Spellcaster (Spellcaster #1) (12 page)

“Hey there!” Verlaine Laughton came up to Nadia, skinny and strange as ever; she’d used two pencils to twist her silver-gray hair into a knot at the back of her neck, and wore the same kind of bizarre clothes she always favored—today, a peasant blouse and bell-bottomed jeans that had orange flower appliqués. She seemed to have been transported directly from 1972. That was about as much as Mateo had ever noticed about her; there was something about Verlaine that almost kept you from paying any attention. Like wherever something interesting was, Verlaine wasn’t. But she seemed to know Nadia pretty well. Verlaine’s face fell as she saw Mateo. “Oh, sorry, am I interrupting?”

Nadia looked up at her. “Mateo’s my Steadfast.”

Verlaine practically slammed the tray onto the table in vindication. “I
knew
it!”

“Are you a witch, too?” he said. Were there witches everywhere? Was the whole world about a thousand times weirder than he’d ever dreamed?

“Nope. This is all about as new to me as it is to you.” Then Verlaine frowned at Nadia. “Wait. I thought you said men couldn’t be Steadfasts. That they couldn’t know about magic.”

“Well, it turns out they can be Steadfasts,” Nadia explained, “so I figured Mateo needs to know about magic. We’re kind of working off-book here.”

“No men ever, you said.” Verlaine leaned across the table, peering at him. “Mateo, are you maybe—well—transgender? Intersex? No prejudice here. Just support.”

Mateo would have started thudding his face against the table in frustration if his pizza hadn’t been in the way. “I’m a guy.”

“We’ll take your word for it.” Verlaine started in on her salad. “I was the only one who was supposed to be in danger of being … Steadfasted, or whatever you want to call it. I even kind of wanted it to happen. And now you stole it. Accidentally. But still.”

“I wish it were you,” Mateo replied. “This is really—weird.” He glanced around, wondering whether anybody was overhearing them; the last thing he needed was for the school to have yet more reasons to write him off as crazy. But the din of a hundred students eating and talking at once drowned out their words. Also, the cafeteria looked more normal than any place he’d been since the … Steadfast thing began. Apparently the cafeteria was completely devoid of magic. This would come as no surprise to anyone who’d eaten the meatloaf.

Then Nadia reached across the table and tentatively laid her hand along his forearm. The touch shocked him out of his confusion. For a moment he could only look at her dark eyes, accepting in a way almost no one else’s had ever been. “Tell me more about what you’ve been seeing. We’ll figure out what it all means. It won’t be as scary if you understand it.”

She didn’t make him feel bad about being scared; she acted like that was a totally natural way to react. Mateo hadn’t realized how much that could help.

Where to begin? Worst things first, he decided. “What freaks me out the most is that—halo around my head. Halo’s the wrong word, because that’s something gorgeous and holy, and this is terrible. But I don’t know what else to call it.”

“What halo?” Verlaine was staring at his head.

“I see it in the mirror,” he explained. “Since the … spell last night.” Of all the freaky things he’d witnessed, including the weird horned thing, the halo was by far the most disturbing, because it was a part of him.

However, Nadia didn’t seem disturbed at all. Very softly she said, “I suspect that’s the curse.”

The word
curse
always made Mateo’s skin crawl—but it was different, the way Nadia said it. Everyone else made it sound unspeakable. Contagious. From her, it sounded real.

The curse was real.

The curse was
a curse
.

Hereditary insanity: He’d prepared himself for that. Superstition: what he’d assumed for most of his life. But an honest-to-God, or maybe honest-to-Satan, curse? Actual, supernatural evil that had been sunk into his family since the dawn of time and now had him, too?

“Excuse me,” Mateo said as he rose from the cafeteria table. “I need a minute.”

Then he stalked through the cafeteria, cut through the gymnasium and the dressing rooms—where he ran into Jeremy running down Charles for his make-out session with another guy, which was as good a reason as any to shove Jeremy into the lockers.

“My dad knows the city council! I’ll have your rat-ass restaurant shut down!” Jeremy yelled after him. Mateo ignored this. First of all, Jeremy regularly threatened to have people’s businesses shut down; by now everyone knew that if Jeremy’s dad actually even listened to him, the city council didn’t listen to Jeremy’s dad.

Second, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Because he was
cursed
.

Finally Mateo reached the very back room where they kept the boxing equipment. He grabbed a pair of gloves, pulled them on, and started hitting the nearest bag. Punching it with all his strength. Whaling on it. Every blow jarred him all the way to his shoulder; the solidity of the bag almost seemed to hit back. But he punched over and over and over again, with all his strength, fighting the thing that had haunted him now that he’d finally seen it for what it was.

Verlaine said, “So, that went well.”

Nadia groaned. “I’m making a total mess of this. But—I don’t know what to do! Nothing like this has ever happened before, and I mean ever, as in since the dawn of time.”

Verlaine tapped her fork against her tray. “Well, hey, why don’t we transfer it over? Turn me into your Steadfast instead. Not that it sounds like so much fun, but—if Mateo can’t handle it—I mean, he’s already got a curse to deal with. I don’t. Anyway, I still think it sounds cool. Can you switch us, Nadia?”

Nadia shook her head. “No chance.”

“There’s no fail-safe? Come on.” Verlaine’s eyes narrowed as she folded her arms; she seemed almost suspicious again.

“You remember how it worked. It’s not something I control. It’s something that happens of its own accord, because of the powers of prophetic magic.” Nadia’s head throbbed. She should never have cast that spell. All she’d done was scare them and turn Mateo into something he never, ever should have been.

“You have to have an out.”

The lone possibility swam in front of her, simultaneously as tempting and as traitorous as a mirage in the desert. “I could end my bond with my Steadfast if I broke all my ties to magic and the Craft—”

“Why didn’t you say so before?” Verlaine demanded. “That counts as an out!”

“Did you hear me? I’d have to break all my ties. I wouldn’t be a witch any longer. Wouldn’t be able to cast any spells, ever again.”

When had she gone from assuming the Craft was lost to her to wanting to hold on to it with all her strength? Was she just fooling herself now? Nadia couldn’t be sure—of anything. Magic itself had changed around her. Who knew what would be next?

After school—and a few more hours during which he was able to cool down—Mateo sought Nadia again. She and Verlaine were in the parking lot, sitting on the hood of Verlaine’s enormous maroon car. Verlaine was the one who waved at him cheerily, like they were pals and this was any other day. “Hey! We were wondering if you’d show!”

“I’ve showed.” He glanced around, but people were emptying out of the parking lot, and the school itself, as fast as possible. Usually Mateo did the same. If you wanted to be left totally alone, hanging around Rodman after 3:30 p.m. was a good way to go. The only person who seemed to be paying them any attention was Ms. Walsh—but after a glance in their direction, she slipped into her car to drive away. “Sorry for freaking out.”

Nadia shrugged. “No worries. The news was pretty freak-worthy.”

The wind played with her shining black hair; she could look so casual discussing this, a literal matter of life and death. But it wasn’t that she didn’t take it seriously—Mateo could tell that much. It was more that Nadia could handle it. There was a center to her—a purpose, a definition—that Mateo had almost never sensed in anyone else. It drew him as strongly and inexorably as gravity pulled them to the earth.

Nadia continued their lunch conversation as if they’d never broken it off. “Like you said—yeah, I’ve already been in town long enough to hear about the family curse. I’m afraid curses are very real. Witches aren’t ever supposed to cast them, but it can happen. If your family has been cursed for generations, then a very powerful witch laid this down long ago. Can you tell me more about how it works? I know it’s supposed to lead to insanity, but there could be lots of reasons why.”

Mateo straightened. Nobody had ever given him a chance to explain. “We start seeing the future. Or, up until recently, I thought it was that people believed they saw the future and that was the first sign they were losing it. But—I’ve been having dreams, and they’ve started coming true.”

“Oh, this is unbelievable,” Verlaine breathed, but she wasn’t trying to move away from him. She only wanted to hear his side of the story. She wasn’t so bad, really. “This is not good news. Nadia was explaining this just last night! Seeing the future makes people go
loco
.”

“Tell me about it.” Mateo’s mother had rowed out to sea so she could drown. His grandfather had died in the house fire he himself had started, the one that had scarred Grandma for life. His great-grandmother committed suicide in City Hall with a shotgun. So it went—on and on, further and further back—a string of suicides, homicides, and self-destructive behavior that had marked at least one Cabot in every generation all the way back to their arrival in the New World when Rhode Island was still a colony. They’d all gone crazy—because each and every one had seen the future, just like him.

“You dream of the future. Okay.” Nadia still seemed totally calm. “What are your dreams?”

Mateo couldn’t speak at first.
I’ve seen you lying dead in my arms
.

But he couldn’t say that to her. Not yet and maybe not ever.

So he went for the simplest thing first. “The night of the wreck? I dreamed about your family’s car going into that ditch. That’s why I was there. I had to see if the dream would come true, and it did. I knew I’d have to pull you out.”

Once again Nadia brushed her hand along his forearm. She had such small hands. “Half the burden is not being believed. Maybe not believing in yourself. But you know the truth, and now we do, too. And you’re strong, Mateo. Strong enough to take this.”

He had to laugh at her then, though he instantly regretted it. “Sorry. I mean, it’s nice for you to say that. But you don’t actually know me. So you don’t have any idea whether I’m strong or not.”

“You have to be. Your whole family has to be. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to bear it at all. That’s probably why your family was cursed in the first place—because you guys could endure what nobody else could.”

All his life, Mateo had heard people speak of his Cabot blood as tainted, sick, even twisted. Never before had anybody said that they might be strong. That
he
might be.

As she absentmindedly tried to work a tangle out of her long hair, Verlaine said, “So why did somebody curse the Cabots?”

“So they’d know the future and reveal it,” Nadia said slowly. “That way, the witch gets to know what the future holds, and the Cabots are the ones who endure the consequences. Mateo, who do you tell about your dreams?”

“Nobody. I mean, nobody besides you guys, today, and Elizabeth, of course.”

Nadia’s hand instantly went tense, and she pulled back from him, suddenly rigid. “About Elizabeth—”

“What about her?” Was there something magical after her, too? Mateo wasn’t sure he could take it if anything happened to Elizabeth. He’d have to warn her. The next time they talked, he’d be able to tell her all of this—that the visions of the future really were true, that the curse was true, too, but there might be a way for him to deal with it. Being able to say all this to his best friend felt like the greatest relief imaginable.

But then Nadia said, “Have you ever noticed anything odd about her?”

“What do you mean? No. Of course not.” Mateo smiled fondly. “The only unusual thing about Elizabeth is how kind she is. She’s the most understanding person in this entire town.”

“That’s so true,” Verlaine agreed. “Everybody loves Elizabeth.”

He hadn’t even realized they knew each other. Pretty much nobody paid attention to Verlaine, but if anybody would, it would be Elizabeth. She had seen someone on the fringes and reached out, like she always did.

Nadia looked back and forth between them. “I’m guessing neither of you knew that Elizabeth is a witch, too.”

Verlaine laughed out loud, kicking her heels against the chrome bumper in delight. “Oh, my God. She got even cooler. I thought that was impossible.”

Mateo wasn’t as sure how to feel about that. His first impulse was that Nadia had to be wrong—but if this witchcraft stuff was true, and it seemed to be, then she’d know another witch, wouldn’t she? Still, Elizabeth? His best and oldest friend? It seemed unreal to him that he wouldn’t know about such a huge part of her life.

Or that she wouldn’t tell him curses were real, that the dreams truly could be glimpses of the future—

But she couldn’t, could she? Nadia had said the witch laws or whatever didn’t let them talk about it with men. So Elizabeth couldn’t have told him, even if she’d wanted to. “She’ll be relieved that I know,” he said, starting to smile. “She’s probably wanted to discuss it for a long time now.”

“I doubt that.” Nadia’s full lips pressed together, as if she was holding back words but for only so long. “Listen—I know she’s your girlfriend and everything—”

“Elizabeth’s not my girlfriend.”

Nadia paused, obviously caught short. Verlaine said, “Wow, I always thought you guys were together. Or did you break up?”

“We’re just good friends,” Mateo insisted. “She’s like the sister I never had.”

Quietly Nadia said, “Well, she’s important to you, so this is still going to be tough to hear. I don’t think Elizabeth is just any witch. I think—I think she might—know a little about what’s going on here.”

Mateo stared at her. “What do you mean, ‘what’s going on here’?”

“Some of the darker stuff happening in Captive’s Sound.” Although Nadia was clearly nervous, she continued, “I don’t think Elizabeth plays by the rules.”