Mateo sat up straight. “What’s wrong with people?”
“I don’t know,” Nadia said. But she was starting to put it together. A spell of liberation could make people feel a little, well, uninhibited. But that was normally a minor side effect, enough to maybe give someone the giggles, not to make an entire roomful of people completely forget where they were. The spell had been more powerful than usual—no, more powerful than ever.
That wasn’t the effect of whatever lay beneath this room. If anything, that would have dimmed the spell, not enhanced it.
That—that was the kind of boost you could only get from a Steadfast.
Verlaine was nowhere near here, and besides, Nadia already knew the spell hadn’t worked on her. Which meant the only option—the only possibility—
It can’t be true, Nadia thought wildly. Everything she knew about magic was built on a few fundamental principles, and the most fundamental principle of all was that men couldn’t hold magic. A curse was one thing—you didn’t hold that; it held you. So men could be cursed. But being a Steadfast should be as impossible for a man as the sun circling the Earth.
“What’s going on?” Mateo said. He was clearly unaffected by the spell—another sign. Steadfasts weren’t as susceptible to simple magic. Then he turned toward Elizabeth—who remained still by his side—and gasped out loud. “Oh, my God. My God.”
Mateo started backing away from Elizabeth, and the expression on his face was the last thing Nadia would have expected to see: utter horror.
Elizabeth made a swift, fluttering gesture with one hand; for the first time, Nadia noticed that she wore little rings on each finger—rings made out of the same materials Nadia wore on her bracelet. Mateo swayed once on his feet, then snapped out of it, turning again to Nadia. “What’s going on?”
All around them, the kissing and laughter and even singing continued unabated. The Piranha, instead of calling for order, was on the floor in Low Cobra Pose. Nadia didn’t look at any of it; she could only stare at Elizabeth. Meanwhile Elizabeth held her hand out over the floor—parallel to it—almost as though she were trying to calm an animal or a very small child.
Or, Nadia thought, something buried beneath the school.
That was ludicrous, wasn’t it? Surely it had to be. Probably Nadia was freaking out because her spell had spun so wildly out of control, and because she’d just learned the incredible truth that Mateo was her Steadfast. Her imagination was running away with her.
But she wasn’t imagining Elizabeth’s reaction.
Elizabeth didn’t look confused by any of this. Instead she took a gulp from her water bottle, and then her sweet, clean-scrubbed face shifted into a smile that was anything but sweet.
It felt more like—a dare.
Nadia’s stomach dropped as she realized that Elizabeth wasn’t any other girl in her class.
She was another witch.
8
CLASS ENDED WITH THE SECURITY GUARD TALKING ONE girl down from the top of the file cabinets, demerits for almost everyone, the Piranha on report, and people starting to complain of headaches or blush as they realized what they’d been doing. Nadia grabbed Mateo’s arm to hustle him out of there as fast as possible.
“What just happened?” he said, his mouth so close to her ear that she could feel his breath.
“Let’s get out of here first, okay?” Nadia hurried out, Mateo by her side. She glanced over her shoulder to look for Elizabeth, who stood there in the middle of the mayhem, very still, watching them go. A small smile played on her lips.
She knew that Nadia knew. And she didn’t care whether Nadia knew or not.
As they went down the hallway toward the cafeteria, she muttered, “Tell me this. What did you see when you looked at Elizabeth?”
“What are you talking about?”
“When you looked at her, right after everybody lost it. You seemed—panicked, almost.”
Mateo frowned even as he pushed the door open for them both. “I don’t remember looking at Elizabeth once. There was a lot more to see.” He started laughing. “The Piranha’s—really bendy. And Erik’s been out since sophomore year, but I had no idea Charles was g*y.”
He’d forgotten; whatever Elizabeth had done to him to make him stop seeing had also made him lose his memory of it. She had acted quickly, and her counterspell had been completely effective.
With a rush of horror, Nadia thought, The dark magic in town—it’s her! It’s Elizabeth; it has to be.
But no. How could Elizabeth be behind everything happening in Captive’s Sound? According to the increasingly worried Google searches Nadia had been running lately, the problems here seemed to go way back—since long before Elizabeth would even have been born, much less practicing magic. Plus, she and Nadia were about the same age, which meant they were only just now coming into their power.
Still—any other witch would have reached out at that moment. When Elizabeth saw that Nadia’s spell had misfired, she should have helped to quiet it, and sought Nadia afterward. The secrecy that bound the Craft didn’t extend that far.
Instead, Elizabeth had given her that cool, appraising smile, covered her tracks with Mateo, and slipped away.
So maybe she wasn’t the cause of everything going wrong in Captive’s Sound. Yet Nadia knew, deep down, that whatever it was twisting things here up in knots—Elizabeth was in the thick of it.
As they got into the cafeteria line, Mateo said under his breath, “Okay, either you were cooking some kind of drugs that can make the whole school start hallucinating at once, or something else seriously strange is going on. Because I did not imagine that. Are you going to explain what this has to do with what happened last night?”
She reached for her tray on autopilot, thinking fast.
One of the First Laws was to never, ever reveal the secret of the Craft to a man. Any man.
Every principle of the Craft also said that it was impossible for a man to be a Steadfast. Yet she couldn’t deny that this was exactly what Mateo had become.
Nadia might never understand how that was possible, but as long as it was—then he had to be told. It was wrong that this had happened to him without his knowledge or consent, wrong that someone already so troubled had been forced to carry that burden. The least she owed him was the truth.
“I’ll tell you,” she promised, feeling almost light-headed. It was like skydiving, terrifying and liberating at once. “I’ll explain everything.”