Steadfast(64)

“I didn’t know I was breaking it, you see. But it turns out there are good reasons for the law that tells us we must never bear a child to the son of another witch.”

“Wait. You mean Dad?”

“Normally witches know enough of each other to warn people away from relationships they shouldn’t be in. Witches learn to recognize one another; you must have picked up on that by now.” Mom sighed. “There are female relatives and coven members around to provide warnings if a mother has died, usually. But if that mother emigrated far from her native country, if she passed away long before she could find a new circle of witches, and she had only male relatives to survive her, men who could never have been told anything about the existence of witchcraft . . .”

Her father had told them the story. His mother had never really recovered after being uprooted from her native Iran. The political situation made it impossible for her to go back and visit, and both Nadia’s pedarjoon and Dad believed her grandmother’s sadness had robbed her of the fighting spirit she would have needed to recover from the sudden infection that had killed her.

Covens were secretive. Several existed in a major city like Chicago, but even those were wary of one another and unsure whether more lurked in the shadows. The likelihood that any American witch would have strong ties to a coven from Tehran in the 1970s—it was beyond remote. It was impossible.

“It’s so stupid,” Nadia said. She still stood in the center of her mother’s living room, like the unwelcome guest she was. “The secrecy about witchcraft. It cuts us off from knowing even the most basic things we should know about each other.”

“That secrecy has kept us alive,” Mom replied.

Nadia would have liked to argue that; at this point, secrecy was creating more problems than it solved. But she had to get her answers first. The rest could come later. “Okay, so, you broke one of the First Laws. It’s not like there are Witch Police who come and shut you down.” She paused. “Are there?”

“No. But these things carry their own penalties. Have you never asked why that would be one of the First Laws, Nadia? Why it’s forbidden for witching bloodlines to intermarry?”

“I always figured it was so we wouldn’t die out. So there would be more witches instead of fewer, like there would be if we intermarried all the time.”

“A good guess, but it comes from a modern understanding of genetics. The First Laws are far older than that.”

Something in Mom’s voice was familiar now in a way it hadn’t been before. She was in Teacher Mode, which Nadia had sometimes found frustrating, but now it encouraged her. Maybe, instead of the vacant-eyed shell who had greeted Nadia at the door, her mother would start acting like herself again. “Well, then, what?”

“A child born with the blood of two witches is—special.”

“You mean, I’m more powerful?”


Nadia’s fragile hopes faded with the shake of her mother’s head. “No. You’re immensely powerful, Nadia. You have so much potential—but my mistake makes you better suited for a specific kind of magic.”

“What is that?”

“Dark magic.” Horribly Mom smiled, as if she could say that and only think of it as a bad joke. “Witches like you are the perfect servants of the One Beneath. His evil fits into your witchcraft like—like a key in a lock. No wonder He’s using this Sorceress to tempt you, Nadia. Almost no children are born of two witching bloodlines, and they haven’t been for centuries. He’s been waiting for a servant like you for a very long time.”

She wanted to tell her mother she was wrong, and yet Nadia knew instinctively, bone-deep, that this was the truth.

Quickly she turned from her mother and walked to the lone window in this long, thin, cramped room. She blinked against the thin, watery sunshine, stifling her tears. Elizabeth’s desperate efforts to persuade her—the way Nadia’s power had developed when she moved to Captive’s Sound, where the One Beneath was at His strongest—even Asa’s smug evasions of her questions, the ones that would have led her to understand this: All of it added up.

Nadia had been made to do evil. To be evil.

Did that mean she was doomed to follow in Elizabeth’s footsteps, no matter what? No. Nadia refused to believe that her fate was already determined, out of her hands.

“Were you ever going to tell me about this?” She kept her voice from shaking somehow. “Or is that one more thing you decided I didn’t need to know?”

“I did what I had to do.”

Nadia turned to glance at her mother over her shoulder. “You had to abandon us? You had to leave Dad, never even see me and Cole again?”

“I had to keep you safe.” Mom’s expression had become—lost, somehow. Her eyes stared past Nadia, through her, trying to see something that wasn’t there any longer. “That was the most important thing to me then. I know that much.”

“. . . What do you mean?”

“The One Beneath doesn’t always give His servants a choice.”

A chill swept over Nadia as she remembered Asa. Once upon a time, he’d been human, like her; he’d been turned into a demon against his will, so that he might be the One Beneath’s slave. She’d despised him for that, knowing that little good remained in demons after their transformation . . . but that had been before she’d realized the exact same thing could happen to her.