Spellcaster

by Claudia Gray

  “Whoa.” Verlaine’s face lit up, which told Nadia she wasn’t explaining this well enough. “That’s fantastic. Beyond fantastic. Do you have, like, dozens of Steadfasts?”

  “What? No. Never. You can only have one, and it’s a serious thing. A sacred thing. A witch and a Steadfast are truly bound together in the most profound way. Lots of times, it’s a witch’s sister who doesn’t have the gift, or a daughter. Someone who’s always going to be there, no matter what.”

  This was crazy, taking a chance like this with someone she’d known only a couple of days. Of course, it wasn’t much of a chance. Some witches cast prophetic spells dozens of times with their closest friends, hoping to be bound as Steadfasts, without it ever occurring.

  But Mom had always said, You never know. When you open yourself to prophetic magic, you open yourself to the primal forces of the universe. It’s unpredictable, and it’s dangerous, and your soul reaches out, like casting anchor in a stormy harbor—

  Nadia didn’t need an anchor, though. She didn’t need Verlaine, didn’t need anyone. Well, Dad and Cole—but really that was more like they needed her.

  “What does that mean, enhance your powers?” Verlaine grabbed another couple of chocolate bars.

  “It means if I cast a spell when my Steadfast is nearby, that spell will be stronger. More effective. It will last longer. That person’s presence might make it possible for me to cast spells that might otherwise be beyond me at this point. I’d probably advance faster, too, if we spent enough time together.” Nadia took a deep breath. “So for me, it’s all positive. For the Steadfast, it’s not. Steadfasts can see magic in ways I can’t—in ways no one else can. Apparently that can be, well, disturbing.” Nadia sighed. “It’s probably not going to happen with you. Seriously. We just met.”

  “You never know. I have really crappy luck, so if this is actually dangerous and bad, I bet I get it on the first try.” Although Verlaine had been joking, Nadia could see her expression shift as she considered the possibilities more seriously. “How long does it last? Being a Steadfast.”

  “Until the witch and her Steadfast end it, or die. So hopefully a really long time. And the bond’s strongest when it’s newest; it would be really hard to break in less than a couple of years.” It might be hard even after ten. Or more. This was one of those things Mom hadn’t reviewed in full.

  The one part about a Steadfast that Mom had stressed most was that person should matter to you. Deeply. The power a Steadfast gave to a witch was in direct proportion to the capacity for love and loyalty between them. It was a bond more profound than any other, as enduring as that between parents and children—

  —so, maybe not that profound, then.

  “It’s not going to happen for us,” Nadia said, trying to push aside the swell of anger within her. “So forget it. Never mind. Don’t be freaked.”

  Verlaine had evidently gone from being excited at the possibility to relieved that it was unlikely. “Okay, I get it, you were just—giving me the ‘in case of emergency’ speech. Like on a plane. They always tell you where the life jackets are, and show you how to calmly put on the oxygen masks—like if those masks fell out of the plane ceiling you wouldn’t all be screaming bloody murder.”

  Nadia had to laugh. “Yeah, pretty much.” She pointed with her whole hand, flat like a blade, the way stewardesses did. “That way is the emergency exit.”

  “Got it. Okay, so—show me what you’ve got.”

  Nothing for it now but to start the spell.

  She took down her Book of Shadows, because she still needed the instructions for a prophetic spell. It probably looked pretty impressive as she scattered a circle of whitish-gray powder on the floor. Even better would be the cleansing flame, which was violet and hovered slightly above the powder, glowing brilliantly.

  “What is that?” Verlaine whispered.

  “A cleansing flame.”

  “What’s it cleansing?”

  “The air. Also the bone.”

  “Bone?”

  Nadia pointed at the powder on the floor. “You can buy it in some fertilizer stores.”

  “Ew. Um, no offense.”

  “None taken. There’s a lot of grossness in witchcraft.”

  The cleansing flame began to do its work; the bone powder looked precisely the same, but the light in the room seemed to disappear. Really, it was all being drawn into the one violet flame, which grew larger, brighter, tongued with more forks of fire. It was a blaze now, illuminating them both. Nadia took her seat on the floor across from Verlaine, who obviously realized the moment was near.

  “We’re about ready,” she said. “Spellcasting is silent, usually. You can speak spells aloud if you really need to keep yourself together, but mostly it works better when the focus turns inward. So I’m going to go through it without speaking. Okay?”

  “Okay.” Verlaine hesitated. “If I do turn into your Steadfast, how will I know?”

  “You won’t be my Steadfast. I’m, like, ninety-nine percent positive.”

  “Yeah, but just in case of a water landing, tell me where to find my life jacket.”

  Nadia grinned despite herself. “There would be a—flare. A surge in the flame. And you’d start to feel it not long afterward.”

  “Got it.” Verlaine straightened herself, clearly ready. Nadia hoped she was, too.

  Looking straight into Verlaine’s hazel eyes, her fingers closing around the pure silver dangle on her bracelet, Nadia began to go through the ingredients of the fortune-telling spell:

  The sight of something wondrous, never before seen.

  The breaking of a bond that should never have been broken.

  Cold beyond desolation.

  Loyalty beyond life.

  These were mostly very powerful ingredients; only at this point in her life, she realized, would she have had any chance of casting this. Nadia pulled the memories together and thought them, felt them, as deeply as she possibly could:

  The first time she’d seen Cole—when he was still in Mom’s belly, the one time her parents let her come to the sonogram, and suddenly all the boring talk about this baby brother she didn’t really want turned into something real, someone real, her actual true brother practically waving to her before he was even born.

  Mom standing at the door, a suitcase next to her, saying, “It’s better this way,” and the horrible sight of her father unable to speak for his tears.

  Chicago that year they’d had the “thundersnow,” when the winds had been hurricane-strength and two feet of snow had fallen amid bolts of lightning, and she’d opened the door to the balcony just to feel the storm’s fury, and the wind had nearly torn her away—

  Dad on the night of the wreck, crawling through twisted metal and broken glass to grab Cole, never hesitating even though his own ribs were cracked and he had to be in incredible pain—

  The magic turned over inside her. Rippled around her. Nadia drew a line in the remaining bone dust and envisioned Captive’s Sound—every street she’d seen, every moment she’d spent here—recreating the place as best she could within her mind and demanding that fate show her what was in store.

  Her eyes widened as the bone dust blackened, began to radiate an unearthly heat that seared her outstretched hand—

  The attic door opened. “Nadia?”

  Startled, Nadia turned to see Mateo poking his head up into her attic.

  The violet flame flared—and vanished. Instantly the room’s light looked normal; the magic she’d felt had gone … someplace. The bone dust was just so much black gunk on the ground. Verlaine jerked back, clearly not sure what to do.

  Mateo frowned. “Whoa. What was that?”

  “What was what?” Nadia answered, too quickly. She tucked her hair behind one ear, glanced back at the pile of bone dust on the floor, and adjusted herself so maybe he wouldn’t see it. Did it look like she was acting weird? Probably.

  “Sorry to barge in; your dad said it was okay.” But Mateo’s atten
tion remained on what he’d seen. “I meant, what was that—purple light, and all the sparks?”

  Verlaine was doing a much better job of acting natural. “What purple light?”

  He paused, then shrugged. “Guess it was something about—you know, it’s dark in the hallway and then you come up here—”

  “Like how you see red after a camera flash,” Nadia agreed. “Definitely. Happens to me all the time. By the way—what are you doing here?”

  Did that sound unfriendly? She hoped not. But it was a pretty good question.

  “Does this look familiar?” Mateo held up a cell phone identical to hers—wait.

  “I never took it out of my backpack!” Nadia protested, going to pick up her pack to prove her point. That was when she discovered a brand-new hole in the side pocket. “Oh, great. Wow. I’m glad it fell out at La Catrina instead of on the side of the road or something.” Blushing—in embarrassment, in the shock of near-discovery, because Mateo was near, for a dozen reasons—Nadia gave him a sidelong glance. “Thanks.”

  He smiled, but awkwardly. “So. I should get going. It’s late. I told my dad I’d be back to help close up. But we should, um, talk sometime. Yeah. Right?” Mateo sounded so awkward, and yet nothing like the guys at school who had no idea how to ask a girl out. There was something else behind his hesitation, something heavier. Nadia could sense the barriers he put between himself and the world, and how hard it was for him to reach past them. And there was something about his eyes—something lost, something hunted.

  Something she wouldn’t understand tonight. So maybe she should stop staring at the guy.

  “Definitely. We’ll talk. See you around,” Nadia said.

  And then Mateo was gone, back down the attic ladder, the door shutting atop him.

  Verlaine said, “Do the two of you usually affect each other like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “You know—big Bambi eyes, all bashful, kind of gooey—”

  “I wasn’t gooey,” Nadia protested as she took her seat next to Verlaine again. “Wait. Did you think Mateo was, um, gooey?”

  “We’ll figure it out later,” Verlaine said impatiently. “The flame definitely flared. Completely. You saw it, right? Am I your Steadfast now?”

  “I—don’t know. I doubt it.” But Verlaine was right; Nadia had seen the flare for herself.

  “Wouldn’t I feel it? I don’t feel any different.”

  Nadia shrugged. “We’ll have to check to make sure.”

  Something quick and simple would be best: Reigniting the cleansing flame, maybe? Nadia pinched a bit of the bone dust between her fingers; it was still warm. Bone had a slight oiliness to it that set it apart from sand or ash, a reminder that it had once been alive.

  If Verlaine were her Steadfast, even brand-new, then the flame would flare up instantly, and brighter than ever before. Nadia snapped her fingers, feeling the bone crumble and spark between them—

  —but a spark was all she got.

  “It didn’t take,” Nadia said. “We’ll have to try again.”

  Verlaine shook her head, suddenly panicked. “What if it took, but it’s Mateo Perez instead?”

  “Impossible.”

  “What are you talking about? He came in just when the flame went foomp and flared up. He could be your Steadfast now!”

  Nadia shook her head. “Couldn’t happen. No man can ever be a Steadfast, no more than a man can be a witch. They’re magic-blind, all of them.”

  “All of them?” Verlaine didn’t look convinced. “You can’t be sure.”

  “I can be absolutely sure, and so can you. It’s one of the absolute truths of witchcraft. It’s been true as long as there have been witches, so about as long as there’s been human history. No men. Not one. Not ever. Some people say it’s because a witch went evil and cursed them all way back at the start of civilization, but that would have been one badass curse. There’s all kinds of theories. But the old books all say ‘no man conceived of woman’ can ever know or use magic. And it’s true.”

  Verlaine frowned. “Isn’t that sexist? You know, reverse sexism?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t care. We have bigger problems, okay?” Nadia kept staring down at the black, oily smears on her fingertips. “The spell.”

  “Oh, right. Yeah! You told the fortune of Captive’s Sound, and … that is not a good expression on your face.”

  Slowly Nadia shook her head.

  “I would call that a bad expression. Very bad.” Verlaine began twisting the ends of her long, silvery hair between her fingers, her nails tugging at a small tangle there. “But—you didn’t see much. You couldn’t. It just turned black, that’s all.”

  “It turned black,” Nadia said. “Nothing more. That means there’s only one thing waiting in this town’s future.”

  Verlaine’s eyes were wide. “Which is not good.”

  “Which is destruction. Complete and total.” Nadia stared down at the black oily soot on her hand, which was about as much as would be left of Captive’s Sound in the end. “I don’t know when it’s coming. And I don’t know why. But it’s coming.”

  Anxious to be done with his work for the night, Mateo tied off a bag of garbage in the back room at La Catrina and stepped out into the alley.

  His eyes widened, and the garbage bag slipped from his fingers, landing on the pavement with a wet crunch.

  Mateo couldn’t pay any attention to that, or to anything else besides the fact that the world had apparently gone mad.

  7

  MATEO STARED AT SOMETHING NOT OF THIS EARTH.

  Precisely what it was he couldn’t have said. The first word that popped into his stunned mind was ox, and the second was wolf, and yet it seemed to be a man, too. As it crouched over the dank asphalt of the alleyway, it lifted its heavy, horned head; eyes that burned with white flame stared at Mateo—through him—and he felt a chill so deep that he thought he might actually freeze. Its fur bristled; even though it stood in shadows, Mateo could see that much.

  Before he could say or do anything else, though, the thing—disappeared. Which was the only way he could describe how it went from being solid to transparent to just not there.

  Within five seconds Mateo was as alone in the alley as he’d ever been, with no other sound but a can skittering along the pavement in the nighttime breeze. The harsh glare of the streetlamp nearby cast its usual stark shadows. He hadn’t thought to check whether the horned thing had a shadow or not.

  Mateo went back inside La Catrina, shut the back door, and leaned against it.

  I’m not insane. I’m not. Easy to say. Hard to believe, given that he had just seen a monster, which had then vanished in a way he associated more with science-fiction movies than real life.

  But whatever he’d just seen—it didn’t feel like one of his dreams. He was awake. Aware. That hadn’t been a vision of the future, or even a nightmare. It had been very solid. Very near.

  Except for the part where it vanished, he told himself. Come on. That couldn’t have been real.

  Quickly he turned back to his final tasks at La Catrina for the night. If he concentrated on his chores, then he wouldn’t have to think about what he’d seen. Or not seen. Maybe he could even forget about it.

  Side work finally done, Mateo folded his black apron and hurried back out to his motorcycle. Right now all he wanted to do was get home. He didn’t see the horned thing again; at first he thought whatever weird thing had happened to his brain had ended.

  But things weren’t back to normal.

  Something about Captive’s Sound had … changed.

  When he looked upward, it was as if there were a film between him and the stars overhead—like a grimy window between the town and the sky. And it was as if there were a deep, dark line in the ground, curving along the street as far as he could see in either direction. A fault line, he wanted to call it, except that it was visible and invisible at the same time. Mateo stretched one foot toward it, a kind of exper
iment, but the road felt perfectly smooth underneath. Yet there was this odd sensation, almost like vibration, that came up from it.

  A stray cat nearby hissed at him and darted away. Mateo often put milk or leftover scraps of the fish tacos out at the end of the day; the strays knew him, sometimes curling about his legs so fondly that he had to shoo them off before he could straddle his motorcycle. Did even the cats see that something was wrong with him?

  Is this what it’s like? Going insane?

  Mateo put on his helmet, got on the bike, and revved the motor. He needed to get home. Once he was home, he’d feel better. He had to.

  The ride was even weirder, though. The farther he drove through Captive’s Sound, the worse it seemed. Those strange lines in the roads—they were everywhere, and he had to remind himself to focus on traffic instead of the ground to keep himself from having a wreck. And some of the houses had a strange, watery light around them, as if they were melting. It was like being in a Van Gogh painting: colors too bright, perspective skewed, and the sense that everything was being broken down into pieces.

  Except Mateo had liked Van Gogh when he took art history. Van Gogh was beautiful. Captive’s Sound was grotesque.

  This started at Nadia’s house. Once again Mateo thought of what he’d seen when he looked into the attic—like a flash, a purple flash of light surrounded by all those dark red sparks—and then there had been that incredible shiver when his eyes met Nadia’s. But the shiver … well, that was just Nadia’s dark eyes. The light, though—

  Seriously, what do you think purple light had to do with this? Why would that make you feel so weird? Either you’re going crazy or you’re coming down with the flu. Or you’re going crazy and coming down with the flu for extra fun.

  Somehow he got home, pulling up to his house right as he thought he couldn’t take it anymore. The ocean roared even louder in his ears—or was that his own blood rushing through? His heart was beating fast, his skin sweaty, all of it adrenaline overload.