by Claudia Gray
“Guys can’t be witches,” Mateo said, but then he caught himself. “We can’t be Steadfasts either, though, and I am one. You mean, the way I was conceived—it makes it possible for me to be a witch?”
Mateo had been conceived via in vitro fertilization. Nadia had already realized that this twist of technology was what had made him exempt from the ancient law of magic that said No man conceived of woman shall possess the powers of witchcraft.
Why hadn’t she realized that Mateo had the capacity for other forms of magic as well? He didn’t seem to have been born into a witching bloodline, but it was possible his father’s family was in the Craft and Mr. Perez just didn’t know it. Or maybe the Cabots had long had the potential, but it had gone untaught during the centuries of the family curse.
“I think so,” Nadia said. “I think you could have learned witchcraft. You broke the thrall over Gage, didn’t you? That power is in you.”
“Could I learn even now? I mean, I know there wouldn’t be time for me to learn a whole lot before you go up against Elizabeth, but if I could do anything—”
“It’s too late now. You would have had to have been trained in childhood . . . at least, I think so.” Nadia had always been taught that you had to begin learning witchcraft very early in life, or else you had no chance of ever mastering magic. But had that been true, or just another arbitrary, antiquated rule? “I guess we could try.”
“Like today?” Mateo lit up. “I could learn some spells before we go up against Elizabeth?”
This was a definite no. As she shook her head, Nadia said, “Even if you do have the potential to learn magic, there’s no way I could teach you anything useful that fast. If we had a few months—maybe even six weeks or so, for something basic—but we don’t.”
“So this magic inside me helps us exactly zero?” Mateo asked. Nadia shook her head no. He sighed. “Figures.”
But he wasn’t thinking of the greater implications. Nadia had already realized that other babies would be born to witches through technologies such as IVF. Thousands and thousands of children were born that way every year. Right now, an entire generation of male witches was out there, not knowing their own power.
Was it possible one of them did know? Surely some mom, somewhere, had realized what her little boy could do. Some male witch had been trained since childhood in absolute secret, kept from the rest of the Craft. At least one—but maybe more than one. Who knew who else might be out there?
If this world survives, Nadia realized, the Craft won’t be the same. It will have to change. The old rules, the First Laws—they won’t apply anymore.
We’ll have to find our own way.
The thought should have intimidated her; instead, it gave her hope. Maybe there was a free future, filled with infinite possibility, just ahead.
All she had to do was win.
Mateo had already put the possibility aside for now. “Are you sure you won’t come home with me? I know you want to.”
“I do. But there’s something else more important waiting for me.”
“What is it?”
“I might be staying here, but that doesn’t mean I get to hide. Before we go against the One Beneath, I need to set things right.” Nadia took a deep breath. In her mind she could only see the image of her father’s face when they’d parted—the betrayal there, and the horror.
Maybe her father still feared her. Maybe he’d learned to hate her. But whatever he was feeling didn’t change what was in Nadia’s own heart.
“I need to see Dad, and Cole,” she said. “I need to go home.”
14
DON’T BE STUPID. JUST WALK IN. MAYBE THEY DON’T hate you.
Nadia stood in front of her house, umbrella overhead shaking under the constant fall of rain, unable to make herself go the next few feet that would take her to her door.
Maybe they do hate me.
So what if they do? This is your home as much as it is theirs.
Except for the part where Dad pays the mortgage and the deed is in his name and everything.
Cole is in there. No matter what Dad thinks, you know Cole still loves you. All these storms must have scared him so much. You need to go in there and hug Cole. The rest is irrelevant.
She couldn’t do it for herself, but for Cole, she could. Nadia walked to the door, put her hand on the knob—then decided to knock.
Dad might’ve changed the locks.
The sound of footsteps coming closer made her gut tense, but Nadia simply dropped the umbrella on the porch and waited. Finally the knob turned, and the door opened—a sliver of warmth and light in the cold, wet darkness—and then her father stood there, staring.
“Hi,” Nadia said. Then she felt stupid. It seemed like she should have had something better to say than that, something that might make her dad respond or at least do something besides just stand there—
Then Dad pulled her into a hug so tight she could barely breathe. His arms were locked around her, as though she were on the edge of a cliff and he was trying to pull her back to safety.
“Nadia. Sweetheart.” Dad’s voice cracked on her name, which just made her start crying. “Thank God you’re all right. We’ve been worried sick.”
“I’m sorry,” she managed to say against his shoulder. “I didn’t know if you hated me.”
“There is nothing, nothing on this earth that could make me hate you. Ever. Don’t you know that?” Dad let go of her to take her face in his hands, and Nadia thought she might be able to get it together until she realized he had tears in his eyes, too. “I should have made sure you always knew that. I’m sorry, sweetheart.”
“It’s not your fault. It’s not.” Nadia tried to smile, but the sobs inside her kept welling up, twisting her mouth and making her sniffle.
Then she heard Cole yelling, “Nadia!”
She let go of her father to drop to her knees just in time to scoop Cole into her arms. His baby blue sweater didn’t match his red cords at all, and his hair was a mess, plus he smelled like Cap’n Crunch, which meant Dad wasn’t doing well at fixing dinner on his own. After so many weeks of knowing the fate of the whole world rested on her shoulders, it was almost comforting to remember that she was needed here, too—to dress her little brother, or make spaghetti, or just be here with them.
Cole wore the biggest smile she’d ever seen. “Nadia, is it true? Dad says you can do magic!”
He told Cole? After the first moment of shock, Nadia found herself smiling, too. If Dad had told Cole, that meant he was able to face it. Her family knew her for who she was, and loved her just the same.
“It’s true,” Nadia said, hugging Cole again. “It’s all absolutely true.”
She used the spell for light again. Nadia didn’t bother using this one often; the glow was fairly dim, which meant a flashlight was usually just as good if not better.
But to little kids, the sphere was the coolest thing ever.
“Wow,” Cole whispered as he sat beside her on the living room floor, staring up at the light overhead. The surface of the sphere rippled slightly, reminding Nadia of NASA films she’d seen of the molten surfaces of stars. “Can you make fireworks?”
Nadia laughed. “I don’t know. I never tried.”
“Try now!” Cole bounced up and down; the sugar rush was in full force.
“Not now. We’re inside, and fireworks wouldn’t be any fun inside the house. Plus nobody wants to be outside while it’s raining.” When Cole looked disappointed, she put her hands on his shoulders. “Hey. Have you been coloring in your Santa coloring book? You know you have to have it all done by Christmas Day if you want your stocking filled.”
“I have! Do you want to see? I’ll go get it.” He dashed for the stairs, leaving Nadia alone with her father for a few moments.
Dad sat in his recliner, leaning on one elbow. Now that Nadia had had a chance to look at him, she could see how exhausted he looked. Normally Dad took better care of himself than most middle-aged guys. Ton
ight he had at least a day’s worth of stubble, and his shirt was rumpled. She thought he might not have slept since he’d learned the truth.
Nadia said, “Did you tell Cole about Mom?”
“No. I didn’t know what to say.”
“Her not telling you—neither of us telling you—it didn’t have anything to do with not loving you. You know that, right? It’s one of the First Laws of the Craft. We’re never, ever supposed to tell a man, any man, about what we can do.” Nadia chewed on her bottom lip.
“Okay.” Dad weighed that for a few seconds before he added, “I don’t blame you, Nadia. I want you to understand that. Apparently you were doing what you felt like you had to do. That doesn’t make it easier for me to deal with the fact that I never knew the woman I married. Not really. In some ways, I’m only starting to get to know you, and you’re one of the two people I love most in the world.”
“Hey, at least Cole’s an open book.” That made Dad smile a little, but the joke sounded fake to her. She forced herself to keep going. “You know Mom loved you a lot. She gave that love away to save me. Nothing else could have made her do it.”
Her father nodded, though she could tell it hadn’t really sunk in yet. His whole world had been turned inside out; Nadia figured it was like one of those optical illusions in books, where you think you’re looking at a vase until suddenly you see it’s two faces—except this was the past twenty years of his life he was looking at, only now seeing the truth that had been hidden in the shadows.
He said only, “You’re back home for good, right? Or until college. Culinary school. Whatever. Where have you been staying?”
“I stayed at Mateo’s one night. Right now I’m staying with Faye Walsh—the guidance counselor from school? Her mom was a witch, so she knows what’s going on.”
She’d been concentrating on not telling him that she’d been driven to go to Elizabeth’s; her father could never know how she’d felt there, abandoned and cast out, forced to sleep on the floor and surrounded by broken glass. But after the words came out, Nadia realized that she’d just told her father she’d spent the night with Mateo. Oh, crap.
Mercifully, Dad didn’t seem to have caught it. “You said the flooding, the rain—that they were part of what Elizabeth was doing to this town. That they were, uh, black magic.” He had to clear his throat after getting those words out. “And it’s still happening.”
“She’s still at work. This isn’t over until I face Elizabeth one more time. The rain is just the symptom, Dad. If she isn’t stopped—the flooding, the collapses, everything else that’s happened in Captive’s Sound over the past few months—that will seem like nothing, compared to what she’s going to do.”
“You’re the only one who can stop her? There’s no one else who can . . . help, or support you, or anything like that? Where are the other witches?”
“I don’t know,” Nadia said, again condemning the ancient secrecy that had once protected the Craft but now crippled it. “But I’m not alone, Dad. Mateo and Verlaine know the truth, and they’re both helping out every way they can.”
She couldn’t tell him the plan. No way she’d calm him down by saying, All I have to do is literally descend into hell.
“What about me?” Dad reached out from where he sat to clasp her hand. “What can I do? Name it, Nadia. Name it and I’m there.”
Tears pricked at her eyes again. “It’s okay, Dad. You don’t have to try to save the world.”
“Forget the damn world. You’re my baby girl. I want to save you.”
Nadia reached up to hug him tightly. “You already have.”
“Nadia said we needed a base of operations,” Mateo explained. “Someplace where nobody would bother us, and nobody would interfere.”
Gage was driving his truck along the few roads in town not closed for flooding—a winding, circuitous path, now, that took forever to reach anyplace. At least nobody else was on the road this early in the morning. Nadia had said they wouldn’t make their move until later in the day, but Mateo thought they ought to get ready.
Gage said, “Okay, but isn’t the idea that she and Verlaine are going to go to hell, as in actual, you-could-put-it-on-a-map hell? So don’t we need to be close to wherever it is that this portal is going to open up?”
“It’s going to open in the sound. Underwater. And there’s another crack just below the chemistry lab at Rodman. But no, we don’t have to be there.” The only way this could be worse, Mateo figured, was if they had to row out into the ocean during this final storm—or go to chemistry. “Basically, Nadia says that once the portal’s breaking open, every single place on earth will be equally close to hell.”
“As in, way too close.”
“You got it. So we just need someplace safe, someplace private, and someplace on high ground, because the waters are only going to rise.”
Gage sighed as he shifted his truck into gear. “Well, we can’t get higher than the Hill.”
With that, they cleared the last steep ridge and pulled into the wide circular driveway of Cabot House. Mateo still thought of it as Grandma’s house—but as she’d said very clearly just before leaving town, now it belonged to him.
As Mateo jumped down from Gage’s truck, he pulled the heavy brass key to the mansion from his pocket. It clearly had been forged decades ago, if not more than a century. Just like Grandma, Mateo thought, to be scared of everything but not invest in a dead-bolt lock. He pushed the door open and turned on the light, then blinked.
“She didn’t take anything?” Gage walked in just a few steps behind Mateo, looking around at the oil paintings in their gilded frames on the walls, the sumptuous furniture, and even the baby grand piano in the corner of the music room. “Wow. As of today, you have the sweetest crib of anybody I know.”
“This place has always creeped me out,” Mateo confessed. The heavy drapes were in such a dark red that they looked almost black; each window framed a sliver of night, and every pane was spattered with droplets as the relentless rain continued.
“I thought it was your grandmother who creeped you out. Now that she’s gone, you can make this place your own, right?”
Maybe Gage had a point. But Mateo couldn’t quite envision him and his dad living someplace like this, with marble tile and velvet rugs. It didn’t matter anymore. “Come on. We need to clear a room. Any room will do.”
Gage turned around; he was framed by the arching doorway, with its elaborate plaster scrollwork. “Why do we need to clear a room?”
“No specific reason,” Mateo admitted, “but I’m gonna guess that battling the forces of hell makes a mess.”
They decided on the living room, or parlor, whatever he ought to call a room with a bunch of fancy couches that nobody had sat on in the past twenty years. As heavy as the couches were, and as much swearing as he and Gage did, it beat trying to move the grand piano.
As they walked the longest sofa into the hallway, Mateo sweating as he tried to walk backward with it, Gage said, “So—you and Elizabeth—that really wasn’t a thing.”
“Right. The one time we made out, she’d cast a spell that made me think she was Nadia.”
“You were trying to warn me the entire time,” Gage said. They never stopped edging the sofa out of the room, never once looked directly at each other. “You just couldn’t tell me the whole truth, because I would’ve thought you were crazy.”
“Yeah. I should’ve tried harder, though.”
“I wouldn’t have believed you.”
The heaviness in Gage’s voice reminded Mateo of how much the guy had always adored Elizabeth from afar; nobody could be genuinely in love with a person they hadn’t even talked to much, but Gage had come as close to it as anyone could. For a few weeks there, he’d really believed Elizabeth loved him back. Learning the truth had shocked Gage, even repulsed him—but a broken heart didn’t mend in a day, or a week.
Quietly, Mateo said, “You still love her.”
Gage just kept inching t
he sofa forward. “I still love the girl I thought she was. Just a dream I made up, I guess. Some kind of stupid, falling in love with a dream.”
“Elizabeth’s powers made almost everyone love her. I mean, I wasn’t in love with her, but I thought she was the best friend I ever had. When Nadia tried to tell me who and what she really was, I shouted her down. Walked out on her. I could’ve lost someone real for the sake of an illusion.”
That wasn’t even the worst part. The worst was that, anytime Mateo tried to call up a happy memory of his childhood, the first images that came to mind were the false ones Elizabeth had slipped into his mind. Climbing trees, making cookies, doing cannonballs off the pier in summertime: Every single memory was clear, bright, and beautiful. And every single one of them was a lie.
He thought he’d miss the childhood friend he’d never really had for the rest of his life.
Look on the bright side, Mateo thought. If we lose this battle, the rest of your life won’t actually be that long.
Finally they were able to set the couch down in the center of the music room, which was now crowded from wall to wall like a furniture store having a closeout sale. “Okay,” Gage said, flexing his hands in relief. “We’ve cleared a room, created a playing field. Now what?”
Mateo knew they wouldn’t talk about Elizabeth again tonight, and maybe not for a very long time. That suited him fine. “Now we wait and see.”
“You don’t sound as confident as you did at the house.”
“I believe in Nadia,” Mateo said. “But—you’ve seen what we’re up against.”
They’d lost the last two times they took Elizabeth on. He had to face the fact that they could lose again.
Gage ventured, “So, in the worst-case scenario—which is not gonna happen!—what comes next?”
“You get out of here. You do whatever you have to do to make your family get in the van, then swing by Verlaine’s to pick up her dads and Cole, too. Then La Catrina—” Mateo’s throat tightened, but he kept going. “Tell Dad I told you to go get him, okay? He’ll go with you then. After that, you step on the gas and get as far from Captive’s Sound as you can, as fast as you can.”