Spellcaster

Okay, fine. She was home. That had to be safe, right? Maybe not, though. He hadn’t taken a close enough look before to see whether it resembled the setting of any of his dreams. Why hadn’t he done that?

“Hey, Mateo.” Melanie held up a cell phone. “One of them left this. You too brokenhearted to take it to her at school tomorrow?”

“I can handle it,” Mateo said.

Maybe he’d get his chance to look out for Nadia after all.

Nadia had never realized there could be so many questions about witchcraft; she didn’t remember asking this many even when she was a little kid. Then again, she’d grown up in the constant company of her mother’s powers, naturally understanding so much of it that there was no need to ask.

Verlaine, on the other hand, felt the need to ask everything.

“Can you fly?” she said as she and Nadia walked along the main strip of Captive’s Sound, Nadia trying her best to be sure she knew her way home. “I don’t mean on a broomstick, Gryffindor-style. That would be stupid. Unless you do use broomsticks.”

“No broomsticks,” Nadia said. “I can’t fly. There are spells—really advanced spells—they could let you, I don’t know, defy the laws of physics for a while. Sort of souped-up versions of what I did to your car. But I’m not that skilled yet. Not even close.”

“So your mom was a witch?”

“Yeah. She taught me.”

“Will she be mad that you told me?”

“Mom’s not in our lives anymore. She left my dad back in the spring, and she pretty much washed her hands of me and Cole then, too.” The facts were harsh enough, but somehow they sounded even worse spoken aloud like that.

Verlaine bit her lip, less confrontational than she’d been at any other point during this endless interrogation. “I’m sorry. That sucks. I mean, I don’t even remember my mom and dad—but it would be worse to remember them and then lose them. At least, I think so.”

So, actually, I’m not the only person who’s had it bad. Nadia felt like a jerk. “It sucks either way. But it’s okay. We’re still here, right?”

“Right.”

“And here is—three blocks from my house, if I turn left at this corner?”

“You’ve got it! Congrats. You’ve learned your way around all ten square feet of Captive’s Sound. Once you get all the gossip down, nobody will be able to tell you from the native population.”

The one piece of gossip she’d learned—about Mateo Perez—echoed in Nadia’s mind again. The family curse.

A cool breeze stirred past them, tangling Verlaine’s silvery hair, which already stood out in the early-evening gloom. After spending most of her life in Chicago, Nadia had thought she was pretty much winter-proofed—but cold came early here, and it cut to the bone. Slowly she said, “Has the town always been like this?”

“Like what?”

“Not right.” Then Nadia said what she really thought: “Dead inside.”

Verlaine stopped. For a long moment they stood there beneath one of the streetlamps, the first fall leaves scudding across the cracked sidewalks. “I always thought—I figured it was just because I hate it here. The same way a lot of people want out of their hometowns, you know? When I looked around and only saw the bad side of it, I thought it was, like, me being in a mood. But it’s not, is it?”

“No. It’s not.”

“Then what is it?”

“I’m not sure. But I think it has to do with whatever’s buried beneath the chemistry lab.” As Verlaine’s eyes widened, Nadia said, “I have no idea. All I know is, it’s dark and it’s strange and some other witch has to have buried it there a long time ago. It’s dark enough to poison this town. To hollow it out.”

Verlaine took that in for a few moments. “Is it—dangerous? I mean, beyond sucking the life out of Captive’s Sound, assuming it had any life to begin with.” Her ghostly skin somehow became even paler. “Can it get worse? I would’ve thought that was impossible, but—you know, the sinkholes—”

“I don’t know that those are related,” Nadia said. Then again, she didn’t know that they weren’t. Was it possible that she’d arrived just as things took a turn for the worse? As the thing buried beneath Captive’s Sound finally … got out?

“Is there a spell we can do to find out?” Verlaine drummed her fingers against her notebook, nervous energy crackling from her almost like static electricity.

Slowly, Nadia answered, “We could try to tell the future.”

“You can tell the future? Awesome. Do I ever—wait. No. You can’t tell the future. That was one of the First Laws, wasn’t it? That you’re not supposed to do that.”

“You have a good memory. Yes, that’s one of the laws. But there are a few ways around it.” Deep in thought, Nadia tried to remember what Mom had said about when you could work with that rule, bend it without breaking it entirely. “If I tried to tell my own future, or yours, it would break that law. Also, it would seriously mess us up, mentally, but—never mind. What we could do is tell the town’s future. See what’s happening to Captive’s Sound. That’s distant enough from us that it’s allowed, and that would be enough to tell us whether—whether something serious has begun, or whether the way things are is permanent. Not changing.”