Spellcaster

“Um, guys?” Verlaine glanced up from her laptop, which was currently atop their dinner table and casting a greenish light on her face. Her eyes were wide, and her voice shook. “I think you might want to see this.”

“What is it?” Nadia said as Verlaine turned the laptop around so they could see.

“Okay, last year everybody who got detention had to help scan and catalog all the school annuals going back to the first one in 1892. So now there’s an online version alumni can look through, stuff like that.” With a nervous look at Mateo, she said, “I thought I’d run a search on Elizabeth. If she’s a witch, maybe some people she spent time with the past couple of years might be witches, too, right?”

Nadia nodded; given the signs she’d already seen of a long history of witchcraft in Captive’s Sound, it seemed unlikely that Elizabeth would be the only one. Although Mateo frowned and crossed his arms in front of him, he didn’t protest.

Verlaine continued, “Look at the index.”

She turned the screen around for them to see. Elizabeth Pike was pictured in last year’s Rodman High School annual. And five years before that. And three years before that. And on and on—Nadia scrolled down to see that the list of images went back and back, never skipping more than seven years, all the way to 1892.

“It’s a family name, I guess,” Mateo said.

“But look.” Verlaine flipped the computer around and started pulling up images. “Here’s from last year—she didn’t get an official picture taken, but there’s this—” A photo showed Elizabeth on the quad, drinking a soda, just one of several students caught in a random shot. “And there’s this from 1963.”

The 1963 image popped up on screen, and Nadia gaped. The caption said it was “Liz Pike” standing in line for the new water fountain—but it looked exactly like Elizabeth. Her hair might have been in a little sprayed bubble and the clothes she wore might have looked like something out of a black-and-white movie, and maybe there was something about her face that made her look a bit older, but the resemblance was beyond uncanny.

Mateo shrugged. “So that’s her grandmother. What about it?”

Verlaine said, “And 1930.”

This image was of some kind of school dance. Standing behind the punch bowl in a ruffled formal dress and a big corsage at her neckline was another Elizabeth, equally identical to the one they knew—“Betsy Pike,” maybe a year or so older than the one from 1963.

“Now 1892.” Verlaine brought up one more image, a formal portrait. The caption again read “Elizabeth Pike”; the face was again unmistakably similar. Even with a lacy, high-necked shirt on and her hair caught atop her head in a prim bun, it was undeniably the exact same face. Only one change was obvious: The version in the earliest photo was the oldest. In 1892, she was listed as a teacher, not a student—a young one, perhaps, but no teenager.

For a long moment, nobody could speak. Finally Nadia said, “I don’t understand.”

“It’s a family name,” Mateo insisted. “Has to be.”

“There’s no way four generations all look that much alike.” Nadia’s mind was working fast.

She’d never learned any black magic—never wanted to. Once you started dealing with those kinds of spells, you were in league with demons, maybe with the One Beneath. But she knew enough about it to recognize it when she saw it.

Something like this—it was darker, and stronger, and scarier than anything she’d even heard of before.

“Elizabeth’s family has to have been a part of this for a very long time.” They would all have been witches, of course; the Craft was handed down mother to daughter.

Verlaine said, “A part of what?”

“Black magic.”

Mateo’s eyes darkened; his lips pressed together into a thin line. After a long moment, he said, “You can’t know any of that from pictures in the yearbook. Come on.”

“You’ve seen the pictures,” Nadia insisted. “The same as we have. That’s not a normal family resemblance, at all. It goes beyond that. It’s almost like Elizabeth … like she’s being born over and over …” But how would that even work?

“Okay, I don’t know what the explanation is, but there has to be one,” Mateo protested. “A joke by the kids in detention, Photoshopping some of us into old pictures, maybe. That doesn’t mean she’s evil.”

“But this isn’t as simple as Photoshop. I’m sure of it.” The memory of Elizabeth smiling at her coolly while the entire chemistry class had a meltdown burned in Nadia’s mind, constant as a gas flame, the one real proof she had that Elizabeth was far more than she seemed. What was going on?

Mateo said only, “I’m tired of blaming Elizabeth all the time. Let’s just get this magic … thing you need and go on from there, okay?”

Right then, his father strolled over to them; he had his son’s coloring but a pug-ugly face that suggested Mateo’s aquiline good looks came from his mother. “Mateo, it’s nice that you’re spending so much time with the lovely ladies, but you should also spend some time with your other tables. Especially table eleven, the nice men whose fajitas are ready?”

“Sure, Dad. Nadia and Verlaine were just leaving,” Mateo said. He didn’t sound angry, exactly, but obviously he was glad to have an excuse to end the conversation.