“Like what?”
“Not right.” Then Nadia said what she really thought: “Dead inside.”
Verlaine stopped. For a long moment they stood there beneath one of the streetlamps, the first fall leaves scudding across the cracked sidewalks. “I always thought—I figured it was just because I hate it here. The same way a lot of people want out of their hometowns, you know? When I looked around and only saw the bad side of it, I thought it was, like, me being in a mood. But it’s not, is it?”
“No. It’s not.”
“Then what is it?”
“I’m not sure. But I think it has to do with whatever’s buried beneath the chemistry lab.” As Verlaine’s eyes widened, Nadia said, “I have no idea. All I know is, it’s dark and it’s strange and some other witch has to have buried it there a long time ago. It’s dark enough to poison this town. To hollow it out.”
Verlaine took that in for a few moments. “Is it—dangerous? I mean, beyond sucking the life out of Captive’s Sound, assuming it had any life to begin with.” Her ghostly skin somehow became even paler. “Can it get worse? I would’ve thought that was impossible, but—you know, the sinkholes—”
“I don’t know that those are related,” Nadia said. Then again, she didn’t know that they weren’t. Was it possible that she’d arrived just as things took a turn for the worse? As the thing buried beneath Captive’s Sound finally … got out?
“Is there a spell we can do to find out?” Verlaine drummed her fingers against her notebook, nervous energy crackling from her almost like static electricity.
Slowly, Nadia answered, “We could try to tell the future.”
“You can tell the future? Awesome. Do I ever—wait. No. You can’t tell the future. That was one of the First Laws, wasn’t it? That you’re not supposed to do that.”
“You have a good memory. Yes, that’s one of the laws. But there are a few ways around it.” Deep in thought, Nadia tried to remember what Mom had said about when you could work with that rule, bend it without breaking it entirely. “If I tried to tell my own future, or yours, it would break that law. Also, it would seriously mess us up, mentally, but—never mind. What we could do is tell the town’s future. See what’s happening to Captive’s Sound. That’s distant enough from us that it’s allowed, and that would be enough to tell us whether—whether something serious has begun, or whether the way things are is permanent. Not changing.”
“Probably the latter,” Verlaine said, “with my luck. Nothing ever changes around here.”
There were worse things than not changing, Nadia thought. “I should probably do this spell alone.”
Verlaine’s dark, silvery eyebrows knitted together as she scowled. “Oh, come on. I know about magic, remember? So why can’t I watch? I want to see! Something besides flying cars, anyway, even though that was excellent.”
“You shouldn’t watch because it’s dangerous.”
To Nadia’s astonishment, Verlaine grinned. “Do you have any idea how long I’ve waited for something interesting to happen to me? I don’t care if it’s dangerous. I don’t care what it is. Bring it.”
6
THE CROW SWOOPED OVER CAPTIVE’S SOUND, WINGS outspread. His cobweb eyes saw nothing and everything.
They saw two girls walking together along the street, one’s hair black and one’s nearly white, one short and one tall, yet not opposites. Not apart as they should be.
They saw the girls go toward a large house the color of the sky at dawn in early spring. The house glowed from within with a force that flickered like candlelight but had the potential to become a flame.
Beyond anything else they saw the dark ripples through the earth, tracing rings beneath every street, every house, every human being in Captive’s Sound. The energy leaped and sparked as it found the deep lines of power that underlay this town, but those lines couldn’t stop the web from being spun. They only made it stronger.
Something else looked through the crow’s stolen eyes and recorded it all. The crow flew on, unknowing, enslaved, and blind.
“Can I go now?” Mateo asked as he loaded the final pitchers into the dishwasher.
“You haven’t touched the Bissell, and I don’t see any chopped peppers in this fridge.” Dad crossed his arms. “What’s up with you? You’ve been trying to escape for twenty minutes, and you know your shift isn’t up for another fifteen. Not like you to ditch the job.”
That was the problem with having your father for a boss; not only was he judging you as harshly as any other boss would, but he also wanted to psychoanalyze you in the bargain.
And Dad was the absolute last person he could talk to about any of this stuff.
At least he had a reason for wanting out that his father would understand. “One of the customers left her cell phone here. A girl I know from school. I wanted to run it by her house.”
“Ahhh. There’s a lady in the case. Might have known.”
“Dad. She really left her phone. See?” Mateo held it up as evidence.
“That’s why we have a lost-and-found box.” But his father seemed more amused than anything else. “About time a girl got your special attention.”
Mateo went for the knife and the peppers. The quicker he finished up his side work, the quicker he could escape both work and the interrogation.
“Here I thought you were going to play the field forever,” Dad said as he continued stirring the sopa Azteca. “Not that a handsome young fellow like you shouldn’t play, hmm? But there’s more to life than that.”
Girls would “play,” sure. Mateo had learned that early. They were attracted to him, flirted with him. At a party, sometimes they would hook up with him, making out just long enough for Mateo to start to hope things were finally changing. But that was it. Girls in Captive’s Sound thought he was dangerous; kissing him, letting him touch them, was something they did only for a thrill. Nobody was foolhardy enough to stay with him—to let herself care. After a beach bonfire early in the summer, when he’d realized this one girl had gotten with him only because her friends dared her to, Mateo hadn’t bothered trying again.
“I spent my time as a bachelor,” Dad said.