Something was buried there—long buried, sunk deep. Whatever it was, it held enormous power.
Was that power linked to the darker fate she saw in store for Captive’s Sound? It had taken Nadia the better part of an hour to calm Verlaine down, to explain that the devastation she saw could be either a week or a century away, or anything in between. But as Verlaine had said—that meant “one week” was a possibility, and so they’d better figure some things out sooner rather than later.
Rodman High wasn’t deserted, even this early; a few teachers on morning duty stood around clutching go-mugs of coffee, and a couple of cheerleaders were putting up posters about the first football game. But none of them paid much attention to Nadia as she darted inside. Despite the uncertainty churning inside her, she continued with her plan to investigate the chemistry lab.
Great. All I have to do is throw my stuff in my locker and figure out a question to ask the Piranha if she shows up in her room early—
Halfway down the hall, Nadia froze. There, sitting on the floor with his back against her locker, was Mateo. To judge by his rumpled hair and the shadows under his eyes, he might have been there for hours, even all night.
At the echo of her footsteps, Mateo looked up. “Nadia. Hey.”
“Hi.” She started walking toward him, her backpack off one shoulder, unsure what to think. But when she saw again how exhausted he looked, she said, “Are you okay?”
“No.” Mateo pushed himself to his feet. “Listen. I know how this is going to sound. I’ve gone over this in my head about a thousand times, trying to make it make sense. It never does. But I’ve got to ask you.” He took a deep breath as she reached him, and they were face-to-face. “Last night—when I looked into your attic and saw that light—”
Oh, crap. Nadia tried to think of another, better explanation than she’d been able to come up with last night.
But then he said, “Did you do something to me?”
“Do something to you? Did it—did the attic light hurt your eyes?” Maybe cleansing flame was damaging to people who weren’t prepared for it? Nadia had never heard of anything like that, but maybe it was only one of the countless things Mom hadn’t gotten around to explaining.
“After I left your house, for a while I felt kind of dizzy—disoriented—”
Which could happen to a Steadfast, but that had to be a coincidence.
“—then I started seeing things.” Mateo’s hands were clenching and unclenching at his sides, like he had to force himself to get through this. “As in, strange phantom animals in the alleyway. Weird lights and stuff around houses. And the sky—it’s all over town, and I thought it might be better when the sun went up, but it’s not. It’s like Captive’s Sound is completely surrounded by something dirty and cloudy and—and evil.”
This can’t be happening, she thought. There’s no possible way. It was like things falling upward. Or suddenly needing to breathe water instead of air. Men didn’t possess magic. They couldn’t. That rule was absolute.
“Were you maybe—I don’t know—cooking some kind of drugs? Something that makes you trip? The purple flame—that could be a hallucination, maybe.” He held up his hands. “I swear I won’t report you, or anything like that, but if that’s true, please tell me the truth so I’ll know this is going to get out of my system.”
Nadia shook her head no, even though that lie would have been her best out. As she did so, the brief hope in his eyes died.
“You think I’m crazy.” Mateo smiled grimly. “Of course you do. You’ve been in town, what, almost two weeks now? So people already got to you and told you that I’m—that my family—they told you, right?”
“The family curse,” she whispered.
Mateo raked one hand through his dark brown hair, clearly trying to hold himself together—and failing. “So you think I’m insane, like everyone else does. Maybe I am. I guess—I guess—” He seemed to remember where he was, and the look of regret on his face cut her to the bone. “I’m sorry I bothered you about it. Could you just, maybe, not tell anybody about this?”
She nodded. He started to walk away, his shoulders slumped, utterly defeated.
No, he couldn’t have become her Steadfast. But if the curse on his family was real, was it possible that there had been some strange reaction between the curse and the Steadfast spell? That didn’t make any sense according to the magical theory she knew, but the visions he was describing sounded all too familiar. By now she knew that what he’d seen—the shroud of evil hanging over this entire town—was very real.
And if there was any chance that she was responsible for what he was seeing, then she couldn’t let Mateo walk away thinking he was going mad.
“Mateo?” He only half turned, so she took a few steps closer to him. “What you saw—in the attic—”
“Yeah?”
You must never speak of witchcraft to any man. One of the First Laws—but maybe there was a way to bend that rule without breaking it. “It wasn’t drugs. But it—it wasn’t only the light.”
Slowly he came back toward her. “Then what was it?”
“I can’t tell you.” Before he could protest, Nadia held up a hand. “I mean it. I can’t.”
“Did it do this to me? Whatever it was?”
“I’m not sure. I can find out, though. If it did, maybe I can undo it.”
Mateo’s eyes lit up with desperate hope. Though he clearly had no idea what she was talking about, he was clutching at any possibility. “Come on. You have to tell me.”
“I can’t,” Nadia insisted. “Mateo, please. I know this is hard for you—”
“Thinking I’m going crazy like my mom? The one who drowned herself in the ocean? You have no idea how hard that is for me.”
Almost on instinct, Nadia laid one hand against his chest to comfort him. He instantly stilled at her touch. It was amazing to think she could do that just by touching him.
Quickly she said, “We have to trust each other right now, okay? We have to … take some things on faith. You just have to understand—I believe you about everything you say you’ve seen. I believe in you.”
Mateo’s lips parted slightly. Was it that astonishing, thinking that somebody really might trust him?