Steadfast (13 page)

Even as she looked down at it, she felt a strange fogginess descend upon her thoughts—as though she were sleepy, or dizzy, or—

Instantly she called upon a spell of repulsion. The fog dissipated in an instant, and Elizabeth gaped in shock at Nadia’s audacity. That child had thought to undo her with one of the most basic spells . . . and had she not been warned, it could even have worked. The memories Nadia had selected must have been strong; no doubt she was on a bridge or in a boat, using the fluidity of the water to strengthen her magic further. It really could have worked, which enraged Elizabeth.

And yet she was reminded: Simplicity was sometimes the best weapon.

So Elizabeth cradled her Book of Shadows in her arms as she rose to her feet again and cast another very simple spell: a spell to move water.

“Did it work?” Verlaine cried.

“I’m not sure,” Nadia said. The wind was so sharp she felt as though it were trying to carve her flesh from her bones. Yet still she didn’t budge. It seemed to her as though she ought to feel some change in this town, some sign that Elizabeth had been affected.

Then she felt the bridge rock beneath her feet. She staggered to one side and heard Verlaine cry out.

“Nadia?” Mateo called. The bridge swayed again, as though it were a horse trying to buck them off. “The waves are higher—it’s like the tide’s trying to come in all at once!”

It didn’t work,
Nadia realized.
Elizabeth knows. She’s doing this.

And the bridge collapsed.

11

NADIA DIDN’T SO MUCH FALL OFF THE BRIDGE AS FALL
through it. Wood splintered around her, metal scraped her skin, and then ice-cold water splashed over her, surrounded her, dragged her down.

Despite her terror, Nadia stayed focused; she’d been a lifeguard once, and she was a strong enough swimmer to propel herself even through this mess. When she broke the surface, though, jagged metal stuck up in all directions, and broken boards littered the water. “Mateo!” she screamed. “Verlaine!”

Then she saw a flash of silver white—Verlaine’s wet hair, slicked down her head and back like a veil, as Verlaine pulled herself onto dry ground. The spell she’d cast had left a powerful magical resonance—that and whatever Elizabeth had cast—because for one moment, when Nadia looked at Verlaine, she saw her.

Really saw her. For one split second, Nadia looked at Verlaine without dark magic in the way and knew just how much she loved her friend, how good Verlaine had been to fight with her all this time.

“Verlaine—” she whispered, overcome by such overwhelming emotion that it outweighed everything else . . . until she heard Mateo splashing behind her.

Nadia turned back and saw him struggling in the water; it looked like his clothes were caught on something, keeping him from getting to safety. She swam to him, ignoring the boards that scraped her flesh, until they were side by side. Together they were able to tug him free and make it to shore.

All three of them ran, teeth chattering, back to Verlaine’s car. She turned on the heater, which was some help, but for a few long seconds they just sat there trying to thaw out enough to speak.

“We—we should go—to my place,” Mateo managed to say. “Dad’s working. You guys can—change into some of my sweatpants. Something like that.”

“Good thinking,” Verlaine said as she hugged herself tightly. “Uncle Dave and Uncle Gary wouldn’t know what to think if I came in like this. Nadia, I take it our plunge in the sound means the spell didn’t work?”

“She stopped me,” Nadia said, and it was so hard to admit it out loud, even when they all knew it already.

Mateo simply put his arm around her and said, “We knew it probably wouldn’t be that easy.”

Nadia just shrugged. She was still too upset to say anything else.

It wasn’t that Elizabeth had beaten her. Although Nadia had hoped to win, she had known all along that defeat was a strong possibility. What hurt worst was that Elizabeth had shut her down in
seconds
. The best plan Nadia had been able to come up with—for Elizabeth, it had probably been no more than an annoyance.

Lifting her face to her friends, Nadia tried to brace herself for their disappointment. But Mateo smiled at her like he knew everything in her heart and wanted to make it better for her if he could. He couldn’t, but Nadia loved that he wanted to try.

Meanwhile, Verlaine wrung water out of her long hair and sighed. “Well, this sucked.”

During his brief time in Captive’s Sound, Asa had sized up Kendall Bender as—insubstantial. Not terribly bright, not stupid, enamored of her own judgment: an entirely ordinary human being. But grief had awakened something else in her, something entirely individual.

The girl seemed to be in a daze as she wandered through the hallway, despite all the balloons and stuffed animals decorating her locker, despite all the questions about her sister. Her sandy hair wasn’t even brushed. Probably she’d come to school straight from the hospital.

Asa stood very near the now-unused chemistry lab. (The school had closed it due to potential contamination, though nobody could say what the contamination might be. Instead the class sat in study hall and watched “science documentaries,” which were mostly designed to amuse the brain-dead.) He was close enough to feel the enormous power lurking there—the wild, dark energy not far below the surface. It reminded Asa of pain. It reminded him of home.

Yet that darkness did not reach out to him, nor would it ever. The One Beneath did not speak to mere slaves.

A dog on a leash,
Verlaine had said. Maddening girl.

Let her call him what she would. After last night’s disastrous attempt on Elizabeth’s life, no doubt Verlaine, Nadia, and Mateo were licking their wounds. They were doubting themselves now. That made them vulnerable.

He’d watched long enough. Waited long enough. The time had come for Asa to begin his work.

So here we go,
Mateo thought.
Plan B.

The butler opened the door, and his eyes widened in surprise. Mateo usually avoided Cabot House, showing up once a year for inspection/birthday wishes/weird, creepy, passive aggression from Grandma/a savings bond, before getting out again as quickly as possible. This was his third visit in three months.

Mateo tried to keep a straight face. “We meet again.”

“Mrs. Cabot isn’t expecting you,” the butler said in his creaky voice. His weedy, white eyebrows seemed to be frozen in an expression halfway between surprise and disapproval.

“Just dropping by. Let her know I’m here, okay?”

He had to wait for her in a long room filled with ornate old furniture that hadn’t been used in a while. A fine layer of dust grayed and softened every line, as though the room had been draped in a veil. Mateo felt more like an intruder in a museum than a visiting grandson. That was pretty much par for the course.

All along the brocade wallpaper hung Cabot family portraits from decades and even centuries gone by. A few of them showed signs of damage from the fire that had damaged the upper stories of the house back when his mother was young. This frame showed some blackening; this picture was stained with soot. But the one that interested Mateo showed not the damage, but the person who had caused it.

There, in a Colonial-era portrait, stood members of Mateo’s family in knee breeches, full-length dresses, and powdered wigs—and next to them stood Elizabeth Pike.

Not Elizabeth as he knew her, of course. She’d spent most of the past four centuries aging backward from the old woman who’d made a deal with the One Beneath. Only now did she again look like a girl of seventeen. In this portrait Elizabeth still had gray hair, the more solid body of someone past middle age, but the painter must have been skilled, because the face remained unmistakably hers. Maybe it was the shape of her eyes; maybe it was the way she tilted her head just slightly.

No. What made Mateo so utterly sure this was Elizabeth was the expression the painter had captured in her eyes: contempt. Elizabeth thought everyone else in the world was beneath her, only fit to do her bidding.

“Mateo.” He turned to see Grandma standing in the door. She rarely stood any longer; it surprised him that she had the strength. Her ebony cane was clenched firmly in one frail hand. As always, she angled herself so that only one side of her face showed—the side without the horrible scars from the fire. “Your young lady appears to have heeded my warning.”

“Nadia and I are still together. Thanks for asking.” Mateo wasn’t going to waste any time trying to make this woman like him. Instead he simply stepped close and held up his phone. “Listen, I need to know if you’ve ever seen this.”

He brought up the picture Nadia had taken of a symbol drawn on yellowing old paper—a sort of wreathed circle made up of a few dozen curving lines that crisscrossed one another. At first Mateo had thought it looked vaguely Celtic, but that wasn’t quite right. Really, it was more like a drawing by this guy they’d studied in art history, M.C. Escher. Lines you thought led somewhere didn’t; angles that shouldn’t have existed did.

“That?” Apparently startled out of her usual gloom, Grandma nodded. “I’ve seen that design before.”

Usually Mateo hated that his grandmother lived in the past, that he was buried under so much horrible family history, it felt like it could crush him. But her obsession had finally paid off. “Where?”

“It’s an old knife—part of the family silver, though it resembles no serving piece I’ve ever seen. But I recall the symbol well. I thought it was some Cabot family crest, fallen out of use.”

“Any chance I could have that knife?”

Immediately she turned to frost again. “If you’re looking for items to hock, I’m sure there’s something more valuable in the house.”

“I’m not pawning anything, okay? You can have it back soon.” In theory, anyway: Nadia might have to use it for some spell that would turn it to ash or God only knew what. He’d deal with that if and when it happened. “My friends and I want to look at it. That’s all.”

“I’m not sure you should be trusted with a knife.”

“Come on. I work in a restaurant. Nothing but knives. So if I were looking for weapons, this is the last place I’d come. Right?” On second thought, Mateo wasn’t sure that was the ideal argument for him to make—but Grandma seemed to be considering it.

She didn’t know the whole truth about Captive’s Sound. Mateo was pretty sure she had no clue that witchcraft even existed. Still, she believed in the family curse—which was enough for her to know that the supernatural was very, very real. Slowly she shook her head no, then called for the butler to find the knife.

He noticed that she was leaning more heavily on her cane; her fingers trembled on the handle. Tentatively Mateo took hold of her elbow. “Hey. Do you want to sit down?”

“Don’t touch me,” she snapped.

“Okay, then.” He stuffed his hands back into the pockets of his letter jacket, took a couple of steps back.

When Grandma spoke again, however, her words were soft for once. “You meant to help. I realize that. But you’re cursed, Mateo. I swore after what your grandfather did to me that I would never again be touched by that curse if I could possibly avoid it.”

Which was why she’d frozen out his mother. Why she’d only begrudgingly acknowledged Mateo’s existence once a year for his whole life.

But now that Mateo stood this close, he could see the other side of his grandmother’s face despite her attempt to keep it turned toward the shadows. The welts had never healed, not after decades. It looked as though claws had raked across her skin, twisting cheek and eyebrow and jaw into mockeries of themselves.

Elizabeth had made her suffer, too.

Quietly he said, “None of us chose this, you know.”

For one moment his grandmother looked at him—straight at him, not trying to hide her damage—and he saw just how lonely she was. They both suffered the same isolation because of the curse; they both mourned his mother, and hated being set apart from the world. Was that only pity in her eyes, or did she maybe, finally understand him a little?

But Grandma sniffed. “I chose this when I was fool enough to marry your grandfather and bear him a child. I won’t choose it again.”

When she pulled farther back, Mateo let her go.

The butler reappeared with something large and flat wrapped in a sueded cloth; the heft of it surprised Mateo as he took it. When he flipped back one corner of the fabric, he saw a long, silver knife—more like a dagger—almost black with tarnish. Although the pattern was almost hidden in the blackness, he could tell it was the same. “This is great. Thanks for loaning it to me.”

“There is no need to return it in person,” Grandma said. “If you must come here, try to send advance word.”

She still feared him. Mateo shrugged it off as best he could, heading for the door. “Right. Got it. By the way, make that guy polish the silver sometime. What else does he do all day?”

Now that Cole had been pacified with what had to be his nine thousandth viewing of
Lilo & Stitch
, Nadia had a chance to unwind.

Well. If extreme moping could be considered unwinding.

Mateo and Verlaine had been so positive and encouraging, but Nadia’s heart still stung from last night’s failure. She still thought the idea had been a good one, in theory—but Elizabeth had charms and protections Nadia could only guess at.

What if she’s just too strong? What if there’s no way for me to take her on? Is it like—like when Cole tells Dad he wants to wrestle? Dad makes a good game of it and they roll around on the floor, but it’s not like he can’t pin Cole in an instant as soon as he’s ready.

Maybe that’s all Elizabeth is doing. Toying with me.

Then a rap on the window startled Nadia from her reverie. She sat upright, brightening as she thought that Mateo must have come to see her. But why hadn’t he come to the front door? Maybe he thought sneaking into her bedroom was romantic. If so, he was right.

Nadia rose and slid open her window—and realized it wasn’t Mateo who’d come to visit.