Steadfast(18)

“Okay, okay. I’ll be right there.” As the door swung shut, Mateo turned back to Nadia. “I’m sorry. This sucks.”


“It’s all right.”

“You’re sure you’re okay?”

“Lots better,” she promised, even though that wasn’t exactly the same thing.

“What are you going to do now?”

“Find a spell I can use to take down Elizabeth,” Nadia said. “And figure out how in the world I’m supposed to practice that before I use it against her.”

It was as though Mateo’s embrace had healed her. Restored her. Nadia returned home energized and ready to work. Even though she had to go through an entire paternal interrogation the moment she walked in the door (“Are you kidding? An ax? What is it about this place?”), Nadia’s mind never stopped racing with possibilities. By the time she was back in her attic, she was already halfway into a plan.

Weirdly it was the whole fiasco tonight that had set her on this path. Nadia now knew she shouldn’t try to find a new spell, however powerful, and use it against Elizabeth. It took time to get to know a spell, to learn how to work with it and discover all the possible repercussions. She’d forgotten that tonight—not much chance she’d ever forget it again.

What Nadia needed was a familiar spell, one that was totally known, totally reliable . . . but could be made stronger, and used for a sneak attack.

Such as a spell of forgetting.

Nadia had used these spells only sparingly; her mother had warned her that if she ever used them on her parents she’d be in Big Trouble, and since Mom had possessed the powers to double-check whether she’d been spelled, Nadia had never broken that rule. But she’d pulled it out to make people at school forget cruel nicknames they’d invented for her and her friends, to break up a near-fight one time on the “L,” and even to get out of detention for talking in class, once back in Chicago . . . a successful spellcasting she’d never shared with Mom.

Last month, a witch in town had used this spell against Mateo with near-disastrous results. She hadn’t known Mateo was a Steadfast, hadn’t known he would make her spell far more powerful than it had ever been before. Instead of forgetting that he’d found another witch, Mateo had forgotten everything: his name, how to speak English, how to stand, nearly how to breathe.

Nadia doubted a spell of forgetting could wreck Elizabeth that badly. Surely she would have some defenses. But if Nadia intensified the spell, and had Mateo with her, they could probably take away some of Elizabeth’s memory. A lot of it.

Including, no doubt, much of her magic . . . quite possibly whatever magic she was using now to hurt Mrs. Purdhy. Enough to undo whatever her real plan was.

It was worth a try.

“Watch your back, Elizabeth,” Nadia muttered as she got to work.

As he rode his motorcycle home, Mateo did his best not to see the dark magic that still bound Captive’s Sound.

He was Nadia’s Steadfast. That meant he had a window to magic’s true nature, one even a witch couldn’t match. His first few days as a Steadfast, the signs and portents had terrified him, but by now they were all too familiar.

Every time he looked at the sky, he saw the strange, roiling film between the town and the stars—the thing that seemed to seal them off from the rest of the world. Every time he glanced at the town hall, there was a strange, glowing energy around the building, almost like fire. Lines blazed deep in the ground, the concentric rings that centered in on the site of the Halloween carnival—the leftover target from Elizabeth’s attempt to kill them all.

By now, Mateo could gun his motorcycle motor and drive past things like that without a second thought.

However, it became harder when he went home and got ready for bed. Maybe Mateo was learning how to be a Steadfast, but there was no learning how to bear the Cabot curse.

His Steadfast abilities allowed him to actually see the curse now, every time he looked in a mirror; it writhed around his head like a dark halo, one made of snakes and thorns. When Mateo looked at it, he knew that Elizabeth’s curse ticked within him like a time bomb. He knew that eventually, like his mother, grandfather, and great-grandmother before him, like all his ancestors going back to colonial times, he would go mad from the burdens of his visions—the ones that showed him slivers of the future.

Mateo could avoid seeing himself in the mirror as he washed his face and brushed his teeth. He could take a couple of Tylenol PMs in the hopes of sleeping more deeply.

But he couldn’t keep himself from dreaming.

Verlaine lay crumpled on the ground, crying so hard that the sobs racked her body. “How could you?” she said, to someone or something he couldn’t see in the blur. “You had to take this, too. You had to take the only thing I ever had.”


He tried to push forward, to see who it was who’d done this to Verlaine, though he still didn’t know what had been done, what she might have lost. Instead Verlaine seemed to disappear as he stumbled—not through the strange, misty blur that had surrounded them before, but through a forest. The dead of night. Twigs snapped under his feet, and thick oak trees and pines surrounded him on every side like the bars of an oversize cage.

In the distance he saw the arc of a flashlight sweep through the gloom, and he ducked down. It was very important not to be seen. Why? He didn’t know, couldn’t remember, but fear had seized his heart, made his pulse feel like the thumping of fear itself trying to escape from inside his chest.