“They all go insane. Apparently it’s hereditary or something. They’ve lived in this town since the beginning of time—well, the 1600s. And they’ve been going crazy ever since. I feel bad for him, but it’s not like anything can change your genes.” Verlaine glanced toward the bar, where Mateo was grabbing a tray of sodas for another table. “Why does it always happen to the hot ones?”
“The family curse,” Nadia repeated. Maybe it was only a saying. Maybe it was the small-town version of an urban legend. For Mateo’s sake, she hoped so.
Verlaine clearly was ready to get back to the subject. “So, come on. Tell me the laws of witchcraft.”
The First Laws were so familiar to Nadia—so often repeated to her, so much a part of her—that the words seemed to flow out almost without her thinking about it. “The most unbreakable one is that you must never be sworn to the One Beneath and do his bidding. Besides that—you must not reveal the Craft to anyone who would betray it. You must never speak of witchcraft to any man. You must never attempt to divine your own fate. You must never bear a child to the son of another witch. You must never command the will of another. You must never suffer a demon to walk among mortals.” Her eyes sought Mateo as she spoke the last remaining law:
“You must never cast a curse.”
“Switch tables with me, will you, Melanie? Trade you eight for eighteen.”
Melanie Sweeney, the senior waitress at La Catrina, glanced past him and frowned. “Eighteen’s just two kids. Girls. Cute ones, too. So why do you want to wait on those six jerks at eight? Wait, don’t tell me. You asked one of the girls out; she shot you down.”
“Love hurts,” Mateo said, which was enough like a yes without being a lie.
“No worries, buddy. I got ’em.” Melanie grinned. “But you better take those guys their empanadas PDQ.”
As he hurried to table eight, Mateo’s mind remained focused on one thing alone—Nadia. If his dreams were really telling him the future—and because of the car crash, they had to be at least partly true, didn’t they?—then the danger surrounding Nadia was very real. And whatever it was, Mateo himself was a part of it.
But his plan—“Stay Away From Nadia for Her Own Good”—was clearly useless. What had he been thinking? This was Captive’s Sound, a town the size of a flash drive. He ran into almost everyone in town at least once a week; with Nadia in his chemistry class, he was guaranteed to see her almost every day. Now that she turned out to like Mexican food—forget it. Game over.
So what the hell was he going to do?
Would Nadia believe him if he tried to explain? Most people wouldn’t, even if they hadn’t grown up in Captive’s Sound thinking he was guaranteed to turn out insane. And even if she believed, did he know enough to protect her? If he frightened Nadia, convinced her that she should fear for her life, then failed to prevent any of his nightmares from coming to pass—that would be worse than anything else he could do.
No, he decided. That’s not the worst thing I could do. The worst thing I could do is nothing.
There have to be ways I could look out for her without talking to her about the visions. I can … watch from afar. Guard her as best I can without putting her in danger.
But is that even possible?
Right as he was trying to work it all out, table eight decided they each had a complicated special order—no refried beans here, extra guacamole there, so on and so forth—and Mateo was too busy to do anything but hurry back and forth between his tables and the kitchen for the next half hour. By the time he was able to look back at Nadia’s table again, she was gone, and Melanie was wiping it down to get it ready for the next customers.
Okay, fine. She was home. That had to be safe, right? Maybe not, though. He hadn’t taken a close enough look before to see whether it resembled the setting of any of his dreams. Why hadn’t he done that?
“Hey, Mateo.” Melanie held up a cell phone. “One of them left this. You too brokenhearted to take it to her at school tomorrow?”
“I can handle it,” Mateo said.
Maybe he’d get his chance to look out for Nadia after all.
Nadia had never realized there could be so many questions about witchcraft; she didn’t remember asking this many even when she was a little kid. Then again, she’d grown up in the constant company of her mother’s powers, naturally understanding so much of it that there was no need to ask.
Verlaine, on the other hand, felt the need to ask everything.
“Can you fly?” she said as she and Nadia walked along the main strip of Captive’s Sound, Nadia trying her best to be sure she knew her way home. “I don’t mean on a broomstick, Gryffindor-style. That would be stupid. Unless you do use broomsticks.”
“No broomsticks,” Nadia said. “I can’t fly. There are spells—really advanced spells—they could let you, I don’t know, defy the laws of physics for a while. Sort of souped-up versions of what I did to your car. But I’m not that skilled yet. Not even close.”
“So your mom was a witch?”
“Yeah. She taught me.”
“Will she be mad that you told me?”
“Mom’s not in our lives anymore. She left my dad back in the spring, and she pretty much washed her hands of me and Cole then, too.” The facts were harsh enough, but somehow they sounded even worse spoken aloud like that.
Verlaine bit her lip, less confrontational than she’d been at any other point during this endless interrogation. “I’m sorry. That sucks. I mean, I don’t even remember my mom and dad—but it would be worse to remember them and then lose them. At least, I think so.”
So, actually, I’m not the only person who’s had it bad. Nadia felt like a jerk. “It sucks either way. But it’s okay. We’re still here, right?”
“Right.”
“And here is—three blocks from my house, if I turn left at this corner?”
“You’ve got it! Congrats. You’ve learned your way around all ten square feet of Captive’s Sound. Once you get all the gossip down, nobody will be able to tell you from the native population.”
The one piece of gossip she’d learned—about Mateo Perez—echoed in Nadia’s mind again. The family curse.
A cool breeze stirred past them, tangling Verlaine’s silvery hair, which already stood out in the early-evening gloom. After spending most of her life in Chicago, Nadia had thought she was pretty much winter-proofed—but cold came early here, and it cut to the bone. Slowly she said, “Has the town always been like this?”