Spellcaster

He managed a smile for her. “Well, it was nice to meet you, Elizabeth.” They parted at the door almost as friends.

Swiftly she walked home. Would Mateo come by again tonight? He demanded so much time and care, and right now—when the dreams were still so unfocused—she was learning little.

Soon it would all be worthwhile, though. Very soon.

She walked into her house. The afternoon sunlight glinted on the broken glass on her floor as she paused, staring at the center of the room. There her crow shuddered on the floor, its wings beating desperately against the boards, twitching in its final throes. It had come back here to die, though not of its wound. The magic had strangled the bird, of course; it always did, sooner or later.

When at last it went still, she touched one of her rings and went through the spell almost without thinking it; that one was familiar to her now. Instantly the crow disappeared in a flame that lasted hardly more than a second. Only the smallest scorch mark on the floor showed where it had been.

Elizabeth reached amid her jars and pulled out the one filled with grayish liquid, the one where all the other dozens of eyes from the earlier crows still floated. She’d need it soon. Then she went to the windowsill, lifted up her arm, and made all the crows believe she was singing, singing to them, and it was only a question of which one came to her first.

“Technically I’m an intern,” Verlaine said as they walked up the steps of the Captive’s Sound newspaper, the Guardian. “But there’s not that much to do here.”

“Really?” Nadia looked askance at the dusty front office. “This seems like a town with a whole lot going on.”

“Not anything normal people know about.” Verlaine took out the heavy key and unlocked the door; the musty smell was comforting to her by now. “The paper publishes once a week. They used to be more newsy back in the day, but the paper was bought by some out-of-town people who only care about putting advertising circulars in it. Not much actual reporting going on, and the editors never let me do any of it. That’s why all my work—and all the real news in town—goes to the Lightning Rod.”

“The Lightning Rod?” Nadia looked confused.

It was Mateo who answered. “The school’s news site. It was a paper until about six years ago. All the journalism students work on it.”

“My honors project is making the back issues digital. Well, what back issues they have, thanks to that weird fire back in 1999.” Verlaine dimly remembered that. What were the odds of lightning striking the chemistry lab twice? Well, Captive’s Sound had a way of beating the odds. Now she finally understood why.

This town really was as strange as Verlaine had always thought. It was incredible how vindicated she felt, how justified. Every creepy nook and cranny of Captive’s Sound was possessed by magic—the secret underlying the whole world, the element that proved wonderful, bizarre, impossible things could really happen.

And the way people were always so mean to her—well, all right, maybe that wasn’t magic, but it wasn’t inevitable. It wasn’t the way her life would be forever. Only a couple of days into her senior year, and already it felt like her world had started to transform. She and Nadia … well, they weren’t quite friends exactly, but they told each other their secrets, which was as close as Verlaine had ever come to friendship. Through Nadia, Mateo had suddenly noticed her, didn’t seem crazy in the slightest, and seemed to like her just fine. After a life of near-total isolation, Verlaine found it almost dizzying to think of having not one but two people to spend time with.

Plus they had a mission! A real, true magical quest or investigation or whatever you wanted to call it, which was one hundred percent more interesting than anything else Verlaine had ever done in her life.

Of course, she’d probably have to give Nadia and Mateo some time alone occasionally. The way Nadia unconsciously bent toward him every time he talked—the light in his dark eyes whenever he looked at her—well, it was pretty obvious what was going on.

Verlaine didn’t resent it. Not exactly. Or only a little. While she’d never been in love herself—had never even kissed a guy yet—she’d had plenty of chances to observe romance from the sidelines. People got incredibly stupid right before and right after they hooked up with someone they really liked, and that was all there was to it. If Nadia and Mateo were going to be way more into each other than they were into her for a while, she figured she could deal. Yes, she wished the first friends she’d ever had were more focused on her, but at least their absorption in each other wasn’t a way of rejecting her. Verlaine had learned pretty much all the ways to get rejected by this point, and that wasn’t what was going on. This was just hormone overload.

Right now, though, all three of them were … questing. Or whatever you wanted to call it.

So they got to work in the front office, aka the only office; the Guardian was old-fashioned enough to still have its printing presses in the back room. The front room was already a mass of papers and old photographs, the kind that had been printed on thick, shiny paper. They couldn’t make it any more disorganized than it already was. Verlaine tugged out the bound back issues and let them all start searching through.

“What are we looking for?” Mateo asked, coughing as yet more dust drifted up in clouds from the back volumes.

“Anything that could point to witchcraft, or magic.” Nadia began thumbing open the pages of Volume XI: 1865–1870. “In other words, anything weird.”