s own … newspaper internship. Wow, Elizabeth was probably throwing up from pure terror right now, only not. What were they going to do? Was there any point in doing anything? Should they just try to get their families to take cruises around Halloween? Verlaine tugged at the tips of her hair, then frowned as her fingernail caught in yet another tangle. It was a nasty one, practically matted. One of these days she was going to cut this whole mess away and go for a pixie cut. Anxious and frustrated, Verlaine hopped down from the ladder, her black Converse shoes slapping against the tile floor, and grabbed a pair of scissors to snip the tangle off.

  As she did so, Mateo gasped.

  Verlaine turned to look at him; so did Nadia, who frowned. “Mateo? What is it?”

  “Verlaine’s hair,” he said.

  She stared down at the little tangle still drifting down into the trash can. “It was never going to comb out. Besides, when it’s this long, nobody notices if it’s a little uneven on the ends.”

  “I’m not talking about your hairstyle,” he said, like that ought to have been obvious, which it probably should have been. “I mean, when you cut it, there was this little … shower of sparks. Only for a second. Now it’s gone.”

  “No, there wasn’t.” Why would there be?

  Then it hit Verlaine: Mateo could see things other people couldn’t. He could see magic.

  Nadia’s eyes widened. “What color were the sparks?”

  “Dark red. Really dark. Nearly black,” Mateo answered. “The same as the ones—” His expression changed as he said, mo
re slowly, “The same as the ones I saw the night I became Nadia’s Steadfast. They were surrounding you then, too.”

  “What does that mean?” Verlaine grabbed a handful of her hair and stared at it, like suddenly she’d be able to see the magic for herself. “Did Elizabeth curse me? Or was it something with the Steadfast thing going wrong?”

  “With that color, I’m guessing it’s old magic,” Nadia said, as if that were remotely comforting. “Something that happened a long time ago but still left—traces behind. And red probably means dark magic. Mateo, how come you didn’t mention it before?”

  “I thought it was just part of the spell you were casting then,” Mateo said. “I wouldn’t have known the difference then, or even now, if you hadn’t just explained.”

  Nadia stepped closer to Verlaine and stared like she’d never really seen her before. “Verlaine … when did your hair go gray?”

  “Since I was little. It’s almost always been this way.” She was the only gray-haired person in her first-grade class photo. “It was brown when I was a baby. Not after that. The only pictures where I have dark hair are the ones when I’m little bitty, with my—”

  Verlaine couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t think. The possibility pushing into her mind didn’t leave room for anything else.

  Mateo took her arm as if he was afraid she might fall over. “Verlaine? What’s wrong?”

  “With my parents,” Verlaine whispered. “I had dark hair while my parents were alive.”

  The Guardian was always quiet, but now the silence seemed like another presence in the room, something so enormous and ominous that it surrounded them all. Nadia and Mateo exchanged a look before Nadia said, “How did they die?”

  Legs trembling, breath weak in her chest, Verlaine braced herself against the front desk. “They said it was viral pneumonia. Had to have been. We—we all went to Uncle Dave’s house one night, and apparently everything was fine. Then he didn’t hear from them for a couple of days and got worried. He came over and found them; they’d died in their bed. I was in my crib crying. They had been dead for at least a day. It was like they both got so sick so fast they couldn’t even call a doctor.”

  “Oh, Verlaine.” Nadia put an arm around her, which was the first time anybody besides her dads had tried to comfort Verlaine in so, so long. But she couldn’t really remember her parents, couldn’t remember that weekend she’d been trapped in a house with dead people. The pain she felt was for their absence even from her memories—and now, for something else besides.

  “It wasn’t viral pneumonia, was it?” Verlaine whispered. “Was it magic? Did Elizabeth do something to them? Did she do something to me?”

  “I can’t say. Not without”—after hesitating, Nadia finished—“visiting the graves.”

  Verlaine grabbed her books. “I have to go.”

  “Hey, wait. Don’t run off like that. You’re upset.” Mateo put an arm out, but Verlaine roughly pushed him aside.

  “I need to be alone. Okay?” Without waiting for an answer, Verlaine ran out into the chilly gray afternoon. She didn’t want to think about Nadia, or Elizabeth, or magic, or her parents. But the reminder blew around her in the whipping wind, silver and gray, a part of Verlaine forever.

  “Nobody ever brought it up,” Mateo said a few minutes later as he and Nadia walked along the street that led to the heart of downtown … at least, as much downtown as Captive’s Sound had.

  “How? Two healthy people, not old or anything, and they die of the flu overnight without even calling somebody? That didn’t strike people as bizarre?”

  When Nadia was trying to figure something out, she got this little worried look—so serious—and Mateo already felt like he knew that look by heart.

  He said only, “Weirder stuff happens all the time. Especially in Captive’s Sound.”

  Nadia sighed. “I guess that makes sense. Here, people’s idea of ‘bizarre’ might be … warped. But I wish Verlaine hadn’t run off like that.”

  “Sometimes you need some space to deal.” That was as close as Mateo could get to apologizing for the way he’d acted recently. But Nadia didn’t seem to need an apology. When she looked at him with those dark eyes, he felt like she understood everything about him, even the parts he barely understood himself.

  He’d missed her so much during the time he tried to stay away. Even though he’d tried not to think about the Craft or the curse or anything like that, it was the subtler things Mateo had missed. That little determined look she got when she focused on a problem. How calm and accepting she was of the craziest things. The way she doodled cubes and pyramids in the margins of her chem notes. How she always looked down at the cafeteria food with fresh despair, its horribleness a surprise to her every single time—like she was always hoping for something better.

  When Mateo thought of all those things together, something tightened within his chest, and felt very like the emotion for her that had always welled up in his dreams....

  No longer able to meet Nadia’s eyes, Mateo turned his head away and looked into the far distance. Verlaine was nowhere to be seen. She must have sprinted for her car, driven off like a bat out of hell. “What do you think happened to her family?”

  “I’m not sure. All I know is that she still bears the scars. Whatever that magic was, it still has some kind of hold on her, even now.”

  “Now? You mean, Verlaine’s—is she cursed? Like me?”

  “Did you see that halo around her?”

  The dark, thorned shape that circled his reflection in the mirror still had the power to turn Mateo’s stomach. It always would, he thought. “No. So, not a curse, then.”

  “But what? I have to figure this out. I’ll keep working with Goodwife Hale’s book, see if there’s anything there.” Nadia hesitated. “Which is about five hours of me trying to read something closer to Middle English than anything normal—”

  “It’s okay,” Mateo said, though he realized how badly he didn’t want to leave her. “Gotta get my hair cut this afternoon. But—call me tonight? Tell me what you found?”

  “I might not find anything.”

  “Call anyway.”

  She ducked her head, glancing away from him with a small smile on her full lips, and despite the cold fall wind, Mateo felt warm all over. Nadia’s dark eyes rose to meet his again as she said, “Okay.”

  He simply lifted his hand in a wave as she walked off.

  This is why I never fell for Elizabeth, Mateo thought as he watched her go. Because she’s nothing like Nadia.

  Mateo walked into the barbershop more or less on autopilot, hardly seeing anything in front of his eyes. He didn’t have to, though; he’d been coming to Ginger Goncalves for his haircuts as long as he could remember. All he did was nod, barely seeing her as he got into the barber chair. She’d know what to do.

  He found that if he stared really hard at his shoes, he didn’t see anything of the terrible halo in the mirror, not even out of the corner of his eye.

  As Ginger used the electric razor at the back of his neck, once again he thought of Verlaine, alone and probably terrified. All these years he’d known her, and yet he’d never bothered talking with her—never dreamed they had so much in common, that magic had scarred both their lives as soon as they’d begun. And though he’d heard the story of her parents’ deaths, because old stories never died in small towns, he’d never questioned it. Verlaine’s gray hair was like Ginger’s muteness: a part of her, a small strangeness that on its own meant nothing, but in a larger pattern—

  Wait.

  He focused on the reflection in the mirror—hard for him to do, with the loathsome halo writhing around his head—but now, behind him, he could see Ginger.

  Ginger, with a shadow of that same writhing energy coiled around her throat.

  Ginger, who hadn’t spoken since the church fire in 1995.

  Nadia had talked about other witches. How there had to have been others in Captive’s Sound sometime.

  And men
couldn’t be told about witchcraft, but women could.

  Did Ginger have any idea what had happened to her? Did she understand at all?

  Mateo had no clue how to bring this up, but he figured he had to try. He cleared his throat, and she glanced up at him with a pleasant smile. It was okay to ask her yes or no questions, even to communicate with short notes. But it was still tough to get this out. “Ginger?”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Do you—do you believe in magic?”

  It was vague enough to mean anything. A song lyric. A joke. If Ginger didn’t understand, Mateo figured, she’d laugh or shrug. Blow it off.

  But Ginger went stiff. Her usual ease had vanished; now her face was pale, and she didn’t seem to know what to do.

  That meant he was onto something, right? Had to. Mateo decided to venture one more comment, something that would seem totally innocent to anybody who wasn’t knee-deep in witchcraft: “I’ve been thinking a lot about it lately. Hey, you know Elizabeth Pike, right?”

  The razor clattered to the linoleum floor, where it buzzed and jittered amid the scraps of his shorn hair. Ginger jerked away, backing up with wide eyes, until she thudded into the far wall.

  “Hey—don’t be scared.” Mateo got up, held out his hands. He felt stupid trying to do this with a black plastic apron around his neck, so he quickly took that off. “It’s okay. It is, really.”

  Ginger slid along the wall to her front desk, like she was going for the phone to call 911. Did she think he’d gone crazy, like all the Cabots? Or was her fear much deeper—because it was based in the truth?

  Mateo tried, “Is this—are you freaking out because—because of—?” He gestured toward her throat.

  That was obviously the last straw for Ginger. Grabbing a pen and an appointment card from the desk, she scrawled something, then held it up for Mateo to see: GET OUT!

  He got out.

  Running down the street, beneath the roiling sky and the chained houses—the whole surreal landscape he was learning to recognize as the truth of his hometown—Mateo grabbed his phone out of his pocket and hit Nadia’s name. She answered on the second ring. “Hello?”