Steadfast

by Claudia Gray

  “You let yourself be diverted by human cares,” she said, kicking shards of the broken glass in his direction.

  He didn’t flinch. “If you didn’t want any distractions, maybe you shouldn’t have sheathed me in someone who has homework.”

  “Don’t let your human body deceive you into thinking that this world is anything more than a shell.” Elizabeth went to one of the few pieces of furniture she still used, a chest of drawers so dilapidated that it leaned to one side and creaked as she pulled it open. “A shell we have already cracked.”

  “I can’t help noticing that Nadia Caldani isn’t with you.” Asa smirked at her. Insolent beast.

  “She will be.” Elizabeth’s fingers touched the thing she sought—a piece of human bone so old that it felt powdery in her hand. “Have you watched them as I bid you? Or are you too preoccupied?”

  “I have watched. Their vulnerabilities are obvious, their schedules predictable. I know the vehicles they travel in, the comings and goings of their families, what they order at Burger King, so on, so forth. Which of them will you turn me toward first?”

  “All three.”

  “Ambitious. You’re not giving Nadia another chance?”

  “I don’t want you to destroy them. I want you to sow discontent.” Elizabeth closed her fist tightly around the bone; motes of dust escaped between the cracks of her fingers. “She resists because she believes herself supported. Beloved. Take that away, and she’ll be able to see reason.”

  “Tear her friends apart. Understood.” Asa grinned. This was the kind of task demons were best at.

  The quartz ring on her finger felt warmer against her skin as she called up ingredients for her spell:

  Death in ice.

  Hatred forever hidden.

  A child never born.

  Old memories sliced through her, so familiar that she could bear them without flinching.

  “Please,” the young man whispered. He was lost in the woods, a blizzard freezing the world around them, while Elizabeth stood and watched him from within a protective fire. “Please help me.” He had no more strength to speak after that, could only lie there as his skin turned blue and the tears in his eyes froze.

  “You will not raise your voice to me,” her husband growled, lifting his arm in a way that meant only a threat, not a blow. Elizabeth wanted to use her spells to strike him down, but no man could ever see magic, could ever know that it existed, and so she meekly nodded and gave him a smile, that he might believe himself loved.

  “Why won’t it come?” The girl writhed in her childbed, trusting Goodwife Pike to help her. There were tisanes of certain roots that might have brought the baby, certain spells that would have done more, but Elizabeth knew she would need this memory someday, and so she merely mopped the girl’s brow and waited for the hours and pain to bear her down to death.

  Elizabeth turned her hand upside down and opened her fingers. The bone dust remained suspended, a small, swirling cloud. She stepped back and let it rise until it steadied at eye level.

  Asa looked bewildered, as well he might; this magic was obscure even for her. “What is that?”

  “Something for Nadia Caldani,” Elizabeth said.

  “Another warning?”

  “Indirectly. Call it a sign of things to come.”

  Mateo was dreaming.

  He knew when he was in one of the visions by now. But that didn’t make them any less immediate, less real—or less frightening.

  The waves churned beneath the boat, twisting his gut with nausea. Overhead lightning split the sky. Mateo hung on to the sides of the boat and screamed, “Nadia!”

  She didn’t hear. He could see her in the distance, a dark, small shape almost lost in the whirling gray clouds and water. Her hair whipped and snapped in the wind, like a scarf of silk streaming behind her.

  He had to get to her somehow. He had to get to her in time.

  In time for what?

  The boat suddenly rocked as though it had struck a shoal, but when Mateo turned he saw Gage sitting next to him. Gage’s dreadlocks didn’t blow in the breeze; his expression was stoic. It was as though nothing happening around them had the power to move him.

  They were going too fast now. Their boat was slicing through the water at a speed so great it seemed to steal Mateo’s breath away. Nadia was coming closer, closer—but soon he would race by her and she wouldn’t even see him—

  “Drop anchor!” Mateo shouted to Gage. “Drop anchor now!”

  Gage lifted the heavy metal anchor, raised it high, then smashed it down toward Mateo’s head—

  Mateo woke with a start. In that first moment, he could only think, Vision.

  But it still felt very real. Too real. Like, for instance, the flat, hard surface beneath his back—and, when he opened his eyes, the night sky above.

  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 Verla
ine, 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.”

  Nothing to lose. Those words kept ringing inside her mind, taunting her, as Asa strolled away.

  Verlaine tried to distract herself and take part in journalism class, but that went about as well as it usually did. “So, we should try to find out what Mrs. Purdhy and Riley have in common. Did Riley come to see her, maybe? You know, talk to an old teacher? This could be some disease she brought home from Brown. And we ought to see if there have been any reports of illnesses there that involve weird black . . . stuff.”

  It was like she was sitting in a bell jar, none of her words escaping. Desi Sheremata, who had inexplicably been named editor despite hardly caring about the Lightning Rod site, pulled up a sample home page that was all old photos of Riley Bender from previous years’ annuals. The headline, centered over a picture of Riley in her homecoming crown, said Our Prayers Are With Her. “I was thinking we could have a text box where people write in their good wishes for Riley, you know?”

  Everyone else nodded and smiled, like that was a really great plan instead of not journalism at all. Mr. Davis only said, “We’ll want to moderate comments. Even with a tragedy, people will troll.”

  Especially with a tragedy. People seemed to get uglier in response to real emotions, at least in Verlaine’s experience. Because nobody ever much noticed when she was hurting unless they wanted to make it worse for her.

  Nothing to lose.

  Verlaine raised her hand. “What about the investigative piece on the Halloween carnival? We’re still running it, right?”

  “Nobody actually got hurt,” Desi huffed. “So it’s kind of old news.”

  “It wasn’t even two weeks ago!” Okay, nobody else here knew it had actually been the work of one of hell’s minions, aka Elizabeth Pike, but still, a huge fire in the middle of town had to count as newsworthy if anything did.

  Desi folded her arms. “I think you’re more interested in a byline than in what happens to Riley Bender.”

  This was pretty massively unfair, given that Verlaine was one of the only people trying to deal with the person actually responsible for hurting Riley—but she couldn’t say that. Even if she did, nobody would listen. Instead she scrunched down in her desk and folded her arms in front of her chest. A few people snickered, but then Mr. Davis got them all talking about which pictures of Riley would be best for the montage.

  So much for asking whether they were even going to try to cover the not-quite-an-ax-massacre at town hall. Only in this room did attempted murder not count as news.

  A byline? They thought she only cared about a byline? As if anybody would have paid attention to her regardless. Verlaine only wanted people to start thinking about how weird Captive’s Sound actually was, to recognize that all these events were part of a larger, scarier pattern. But Elizabeth’s magic wouldn’t let them see that.

  Just like Elizabeth’s magic wouldn’t let them see Verlaine for herself.

  Nobody pays any attention to anything I do, no matter how hard I try, no matter how good it is. Even my best friends hardly notice me—and I know they don’t mean it, but it doesn’t matter, because the magic works on them, too. I might as well not even talk. Or show up.

  Or exist.

  That was usually the point where Verlaine reined herself in. Where she told herself that everything could change, that someday she’d go off to college and people would be nicer. Thinking about college and the better life she could create for herself there was the only way she made it through Rodman High.

  But now she knew—it wasn’t true.

  Nothing was going to change in college. Nothing was going to change, ever. The magic Elizabeth had worked, the magic that prevented anyone from caring about Verlaine—that was permanent. It would last forever.

  No one would ever, ever care about her any more than they did right now, today. She was going to spend the rest of her life on the outside looking in. This horrible, clawing loneliness inside her, the thing she battled every single day . . .

  The loneliness was going to win.

  Verlaine drew her knees up in her chair and huddled into a ball, right there at her desk, because otherwise she would break down and cry.

  Nobody noticed. And she knew nobody would have noticed if she’d cried, either.

  Nadia used one of Cole’s purple markers to try to draw the shape again. Last night she’d made notes, but they weren’t quite right. Were the lines on Elizabeth’s shoulders a little more—curved, maybe?

  “This tea tastes a little funny.” Her dad squinted down at the cup she’d made for him. “Are you sure this is the same stuff?”

  “Absolutely,” she said. Just with a special ingredient added.

  She put down the marker and touched the pearl charm on her bracelet. Betrayer’s Snare was another spell she’d never cast before; it could only be used in certain situations, and she wasn’t sure whether the seduction Elizabeth was attempting was even one of them. Tonight was her first chance to cast it—you needed the moon at three-quarters to be sure the spell would take root.

  Hopefully, as of tomorrow night, Elizabeth wouldn’t be an issue any longer. But Betrayer’s Snare couldn’t hurt Dad, and Nadia didn’t want to take any chances.

  An unkindness returned.

  An unwanted message received.

  A danger unseen until too late.

  Nadia kept her eyes on her father as she pulled up the memories:

  Toddler Cole pulling her hair one time too often, shouting at him that he was a little brat, and watching his face crumple.

  Mom saying “It’s better this way” as she wa
lked 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.