Steadfast

“A child born with the blood of two witches is—special.”

“You mean, I’m more powerful?”

Nadia’s fragile hopes faded with the shake of her mother’s head. “No. You’re immensely powerful, Nadia. You have so much potential—but my mistake makes you better suited for a specific kind of magic.”

“What is that?”

“Dark magic.” Horribly Mom smiled, as if she could say that and only think of it as a bad joke. “Witches like you are the perfect servants of the One Beneath. His evil fits into your witchcraft like—like a key in a lock. No wonder He’s using this Sorceress to tempt you, Nadia. Almost no children are born of two witching bloodlines, and they haven’t been for centuries. He’s been waiting for a servant like you for a very long time.”

She wanted to tell her mother she was wrong, and yet Nadia knew instinctively, bone-deep, that this was the truth.

Quickly she turned from her mother and walked to the lone window in this long, thin, cramped room. She blinked against the thin, watery sunshine, stifling her tears. Elizabeth’s desperate efforts to persuade her—the way Nadia’s power had developed when she moved to Captive’s Sound, where the One Beneath was at His strongest—even Asa’s smug evasions of her questions, the ones that would have led her to understand this: All of it added up.

Nadia had been made to do evil. To be evil.

Did that mean she was doomed to follow in Elizabeth’s footsteps, no matter what? No. Nadia refused to believe that her fate was already determined, out of her hands.

“Were you ever going to tell me about this?” She kept her voice from shaking somehow. “Or is that one more thing you decided I didn’t need to know?”

“I did what I had to do.”

Nadia turned to glance at her mother over her shoulder. “You had to abandon us? You had to leave Dad, never even see me and Cole again?”

“I had to keep you safe.” Mom’s expression had become—lost, somehow. Her eyes stared past Nadia, through her, trying to see something that wasn’t there any longer. “That was the most important thing to me then. I know that much.”

“. . . What do you mean?”

“The One Beneath doesn’t always give His servants a choice.”

A chill swept over Nadia as she remembered Asa. Once upon a time, he’d been human, like her; he’d been turned into a demon against his will, so that he might be the One Beneath’s slave. She’d despised him for that, knowing that little good remained in demons after their transformation . . . but that had been before she’d realized the exact same thing could happen to her.

Mom kept talking. “I knew He’d find a way to tempt you one day. But I could keep Him from controlling you. From forcing you to serve Him.”

“Mom? What did you do?”

“I cast the only spell that could protect you. A spell of sacrifice.”

Her mother had tried to protect her? The same one who had left without a backward glance? Nadia didn’t want to believe it. Believing that could even be possible—it would rip off the bandages on her wounds, leave her bleeding and in agony about Mom’s abandonment all over again. She whispered, “I don’t know that spell.”

“It’s very advanced magic. Rare. The sort of thing a witch hopes never to cast once in her lifetime. Sacrifices have their own power, and only become stronger when mixed with magic. A spell of sacrifice will protect someone from being enslaved by the One Beneath, always and forever. But in order to cast it, a witch must give up the most important thing in her life.”

Nadia whispered, “You mean . . . us?”

“I mean my love for you, for all of you. My very ability to love. That was the only sacrifice powerful enough to keep you safe. All the love I’d ever felt or could ever feel—I tore it out of my heart and laid it down.”

Memories of those last few weeks they’d lived together as a family came flooding back. Mom had stopped smiling. Stopped laughing. She’d forgotten to sing bedtime songs to Cole, to come shopping with Nadia for a prom dress, even to kiss Dad hello when he came in through the door. Nadia had always known that was the beginning of the end—the moment when Mom’s love ran out. She had never imagined that Mom had actually given that love away.

For her.

“I thought—afterward—I’d be able to go on like I had before,” Mom said, forehead furrowed in concentration. “I’d just do everything I used to do, and none of you would ever have to know that my heart wasn’t in it any longer. But you did know, all of you. You knew it right away.”

“Not this—”

“No, not about the spell, but you knew I didn’t love you. The way you all looked at me with those wounded eyes—I couldn’t stand it. And you have no idea how irritating it is to live with people you don’t love in the slightest. Like a college roommate, but worse.” Mom laughed at her little joke; Nadia didn’t.

Mom didn’t even seem to realize that would hurt.

“That’s why you left?” Nadia managed to say.

“More or less. I’d been emptied out. I was of no more use to you, and I thought it would at least be easier to live somewhere else.” Her mother shrugged, like it was no big deal. “I didn’t realize all the repercussions then.”

“You mean, how it would affect Cole.” Her little brother was the easiest one to talk about, the one most obviously betrayed.