Steadfast (6 page)

“But why? There have to be other single men in town.”

“First of all, not so much, seeing how small Captive’s Sound is. And second, your dad’s hot.”

Nadia made a face. “Oh, gross, Verlaine.”

“I don’t mean
hot
hot. I mean dad hot. Listen.” Verlaine started counting off points on her fingers. “He hasn’t gotten fat, he still has his hair, he has a job, and it seems like he looks in the mirror when he gets dressed in the morning. After forty, that’s all hot is.”

Okay, that was disturbing. Before Nadia could think any more about it, mercifully, the meeting began with the banging of a gavel. A half dozen people seemed to make up the city council—including Mr. Prasad, which was probably why his family was here. All of them seemed grumpy in the extreme, though Nadia couldn’t blame them once the questions got going.

“Why wasn’t there a fire extinguisher in the haunted house?”

“Well, if there was an extinguisher, why didn’t anyone use it? Isn’t that someone’s job?”

“First the roads start collapsing from the sinkholes, and now this? What exactly is the city council spending the infrastructure funds on? We demand an audit!”

“All I know is my salary pays for the fire department of this city, and if the fire department can’t find a damn three-story house ablaze in the middle of town in less than twenty minutes, they’ve got a problem!”

“For once,” Verlaine whispered, “this is almost interesting.”

Almost—but the novelty wore off fast. Within a few minutes, Nadia was back to staring over her shoulder at Asa—at the demon—with the woman who believed she was his mother.

She was just so
loving
. So much so that any real kid of hers would have been annoyed. Mrs. Prasad kept petting his arm, glancing over at him, smiling . . .

Mom had acted that way with Nadia and Cole sometimes—when Cole had gotten done singing a song with the rest of his kindergarten class at their “graduation” ceremony, or when Nadia had managed to cast a really tough spell that day but Mom couldn’t say anything directly because Dad and Cole were around. Instead she just did that thing Mrs. Prasad was doing now, radiating pride, so much that you almost hated it but didn’t really.

All at once Nadia couldn’t stand it any longer. It was wrong—beyond wrong—for Asa to sit there soaking up love he didn’t deserve. He was working for Jeremy’s murderer. This was sickening, and it couldn’t go on any longer.

She has to know,
Nadia thought, looking at Mrs. Prasad.
She has to at least understand that something’s seriously wrong with her son. I want her to look at him and see that something’s not right.

So. A spell of revelation.

Never taking her eyes from Mrs. Prasad, Nadia’s fingers found the pearl charm on her bracelet. For a moment she wished Mateo were here with her instead of on shift at La Catrina; still, she shouldn’t need a Steadfast’s power for this. It was a stronger revelation spell than she’d ever used before. She’d never had the emotional ingredients for it until now.

Laughter at a time of sorrow.

Bloodshed at a time of joy.

Salvation at the moment of despair.

Nadia kept her gaze on Mrs. Prasad as she lived each emotion in turn:

Packing to leave Chicago forever, going through the dressier clothing Mom had left behind, watching her dad’s face fall with every nice gown or glittery shoe Nadia pulled from the closet to reluctantly throw away, until he said, “I guess I could perform a drag show,” and then the two of them rolled on the floor laughing until they cried.

The laughter at the Halloween carnival, popcorn and cotton candy in everyone’s hands, all the little kids running around in their costumes, never realizing what was about to unfold within the haunted house.

Being trapped underwater in the sound, seaweed tangling around her ankles, binding her with the force of a magic so old she couldn’t fight it, desperate to breathe and sure she was about to die—until Mateo found her there in the cold and dark, pressed his mouth to hers, his breath to hers—

Mrs. Prasad screamed.

Everyone in the room turned to stare—except Nadia, who had been staring already. But she hadn’t expected a reaction like this. Suspicion, maybe. Trepidation. Caution, which would be a good thing around a demon from hell.

Instead Mrs. Prasad had gone straight to full-blown panic.

“Get away!” she cried, plowing over a few other people as she tried to back away from Asa. For his part, though he must have sensed what was going on, he looked nearly as shocked as everyone else. “Get away from me!”

Mr. Prasad’s voice came over the microphone from the city-council podium. “Honey? Honey, calm down. Nobody’s making this personal.”

But Mrs. Prasad had completely lost it. Her screams kept rising in pitch, and when Asa rose as if to go to her, she staggered back like she might pass out.

It’s too much,
Nadia realized in horror.
This spell’s too powerful. She’s seeing the demon within in a way that I can’t—a way even Mateo can’t. That’s going to drive her crazy, if it hasn’t already. I have to take it back!

Quickly she grabbed her quartz charm and called up the first useful spell she could think of: a spell of equation, one that witches sometimes used to cover up evidence of their magic, to convince people that the phenomenon they’d just seen was something totally regular—that the thing that had seemed so different to them a moment before was in fact just like everything else around them. This, too, was one Nadia had never cast before, but this seemed like the time to try it.

Snow turning into rain.

A fear suddenly realized to be false.

The interruption of the extraordinary by the ordinary.

Nadia closed her eyes, the better to concentrate:

Mom saying, “Oh, shoot,” as she stood on the balcony of their Chicago condo one unexpectedly warm Christmas, as the snow that would have made the day perfect vanished into rain, turning the whitening scene below almost instantly gray.

That time on the bus when she’d been sure this weird guy was following her, and it was only the second week her parents had let her take the bus on her own, and her heart had been pounding as he got off the bus behind her, but then he’d walked right past her into the Billy Goat Tavern and she’d laughed at her own stupidity.

The moment in her attic when she’d just finished cutting Mateo’s hair, and they’d never been so close for so long before, and they leaned into each other for what would have been their first kiss—except that Cole came in, and they’d laughed and pulled apart even though she still yearned for him so badly it hurt—

“Oh, my God!” Mrs. Prasad screamed. She didn’t sound better. She sounded a whole lot worse.

Nadia opened her eyes—just in time to see a crazed Mrs. Prasad run straight to the emergency fire ax and break the glass with her elbow.

“She isn’t—” Verlaine gasped. “Oh, crap, she is!”

Mrs. Prasad swung the ax at the people nearest her; everyone started to run and shriek. Horrified, Nadia realized that the spell of equation hadn’t made her see Asa as normal again; instead Mrs. Prasad thought everyone in the room was a demon.

And she was now trying to kill them.

What was she going to do? She had no idea. What spell could she cast for this? Even if she could think of one, which she couldn’t, Nadia knew she’d just screwed up her last two spells in ways she didn’t even fully understand. It wasn’t like she hadn’t known before this that her training was incomplete, that she didn’t know everything she needed to know, but never before had she done anything that went so incredibly, dangerously wrong.

“Somebody stop her!” one guy yelled, and a few people tried to get nearer, but Mrs. Prasad seemed like a woman possessed. She kept swinging, kept advancing, eyes wide with terror but never flinching from her homicidal determination. Wildly Nadia thought that if she ever were surrounded by demons, she’d want Mrs. Prasad by her side.

Then Asa was next to her, his breath warm against her ear as he stepped behind her. “I think someone’s gotten a little ahead of herself.”

Snap!
The entire room went motionless again—even Verlaine this time, who was frozen in place with her phone held up to get video of the entire incident. Mrs. Prasad had halted midslash, someone who’d been trying to leap away suspended in midair in front of her. People’s hair and dresses and coats were spiraled out around them from their attempts to flee. Only Nadia and Asa were able to move.

Nadia turned toward him; he was standing too close for comfort, so close he was only inches away. “What are you doing?”

“What are you doing, more like. Let me guess. You meant to kindly inform Jeremy’s mother that her son was, perhaps, no longer with the living. Why you thought she’d enjoy that knowledge is beyond me, but it’s the only sensible possibility.” Asa raised an eyebrow as he glanced at Faye Walsh next to them, paused in place as she attempted to crouch and take cover behind her seat. “If ‘sensible’ comes into this. Which I doubt.”

She wasn’t taking lectures from a demon. “You don’t think it’s sick, walking around in his skin, not letting her know her own child is dead?”

“What I think is irrelevant. I didn’t ask for a role in Elizabeth’s little dramatic production, but I play it as best I can. Let the Prasads live without grief while they can. I promise you, it can’t be for long.” His expression had been unreadable for a moment there—almost angry—but a mocking smile spread over his face. “I bet you’re weaving more memories of Mateo in with your spell ingredients. Aren’t you? Love is powerful, Nadia. Maybe more powerful than you realize. Certainly more than you can control.”

This chaos—this was because she loved Mateo so much? Nadia felt a sick sort of shiver inside. “Why are you talking to me now?”

“So angry. So rude. And here I am, helping you out.”

“Helping?”

Asa held out his hands, gesturing at the entire frozen-in-place scene around them. “Giving you a moment to get your bearings, to think how you might undo the worst of what you’ve done? Very useful, if you’ll take advantage of it. But I’d hurry up, if I were you. My existence is eternal, but my patience isn’t.”

Nadia knew better than to trust a demon’s word. “Why would you help me?”

“You know, just because Elizabeth brought me here doesn’t make me her servant,” he said, very quietly. He stepped even closer, tilted his head, as if studying her expression; she could feel the heat radiating from his body, even through her clothes. “I serve the One Beneath, not her. Yes, if she commands me to do something that helps them both, I have to do it. But that doesn’t mean I’m incapable of acting on my own. Serving my own purposes. Even working against her, if it doesn’t betray my unholy lord and master. You think I’m your enemy, but there are ways I could be a very powerful ally, Nadia.”

For a moment she paused. Could Asa be telling some sliver of the truth?

But she said only, “You need Mrs. Prasad to believe in you again, or else you’ll have blown your cover. You’ll be punished.”

He smiled mirthlessly. His black eyes seemed to look through her—as though he knew what she looked like without her clothes. “You say it so easily. What do you think the punishments of hell are like? Have you ever considered that?”

Her heart thumped wildly in her chest. “It doesn’t matter. I have to make Mrs. Prasad forget it for her own sake. So I guess it’s your lucky day.”

“Only if you think fast.” Asa held up his hands, obviously about to allow time to resume.

Nadia went for her bracelet again, this time reaching for the aquamarine charm. A spell of forgetting was simple, really. Basic. And one of the first lessons she’d learned, one she ought to have remembered before now, was that the simplest way out was almost always the best.

Snap!
People were screaming again, and she heard the
chunk
of the ax against wooden seats, but Nadia kept concentrating on the spell.

Letting go of what was once irreplaceable.

Smiling through pain.

Making right a wrong.

“Are you seeing this?” Verlaine yelled, backing away from the fast-approaching Mrs. Prasad. She was still filming. “Nadia,
move
!”

Packing a box for Goodwill full of Mom’s stuff, and dropping in the heart-shaped locket she’d given Nadia on her thirteenth birthday, the one Nadia had thought was so beautiful that she’d wear it forever.

Joking about her broken arm after coming home from the hospital, and letting Cole be the first to sign her cast, in green crayon.

Coming to see Verlaine in the hospital, finally acting like the friends they would’ve been all along but for the dark magic, and seeing Verlaine’s face light up.

Mrs. Prasad stopped. Slowly she lowered the ax. Nobody moved, or spoke, or even seemed to breathe. Then Mrs. Prasad said, “Where am I?”

“You’re okay, Mom.” Asa went to her immediately, putting one arm around her shoulders while with the other he took the ax. People sighed in relief as he handed it to someone nearby. “It’s okay. I think those new meds of yours aren’t good. You just need to lie down.”

A wave of voices rose—people either expressing sympathy or anger or bewilderment. Really, though, Nadia could tell most people were just relieved it was over. Nobody seemed to be asking any more questions about the Halloween carnival. Asa shepherded Mrs. Prasad toward the door, Mr. Prasad falling into step alongside them.

Nadia looked down at the aquamarine charm, still held between two of her fingers. She didn’t think Mrs. Prasad had full amnesia, though she’d have to check later. Her spells had been so powerful before—