Spellcaster

Verlaine realized she didn’t get a vote on whether or not Mateo got to come back on board. For one, he was the Steadfast, which meant he brought some mojo to the table. For two, he was the one Elizabeth had cursed to see the future, which both made him Victim Number One and added to said mojo.

Still, he’d totally ditched them for a whole week. Instead of working on the huge enormous crisis threatening their whole town, he’d been—well, okay, he’d been dealing with massive personal betrayal and renewed grief for his dead mother. Which was actually a valid distraction.

But Verlaine? She’d been working. Carefully she’d put together a file of her findings about the sinkholes, complete with a PowerPoint presentation, and sent it to the city council; even without any mention that magic was responsible, they ought to be able to figure out that something was seriously wrong, something centered on Swindoll Park. Maybe that would be enough to get them to cancel the Halloween carnival or at least move it. But she hadn’t heard anything from the council office. Apparently reading mail from high school students wasn’t their top priority. Idiots.

Besides, now that Mateo was here in the Guardian offices with them, ready to be productive again, Verlaine was ready to give the guy another shot. Then again, was he even here to be productive?

Because he wasn’t going through the records she’d spent all weekend pulling. No, he was staring at Nadia all rapt and gooey, like he was seeing a rainbow for the first time, or something about that sappy. And, of course, he was currently engaged in the oh-so-important task of drawing something in pen on the side of Nadia’s sneaker—a tree, maybe. Verlaine was torn between thinking it was completely irritating and feeling the familiar ache of wishing that some guy, any guy, would look at her that way.

Anything can change, she reminded herself fiercely.

“Okay,” she said. “The big question here is, how do we stop Elizabeth in her tracks?”

Nadia and Mateo shared a look; apparently they hadn’t realized that Verlaine intended to take over the meeting. Well, that was what happened when certain persons were too busy being twitterpated to concentrate on the business at hand. Certain other persons had to seize control. And put together the PowerPoint presentations.

She turned her laptop around so that it showed a white screen with the header: Operation Stop Elizabeth. That slide dissolved into the next, which had three columns: A—Face her directly. B—Secretly undermine her plans. C—Provide alternate action/distraction.

“As you can see, Option A has serious shortcomings,” Verlaine said. “Mostly because Elizabeth is powerful enough to squash us all like bugs.” The next slide revealed a clip art cartoon she’d found of a smushed bug, complete with xs over its eyes and a tongue sticking out of its mouth. “Which means we need to look at Options B or C.”

Nadia raised her hand, then stared at it, like she couldn’t believe she’d just asked permission to talk. “Uh—I think Option C is a no-go.”

Verlaine shook her head. “No, think about it! We get her to believe there’s some other powerful witch just out of town, or—maybe a magical artifact she’d like to get her hands on. I don’t know what that would be, but you can come up with something, right?”

Still Nadia looked unenthused. “Whatever it is Elizabeth has planned for Halloween night—it’s big. It’s important to her. And she’s been setting this up for a long time. I don’t know whether we could think of anything capable of distracting her. I’m not even sure something like that exists.”

Well, so much for the next slide, which had all Verlaine’s ideas about Option C, her personal favorite. Her disappointment must have showed, because Mateo quickly said, “Hey, that leaves us with Option B. We concentrate on what we can do, not what we can’t. Right?”

“Right,” Nadia said. Mateo smiled at Verlaine, like she had been really smart to bring them to this point. Maybe he was okay after all.

Of course, she hadn’t come up with as many choices for Option B—

Then an idea came to her. “Hey, you said a Book of Shadows has its own power, right?”

“Right,” Nadia said, looking up at her. Mateo never glanced away from Nadia.

“And the stronger the witch, the stronger her book.”

“Eventually, yeah.”

Verlaine grinned. “So why don’t we steal Elizabeth’s Book of Shadows? I mean, she’s four hundred and something years old, so her book has to be, like, the most powerful ever.”

“No.” Nadia held out a hand, as though she were physically going to stop Verlaine from trying. “Don’t ever, ever suggest that again. Don’t even think about it.”

“Why not?” Mateo looked as startled as Verlaine felt. “It sounded like a good idea to me.”

But Nadia shook her head as she rose and paced across the room, Mateo’s little sketch still only half-finished on her shoe. “Both of you—you have to listen to me. Everything Verlaine said is true. Which means a Book of Shadows that old, that powerful—it probably has power beyond anything we can imagine. It might have … consciousness.”

Verlaine bit her lip. “You mean, it would know we were there?”

“Possibly. I can’t be sure.” Nadia raked a hand through her black hair, which gleamed in the afternoon light filtering in through the dusty Guardian windows. “Certainly Elizabeth will have protected it, and probably it protects itself. If we go after it, it could hurt us. Physically, mentally. Mateo, you should never even look directly at it. I don’t know what it might do. No matter what Elizabeth’s doing, going after her Book of Shadows isn’t worth the risk.”