Spellcaster (Spellcaster #1) (15 page)

After a few moments of awkward silence, Verlaine tried to lighten the mood. “Hey, at least we weren’t here for the ice storm in July. Or the time everyone at a screening of
How To Marry a Millionaire
started bleeding from the eyes and they blamed CinemaScope.”

“I have a feeling—before this fall is through, we’ll
wish
that’s all we had to deal with,” Nadia said, which in Verlaine’s opinion wasn’t helping the mood one bit. But Nadia remained focused. “What I can’t get over are how many reports there are about witches, witchcraft, et cetera. All the reports are about rumors—‘town lore,’ that kind of thing—but it seems like witchcraft has been a pretty open secret here for a long time.”

Verlaine pointed out, “Some of that is just New England for you. I mean, you have the Salem witch trials—women who fled Massachusetts because they were scared by the witch trials—that kind of thing.”

“Right, of course,” Nadia said, “but this goes way past that. So there have to be other witches in town, besides me and—and Elizabeth.”

As Nadia spoke, she glanced over at Mateo, but he didn’t argue. His arms were folded, and the expression on his face was strange—almost sad. He noticed both of them watching him and sighed. “I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that the curse is real. And looking through these records—do you see how often all the weirdness in town gets blamed on one of the Cabots? Not just Millicent. Any of us—almost all of us. Sometimes it was true, because of the curse. Sometimes it wasn’t true, because of the witchcraft. It’s like I have to rewrite everything I know about my family. About myself.”

“It has to be rough,” Nadia said softly. “I’m sorry.” They gave each other a look then, one of those looks that seemed to raise the room’s temperature by a few degrees and make Verlaine feel like she ought to find an excuse to leave.

Instead, she slid over the volume that read
1815–1820
. “I only found one report about witchcraft, actually. This one.”

“This is almost two hundred years old?” Nadia began turning the pages, but very gingerly.

“A reproduction. The really old issues are too fragile now; they made copies of a lot of it back in the nineteen-fifties. But it’s all verbatim.”

They all gathered together, shoulder to shoulder, as Nadia found the correct issue. It took awhile to locate the story they wanted—newspapers were different then, with tiny type and vague headlines and no sections dividing the news by topic. But within a couple of minutes they had it:

“‘The sailors met their mischance while diving off the lighthouse for so-called “buried treasure,” perhaps believing it brought by privateers returning from the Caribbean,’” Verlaine read aloud. “‘But such treasure is well known to be only the possessions of one Goodwife Hale, an early settler of Captive’s Sound. Rumormongers and gossips claimed she had fled the Salem witch trials, and to be sure, she was a peculiar character, known for home medicines and squirreling away odds and ends not valuable to any rational mind. Yet she was a poor woman who never owned the gold or jewels that the sailors boasted they might find. Compatriots in the tavern who overheard the doomed men’s braggadocio about treasure tried to tell them better, but they paid no heed—and have paid the price.’”

Nadia sighed. “Gold. Jewels. The stuff a witch would have possessed—it would have been worth way more than any of that junk, at least to me.”

“How do you know she was a witch?” Verlaine had studied the Salem hysteria in school; none of those people had really been witches.

“Well, I can’t be totally sure,” Nadia admitted, “but it sounds right. The bit about the home medicine—that’s a clue. And keeping odds and ends that nobody else thought were useful? They could have been for spells. Plus, the article talks about her hiding stuff here and there, so—who knows? The sailors who died probably heard something third- or fourth-hand that was based on the truth. If she really did hide something out in the sound, it could’ve been … I don’t know. Something amazing. But it has to have washed away years ago.”

Mateo straightened in his chair, an odd expression on his face. “Or maybe not.”

“What do you mean?” Verlaine said.

“After I became your Steadfast—when I could see—” He stumbled over the word before getting it out. “When I could see
magic
for the first time, I saw something shining up from beneath the water. Right around the lighthouse. Something brilliant green, and strong, like a spotlight.”

“Green,” Nadia murmured. “That sounds good.” Apparently she could sense Verlaine’s confusion, because she added, “Different kinds of magic often hold different colors. Black magic—misused magic, evil—that’s usually a shade of red. Something green is either harmless or very, very helpful.”

They all looked at one another. It was funny, Verlaine thought, how you could actually
see
an idea make its way around the room, illuminating each of their faces in turn.

“What’s down there?” Verlaine finally whispered.

“No idea.” Nadia started to grin. “But I intend to find out.”

THE MAGICAL POSSESSIONS OF A WITCH FROM MORE THAN
three centuries in the past—what could they be? What had Mateo seen shimmering in the depths of the sound? There could be tinctures and potions in sealed jars or bottles. Her bracelet or rings, whatever materials she had used to help her cast spells, which over time would acquire certain glamours of their own. Or anything, really, once mundane but enchanted by the mysterious Goodwife Hale.

By far the most tantalizing possibility, though, was that it might be Goodwife Hale’s Book of Shadows.

The water burial would make sense. A Book of Shadows acquired too much power and individuality to simply be burned on a witch’s death, but was a dangerous thing to leave lying around. Most witches either willed theirs to a younger witch in her family or were buried with them. Goodwife Hale might have chosen another path.

What would a centuries-old spell book look like? Nadia knew that most spells evolved over time, from community to community, from generation to generation. What would spells that ancient call for? How powerful must the book have been for it to need burial at sea?

“You’ve got that look again,” Mateo said as he stood beside their table. They’d all decamped to La Catrina so he could be there for his evening shift, and she and Verlaine had made themselves comfortable in a far corner. But it was a quiet night at the restaurant, and instead of the bedlam she’d expected, they were surrounded by the murmurs of conversation at the few tables that were occupied, and delicious smells—black beans, roast chicken, fresh-cut tomatoes. Best of all was the way Mateo was smiling at her. “That gotta-have-it look,” he said.

“It’s important,” she insisted. “Something extremely strange is going on in this town—a magical artifact from way back in its history could tell us a lot.”

And if it is a Book of Shadows, it would teach me so much—maybe some of what my mother should’ve taught me and never will—

“No arguments here,” Mateo said. “You know this stuff; I don’t. It’s like … it makes you light up. It’s cute.”

He’d called her cute. Her cheeks felt warm. Nadia dropped her gaze from his face, bashful, but found herself staring at his hands instead. They were nice hands—square and solid, and she remembered how he had held them out to her on the terrifying night of the wreck—

“Um, guys?” Verlaine glanced up from her laptop, which was currently atop their dinner table and casting a greenish light on her face. Her eyes were wide, and her voice shook. “I think you might want to see this.”

“What is it?” Nadia said as Verlaine turned the laptop around so they could see.

“Okay, last year everybody who got detention had to help scan and catalog all the school annuals going back to the first one in 1892. So now there’s an online version alumni can look through, stuff like that.” With a nervous look at Mateo, she said, “I thought I’d run a search on Elizabeth. If she’s a witch, maybe some people she spent time with the past couple of years might be witches, too, right?”

Nadia nodded; given the signs she’d already seen of a long history of witchcraft in Captive’s Sound, it seemed unlikely that Elizabeth would be the only one. Although Mateo frowned and crossed his arms in front of him, he didn’t protest.

Verlaine continued, “Look at the index.”

She turned the screen around for them to see. Elizabeth Pike was pictured in last year’s Rodman High School annual. And five years before that. And three years before that. And on and on—Nadia scrolled down to see that the list of images went back and back, never skipping more than seven years, all the way to 1892.

“It’s a family name, I guess,” Mateo said.

“But look.” Verlaine flipped the computer around and started pulling up images. “Here’s from last year—she didn’t get an official picture taken, but there’s this—” A photo showed Elizabeth on the quad, drinking a soda, just one of several students caught in a random shot. “And there’s this from 1963.”

The 1963 image popped up on screen, and Nadia gaped. The caption said it was “Liz Pike” standing in line for the new water fountain—but it looked exactly like Elizabeth. Her hair might have been in a little sprayed bubble and the clothes she wore might have looked like something out of a black-and-white movie, and maybe there was something about her face that made her look a bit older, but the resemblance was beyond uncanny.

Mateo shrugged. “So that’s her grandmother. What about it?”

Verlaine said, “And 1930.”

This image was of some kind of school dance. Standing behind the punch bowl in a ruffled formal dress and a big corsage at her neckline was another Elizabeth, equally identical to the one they knew—“Betsy Pike,” maybe a year or so older than the one from 1963.

“Now 1892.” Verlaine brought up one more image, a formal portrait. The caption again read “Elizabeth Pike”; the face was again unmistakably similar. Even with a lacy, high-necked shirt on and her hair caught atop her head in a prim bun, it was undeniably the exact same face. Only one change was obvious: The version in the earliest photo was the oldest. In 1892, she was listed as a teacher, not a student—a young one, perhaps, but no teenager.

For a long moment, nobody could speak. Finally Nadia said, “I don’t understand.”

“It’s a family name,” Mateo insisted. “Has to be.”

“There’s no way four generations all look that much alike.” Nadia’s mind was working fast.

She’d never learned any black magic—never wanted to. Once you started dealing with those kinds of spells, you were in league with demons, maybe with the One Beneath. But she knew enough about it to recognize it when she saw it.

Something like this—it was darker, and stronger, and scarier than anything she’d even heard of before.

“Elizabeth’s family has to have been a part of this for a very long time.” They would all have been witches, of course; the Craft was handed down mother to daughter.

Verlaine said, “A part of what?”

“Black magic.”

Mateo’s eyes darkened; his lips pressed together into a thin line. After a long moment, he said, “You can’t know any of that from pictures in the yearbook. Come on.”

“You’ve seen the pictures,” Nadia insisted. “The same as we have. That’s not a normal family resemblance, at all. It goes beyond that. It’s almost like Elizabeth … like she’s being born over and over …” But how would that even work?

“Okay, I don’t know what the explanation is, but there has to be one,” Mateo protested. “A joke by the kids in detention, Photoshopping some of us into old pictures, maybe. That doesn’t mean she’s evil.”

“But this isn’t as simple as Photoshop. I’m sure of it.” The memory of Elizabeth smiling at her coolly while the entire chemistry class had a meltdown burned in Nadia’s mind, constant as a gas flame, the one real proof she had that Elizabeth was far more than she seemed. What was going on?

Mateo said only, “I’m tired of blaming Elizabeth all the time. Let’s just get this magic … thing you need and go on from there, okay?”

Right then, his father strolled over to them; he had his son’s coloring but a pug-ugly face that suggested Mateo’s aquiline good looks came from his mother. “Mateo, it’s nice that you’re spending so much time with the lovely ladies, but you should also spend some time with your other tables. Especially table eleven, the nice men whose fajitas are ready?”

“Sure, Dad. Nadia and Verlaine were just leaving,” Mateo said. He didn’t sound angry, exactly, but obviously he was glad to have an excuse to end the conversation.

As Verlaine and Nadia walked away from La Catrina afterward, Verlaine said, “Is that possible, what you said? Someone being born over and over again?”

“Well, I’m not sure. I never heard of a spell like that.” If she could only talk to Mom for five minutes …

“If you never heard of that spell before, then why do you think that’s what’s going on?”

Nadia shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable in the early fall chill. Dark visions drawn from her mother’s few whispered warnings about black magic swirled in her mind, and it seemed to her that underneath her feet she could feel the unsteady shifting of demon-haunted ground. An illusion, of course—but an illusion that might have meaning.

To Verlaine she said only, “With powerful enough magic—anything is possible. Anything at all.”

That night, Mateo fell into bed, exhausted, but he couldn’t sleep.

As he lay there, stretched atop his covers with his jeans still on, his mind raced. Even walking down the streets of Captive’s Sound was different for him now; he knew the places he saw the glimmer were places touched by magic, knew the grime between him and the sky was proof that the entire town labored under some malevolent force. And even washing his face meant having to look again at the swirling, sickly blackness that haloed his head.

His curse was as loathsome to look at as it was to endure.

He shook a few extra Tylenol PM into his palm; he knew you could overdo these, and even trying not to have the dreams wasn’t worth frying his liver, but he’d looked up the maximum safe dosage online. With one fist he tossed them into his mouth, gulped them down with water, and hoped again to rest too deeply for dreaming.