Spellcaster (Spellcaster #1)

by Claudia Gray

  “Silence, beast.”

  The more she thought about the identity of Nadia Caldani’s Steadfast, the less certain she was. Verlaine Laughton was the obvious choice, the only girl she had seen regularly in Nadia’s company. Yet she was so new to Nadia’s life—such an unusual person to reach out to.

  They might have known each other before, Asa chimed in. Did you ever consider that? People talk via computers now. The witch and Verlaine could have been friends online.

  Elizabeth had never used a computer in her life and did not intend to begin at this late date. As cold sea spray stung her face, she considered the possibility of some past acquaintance between Nadia and Verlaine. It seemed unlikely. They had not greeted each other that first day at school, and their attitude toward each other during the few days Elizabeth had observed them early in the semester—it was more wary than warm. No, they had been strangers before.

  Yet what kind of a Steadfast could Verlaine Laughton be? Bereft as she was, could she even hold the power? Elizabeth supposed it was possible—this was something she’d never tested—though she found it surprising.

  Must be fun for you. You get so few surprises these days.

  Although Elizabeth did not appreciate the demon’s attempts at levity, there was truth to what he said. This world felt so old to her—so peculiar and yet so predictable. People wore shapeless, flimsy clothing now, and the women were brazen, and everyone talked to little machines they held in their hands, but they were as venal and selfish as they had ever been. Their hopes were just as craven, their perspective as small. She’d abandoned any attempt to take part in their ordinary affairs many decades ago, beyond her token school attendance to look after the Chamber. Being with ordinary mortals increasingly felt to her like watching small, squabbling children fighting over broken toys.

  Even the Craft could no longer fascinate her; she had mastered it so long ago. This one tiny unanswered question about a Steadfast was the first flicker of uncertainty she had felt in many years, and briefly it entertained her. It was like seeing a butterfly in the desert.

  But Verlaine remained the most likely candidate. Perhaps there were others to investigate—that school counselor, for one, Ms. Walsh; she seemed to take an interest in Nadia—but Verlaine Laughton was the correct place to begin.

  Satisfied, Elizabeth dipped her hands into the ocean and drank. Even a mouthful of seawater could cause vomiting and hallucinations in most people. She was past all that now. It could not even make her thirstier than she already was, always was. All she needed to do was to see if she could start to taste the blood.

  “You should’ve had your friends stay for dinner,” Dad said as he went into the kitchen. “We could have celebrated.”

  “If you’d called ahead to tell me you won, maybe I would’ve asked them.” Nadia wasn’t being entirely honest about that, she knew. Today had been intense for all of them; she figured Mateo and Verlaine probably needed to decompress tonight as much as she did. Her nerves remained on edge. But still—she could imagine a day when they would all hang out at her place, and her father would maybe be in “kind of cool Dad” mode instead of “annoying oversensitive Dad” mode. It could be … sort of fun. She could see them here. Especially Mateo. Her lips curled into a soft smile as she remembered how friendly and gentle he’d been with Cole, down there on the floor like playing with LEGOs was still his favorite thing to do.

  If only they could get out from under Elizabeth’s influence—if only she could be sure that Mateo could be hers to keep, that there was no chance of having him stolen away—

  The clanging of a pan on the stove jolted her back to the here and now. “Hey. What are you doing?”

  “Making us some spaghetti.” Dad had taken out a glass jar of some sauce from the store. “The pasta—that’s going to be on this shelf, right? Yes. Huh, no spaghetti, but we have these tube things, and that works just the same.”

  “Dad. I’ll make dinner.”

  “Don’t be silly.” He didn’t even slow down, like he wasn’t listening to her at all. “I’ve got this. How hard can it be?”

  “That stuff in the jar is from, like, a factory. I can make it from scratch in half an hour, and it’ll be ten times better.”

  “Yeah, I know, but this is all right, isn’t it? You’ve eaten it before. Cole even likes it; he put it in the shopping cart himself.”

  “That’s not the point.” Why was he being so annoying? Nadia wanted him out of her kitchen, where he was going to make a mess, plus gross pasta sauce. She tried the buttering-up approach. “You won your big hearing today. So you should take the night off, right? Let us treat you.”

  “The treat for me is fixing dinner for my family.” Dad was starting to look about as ticked off as she felt. “Don’t you have some homework to do? You never seem to have any homework.”

  “Dad. Come on.” Nadia tried to snatch the packet of rigatoni from him. To her surprise, he grabbed on to it tighter, and for half a second they were in the world’s stupidest tug-of-war, she and her father almost fighting over a bag of pasta—

  —until it ripped apart, scattering rigatoni all over the kitchen so that it clattered on the counters and the floor, rolled into the living room, even got into Nadia’s hair.

  She stared at her father, who stared right back, until at the same moment they bent to their knees to start scooping it up. She huffed, “I’ve got it, okay?”

  “No! It’s not okay!” Dad wasn’t shouting—he never shouted—but he was as close to angry as he ever got.

  “Why are you yelling at me? I was just trying to help out! I’m always trying to help out! Most parents would like that, you know, not scream at their kids when they try to be nice—”

  “Jesus Christ, are you ever going to let me do anything for you?” Dad’s voice broke on the last word, and then he sat back on the floor, right there in the middle of all the pasta, and leaned his head into one hand. For one horrifying second, Nadia thought he was going to cry, but he didn’t.

  She felt like she was frozen there on her knees, one hand full of uncooked pasta. But slowly she eased herself into a seated position; whatever Dad was waiting for, she felt like she needed to wait it out with him. From the backyard, they could hear Cole yelling out the details of some imaginary battle involving all his action figures.

  Finally Dad said, “I know you do a lot for this family, Nadia. You’ve really stepped up since your mother—since she left. And I appreciate that. I couldn’t make it without you.”

  “Thank you.” Her voice seemed very small.

  “But you’re still my daughter, okay? It’s my job to take care of you. It’s not your job to take care of me.”

  He didn’t have any idea. Elizabeth’s whirlwind was coming for them, for everyone in town, and scary as it was, Nadia’s witchcraft might be the only thing that could stop her. If Nadia wasn’t taking care of her father, of all of them, who knew what might happen?

  Still—she could let the man cook once in a while, if it made him feel better. Even if it meant eating nasty sauce from a jar. “Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry I fought with you over the bag. That was stupid.”

  Dad just sat there, forearms on his knees, staring at nothing in particular. “Never learned to cook. Always left that to your mom. I let that firm take so much of my life—eighty hours a week, ninety, more—and she always said it was all right. She had the home front covered. That was our deal, how it was supposed to work. I thought—I really thought she was okay with it.”

  Nadia remembered Mom laughing about the “home front.” It had been one of her favorite jokes. “I thought she was, too.”

  He shook his head. “I was a fool. I should’ve known that couldn’t work forever.”

  “It worked fine. Everything was absolutely fine until one day, Mom—it was like she checked out.” How else could she even say it? Nadia had known before Mom left that something was wrong, but only for a couple of weeks—a couple of weeks during which Mom had hardly seemed
to notice they were even around. “You didn’t do anything.”

  “I don’t know. Guess we don’t get to know.” He sighed and thumped the back of his head once, softly, against the counters, then looked at the kitchen with something like his usual good humor. “Tonight’s another pizza night, isn’t it?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “You order, and I’ll clean up.”

  “Okay,” she said, even though she was sure this meant she’d find lost rigatoni noodles lying around the kitchen for another day or two to come.

  “And—we should take a break sometime soon. As a family. Maybe take a weekend away. Go down to New York, maybe. Keep our city-dweller cred current, you know?”

  Dad’s attempt to talk like a teenager was embarrassing, but not so much that Nadia missed the opportunity. “Can we? Please? We should go soon. Halloween weekend, definitely.”

  “Halloween? But there’s some big carnival here in town, with a haunted house and everything.”

  “It’s supposed to be incredibly lame.” Nadia thought fast. “Last year a kid around Cole’s age cut his hand open in the haunted house. I heard he needed a dozen stitches. It’s really unsafe.”

  Dad frowned. “Huh. Well, I wouldn’t want Cole running around in something like that.”

  “You should get the tickets to New York tonight. I bet there’s tons of fun stuff to do in Manhattan on Halloween. And Cole misses the ‘L’ so much, probably he’ll want to ride the subway the whole time.” Little boys had a thing about trains.

  “You know what? I think it’s a good idea.” Dad nodded, satisfied with himself. “This is going to be good for us. I’ll get online after dinner tonight.”

  An incredible tension that had been gripping her heart seemed to release in an instant. Whatever happened on Halloween night, Dad and Cole would be far away. Nadia could come up with an excuse not to go at the last minute—a school project, something like that. Knowing they were safe would let her concentrate. That was one less thing Elizabeth could do to her, one less weapon Elizabeth would have against them. No matter what happened to Nadia, the rest of her family would be okay.

  When Dad hugged her before standing up, she hugged him back for a really long time. He seemed to need it.

  Reasons to Visit My Parents’ Graves Soon

  1. Have to know if that hag Elizabeth killed them or not.

  2. Should probably take flowers or something because I’ve never taken anything there and maybe that’s kind of awful, and I am somehow being the worst daughter ever to people who aren’t even alive.

  3. If Elizabeth did this, then revenge is necessary even though she is a megabadass witch from ye olden days and I am a high school senior with a shrieking-alarm key chain as my sole means of self-defense. So some planning time for said revenge is probably necessary.

  Reasons Not to Visit My Parents’ Graves Soon

  1. Not sure I’m ready to deal with that, at all.

  2. Already working on stopping Elizabeth in her tracks, so revenge motivation is an unnecessary addition to my plans.

  3. Also that’s probably the only way to make this apocalypse-averting thing even more stressful than it already is.

  Verlaine stared at the lists on her laptop screen and groaned. Even though both lists were short, she knew she could keep adding items all night and still wind up with no clear conclusion.

  She had made her usual nest behind the Guardian front desk for the Thursday night “late hours,” which was something the editor, Mrs. Chew, had come up with to help Verlaine burn more internship credits. Her coffee milk was in its usual glass at her side; the funky Bakelite bracelet she’d found seriously underpriced at the thrift store, the one that was too bulky to wear while typing, made a turquoise ring on the other side of her laptop. Since the newspaper wasn’t exactly a hotbed of activity even during regular hours, Verlaine usually found this a good time to update the Lightning Rod or get homework out of the way before the weekend.

  Or, in this case, to sit around making useless lists that didn’t do anything to settle her chaotic mind.

  Between two fingers, Verlaine caught the shorter strand of her hair—the one she’d cut the other day. Mateo had sworn he’d seen something, and she believed him. Somewhere, sometime, magic had been worked on her, and the taint of it lingered.

  But that doesn’t mean it’s why Mom and Dad died. Your hair could have turned gray from the shock. That’s what Uncle Gary always said. You were alone in that house with them for a day, and it must have been scary as hell. Sometimes she had nightmares about it—not real memories, but her imagination running wild with what it would mean to be trapped in a house with two dead bodies.

  If not her parents, though—then what was the magic about?

  Sourly Verlaine thought, Maybe it’s all about making me the least popular kid in school. Yeah, I bet that’s it. Elizabeth uses her badass witch vibes to figure out who doesn’t get to be prom queen.

  “Hello, Verlaine.”

  She glanced up to see Elizabeth standing right in front of the desk.

  About eighty thousand swear words ran through Verlaine’s mind all at the same second, which was maybe why none of them came out of her mouth. Instead she just gaped.

  Elizabeth didn’t seem to notice. She seemed as calm and gentle as ever, a knit cardigan pulled over one of her white dresses. Her windswept chestnut hair fell over one shoulder, and she smiled, unbothered by Verlaine’s silence. “These evening hours are a good idea. I wanted to ask about the fee to place a classified ad?”

  She couldn’t seriously want that, could she? Maybe she did. Maybe evil Sorceresses had their own classified-ad needs. Help Wanted: Henchman/Underling for part-time service. For Sale: Eye of toad, never used. “Um, I’m not sure. Let me check.”

  “If at all possible.”

  It felt beyond weird to go look this up for Elizabeth Pike, the same as she would have for any other customer. But Verlaine didn’t know what else to do. Without Nadia by her side, any confrontation would have been stupid to the point of suicidal. For now, all she could do was act naturally.

  So maybe not letting her fingers shake so much while she typed on the keyboard would be a good idea.

  “Okay,” Verlaine said, a bit too loudly, but Elizabeth didn’t react. “As long as you keep the text under five lines, it’s seventy-five dollars for one week, one hundred dollars for two. Which is a whole lot cheaper than virtually any other paper in the world, but hey—it’s the Guardian.”

  “Under five lines.” Elizabeth’s voice sounded distant. “I’ll have to think how to word it. Thanks for your help.”

  “No problem.” The only problem, Verlaine thought, had been keeping this fake smile plastered on her face the whole time.

  With a nod, Elizabeth turned to go. She walked back out into the night without ever glancing back.

  What was that about? Verlaine wondered.

  Once she was halfway down the block, Elizabeth reached into her bag and pulled out the turquoise Bakelite bracelet. It gleamed brightly in her palm.

  Verlaine must have been wearing it earlier today. It would work.

  Although Nadia considered calling Mateo to be with her while she attempted the spell, ultimately she decided against it. For one, it was late—eleven p.m.—so if his father realized he was gone or her father realized he was in her house, it would be tough to explain.

  Also, the first time she did this shouldn’t be too strong. Spells for removal of magic could be violent or gentle, showy or soft. This needed to be gentle and soft. Nadia was mostly checking to see if it would work—whether she could sneak a sliver of Elizabeth’s magic away without her noticing. That was more likely without the boost to her powers that Mateo provided. (Later, when they had to stop her on Halloween, then she’d need him by her side the whole way.)

  Finally, this spell was best cast while in the water, and there was no way Nadia was taking another dive in that freezing cold ocean. Much, much better to run a hot bath.

/>   One thing awesome about living in an old-fashioned house was the old-fashioned bathtub. It was white porcelain, so big about four people could sit in it at once, set up on golden claw feet. Nadia had the squeaky taps turned all the way up, which was the only way to fill the tub before the water started getting cold.

  Okay, supplies. Quartz dust. Rose petals. And—the razor blade.

  Nadia set the stuff on the broad shelf beside the tub and took a deep breath. Then she slipped off her robe and sank into the warm bathwater, which covered her whole body up to her neck. She wore only her bracelet.

  The dust swirled into the water, making it cloudy and yet softly sparkly. The rose petals floated on the surface. The razor blade—

  —this was harder to do than she’d anticipated. Nadia had never cast any spells that called for her own blood, not before this. But blood mixed in water gave certain kinds of magic an accuracy and intensity that couldn’t be matched any other way.

  Great. The one time I actually need it to be that time of the month, and it’s not.

  She bit down on her lip, held out one thumb, and jabbed.

  Ow! Owowowowow. But she’d done it. Nadia pressed on the tiny cut in her thumb tip until the first fat drops of blood spattered into the water. First they became strange trails of red, then lightened to pink, then vanished.

  By the light of her stove, Elizabeth began her work. When she held the bracelet up to that glow, she could feel the response between them; yes, this would do nicely.

  But then a cool draft shivered past her—a kind of chill that had nothing to do with temperature.

  Her eyes widened. Nadia—reaching out for her. Attempting to meddle. And she seemed to understand precisely how to do it.

  Elizabeth’s respect for the girl increased, but she felt no alarm, any more than an elephant would have been afraid of a gnat, even if it knew where to bite.

  She set aside Verlaine’s bracelet. That could wait.

  First she needed to show Nadia Caldani her place.