Spellcaster

The curse on the Cabots was far too old and too strong to be shaken loose by such feeble methods. She smiled around the rim of her water bottle.

And what ridiculous overkill. Clumsy, stupid, to have cast that spell with such force that it affected the entire class. Obviously Nadia was raw and new to the Craft. Her inherent abilities weren’t matched by technique.

Yet she had, however briefly, somehow allowed Mateo to glimpse Elizabeth’s true hold on him—and that wouldn’t do. Elizabeth wasn’t quite done with him yet.

Elizabeth reached the pale gray house, opened the door, and went inside. When one of her rare guests came here—Mateo, or the delivery service with her cases of bottled water—they saw whatever it was they expected to see. Mateo had commented once on the paintings; his mother had always talked about how soft the carpet was underfoot.

In reality, the creaking wooden boards of the floor had long ago been painted blue, and they were overlaid with decades worth of shattered glass.

Her feet wove through the shards easily; the gaps for her steps were as familiar to her as everything else in Captive’s Sound. The yellowed plaster walls were all but bare; one held a mirror, draped with heavy old red velvet, which she could rip away in case of emergency. A few pieces of furniture from various centuries slumped against the walls, their wood crumbling, their upholstery threadbare. Elizabeth had no idea whether any of them could still bear her weight. In one corner was the old cast-iron stove, which as always glowed with a heat that was bright and constant, even beautiful, in the same way that a spectacular tropical bird could be beautiful even when kept in a cage too small for its wings. Between two of the walls hung the rope hammock, piled high with quilts and coverlets. The most powerful spells of imprisonment always worked from the ground up, and Elizabeth did not intend to be caught while sleeping.

On every surface sat empty bottles—water bottles, mostly, though there were some for soda, some for the green tea that seemed to be popular these days. Once every few months or so, Elizabeth would get rid of them, but she accumulated them so quickly that it was pointless to throw each out in turn. The thirst—the terrible thirst—it cracked and dried her from within every single moment, as it had for almost as long as she could remember. Even now she tossed aside the bottle that had seen her home and took up another one, gulping the water down desperately.

She’d tried drinking almost anything over the years, to see what might help. She’d drunk mud. She’d drunk wine. She’d even tried blood a few times, before she realized it was too salty to be any help.

Not long now, Elizabeth told herself. It was her only comfort.

Her hand rested on the knob of the door to the back room, the only room of her house she no longer really considered hers. That room belonged to something else.

Elizabeth looked inside. She felt as though her Book of Shadows looked back at her.

It shook free of the cobwebs with difficulty; it had been a long time since Elizabeth had consulted its pages instead of merely drawing upon its inherent power. For a moment she wondered whether it had become illegible, whether it had finally become a book no longer, but the fragile pages fell open to the correct page instantly. Her Book of Shadows still wished to do her bidding, no matter what.

Mateo sat at the cafeteria table, pizza untouched on his tray, staring at Nadia Caldani, who had turned out to be even crazier than he was.

Beautiful. Persuasive. But nuts. She was telling him stuff nobody could ever believe was real.

And yet he believed her.

“I’m sorry about you becoming my Steadfast,” she said yet again, stabbing at her lasagna with her plastic fork like it was somehow responsible for this. “If I’d had any idea it could affect you—any man, ever—I’d never have cast a prophetic spell in my own house. And I still don’t understand how it could be you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, repeating the words she’d been over a couple times already, like he was on autopilot. “No man conceived of woman can hold magic. I remember that part.”

“It’s like finding out that every action doesn’t have an equal and opposite reaction,” Nadia protested. “But, still. Here you are. You’re my Steadfast, and that’s a pretty powerful bond, so we’re going to have to learn to work with it.”

“Hey there!” Verlaine Laughton came up to Nadia, skinny and strange as ever; she’d used two pencils to twist her silver-gray hair into a knot at the back of her neck, and wore the same kind of bizarre clothes she always favored—today, a peasant blouse and bell-bottomed jeans that had orange flower appliqués. She seemed to have been transported directly from 1972. That was about as much as Mateo had ever noticed about her; there was something about Verlaine that almost kept you from paying any attention. Like wherever something interesting was, Verlaine wasn’t. But she seemed to know Nadia pretty well. Verlaine’s face fell as she saw Mateo. “Oh, sorry, am I interrupting?”

Nadia looked up at her. “Mateo’s my Steadfast.”

Verlaine practically slammed the tray onto the table in vindication. “I knew it!”

“Are you a witch, too?” he said. Were there witches everywhere? Was the whole world about a thousand times weirder than he’d ever dreamed?

“Nope. This is all about as new to me as it is to you.” Then Verlaine frowned at Nadia. “Wait. I thought you said men couldn’t be Steadfasts. That they couldn’t know about magic.”