Steadfast (4 page)

And of course, Elizabeth was still his lab partner.

“Ah, young love,” said Mrs. Purdhy, who had walked up while they were distracted. Mateo and Nadia pulled apart slightly. “What a beautiful sight. Also, what a stupid reason for a tardy. You two want to get into class?”

“Oh, yeah, right.” Nadia shared a glance with Mateo. They were stuck.

As they walked in, Jeremy was arranging the stuff for today’s experiment neatly on the lab table he shared with Nadia.
(Oh, crap, how did I forget that he’s teamed with Nadia?)
Elizabeth went calmly to her own table to wait for Mateo, staring at him the whole time he approached. She didn’t so much as glance at Jeremy.

Memories flickered through his mind: the two of them as eight-year-olds, making cookies and giggling. Swimming together in the surf on a blazing-hot summer afternoon. Hiking around Breakheart Pond two years ago, on a cool, bright autumn day much like this one.

Those were some of the happiest memories of Mateo’s life—and each and every one was fake.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he muttered as he came to the table.

“Learning about—” She squinted at the board. “Combustion, apparently.”

“Stop lying to me!” That came out too loudly; a few people turned their heads in his direction.

Elizabeth just smiled and pushed up the sleeves of her cardigan. Her hair was a little disheveled, her cardigan not quite on straight. Had she always been like this? Slightly askew? “I doubt you’d like the truth any better. But don’t worry, Mateo. I’m not here for you today; I’m not even here for her.” She nodded over at Nadia, who was currently watching the un-Jeremy obediently start filling out today’s worksheet. “I have my own reasons.”

From the front of the room, Mrs. Purdhy started lecturing. “Okay, everyone. We got an inadvertent lesson about combustion over the weekend—” People groaned at the bad joke, and she nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Work with me here. Today’s lesson is going to be a lot more controlled than that, and hopefully a lot more fun.”

Between Elizabeth standing there next to him like nothing was going on and the
dead guy
right by Nadia, Mateo could hardly pay attention to what else the teacher was saying . . . but then he realized she’d stopped talking.

He looked toward the front. Mrs. Purdhy was standing very still, her eyes wide with what he knew was fright. She wasn’t looking at Elizabeth or Not-Jeremy, not at anything in particular. Her eyes seemed glazed with fear.

People started glancing at one another, looking for confirmation that this was definitely weird. After a moment, Kendall Bender raised her hand and said, “Um, Mrs. Purdhy, do you know you’re, like, acting all weird?”

There was no answer. Slowly Mrs. Purdhy lifted one hand to her throat, like she might be about to cough.

“Ma’am?” Kendall’s voice was a little quieter. “Are you okay?”

Mrs. Purdhy opened her mouth. A drop of liquid appeared at the corner of her lips and trickled down her chin—black as tar.

People started to swear. A few students in the front row shoved their desks backward or hurried to the rear of the classroom. One guy started filming it on his phone. Someone else dashed into the hallway and started yelling for the school nurse. Nadia pushed toward the front, to Mrs. Purdhy’s side. “Are you all right? Can you talk?”

Mrs. Purdhy showed no sign she could hear, or see, or take in anything besides whatever was happening to her. The liquid coming out of her mouth increased—a slow pour, thick as chocolate syrup, and getting thicker by the moment. Black streaks were beginning to rain down her shirt. When droplets hit the floor, the linoleum made a horrible sizzling sound.

Mateo turned to Elizabeth. “What the hell are you doing?”

Elizabeth never even glanced sideways at him. “I told you I wasn’t here for you.”

With a gurgling cry, Mrs. Purdhy clutched at her throat and passed out. Nadia caught her and eased her to the floor.

To hell with Elizabeth. Mateo ran to Nadia’s side; somebody else had to help. As he knelt beside them, careful not to touch whatever that gunk was, he saw that Nadia had pillowed Mrs. Purdhy’s head on her knees—the better to take hold of her bracelet and cast some kind of spell. Mateo wrapped his arms around Nadia’s waist, knowing that the closer they were, the more she would be able to draw upon the increased power he gave her as her Steadfast.

But after a moment, Nadia whispered, “I can’t get at it. Whatever it is—it’s too strong.”

Mateo looked down at Mrs. Purdhy, who was beginning to convulse on the floor. As he pressed down her arms to keep her from hurting herself, he thought for a moment that the tarry stuff coming out of her had streaked all along her face and hands. Then he realized that the black streaks were beneath her skin, widening and darkening like grotesque veins.

What’s happening to her?
He looked at Nadia, who shook her head in despair.

Then the school nurse came in, and she shooed them off, and it turned out Kendall had called 9-1-1 because the paramedics showed up about ninety seconds after that. Within a few minutes, they were running down the hallway with Mrs. Purdhy on their gurney, and in the panic nobody had thought to send in a substitute or anything else. People huddled in the room, crying, talking, or posting details on Facebook.

Nadia curled into Mateo’s embrace. “I feel so helpless.”

“If anyone can help her, it’s you.” He stroked his hands through Nadia’s black hair. “Don’t blame yourself. We know who’s really to blame.”

As Mateo turned his head to glare at Elizabeth, he saw her walk through the other students to the black puddle on the floor where Mrs. Purdhy had fallen. Everyone else was leaving that gunk severely alone; no doubt a custodian would show up any second to mop the floor clean, but Mateo wondered if it would disintegrate the mop or something. Whatever that crap was, it wasn’t good.

Elizabeth went to her knees beside it and pulled her cardigan half-down, exposing her shoulders. Then she dipped two fingers into the stuff. Smoke rose from her nails as she raised her hand and painted two stripes on the very top of her arm. The skin there burned so quickly that he could smell it—the disgusting odor that came from cooking meat that had gone bad.

Nobody else paid attention. Nobody else could even see what Elizabeth was doing; she had willed them not to see. Her power was so vast that she could do her worst right in front of people, without them ever knowing a thing.

But once you knew the truth, Elizabeth’s power became easier to see. Mateo and Nadia both stared, and Nadia whispered, “She’s burned.”

The red streaks on Elizabeth’s arm bubbled, immediately blistering. A surge of sympathetic pain lanced across Mateo’s shoulder; his nerve endings didn’t understand that she didn’t deserve sympathy.

And the light that shimmered around her as she did it—the glow of it was febrile and sick. Mateo understood instinctively that this was something only he could see with his Steadfast power. So he stared at it long and hard, this orange halo that melted around her for a moment and was gone.
Tell Nadia this. Tell Nadia everything.

Elizabeth simply pulled her cardigan back on and walked out of class. As usual, nobody noticed.

For a few moments, Mateo and Nadia could only look at the doorway she’d walked through. Mateo’s mind kept replaying that horrible gurgle Mrs. Purdhy had made—like she was both trying to breathe and trying to scream.

Whatever had happened to her was Elizabeth’s fault. Just like the curse, and Mom’s death, and everything else in Captive’s Sound. All because of Elizabeth.

Then Jeremy came up beside them, gesturing in the direction Elizabeth had gone. “What a bitch, huh?”

4

ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE ELSE IN VERLAINE’S PSYCHOLOGY
class had been texted about Mrs. Purdhy’s sudden collapse . . . everyone, that was, besides Verlaine.

Not that she was upset about being left out. Between Nadia’s magical powers and Mateo’s hero complex, no doubt her friends were right in the thick of it. Like usual.

Now she intended to get in the thick of it, too. Yes, the world of witchcraft was dangerous and terrifying, but it was also about a thousand times more interesting than anything else Verlaine had going on.

So Verlaine darted through the hallways with her books clutched to her chest, not even bothering to go to her locker, ducking and weaving around other students to reach the chem lab before Nadia and Mateo left. As she got near, she saw that the guidance counselor, Faye Walsh, was closing the room, using duct tape the way police might have used yellow crime-scene banners. Standing nearby were Nadia and Mateo, clinging to each other like . . . socks out of the dryer.

Oh, stop it. Just because you haven’t got anybody is no reason to resent Nadia and Mateo for falling in love.

But then she noticed guy who was
not Jeremy Prasad
standing right next to them.

“What happened?” she said as she ran up, trying to keep an eye on the not-Jeremy while not being obvious about it. Crowds of students kept hurrying past, trying to get a look at the scene. She kept hearing murmurs like
seizure
and
overdose
. “Is Mrs. Purdhy dead?”

“She wasn’t when the ambulance left,” Mateo said. His arm was around Nadia’s shoulder, and neither of them was bothering to hide the fact that they were staring at the dead person; Not-Jeremy seemed to be smiling, as though amused by their attention. “Beyond that, we don’t know.”

Nadia said, “Elizabeth did it. We know that much. I have no idea what kind of spell that was—or what the burning was about—but I doubt she did it alone.”

Verlaine gave in and stared at Not-Jeremy, too. He sighed, for a moment so put upon and annoyed that he seemed like his old self again. “You know, I should probably make you guys guess a while longer, but what the hell.”

With a grin, he brought his hands together, as if to clap—

—but the moment Verlaine heard the sound, all the other noise around her stopped.

So did all the movement. Everybody around her froze in place, midstep, midword. One girl’s blond ponytail levitated in air, midbounce. Ms. Walsh held the silver duct tape slightly above her head, like she was studying it in the light. Verlaine kept turning from one direction to another, trying to make herself believe what she was seeing. Nadia and Mateo were doing the same.

And the guy who was now definitely, positively
not Jeremy
leaned against the wall and folded his arms against his chest.

“There’s not that much I can do on my own,” he said. “But I can do this. Nice trick, hmm? You’d be surprised how often it comes in handy.”

“Who are you?” Verlaine demanded. “No.
What
are you?”

“You may call me—” His voice choked off for a moment, but then he smiled, casual again. “Asa.”

Nadia jerked backward, out of Mateo’s embrace, so far that she knocked into a frozen-in-place cheerleader. Her pom-pom rustled, but otherwise the cheerleader remained still. “You can’t say your true name.”

“Asa” sighed. “Elizabeth thought your training might not have gotten far enough for you to recognize my nature. I’ll enjoy telling her she’s mistaken.”

“What does that mean?” Verlaine demanded, looking from Nadia to Asa to Mateo to the weird stopped-time scene around them. Not even the hands of the wall clock were moving. “Why can’t he say his name?”

“Because he’s a demon,” Nadia whispered.

For a few moments, nobody spoke. Asa just shrugged, like,
Yeah, you got me.
Then Mateo said, “Since when did demons come into this? There are
demons
?”

“A
demon
demon?” Verlaine couldn’t stop staring at him. “From hell?”

“We call it hell sometimes,” Asa said. “Just a figure of speech, though I promise you, it’s appropriate. Where I’m from isn’t a collection of evil dead people, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’ve been down there for centuries—haven’t run into Hitler once.”

“Demons come from the realm of the One Beneath.” Nadia’s eyes were narrowed now, like she was mad as hell but still hadn’t decided what to do about it. “They’re souls bound to serve Him.”

Oh, okay. This was starting to make a little bit of sense. “You mean, he’s like Elizabeth,” Verlaine said, relieved to have put some of this together.

But Nadia shook her head, never taking her gaze from Asa. “No. Elizabeth chose her path; no one controls her but the One Beneath himself. A demon was either captured by the One Beneath or one of His servants, or brought into being by one of their spells. They don’t have a lot of power on their own, but once they’re summoned into service, they can perform levels of dark magic no human being ever could.”

“Like a Steadfast for a Sorceress?” Mateo said.

“Not exactly.” Nadia gave Asa a thin, mirthless smile. “More like a Sorceress’s slave.”

As weird, screwed-up, and freakish as this whole scene was, Verlaine couldn’t help thinking Nadia had skated over a pretty critical point. “But—if they got captured—if they didn’t choose to be bad—then they’re the victims of the One Beneath. Slaves, you said. That’s wrong, isn’t it?”

Asa turned his head toward her as though he’d never seen her before. And then, in his dark eyes, she glimpsed something that had never been there when this was Jeremy Prasad.

No. Something that had never been there when anyone looked at her, ever. It was as though—as though he could
see
her, but he didn’t mind what he saw—

“Don’t waste your pity,” Nadia said. “Asa can only be here because Elizabeth brought him to do her bidding. I never thought they could walk in our world like this, but apparently there’s some kind of spell to put a demon inside a dead body.”

“A spell that involves digging out the eyes.” Mateo’s face was ashen, and Verlaine remembered the horrifying story he’d told them about having to stand there motionless, bound by Elizabeth’s magic, watching her slice into Jeremy with the serrated edge of a seashell. “The big question is why you’re telling us all this.”

Verlaine half raised her hand. “Actually, I think the big question is how he
stopped time
. And also why.”