At least Dad wasn’t home yet. Mateo slammed the door behind him and stumbled to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face. It wasn’t much, but it seemed to help.
At least, until he stood up and looked in the mirror.
His face was the same, but around it was—Mateo would have called it a halo, except that it was dark instead of light. Within it twisted shapes, too foggy and indefinite to be identified, but his mind supplied suggestions. Snakes. Broken glass. Thorns.
Water dripping from his forehead and chin, Mateo lifted his shaking hands to try to touch the halo. Would it feel like slime? Like razor blades? It couldn’t be anything good; it had to hurt, but somehow he had to prove to himself that it was really there.
Instead his hands passed right through it. Mateo felt a slight chill against his fingers, but nothing else.
In his reflection, the halo swirled around his fingers, seeming to stick to them like tar.
Mateo bolted from the bathroom and ran from his house, scrambling down the rocky slope that led from their backyard down to the beach. Gritty sand dragged at his boots as he stumbled toward the ocean—toward the vast darkness where nothing had changed, nothing was sick, and everything remained sane.
Is that why you did it, Mom? Is that why you decided to drown? Was this the last place left you could get any peace?
But the waves weren’t dark any longer. Out in the distance, not far from the lighthouse, a beam shone up from the water like a spotlight aimed at the stars. It gleamed a vivid pale green, more steadily than it should have for something submerged in the ocean.
Hugging himself against the chill, staring at the eerie light, Mateo fought back the urge to vomit. The fear that had been haunting him since the dreams began was on him now, like a bird of prey on its kill, and he felt paralyzed. Numbly he thought that he should call Elizabeth—one of the handful of numbers saved in his phone, by far his most called. She’d know what to do. She always did.
But Elizabeth still believed he was sane, and he couldn’t bear the thought of her giving up on him like everybody else.
Soon everyone would know, though. Dad, Gage, even Nadia—
Nadia, the girl he’d thought he might be able to keep safe. What a joke. Maybe his insanity was the reason she was going to die.
Then, once more, he remembered the light in her attic—the light that had surrounded her.
Which was a stupid thing to be thinking about, except that something about that light—some quality it had that he couldn’t name—was sort of like the halo he’d seen in the mirror. The difference was that the halo was hideous, and that light had been beautiful. But they were alike.
And both of them were like the strange green glow he saw out in the sound.
How was that possible?
And what did Nadia Caldani have to do with it?
Even taking time to make waffles for Cole and double-check that he had all his art supplies, Nadia got to school early. She hoped to have a chance to sneak into the chemistry lab.
Something was buried there—long buried, sunk deep. Whatever it was, it held enormous power.
Was that power linked to the darker fate she saw in store for Captive’s Sound? It had taken Nadia the better part of an hour to calm Verlaine down, to explain that the devastation she saw could be either a week or a century away, or anything in between. But as Verlaine had said—that meant “one week” was a possibility, and so they’d better figure some things out sooner rather than later.
Rodman High wasn’t deserted, even this early; a few teachers on morning duty stood around clutching go-mugs of coffee, and a couple of cheerleaders were putting up posters about the first football game. But none of them paid much attention to Nadia as she darted inside. Despite the uncertainty churning inside her, she continued with her plan to investigate the chemistry lab.
Great. All I have to do is throw my stuff in my locker and figure out a question to ask the Piranha if she shows up in her room early—
Halfway down the hall, Nadia froze. There, sitting on the floor with his back against her locker, was Mateo. To judge by his rumpled hair and the shadows under his eyes, he might have been there for hours, even all night.
At the echo of her footsteps, Mateo looked up. “Nadia. Hey.”
“Hi.” She started walking toward him, her backpack off one shoulder, unsure what to think. But when she saw again how exhausted he looked, she said, “Are you okay?”
“No.” Mateo pushed himself to his feet. “Listen. I know how this is going to sound. I’ve gone over this in my head about a thousand times, trying to make it make sense. It never does. But I’ve got to ask you.” He took a deep breath as she reached him, and they were face-to-face. “Last night—when I looked into your attic and saw that light—”
Oh, crap. Nadia tried to think of another, better explanation than she’d been able to come up with last night.
But then he said, “Did you do something to me?”
“Do something to you? Did it—did the attic light hurt your eyes?” Maybe cleansing flame was damaging to people who weren’t prepared for it? Nadia had never heard of anything like that, but maybe it was only one of the countless things Mom hadn’t gotten around to explaining.
“After I left your house, for a while I felt kind of dizzy—disoriented—”
Which could happen to a Steadfast, but that had to be a coincidence.
“—then I started seeing things.” Mateo’s hands were clenching and unclenching at his sides, like he had to force himself to get through this. “As in, strange phantom animals in the alleyway. Weird lights and stuff around houses. And the sky—it’s all over town, and I thought it might be better when the sun went up, but it’s not. It’s like Captive’s Sound is completely surrounded by something dirty and cloudy and—and evil.”
This can’t be happening, she thought. There’s no possible way. It was like things falling upward. Or suddenly needing to breathe water instead of air. Men didn’t possess magic. They couldn’t. That rule was absolute.
“Were you maybe—I don’t know—cooking some kind of drugs? Something that makes you trip? The purple flame—that could be a hallucination, maybe.” He held up his hands. “I swear I won’t report you, or anything like that, but if that’s true, please tell me the truth so I’ll know this is going to get out of my system.”
Nadia shook her head no, even though that lie would have been her best out. As she did so, the brief hope in his eyes died.
“You think I’m crazy.” Mateo smiled grimly. “Of course you do. You’ve been in town, what, almost two weeks now? So people already got to you and told you that I’m—that my family—they told you, right?”
“The family curse,” she whispered.
Mateo raked one hand through his dark brown hair, clearly trying to hold himself together—and failing. “So you think I’m insane, like everyone else does. Maybe I am. I guess—I guess—” He seemed to remember where he was, and the look of regret on his face cut her to the bone. “I’m sorry I bothered you about it. Could you just, maybe, not tell anybody about this?”
She nodded. He started to walk away, his shoulders slumped, utterly defeated.
No, he couldn’t have become her Steadfast. But if the curse on his family was real, was it possible that there had been some strange reaction between the curse and the Steadfast spell? That didn’t make any sense according to the magical theory she knew, but the visions he was describing sounded all too familiar. By now she knew that what he’d seen—the shroud of evil hanging over this entire town—was very real.
And if there was any chance that she was responsible for what he was seeing, then she couldn’t let Mateo walk away thinking he was going mad.
“Mateo?” He only half turned, so she took a few steps closer to him. “What you saw—in the attic—”
“Yeah?”
You must never speak of witchcraft to any man. One of the First Laws—but maybe there was a way to bend that rule without breaking it.
“It wasn’t drugs. But it—it wasn’t only the light.”
Slowly he came back toward her. “Then what was it?”
“I can’t tell you.” Before he could protest, Nadia held up a hand. “I mean it. I can’t.”
“Did it do this to me? Whatever it was?”
“I’m not sure. I can find out, though. If it did, maybe I can undo it.”
Mateo’s eyes lit up with desperate hope. Though he clearly had no idea what she was talking about, he was clutching at any possibility. “Come on. You have to tell me.”
“I can’t,” Nadia insisted. “Mateo, please. I know this is hard for you—”
“Thinking I’m going crazy like my mom? The one who drowned herself in the ocean? You have no idea how hard that is for me.”
Almost on instinct, Nadia laid one hand against his chest to comfort him. He instantly stilled at her touch. It was amazing to think she could do that just by touching him.
Quickly she said, “We have to trust each other right now, okay? We have to … take some things on faith. You just have to understand—I believe you about everything you say you’ve seen. I believe in you.”
Mateo’s lips parted slightly. Was it that astonishing, thinking that somebody really might trust him?
Nadia finished, “So I’m asking you to believe in me right now. Let me work this out. If I had anything to do with what’s happening to you—I’ll know soon.”
He nodded. “Today? This week?”
Right away, Nadia wanted to say, but already people were starting to mill around in the hallways—only a few, but enough that she no longer felt safe to experiment in the lab uninterrupted.
But there was something she might be able to try even in the middle of class—quiet, simple, something nobody would even notice her casting—and she needed to do this right away, during the next class period they shared.
She looked back at Mateo and gave him the most encouraging smile she could manage. “Sometime during chemistry.”
“Obviously we need to review how to write a lab report,” the Piranha said as everyone began assembling their materials. “I’ve put an outline on the board, which should prove useful to those of you who have learned how to read. This is apparently a minority.”
Nadia had finally been assigned a lab partner, which would have been bad news for her today no matter what. The fact that she’d been stuck with that slimy Jeremy Prasad made it worse. She didn’t care what Verlaine said; as far as Nadia was concerned, the view wasn’t worth it, no matter how hot he was.
“She’s such a bitch,” he said as he handed Nadia the sodium bicarbonate for their experiment.
“The Piranha?” Nadia shrugged. She kept glancing over at Mateo, who looked as exhausted as he had this morning, though apparently it was comforting for him to be near Elizabeth. Every time their eyes met, he smiled. They must really be in love. How awesome for them. “Basic teacher snark, if you ask me.”
“She shouldn’t talk down to us. Somebody should teach that woman her place. We pay her salary.”
Nadia wondered how many checks Jeremy had written to the school board lately. “We’re supposed to write down our impressions of all the equipment and materials for the experiment.”
“We get to write down our impressions of baggies? This is supposed to be a good use of our time?”
“If you do that part, I’ll do the harder stuff later,” Nadia promised. Not that Jeremy deserved a break, but she had better things to do.
Once again she turned her attention to the power she sensed underfoot. The burial was deep underground; that meant she was unlikely to be able to get to it through non-magical means. Which meant that if she wanted to use magic to get the buried thing out again, she would be taking it out sight unseen, with no idea what the source of that powerful magic was. That was an extremely bad plan. Possibly whoever had buried this … whatever … had had a very good reason.
And yet—she was tempted. Nadia itched to discover it, even if it were likely to blow up in her face like Pandora’s box.
To have power—real power—beyond anything Mom had ever known, to be able to stand up and say, See what you walked away from? I’m stronger than you. Stronger than anyone. You shouldn’t have left me behind.
Nadia blinked, shook her head. The shudder of vengeful fury that passed through her was gone in an instant, but the uneasiness it left behind lingered.
And she realized—that fury hadn’t entirely been her own. It had belonged, in part, to whatever lay beneath the lab.
Now Nadia understood that mysterious presence as she never had before. It did not merely wait there: It lurked. It seethed. It longed to break free—
—and wreak vengeance.
Vengeance on what, she didn’t know. She no longer wanted to. The only thing she understood was that it couldn’t be directly causing any devastation in Captive’s Sound; it lacked that power, and she was grateful.
Whatever lay imprisoned beneath the school had been put there for good reason. The entity she sensed was buried beneath any retrieval, and they were safe from it, and that was actually all she needed to know for now.
Besides, at the moment, her attention should be focused on whatever she’d done to Mateo.
It wasn’t as if she could cast any elaborate spells right here in the middle of class. But something basic might be effective, if Mateo’s problem was what she suspected.
If he was cursed—truly cursed, the inheritor of a dark magic hundreds of years old—then that meant he might potentially react to magic in a different way. Nadia wasn’t exactly sure how that would work, but it seemed plausible.
And a basic spell of liberation might make the magic … unstick.
Well, it was worth a shot, anyway.
Nadia’s fingers found the small ivory drop at her bracelet, and she put the ingredients together:
Helpless laughter.
Washing away what cannot come clean.
A moment of forgiveness.
The first two were easy —
Her thirteenth birthday party, when they put a pair of Cole’s Pull-Ups on her best friend’s Boston terrier and they all got hysterical, rolling on the floor.
Taking her first shower in the new house, three in the morning after the wreck, mud under her fingernails and a piece of car glass in her hair, feeling like it would never, ever all rinse clean.
But forgiveness? Nadia dug deep.
Weeks of wondering if Dad had driven Mom away, if there had been an affair or something Nadia hadn’t known about, all ending the moment she tiptoed to the kitchen late at night and glimpsed her father bent over the table, his head in his hands, so miserable that she knew, just knew, he hadn’t seen any of this coming.
It was enough. She felt the spell swirling outward, invisible but powerful—
—really powerful—
“You know what?” Jeremy said loudly. “I’m sick of this.” With that he shoved all the lab equipment off their table; it fell to the floor with a crash.
“You know what I’m sick of?” The Piranha put her hands on her hips. “You. All of you. This entire school. I could be in yoga right now instead of trying to pour information into the sieves you call your brains.”
Several students started laughing. One girl started crying. Another reached around her own back and unfastened her bra through her sweater, groaning in relief as it went slack.
What the—
Another girl and a guy started making out. So did two guys in the far corner. Jeremy started tearing up his chemistry book, ripping pages out in hanks, then shredding them one by one. The Piranha kicked off her shoes and took a one-footed position that Nadia remembered from her own yoga class as Tree Pose.
Mateo sat up straight. “What’s wrong with people?”
“I don’t know,” Nadia said. But she was starting to put it together. A spell of liberation could make people feel a little, well, uninhibited. But that was normally a minor side effect, enough to maybe give someone the giggle
s, not to make an entire roomful of people completely forget where they were. The spell had been more powerful than usual—no, more powerful than ever.
That wasn’t the effect of whatever lay beneath this room. If anything, that would have dimmed the spell, not enhanced it.
That—that was the kind of boost you could only get from a Steadfast.
Verlaine was nowhere near here, and besides, Nadia already knew the spell hadn’t worked on her. Which meant the only option—the only possibility—
It can’t be true, Nadia thought wildly. Everything she knew about magic was built on a few fundamental principles, and the most fundamental principle of all was that men couldn’t hold magic. A curse was one thing—you didn’t hold that; it held you. So men could be cursed. But being a Steadfast should be as impossible for a man as the sun circling the Earth.
“What’s going on?” Mateo said. He was clearly unaffected by the spell—another sign. Steadfasts weren’t as susceptible to simple magic. Then he turned toward Elizabeth—who remained still by his side—and gasped out loud. “Oh, my God. My God.”
Mateo started backing away from Elizabeth, and the expression on his face was the last thing Nadia would have expected to see: utter horror.
Elizabeth made a swift, fluttering gesture with one hand; for the first time, Nadia noticed that she wore little rings on each finger—rings made out of the same materials Nadia wore on her bracelet. Mateo swayed once on his feet, then snapped out of it, turning again to Nadia. “What’s going on?”
All around them, the kissing and laughter and even singing continued unabated. The Piranha, instead of calling for order, was on the floor in Low Cobra Pose. Nadia didn’t look at any of it; she could only stare at Elizabeth. Meanwhile Elizabeth held her hand out over the floor—parallel to it—almost as though she were trying to calm an animal or a very small child.
Or, Nadia thought, something buried beneath the school.
That was ludicrous, wasn’t it? Surely it had to be. Probably Nadia was freaking out because her spell had spun so wildly out of control, and because she’d just learned the incredible truth that Mateo was her Steadfast. Her imagination was running away with her.