Steadfast

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.”

Asa stepped closer to them, and Verlaine imagined that she could feel a kind of heat radiating from him . . . but it wasn’t her imagination. It was as though he were running a fever, one so high no human could ever have survived it. “I stopped time and told you who and what I am because I thought it would be much less annoying than listening to you whispering and guessing and carrying on. I only get so long here on Earth. I intend to enjoy it.”

That wasn’t all. It couldn’t be all. Verlaine sensed that much.

Apparently there was also something about saying his real name, whatever it was. He found it difficult.

“We know one thing,” Mateo said, folding his arms. “You don’t like Elizabeth much more than we do.”

“Are you honestly surprised? With that charming personality of hers.” Asa just smiled. “Still, I never forget: She’s the boss.”

With that, he clapped his hands together—and time began again, everyone rushing past them in the hallway like before. Nadia had stepped right into that cheerleader’s path, and she huffed and said, “Excuse you” before sweeping by the three of them.

The assistant principal glanced over her shoulder at them. “Move along. There’s nothing to see.”

“How wrong she is,” Asa whispered in Verlaine’s ear. His breath was so hot—like steam against her skin.

He walked away, quickly blending into the crowd.

Mateo turned to Nadia. “Demons?”

“What do they do?” Verlaine asked. “What is Elizabeth going to use him for?”

Nadia shook her head. “I—I don’t know. There’s too much I don’t know.” She bit her lower lip, so obviously troubled that Verlaine didn’t have the heart to ask her any more questions. “I’ll dig into Goodwife Hale’s Book of Shadows tonight. Go over my own materials. See if I can find anything else. But demons . . . that’s arcane magic. High-level magic. The kind of stuff I don’t know nearly enough about.”

Well, that wasn’t encouraging. Mateo responded to Nadia’s disquiet the way he responded to her happiness, or her absentmindedness, or anything else these days—by hugging her tightly.

Verlaine was sure of only one thing: The situation had just gotten worse.

Elizabeth opened the door to her back room. She had not entered it in years, but knew that until very recently, it had not looked like this.

Spiderwebs shivered as the wind blew through the room behind her, ruffling her chestnut curls. The room was thick with them, corner to corner, floor to ceiling. The one chair in the corner was nothing but silver white now, as though it were made of wool instead of rotting wood. Some chips of the remaining paint dangled in the webs, wrapped in cocoons as though they were prey. Elizabeth stretched her hand forward, her long fingers breaking web after web; spiders skittered along her skin, and she paid them no mind.

Here her Book of Shadows had attempted to trap Nadia Caldani—and had failed.

The webs thickened, breaking across her face, sticking to her hair. Elizabeth bent to kneel on the floor; through the misty grayness of the webs she could see the Book of Shadows. She smiled, almost fond. If Elizabeth had ever had a friend, she had long since forgotten what that felt like. The affection she felt for this book, and the primal, unthinking loyalty it gave her in return, were the closest Elizabeth would ever come to friendship again.

“I would have thought you could hold her,” Elizabeth murmured. She knew the book did not hear, but she spoke gently all the same. “There is something uncanny about her power. Something I must understand.”

Her fingers closed around the Book of Shadows. Its leather was dark with age, but not brittle in the way any ordinary binding would have been after nearly four hundred years. Instead it felt rough, too thick—like scar tissue that had never quite healed. When she lifted it from the floor, she could see the rectangular space where it had long been, free of dust or cobwebs. But one long-legged spider, as large as her palm, scurried into the spot as though to fill it up.

Elizabeth folded the book close to her chest. For so many years she had not consulted it, only drawn on its power.

But this close to the completion of her great work, she could not allow anything to go wrong. She would have to draw on every resource she had. Permit no interruptions. No mistakes.

She walked back into the area of the house where she spent most of her time. For a moment, Elizabeth saw it as a human would have seen it, were they free of her glamours: a derelict place, furnished with only a few threadbare chairs and a sofa that had not been sat in for decades and probably would no longer bear weight. Faded walls. Water bottles left over from the terrible thirst that had so long racked her but had now departed along with her immortality. (Elizabeth found that she still drank from them often, but it was now merely a matter of habit.) Her old stove, the same one that had once burned wood in the nineteenth century, which now glowed with a very different kind of flame. Broken glass strewn along her blue floor, the shards so familiar to her that she stepped through them easily, without hesitation.

Nadia would have had to wind her way through all this to reach the back room.

Elizabeth sat cross-legged in the middle of her floor, book in front of her, then unbuttoned her dress far enough to allow the shoulders to slip down her arms. The burned flesh there stuck to the fabric, and she had to tug it away; the pain was as meaningless as the stray spider at the hem of her skirt.

Without her having to speak, or even consciously think of what she wanted, the Book of Shadows fell open to a symbol she had drawn there long ago. The One Beneath had showed her this more than a century past, pooling a victim’s blood into the precise markings He needed. She had pressed this page against the symbol, and the maroon stains still held every line perfectly.

She held two fingers to the symbol, checking the sweep of those two lines—then lifted her hand to her upper arm. Yes, the arc and angle were correct. Although Elizabeth knew this by heart, when it came to this, she wanted to make utterly, completely certain.

The front door opened.

Elizabeth was only startled that so much time had passed without her realizing it, but communing with her Book of Shadows could have that effect. “Enter, beast.”

“You know, if Asa doesn’t work for you, you could just call me Jeremy.” The demon sauntered in as if she were to do his bidding, instead of the reverse. “Beast is rude.”

She flicked her hand toward him, calling up spell ingredients without even having to ask, the malachite ring around her finger automatically providing the grounding. Asa staggered backward, gripped by pain of some nature she didn’t bother to recall. As he slumped against the wall, she said, “You let your human guise deceive you. Don’t believe that you have their freedoms. Their souls. It will hinder me and hurt you, when once again you face the truth of what you are.”

“How kind—of you—to remind me,” he gasped. But already he was straightening; the pain had been vicious but had not lasted long. She had gauged it well. “Name your task.”

“For now I only want you to stay close to Nadia Caldani and her friends.”

“Difficult, seeing as how Mateo remembers Jeremy Prasad’s death. And Nadia’s more than far enough along in her training to know a demon when she sees one.” Asa lifted his chin, attempting to display a bit of his earlier nonchalance; it would have been more convincing if his skin weren’t still shiny with the cold sweat of pain.

“Do what you can,” she said. “I still don’t understand how Nadia made him her Steadfast. No man should be able to hold that power. They’re trying to learn more about the fate of the Laughtons, which is meaningless on its own, but could lead them too close to things they cannot discover.”

Asa’s eyes darted over to the stove, to the unearthly glow that flickered through the narrow slits of its door. He understood. Good.

“Eventually they’ll think they can use you to get to me.” Elizabeth slid her dress back on her shoulders, once again felt the distant sting of pain on her arm. Probably she should bandage that. Though her earthly body only needed to serve a brief time longer, there was no point in being weakened by illness or injury when the One Beneath’s work had to be done. “Maybe you’ll think so, too. But we both know how this ends.”

“Yes. We do.” Asa looked down on the symbol in blood; the two lines she’d already drawn on her flesh had begun to glow slightly. Elizabeth felt the answering heat on her skin.