Steadfast(19)

But he wasn’t afraid for himself.

Nadia stood nearby, hiding behind the trunk of one of the trees. When she peeked around the corner, a shape in the darkness moved, swinging at her viciously. The blow sounded solid, even wet—the crunch of bone in blood. She fell so limply that he knew she was dead.

“Nadia! No! Nadia—”

Mateo woke in his room, breathing hard. He’d dreamed about losing Nadia before.

This was the first time he’d ever dreamed that she was truly dead.

And he always saw the future.

Not that anybody on Earth or in hell would care, but Asa was having a terrible night.

First he’d had to go to the emergency room with his parents. (He’d decided to think of them that way for simplicity’s sake; besides, the idea of having parents again was novel enough to be entertaining.) Apparently the doctors decided his mother must have had some completely new reaction to the blood-pressure medication she was taking, and wanted to keep her overnight for observation.

“You promise I didn’t hurt anyone?” She’d been teary-eyed and shaky as they settled her in her hospital bed, fixing foam-and-Velcro cuffs around her wrists and ankles just in case she snapped again. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“You were just sick, Mom. People will understand.” Asa smiled at her, trying to be reassuring. It didn’t come naturally to him, but clearly that was what was needed.

How strange, to be able to do that and feel . . . happy that she was comforted. Maybe that was some echo of his feelings for the long-ago human mother he could no longer remember. Maybe it was human nature, soaking into him through this human shell.

Regardless, Asa thought he liked it.

Then he and his father had to leave her there and go home, which meant another couple of hours of running interference on the phone (“He can’t talk right now. We’re all very shaken up; I’m sure you understand. Can I take a message?”) while his father Googled the blood-pressure drug to see if it had caused psychotic breaks in anyone else, then called his lawyer to talk about suing GlaxoSmithKline.

Once Asa finally had a minute, he went upstairs to take a shower. There was just something about misfired magic that felt sticky against your skin, like flop sweat or spilled syrup.

He stripped off Jeremy Prasad’s designer clothes—the two-hundred-dollar jeans, the cashmere sweater, even the Calvin Klein underwear. How ridiculous, and yet . . . he had to admit, he looked good in those clothes.

As he stood in the bathroom, steam from his shower filling the air, he took a moment to admire his new possession. This body was exceedingly well made, wasn’t it? Long and lean. Taller than either of his parents, thanks to a trick of genetics. Thick, black hair that curled slightly; tawny skin; angled brows that strongly framed large, dark eyes. Sculpted muscles that gave him strong arms and good abs—and the magic that ensnared him here kept this body from aging or degenerating, so he didn’t even have to work out to keep this. Jeremy had done all the sit-ups for him.

Then he felt it—a sickening dip and sway as though he were at sea in a storm. Asa tried to right himself, but the sensation wasn’t coming from the room or the chair; it was coming from within.

It was as though something was turning him inside out, blinding him to his real surroundings, stretching him thin and forcing his attention on one point, one thing—

Elizabeth. She sat cross-legged on her floor, surrounded by glinting points of broken glass. It was as though he were with her, and yet he wasn’t.

He realized she had conjured this, making at least a shadow of him appear before her. But why did it have to hurt so much?

“Would it kill you to get a cell phone like everyone else?” he snapped.

She ignored this. She ignored pretty much everything she couldn’t use. Even the fact that he stood naked in front of her was meaningless to Elizabeth. “There was a disturbance tonight. Magic far too strong for its purpose. You were near it, weren’t you?”

“But not responsible.”

“Nadia?”

“Even though her Steadfast was nowhere near her. It turns out she’s significantly out of her depth.”


Asa told her the whole story, exaggerating Nadia’s panic slightly; it made the telling better, and it seemed to amuse Elizabeth, insofar as anything that ancient and evil could be amused. When he got to the part where his mother had started swinging an ax around, she actually laughed out loud.

“Good,” she said. “The sooner she recognizes her own limitations, the sooner she’ll understand that she has to turn to me.”

He didn’t understand the urgency behind Elizabeth’s desire to convert Nadia Caldani into her apprentice, but it wasn’t his to question. “What next?”

Elizabeth smiled slowly. “She won’t come to me for her own sake. Nadia will only turn to me to save another. The question is who.”





7


ELIZABETH WALKED THROUGH THE STREETS OF CAPTIVE’S Sound—ignoring those who waved and smiled at her, knowing they would remember her smiling back anyway—until she reached the old blue Victorian house on Felicity Street. There she knocked and waited for an answer.

Nadia’s father opened the door, and this time she really did smile.

He returned the smile, but vaguely. Her protective glamours would allow him only to think of her as one of his daughter’s friends, a sweet girl with chestnut curls. “Elizabeth—that’s the name, right? Nice to see you.”