by Claudia Gray
The memories drawn upon for dark magic were never pleasant ones. Nadia closed her eyes, felt the ripple of magic around her as Elizabeth began, and summoned up her own version of the spell to combine with Elizabeth’s.
Verlaine crying in the front seat of her car as she talked about the magic worked on her, the magic that had stolen her ability to be loved by anyone.
Her mother saying, “It’s better this way,” before walking out the door to leave their family forever.
Standing on the small island with Elizabeth, swearing her allegiance to the One Beneath, while Mateo shouted for her to stop.
Nadia jerked her head upright, feeling a shock wave ripple through her—unlike any kind of magic she’d felt before. The sensation was uncomfortable, not painful but queasy and wrong.
“You chose poorly,” Elizabeth said with her eyes still shut.
It was true; she had. Nadia had felt betrayed when her mother walked out, but now she knew the truth behind what Mom had done and why; that had actually been Mom’s deepest sacrifice for her family. And she’d had no choice but to swear allegiance to Elizabeth, to save the lives of dozens of people.
Elizabeth couldn’t know which memories Nadia had chosen—but obviously she had felt the spell’s failure. Nadia felt embarrassed despite herself. You know you’re too much of a perfectionist when you’re upset that you weren’t good enough at being evil.
Elizabeth’s smile was thin, yet satisfied. “You need more experience with betrayal.”
Mateo had known something was up when Nadia texted him that she couldn’t come by La Catrina. He’d worked his way through his shift, his thoughts so confused that he’d delivered burritos to the table that wanted tamales—and vice versa. Eventually his dad had drawn him aside. Not for a lecture. No, worse: Dad was worried that the “seizures” were affecting his ability to concentrate.
“That’s not it. I swear. It’s Nadia. She’s upset about something, and I don’t know what, so I can’t stop wondering why.” It was a relief to be able to tell his father the truth for once.
Dad folded his arms. “Maybe I should be relieved it’s just hormones like any other guy your age. Don’t worry; you two will work it out. Talk to your girlfriend later. Now? Concentrate on what you’re doing.”
Mateo nodded and tried to concentrate on his tables. Still, he didn’t feel right.
The second he was free, though, he grabbed his phone—and it buzzed with a text from Nadia just as he picked it up. Can you come get me? It’s raining.
Mateo hadn’t even heard the rain before, not over the mariachi music playing in the front of the restaurant. Sure enough, drops were pattering against the window in the back room. Of course. Where are you?
Elizabeth’s.
A chill shivered along Mateo’s skin, but he punched his arms through the sleeves of his coat and headed out.
Elizabeth’s house glowed a sickly, feverish red on the horizon as he sped toward it on his motorcycle. His Steadfast powers showed him the magic within that house, the twining, twisted evil that clung to it like ivy. The heat of it beat at him even through the December cold, so fierce that he almost expected the rain to evaporate before it fell—like it would sizzle into steam.
Mateo had braced himself to walk up the steps or even inside to get Nadia if he had to. But even as he brought his motorcycle to a stop, she dashed out to him, holding the collar of her coat over her head. From his glove box he fished out his waterproof jacket—the one he would normally wear when riding his cycle in this kind of weather but had saved for her tonight. As Nadia wrestled it on, Mateo saw Elizabeth looking out the door at him, leaning against the jamb with a slight smile on her face.
Last month he’d tried to convince Nadia they should try to kill Elizabeth. She’d talked him out of it at the time. He still thought it wasn’t a bad idea.
Nadia spoke not a word. Not as she put on his spare helmet. Not as he sped her to her house. When he stopped, though, they got off the bike together and ran to her porch, their feet sloshing through mud puddles side by side. Only when they sat on the wood steps of her porch—him half-soaked and shivering, her in the bright orange reflective jacket, did he break the silence.
“Why didn’t you come by earlier?” he asked.
Nadia shrugged. “I was upset.” Her voice barely carried over the pattering of the rain.
“Why? I mean, why particularly. Besides the apocalypse.”
“Oh, yeah, besides that.” She had to smile then, and Mateo knew it was all right to cover her hand with his. How did she manage to look beautiful even in an orange reflective parka? “I tried to look through Goodwife Hale’s Book of Shadows and it—rejected me. Wouldn’t let me even hold it.”
“How did that happen?”
“It knows I’ve sworn myself to the One Beneath.” Nadia’s wide eyes sought his. Her hand beneath his palm was chilly, like someone who’d awakened from a bad dream. “The evil I’m working with—it’s becoming a part of me.”
No, he wanted to say. That’s not true. And yet there was a kind of dark fire about her now, a feverish quality to the light in her eyes. Maybe that was what allowed her to glow despite the darkness, to remain warm despite the cold . . .
Quit it, he told himself. She hasn’t changed. Your mind is playing tricks on you, that’s all.
“Stop it right there.” Mateo gripped her hand more tightly, rubbing his thumb back and forth along her skin. “You said it yourself. You’re working with evil right now, because you don’t have any choice, and because it’s the only way to stop Elizabeth. You know that as well as I do.”
“The Book of Shadows doesn’t know that.”
“Exactly. Because it’s a freakin’ book. It’s just—just—it’s a tool you can use, right? A tool. Nothing more than that. Right now, you’re using a different tool. You just can’t hold them both at the same time. That’s all there is to it.”
Nadia stared into the distance for a few seconds, and he studied her profile—the delicate slope of her nose, her stubborn little chin—until she said, “Do you really think so?”
“Absolutely. If working with Elizabeth is the better tool right now, then you’re doing the right thing.” He lifted her hand to his and kissed it. “You usually do.”
She turned back to him, and her smile took away all the cold, all the dark. Mateo leaned in to kiss her. The moment their lips met, his heart seemed to jump inside his chest—which was the moment a small voice crowed, “They’re kissing!”
They broke apart to see Cole up against the front window, grinning because he’d caught his big sister in the act. The thump of footsteps inside revealed that Mr. Caldani was coming to snag Cole out of the way—but that, too, kind of killed the mood.
Instead Mateo leaned his forehead against Nadia’s and murmured, “The next time you’re feeling lost, don’t avoid me. Call me.”
“And then you’ll find me,” she whispered. “You always do.”
Nearby, from a shadowed place between two trees, Elizabeth watched them. Rainwater trickled down her face, plastered her hair to her scalp and shoulders, and soaked her dress through. She didn’t pay attention to the rain, didn’t even wipe her face, as she stared at Nadia and Mateo kissing on the porch. Nadia’s mouth was open against his; Mateo’s hands ran through her thick black hair. Passion, Elizabeth thought. For her it was an abstract concept.
Once, long ago, she had been in love, but she hardly remembered it any longer. Had it made her so easily distracted? So vulnerable?
Perhaps it had. No matter.
Nadia needed to commit herself more fully to darkness. Right now she served the One Beneath by obligation; what He truly wanted was her devotion. Elizabeth intended to give Him precisely that.
The love Nadia and Mateo shared would serve as just one more weapon in her hands.
In a whisper, Elizabeth repeated the words she’d said to Nadia earlier that night: “You need more experience with betrayal.”
As the rain pattered c
omfortingly against her bedroom window, Verlaine sat on the floor, her cat curled next to her, and flipped through Goodwife Hale’s Book of Shadows. She’d been trying to outline the thing—even opened a file for it in Scrivener—but had given this up as futile about half an hour before. Now she was just scanning each page, looking for any mention of the word demon.
And there were lots.
Lists of demons filled the pages, too many for Verlaine to have any reasonable guess as to which one of these (if any) Asa might be. (At least ten of the names started with the letters A-S. Didn’t narrow it down lots.) These demons were blamed for any number of weird events: blights on crops (whatever a blight was), sick livestock, sudden turns in the weather, that kind of thing. Verlaine would have written this off as the superstition of ye olden days if she hadn’t personally known a demon—though Asa didn’t seem interested in blighting anything.
Still, there was no doubting that demons played a role in black magic, and Goodwife Hale had been very, very interested in how to stop them.
“The demon’s name has more power in hell than on earth, but even here it can be used against him,” Verlaine read in a whisper, leaning forward as she traced the scrawled handwriting. Time had faded the ink to sepia brown, and deeply yellowed the page, but she could make it out. “Mark him in the Word of God. Mark him in the words of the Craft. And Mark him in that which he himself possesses. Pierce these and the demon will perish, returning to hell forevermore.”
Mark him? Pierce these? The demon’s name?
“What is any of that supposed to mean?” she asked her cat. Smuckers blinked up at her, then stuck one leg in the air and began to lick his privates. Verlaine sighed. “Helpful and classy. Way to go, Smuckers.”
“Honey?” Uncle Dave called. “There’s a roll of slice-and-bake cookies in the fridge calling your name.”
Verlaine loved cookies as much as the next right-thinking human being, but . . . “I’ve got homework!” This ought to count as an assignment, right? Analyzing “historical documents”? Maybe she could get extra credit.
“I hear that, but you’re a seventeen-year-old girl, so if you bake cookies on a weeknight, you’re just being a normal kid. If I bake the cookies, as a supposed adult person, then I’m a pathetic slob with no self-control.”
She laughed despite herself. “Okay, hang on, I’m coming.” Cookie emergencies couldn’t be ignored. It wasn’t like she could transcribe the entire Book of Shadows tonight anyway.
But quickly Verlaine flipped open Mrs. Walsh’s spell book, because she could have sworn she’d seen something about “the demon’s true name” in there when she’d scanned it the first time. Where is it, where is it . . .
There.
With his name and with this you will conquer him. The words were written beneath a wickedly edged drawing of an ornate dagger. There was no explanation of what the dagger did, but—come on, it was a dagger. Pretty obvious what that was for.
I couldn’t hurt Asa in any case, she thought. The relief that settled over her went deeper than she’d known it would be. That is definitely a very specific kind of dagger. Not just some knife at your local Walmart. So Asa’s safe, because I don’t have a dagger like that or any idea how to find one . . .
Which was when she realized she’d seen a dagger exactly like that. It was the knife Mateo had taken from his grandmother’s house, the one with an intricate design set into the hilt.
Just like in this drawing. Exactly like it.
The tool to kill Asa was at hand, and it had been all along.
“The same knife?” Nadia said the next day in gym class, as they waited for their turn on the leg-press machine. “Are you sure?”
Verlaine gave her a look and breathed out sharply, blowing aside a lock of her silver-gray hair that had escaped from its PE bun. “What, based on my expert knowledge of demon-killing magical weapons? I don’t have any idea if it’s the same one. But—it looked like it to me. Do you still have the knife?”
Nadia nodded. Mateo had promised to return it to his grandmother eventually, but he hadn’t yet been able to face returning to her grand house on the Hill, or her unending disapproval. “It’s in the attic.”
Their eyes met, and then neither of them knew what to say.
“Laughton!” Coach Pang called. “You’re up!”
It took Verlaine a moment to follow the coach’s instructions. Nadia hugged her arms around herself as she thought about what they were doing. It was one thing to research ways to kill a demon—another to take hold of a real, literal knife and think about murdering Asa.
Verlaine seemed to feel it even more.
And when did the dagger become consecrated to white magic? A long time ago, Nadia suspected—witches hadn’t used the term white magic much in the past couple hundred years. Maybe she shouldn’t have been so surprised that at least one of Mateo’s cursed ancestors had figured out what was happening and at least tried to defeat the supernatural and break the curse.
After Verlaine got done, Nadia took her own turn on the weight machine—hamstrings burning as she pushed through the reps—then joined Verlaine in the line for the bench press. Nadia muttered, “I’m not sure you’re just supposed to stab Asa with it.”
That won her a raised eyebrow. “I’m supposed to use a dagger to kill a demon, but not to stab him?”
“I said, not just to stab him. You said—let me get this straight—that the Book of Shadows said to mark his name three times and pierce him.”
“Um, pierce means stab.”
Nadia shook her head. “I think it means to pierce his name first. The book said the name had power, right?”
“How am I supposed to pierce the name?”
Ever since Verlaine had texted her the info late last night, Nadia had been thinking about this, and finally she thought she had it. “Remember, in witchcraft, books are powerful. The written word matters. I think you’re supposed to write his name three times, then pierce the three papers with the dagger. Once it’s been anointed with whatever the hell Elizabeth was talking about. Then the knife is ready.”
Verlaine’s eyes widened. “Marking means writing? And on the Word of God—that means in a Bible, right? Or a Torah, or a Koran, or any other religious text, because holy is holy, right?”
“Probably.” The gears were turning now, showing Nadia more and more. “The ‘words of the Craft’ obviously means writing his name in a Book of Shadows. That which he himself possesses—probably that’s anything belonging to him here. A notebook, even.”
“Not hard to get.” Verlaine looked so sad.
“We still don’t know what ‘the blood of the sea’ is—”
“Seawater.” When Nadia stared, Verlaine just shrugged. “It’s obvious.”
“It’s too bad you’re not from a witching bloodline. You’d have been great at the Craft.”
For the first time that day, Verlaine smiled.
Now it was bench press time. Nadia gritted her teeth as she managed to pump the bar upward. Usually she hated gym class, but right now, the distraction was welcome. It felt good to only exist in her body for a few moments, where she couldn’t worry about anything but how freakin’ heavy this was.
When they moved on toward the free weights, Verlaine muttered, “I can’t believe we’re supposed to worry about building muscle tone while we’re fighting the apocalypse.”
“Don’t get distracted. If we head to my place after school, do you think you could remember the drawing well enough to tell for sure if the Cabot family dagger is the right one?”
Shifting her weight from one foot to the other, Verlaine didn’t quite meet Nadia’s eyes. “I don’t know. Maybe I should go get that Book of Shadows from my house. It would be okay as long as I’m the only one who touches it. But then, maybe it shouldn’t get wet?” The heavy rain hadn’t stopped, not once.
Nadia said, “I know you don’t want to think about—hurting Asa.”
“Killing.” Verlaine finally looked straight
at her. “Let’s skip the euphemisms. We’re talking about killing him.”
“Excuse me?” Kendall Bender glanced back at them. She was Rodman High’s one-girl gossip amplification system; while she wasn’t actually all that bad, Nadia thought, there was no such thing as keeping a secret anywhere in her vicinity.
So she improvised quickly. “We’re talking about a—role-playing game. Online. Multiplayer.”
“With orcs.” Verlaine caught on right away. “Tons of orcs. Plus dwarves and elves and fighting unicorns.”
Kendall rolled her eyes as she turned from them. “You guys are such geeks.”
Although Verlaine grinned, like, That was close, Nadia knew they needed to stick to the subject. “You realize there’s no reason for you to go after Asa, right? Not yet, anyway.” In the final battles to come, there was no telling what any of them might be called to do. “If Asa gets killed, Elizabeth might summon another demon to take his place, and that one might be even worse. So I don’t know why you’re so fixated on taking Asa out right now.”
“I have to be ready. That’s all.”
That couldn’t be all.
Nadia had taken comfort from Verlaine’s determination to kill Asa, assuming that meant she wasn’t too attached. But what if it was the exact opposite?
They aren’t—they can’t be—
“Uh, Coach Pang?” Kendall piped up. “Is it, you know, flooding in here?”
People giggled and skittered to the far side of the room as water began pooling in one corner of the weight room. Coach Pang looked more annoyed than anything else. “I told them building in the basement was—never mind. Come on, guys, get some towels. Let’s keep this contained if we can.”
Before Nadia could say a word, Verlaine hurried for her locker. Probably to get some pictures of the “news story” for the Lightning Rod, Nadia thought. Most of her classmates ran for towels. Nadia remained where she was, watching the gray puddle swell on the concrete floor, its curved outlines slowly, inexorably expanding outward.