Spellcaster

And yet—she was tempted. Nadia itched to discover it, even if it were likely to blow up in her face like Pandora’s box.

To have power—real power—beyond anything Mom had ever known, to be able to stand up and say, See what you walked away from? I’m stronger than you. Stronger than anyone. You shouldn’t have left me behind.

Nadia blinked, shook her head. The shudder of vengeful fury that passed through her was gone in an instant, but the uneasiness it left behind lingered.

And she realized—that fury hadn’t entirely been her own. It had belonged, in part, to whatever lay beneath the lab.

Now Nadia understood that mysterious presence as she never had before. It did not merely wait there: It lurked. It seethed. It longed to break free—

—and wreak vengeance.

Vengeance on what, she didn’t know. She no longer wanted to. The only thing she understood was that it couldn’t be directly causing any devastation in Captive’s Sound; it lacked that power, and she was grateful.

Whatever lay imprisoned beneath the school had been put there for good reason. The entity she sensed was buried beneath any retrieval, and they were safe from it, and that was actually all she needed to know for now.

Besides, at the moment, her attention should be focused on whatever she’d done to Mateo.

It wasn’t as if she could cast any elaborate spells right here in the middle of class. But something basic might be effective, if Mateo’s problem was what she suspected.

If he was cursed—truly cursed, the inheritor of a dark magic hundreds of years old—then that meant he might potentially react to magic in a different way. Nadia wasn’t exactly sure how that would work, but it seemed plausible.

And a basic spell of liberation might make the magic … unstick.

Well, it was worth a shot, anyway.

Nadia’s fingers found the small ivory drop at her bracelet, and she put the ingredients together:

Helpless laughter.

Washing away what cannot come clean.

A moment of forgiveness.

The first two were easy —

Her thirteenth birthday party, when they put a pair of Cole’s Pull-Ups on her best friend’s Boston terrier and they all got hysterical, rolling on the floor.

Taking her first shower in the new house, three in the morning after the wreck, mud under her fingernails and a piece of car glass in her hair, feeling like it would never, ever all rinse clean.

But forgiveness? Nadia dug deep.

Weeks of wondering if Dad had driven Mom away, if there had been an affair or something Nadia hadn’t known about, all ending the moment she tiptoed to the kitchen late at night and glimpsed her father bent over the table, his head in his hands, so miserable that she knew, just knew, he hadn’t seen any of this coming.

It was enough. She felt the spell swirling outward, invisible but powerful—

—really powerful—

“You know what?” Jeremy said loudly. “I’m sick of this.” With that he shoved all the lab equipment off their table; it fell to the floor with a crash.

“You know what I’m sick of?” The Piranha put her hands on her hips. “You. All of you. This entire school. I could be in yoga right now instead of trying to pour information into the sieves you call your brains.”

Several students started laughing. One girl started crying. Another reached around her own back and unfastened her bra through her sweater, groaning in relief as it went slack.

What the—

Another girl and a guy started making out. So did two guys in the far corner. Jeremy started tearing up his chemistry book, ripping pages out in hanks, then shredding them one by one. The Piranha kicked off her shoes and took a one-footed position that Nadia remembered from her own yoga class as Tree Pose.

Mateo sat up straight. “What’s wrong with people?”

“I don’t know,” Nadia said. But she was starting to put it together. A spell of liberation could make people feel a little, well, uninhibited. But that was normally a minor side effect, enough to maybe give someone the giggles, not to make an entire roomful of people completely forget where they were. The spell had been more powerful than usual—no, more powerful than ever.

That wasn’t the effect of whatever lay beneath this room. If anything, that would have dimmed the spell, not enhanced it.

That—that was the kind of boost you could only get from a Steadfast.

Verlaine was nowhere near here, and besides, Nadia already knew the spell hadn’t worked on her. Which meant the only option—the only possibility—

It can’t be true, Nadia thought wildly. Everything she knew about magic was built on a few fundamental principles, and the most fundamental principle of all was that men couldn’t hold magic. A curse was one thing—you didn’t hold that; it held you. So men could be cursed. But being a Steadfast should be as impossible for a man as the sun circling the Earth.

“What’s going on?” Mateo said. He was clearly unaffected by the spell—another sign. Steadfasts weren’t as susceptible to simple magic. Then he turned toward Elizabeth—who remained still by his side—and gasped out loud. “Oh, my God. My God.”

Mateo started backing away from Elizabeth, and the expression on his face was the last thing Nadia would have expected to see: utter horror.

Elizabeth made a swift, fluttering gesture with one hand; for the first time, Nadia noticed that she wore little rings on each finger—rings made out of the same materials Nadia wore on her bracelet. Mateo swayed once on his feet, then snapped out of it, turning again to Nadia. “What’s going on?”