Steadfast

Cold wind made him hug himself tightly as he sat up and stared in disbelief. He was no longer in his bedroom. Instead Mateo lay in the rowboat tethered to the nearest dock. His hands were scraped and raw; even in his dreams, he’d tried to undo the ropes, to actually live out the vision playing within his head.

Was it a vision or was it real? Terror seized him at the thought of Nadia out there on the water alone—

No. It had to have been a vision. His boat had never left the dock, he was wearing a T-shirt and pajama pants that left him shivering in the cold, and Gage was nowhere to be seen.

But the vision had drawn him out of his house. Made him do something dangerous. If someone had come upon him during the vision—someone Mateo might have thought was hurting Nadia—

I could have done anything. Anything. And I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself.

Mateo shuddered as he realized: This was how people began to go mad.

10

AS PEOPLE PUSHED PAST THEM IN THE HALLWAY, HURRYING to their morning classes, Nadia smoothed Mateo’s hair back with her hands. “Night terrors can happen to anybody,” she said. “Lots of people try to act out parts of their bad dreams. You don’t know that it had anything to do with your curse.”

“It wasn’t a regular nightmare,” Mateo insisted. “It was one of the visions, but this time it made me do something dangerous. Almost crazy.” He still looked shaken, and Nadia caught others staring and whispering. The mad Cabots, the ones who always went insane—that was the reputation Mateo had had to live with his whole life. Now he’d come to school with his clothes slightly askew, his entire body tense, going on and on about his rude awakening that morning. Nadia realized now that this was one of the ways the curse worked against its victims: It scared them. Then when others saw how unstable they looked, that began the cycle of alienation, whispers, rejection. Someone left so alone while scary things were happening to them—well, no wonder they freaked out.

But Nadia knew the truth. Mateo wouldn’t have to bear this alone.

“Listen to me,” she said, reaching up to take his face in her hands. “The curse dies with Elizabeth’s power. Got it? When we take her down, you won’t have to worry about the dreams getting stronger. You’ll never have to worry about them again.”

Verlaine hesitantly raised her hand. “So, do we have a firm date for this take-Elizabeth-down plan?”

“Tomorrow night?”

“Whoa.” Verlaine’s eyes widened. “I was being sarcastic. Are you kidding? Tomorrow night?”

“Yeah. I’m ready.” Was she? Nadia had learned how to focus the spell of forgetfulness more sharply; at this point, further delay probably just gave Elizabeth more time to catch on. Now that Mateo’s condition had worsened, her resolve hardened into certainty. “We need a location over water—it’s not like I couldn’t cast the spell without that, but over water would be ideal.” And, in this case, nothing less than perfection would do. “We could take a boat out, but it’s been so windy. The sound’s too rough. Is there, like, a bridge we could go to? One nobody is likely to drive over while we’re there? Someplace out of the way.”

Mateo and Verlaine, the two locals, exchanged a look. It was Mateo who said, “I guess there’s Davis Bridge.”

“Out to Raven Isle,” Verlaine added. “But do we have to actually be on the bridge? Because it’s pretty run-down. Nobody’s used it to go to Raven Isle for years now, not even on a dare.”

Nadia brushed this aside. “It doesn’t have to stand for much longer. Tomorrow night, and that’s all.”

She felt suddenly free. Imagine—forty-eight hours from now, they might be free from Elizabeth forever. Mateo smiled tiredly, and she knew he was trying hard to believe it, too.

When Novels class was over, Verlaine was able to catch up to Asa on the way out. “You need to tell me what’s going on with Mateo.”

Yeah, okay, they were going after Elizabeth tomorrow night—but Asa didn’t know that, and Verlaine figured the more information they had to work with, the better.

“Why would I ever do that?” Asa shrugged on his backpack as though the books weighed nothing; he turned and walked backward through the hallway, never running into anyone. The crowds just parted around him, perhaps sensing the strange heat from his skin. “You’re desperate for someone to talk to, aren’t you?”

That hit too close to the bone. Verlaine stopped walking. “At least I’m not Elizabeth’s slave. And if I were, I’d try to do something about it. Not just sit and smirk and pretend I’m something besides her dog on a leash.”

So that was what it looked like when you wiped the smile off that face. She’d never scored a point off Jeremy Prasad, but apparently she did better when it came to demons from the furnace of hell.

Asa had stopped walking, too, now. He leaned toward her, close enough for her to feel that searing heat, to see the blaze in his dark eyes. “You think it’s so simple, throwing off the shackles of the One Beneath? You think you understand damnation? Slavery? Eternity? You understand nothing.”

“I understand that you hate Elizabeth as much as we do,” she shot back.

“Meaningless. Irrelevant. And foolish, too. You’re still mostly arguing with the worthless boy who used to live in this body, instead of with me. I don’t think you’re ready to understand what I am, or what I can do. But you will.” Asa’s smile was feral now. Dangerous. Verlaine realized she was holding her books in front of her chest like a shield, but she managed to keep a straight face, even as he whispered, “You think you have nothing to lose. But you are so, so wrong.”