“COME ON,” NADIA WHISPERED, TEARS OF SHEER EXERTION rolling down her face. “Just—a few more inches—”
She reached desperately for the doorway of the room where she was trapped, fingers extended, every joint in her hand and arm aching. If she could only get hold of one of the shards of glass lying right outside, maybe she could start to hack away at the cobwebs surrounding her. Already she could hardly see the lower half of her body, and her left leg was going numb. Nadia had let herself fall to the floor, knowing the glass was her best chance, but now she wondered if she’d wind up mummified here, swaddled in gray filmy stuff, spiders all over her.
Already Nadia had tried to cast spells to liberate herself, but the Book of Shadows’s protections were ancient and primal. Her magic skittered across it like a raindrop across the windshield of a car, without any chance of getting in and changing anything.
Worst of all, she felt as if it were staring at her. Enjoying her fear and pain.
Nadia clutched desperately at the spiderwebs, trying to pull them away; little legs scrambled through her hair, and she screamed. How long had she been screaming? It seemed like forever, and it seemed like she pulled away handfuls of cobwebs every second, but there were always more around her, bearing her down.
Elizabeth walked into the ocean again; her blood would still be strong here. It would work.
Mateo followed her. He couldn’t help it. The frigidity of the waters affected him more than it did her. As the tides splashed over their waists, up toward their shoulders, he said, voice shaking from the severe cold, “Are you—going to—drown us?”
“We will die by fire,” she promised. “Silence. I have work to do.”
The eyes in her hand were smooth against her palm. They knew her blood, and again they would see.
“You might as well kill me,” Mateo said. “That’s what you do, isn’t it? What you did to Mom, my grandfather, Jeremy. What you tried to do to Verlaine. You use us up and throw us away.”
“Yes. But I haven’t used you up yet. Your curse is a part of me, Mateo. As long as I live, so does the curse.”
Enough distractions. This spell—even for her, this was difficult. Elizabeth had to bring all her concentration to bear, though she knew it would mean her hold on Mateo lessened for a moment. No matter. She knew her duty.
As the eyes drifted away into the tides, she felt the cord between her and Mateo—not break, but bend and stretch, giving him slightly more liberty. He felt it, too, or saw it; he was a Steadfast, after all.
Mateo threw himself at her, bearing them both down underwater. A wave came in, tossing them hard against the shells and sand; Mateo struggled for purchase, trying to get enough grip with his feet to anchor her against the ocean floor and drown her. Elizabeth could have laughed at his foolishness.
Another wave—and this one knocked them both into a roll. Now Mateo dragged her from the water by her wrist and hair before clutching her around the throat with both hands. His knees pressed down on her legs, pinning her.
“I can kill you.” His voice shook. “Don’t think I can’t. After what you did to my mom—I’m going to enjoy killing you.”
“No, you won’t.” She could still whisper. He wasn’t even bearing down hard enough to cut off all her air. Angry as he was, justified though he thought himself, Mateo was not the kind of man who could easily take life, not even to end the curse that kept him prisoner. “You’ll hate yourself for it.”
Mateo paused. Water dripped from his hair, from his eyelashes. His entire body shook with the tension. “You’re right. I will. But if I can protect Nadia—protect everyone—then I have to do it. I have to.”
He was talking himself into it. So, he had more resolve than she’d thought.
Too bad he was only a human.
Elizabeth pulled the spell taut again, sent him staggering to the side, then to his knees in the sand. No matter how hard he struggled to rise again, he couldn’t. She ruffled his hair as if he were a small boy. “You only had a second,” she confided. “And you’ve lost your chance.”
Oh, the despair in his eyes was sweet. Elizabeth warmed herself by it.
The first thing Asa felt was pain.
Not the agonies of hell, not any longer—that would have been familiar to him. No, this felt more like … like he’d banged his nose on something.
He had a nose?
He opened his eyes and looked around. Apparently he was lying on a beach, sand all over him (scratchy—he also felt scratchy! Even that was a treat after so long without a body). A puddle next to him smelled strongly of beer.
Pushing himself into a seated position, Asa looked down at the body the Sorceress had provided for him. He was male—not that it mattered so much, but he’d been male before, when he had been what you’d call “alive,” so at least he was familiar with the equipment. Apparently he was tall. His skin was a deep, tawny shade of tan.
Something uncomfortably bulky was in his pocket. He pulled out a wallet and flipped through it. Cash—quite a lot of it, if his understanding of human economics was up to date—a set of car keys, a Starbucks card (he’d been wanting to try this coffee he kept hearing about), a Rodman High ID, and what appeared to be a driver’s license.
“Jeremy Arun Prasad,” Asa read aloud. “Sorry about your untimely death. And thanks for the ride.”
Nice voice, really. Not very deep, but—mellifluous. Pleasing to the ear. And even the flat, awkward photos on the ID and driver’s license suggested his new form was pleasing to the eye as well. That would make his brief sojourn in the mortal world simpler; such shallow virtues carried more weight than they should here. That was something you could see very clearly from hell.
Carefully he got to his feet. Balance came back to him more easily than he would have thought. Brushing the sand from his clothes and face, Asa wondered how best to begin. He knew his role here—was sworn to it by unbreakable bonds—but the town looked different from above than it did from below. First he had to get his bearings.
“Jeremy!” A tall man with braided hair and even darker skin than his own came jogging up to him. His memories of the people he had seen while observing Mateo Perez supplied the name Gage Calloway. “Hey, man, are you all right?”
“Yeah, sure. I just—I think I passed out.” The puddle of beer would support that story.
Gage paused. “You gonna be sick? Do you need some coffee or some water or something? I have a strong antipuke policy.”
“I feel fine now.” Fine. What a word for the ecstasy of having legs, arms, a voice, eyes—well, eyes of a sort. They did the job of the real thing. He was whole again. A person again. And this miracle he could only call fine.
“Yeah, you look okay, I guess. But I’ll give you a ride home.”
“What are you doing out here?” Asa thought this time of day—this, with the light beginning to emerge over the water—was sunrise, and that meant it was either too early or too late for most people to be up.
“Some people took my aunt’s patio furniture so they could hang out on the beach. I’m still missing a chair. If I don’t find it, Aunt Lorraine’s gonna kill me. This is the last party I ever have at her place, I swear to God.”
It would be, of course. Tonight Gage would probably die, just like most of the residents of Captive’s Sound.
Asa felt a wave of pity for the young man, who seemed friendly and kind. He wished he could say, Get in your car. Go. Drive as far as you can, as fast as you can.
But Asa belonged to the One Beneath. Working against Him was impossible. If he even tried to speak one word that would go against Elizabeth’s plan, so much as attempted to perform an act that might save one of the lives that needed to be ended, not only would he fail, but he would also be immolated in a flame that would make hell look like a top vacation destination. And that fire would outlast even hell, because death was a mercy he would never receive.
Yet at least a few of his actions could be his own, if they were harmless enough. “Come on. I’ll help you look for the chair.”
Gage stared at him. “Uh, okay. That’s—nice of you.”
Apparently Jeremy Prasad hadn’t spent much of his life being nice for no reason. It hardly mattered. No one here would have time to realize that Jeremy was dead, or who—no, what—was walking around in his skin.
So Asa enjoyed what freedom he had, walking along the beach with Gage to look for a plastic patio chair and reveling in the beauty of the last dawn this town would ever see.
Nadia kept struggling. Kept fighting. She pulled the cobwebs from her face, freed one hand, then the other, then the first again. Her feet could kick the tendrils loose for a second before they ensnared her once more. Some of the spiders had found the holes in her tights and were crawling inside them now. Long ago, she’d given up screaming; she couldn’t even spare that much breath, and she didn’t want to give the Book of Shadows the satisfaction.
No matter how hard I fight, it’s not enough, she thought. Elizabeth’s got me, no matter how hard I try.
How hard I try.
An idea flickered into flame, and Nadia gasped.
A spell like this, meant to entrap—it would naturally wrap itself around someone trying to get away. The harder she fought, the harder it clutched at her.
What if she stopped fighting?
Merely lying still wouldn’t work—no spell of protection could be that easily fooled—but there were other spells that might be more convincing.
Such as a spell that would keep her right here.
Nadia pulled against the cobwebs wound around her upper arms to bring one hand to her bracelet. Two fingers found the quartz charm, and quickly she assembled the ingredients:
Love unbreakable.
Hatred implacable.
Hope eternal.
She had to think it, feel it, believe it more powerfully than ever before —
Hugging her father as he left for New York City with Cole, knowing she might not ever see him again.
The moment she’d realized that Elizabeth had tried to kill Verlaine—then the moment she knew Elizabeth had Mateo in her grasp.
Her own hand reaching for the shards of mirror, hour after hour, despite exhaustion and terror, because there had to be a chance; there had to be.
The spell of encirclement sprang to life around her. Immediately the spiderwebs slithered back. A few of the small crawly guests in the legs of her tights followed suit. The circle spread around her, a soft blue glow, a sphere that was meant to hold her in position against any force. It was what she would have cast the night of the wreck, if she’d had time; it would have kept her and her family almost motionless as the car flipped down around them, protecting them from every blow. Lacking independent thought, Elizabeth’s Book of Shadows knew only that another spell now held Nadia in place, that its protections were no longer required, and so the spiderwebs inched away.
No Book of Shadows, not even this one, could know that Nadia controlled the spell herself, that she would be able to use the sphere to move away as she wished.
Her whole body shaking with exhaustion, Nadia began stumbling toward the door. Now she didn’t have to worry about the broken glass; the blue sphere around her kept it from touching her feet. She did, however, stop in the middle of the room and rip off the remnants of her tights. A last spider tumbled down and scurried away. She shuddered.
Still Elizabeth’s house remained empty. Wherever she had taken Mateo, it wasn’t here. But wait—was that daylight outside? She’d been in the grip of a powerful enchantment; time could get lost during an enchantment, making hours seem like days, or years seem like minutes.
I can’t have been here all night. Please, no.
Nadia looked out the window and her heart sank. Not only was that daylight—it was late afternoon. No, evening. The sun would be setting any moment. She’d lost nearly twenty-four hours.
The Halloween carnival would already have begun.
She hadn’t prepared any more spells. Hadn’t thought any more about how to defeat Elizabeth’s plan of ripping away the entire magical framework of Captive’s Sound. She hadn’t even bathed or slept.
Didn’t matter. She was out of time.
Nadia saw a pair of Elizabeth’s shoes next to the door, simple flats, and quickly slipped them on. She could run in these if she had to, and she had to.
Just then she heard a chiming from her pocket—her phone ringing.
Dad! Nadia thought. Oh, crap, he’d probably tried to call or text a dozen times last night, and she hadn’t answered or even heard it over her own screams. Now he was no doubt on his way home to find out what the hell was going on.
But when she looked down at the screen, it was Verlaine’s face she saw smiling back. Was one of her dads calling from Verlaine’s phone? Please, she thought, please don’t let her have gotten worse. Don’t let her be— “Hello?”
“Hey, stranger.” The voice was hardly more than a whisper, but it was definitely Verlaine.
“Oh, my God. You’re okay!” Nadia could have wept. At least one thing had gone right. “What—where are you?”
“Still in the hospital. Can’t talk long.” Verlaine’s tremulous words made it clear she could hardly talk. “Couple hours ago—just woke up.”
“How?” Elizabeth wouldn’t have released Verlaine from the spell she’d used to attack her—
—unless she was already beginning. Bit by bit, she was undoing her own magic. A spell here, a spell there, until the great collapse came.
“Managed one thing,” Verlaine said. “My dads are here in Wakefield with me, not in Captive’s Sound. Tonight—you and Mateo—”
“Elizabeth has Mateo. I have to get to him, now. But I’m so glad you’re all right.” At least one of them got out okay. At least in this one small way, Elizabeth hadn’t won.
Or—had she? Verlaine’s survival, amazing and wonderful as it was, might be only a sign that Elizabeth’s final plan was under way, and the end was even closer than Nadia had feared.
But Verlaine was safe. Her dads were safe. Her own father and brother were safe. Gratitude for at least that much flooded through Nadia, giving her courage, pushing back the exhaustion until she knew she could run again.
Verlaine whispered, “Nadia, be careful.”
“Good-bye,” Nadia said, and hung up. She couldn’t have answered any other way. What she had to do now, to go against Elizabeth—careful couldn’t have anything to do with it.
“Do you know, I’ve never been to this carnival before?”
Mateo remembered being with her at the Halloween carnival when they were little kids. Remembered them riding the same carousel horse. Giving her his cotton candy. Each memory was just one more of her lies.
He and Elizabeth walked through the carnival, hand in hand. The mere touch of her skin repulsed him, but over the course of the last day, he’d learned how futile it was to try to pull back.
(“You consented to the binding spell,” she’d told him sweetly as he’d struggled against her on the beach, his clothes soaked and freezing. “The spells you consent to are always stronger for it.”)
They’d dried off by now. To anyone else, they probably looked like a happy couple. He had on his letter jacket and jeans; Elizabeth wore her usual white dress, carefree of the cold. Twinkling lights had been strung from tent to tent, laced around the tree trunks and branches so that they stood out in the darkening twilight. All the little kids and about half of the adults were in costumes—vampires, Transformers, Disney princesses, a couple of ghosts here and there. People were munching on popcorn balls, drinking sodas out of “collector’s cups.” It was the exact same cheesy carnival it had always been, except this time Elizabeth was here, and she meant to kill them all.
“You think I’m ruthless, don’t you?”
“I know you are.” He could use his voice when he wasn’t trying to defy her; Mateo had learned that today, too.
“If anything less could kill me, I’d do that instead. But it won’t. The One Beneath has released me, but the spell’s magic isn’t that easily undone.”
“Wait. You’re telling me this whole disaster is just so you can die? This is a murder/suicide?”
“Partly.”
“Then what’s the other part?”
Elizabeth gave him a sidelong glance, more openly flirtatious than he’d ever seen her before. “And ruin the surprise?”
“Oh, hey, Mateo. Hey, Elizabeth.” Kendall gave them a wave; she was wearing something very form-fitting, very short, and very green. “So, Mateo, I want you to know that I thought really hard about what you said about racism and stuff, and, like, perspective is incredibly valuable, and so I didn’t go for the sexy geisha thing, and instead I went for sexy Robin Hood.”
“You look wonderful,” Elizabeth gushed. Why had he never heard the mockery behind her “sweet” voice before?
Kendall preened, striking faux-sexy poses that she probably memorized from the package. “Well, it’s sexy girl Robin Hood, obviously. Not that there’s a whole lot of difference, because really Robin Hood was wearing girl clothes back in the day, and I know they all dressed differently then, but get real, the guy had on leggings.”
Mateo wanted to tell her to run. If he could save only one person from this mess, even if that person were Kendall Bender, it would be something. But Elizabeth’s spell held his tongue.
“So where are you guys headed?” Kendall said. Her eyes darted down to their joined hands; no doubt she thought this was the gossip scoop of the year.
“The haunted house.” Elizabeth leaned against Mateo’s shoulder, probably just for the pleasure of knowing how touching her would disgust him. “I like a good scare.”
From Rodman High, at least from the top of the football-field bleachers, the carnival in Swindoll Park glittered on the far hill like a swarm of fireflies.
Asa sat on the highest rung of the stands, watching the party far away. He would have felt bad for the people celebrating, if there were any point. At least he didn’t have to watch them die.
No, his work would keep him right here.
His gaze drifted down to the main school building, specifically to one spot that he’d been told was the location of the chemistry lab.
Nadia made it to the carnival right after dark. She looked around frantically, but so far nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary—and there was no sign of Mateo or Elizabeth.
Chest heaving, exhausted, she braced herself against a nearby picnic table and tried to think. Where would Elizabeth be? Dead center—right at the bull’s-eye of the target Verlaine had showed her. But where was that? When they’d looked at it before, Swindoll Park had seemed specific enough, but this park was pretty big, and now it was filled with hundreds of people. She should have downloaded Verlaine’s data onto her phone, something like that—
“Whoa. Nadia.” Kendall stood in front of her, wearing a pointy hat and some kind of weird green minidress with a jagged hem. “Are you doing, like, a sexy zombie thing? Because it’s really more scary than sexy. Just FYI.”
Her ripped dress and crazy hair probably would make people stare on any day but Halloween. “Kendall. Hey. No offense—gotta go.”
“What, are you looking for Mateo? I mean, I’m not being insensitive, like, honestly, everybody could tell you were crushed out on him, so I think you should know about him and Elizabeth.”
“I’ve been told.” Kendall must have heard the party gossip, too. Nadia pushed her hair back from her face.
“Plus, you know, he’s got that crazy gene that runs in his family, and I hear they might have, like, stem cell therapy for it someday, but for now he’s bad news. I don’t know what Elizabeth’s thinking. Taking a guy like that into a haunted house? That is basically asking for a total psychotic break.”
Nadia grabbed Kendall’s arm. “Did you say they’re in the haunted house?”
“They said they were going that way.”
All her spells, all her magic, all their desperate efforts to fight Elizabeth, and they’d gotten their single biggest break from Kendall Bender.
“Kendall, thank you,” Nadia said, and then she took off running toward the gnarled old house with orange lights in all the windows—using her last strength to reach Elizabeth and Mateo, if she could only make it in time.
But then the screams began.