Spellcaster

by Claudia Gray

  But she wasn’t imagining Elizabeth’s reaction.

  Elizabeth didn’t look confused by any of this. Instead she took a gulp from her water bottle, and then her sweet, clean-scrubbed face shifted into a smile that was anything but sweet.

  It felt more like—a dare.

  Nadia’s stomach dropped as she realized that Elizabeth wasn’t any other girl in her class.

  She was another witch.

  8

  CLASS ENDED WITH THE SECURITY GUARD TALKING ONE girl down from the top of the file cabinets, demerits for almost everyone, the Piranha on report, and people starting to complain of headaches or blush as they realized what they’d been doing. Nadia grabbed Mateo’s arm to hustle him out of there as fast as possible.

  “What just happened?” he said, his mouth so close to her ear that she could feel his breath.

  “Let’s get out of here first, okay?” Nadia hurried out, Mateo by her side. She glanced over her shoulder to look for Elizabeth, who stood there in the middle of the mayhem, very still, watching them go. A small smile played on her lips.

  She knew that Nadia knew. And she didn’t care whether Nadia knew or not.

  As they went down the hallway toward the cafeteria, she muttered, “Tell me this. What did you see when you looked at Elizabeth?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When you looked at her, right after everybody lost it. You seemed—panicked, almost.”

  Mateo frowned even as he pushed the door open for them both. “I don’t remember looking at Elizabeth once. There was a lot more to see.” He started laughing. “The Piranha’s—really bendy. And Erik’s been out since sophomore year, but I had no idea Charles was gay.”

  He’d forgotten; whatever Elizabeth had done to him to make him stop seeing had also made him lose his memory of it. She had acted quickly, and her counterspell had been completely effective.

  With a rush of horror, Nadia thought, The dark magic in town—it’s her! It’s Elizabeth; it has to be.

  But no. How could Elizabeth be behind everything happening in Captive’s Sound? According to the increasingly worried Google searches Nadia had been running lately, the problems here seemed to go way back—since long before Elizabeth would even have been born, much less practicing magic. Plus, she and Nadia were about the same age, which meant they were only just now coming into their power.

  Still—any other witch would have reached out at that moment. When Elizabeth saw that Nadia’s spell had misfired, she should have helped to quiet it, and sought Nadia afterward. The secrecy that bound the Craft didn’t extend that far.

  Instead, Elizabeth had given her that cool, appraising smile, covered her tracks with Mateo, and slipped away.

  So maybe she wasn’t the cause of everything going wrong in Captive’s Sound. Yet Nadia knew, deep down, that whatever it was twisting things here up in knots—Elizabeth was in the thick of it.

  As they got into the cafeteria line, Mateo said under his breath, “Okay, either you were cooking some kind of drugs that can make the whole school start hallucinating at once, or something else seriously strange is going on. Because I did not imagine that. Are you going to explain what this has to do with what happened last night?”

  She reached for her tray on autopilot, thinking fast.

  One of the First Laws was to never, ever reveal the secret of the Craft to a man. Any man.

  Every principle of the Craft also said that it was impossible for a man to be a Steadfast. Yet she couldn’t deny that this was exactly what Mateo had become.

  Nadia might never understand how that was possible, but as long as it was—then he had to be told. It was wrong that this had happened to him without his knowledge or consent, wrong that someone already so troubled had been forced to carry that burden. The least she owed him was the truth.

  “I’ll tell you,” she promised, feeling almost light-headed. It was like skydiving, terrifying and liberating at once. “I’ll explain everything.”

  Elizabeth went home.

  Her teachers would remember her being in class, whether or not she attended. Really, going to Rodman was something she did only to be near the Chamber once in a while, and these days also occasionally to keep Mateo Perez soothed and unquestioning. Today she finally had something new to think about.

  Nadia Caldani was a witch. Elizabeth had suspected as much, given the family’s arrival in town immediately after the night of the storm, when her barrier had torn and shrieked as it was pierced through. What she had not suspected was that Nadia would possess such extraordinary magic.

  Powerful—but undisciplined. Elizabeth had to smile as she remembered the ridiculous scene in chemistry class. Nadia must have suspected some magical hold on Mateo Perez; her crush was so painfully obvious, the way her eyes flickered over to him countless times during their lessons. Had she thought to free him with a spell of liberation?

  The curse on the Cabots was far too old and too strong to be shaken loose by such feeble methods. She smiled around the rim of her water bottle.

  And what ridiculous overkill. Clumsy, stupid, to have cast that spell with such force that it affected the entire class. Obviously Nadia was raw and new to the Craft. Her inherent abilities weren’t matched by technique.

  Yet she had, however briefly, somehow allowed Mateo to glimpse Elizabeth’s true hold on him—and that wouldn’t do. Elizabeth wasn’t quite done with him yet.

  Elizabeth reached the pale gray house, opened the door, and went inside. When one of her rare guests came here—Mateo, or the delivery service with her cases of bottled water—they saw whatever it was they expected to see. Mateo had commented once on the paintings; his mother had always talked about how soft the carpet was underfoot.

  In reality, the creaking wooden boards of the floor had long ago been painted blue, and they were overlaid with decades worth of shattered glass.

  Her feet wove through the shards easily; the gaps for her steps were as familiar to her as everything else in Captive’s Sound. The yellowed plaster walls were all but bare; one held a mirror, draped with heavy old red velvet, which she could rip away in case of emergency. A few pieces of furniture from various centuries slumped against the walls, their wood crumbling, their upholstery threadbare. Elizabeth had no idea whether any of them could still bear her weight. In one corner was the old cast-iron stove, which as always glowed with a heat that was bright and constant, even beautiful, in the same way that a spectacular tropical bird could be beautiful even when kept in a cage too small for its wings. Between two of the walls hung the rope hammock, piled high with quilts and coverlets. The most powerful spells of imprisonment always worked from the ground up, and Elizabeth did not intend to be caught while sleeping.

  On every surface sat empty bottles—water bottles, mostly, though there were some for soda, some for the green tea that seemed to be popular these days. Once every few months or so, Elizabeth would get rid of them, but she accumulated them so quickly that it was pointless to throw each out in turn. The thirst—the terrible thirst—it cracked and dried her from within every single moment, as it had for almost as long as she could remember. Even now she tossed aside the bottle that had seen her home and took up another one, gulping the water down desperately.

  She’d tried drinking almost anything over the years, to see what might help. She’d drunk mud. She’d drunk wine. She’d even tried blood a few times, before she realized it was too salty to be any help.

  Not long now, Elizabeth told herself. It was her only comfort.

  Her hand rested on the knob of the door to the back room, the only room of her house she no longer really considered hers. That room belonged to something else.

  Elizabeth looked inside. She felt as though her Book of Shadows looked back at her.

  It shook free of the cobwebs with difficulty; it had been a long time since Elizabeth had consulted its pages instead of merely drawing upon its inherent power. For a moment she wondered whether it had become illegible, whet
her it had finally become a book no longer, but the fragile pages fell open to the correct page instantly. Her Book of Shadows still wished to do her bidding, no matter what.

  Mateo sat at the cafeteria table, pizza untouched on his tray, staring at Nadia Caldani, who had turned out to be even crazier than he was.

  Beautiful. Persuasive. But nuts. She was telling him stuff nobody could ever believe was real.

  And yet he believed her.

  “I’m sorry about you becoming my Steadfast,” she said yet again, stabbing at her lasagna with her plastic fork like it was somehow responsible for this. “If I’d had any idea it could affect you—any man, ever—I’d never have cast a prophetic spell in my own house. And I still don’t understand how it could be you.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said, repeating the words she’d been over a couple times already, like he was on autopilot. “No man conceived of woman can hold magic. I remember that part.”

  “It’s like finding out that every action doesn’t have an equal and opposite reaction,” Nadia protested. “But, still. Here you are. You’re my Steadfast, and that’s a pretty powerful bond, so we’re going to have to learn to work with it.”

  “Hey there!” Verlaine Laughton came up to Nadia, skinny and strange as ever; she’d used two pencils to twist her silver-gray hair into a knot at the back of her neck, and wore the same kind of bizarre clothes she always favored—today, a peasant blouse and bell-bottomed jeans that had orange flower appliqués. She seemed to have been transported directly from 1972. That was about as much as Mateo had ever noticed about her; there was something about Verlaine that almost kept you from paying any attention. Like wherever something interesting was, Verlaine wasn’t. But she seemed to know Nadia pretty well. Verlaine’s face fell as she saw Mateo. “Oh, sorry, am I interrupting?”

  Nadia looked up at her. “Mateo’s my Steadfast.”

  Verlaine practically slammed the tray onto the table in vindication. “I knew it!”

  “Are you a witch, too?” he said. Were there witches everywhere? Was the whole world about a thousand times weirder than he’d ever dreamed?

  “Nope. This is all about as new to me as it is to you.” Then Verlaine frowned at Nadia. “Wait. I thought you said men couldn’t be Steadfasts. That they couldn’t know about magic.”

  “Well, it turns out they can be Steadfasts,” Nadia explained, “so I figured Mateo needs to know about magic. We’re kind of working off-book here.”

  “No men ever, you said.” Verlaine leaned across the table, peering at him. “Mateo, are you maybe—well—transgender? Intersex? No prejudice here. Just support.”

  Mateo would have started thudding his face against the table in frustration if his pizza hadn’t been in the way. “I’m a guy.”

  “We’ll take your word for it.” Verlaine started in on her salad. “I was the only one who was supposed to be in danger of being … Steadfasted, or whatever you want to call it. I even kind of wanted it to happen. And now you stole it. Accidentally. But still.”

  “I wish it were you,” Mateo replied. “This is really—weird.” He glanced around, wondering whether anybody was overhearing them; the last thing he needed was for the school to have yet more reasons to write him off as crazy. But the din of a hundred students eating and talking at once drowned out their words. Also, the cafeteria looked more normal than any place he’d been since the … Steadfast thing began. Apparently the cafeteria was completely devoid of magic. This would come as no surprise to anyone who’d eaten the meatloaf.

  Then Nadia reached across the table and tentatively laid her hand along his forearm. The touch shocked him out of his confusion. For a moment he could only look at her dark eyes, accepting in a way almost no one else’s had ever been. “Tell me more about what you’ve been seeing. We’ll figure out what it all means. It won’t be as scary if you understand it.”

  She didn’t make him feel bad about being scared; she acted like that was a totally natural way to react. Mateo hadn’t realized how much that could help.

  Where to begin? Worst things first, he decided. “What freaks me out the most is that—halo around my head. Halo’s the wrong word, because that’s something gorgeous and holy, and this is terrible. But I don’t know what else to call it.”

  “What halo?” Verlaine was staring at his head.

  “I see it in the mirror,” he explained. “Since the … spell last night.” Of all the freaky things he’d witnessed, including the weird horned thing, the halo was by far the most disturbing, because it was a part of him.

  However, Nadia didn’t seem disturbed at all. Very softly she said, “I suspect that’s the curse.”

  The word curse always made Mateo’s skin crawl—but it was different, the way Nadia said it. Everyone else made it sound unspeakable. Contagious. From her, it sounded real.

  The curse was real.

  The curse was a curse.

  Hereditary insanity: He’d prepared himself for that. Superstition: what he’d assumed for most of his life. But an honest-to-God, or maybe honest-to-Satan, curse? Actual, supernatural evil that had been sunk into his family since the dawn of time and now had him, too?

  “Excuse me,” Mateo said as he rose from the cafeteria table. “I need a minute.”

  Then he stalked through the cafeteria, cut through the gymnasium and the dressing rooms—where he ran into Jeremy running down Charles for his make-out session with another guy, which was as good a reason as any to shove Jeremy into the lockers.

  “My dad knows the city council! I’ll have your rat-ass restaurant shut down!” Jeremy yelled after him. Mateo ignored this. First of all, Jeremy regularly threatened to have people’s businesses shut down; by now everyone knew that if Jeremy’s dad actually even listened to him, the city council didn’t listen to Jeremy’s dad.

  Second, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Because he was cursed.

  Finally Mateo reached the very back room where they kept the boxing equipment. He grabbed a pair of gloves, pulled them on, and started hitting the nearest bag. Punching it with all his strength. Whaling on it. Every blow jarred him all the way to his shoulder; the solidity of the bag almost seemed to hit back. But he punched over and over and over again, with all his strength, fighting the thing that had haunted him now that he’d finally seen it for what it was.

  Verlaine said, “So, that went well.”

  Nadia groaned. “I’m making a total mess of this. But—I don’t know what to do! Nothing like this has ever happened before, and I mean ever, as in since the dawn of time.”

  Verlaine tapped her fork against her tray. “Well, hey, why don’t we transfer it over? Turn me into your Steadfast instead. Not that it sounds like so much fun, but—if Mateo can’t handle it—I mean, he’s already got a curse to deal with. I don’t. Anyway, I still think it sounds cool. Can you switch us, Nadia?”

  Nadia shook her head. “No chance.”

  “There’s no fail-safe? Come on.” Verlaine’s eyes narrowed as she folded her arms; she seemed almost suspicious again.

  “You remember how it worked. It’s not something I control. It’s something that happens of its own accord, because of the powers of prophetic magic.” Nadia’s head throbbed. She should never have cast that spell. All she’d done was scare them and turn Mateo into something he never, ever should have been.

  “You have to have an out.”

  The lone possibility swam in front of her, simultaneously as tempting and as traitorous as a mirage in the desert. “I could end my bond with my Steadfast if I broke all my ties to magic and the Craft—”

  “Why didn’t you say so before?” Verlaine demanded. “That counts as an out!”

  “Did you hear me? I’d have to break all my ties. I wouldn’t be a witch any longer. Wouldn’t be able to cast any spells, ever again.”

  When had she gone from assuming the Craft was lost to her to wanting to hold on to it with all her strength? Was she just fooling herself now? Nadia couldn’t be sure—of anyt
hing. Magic itself had changed around her. Who knew what would be next?

  After school—and a few more hours during which he was able to cool down—Mateo sought Nadia again. She and Verlaine were in the parking lot, sitting on the hood of Verlaine’s enormous maroon car. Verlaine was the one who waved at him cheerily, like they were pals and this was any other day. “Hey! We were wondering if you’d show!”

  “I’ve showed.” He glanced around, but people were emptying out of the parking lot, and the school itself, as fast as possible. Usually Mateo did the same. If you wanted to be left totally alone, hanging around Rodman after 3:30 p.m. was a good way to go. The only person who seemed to be paying them any attention was Ms. Walsh—but after a glance in their direction, she slipped into her car to drive away. “Sorry for freaking out.”

  Nadia shrugged. “No worries. The news was pretty freak-worthy.”

  The wind played with her shining black hair; she could look so casual discussing this, a literal matter of life and death. But it wasn’t that she didn’t take it seriously—Mateo could tell that much. It was more that Nadia could handle it. There was a center to her—a purpose, a definition—that Mateo had almost never sensed in anyone else. It drew him as strongly and inexorably as gravity pulled them to the earth.

  Nadia continued their lunch conversation as if they’d never broken it off. “Like you said—yeah, I’ve already been in town long enough to hear about the family curse. I’m afraid curses are very real. Witches aren’t ever supposed to cast them, but it can happen. If your family has been cursed for generations, then a very powerful witch laid this down long ago. Can you tell me more about how it works? I know it’s supposed to lead to insanity, but there could be lots of reasons why.”

  Mateo straightened. Nobody had ever given him a chance to explain. “We start seeing the future. Or, up until recently, I thought it was that people believed they saw the future and that was the first sign they were losing it. But—I’ve been having dreams, and they’ve started coming true.”