Spellcaster

Although Dad looked like he wanted to protest, he’d also caught sight of the bacon she’d put on the table. Distraction provided; discussion over.

The kitchen in their new house was one of the few things about it Nadia didn’t like. In their Chicago condominium, they’d had the best and brightest appliances her father’s big law-firm salary could buy, and oceans of counter space. Here, everything was old-fashioned and a little shabby. But what she disliked in the kitchen was precisely what made the rest of the house so awesome. It was an old Victorian, two stories not counting the large attic she’d claimed as her private space—the perfect hiding place for her Book of Shadows and the supplies for her magic. She’d expected Cole to pitch a fit, but he was so thrilled by having a real, true backyard of his own that he showed no signs of coming indoors of his own free will ever again. The oaken plank floors creaked comfortingly, and a stained-glass window let cranberry-tinted light into the stairwell. If it was all slightly run-down, it was also beautiful—and as big a change from their high-rise condo as she could imagine.

Nadia didn’t want any reminders of their life before. She wanted to seal her family into a place where nothing could hurt them—not memory, not her mother, not whatever weird magic was at work in this town. This house seemed to provide a chance, and she knew just enough of the Craft to help that along.

So she’d whispered the spells, encircled it with the best protection she knew. She’d slipped out in the night to bury moonstones next to the steps; she’d begun the work of painting the attic ceiling blue. To make it cute, she’d told her dad. The real power of that particular shade, what it meant for a home to be protected from above—those were things he never had to know.

Great, Nadia thought as she stared at her new high school, Isaac P. Rodman High. Just great.

Just the fact that it was a high school was bad enough. On top of that, it was a new school for her senior year. She’d accepted they needed the move, but that didn’t mean she was looking forward to navigating completely new people and teachers and cliques for the nine and a half months before she’d graduate and be free again. Her new school was far smaller than the one she’d attended in Chicago, but in some ways that was more intimidating, not less. Everyone here knew one another, and probably had for their whole lives. That made her the odd one out.

But beyond that, there was something else. Something shivering just beneath the surface—once again, something magical, though it was different from anything else she’d ever known. Precisely how it was different, she couldn’t say, but this energy was familiar and unfamiliar at once. Nadia could feel it coursing all around her, that static-electricity thing all over again.

This was … a complication.

What is going on here? It’s not like someone is using magic near me—even if I could feel that, I don’t think it would feel like this. It’s more like some source of magical energy is kept here. But shielded—encased—in a way I don’t understand.

Nadia clutched the straps of her backpack tighter as she hurried inside the registrar’s office. Don’t think about it now, she told herself. You can figure it out later. Besides, there’s nothing you can do about it without Mom around to help. For now? All you have to do is get through the day.

Even waiting for her class schedule was almost more than she could take.

“So, like, Jinnie’s just standing there, like nothing is going on, even though we both know what’s going on, so I’m like, hey, Jinnie, and she’s like, hey, Kendall, and I’m like, what’s up, and she’s like, nothing. I swear to God, she is so fake.” The girl in front of Nadia somehow managed to talk into her cell phone without pausing, even though she was chewing at least half a pack of gum at once. “And she’s all, did you have a good summer, and I just went, yeah, because I’m so not getting into that with her.”

Nadia prayed for the ancient secretary behind the counter in her lilac polyester suit to find whatever the heck it was this girl wanted so she’d leave already. Or shut up. Either way.

The door opened and shut behind her; Nadia didn’t bother turning around. The girl in front of her did, her sandy hair falling over her shoulder. Almost instantly, her freckled face went from pleasant to nasty, her expression from vapid to mean. “Speaking of total fake bitches,” she said into her phone, far too loudly, “that skank Verlaine just walked in.”

Nadia couldn’t help but turn back to look.

The first word that came into her mind when she saw Verlaine was Goth. But that wasn’t right. The black dress she wore wasn’t lace or leather; it had puffed sleeves and a wide belt at the waist like something from a 1950s movie, and her shoes were cheerful kelly-green Converse sneakers. Her complexion was so white that Nadia had assumed she was wearing that stuff Goths used to come across like porcelain dolls or ghosts—but Verlaine was really that fair all over. And her long hair wasn’t an elaborate wig or even a dye job, unless she’d been thorough enough to even do her eyebrows. Instead, it was really, truly, totally silver-gray, though Verlaine seemed to be no older than Nadia herself.

The most striking thing about her, though, was how … hopeless she looked. Like people were mean to her all the time, and she no longer even dreamed of anything better. Her only response was to roll her eyes and say, “Kendall, give it a rest.”

Kendall said, “I have to go. If I don’t get out of here soon, the skank overload will kill me.” She stowed her phone with another withering glance toward Verlaine; Kendall’s bubbly personality seemed to have changed in an instant. “You’d think having two fags for dads would mean at least somebody would tell you what to wear.”