Spellcaster

It has to be. I’ve already lost Verlaine, already let her down, and I can’t lose Mateo, too—

Finally Nadia reached the street where Elizabeth lived. She’d been here before—had jealously spied on Mateo and Elizabeth together. That felt so childish now, so pointless. But even then she’d known that approaching Elizabeth’s house might be dangerous. Waiting inside could be protective spells, wards, and watchers, omens Nadia might not even recognize.

But Mateo might be inside, too, in danger, and that left her no choice. Nadia went up the steps without hesitation and tried the door. It was unlocked. What she saw was … a completely normal, nicely furnished house. Like something out of a Pottery Barn catalog. Not what she’d been expecting.

No. This wasn’t right. It had to be a glamour at work.

Nadia touched her bracelet, went through the simple thoughts necessary to construct a spell of disillusion, and watched as the Pottery Barn facade melted. In its place was—a ruin.

Holding her breath, Nadia carefully stepped between the shards of broken glass and mirrors. Her feet—now effectively bare, as her tights had been all but shredded away—could feel a layer of thick, oily dust underneath. If she put even one foot wrong, though, she’d feel even worse when glass stabbed through her foot.

She heard nothing, but that was meaningless. Elizabeth might have taken Mateo’s voice the same way she had Ginger’s; even now he could be trying to warn her but unable to speak a word. In any room, around any corner, Elizabeth could be waiting. Watching.

The house was almost entirely dark; the light Nadia found her way by came from an old-fashioned wood stove in one corner of the large front room. Yet the light it cast didn’t flicker like flame—it was almost eerily steady, and there was a strange cast to it, as if the yellow were too close to green. And the heat of it almost seemed to sear the skin, though it was a dozen feet away.

Don’t look at it, Nadia told herself. Whatever it was, however unnatural that burning might be, that couldn’t matter now. All that mattered was finding Mateo if he was here, and getting out again as fast as possible if he wasn’t.

Carefully she edged her way along one wall, trying to push some of the broken glass out of the way with her toes. There were the stairs—but they were so rotten, more spiderweb than wood by now, that surely Elizabeth and Mateo couldn’t have climbed them.

Here was a back room. Hand trembling, Nadia reached out for the doorknob and turned it slowly, so slowly.

She pushed the door open. Hinges creaked, and her breath caught again in her chest. The stove’s light barely reached this room, its heat, either; the chill of the shadows inside turned Nadia’s breath to a cloud.

If they’re in there, they know you’re here. Elizabeth knows. Step inside and find out. At least there was no glass on that floor.

Nadia walked inside. The room was completely empty except for spiderwebs—countless spiderwebs, so thick they’d covered the windows, and a couple of the walls, completely. She breathed out, a sigh of both relief and disappointment. If Elizabeth hadn’t brought Mateo to her house, then where might they have gone?

But wait, there was something in the far corner. Nothing Mateo would have left behind, though, just a—

—a book.

Elizabeth’s Book of Shadows.

A spiderweb brushed against her arm, making her jump. Nadia flicked it away.

But it stuck. As did another. And another.

The spiderwebs were weaving around her, so fast she couldn’t even kick them away, so fast that already Nadia could hardly move. She lunged for the door, but it was too late; already she was tangled in the stuff, spiders crawling among the silvery threads that bound her on every side.

She was trapped. There was no saving Mateo, no saving herself.

Elizabeth had them both now.

22

“COME ON,” NADIA WHISPERED, TEARS OF SHEER EXERTION rolling down her face. “Just—a few more inches—”

She reached desperately for the doorway of the room where she was trapped, fingers extended, every joint in her hand and arm aching. If she could only get hold of one of the shards of glass lying right outside, maybe she could start to hack away at the cobwebs surrounding her. Already she could hardly see the lower half of her body, and her left leg was going numb. Nadia had let herself fall to the floor, knowing the glass was her best chance, but now she wondered if she’d wind up mummified here, swaddled in gray filmy stuff, spiders all over her.

Already Nadia had tried to cast spells to liberate herself, but the Book of Shadows’s protections were ancient and primal. Her magic skittered across it like a raindrop across the windshield of a car, without any chance of getting in and changing anything.

Worst of all, she felt as if it were staring at her. Enjoying her fear and pain.

Nadia clutched desperately at the spiderwebs, trying to pull them away; little legs scrambled through her hair, and she screamed. How long had she been screaming? It seemed like forever, and it seemed like she pulled away handfuls of cobwebs every second, but there were always more around her, bearing her down.

Elizabeth walked into the ocean again; her blood would still be strong here. It would work.

Mateo followed her. He couldn’t help it. The frigidity of the waters affected him more than it did her. As the tides splashed over their waists, up toward their shoulders, he said, voice shaking from the severe cold, “Are you—going to—drown us?”

“We will die by fire,” she promised. “Silence. I have work to do.”