Steadfast(39)

“Well. Guess that showed him.” She smoothed the front of her sheath dress and went back to her desk to finish her homework. “Bet he’s not so smug anymore.”

If she could have seen Asa at that moment, she would have seen him laughing out loud in sheer delight.

How brilliant she was. How fierce. Asa enjoyed fighting with Verlaine more than he remembered enjoying time with anyone else.

He wanted to watch her from a distance, but he made himself pull back. If he paid any more attention to Verlaine Laughton, Asa thought he might actually become . . . fond of her. That would be disastrous. First of all, she was doomed. Bad long-term relationship prospects there.

Second, he couldn’t save her from whatever danger would come. While there was a bit of wiggle room for him to betray Elizabeth, he could never betray the One Beneath. Rescuing Verlaine from mortal danger would be utterly forbidden. If he broke that rule, he would be forced to endure the worst torments of hell for what would feel like centuries. No girl could be worth that, not even one so daring and delightful as Verlaine.

Even one that made him feel as if he would find it painful when she died.

Yet Asa lingered awhile, watching her anyway.

He was still in a good mood the next morning as he walked through the halls of Rodman High; even the sight of Elizabeth falling into step beside him couldn’t dim his smile. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “You just can’t wait to watch a documentary on Albert Einstein.”

“You know I have my reasons for coming here. How goes your task?”

“Let’s see.” Asa nodded toward the far end of the hall, where Nadia, Mateo, and Verlaine were all walking in.

They must have met up outside. Maybe they even came to school together. But even though the three of them walked side by side, even though they were smiling at one another, Asa could tell—there was a bit of a chill in the air that had nothing to do with autumn. Mateo didn’t have his arm around Nadia. Nadia couldn’t quite meet Verlaine’s eyes. And Verlaine crossed her arms and scowled at both Asa and Elizabeth as the two groups passed.

“The suspicion is still subtle,” Elizabeth said. “They doubt themselves more than one another. But I can see that the seeds have been planted. What next, beast?”

“Watch and wait.” He imagined the elm trees that grew all over town, many of them so old they had pushed up the sidewalks in front of them and broken the paving stones into half a dozen planes and angles. The smallest seed could cause incredible damage, given time and the right conditions to grow.

She asked, “What did you tell them?”

“The most dangerous thing of all. The truth.”


I laid out three possible ways to destroy you. Any one of them might work. All I have to do is hope at least one of them sees it. The faster they’re driven apart, the faster they can stop focusing on one another and go after you. Your work and your undoing, and I managed it in just one night. You’ll be sorry you called me beast soon enough.

Asa glanced over his shoulder at them once more. Really he should have been watching all three of them for signs of discord. Instead he only had eyes for the way Verlaine’s long, silver hair flowed down her back.

Quietly he repeated, “Everything I said was true.”





13


ON THE LIBRARY’S TV SCREEN, BLACK-AND-WHITE IMAGES of Albert Einstein flickered. The overhead lights were out. That meant Mateo’s phone glowed too brightly—but since not even the substitute cared about what “chemistry class” was up to, that worked just fine.

“It’s Latin,” Nadia whispered as she squinted down at the picture on Mateo’s phone. “At least, I think so. I’ve never studied it.”

“Does Google Translate do Latin?” Mateo asked.

“I’ll check and see.” Nadia got to work on her own phone. “Even at full magnification, the words are kind of blurry. It would be better to see the real thing.”

“Oh, yeah, I can see it now. ‘Hi, I’m the unstable guy who brought a knife to school!’ Let’s not go there.”

She put her hand on Mateo’s arm; the pain behind that joke was all too clear. “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

“It’s okay. You should see it. Just—after school, you know?”

Still, he looked shaken and tired. Nadia rubbed his arm more gently, leaned close enough to whisper in his ear. “Was it rough? Dealing with your grandmother? I know how hard that is for you.”

Mateo took a deep breath. “She wasn’t as bad as usual,” he said. “Which means she was awful. But maybe twenty percent less vindictive?”

“I say we call it a win.”

He grinned, then pointed at her phone screen. “We have a translation. Okay, according to the internet, this Latin script means something like ‘the road has three sections.’”

They met each other’s eyes in mutual bafflement. Nadia said, “I was expecting something more ominous.”

“It sounds more like directions from your GPS. ‘In three hundred yards, turn left at the fortress of doom.’”

She only barely managed to hold back a laugh. “Maybe the internet translation is wrong?”

“Probably. Do we know anybody who speaks Latin? My priest, maybe—”