Steadfast

Nadia doubted a spell of forgetting could wreck Elizabeth that badly. Surely she would have some defenses. But if Nadia intensified the spell, and had Mateo with her, they could probably take away some of Elizabeth’s memory. A lot of it.

Including, no doubt, much of her magic . . . quite possibly whatever magic she was using now to hurt Mrs. Purdhy. Enough to undo whatever her real plan was.

It was worth a try.

“Watch your back, Elizabeth,” Nadia muttered as she got to work.

As he rode his motorcycle home, Mateo did his best not to see the dark magic that still bound Captive’s Sound.

He was Nadia’s Steadfast. That meant he had a window to magic’s true nature, one even a witch couldn’t match. His first few days as a Steadfast, the signs and portents had terrified him, but by now they were all too familiar.

Every time he looked at the sky, he saw the strange, roiling film between the town and the stars—the thing that seemed to seal them off from the rest of the world. Every time he glanced at the town hall, there was a strange, glowing energy around the building, almost like fire. Lines blazed deep in the ground, the concentric rings that centered in on the site of the Halloween carnival—the leftover target from Elizabeth’s attempt to kill them all.

By now, Mateo could gun his motorcycle motor and drive past things like that without a second thought.

However, it became harder when he went home and got ready for bed. Maybe Mateo was learning how to be a Steadfast, but there was no learning how to bear the Cabot curse.

His Steadfast abilities allowed him to actually see the curse now, every time he looked in a mirror; it writhed around his head like a dark halo, one made of snakes and thorns. When Mateo looked at it, he knew that Elizabeth’s curse ticked within him like a time bomb. He knew that eventually, like his mother, grandfather, and great-grandmother before him, like all his ancestors going back to colonial times, he would go mad from the burdens of his visions—the ones that showed him slivers of the future.

Mateo could avoid seeing himself in the mirror as he washed his face and brushed his teeth. He could take a couple of Tylenol PMs in the hopes of sleeping more deeply.

But he couldn’t keep himself from dreaming.

Verlaine lay crumpled on the ground, crying so hard that the sobs racked her body. “How could you?” she said, to someone or something he couldn’t see in the blur. “You had to take this, too. You had to take the only thing I ever had.”

He tried to push forward, to see who it was who’d done this to Verlaine, though he still didn’t know what had been done, what she might have lost. Instead Verlaine seemed to disappear as he stumbled—not through the strange, misty blur that had surrounded them before, but through a forest. The dead of night. Twigs snapped under his feet, and thick oak trees and pines surrounded him on every side like the bars of an oversize cage.

In the distance he saw the arc of a flashlight sweep through the gloom, and he ducked down. It was very important not to be seen. Why? He didn’t know, couldn’t remember, but fear had seized his heart, made his pulse feel like the thumping of fear itself trying to escape from inside his chest.

But he wasn’t afraid for himself.

Nadia stood nearby, hiding behind the trunk of one of the trees. When she peeked around the corner, a shape in the darkness moved, swinging at her viciously. The blow sounded solid, even wet—the crunch of bone in blood. She fell so limply that he knew she was dead.

“Nadia! No! Nadia—”

Mateo woke in his room, breathing hard. He’d dreamed about losing Nadia before.

This was the first time he’d ever dreamed that she was truly dead.

And he always saw the future.

Not that anybody on Earth or in hell would care, but Asa was having a terrible night.

First he’d had to go to the emergency room with his parents. (He’d decided to think of them that way for simplicity’s sake; besides, the idea of having parents again was novel enough to be entertaining.) Apparently the doctors decided his mother must have had some completely new reaction to the blood-pressure medication she was taking, and wanted to keep her overnight for observation.

“You promise I didn’t hurt anyone?” She’d been teary-eyed and shaky as they settled her in her hospital bed, fixing foam-and-Velcro cuffs around her wrists and ankles just in case she snapped again. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“You were just sick, Mom. People will understand.” Asa smiled at her, trying to be reassuring. It didn’t come naturally to him, but clearly that was what was needed.

How strange, to be able to do that and feel . . . happy that she was comforted. Maybe that was some echo of his feelings for the long-ago human mother he could no longer remember. Maybe it was human nature, soaking into him through this human shell.

Regardless, Asa thought he liked it.

Then he and his father had to leave her there and go home, which meant another couple of hours of running interference on the phone (“He can’t talk right now. We’re all very shaken up; I’m sure you understand. Can I take a message?”) while his father Googled the blood-pressure drug to see if it had caused psychotic breaks in anyone else, then called his lawyer to talk about suing GlaxoSmithKline.

Once Asa finally had a minute, he went upstairs to take a shower. There was just something about misfired magic that felt sticky against your skin, like flop sweat or spilled syrup.

He stripped off Jeremy Prasad’s designer clothes—the two-hundred-dollar jeans, the cashmere sweater, even the Calvin Klein underwear. How ridiculous, and yet . . . he had to admit, he looked good in those clothes.