Spellcaster

“This is my dad’s restaurant. I help out after school, on weekends—that kind of thing.” Mateo took out his order pad and stared down at it as if he was unwilling to meet her eyes one moment longer. “What can I get for you guys?”

“Not dinner, sorry. Maybe some salsa and chips, though,” Verlaine said cheerfully. “Oh, how about two virgin margaritas? What do you think, Nadia?”

“Sure.” Nadia never stopped looking at Mateo; he never looked back at her.

“Got it,” Mateo said, scribbling it down. “Have that right out to you.”

As he walked away, Nadia said, “Did it seem like Mateo was, I don’t know—trying to ignore me?”

“He always ignores me. Which makes him one of the nice guys. I mean, at least he’s never mean to me.” Verlaine stopped. “Wait. How do you know Mateo? I thought you just moved to town.”

“I don’t know him, really. But I met him when—when he pulled me out of a car accident.”

“What?”

Nadia retold the whole story while Verlaine stared, open-mouthed. Only when it was all over did Verlaine manage to say, “That is wild.”

“I wish I knew why he acted like he knew me that night,” Nadia said. “Or why he acts like he wishes he didn’t know me now.”

“Well, probably because he’s crazy.”

With a shrug, Nadia said, “Like all guys are crazy?” The ones she liked never seemed to be the ones who liked her.

“No, I mean, crazy crazy.” Verlaine glanced over her shoulder to check for Mateo. “I wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings. Like I said, he’s always been nice enough to leave me alone. But his mother was a Cabot, and everybody knows all the Cabots eventually lose their minds. It’s the family curse.”

Nadia didn’t hear those words; she felt them. Literally felt them as a sudden sickening drop in her belly, like she was riding a roller coaster that had started to plunge downward. “What did you say?”

“They all go insane. Apparently it’s hereditary or something. They’ve lived in this town since the beginning of time—well, the 1600s. And they’ve been going crazy ever since. I feel bad for him, but it’s not like anything can change your genes.” Verlaine glanced toward the bar, where Mateo was grabbing a tray of sodas for another table. “Why does it always happen to the hot ones?”

“The family curse,” Nadia repeated. Maybe it was only a saying. Maybe it was the small-town version of an urban legend. For Mateo’s sake, she hoped so.

Verlaine clearly was ready to get back to the subject. “So, come on. Tell me the laws of witchcraft.”

The First Laws were so familiar to Nadia—so often repeated to her, so much a part of her—that the words seemed to flow out almost without her thinking about it. “The most unbreakable one is that you must never be sworn to the One Beneath and do his bidding. Besides that—you must not reveal the Craft to anyone who would betray it. You must never speak of witchcraft to any man. You must never attempt to divine your own fate. You must never bear a child to the son of another witch. You must never command the will of another. You must never suffer a demon to walk among mortals.” Her eyes sought Mateo as she spoke the last remaining law:

“You must never cast a curse.”

“Switch tables with me, will you, Melanie? Trade you eight for eighteen.”

Melanie Sweeney, the senior waitress at La Catrina, glanced past him and frowned. “Eighteen’s just two kids. Girls. Cute ones, too. So why do you want to wait on those six jerks at eight? Wait, don’t tell me. You asked one of the girls out; she shot you down.”

“Love hurts,” Mateo said, which was enough like a yes without being a lie.

“No worries, buddy. I got ’em.” Melanie grinned. “But you better take those guys their empanadas PDQ.”

As he hurried to table eight, Mateo’s mind remained focused on one thing alone—Nadia. If his dreams were really telling him the future—and because of the car crash, they had to be at least partly true, didn’t they?—then the danger surrounding Nadia was very real. And whatever it was, Mateo himself was a part of it.

But his plan—“Stay Away From Nadia for Her Own Good”—was clearly useless. What had he been thinking? This was Captive’s Sound, a town the size of a flash drive. He ran into almost everyone in town at least once a week; with Nadia in his chemistry class, he was guaranteed to see her almost every day. Now that she turned out to like Mexican food—forget it. Game over.

So what the hell was he going to do?

Would Nadia believe him if he tried to explain? Most people wouldn’t, even if they hadn’t grown up in Captive’s Sound thinking he was guaranteed to turn out insane. And even if she believed, did he know enough to protect her? If he frightened Nadia, convinced her that she should fear for her life, then failed to prevent any of his nightmares from coming to pass—that would be worse than anything else he could do.

No, he decided. That’s not the worst thing I could do. The worst thing I could do is nothing.

There have to be ways I could look out for her without talking to her about the visions. I can … watch from afar. Guard her as best I can without putting her in danger.

But is that even possible?

Right as he was trying to work it all out, table eight decided they each had a complicated special order—no refried beans here, extra guacamole there, so on and so forth—and Mateo was too busy to do anything but hurry back and forth between his tables and the kitchen for the next half hour. By the time he was able to look back at Nadia’s table again, she was gone, and Melanie was wiping it down to get it ready for the next customers.