THE MAGICAL POSSESSIONS OF A WITCH FROM MORE THAN three centuries in the past—what could they be? What had Mateo seen shimmering in the depths of the sound? There could be tinctures and potions in sealed jars or bottles. Her bracelet or rings, whatever materials she had used to help her cast spells, which over time would acquire certain glamours of their own. Or anything, really, once mundane but enchanted by the mysterious Goodwife Hale.
By far the most tantalizing possibility, though, was that it might be Goodwife Hale’s Book of Shadows.
The water burial would make sense. A Book of Shadows acquired too much power and individuality to simply be burned on a witch’s death, but was a dangerous thing to leave lying around. Most witches either willed theirs to a younger witch in her family or were buried with them. Goodwife Hale might have chosen another path.
What would a centuries-old spell book look like? Nadia knew that most spells evolved over time, from community to community, from generation to generation. What would spells that ancient call for? How powerful must the book have been for it to need burial at sea?
“You’ve got that look again,” Mateo said as he stood beside their table. They’d all decamped to La Catrina so he could be there for his evening shift, and she and Verlaine had made themselves comfortable in a far corner. But it was a quiet night at the restaurant, and instead of the bedlam she’d expected, they were surrounded by the murmurs of conversation at the few tables that were occupied, and delicious smells—black beans, roast chicken, fresh-cut tomatoes. Best of all was the way Mateo was smiling at her. “That gotta-have-it look,” he said.
“It’s important,” she insisted. “Something extremely strange is going on in this town—a magical artifact from way back in its history could tell us a lot.”
And if it is a Book of Shadows, it would teach me so much—maybe some of what my mother should’ve taught me and never will—
“No arguments here,” Mateo said. “You know this stuff; I don’t. It’s like … it makes you light up. It’s cute.”
He’d called her cute. Her cheeks felt warm. Nadia dropped her gaze from his face, bashful, but found herself staring at his hands instead. They were nice hands—square and solid, and she remembered how he had held them out to her on the terrifying night of the wreck—
“Um, guys?” Verlaine glanced up from her laptop, which was currently atop their dinner table and casting a greenish light on her face. Her eyes were wide, and her voice shook. “I think you might want to see this.”
“What is it?” Nadia said as Verlaine turned the laptop around so they could see.
“Okay, last year everybody who got detention had to help scan and catalog all the school annuals going back to the first one in 1892. So now there’s an online version alumni can look through, stuff like that.” With a nervous look at Mateo, she said, “I thought I’d run a search on Elizabeth. If she’s a witch, maybe some people she spent time with the past couple of years might be witches, too, right?”
Nadia nodded; given the signs she’d already seen of a long history of witchcraft in Captive’s Sound, it seemed unlikely that Elizabeth would be the only one. Although Mateo frowned and crossed his arms in front of him, he didn’t protest.
Verlaine continued, “Look at the index.”
She turned the screen around for them to see. Elizabeth Pike was pictured in last year’s Rodman High School annual. And five years before that. And three years before that. And on and on—Nadia scrolled down to see that the list of images went back and back, never skipping more than seven years, all the way to 1892.
“It’s a family name, I guess,” Mateo said.
“But look.” Verlaine flipped the computer around and started pulling up images. “Here’s from last year—she didn’t get an official picture taken, but there’s this—” A photo showed Elizabeth on the quad, drinking a soda, just one of several students caught in a random shot. “And there’s this from 1963.”
The 1963 image popped up on screen, and Nadia gaped. The caption said it was “Liz Pike” standing in line for the new water fountain—but it looked exactly like Elizabeth. Her hair might have been in a little sprayed bubble and the clothes she wore might have looked like something out of a black-and-white movie, and maybe there was something about her face that made her look a bit older, but the resemblance was beyond uncanny.
Mateo shrugged. “So that’s her grandmother. What about it?”
Verlaine said, “And 1930.”
This image was of some kind of school dance. Standing behind the punch bowl in a ruffled formal dress and a big corsage at her neckline was another Elizabeth, equally identical to the one they knew—“Betsy Pike,” maybe a year or so older than the one from 1963.
“Now 1892.” Verlaine brought up one more image, a formal portrait. The caption again read “Elizabeth Pike”; the face was again unmistakably similar. Even with a lacy, high-necked shirt on and her hair caught atop her head in a prim bun, it was undeniably the exact same face. Only one change was obvious: The version in the earliest photo was the oldest. In 1892, she was listed as a teacher, not a student—a young one, perhaps, but no teenager.
For a long moment, nobody could speak. Finally Nadia said, “I don’t understand.”
“It’s a family name,” Mateo insisted. “Has to be.”
“There’s no way four generations all look that much alike.” Nadia’s mind was working fast.
She’d never learned any black magic—never wanted to. Once you started dealing with those kinds of spells, you were in league with demons, maybe with the One Beneath. But she knew enough about it to recognize it when she saw it.
Something like this—it was darker, and stronger, and scarier than anything she’d even heard of before.
“Elizabeth’s family has to have been a part of this for a very long time.” They would all have been witches, of course; the Craft was handed down mother to daughter.
Verlaine said, “A part of what?”
“Black magic.”
Mateo’s eyes darkened; his lips pressed together into a thin line. After a long moment, he said, “You can’t know any of that from pictures in the yearbook. Come on.”
“You’ve seen the pictures,” Nadia insisted. “The same as we have. That’s not a normal family resemblance, at all. It goes beyond that. It’s almost like Elizabeth … like she’s being born over and over …” But how would that even work?
“Okay, I don’t know what the explanation is, but there has to be one,” Mateo protested. “A joke by the kids in detention, Photoshopping some of us into old pictures, maybe. That doesn’t mean she’s evil.”
“But this isn’t as simple as Photoshop. I’m sure of it.” The memory of Elizabeth smiling at her coolly while the entire chemistry class had a meltdown burned in Nadia’s mind, constant as a gas flame, the one real proof she had that Elizabeth was far more than she seemed. What was going on?
Mateo said only, “I’m tired of blaming Elizabeth all the time. Let’s just get this magic … thing you need and go on from there, okay?”
Right then, his father strolled over to them; he had his son’s coloring but a pug-ugly face that suggested Mateo’s aquiline good looks came from his mother. “Mateo, it’s nice that you’re spending so much time with the lovely ladies, but you should also spend some time with your other tables. Especially table eleven, the nice men whose fajitas are ready?”
“Sure, Dad. Nadia and Verlaine were just leaving,” Mateo said. He didn’t sound angry, exactly, but obviously he was glad to have an excuse to end the conversation.
As Verlaine and Nadia walked away from La Catrina afterward, Verlaine said, “Is that possible, what you said? Someone being born over and over again?”
“Well, I’m not sure. I never heard of a spell like that.” If she could only talk to Mom for five minutes …
“If you never heard of that spell before, then why do you think that’s what’s going on?”
Nadia shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable in the early fall chill. Dark visions drawn from her mother’s few whispered warnings about black magic swirled in her mind, and it seemed to her that underneath her feet she could feel the unsteady shifting of demon-haunted ground. An illusion, of course—but an illusion that might have meaning.
To Verlaine she said only, “With powerful enough magic—anything is possible. Anything at all.”
That night, Mateo fell into bed, exhausted, but he couldn’t sleep.
As he lay there, stretched atop his covers with his jeans still on, his mind raced. Even walking down the streets of Captive’s Sound was different for him now; he knew the places he saw the glimmer were places touched by magic, knew the grime between him and the sky was proof that the entire town labored under some malevolent force. And even washing his face meant having to look again at the swirling, sickly blackness that haloed his head.
His curse was as loathsome to look at as it was to endure.
He shook a few extra Tylenol PM into his palm; he knew you could overdo these, and even trying not to have the dreams wasn’t worth frying his liver, but he’d looked up the maximum safe dosage online. With one fist he tossed them into his mouth, gulped them down with water, and hoped again to rest too deeply for dreaming.
With his brain in complete overdrive like this, though, he didn’t see how even regular sleep was possible. Mateo thought he could handle everything he’d learned about magic and witches; it was the stuff about Elizabeth that churned his guts and made him want to be sick.
No, Nadia’s weird theories couldn’t be true; he knew that. But all those pictures—all those generations of women named Elizabeth Pike—
Why had Elizabeth never mentioned that she had a family name? That she looked just like her mother and grandmother? It was the kind of thing people brought up from time to time, or told jokes about. And he and Elizabeth were best friends. They shared everything.
Slowly he took up his phone and hit her name on Contacts. As always, she answered on the first ring. “Mateo. What’s wrong? Did you have another dream?”
“Haven’t fallen asleep yet.” He curled on one side, imagining—like he often did—Elizabeth lying next to him. It wasn’t a sexual fantasy, merely comforting—the idea of her so gentle and sweet and close.
And yet now he envisioned her as “Liz Pike,” the sixties coed, or in old-timey Victorian clothes—
“I was thinking about when we were little,” Mateo said. “All the fun stuff we used to do together.”
“Those were good times, weren’t they? Maybe you can think about those while you try to fall asleep.”
“What was your favorite? Out of all those memories.” He needed to hear that—to remember it through her, to know that she treasured those experiences as much as he did.
Elizabeth said, “All of them, of course.”
“Pick one.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
Why was she being so vague? It couldn’t be that she didn’t cherish those memories as much as he did—that was impossible. Elizabeth had proved, time and again, how much she cared about him. If Elizabeth could forgive him for being a freak, then Mateo could forgive her for keeping a few secrets she felt she had to keep.
But I’m not a freak, he reminded himself. The curse is real. What happened to Mom, to all the other Cabots—that was something done to us.
Her soft voice said, “You’ll call me if you have another of the dreams, won’t you? Right away. I don’t want you to worry.”
If she is a witch, the way Nadia says, she knows the curse is real but won’t tell me about it. Not even to make me less afraid of going nuts and killing myself.
“Okay,” he said. He couldn’t picture her lying next to him any longer. “Good night.”
“Night,” she replied. Funny, how he’d never noticed before now that she never added the good in front.
That night, despite all the Tylenol PM, he dreamed.
The entire world was fire.
Floor. Ceiling. Walls. Doors. Every breath burned in Mateo’s lungs. Red, yellow, orange: They all glowed and flickered around him, strangely alive, as if heat itself could hate him enough to kill.
Nadia lay at his feet, her dark hair just another burn in the scorched world that now enclosed him.
Mateo wanted to go to her—to save her, to hold her, something, anything—but he couldn’t, because he was in someone else’s arms.
Why couldn’t he let go?
From her place on the floor, Nadia whispered, “You shouldn’t have kissed me.”
Desperately Mateo tried to reach her, but he remained held fast—those weren’t arms holding him, they couldn’t be—they were chains—
He awoke with a start.
Then swore.
Then rolled over in bed, punching his pillow, to wait out the long, sleepless hours until dawn.
“You’re positive?” Cole whispered, his covers drawn up under his chin.
Nadia closed the closet doors. “Inspected it top to bottom. No monsters. Absolutely, one hundred percent monster-free.”
He smiled a little, and she came to his bedside and ruffled his hair. As Cole relaxed, he said, “Can we have mac and cheese tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow is a pizza night. I won’t be here. But I bet Dad will order all the toppings you want. You should pick some crazy ones. Like—pineapple and anchovy!”
“Ewww.” Cole wriggled in delighted disgust. “Where will you be?”
Diving in the sound for God knows what. “Out with some of my new friends. I’m lucky to have met so many people right away. What about you, buddy? Do you like the kids at school?”
Cole started telling her all about his new friends, and a birthday party he had this weekend; Nadia felt her phone vibrate in her pocket but ignored it, letting her little brother go on and on until his words came slowly, and his eyelids had begun to droop. He was worrying about the monsters less and less now. Maybe he was finally back to being a normal little kid. She hoped so. He deserved it. Mom had taken enough away from her and Dad—it wasn’t right if she took away Cole’s ability to feel safe ever again.
Only when he was conked out and she’d shut his door behind her did she look down and see that she had a message from Mateo. Instantly she hit Call Back. “Hey. What’s up?”
“Hey.” He sounded almost as sleepy as Cole had. There was something about his voice when it was sleepy—warm and not quite controlled. Nadia found herself leaning against the wall, making little circles on the floor with her foot. “Sorry we left things so weird. We seem to keep doing that.”
Nadia forced out the next: “I don’t mean to say anything bad about Elizabeth.”
“Listen, I admit—Elizabeth hasn’t told me the whole truth. I know she can’t. I get that. I also know you’re not making all this up. Before I can talk to Elizabeth, really talk about this, I have to know what she’s dealing with. The more I know, the more she’s likely to tell me. Right?”
“Right.” Why did he have to be so focused on Elizabeth? Nadia focused on the most important thing. “I want to go diving near the lighthouse. To search. Tomorrow night, if I can.”
She expected him to argue. Or hesitate. To come up with reasons they should ask more questions first.
All Mateo said was, “I’m with you.”
All day, Nadia’s mind was on the night’s dive. Her body, unfortunately, was stuck in school, and every class seemed to drag on and on forever. A counseling session with Faye Walsh seemed likely to bore her to actual, literal death, until Nadia came up with the idea of telling her that she was working with Verlaine on digitizing the back issues of the Lightning Rod—that was an extracurricular project, right? Apparently it counted, at least enough to get Ms. Walsh off her back for the moment.
Her head still in the clouds—thinking of what to wear, when to go, what to tell her father—she drifted down the hallway toward her last class, when suddenly Elizabeth stepped directly in front of her.
Nadia stopped short. Elizabeth regarded her without malice or curiosity. With her chestnut curls long and loose and her unfashionable airy dress, she ought to have looked unkempt, even tacky. Instead, there was an incredible stillness to her. Her beauty was so precise that it might have been plotted on a sketch pad with compass and protractor, every measurement ideal and yet impersonal. Looking at Elizabeth was like looking at a statue of some ancient goddess that could smite you at a glance.
“Your mother is gone,” Elizabeth said.
How did she know that? Nadia struggled for words. “That’s—none of your business.”
Elizabeth cocked her head. “Your father forgot to mention my visit, didn’t he?”
Wait—Elizabeth was in my house? Nadia felt her arms tightening around her books, as if using them to shield her heart.
“People often forget where I’ve been,” Elizabeth continued. “I prefer it that way. Once they’re aware of me—of what I can do—it’s harder. But I could make you forget about me. Forget my name. Forget your own name, if I chose.”
Every bad thought she’d had about Elizabeth was true. Nadia remembered Mateo—the danger he was in because of the curse, how vulnerable he was to Elizabeth’s manipulation—and that plus her fear for her dad seized her, turning her fear to rage. “Tell me what you’re doing to this town. What are you after? What do you want?”
“Nothing I haven’t earned.”
“Then what are you doing to Mateo? You’re friends. You have to care about him, at least a little. Why haven’t you told him about the curse? Why aren’t you protecting him from it?”
To her surprise, Elizabeth smiled. The expression was fond, in a patronizing way—like how she might look at a puppy before she petted its head. “You’re very young. You don’t have your full power yet, and you have no teacher to guide you. So you’ll never be a real witch. You and I both know that. So why are you prying into my life? And Mateo belongs to me in ways you could never even begin to understand.”
“He’s not your property,” Nadia shot back.
“Oh, but he is. You know I can make people forget, Nadia. I can also make people remember. If I wish it, Mateo will ‘remember’ that he’s in love with me. That he always has been. He’d be so intensely in love with me that he’d do anything I asked, as quickly as a snap of my fingers.” Elizabeth’s eyes crinkled slightly at the corners, like someone remembering a good joke. “They say it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. But you’ve loved and lost, haven’t you? You know how it hurts. Are you going to keep investing all that emotion in Mateo, knowing I can separate you two forever at any moment I please?”
Loved and lost. Nadia had gone out with guys, had cared about a few, but she’d never truly fallen for someone—not the way she sensed she could fall for Mateo. The only love she’d lost was her mother’s love.
And that loss had gutted her beyond anything else Nadia had ever experienced or imagined. It still hurt so badly, every single day—
The thought of setting herself up for that kind of pain again made Nadia feel faint. She put one hand out to steady herself against the cinder-block wall of the school. Elizabeth’s chin lifted—she’d seen Nadia’s weakness, and Nadia hated herself for it.
Elizabeth said only, “For your own sake, you should move on. From me, from this town. Keep your family safe. Haven’t you been through enough?”
Then she simply walked away.
Would that warning be sufficient?
Elizabeth thought so. She doubted a slip of a girl like Nadia Caldani represented any real danger in the first place; any complications from Nadia’s crush on Mateo would be minor and easily corrected with spells of forgetting or compulsion. Nadia would never tell Mateo about magic, or therefore about Elizabeth’s own witchcraft—someone so earnestly self-righteous would never break one of the First Laws.
And yet Elizabeth had to think of another besides herself.
Were Nadia to turn her avid curiosity away from Elizabeth and onto the magic she must, by now, have sensed beneath the chemistry lab—
No, that would not do.
Quickly Elizabeth cast a simple spell to shield the chemistry lab better. No magic on earth was capable of shielding that much power for very long, but she only needed another few weeks now.
I protect you, she thought to the last One she would ever love. I stand between you and all who would oppose you, weak or mighty.
The spell shimmered out across the school, settling deep within the earth, where it could do the most good.
Now, to cover her tracks. Briefly Elizabeth considered having Nadia forget everything about her. It would be cleaner—but probably short-lived. If Nadia had figured out this much already, she’d probably manage to figure out that Elizabeth was a witch again—and again—and again. Repeated confrontations: What a bore.
Besides, Nadia’s knowledge was no more threat than Nadia herself, now that the Chamber was protected. Elizabeth needed only to ensure that would continue.
So she sent out a spell of forgetting, highly targeted, highly specific—and sufficient to make sure Nadia Caldani could do nothing to interfere with Elizabeth’s plans, in even the slightest way.
Nadia stopped in her tracks, books in her arms. Did I forget something?
She’d been freaking out about Elizabeth facing her down that way—so much that apparently she’d lost track of something else. And it was important, too. Did it have to do with chemistry class, maybe?
I bet there’s an assignment I forgot to write down, she thought, and sighed. She’d have to ask Mateo about it later.
The neighbors looked at Mateo warily when he asked to borrow the boat, but then, that was how they always looked at him. As soon as they said yes, he texted Nadia: Meet me at sunset at the boathouse. Is Verlaine coming?
I didn’t tell her about it, Nadia replied, and Mateo felt slightly relieved. It wasn’t that he didn’t like Verlaine—he kind of did, which surprised him, since as long as he could remember, she’d been the only kid more outcast than he was in Captive’s Sound. But whatever they found in the ocean—if it explained more about who Elizabeth really was, what she was keeping from him—then he wanted to talk about that with Nadia, alone.
Already he felt like he could tell Nadia everything.
What was it about someone that made you know, just know, your secrets were safe with them? Mateo had come to know Nadia first in his dreams, and in those dreams he’d felt—protectiveness, trust, even something that might be love. But those had been only nightmare visions, the emotions experienced there as fleeting as sleep. What was stirring between him and Nadia now—that was real. It could endure. Could he trust that feeling, and trust her?
Walking out to the water that evening made him shiver. Not from the chill in the air—though it was coming, fall already threatening to turn into winter with September not even quite over—but from the view, the look at his hometown that revealed all the evil he’d always sensed but never before seen.
Being a Steadfast meant more than strengthening Nadia’s powers. It meant facing the world for what it really was—filled with magic, more dangerous and far stranger than anyone could ever guess.
Even during the daytime, the sky overhead was different than it should have been. Dingier. Lower. When he looked at it, Mateo had the uncanny sense that it was looking back. At first he thought he could even see the reflection of that gloom on the waters, but then he realized they were poisoned in the exact same way. Staring at the ocean, the waves seemed not blue but a slick, iridescent black, as if in the aftermath of an oil spill.
As the sun lowered enough to touch the eerie surface of the ocean, Nadia appeared at the boathouse. Her figure was all but obscured by the heavy fleece top and sweatpants she wore.
It wasn’t like Mateo hadn’t noticed before then that Nadia had an incredible body. He was a guy. There was no chance he’d miss that. But he hadn’t realized he was already in the habit of checking Nadia out every single time he saw her. Maybe he should think about that some more later, he decided as he straightened up. They had a job to do.
“You got a boat?” she said. “Good work.”
“No big deal. Pretty much half the population of Captive’s Sound has a boat.”
“How come you guys don’t? No time, with the restaurant?”
Mateo hesitated. “We had one. Mom took it when she—when she drowned herself. Dad never bought another.” He’d never known what became of the boat. Had it washed up, been found and disposed of by some neighbor quick to burn something that had touched the Cabot curse? Or did it drift out to sea? It might still be there, floating in the middle of the ocean, empty and alone.
Nadia’s hand briefly rested on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring that up. I should’ve thought.”
“You didn’t know.” He took a deep breath. “Come on. Let’s get going.”
“Hey, do we have an assignment in chemistry?”
“No homework I can remember. Why?”
“Huh. No reason.”
The motor gunned on the first yank, and soon they were skimming across the shining black water. Going out at dark like this was risky, he knew, but they couldn’t be seen; diving was way more dangerous than boating, and if anybody caught them at it, they’d get hauled back in.
Besides, he figured—they were heading straight for the lighthouse.
It still ran most nights, its golden beam sweeping around the water in wide circles. As the sky overhead darkened, the lighthouse turned on; the first time the beam swept over their boat, it was as if they momentarily dissolved in brilliance.
“Will the lighthouse keeper see us?” Nadia shouted over the roar of the engine. Her black hair streamed behind her in the wind.
Mateo shook his head. “It’s automated. We’re safe.”
Then his eyes widened, and he didn’t feel safe anymore.
Because once again he saw the magic burning bright beneath the water.
Finally the sky was dark enough for Mateo to take it in as he had before. The steady, greenish glow was a few dozen feet from the lighthouse. The churning surface of the waves, this close, meant that the illuminated water leaped and moved as though it were alive somehow, twisting and writhing as if to enclose them.
He cut the motor. Their boat continued forward propelled only by momentum. Nadia frowned at him. “Why are we stopping?”
“We’re almost there. Can you not see it?”
“No. Tell me.”
Mateo pointed at the heart of it, only a few feet away now. The light seemed to form a wreath around their boat, as if they were caught in its net. “Right there. That’s where I need to dive.”
“You mean, where I need to dive.”
He turned toward her, startled. “Nadia, are you crazy? I can see it. You can’t. Being in the ocean—it’s not like being in a pool, you know.”
“But it’s not that different from being in Lake Michigan,” she insisted. “I’m a good swimmer. Even did Red Cross lifeguard training.”
She had him there; Mateo had never been a great swimmer, and he’d given it up altogether after Mom’s death. But he said, “I should still be able to dive for it if I can see it.”
Already she was peeling off her sweatshirt; Nadia gasped softly, probably from the cold air hitting her skin. Next came the thermal undershirt, and then he could see the slim black one-piece she wore beneath. It was a lifeguard’s suit, or a competitive swimmer’s, not the usual brightly colored bikini girls wore to show off on the sand. And yet something about the purposeful way she moved, the simple grace of her, captivated him more than bare skin ever had.
Oblivious to his distraction, Nadia said, “Mateo, whatever is down there is powerful magic. There may be enchantments protecting it. Nobody but a witch would be able to do this. Besides—you’re my Steadfast. You make me stronger. That’s why I need you up here.”
“I don’t like it,” he said, but if what she said was true—he was stuck with it. He tossed the anchor over the side; cold water splashed his arms as the chain snaked down behind it. Fifteen feet deep, maybe a little more: That wasn’t too bad. “Okay. Just—work as fast as possible.”
“Trust me, I intend to.” Nadia had kicked off her sweatpants and shoes, too; she wore only the swimsuit and hugged herself as she looked over the edge. Mateo tried not to stare, at least not to drool like that jerk Jeremy Prasad would, but it was hard not to—she was so close to him, close enough to touch.
For a moment he found himself remembering last summer at the beach, and the girl who’d hooked up with him on a dare. But now, in his mind, he imagined that this time it was Nadia lying on the towel with him beneath the pier, her fingers tangled in his hair as he ran one hand along her bare leg—
Jesus, she’s about to do something seriously dangerous, could you concentrate for a second? Mateo handed her the wrist flashlight he’d brought for his own use. “Here. And if you run into trouble, flick the light off and on really fast, okay?”
“Good idea.” Nadia slipped it on, tested the switch, and took a deep breath. “Point to where you think it is—exactly where.”
He leaned next to her, so that they were shoulder to shoulder, their foreheads touching. Nadia took one sharp breath that made the boat seem to rock and bob even more strongly beneath them. Lifting her hand with his, he made it so that their fingers pointed together to the core of the greenish fire. “Right there.”
“I’ve got it.”
Nadia turned to him as she spoke, and for one moment they remained like that—face-to-face, only inches apart.
Then she said, “Wish me luck.”
Before he could do that, or say anything else, Nadia gulped in a breath and went over the edge, diving into the chilly sound without hesitating. The boat rocked beneath him.
And then—only then—did Mateo remember the dream of her floating overhead, writhed in the murk, her hair flowing around her. He’d thought she was suspended in midair, amid the fog.
But what if the dream had showed her underwater?
The cold stabbed into Nadia through every inch of her skin, and it took all her will not to open her mouth and gasp water into her lungs. She slapped on the wrist light, pointing the beam ahead of her—and thanks to Mateo’s guidance, she saw it almost immediately. In a nest of seaweed lay a chest, half-dissolved by time and tide, its ancient boards warped free of the metal framework. A crab scuttled by in the murk, the light glinting off its shell.
With a few strong kicks, Nadia propelled herself toward it. With any luck she could grab whatever was in the chest right away and get back to the surface within seconds. Then she could put on her clothes, dry her hair, and be warm again—be ready to explore this thing—
Water stinging her eyes—ugh, she should have brought goggles, but what a time to think of it—Nadia reached the trunk. She couldn’t pry the lid up, but no need: The side of the trunk fell away even as she touched it, and a crab scuttled out. Nadia hoped for no more crabs but put her hand in half expecting to be pinched.
Instead, she pulled out—yes!—a book. A Book of Shadows.
It was huge—so big she could hardly wrap her hand around it. Despite its centuries of immersion in water, the book remained intact; when she opened it, Nadia suspected, the pages would remain dry.
No charms showed themselves; no more spellwork was required. And only one breath! Triumphantly, Nadia began kicking toward the surface—only to feel seaweed winding around her legs.
Tight.
So tight it was like being tied down.
Nadia kicked, then thrashed, but the seaweed only increased its hold.
The Book of Shadows had been protected after all—and by magic she didn’t know how to break.