NADIA MANAGED TO AVOID BOTH VERLAINE AND MATEO for the rest of the school day, even though she had to hide in the bathroom instead of eating lunch. It felt cowardly, hiding from them—
—no, all of it felt cowardly, period.
I’m not backing down because I’m scared, Nadia reminded herself. It’s because I’m putting too many people in danger. Dad. Cole. Mateo. Elizabeth’s evil—but that doesn’t make her my problem.
That was all true, or true enough. So why did it make her feel so hollow inside?
When the final bell rang, she didn’t even bother returning to her locker, just shouldered her heavy backpack and hurried across the grounds, not looking back. The crowd of laughing, carefree people didn’t seem to have anything to do with Nadia. Even though she’d learned most of their names by now, worked with a couple of people on school projects, they were still strangers, really. And that was how she wanted it.
But it was so easy to imagine them out on the night of the Halloween carnival, acting crazy in their costumes, laughing like this, until the ground began to shake—
“Nadia!” That was Verlaine behind her. Nadia didn’t want to turn around, but she did.
Verlaine and Mateo ran to her, side by side. Why was it surprising to realize they would have talked about this without her? The whole world doesn’t revolve around you, she told herself. But all she could do was grip her backpack straps tightly and stare at the ground as they came closer.
“Wait up,” Verlaine panted, even though Nadia had already stopped walking. “We need to talk to you about this.”
Mateo said nothing, only looked at Nadia with those dark eyes—brown with a touch of gold.
Nadia managed to say, “I realize you guys both need to understand what was done to you. And maybe I can help with that. But this whole thing about figuring Elizabeth out, taking her on—that has to stop.”
“How can you say that?” Verlaine stomped one Converse-clad foot on the ground. “We’re just supposed to let her go on like she has been? Hurting anybody who gets in her way?”
“If we get in her way, then we’re next.” Although she was talking to Verlaine, Nadia couldn’t look away from Mateo’s face. “We’re all fooling around with stuff we don’t understand—not even me. My mom”—her voice choked in her throat; she spat the bitter words out—“my mom didn’t teach me enough. There’s no one else to teach me. I’m not Elizabeth’s equal. I’m not even close. To you two, maybe it seems like I know everything there is to know about magic, but I don’t. Anything I try to do to Elizabeth is doomed to fail. Do you understand that? Mateo, you—you got hurt two days ago. You could have ended up on a ventilator, in a coma, for the rest of your life. And that was just Ginger coming after you because you knew too much! Because of me. It’s nothing compared to what Elizabeth could do. Do you guys get how far over our heads we are here? If you did, there’s no way you’d fight me about this. You’d know the only thing to do is to run as far away from Elizabeth as possible.”
“How?” Mateo said quietly. “We live here. I’m cursed. There’s no getting away from that.”
“I don’t know,” Nadia confessed. “We’ll have to figure something out.” She’d been up all night asking herself this same question. Dad liked his new job, even if they did scrape by on less money, but she figured he’d still put her and Cole in front of everything else. So if she started talking about how desperately she missed Chicago—and said she wanted to go to Yale or Stanford, someplace crazy expensive—maybe he’d talk to his old law firm and get his job back. It was the only plan she had so far, but it seemed possible.
Verlaine was so thin, so pale—a stretched cobweb of a girl—that Nadia sometimes forgot how tall she was. Now, though, when Verlaine’s fury was blazing, there was no forgetting that she towered over her, and even had a few inches on Mateo. “Elizabeth might’ve killed my parents. She definitely killed Mateo’s mom. How can we not take her on? Somebody has to! Do you want to let her get away with it?”
“No!” Nadia shot back. “But she already got away with it! I don’t have the power to stop her, and you two—you have to stop believing that I do. You have to stop believing in me.”
She started to turn away from them, but Mateo’s hand closed around her arm, and just like that, Nadia couldn’t move. Feeling him touch her made her want to melt, even though she knew she ought to push him away.
Mateo looked at her steadily as he said, “I can’t do that.”
“You can walk away from Elizabeth if you have to—you’ve already started—”
“That’s not what I mean.” Mateo’s thumb brushed along the crook of her elbow, back and forth, the smallest, gentlest touch she could imagine. “You said I had to stop believing in you. Well, I can’t.”
Nadia refused to cry. She wouldn’t. Even if her eyes were blurring and she couldn’t get a word out because her breaths were coming hard and fast, even if Mateo kept looking at her like that, she wasn’t going to cry.
Mateo kept going. “You’ve already done the impossible. Remember? I’m a Steadfast. Shouldn’t happen. But it has. You’ve already figured out more about Elizabeth than just about anyone else in town ever did. I don’t know enough about all this to say whether you could ever be stronger than her, but—I think you could be strong enough. Nadia, you could be strong enough to do anything.”
She gulped down something that was either a sob or a laugh, and although she still wanted to pull her arm away, she couldn’t bring herself to. She could only look back at Mateo and wish she were anything like the person he thought he saw.
“Okay, so, you two are having a moment.” Verlaine jerked her backpack onto her shoulders in a huff. “Mateo, good luck getting through to her. Nadia, call me when you’re talking sense again.” With that, Verlaine stalked off across the grounds, her silvery hair seemingly a tangled part of the gray fall sky.
Once they were alone, Nadia whispered, “Mateo, you aren’t listening.”
“You’re not talking. Your fear is.” He breathed out. “Listen. Can we go somewhere? Hang out for a while? We could talk about this better if we weren’t about forty feet from cheerleader practice.”
“My house. Dad’s at his hearing, and Cole’s over at a friend’s for a while.” Nadia realized that she needed to be at home; more than that she needed to be in her attic, surrounded by the tools of her Craft. It was the Craft that had shaped her life so much so far, that had brought Verlaine and Mateo to her. It was the Craft she was coming close to abandoning.
So it was the Craft she needed to confront now—and when she did, she wanted Mateo beside her.
“The last time I was here I thought it was bigger,” Mateo said as he stooped his head; the sloping roof of the attic meant that he could only stand up straight at the very center. “Of course, the last time I was here I was seeing my first magic spell. So I guess I got distracted.”
Nadia sat cross-legged on one of the oversize pillows on the floor; normally she popped her phone into the dock she kept in the corner, both for the music and to make sure her father and Cole wouldn’t overhear anything they shouldn’t. Doing that now felt like trying to set a mood or something, though, so she didn’t. But that meant Mateo took his seat across from her in a silence that felt heavy and strange.
Yet not awkward. Mateo—even though he was a guy, even though they couldn’t agree on what to do or how to do it—he belonged here.
Didn’t mean she knew what to say to him.
Their eyes met, and she looked at him from a different angle than before—and then it was hard to meet his eyes. Mateo said, “Okay. Where do we start? You’re finally smiling, so I guess we’re on the same page.”
“It’s not that.” Nadia tried to cover her mouth with her hand, the better to disguise her smile. “Momentary distraction. Sorry.”
“What is it?”
“It’s just—” She put this as gently as she could. “Ginger really shortchanged you on that cut.”
“Is my whole head still lopsided?” When Nadia nodded, Mateo groaned. “Great. I’m trying to have a serious discussion while I look like an idiot.”
“You don’t. Look like an idiot, I mean.” Nadia hesitated. His hair was the least of their concerns—something for her to focus on instead of the bigger issue—but maybe it was better to get rid of any distractions. Besides, Mateo really did need some help. “Hey. I keep some scissors up here. Let me finish it.”
“Cut my hair?”
“Shouldn’t be too hard. I could try,” she said. “Only if you want me to.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
Nadia leaned over to one of her toolboxes (she used ones from the hardware store—less suspicious and supersturdy) to get her scissors; Mateo slipped off his letter jacket, revealing the hard lines of his chest and arms beneath a long-sleeved black T-shirt. At first she was startled—by how amazing he looked, how close he was, the fact that he was taking his clothes off—but then she thought, He doesn’t want to get hair all over himself. Obviously. Don’t be an idiot.
But her pulse was pounding as she took the scissors, and grabbed one of her drop cloths to drape around his shoulders.
When she slipped her arms around his neck, he shifted his weight—surprised the same way she had been, she thought, by how close they were. Just thinking that made her cheeks flush hot, and Mateo wasn’t looking her straight in the eyes any longer, either. He said only, “You’ve cut hair before, right?”
“Sure. Plenty of times.” No need to tell him that the hair she’d cut had belonged to her old Barbie dolls, which all looked demented afterward.
Nadia tentatively reached toward him, her fingertips barely short of his hair, until finally she ran her hands through it. Mateo’s hair felt like warm silk against her palms. At her touch, he closed his eyes. Him reacting like that—it made the silence in the room softer, something that could hold them both.
Carefully Nadia took the scissors in one hand and combed her fingernails through the very back of his hair. Should she just—even it out? That seemed obvious enough. The metallic scrape of the blades against each other made her bite her lower lip, but then the first lock of hair fell away.
There were ways to use locks of hair in love spells—
“Thank you,” she said quietly as she made the next snip. “For believing in me. After what you’ve been through—everything that’s happened—I wouldn’t blame you if you hated witchcraft. And witches.”
“I did, for a little while. Or thought I did. But that was only Elizabeth.”
Nadia brushed some hair past his ear, feeling the curve of it against her thumb. She checked the other side of his head and decided to risk another snip. “I know that must have been hard.”
“Yeah.” Mateo swallowed hard. “I thought she was my best friend. All those great memories I have of us growing up together—it’s hard to believe they were only lies.” He hesitated. “Do you think she erased other memories? You know. Other people I used to be friends with. So I’d really think she was all I had.”
“I don’t know.”
“I can’t decide what would be worse. Her wiping out whatever happy memories I ever had, or whether—whether there weren’t any.” He breathed out; his shoulders rose and fell, and she paused in her work, only for a moment. Then Nadia bent closer to him to start again.
It was easier, somehow, talking to him when they didn’t have to look each other in the eyes. So she kept her concentration on the fringe of dark hair between her fingers as she snipped. “You have the right to feel betrayed.” The next words stuck in her throat, but she got them out: “Elizabeth made you think that you loved her.”
He hesitated before saying, “It was never like that between us. You get that, right?”
Once again Nadia remembered Elizabeth saying she could make Mateo love her at any moment she chose. Make him believe he’d always loved her. There was no reason for her to do that, Nadia knew, no reason it would increase Elizabeth’s control—but she would do it just to be mean. Just to make sure Nadia hurt.
“Yeah, you told me,” she said briskly. “But there’s more than one kind of love. Losing the love of a friend—that’s bad enough.”
Mateo breathed out. “Sometimes I think the only reason I’ve been able to keep myself from totally losing it is that she never made me … want her. Kiss her. Anything like that. If she had, I couldn’t take it.”
“You’ve had too many people using magic to screw with your head already. That’s one more reason to break the Steadfast spell. So your thoughts can be your own again.”
“I thought you said you couldn’t break that spell—not for a long time, maybe ever.”
“Not without—sacrificing my magic.”
Nadia knew what that meant. Destroying and burying her Book of Shadows. Removing all the enchantments from the attic. Taking apart her bracelet. Never having the assurance of even a casual spell again. It felt like ripping out her own heart.
But if that was what it took to keep her family safe—and to set Mateo free—
“Then I don’t want you to break the spell,” Mateo said.
“I’m ready to do it.”
“Well, I’m not. This Steadfast thing—what we did that day on the beach, what we were together—it was amazing. It felt like I’d been waiting my whole life to be a part of something like that.”
Me too, Nadia wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come out. She combed one hand through his hair, shaking out the loose strands, checking her work—hey, this looked pretty good. But her fingers trembled, and her breaths were coming shallow and fast as she struggled against tears.
“Don’t take it away from me,” Mateo said. “Or from yourself. As scary and as weird as this is, being your Steadfast—I know it’s what I was meant to do. Like being a witch is what you’re meant to do. It’s a part of us. You can’t just … end it like it never happened.”
Nadia sat back and set the scissors down. “You know I’m telling you the truth about how dangerous it is.”
“Yeah. I do. You want to protect the people you love. I do, too. But we fall apart or we stand together, right?”
It flowed into her like sunlight, took her tears away. If Mateo could bear the curse, and still have the courage to stand as her Steadfast and take Elizabeth on—how could she do any less? She still owed Dad and Cole all her protection, but with Elizabeth’s evil unfolding everywhere around them, the only thing for Nadia to do was fight. At least she wasn’t fighting alone.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “You’re right. We stand together.”
“Together.” Mateo held his hand out, and she took it. When their eyes met again, Nadia flushed with warmth. She kept waiting for him to say something else, but he didn’t. Maybe he couldn’t, if he felt as shaky as she did. If the feeling of his hand in hers did half as much to him as it did to her—
Once again she remembered Elizabeth standing in the hallway, promising to make Mateo love her if it suited her purposes.
If Nadia leaned forward right now—the way Mateo had begun to—if she kissed him and they were together, would Elizabeth know? She’d sensed the spell of forgetting right away; who could guess how deeply she was wound into Mateo’s mind?
If Elizabeth realized Nadia and Mateo were together, she might take Mateo back. She might make him believe that he’d always loved Elizabeth. Could Nadia bear that? Once again she remembered Elizabeth’s words to her: You’ve loved and lost, haven’t you?
And Mateo had said the only thing keeping him from losing it was the fact that Elizabeth hadn’t deceived him in this one, last, terrible way.
Nadia pulled back. Mateo blinked, obviously caught off guard.
“Nadia!” Cole’s voice sang from downstairs. “Are you home yet?”
That broke the sudden awkwardness, and both of them started to laugh from embarrassment. “Little brothers,” Nadia said. “They have amazing timing.”
“Apparently.” But even though they were smiling, she could feel the uncertainty still between them.
Mateo wasn’t sure how he’d expected this whole weird day to end, but it definitely hadn’t involved LEGOs.
“These are big-boy LEGOs,” Cole said proudly. “Not the stupid ones for little babies. Dad let me get the real ones a year ago.”
“I can see that. Is this the Millennium Falcon we’re building?”
“Yeah. Or it can be a castle.”
Really it sort of looked like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, even if it had Chewbacca in it. Mateo figured it didn’t matter as long as he kept sticking more LEGOs on.
He sat with Cole in the middle of the Caldanis’ living room floor, keeping him busy while Nadia talked things through on the phone with Verlaine. Apparently Cole’s friend had gotten sick, which made for an unexpected afternoon of babysitting.
Which was definitely not what he wanted to be doing right now. He wanted to be back in that attic, with Nadia’s hand in his—back in that moment so he could find out exactly how she felt about him—
But life got in the way sometimes, and that was just how it was. Mateo didn’t mind keeping Cole busy; he was a fun little kid. Also, maybe Mateo was way too old for LEGOs, but that didn’t mean he didn’t sort of like them still.
And, just as obviously, Nadia needed to talk to Verlaine almost as much as she’d needed to talk to him.
“I’m really sorry,” Nadia said into her phone for about the eighteenth time. “I had to think about my dad and Cole, you know? And how they could be affected by—um, by our science project. And where are you?” Then she opened the front curtains. “Oh, okay. Come on in.” She put her phone back on the counter. To Mateo she said, “I asked Verlaine to pick up some Slushos, but I don’t know. She’s still pretty hacked off.”
“We can live without Slushos,” Mateo said.
Cole sighed. “Speak for yourself.” Mateo laughed and ruffled his hair.
Nadia opened the front door as Verlaine came up the steps, gray hair in a ponytail, a scowl on her face, and a tray of Slushos in her hands. “They’re all cherry,” she said. “Take them or don’t.”
“Yes!” Cole did his version of an end-zone touchdown dance, while Mateo rose to his feet.
“How are you doing?” he asked her, and just like that, Verlaine’s expression softened. They’d spoken only briefly this afternoon—the first time they’d ever had a lengthy conversation without Nadia there, even though they’d known each other almost their whole lives. But that had been enough for him to know how betrayed she felt, and how lonely. As suspicious as she was of Nadia, witchcraft, and the rest of it, this was the one time in Verlaine’s life she’d ever been included in something.
How come I never talked to Verlaine before? Mateo wondered. She’s smart. She sees a lot. So why is it like I always forget about her? A six-foot-tall girl with crazy clothes and silver hair—it’s not as if she doesn’t stand out.
“I’m okay.” Verlaine handed Cole his Slusho and took a slurp from hers. “Better now that I’m not being abandoned to investigate my parents’—I mean, our science project all on my own. Plus the whole thing with, um, with Elizabeth.”
“Is Elizabeth your girlfriend?” Cole said to Mateo. He looked all kid-innocent, but there was mischief in his eyes to go with the pink Slusho mustache. “Nadia said she was.”
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Mateo said.
Nadia quickly interjected, “Cole, wouldn’t it be fun to play in the yard for a while?”
“I’m not supposed to take snacks outside because of that time I got gravel in my sandwich.”
“I wouldn’t tell. Just this once!”
Cole grinned as he sat in the nearest chair, kicking his legs back and forth. “Nope. I like it here.”
Mateo had always wished he weren’t an only child, but now he wasn’t so sure about that. They’d have to be careful about how they said things. “So our … science project is about the sinkholes in town. And what might be pulling the town out from under our feet.”
Nadia gasped, so sharply that Mateo thought she might have hurt herself. He leaned toward her, concerned, but instead she thumped her hand fast against the wall. “Oh, that’s it. That’s actually it.”
Verlaine stared at Mateo, who shrugged. “That’s what?”
Nadia grabbed the remote and turned on the television; almost instantly, Cole wandered toward it like a kid hypnotized. Then she gestured them closer and whispered, “Goodwife Hale’s—book. She said something about this, about the framework of this town being built on mag—on, uh, magnetism.”
“He’s not listening!” Verlaine whispered. “Magic. It’s built on magic?”
“I think so,” Nadia continued. “That’s what Elizabeth’s doing. She’s ripping out that old magic. Pulling the town out from under us.”
“With the sinkholes,” Mateo said, trying to make sure he had this straight.
“Yes, but it’s more than that. The way this town is sick on the inside—and all the curses she’s laid, whatever the hell that is buried beneath the chemistry lab—there’s magic everywhere here, do you understand?”
“We do now,” Verlaine said, “but where are you going with this?”
Looking straight at Mateo, Nadia continued, “You said the magic was a part of us. That it wasn’t meant to be taken away. That’s true for this whole town. See? Captive’s Sound has been cursed and enchanted for so long that it’s—it’s literally lying on a foundation of magic. Elizabeth’s stripping away her own spells. She’s removing the framework.”
He could kind of see that. “Why?”
“The One Beneath must want it. I don’t know what for. They say sometimes he demands death for its own sake.” Nadia said that so quietly, so matter-of-factly, that it sent a chill along Mateo’s spine. Next to him, Verlaine shuddered. “But now I know some of the spells she must be using. That means—that means I have an idea what to do to stop her.”
“This sounds dangerous,” Verlaine said.
“It is.” Nadia nodded slowly. “But it’s worth a try.”
Mateo felt the urge to tell her not to do it—whatever it was—to get between her and Elizabeth if he could. But he knew he couldn’t. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to try to turn the spell back on her,” Nadia said, her dark eyes lighting up. “Unmagic her, at least a little bit. We’re going to fight fire with fire.”