Spellcaster

by Claudia Gray

  Nadia retold the whole story while Verlaine stared, open-mouthed. Only when it was all over did Verlaine manage to say, “That is wild.”

  “I wish I knew why he acted like he knew me that night,” Nadia said. “Or why he acts like he wishes he didn’t know me now.”

  “Well, probably because he’s crazy.”

  With a shrug, Nadia said, “Like all guys are crazy?” The ones she liked never seemed to be the ones who liked her.

  “No, I mean, crazy crazy.” Verlaine glanced over her shoulder to check for Mateo. “I wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings. Like I said, he’s always been nice enough to leave me alone. But his mother was a Cabot, and everybody knows all the Cabots eventually lose their minds. It’s the family curse.”

  Nadia didn’t hear those words; she felt them. Literally felt them as a sudden sickening drop in her belly, like she was riding a roller coaster that had started to plunge downward. “What did you say?”

  “They all go insane. Apparently it’s hereditary or something. They’ve lived in this town since the beginning of time—well, the 1600s. And they’ve been going crazy ever since. I feel bad for him, but it’s not like anything can change your genes.” Verlaine glanced toward the bar, where Mateo was grabbing a tray of sodas for another table. “Why does it always happen to the hot ones?”

  “The family curse,” Nadia repeated. Maybe it was only a saying. Maybe it was the small-town version of an urban legend. For Mateo’s sake, she hoped so.

  Verlaine clearly was ready to get back to the subject. “So, come on. Tell me the laws of witchcraft.”

  The First Laws were so familiar to Nadia—so often repeated to her, so much a part of her—that the words seemed to flow out almost without her thinking about it. “The most unbreakable one is that you must never be sworn to the One Beneath and do his bidding. Besides that—you must not reveal the Craft to anyone who would betray it. You must never speak of witchcraft to any man. You must never attempt to divine your own fate. You must never bear a child to the son of another witch. You must never command the will of another. You must never suffer a demon to walk among mortals.” Her eyes sought Mateo as she spoke the last remaining law:

  “You must never cast a curse.”

  “Switch tables with me, will you, Melanie? Trade you eight for eighteen.”

  Melanie Sweeney, the senior waitress at La Catrina, glanced past him and frowned. “Eighteen’s just two kids. Girls. Cute ones, too. So why do you want to wait on those six jerks at eight? Wait, don’t tell me. You asked one of the girls out; she shot you down.”

  “Love hurts,” Mateo said, which was enough like a yes without being a lie.

  “No worries, buddy. I got ’em.” Melanie grinned. “But you better take those guys their empanadas PDQ.”

  As he hurried to table eight, Mateo’s mind remained focused on one thing alone—Nadia. If his dreams were really telling him the future—and because of the car crash, they had to be at least partly true, didn’t they?—then the danger surrounding Nadia was very real. And whatever it was, Mateo himself was a part of it.

  But his plan—“Stay Away From Nadia for Her Own Good”—was clearly useless. What had he been thinking? This was Captive’s Sound, a town the size of a flash drive. He ran into almost everyone in town at least once a week; with Nadia in his chemistry class, he was guaranteed to see her almost every day. Now that she turned out to like Mexican food—forget it. Game over.

  So what the hell was he going to do?

  Would Nadia believe him if he tried to explain? Most people wouldn’t, even if they hadn’t grown up in Captive’s Sound thinking he was guaranteed to turn out insane. And even if she believed, did he know enough to protect her? If he frightened Nadia, convinced her that she should fear for her life, then failed to prevent any of his nightmares from coming to pass—that would be worse than anything else he could do.

  No, he decided. That’s not the worst thing I could do. The worst thing I could do is nothing.

  There have to be ways I could look out for her without talking to her about the visions. I can … watch from afar. Guard her as best I can without putting her in danger.

  But is that even possible?

  Right as he was trying to work it all out, table eight decided they each had a complicated special order—no refried beans here, extra guacamole there, so on and so forth—and Mateo was too busy to do anything but hurry back and forth between his tables and the kitchen for the next half hour. By the time he was able to look back at Nadia’s table again, she was gone, and Melanie was wiping it down to get it ready for the next customers.

  Okay, fine. She was home. That had to be safe, right? Maybe not, though. He hadn’t taken a close enough look before to see whether it resembled the setting of any of his dreams. Why hadn’t he done that?

  “Hey, Mateo.” Melanie held up a cell phone. “One of them left this. You too brokenhearted to take it to her at school tomorrow?”

  “I can handle it,” Mateo said.

  Maybe he’d get his chance to look out for Nadia after all.

  Nadia had never realized there could be so many questions about witchcraft; she didn’t remember asking this many even when she was a little kid. Then again, she’d grown up in the constant company of her mother’s powers, naturally understanding so much of it that there was no need to ask.

  Verlaine, on the other hand, felt the need to ask everything.

  “Can you fly?” she said as she and Nadia walked along the main strip of Captive’s Sound, Nadia trying her best to be sure she knew her way home. “I don’t mean on a broomstick, Gryffindor-style. That would be stupid. Unless you do use broomsticks.”

  “No broomsticks,” Nadia said. “I can’t fly. There are spells—really advanced spells—they could let you, I don’t know, defy the laws of physics for a while. Sort of souped-up versions of what I did to your car. But I’m not that skilled yet. Not even close.”

  “So your mom was a witch?”

  “Yeah. She taught me.”

  “Will she be mad that you told me?”

  “Mom’s not in our lives anymore. She left my dad back in the spring, and she pretty much washed her hands of me and Cole then, too.” The facts were harsh enough, but somehow they sounded even worse spoken aloud like that.

  Verlaine bit her lip, less confrontational than she’d been at any other point during this endless interrogation. “I’m sorry. That sucks. I mean, I don’t even remember my mom and dad—but it would be worse to remember them and then lose them. At least, I think so.”

  So, actually, I’m not the only person who’s had it bad. Nadia felt like a jerk. “It sucks either way. But it’s okay. We’re still here, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And here is—three blocks from my house, if I turn left at this corner?”

  “You’ve got it! Congrats. You’ve learned your way around all ten square feet of Captive’s Sound. Once you get all the gossip down, nobody will be able to tell you from the native population.”

  The one piece of gossip she’d learned—about Mateo Perez—echoed in Nadia’s mind again. The family curse.

  A cool breeze stirred past them, tangling Verlaine’s silvery hair, which already stood out in the early-evening gloom. After spending most of her life in Chicago, Nadia had thought she was pretty much winter-proofed—but cold came early here, and it cut to the bone. Slowly she said, “Has the town always been like this?”

  “Like what?”

  “Not right.” Then Nadia said what she really thought: “Dead inside.”

  Verlaine stopped. For a long moment they stood there beneath one of the streetlamps, the first fall leaves scudding across the cracked sidewalks. “I always thought—I figured it was just because I hate it here. The same way a lot of people want out of their hometowns, you know? When I looked around and only saw the bad side of it, I thought it was, like, me being in a mood. But it’s not, is it?”

  “No. It’s not.”

  “Then
what is it?”

  “I’m not sure. But I think it has to do with whatever’s buried beneath the chemistry lab.” As Verlaine’s eyes widened, Nadia said, “I have no idea. All I know is, it’s dark and it’s strange and some other witch has to have buried it there a long time ago. It’s dark enough to poison this town. To hollow it out.”

  Verlaine took that in for a few moments. “Is it—dangerous? I mean, beyond sucking the life out of Captive’s Sound, assuming it had any life to begin with.” Her ghostly skin somehow became even paler. “Can it get worse? I would’ve thought that was impossible, but—you know, the sinkholes—”

  “I don’t know that those are related,” Nadia said. Then again, she didn’t know that they weren’t. Was it possible that she’d arrived just as things took a turn for the worse? As the thing buried beneath Captive’s Sound finally … got out?

  “Is there a spell we can do to find out?” Verlaine drummed her fingers against her notebook, nervous energy crackling from her almost like static electricity.

  Slowly, Nadia answered, “We could try to tell the future.”

  “You can tell the future? Awesome. Do I ever—wait. No. You can’t tell the future. That was one of the First Laws, wasn’t it? That you’re not supposed to do that.”

  “You have a good memory. Yes, that’s one of the laws. But there are a few ways around it.” Deep in thought, Nadia tried to remember what Mom had said about when you could work with that rule, bend it without breaking it entirely. “If I tried to tell my own future, or yours, it would break that law. Also, it would seriously mess us up, mentally, but—never mind. What we could do is tell the town’s future. See what’s happening to Captive’s Sound. That’s distant enough from us that it’s allowed, and that would be enough to tell us whether—whether something serious has begun, or whether the way things are is permanent. Not changing.”

  “Probably the latter,” Verlaine said, “with my luck. Nothing ever changes around here.”

  There were worse things than not changing, Nadia thought. “I should probably do this spell alone.”

  Verlaine’s dark, silvery eyebrows knitted together as she scowled. “Oh, come on. I know about magic, remember? So why can’t I watch? I want to see! Something besides flying cars, anyway, even though that was excellent.”

  “You shouldn’t watch because it’s dangerous.”

  To Nadia’s astonishment, Verlaine grinned. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve waited for something interesting to happen to me? I don’t care if it’s dangerous. I don’t care what it is. Bring it.”

  6

  THE CROW SWOOPED OVER CAPTIVE’S SOUND, WINGS outspread. His cobweb eyes saw nothing and everything.

  They saw two girls walking together along the street, one’s hair black and one’s nearly white, one short and one tall, yet not opposites. Not apart as they should be.

  They saw the girls go toward a large house the color of the sky at dawn in early spring. The house glowed from within with a force that flickered like candlelight but had the potential to become a flame.

  Beyond anything else they saw the dark ripples through the earth, tracing rings beneath every street, every house, every human being in Captive’s Sound. The energy leaped and sparked as it found the deep lines of power that underlay this town, but those lines couldn’t stop the web from being spun. They only made it stronger.

  Something else looked through the crow’s stolen eyes and recorded it all. The crow flew on, unknowing, enslaved, and blind.

  “Can I go now?” Mateo asked as he loaded the final pitchers into the dishwasher.

  “You haven’t touched the Bissell, and I don’t see any chopped peppers in this fridge.” Dad crossed his arms. “What’s up with you? You’ve been trying to escape for twenty minutes, and you know your shift isn’t up for another fifteen. Not like you to ditch the job.”

  That was the problem with having your father for a boss; not only was he judging you as harshly as any other boss would, but he also wanted to psychoanalyze you in the bargain.

  And Dad was the absolute last person he could talk to about any of this stuff.

  At least he had a reason for wanting out that his father would understand. “One of the customers left her cell phone here. A girl I know from school. I wanted to run it by her house.”

  “Ahhh. There’s a lady in the case. Might have known.”

  “Dad. She really left her phone. See?” Mateo held it up as evidence.

  “That’s why we have a lost-and-found box.” But his father seemed more amused than anything else. “About time a girl got your special attention.”

  Mateo went for the knife and the peppers. The quicker he finished up his side work, the quicker he could escape both work and the interrogation.

  “Here I thought you were going to play the field forever,” Dad said as he continued stirring the sopa Azteca. “Not that a handsome young fellow like you shouldn’t play, hmm? But there’s more to life than that.”

  Girls would “play,” sure. Mateo had learned that early. They were attracted to him, flirted with him. At a party, sometimes they would hook up with him, making out just long enough for Mateo to start to hope things were finally changing. But that was it. Girls in Captive’s Sound thought he was dangerous; kissing him, letting him touch them, was something they did only for a thrill. Nobody was foolhardy enough to stay with him—to let herself care. After a beach bonfire early in the summer, when he’d realized this one girl had gotten with him only because her friends dared her to, Mateo hadn’t bothered trying again.

  “I spent my time as a bachelor,” Dad said.

  Oh, great. Mateo hoped he wouldn’t vomit on the peppers.

  But Dad wasn’t going to launch into stories about his swinging single days; it was worse than that. “From the week I moved to Captive’s Sound—the day I met your mother—it all changed. So beautiful. So lonely. Nobody in this damned town ever gave her a chance.” Bitterness had crept into his father’s voice; it usually did, when they talked about Mom. “Crazy, they called her. They drove her crazy with their stupid stories about a curse. That’s what did her in, Mateo. As far as I’m concerned, every gossip in this town has her blood on their hands.”

  This was the point in the speech where Mateo usually mouthed the final words along with Dad’s voice: blood on their hands.

  Today, though—with his own knowledge of the dreams Mom had seen, too, with his grandmother’s scarred face still fresh in his memory—that blood seemed way too real.

  Nadia had hoped she and Verlaine could slip up to the attic without being noticed, but there was a downside to having her father working from home.

  “Well, who have we here?” He smiled as he rose from his desk; already stacks of papers were spread around him like he was building a nest. Within a week, the chaos would be total.

  “Verlaine Laughton,” Verlaine said. She didn’t seem to mind meeting Nadia’s father; the weird defensive edge she had most of the time had vanished. “Nadia and I go to school together. Thanks for having me over. This house is amazing. Is it, like, a hundred years old?”

  “A hundred and fifteen, according to the realtor. Did you say your name was—”

  “Verlaine.” Obviously she was used to repeating it. “One of my grandmothers was named Vera, the other one was named Elaine, so my parents put them together.” Her cheery expression clouded. “I like to think they’d have chosen something else if they’d known Verlaine was also a famous poet who died of syphilis back in the day. At least, I hope they would’ve.”

  “At least it’s original.” Dad laughed, though he was clearly distracted; Nadia could tell she’d have to remind him of Verlaine’s name again.

  “We’ll be upstairs, okay, Dad?” Nadia hurried Verlaine out as smoothly as she could. For his part, Dad settled back into work; when he got his head into legal questions, he usually didn’t resurface for hours. Cole, meanwhile, had only looked away from the Disney Channel long enough to wave.

  Ve
rlaine followed her up to the attic, obviously wary, but when she got there, her reaction was almost deflated. “I thought this would be all, you know, spooky and mysterious.”

  “Sorry to disappoint you.” Nadia stowed her school stuff in a corner. Already she’d set up a couple of card tables; someday soon, around the end of the month, she’d go Dumpster diving and see if she couldn’t find something sturdier to replace them with. Her various ingredients were stored in test tubes and flasks she’d ordered from medical-supply catalogs, along with a few apothecary jars that had been in her family for a long time, left behind by Mom when she went, probably by accident. Her Book of Shadows might get to look mystical in time—as they gained power, apparently, they could change appearance and practically take on lives of their own—but right now it looked like an ordinary leather-bound journal propped on a windowsill.

  But it wasn’t all science. She had some oversize pillows to sit on, the protective blue ceiling like a cloudless sky overhead, and a secret stash of chocolate. Some materials and ingredients had the power to conduct and focus magic, and weirdly, wonderfully, chocolate was one of the best.

  As she tossed Verlaine one of the mini candy bars, Nadia said, “So, you need to really listen to this, okay? Think long and hard before you say you want to stay. It’s serious.”

  “What’s serious?” Verlaine said around a mouthful of chocolate.

  “If you’re here when I cast a prophetic spell—which I’m going to admit right now I’ve never done before—there’s a chance you’ll do more than watch me. There’s a chance the magic will … change you. Change us. It could make you my Steadfast.”

  Verlaine scooted closer. “What’s a Steadfast? It sounds important.”

  “It is.” Nadia had to go through it all, so there would at least be some chance Verlaine knew what she was getting into. “A Steadfast is a woman who isn’t a witch herself, but who has the ability to enhance a witch’s powers through her presence. A Steadfast doesn’t have magic of her own, but she amplifies everyone else’s magic. By that, I really mean everyone—any witch who’s near the Steadfast, whether they know about her or not—but the effect is infinitely more powerful for the witch she’s bound to.”