Nadia shook her head no, even though that lie would have been her best out. As she did so, the brief hope in his eyes died.
“You think I’m crazy.” Mateo smiled grimly. “Of course you do. You’ve been in town, what, almost two weeks now? So people already got to you and told you that I’m—that my family—they told you, right?”
“The family curse,” she whispered.
Mateo raked one hand through his dark brown hair, clearly trying to hold himself together—and failing. “So you think I’m insane, like everyone else does. Maybe I am. I guess—I guess—” He seemed to remember where he was, and the look of regret on his face cut her to the bone. “I’m sorry I bothered you about it. Could you just, maybe, not tell anybody about this?”
She nodded. He started to walk away, his shoulders slumped, utterly defeated.
No, he couldn’t have become her Steadfast. But if the curse on his family was real, was it possible that there had been some strange reaction between the curse and the Steadfast spell? That didn’t make any sense according to the magical theory she knew, but the visions he was describing sounded all too familiar. By now she knew that what he’d seen—the shroud of evil hanging over this entire town—was very real.
And if there was any chance that she was responsible for what he was seeing, then she couldn’t let Mateo walk away thinking he was going mad.
“Mateo?” He only half turned, so she took a few steps closer to him. “What you saw—in the attic—”
“Yeah?”
You must never speak of witchcraft to any man. One of the First Laws—but maybe there was a way to bend that rule without breaking it. “It wasn’t drugs. But it—it wasn’t only the light.”
Slowly he came back toward her. “Then what was it?”
“I can’t tell you.” Before he could protest, Nadia held up a hand. “I mean it. I can’t.”
“Did it do this to me? Whatever it was?”
“I’m not sure. I can find out, though. If it did, maybe I can undo it.”
Mateo’s eyes lit up with desperate hope. Though he clearly had no idea what she was talking about, he was clutching at any possibility. “Come on. You have to tell me.”
“I can’t,” Nadia insisted. “Mateo, please. I know this is hard for you—”
“Thinking I’m going crazy like my mom? The one who drowned herself in the ocean? You have no idea how hard that is for me.”
Almost on instinct, Nadia laid one hand against his chest to comfort him. He instantly stilled at her touch. It was amazing to think she could do that just by touching him.
Quickly she said, “We have to trust each other right now, okay? We have to … take some things on faith. You just have to understand—I believe you about everything you say you’ve seen. I believe in you.”
Mateo’s lips parted slightly. Was it that astonishing, thinking that somebody really might trust him?
Nadia finished, “So I’m asking you to believe in me right now. Let me work this out. If I had anything to do with what’s happening to you—I’ll know soon.”
He nodded. “Today? This week?”
Right away, Nadia wanted to say, but already people were starting to mill around in the hallways—only a few, but enough that she no longer felt safe to experiment in the lab uninterrupted.
But there was something she might be able to try even in the middle of class—quiet, simple, something nobody would even notice her casting—and she needed to do this right away, during the next class period they shared.
She looked back at Mateo and gave him the most encouraging smile she could manage. “Sometime during chemistry.”
“Obviously we need to review how to write a lab report,” the Piranha said as everyone began assembling their materials. “I’ve put an outline on the board, which should prove useful to those of you who have learned how to read. This is apparently a minority.”
Nadia had finally been assigned a lab partner, which would have been bad news for her today no matter what. The fact that she’d been stuck with that slimy Jeremy Prasad made it worse. She didn’t care what Verlaine said; as far as Nadia was concerned, the view wasn’t worth it, no matter how hot he was.
“She’s such a bitch,” he said as he handed Nadia the sodium bicarbonate for their experiment.
“The Piranha?” Nadia shrugged. She kept glancing over at Mateo, who looked as exhausted as he had this morning, though apparently it was comforting for him to be near Elizabeth. Every time their eyes met, he smiled. They must really be in love. How awesome for them. “Basic teacher snark, if you ask me.”
“She shouldn’t talk down to us. Somebody should teach that woman her place. We pay her salary.”
Nadia wondered how many checks Jeremy had written to the school board lately. “We’re supposed to write down our impressions of all the equipment and materials for the experiment.”
“We get to write down our impressions of baggies? This is supposed to be a good use of our time?”
“If you do that part, I’ll do the harder stuff later,” Nadia promised. Not that Jeremy deserved a break, but she had better things to do.
Once again she turned her attention to the power she sensed underfoot. The burial was deep underground; that meant she was unlikely to be able to get to it through non-magical means. Which meant that if she wanted to use magic to get the buried thing out again, she would be taking it out sight unseen, with no idea what the source of that powerful magic was. That was an extremely bad plan. Possibly whoever had buried this … whatever … had had a very good reason.