Sorceress

by Claudia Gray

  “Grandma?”

  “The house is yours.” Her tone was brisk. “It always would have been, upon my death. I have no other living descendants, thank God, and I cannot imagine what any charity would want with the place. I always thought I’d live out my life there. I have had no use for life these many years . . . but I find I’m not ready to die either.”

  Was she talking about committing suicide? Mateo flashed back to his mother’s death, the way she’d set out in a rowboat to surrender her life to the sea. His chest tightened. As weird and creepy a relationship as he’d always had with his grandma, there was no way in hell he was going to lose someone else like that. “You don’t have to . . . leave,” he said. “Whatever it is you’re planning, it’s going to be okay.”

  “Okay?” She parroted him, then gave a short, harsh laugh. “The darkness that has tortured your family for generations is about to burst forth and unleash itself upon the whole world. How is that okay?”

  “Nadia can stop them. I know she can.” He knew he had a way to make sure of it. Once he’d done what he had to do, nothing else would hold Nadia back.

  “I wish your Miss Caldani good luck. But if a battle is coming, and this is the battleground, I prefer not to wait upon it. I am leaving Captive’s Sound, and I do not expect to return. Therefore I give you your inheritance now. Make what use of it you can in the time you have.”

  Mateo could only stare at her. Where would Grandma go? Presumably that antiquated butler of hers was traveling along. But if they ran to the far edges of the earth, and the One Beneath succeeded, she still wouldn’t have run far enough. Her escape was futile, but she’d always been driven by fear. That was the only emotion left in her, really. No hope, no curiosity, no love.

  This is the last time I’ll ever see her, Mateo thought. She was his grandmother, his only living relative aside from Dad, and he should have felt sad, or worried—something like that. Instead he only felt numb.

  “Thanks for the house,” he said.

  Grandma simply wrapped her coat more tightly around her. “The papers are signed over to you, in the desk of the upstairs library, should anyone ever get around to asking.”

  She didn’t hug him, didn’t even say good-bye. Mateo’s grandmother simply turned away and took her tiny, wobbling steps toward the door. The butler waiting there opened the door and held a large black umbrella over her head as they set out in the rain. Mateo stood there, watching her dark shape until it vanished into the gray.

  What had she been like as a young mother? What had Mom been like as a little girl? Had Grandma been able to love and cherish her, or had Mom turned out great despite being raised by a woman made of pain and ice? He’d never know.

  “Gonna hang around here all day?” the policeman said, between squawks from his walkie-talkie. “Most people are kinda in a hurry to get out of jail once they’re free to go.”

  Mateo realized he should find his father right away; Dad was probably worried sick, trying to get the bank to open up so he could bail out his son. (Grandma would never have called Dad to explain what was going on.) But he had another errand, even more important.

  He’ll probably be at home, Mateo reasoned as he set out through the rain, his only protection a cheap plastic poncho the policeman had grudgingly lent him. Or at Elizabeth’s, but I can’t go to him there. If I do that, she might realize what I’m planning. He didn’t intend to let Elizabeth stand in his way.

  When Mrs. Prasad opened the door, she smiled and welcomed him into the kitchen and even gave him a snickerdoodle. “Jeremy! One of your school friends is here!”

  Asa thumped down the stairs and looked into the kitchen in bewilderment. When he saw Mateo sitting there, he raised an eyebrow. “Mateo! Hey. Uh—want to play video games in my room?”

  Which sounded like something out of the cheesiest commercial in the world, but Mateo stifled a laugh. “Sure.”

  Once they were alone, Asa muttered, “What are you doing here?”

  “I need you to help me do something. Or—I guess, really, you only have to explain the details. After that, I won’t need any more help.”

  Asa closed the door to his bedroom, to be sure Jeremy’s mother wouldn’t hear. “Help with what?”

  “I have to free Nadia from her deal with the One Beneath. I can’t do that without giving the One Beneath another soul in return.” Mateo took a deep breath. “So I’m going to give him mine.”

  10

  AS ASA LOOKED AT MATEO, HE WONDERED WHETHER reasoning would ever get through to him, or whether a punch to the face would be required. “You’re a fool.”

  “This is what has to happen,” Mateo insisted. “My life for hers.”

  “This isn’t as easy as self-sacrifice, you know.”

  “Easy? Self-sacrifice. That’s your idea of easy?”

  Asa took a step closer to Mateo, lest his “mother” overhear. “As heroic as it may be, the mere act of laying down your life for the one you love? Yes, it’s easy. The quicker it is, the easier it is. Virtually anyone would throw themselves in front of a train for their child or lover; many people would do it for a stranger. That impulse—that breathtaking leap out of yourself for someone else—it’s easier than we ever dare imagine. I think if humans truly understood they were capable of that, they couldn’t handle it. They’d never stop wondering why they act like such moronic asses the rest of the time.”

  Mateo looked confused. “This isn’t about jumping in front of a train.”

  “No. As I said, that would be easy. Only a flash of pain, certainly messy, but also very, very quick. You make the decision. You leap. You die. Sacrifice made. But that’s not the bargain you propose to strike, Mateo. You’re planning something very, very slow. Certainly messy. And more painful than you can possibly imagine.” Asa pushed up the sleeve of his sweater, revealing the jagged scar left from one of Elizabeth’s spells last month. She had needed to cause someone immense agony to do her work, so she’d sliced him to the bone, and all his demonic powers had not yet erased the damage left behind.

  Although Mateo blanched when he saw the scar, he didn’t waver. “You know Nadia is our only chance against Elizabeth’s plan.”

  “I’m technically Team Evil. You remember that, right?”

  Mateo ignored this. “Nadia’s not doing well. She’s cut off from her family, and she cut herself off from me and Verlaine. Being alone like that, with only Elizabeth to turn to, that can’t be good. It’s like . . . her soul is drowning. You’ve seen her, haven’t you?”

  Asa could not bring himself to describe Nadia’s state of despair. He simply nodded.

  “She has to be freed from that darkness, at least for a little while. That’s the only way she’s going to win. The only way for me to free her from that darkness is by trading something valuable to the One Beneath. I don’t have anything else He wants. Only my soul.”

  Why did his noble idiocy have to make so much sense? “The One Beneath—He keeps His deals, but He twists them. He always finds a way.”

  “How much worse can He make it for me? Once I’m a demon, that’s as low as it gets. No offense.”

  “None taken. But you’re talking about the powers and dimensions of hell. You don’t know just how low it can be. First of all, you’d still have to bear your curse, but now you’d have to endure it for eternity. Now add to that torments for the slightest disobedience, the guilt and the shame of it, having to plot against the girl you love—”

  He’d said too much, Asa realized. But there was no taking it back.

  “The girl you love?” Mateo stared at him in disbelief, then anger. “Are you telling me you’ve fallen in love with Nadia, too?”

  Asa laughed out loud. “No, Romeo, lovely as your Juliet is, she has no hold over me.”

  “Then you have to mean—who, Verlaine? Seriously?”

  “You say it like that because Elizabeth’s magic keeps you from truly seeing her, or connecting with her,” Asa said quietly. “Which you know. That magic
doesn’t affect demons. I see the true Verlaine—the only one that matters—and she is more beautiful than you can possibly imagine. And she is mine, or she would be, if I had the right to love her. I don’t. I never will again. Because I’m a demon. Do you see now what you’re about to do?”

  Mateo paused, obviously torn. The first thing he said was, “You need to leave Verlaine alone.”

  “I know, and I try. By the way, I heard about your valiant defense of her this morning. Thank you.”

  It killed Asa to think about Verlaine persecuted—endangered—while he was powerless to help. This was as bad as anything hell had to offer. Surely Mateo had to see that.

  He didn’t. Instead he said something Asa would never have expected. “Nadia’s mother gave up her ability to love, to try and keep Nadia safe.”

  “. . . Yes, she did.”

  “I love Nadia that much, too. I’m willing to give up just as much. If sacrificing my ability to be with Nadia is part of the price I pay for her freedom, then that’s how it is.”

  Asa tried one last time. “Do you remember how that deal worked out for Nadia’s mom?”

  Mateo insisted, “Tell me how this is done. Explain. Help me make the best deal I can make—and you can do that, right? Because it’s all about delivering another demon to the One Beneath.”

  Sadness settled over Asa, heavy and hopeless. “As you wish.”

  Elizabeth stopped midstep, then jerked her face up toward the sky.

  Rain fell on her open eyes, but she didn’t blink. Absolute stillness would allow the message to take shape more clearly within her mind.

  She stood at the foot of the Hill, in the center of the road. Although the Hill was of course the highest ground in town, nobody was driving there either—mostly because there was nowhere in town for them to go. The thick mud surrounding them all steadied Elizabeth; she imagined it as concrete settling, turning hard as stone. By now she had given up all pretense of normality. Without the need to maintain some presence at the high school, Elizabeth was free to let her body degenerate. Her dress was no more than rags now, her flesh mortified with cuts and bruises she had not bothered to tend. What bliss it would be if she died at the very moment of the One Beneath’s return, so that her mortal self perished along with the mortal world.

  Still, those who should serve her defied her.

  Nadia plotted against her? Yes, that was it. Earlier, Elizabeth had cast a sophisticated variant on Betrayer’s Snare, knowing that at any moment Nadia might turn on her. And it was Betrayer’s Snare twitching now, alerting Elizabeth to the possibility that her student—the beloved of the One Beneath—remained disloyal, even after losing all her ties to the regular world.

  How disappointing, and yet how gratifying, too. Elizabeth’s chagrin at failing to fully convert Nadia was outweighed only by her pleasure that Nadia was not so perfect a student as the One Beneath had wanted her to be.

  “I will give her to you, beloved lord,” she whispered up into the rain.

  Yet there was more danger—more trouble, more disloyalty.

  Her eyes darkened. Elizabeth walked out of the street, into a small patch of trees preserved in a copse halfway up the Hill, perhaps to make the fine houses upon it look even grander. Once she was surrounded by the trees, by life, she raised a hand to the sky and summoned one of her crows.

  It flew to her without hesitation, perching in her hand even as she clutched it around the throat. “Transform,” she whispered.

  The crow vanished. (Dead? Transported elsewhere? It was irrelevant to the spell and Elizabeth did not care.) In its place appeared Asa, wearing only a T-shirt and jeans, stumbling back in surprise—but she tightened her hand around his neck.

  He went very still, and said nothing.

  “You are not stupid,” she said. “You know you have been disloyal to me, yet you have not been returned to hell, so you have not been disloyal to the One Beneath. Therefore this is mine to learn and punish.”

  The magic she wielded—raw and primitive—lashed out of her hand into his chest. He cried out as it closed around his heart, squeezing it so that it could hardly beat. Elizabeth smiled.

  “You think you can hide things from me,” she whispered. “You think your soul is not mine to claim. Learn, beast. Learn what I am.”

  And she reached inside his chest to tear out the truth.

  Asa screamed. Her fingers plunged through skin and muscles; her hand embedded in the core of him so that she felt his caged heartbeat against her knuckles, his panting lungs swelling against her fingers, the slip of his bloody liver upon her palm. His torn flesh gaped and puckered around her wrist. Elizabeth cocked her head, studying his face in its rictus of pain.

  The truth was no tangible thing for her to pull forth, like one of his bones. Instead she felt it like the liquid run of blood within Asa’s body, somehow flowing into her to blossom red and certain within her thoughts.

  “Mateo Perez,” she whispered. Then she pulled back her hand.

  The demon fell to the ground, landing with a wet splat in the mud. He gasped feebly for breath. With amusement Elizabeth recalled that she had punctured his diaphragm, which made it impossible for him to breathe. She could have stood there and watched him suffocate within minutes.

  Yet he was still a tool, and while work remained to be done . . .

  Absently she cast a spell of healing, while meditating upon what she had learned. So Mateo wanted to trade himself as a demon in order to free Nadia? An interesting gambit—given Nadia’s own plans, an ironic one—and it might have worked, against a lesser opponent. Instead this, too, was a tool for her to use.

  “Beast. Get up.”

  “I don’t think I can yet.” Asa sat in the mud, one hand to his perfectly healed chest. His T-shirt gaped open, the tears in the cloth still bloody. He shook, either from shock or cold, possibly both, and the raindrops on his face looked like tears.

  “Your weakness does not interest me. Your service does.”

  Asa looked up at her. “Let him make the trade. Let him do it. Then you’ll have two servants instead of one, and you can do the One Beneath’s work on your own. He doesn’t need Nadia Caldani, not really. He doesn’t need anyone but you.”

  The flattery pleased her—as he had no doubt known it would, but that did not change the fact that Asa was correct. “Finally you pay me proper respect. In return, I’ll let you keep it.”

  He sat there in the mud for a long moment before he asked, “Keep what?”

  “Your love for the girl. Verlaine, the gray-haired thing. I was considering tearing it out of you, just like I tore out the truth. Then I could hold it in front of you so you could watch it die. Every feeling you had for her would crumble like ash.”

  Merely telling him, and seeing his horror, was nearly as much fun as doing it would have been. He said, “Anything but that.”

  Bold words, from a demon who knew precisely what “anything” could mean, from her. Elizabeth’s smile widened. “Or I could give it back to you just after I made you kill her. Maybe in time to watch her dying in your arms, betrayed by you, afraid of you—”

  Asa prostrated himself in front of her. Kneeling in the mud, like the low, worthless slave he was: At last he was learning. “Do you want me to beg you? I will. I’ll do anything you ask, if you spare her that.”

  “I already said I would not steal your pathetic love . . . at least, not as of now. But your service to me must be worthy.”

  “Name my task.”

  “Mateo Perez just left your house after telling you he wants to become a demon.” Elizabeth leaned against the nearest tree; the leaves were so thick she was almost sheltered from the rain. “Help him. Make him swear it. Bring him over to our side. But do this at the hour I ask. The minute. The moment. Do you understand?”

  Although Asa looked wary, he was too beaten down to fight—too desperate to protect his silly mortal love. He nodded, and Elizabeth’s plan was nearly complete.

  Nadia didn’t know where
Elizabeth was at the moment, and she didn’t care. More time alone in this house gave her more time to prepare for what she had to do next.

  It wasn’t that she needed anything physical, not at this point. Nadia was as prepared for the task ahead as she was ever going to get.

  But this required resolve. It required . . . giving up on her life completely, and that was a hard thing to do.

  I walked away from Mateo. I told Verlaine good-bye. I left my family. There’s nothing else left.

  Lies, and she knew it. Nadia still loved her dad and her brother so much that she felt hollow without them. Still worried about whether or not Verlaine would be able to stand up to Asa, or would fall prey to him in the end. And Mateo—she hadn’t known you could hurt for someone, ache because of his absence, every single moment.

  If I could only see him one more time . . .

  No. If she saw Mateo again, it would just make her want her life back, so that she could spend it with him. That could never happen. Her old life was just one more thing she had to lay down in order to get the job done.

  Nadia slipped on her raincoat. Water still beaded along its plastic surface; it felt like nothing ever got dry now. She shivered as she put it on and looked outside the window. Twilight, maybe? Hours and times of day made no sense to her any longer now that she had no schedule and the sun never shone.

  On one wall hung the broken remnants of a mirror, its remaining glass in the oval frame spotted with age. Nadia stepped in front of it and looked at herself.

  Could this—this wreck of a person—be her?

  Her fingers ran through her tangled hair as she stared at her pale, disheveled reflection. She looked younger somehow. Like Cole after one of his nightmares, or like a little lost kid. Quickly Nadia combed through her hair with her fingers; it didn’t make much difference, but she didn’t want to go to her doom looking like total crap.

  Now I know how Elizabeth ended up like this, she thought. How she became so disconnected from normal life, and human emotions.