Steadfast

Mom saying “It’s better this way” as she walked out the door for the last time.

Jerking back in horror as cobwebs closed over her face and body, entrapping her in Elizabeth’s run-down old house, and Nadia realizing Elizabeth’s Book of Shadows was an enemy in its own right—

Nothing happened. Dad still looked vaguely preoccupied. The only way to tell if Betrayer’s Snare worked was if the person you were trying to protect stayed safe. Right now, Nadia thought, that didn’t feel very comforting.

Cole came back into the room. When he saw that Nadia had stopped coloring, he started whining, “You didn’t draw the zebra. You promised you would make a zebra!”

“I’m on it, buddy.” Cole acted out when he was tired, and he was probably the most exhausted member of the family—which was saying something. He’d been torn apart last night, sobbing until after two a.m. Nadia and her father had taken turns sitting with him. It had been hard for her to focus on calming Cole down. She kept remembering Elizabeth’s taunts, noticing how her dad’s mind seemed to be . . . someplace else. She knew it wasn’t anything Dad had control over. He was in the grips of a spell most people couldn’t have fought off even this long. But still—yuck.

Was it only a few days ago that she’d been grossed out by imagining her dad dating again? If he took up with some normal forty-year-old woman now, Nadia thought she’d offer to babysit every night of the week. Anyone but Elizabeth. Anything but that.

“You’re not drawing my zebra!” Pouting, Cole grabbed the red marker and deliberately made an ugly mark across her design.

That should have earned him a time-out. Instead Nadia gasped. “Cole, that’s good. That’s really good.”

“It is?” He seemed too surprised to remember he was in a bad mood.

“It is!” Nadia grabbed the piece of paper and bolted for the stairs. “Dad, can you take Cole Patrol for a minute? I’ll be right back down!”

She took the steps two at a time, yanked down the attic ladder, and climbed up as fast as she could, pulling the ladder up behind her. Goodwife Hale’s Book of Shadows sat there next to her jar of Hershey’s Miniatures, and Nadia helped herself to a Mr. Goodbar as she started flipping through.

Slowly, slowly—the pages are fragile—there. Nadia’s eyes widened as she smoothed out the crumpled paper she and Cole had both drawn on. Although she couldn’t yet be sure, it looked a lot like this symbol Goodwife Hale had sketched four hundred years ago. If this was what Elizabeth was trying to create—

Nadia quickly copied the symbol into her own Book of Shadows, making sure she matched every line, every angle. Beneath it she wrote the same words Goodwife Hale had written:

This sign shall mark His path.

The whole next day, Mateo could hardly pay attention in class. Part of that had to do with how people were still staring at him; more of it was the memory of waking up outside in the cold, alone, damaged from nightmares he knew would soon come back.

But as the hours wore on, as he slammed through homework right after school, his excitement grew. Nadia felt so sure about this spell of forgetting. Mateo knew firsthand just how powerful that spell could be. Yeah, it seemed almost too simple—but sometimes the most complicated problems had simple solutions. In fact, the simple ones were often the hardest to see.

If they could take Elizabeth out, lift this curse, protect everyone, make sure Nadia would be free from her corrosive influence forever—

And then what? Elizabeth would still be alive. She wouldn’t have her powers anymore; she might not even remember being a witch. What if she just turned into an ordinary girl?

Could he stop hating her? Could he even . . . help her?

His entire mind recoiled from it. Elizabeth had murdered his mother. He could never forgive her, not for that.

They all met out by Davis Bridge just after dark. The wind was even sharper than usual, and Mateo shivered in his jacket.

“Guys—” Nadia stood there, gaping at the warped wood planks and battered metal frame that was, or had been, Davis Bridge. In several places, he could see through the wood to the churning water of the sound beneath. “You said this was a bridge. Not . . . an ex-bridge.”

Verlaine shrugged, apparently comfortable in her leopard-print coat. “Over the water, you said. Over the water, we provided. Besides, yeah, it looks scary as all get-out, but it’s stood for more than a century. What are the chances it’s going to plunge into the ocean tonight?”

The wind blew harder, and the entire bridge shuddered in the gale. For a few long seconds all three of them stared at the bridge. Finally Mateo said, “Maybe we should get a boat after all?”

“No.” Nadia squared her shoulders. For someone so little, she could look fierce when she made up her mind; Mateo loved that look. “We’re here. This is the time. Let’s try it.”

Verlaine was the one who suggested they should spread out, so the bridge didn’t have to support the weight of all three of them in any one spot. Although Mateo wondered for a moment whether Verlaine needed to be out there at all since she wasn’t a Steadfast, that hardly even took shape as a conscious thought within his mind. Nadia was going to do something dangerous; they were going to be by her side. That was all there was to it.

He drew Nadia close and gave her a quick kiss. When she smiled up at him, he whispered, “For luck.”

He went first, inching out along one of the steel beams that seemed less crooked than the others. The last light of day clung to the edges of the clouds on the western horizon; otherwise inky blue had claimed both sky and sea. Mateo glanced down to see the whitecapped waves beneath him, then decided not to look at them again. Nadia came next, walking more confidently on the battered old boards than Mateo thought was wise—but she didn’t fall through, didn’t even stumble. Verlaine took up the rear, barely edging out onto the bridge. But she was far enough for Nadia to reach in a few steps. If any one of them ran into trouble—or, God forbid, the bridge started to collapse—they could form a human chain to keep them all safe.