5

VERLAINE FLATTENED HERSELF AGAINST THE WALL, where she was hidden by the lockers. Then she wondered if she looked like an insane person.

Well, it wasn’t like people at this school could hate her any more even if she were crazy. Everybody knew Mateo Perez was basically a big old ticking time bomb of crazy, but nobody went out of their way to be unkind to him.

Maybe she actually was nuts—but there was only one way to find out.

Peering out from behind the lockers, Verlaine could again see Nadia Caldani, who was putting away her books. She looked like any other girl in school, getting ready to go home like everybody else, and about the only thing that stood out was her really great hair. Verlaine glanced down at her own prematurely gray locks and sighed.

Was she really going to challenge Nadia about this? Was she willing to stand up and say she believed something that bizarre?

My car flew, Verlaine thought, and decided to trust her gut.

Just as she darted forward into the crush of people in the hallway, Nadia lifted her head and saw her. As soon as she did, she turned away from Verlaine, obviously eager to escape, but Verlaine quickened her steps to catch up.

Then Jeremy Prasad appeared. Verlaine’s heart did that thing it did whenever she saw him—that stealthy thing that felt like turning over and constricting at the same time. It wasn’t that she liked the guy; Jeremy’s personality defied any reaction but total contempt. But oh, God, that face—those shoulders—

“So you’re the new girl,” he said to Nadia, who was now glancing back and forth between Verlaine and Jeremy like she was trapped. “Need someone to show you around? We ought to be friends, you know. The benefits—we can add those later.”

Sensing her opportunity, Verlaine pounced. “Sorry, Jeremy. Nadia and I are headed out.” She folded her arm possessively in Nadia’s, and Nadia was either too surprised to resist or too desperate to get away from the oily sheen of Jeremy Prasad.

“Hanging with the freaks already?” Jeremy said to Nadia. He shrugged, and damn it, the movement of his muscles showed through every inch of the tee he was wearing. “Have it your way.”

As he wandered off, Nadia muttered, “Who is that loser?”

“Jeremy Prasad? He’s pretty much the king of the hill around here, and he knows it. As rich as his family is, and with a face like that, I guess he figures he can pick up any girl he wants, no matter how disgusting he is.” Verlaine hated that she’d said anything nice about him. “It’s not like I like him or anything. I just wish—sometimes—it were possible to pour somebody else’s soul inside that body. You know?”

“It would have to be an improvement.” Then Nadia tensed, and Verlaine knew she was about to try to dodge her again. Maybe it would be good to get her off her guard.

“How do you like the Piranha?”

“The Piranha—oh, is that what people call Mrs. Purdhy? I can kind of see it. The thing with the teeth—” Nadia made a face instantly recognizable as Mrs. Purdhy’s clenched jaw. She seemed to have decided that talking about anything but what happened yesterday might be a good idea … as if Verlaine would just forget about it. “Hey, cool dress.”

“Oh … thanks. Glad you like it,” Verlaine said, genuinely surprised. Most people in Captive’s Sound didn’t understand vintage style, though of course that meant Verlaine got to comb through the local thrift stores and secondhand shops without having to compete for their treasures. Today she was wearing a mod dress from the 1960s with big black-and-white squares, exactly the kind of thing most people here made fun of. Verlaine had told herself she didn’t care about the ridicule anymore, but all the same, it was nice to have someone actually get it.

Obviously Nadia thought the danger was past, because she had begun to relax. “The shoes are kind of different, though.”

“I stick to Converse.” Today’s pair was black. “Real period shoes are expensive, and they never turn up in sizes big enough for my boat feet. Besides, if I wore heels, I would go from being the third tallest person at this school to the actual tallest, and yes, I’m including everyone on the men’s basketball team.” They were out on the quad now, away from some of the other students; Verlaine decided it was about time to make her move. “So, yesterday, what was that?”

Nadia whirled toward her, too caught off guard to hide her shock. She tried to recover, though: “What are you talking about?”

“Last night, I narrowed it down to three possibilities.” Verlaine counted them off on her fingers. “One, you have some kind of superpower, but you’re trying to hide it because you have a secret identity; maybe there’s a Justice League scenario, et cetera. Two, this is more supernatural or occult, like witchcraft, maybe. Three, you’re an alien. I know that’s a long shot, but then all of these seem like long shots even though they’re the only possible explanations. So, can’t exclude aliens. If you are from another planet, I want to say, welcome to Earth, and if you have a starship or a transporter beam or whatever, as long as I can still call my dads once in a while, I’m totally ready to ditch this planet and try it somewhere else.”

After a long moment when they stared at each other and Verlaine’s heart thumped crazily in her chest, Nadia breathed out in a sigh. “Not here, okay?”

“Okay.” Wait. Did that mean—she was right? This really was something out of the ordinary? The surreal was becoming real, at last? Yes. It was all Verlaine could do not to jump in the air and cheer.

Glancing around nervously, Nadia said, “Is there someplace we can talk?”

“Not at school. Let me think—someplace quiet—”

“No. Someplace loud.” Nadia seemed very sure about this. “People overhear you in quiet places. Nobody overhears when it’s loud. Mom—my mother would talk about it in the mall, or at Cubs games, places like that.”

Her mother was a—whatever she was—too? This was getting better and better. And for once, Verlaine was absolutely sure she knew the right thing to suggest. “If you want loud, we should go to La Catrina.”

La Catrina turned out to be the only Mexican restaurant in town, or at least the busiest. Even though Nadia had yet to taste the food, she could understand why everybody came here; this was pretty much the first cheerful public place she’d seen in Captive’s Sound. It was warm and welcoming, with pressed-tin panels on the ceiling, dark gold walls, and tons of woodwork stained a deep red. Brilliantly painted carvings hung on the walls—all of them skeletons, though they were the happy kind, grinning merrily, wearing sombreros or colorful dresses, and apparently having the time of their afterlives.

Verlaine leaned over the table, obviously starting to digest everything Nadia had told her. “So, you don’t look like a witch.” She glanced around, but the din of laughter, conversation, and jukebox music made it obvious they wouldn’t be overheard. “Either the haglike, warty, green variety or the mystical pagan sexpot variety.”

“Uh, thanks, I guess.”

“You’re not going to try to recruit me, are you? Is this one of those things where you learn about the witchcraft and then, that’s it, you’re trapped in it for life?”

“No. I can tell you about it, and that’s fine. But you really shouldn’t tell anyone else.” There were spells Nadia could use to make sure Verlaine didn’t tell anyone—spells of silencing or forgetting—but they were drastic measures. Messing with another person’s head that way was nasty work, something you only did if you had no other choice.

But Verlaine said only, “Who could I possibly tell? Nobody would ever believe me.” Then she frowned. “Wait. You can teach me some spells, right? Without me being sworn to witchcraft for eternity or anything. I really want to stress that last part.”

“It’s too late for me to teach you,” Nadia said.

“You mean—too late today, or what?”

“I mean, too late ever.” Nadia made the words as gentle as she could. What would it be like, to discover that witchcraft was real but you were left out? “You have to start learning in childhood. The earlier the better, my mom always said. And not every girl can be a witch. If witchcraft doesn’t run in your family, you probably don’t have the blood for it. And even if you did, by now, you would have lost the potential.”

“Oh.” Verlaine frowned. “That leaves you with the power, then, doesn’t it?”

“Pretty much.” It was the truth; why should she apologize for it?

“How do I know you won’t turn me into a newt or something?”

“Honestly, where are you getting this? Listen. Most of what’s in pop culture about witchcraft is crap. What I practice doesn’t have anything to do with being Wiccan, either; that’s a religion of its own. I think the Craft I practice might have been linked to it way back when, but they parted paths a long time ago. And in neither of those is there any turning people into newts.”

Verlaine didn’t seem comforted in the slightest. “I wasn’t specifically afraid of newthood. What I mean is, it’s kind of freaky to know somebody has power over you that you can’t understand.”

Nadia shrugged. “Yeah. It throws a lot of people off. Which is exactly why we try to keep it secret. But you wanted to know. And now you do.”

After an awkward pause, Verlaine said, “Okay, no newts. But what kind of stuff can you do?”

Nadia felt weird—beyond weird—talking about this with someone who wasn’t a witch herself. Mom was the only witch she’d ever known well; Grandma had been in the Craft herself, of course, and had taught Mom, but she’d died when Nadia was eight and had learned only the basics. Not every witch was so isolated—some cities and even small towns had active communities—but Mom had stuck to her one secret coven in Chicago. Nadia had never been introduced to them, and had not expected to be; usually you only met witches outside of your family once you were grown and fully possessed of your power. And while it wasn’t forbidden to reveal witchcraft to a woman who didn’t practice, it was something you were supposed to do as little as possible … which Nadia now understood completely.

Secrecy is important, Mom always said. Secrecy is what protects us from the ignorant and the hateful. Secrecy is the first and most precious rule.

Well, Mom always said she loved us forever, Nadia thought savagely. So who cares about her rules?

“The only real limit on what a witch can do is how much she’s learned so far,” Nadia said. “Well, that and the First Laws, of course.”

“What are the laws?” Verlaine asked. But that was the moment the waiter strolled up to their table.

“Hello there and welcome to …” Mateo’s voice trailed off as he recognized them; his eyes widened as they met Nadia’s. But he barely paused in his spiel. “La Catrina.”

“You work here?” Nadia asked, then felt stupid. He wasn’t walking up to their table in a black apron because he was trying to set a fashion trend.

“This is my dad’s restaurant. I help out after school, on weekends—that kind of thing.” Mateo took out his order pad and stared down at it as if he was unwilling to meet her eyes one moment longer. “What can I get for you guys?”

“Not dinner, sorry. Maybe some salsa and chips, though,” Verlaine said cheerfully. “Oh, how about two virgin margaritas? What do you think, Nadia?”

“Sure.” Nadia never stopped looking at Mateo; he never looked back at her.

“Got it,” Mateo said, scribbling it down. “Have that right out to you.”

As he walked away, Nadia said, “Did it seem like Mateo was, I don’t know—trying to ignore me?”

“He always ignores me. Which makes him one of the nice guys. I mean, at least he’s never mean to me.” Verlaine stopped. “Wait. How do you know Mateo? I thought you just moved to town.”

“I don’t know him, really. But I met him when—when he pulled me out of a car accident.”

“What?”

Nadia retold the whole story while Verlaine stared, open-mouthed. Only when it was all over did Verlaine manage to say, “That is wild.”

“I wish I knew why he acted like he knew me that night,” Nadia said. “Or why he acts like he wishes he didn’t know me now.”

“Well, probably because he’s crazy.”

With a shrug, Nadia said, “Like all guys are crazy?” The ones she liked never seemed to be the ones who liked her.

“No, I mean, crazy crazy.” Verlaine glanced over her shoulder to check for Mateo. “I wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings. Like I said, he’s always been nice enough to leave me alone. But his mother was a Cabot, and everybody knows all the Cabots eventually lose their minds. It’s the family curse.”

Nadia didn’t hear those words; she felt them. Literally felt them as a sudden sickening drop in her belly, like she was riding a roller coaster that had started to plunge downward. “What did you say?”

“They all go insane. Apparently it’s hereditary or something. They’ve lived in this town since the beginning of time—well, the 1600s. And they’ve been going crazy ever since. I feel bad for him, but it’s not like anything can change your genes.” Verlaine glanced toward the bar, where Mateo was grabbing a tray of sodas for another table. “Why does it always happen to the hot ones?”

“The family curse,” Nadia repeated. Maybe it was only a saying. Maybe it was the small-town version of an urban legend. For Mateo’s sake, she hoped so.

Verlaine clearly was ready to get back to the subject. “So, come on. Tell me the laws of witchcraft.”

The First Laws were so familiar to Nadia—so often repeated to her, so much a part of her—that the words seemed to flow out almost without her thinking about it. “The most unbreakable one is that you must never be sworn to the One Beneath and do his bidding. Besides that—you must not reveal the Craft to anyone who would betray it. You must never speak of witchcraft to any man. You must never attempt to divine your own fate. You must never bear a child to the son of another witch. You must never command the will of another. You must never suffer a demon to walk among mortals.” Her eyes sought Mateo as she spoke the last remaining law:

“You must never cast a curse.”

“Switch tables with me, will you, Melanie? Trade you eight for eighteen.”

Melanie Sweeney, the senior waitress at La Catrina, glanced past him and frowned. “Eighteen’s just two kids. Girls. Cute ones, too. So why do you want to wait on those six jerks at eight? Wait, don’t tell me. You asked one of the girls out; she shot you down.”

“Love hurts,” Mateo said, which was enough like a yes without being a lie.

“No worries, buddy. I got ’em.” Melanie grinned. “But you better take those guys their empanadas PDQ.”

As he hurried to table eight, Mateo’s mind remained focused on one thing alone—Nadia. If his dreams were really telling him the future—and because of the car crash, they had to be at least partly true, didn’t they?—then the danger surrounding Nadia was very real. And whatever it was, Mateo himself was a part of it.

But his plan—“Stay Away From Nadia for Her Own Good”—was clearly useless. What had he been thinking? This was Captive’s Sound, a town the size of a flash drive. He ran into almost everyone in town at least once a week; with Nadia in his chemistry class, he was guaranteed to see her almost every day. Now that she turned out to like Mexican food—forget it. Game over.

So what the hell was he going to do?

Would Nadia believe him if he tried to explain? Most people wouldn’t, even if they hadn’t grown up in Captive’s Sound thinking he was guaranteed to turn out insane. And even if she believed, did he know enough to protect her? If he frightened Nadia, convinced her that she should fear for her life, then failed to prevent any of his nightmares from coming to pass—that would be worse than anything else he could do.

No, he decided. That’s not the worst thing I could do. The worst thing I could do is nothing.

There have to be ways I could look out for her without talking to her about the visions. I can … watch from afar. Guard her as best I can without putting her in danger.

But is that even possible?

Right as he was trying to work it all out, table eight decided they each had a complicated special order—no refried beans here, extra guacamole there, so on and so forth—and Mateo was too busy to do anything but hurry back and forth between his tables and the kitchen for the next half hour. By the time he was able to look back at Nadia’s table again, she was gone, and Melanie was wiping it down to get it ready for the next customers.

Okay, fine. She was home. That had to be safe, right? Maybe not, though. He hadn’t taken a close enough look before to see whether it resembled the setting of any of his dreams. Why hadn’t he done that?

“Hey, Mateo.” Melanie held up a cell phone. “One of them left this. You too brokenhearted to take it to her at school tomorrow?”

“I can handle it,” Mateo said.

Maybe he’d get his chance to look out for Nadia after all.

Nadia had never realized there could be so many questions about witchcraft; she didn’t remember asking this many even when she was a little kid. Then again, she’d grown up in the constant company of her mother’s powers, naturally understanding so much of it that there was no need to ask.

Verlaine, on the other hand, felt the need to ask everything.

“Can you fly?” she said as she and Nadia walked along the main strip of Captive’s Sound, Nadia trying her best to be sure she knew her way home. “I don’t mean on a broomstick, Gryffindor-style. That would be stupid. Unless you do use broomsticks.”

“No broomsticks,” Nadia said. “I can’t fly. There are spells—really advanced spells—they could let you, I don’t know, defy the laws of physics for a while. Sort of souped-up versions of what I did to your car. But I’m not that skilled yet. Not even close.”

“So your mom was a witch?”

“Yeah. She taught me.”

“Will she be mad that you told me?”

“Mom’s not in our lives anymore. She left my dad back in the spring, and she pretty much washed her hands of me and Cole then, too.” The facts were harsh enough, but somehow they sounded even worse spoken aloud like that.

Verlaine bit her lip, less confrontational than she’d been at any other point during this endless interrogation. “I’m sorry. That sucks. I mean, I don’t even remember my mom and dad—but it would be worse to remember them and then lose them. At least, I think so.”

So, actually, I’m not the only person who’s had it bad. Nadia felt like a jerk. “It sucks either way. But it’s okay. We’re still here, right?”

“Right.”

“And here is—three blocks from my house, if I turn left at this corner?”

“You’ve got it! Congrats. You’ve learned your way around all ten square feet of Captive’s Sound. Once you get all the gossip down, nobody will be able to tell you from the native population.”

The one piece of gossip she’d learned—about Mateo Perez—echoed in Nadia’s mind again. The family curse.

A cool breeze stirred past them, tangling Verlaine’s silvery hair, which already stood out in the early-evening gloom. After spending most of her life in Chicago, Nadia had thought she was pretty much winter-proofed—but cold came early here, and it cut to the bone. Slowly she said, “Has the town always been like this?”

“Like what?”

“Not right.” Then Nadia said what she really thought: “Dead inside.”

Verlaine stopped. For a long moment they stood there beneath one of the streetlamps, the first fall leaves scudding across the cracked sidewalks. “I always thought—I figured it was just because I hate it here. The same way a lot of people want out of their hometowns, you know? When I looked around and only saw the bad side of it, I thought it was, like, me being in a mood. But it’s not, is it?”

“No. It’s not.”

“Then what is it?”

“I’m not sure. But I think it has to do with whatever’s buried beneath the chemistry lab.” As Verlaine’s eyes widened, Nadia said, “I have no idea. All I know is, it’s dark and it’s strange and some other witch has to have buried it there a long time ago. It’s dark enough to poison this town. To hollow it out.”

Verlaine took that in for a few moments. “Is it—dangerous? I mean, beyond sucking the life out of Captive’s Sound, assuming it had any life to begin with.” Her ghostly skin somehow became even paler. “Can it get worse? I would’ve thought that was impossible, but—you know, the sinkholes—”

“I don’t know that those are related,” Nadia said. Then again, she didn’t know that they weren’t. Was it possible that she’d arrived just as things took a turn for the worse? As the thing buried beneath Captive’s Sound finally … got out?

“Is there a spell we can do to find out?” Verlaine drummed her fingers against her notebook, nervous energy crackling from her almost like static electricity.

Slowly, Nadia answered, “We could try to tell the future.”

“You can tell the future? Awesome. Do I ever—wait. No. You can’t tell the future. That was one of the First Laws, wasn’t it? That you’re not supposed to do that.”

“You have a good memory. Yes, that’s one of the laws. But there are a few ways around it.” Deep in thought, Nadia tried to remember what Mom had said about when you could work with that rule, bend it without breaking it entirely. “If I tried to tell my own future, or yours, it would break that law. Also, it would seriously mess us up, mentally, but—never mind. What we could do is tell the town’s future. See what’s happening to Captive’s Sound. That’s distant enough from us that it’s allowed, and that would be enough to tell us whether—whether something serious has begun, or whether the way things are is permanent. Not changing.”

“Probably the latter,” Verlaine said, “with my luck. Nothing ever changes around here.”

There were worse things than not changing, Nadia thought. “I should probably do this spell alone.”

Verlaine’s dark, silvery eyebrows knitted together as she scowled. “Oh, come on. I know about magic, remember? So why can’t I watch? I want to see! Something besides flying cars, anyway, even though that was excellent.”

“You shouldn’t watch because it’s dangerous.”

To Nadia’s astonishment, Verlaine grinned. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve waited for something interesting to happen to me? I don’t care if it’s dangerous. I don’t care what it is. Bring it.”