Spellcaster

All around them, the kissing and laughter and even singing continued unabated. The Piranha, instead of calling for order, was on the floor in Low Cobra Pose. Nadia didn’t look at any of it; she could only stare at Elizabeth. Meanwhile Elizabeth held her hand out over the floor—parallel to it—almost as though she were trying to calm an animal or a very small child.

Or, Nadia thought, something buried beneath the school.

That was ludicrous, wasn’t it? Surely it had to be. Probably Nadia was freaking out because her spell had spun so wildly out of control, and because she’d just learned the incredible truth that Mateo was her Steadfast. Her imagination was running away with her.

But she wasn’t imagining Elizabeth’s reaction.

Elizabeth didn’t look confused by any of this. Instead she took a gulp from her water bottle, and then her sweet, clean-scrubbed face shifted into a smile that was anything but sweet.

It felt more like—a dare.

Nadia’s stomach dropped as she realized that Elizabeth wasn’t any other girl in her class.

She was another witch.

8

CLASS ENDED WITH THE SECURITY GUARD TALKING ONE girl down from the top of the file cabinets, demerits for almost everyone, the Piranha on report, and people starting to complain of headaches or blush as they realized what they’d been doing. Nadia grabbed Mateo’s arm to hustle him out of there as fast as possible.

“What just happened?” he said, his mouth so close to her ear that she could feel his breath.

“Let’s get out of here first, okay?” Nadia hurried out, Mateo by her side. She glanced over her shoulder to look for Elizabeth, who stood there in the middle of the mayhem, very still, watching them go. A small smile played on her lips.

She knew that Nadia knew. And she didn’t care whether Nadia knew or not.

As they went down the hallway toward the cafeteria, she muttered, “Tell me this. What did you see when you looked at Elizabeth?”

“What are you talking about?”

“When you looked at her, right after everybody lost it. You seemed—panicked, almost.”

Mateo frowned even as he pushed the door open for them both. “I don’t remember looking at Elizabeth once. There was a lot more to see.” He started laughing. “The Piranha’s—really bendy. And Erik’s been out since sophomore year, but I had no idea Charles was g*y.”

He’d forgotten; whatever Elizabeth had done to him to make him stop seeing had also made him lose his memory of it. She had acted quickly, and her counterspell had been completely effective.

With a rush of horror, Nadia thought, The dark magic in town—it’s her! It’s Elizabeth; it has to be.

But no. How could Elizabeth be behind everything happening in Captive’s Sound? According to the increasingly worried Google searches Nadia had been running lately, the problems here seemed to go way back—since long before Elizabeth would even have been born, much less practicing magic. Plus, she and Nadia were about the same age, which meant they were only just now coming into their power.

Still—any other witch would have reached out at that moment. When Elizabeth saw that Nadia’s spell had misfired, she should have helped to quiet it, and sought Nadia afterward. The secrecy that bound the Craft didn’t extend that far.

Instead, Elizabeth had given her that cool, appraising smile, covered her tracks with Mateo, and slipped away.

So maybe she wasn’t the cause of everything going wrong in Captive’s Sound. Yet Nadia knew, deep down, that whatever it was twisting things here up in knots—Elizabeth was in the thick of it.

As they got into the cafeteria line, Mateo said under his breath, “Okay, either you were cooking some kind of drugs that can make the whole school start hallucinating at once, or something else seriously strange is going on. Because I did not imagine that. Are you going to explain what this has to do with what happened last night?”

She reached for her tray on autopilot, thinking fast.

One of the First Laws was to never, ever reveal the secret of the Craft to a man. Any man.

Every principle of the Craft also said that it was impossible for a man to be a Steadfast. Yet she couldn’t deny that this was exactly what Mateo had become.

Nadia might never understand how that was possible, but as long as it was—then he had to be told. It was wrong that this had happened to him without his knowledge or consent, wrong that someone already so troubled had been forced to carry that burden. The least she owed him was the truth.

“I’ll tell you,” she promised, feeling almost light-headed. It was like skydiving, terrifying and liberating at once. “I’ll explain everything.”

Elizabeth went home.

Her teachers would remember her being in class, whether or not she attended. Really, going to Rodman was something she did only to be near the Chamber once in a while, and these days also occasionally to keep Mateo Perez soothed and unquestioning. Today she finally had something new to think about.

Nadia Caldani was a witch. Elizabeth had suspected as much, given the family’s arrival in town immediately after the night of the storm, when her barrier had torn and shrieked as it was pierced through. What she had not suspected was that Nadia would possess such extraordinary magic.

Powerful—but undisciplined. Elizabeth had to smile as she remembered the ridiculous scene in chemistry class. Nadia must have suspected some magical hold on Mateo Perez; her crush was so painfully obvious, the way her eyes flickered over to him countless times during their lessons. Had she thought to free him with a spell of liberation?