Steadfast(29)

Verlaine hesitantly raised her hand. “So, do we have a firm date for this take-Elizabeth-down plan?”

“Tomorrow night?”

“Whoa.” Verlaine’s eyes widened. “I was being sarcastic. Are you kidding? Tomorrow night?”

“Yeah. I’m ready.” Was she? Nadia had learned how to focus the spell of forgetfulness more sharply; at this point, further delay probably just gave Elizabeth more time to catch on. Now that Mateo’s condition had worsened, her resolve hardened into certainty. “We need a location over water—it’s not like I couldn’t cast the spell without that, but over water would be ideal.” And, in this case, nothing less than perfection would do. “We could take a boat out, but it’s been so windy. The sound’s too rough. Is there, like, a bridge we could go to? One nobody is likely to drive over while we’re there? Someplace out of the way.”

Mateo and Verlaine, the two locals, exchanged a look. It was Mateo who said, “I guess there’s Davis Bridge.”

“Out to Raven Isle,” Verlaine added. “But do we have to actually be on the bridge? Because it’s pretty run-down. Nobody’s used it to go to Raven Isle for years now, not even on a dare.”

Nadia brushed this aside. “It doesn’t have to stand for much longer. Tomorrow night, and that’s all.”

She felt suddenly free. Imagine—forty-eight hours from now, they might be free from Elizabeth forever. Mateo smiled tiredly, and she knew he was trying hard to believe it, too.

When Novels class was over, Verlaine was able to catch up to Asa on the way out. “You need to tell me what’s going on with Mateo.”

Yeah, okay, they were going after Elizabeth tomorrow night—but Asa didn’t know that, and Verlaine figured the more information they had to work with, the better.

“Why would I ever do that?” Asa shrugged on his backpack as though the books weighed nothing; he turned and walked backward through the hallway, never running into anyone. The crowds just parted around him, perhaps sensing the strange heat from his skin. “You’re desperate for someone to talk to, aren’t you?”

That hit too close to the bone. Verlaine stopped walking. “At least I’m not Elizabeth’s slave. And if I were, I’d try to do something about it. Not just sit and smirk and pretend I’m something besides her dog on a leash.”

So that was what it looked like when you wiped the smile off that face. She’d never scored a point off Jeremy Prasad, but apparently she did better when it came to demons from the furnace of hell.

Asa had stopped walking, too, now. He leaned toward her, close enough for her to feel that searing heat, to see the blaze in his dark eyes. “You think it’s so simple, throwing off the shackles of the One Beneath? You think you understand damnation? Slavery? Eternity? You understand nothing.”

“I understand that you hate Elizabeth as much as we do,” she shot back.

“Meaningless. Irrelevant. And foolish, too. You’re still mostly arguing with the worthless boy who used to live in this body, instead of with me. I don’t think you’re ready to understand what I am, or what I can do. But you will.” Asa’s smile was feral now. Dangerous. Verlaine realized she was holding her books in front of her chest like a shield, but she managed to keep a straight face, even as he whispered, “You think you have nothing to lose. But you are so, so wrong.”

Nothing to lose. Those words kept ringing inside her mind, taunting her, as Asa strolled away.

Verlaine tried to distract herself and take part in journalism class, but that went about as well as it usually did. “So, we should try to find out what Mrs. Purdhy and Riley have in common. Did Riley come to see her, maybe? You know, talk to an old teacher? This could be some disease she brought home from Brown. And we ought to see if there have been any reports of illnesses there that involve weird black . . . stuff.”

It was like she was sitting in a bell jar, none of her words escaping. Desi Sheremata, who had inexplicably been named editor despite hardly caring about the Lightning Rod site, pulled up a sample home page that was all old photos of Riley Bender from previous years’ annuals. The headline, centered over a picture of Riley in her homecoming crown, said Our Prayers Are With Her. “I was thinking we could have a text box where people write in their good wishes for Riley, you know?”

Everyone else nodded and smiled, like that was a really great plan instead of not journalism at all. Mr. Davis only said, “We’ll want to moderate comments. Even with a tragedy, people will troll.”

Especially with a tragedy. People seemed to get uglier in response to real emotions, at least in Verlaine’s experience. Because nobody ever much noticed when she was hurting unless they wanted to make it worse for her.

Nothing to lose.

Verlaine raised her hand. “What about the investigative piece on the Halloween carnival? We’re still running it, right?”

“Nobody actually got hurt,” Desi huffed. “So it’s kind of old news.”

“It wasn’t even two weeks ago!” Okay, nobody else here knew it had actually been the work of one of hell’s minions, aka Elizabeth Pike, but still, a huge fire in the middle of town had to count as newsworthy if anything did.

Desi folded her arms. “I think you’re more interested in a byline than in what happens to Riley Bender.”