Spellcaster

“No shortage of that here,” Verlaine said.

But it quickly became clear she hadn’t understood the half of it.

The church fire in 1995? Not the first church fire in Captive’s Sound. Not the second, or third. It was the twenty-fifth. Verlaine knew more buildings used to burn down back in the days of dry timber and no fire departments, but twenty-five churches seemed … extreme, even over a span of more than three centuries.

As for the sinkholes that had begun in town earlier this year—that had happened before, too. Only once, and that back in the 1810s, but sinkholes were almost unheard of in this part of the United States. (Verlaine had researched this for the Lightning Rod, which was way more on top of the issue than the Guardian—not that anyone paid attention.)

The part that got to Verlaine was all the news about animals. She had a tender heart for animals—not just her beloved cat, Smuckers, but all of them, alpacas to zebras. Since age eleven she’d been a vegetarian. So her eyes blurred with tears every time she read about a mass death of crows, all of them found twitching and dying in a heap of feathers on the street. Or foals born with three heads, a bizarre genetic event that apparently happened in Captive’s Sound once every twenty years, like clockwork. Or a dog found without its head on the steps of City Hall. Who could do that to a dog?

A witch, apparently. Not like Nadia. The other kind of witch, the one behind whatever was going on here.

“I can’t believe we don’t know about more of this,” Mateo said after they’d all been at it for more than an hour. “I mean, they actually thought a ‘freak wave’ could pick up a whaling ship and just drop it in the middle of town? Even back in the 1700s, you’d figure they knew better than that.”

“They probably did,” Nadia said absently. “But what were they supposed to report? The truth?”

“Well, yeah.” Verlaine took journalism seriously, even if everyone else thought it was just tabloid stuff and spin. There was a place in the world for people who told the unvarnished truth. At least, she hoped so.

“The part that weirds me out is the rain of toads,” Nadia said.

At last, a question Verlaine could answer. “Oh, that’s actually not magic. Not even weird. Sometimes tornadoes pick them up, and they get dropped down through a rain cloud somewhere else.”

Nadia shook her head. “It rained toads inside. In several of the houses on the Hill. All of a sudden, plop, toads rained from the ceiling.”

“Ew.” Okay, Verlaine decided, that was definitely not tornado-related.

Mateo cut in, “What about the Cabot house? Did it happen there?”

Suddenly Nadia looked embarrassed—as though she’d like to sink into the ground to hide. Verlaine was very familiar with this feeling. “No. It didn’t. But they—well, they said there were questions about whether a Cabot was involved. Some people suspected a prank by the ‘eccentric’ Millicent Cabot—”

“My great-great-grandmother.” Mateo leaned back in the creaky wooden chair, shutting his eyes too tightly, like someone with a headache. “She lasted for decades, crazy as hell—at least, according to Grandma. Most of us burn out after only a few years of the visions. Millicent ran mad for almost thirty years, until finally one day she—well, she hung herself from the rafters in the attic.” He tried to smile, but it was an odd expression, tense and tight. “Another reason I really never want to live in that house.”

After a few moments of awkward silence, Verlaine tried to lighten the mood. “Hey, at least we weren’t here for the ice storm in July. Or the time everyone at a screening of How To Marry a Millionaire started bleeding from the eyes and they blamed CinemaScope.”

“I have a feeling—before this fall is through, we’ll wish that’s all we had to deal with,” Nadia said, which in Verlaine’s opinion wasn’t helping the mood one bit. But Nadia remained focused. “What I can’t get over are how many reports there are about witches, witchcraft, et cetera. All the reports are about rumors—‘town lore,’ that kind of thing—but it seems like witchcraft has been a pretty open secret here for a long time.”

Verlaine pointed out, “Some of that is just New England for you. I mean, you have the Salem witch trials—women who fled Massachusetts because they were scared by the witch trials—that kind of thing.”

“Right, of course,” Nadia said, “but this goes way past that. So there have to be other witches in town, besides me and—and Elizabeth.”

As Nadia spoke, she glanced over at Mateo, but he didn’t argue. His arms were folded, and the expression on his face was strange—almost sad. He noticed both of them watching him and sighed. “I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that the curse is real. And looking through these records—do you see how often all the weirdness in town gets blamed on one of the Cabots? Not just Millicent. Any of us—almost all of us. Sometimes it was true, because of the curse. Sometimes it wasn’t true, because of the witchcraft. It’s like I have to rewrite everything I know about my family. About myself.”

“It has to be rough,” Nadia said softly. “I’m sorry.” They gave each other a look then, one of those looks that seemed to raise the room’s temperature by a few degrees and make Verlaine feel like she ought to find an excuse to leave.

Instead, she slid over the volume that read 1815–1820. “I only found one report about witchcraft, actually. This one.”