Steadfast

“That couldn’t be true.” The response was automatic, and as soon as it was out of Nadia’s mouth, she began to doubt it. Was this situation somehow even worse than she’d thought?

Counting off on her fingers, Verlaine said, “You meant to stop Elizabeth on Halloween. Not only did you not stop her, you inadvertently wound up helping her. You’ve tried to kill her twice now. Most people wouldn’t look at their attempted murderer and say, ‘Hey, that’s exactly who I want on my team.’ Elizabeth’s still trying to recruit you. She knows something you don’t. Do you think—maybe—your mom traded you to, well . . .”

Verlaine pointed down at the floor. Nadia and Mateo both stared.

“By that I mean hell,” Verlaine said. “In case it wasn’t obvious.”

“It was.” Nadia’s head had begun to spin. Maybe that was sleepless nights and stress messing with her, but she didn’t think so. “I didn’t even think that was possible.”

“We don’t know that it is.” Mateo shot Verlaine a dirty look; she responded by shrugging, like, Just saying. “Listen. Your mother can’t have traded you to the One Beneath. If she had, He’d already have you. Instead Elizabeth keeps trying to get you to join her. So you can’t belong to Him.”

She clutched at that fragile hope. “You really think so?”

“Yeah. I do.” Mateo’s hand tightened around hers, and Nadia managed a smile for him.

Verlaine just said, “Wait. How are you going to confront your mother? She’s nowhere near here.”

“I’m going to have to get out of town.”

Mateo gave her a look. “You noticed the quarantine around the town, right?”

“Okay, yeah, that makes it harder, but still—I have to do it,” Nadia insisted.

“I thought you didn’t even know where she was,” Verlaine said.

“I didn’t. But after Elizabeth said that—I kinda went through my dad’s stuff. Got an address. She’s still in Chicago, actually. Twenty minutes from where we used to live.”

“Which brings us back to where you’re trying to get out of a town under quarantine.” Mateo’s eyes shifted sideways, toward the nearest set of medics from the CDC; they’d worked their way to a table not far off.

“I’m a witch. I have ways around barricades.”

“Yeah, but after the barricades, you have to travel all the way to Providence, get on a plane, get a hotel room in Chicago, all of that. You’re going to need cash. Do you have a credit card?”

“Oh. Right.” Magic couldn’t solve every problem. “No credit cards—Dad won’t let me get one until college. I have a few hundred bucks in my checking account.”

“Won’t be enough,” Verlaine said. “I can swing you some, though, no worries.”

“Me too. Dad pays me the same as any other server.” Mateo took a deep breath, as though preparing himself for a needle stick or something else that would hurt. “Don’t worry. We can do it.”

It was too much. Nadia hadn’t realized how fragile her hold on her emotions was until that moment, when her throat choked up and her hands started to shake.

Verlaine leaned closer to her. “Hey. Are you okay?”

“I don’t deserve you guys.”

Mateo’s fingers closed around hers. His touch anchored her again, as though she could once more feel the ground beneath her.

Verlaine said, “Well, no kidding. We are pretty awesome.”

At least she could still laugh.

I shall never understand the madness of this world, Asa thought.

Captive’s Sound had been turned upside down by these strange people who wielded needles and microscopes, who would try to find a cure for Elizabeth’s dark magic. They would try and fail, and yet he admired the effort. In his day—distant though that was, and fragile as the memories had become over centuries of disuse—humanity was helpless before plagues and pandemics. Sickness swept across the land unchecked, mowing down lives the way a scythe mowed wheat. Now humanity had found the tools to fight back against disease and death.

Not that you could ever defeat fate. Death waited; that would never change. But Asa liked that humanity fought anyway. Elizabeth would have called it misguided; he thought of it as valiant.

What bewildered him were the reactions of the townspeople. Fear should have galvanized them, stirred them to protect themselves. He would have thought at least a few would recognize the marks of witchcraft and begin to suspect others in their midst.

They would never suspect Elizabeth—her glamours had seen to that. But he’d expected to see at least a little random harassment of the innocent-yet-marginalized. Torches. Pitchforks. The classics.

Instead the people of Captive’s Sound had been stunned into passivity. They’d turned as stupefied as rabbits caught in a hunter’s snare. All around him, they shuffled along the sidewalks, staring at nothing. What little fire remained in them only sparked when they had to line up for supplies, food, and the like. Now that stores and restaurants couldn’t receive new shipments, these people whose tags and vans read CDC were the only ones who could provide the basics of life. They couldn’t imagine how much worse it would get.

They were about to learn, courtesy of Elizabeth.

He ought to have delighted in that, reveled in the explosion of fear and fury that was to come. Instead he could only think of Verlaine trapped in the midst of it. . . .