Steadfast

5

THE TOWN HALL FOR CAPTIVE’S SOUND WAS IMPRESSIVE, for a small town—almost too impressive—so much so that the contrast drew comic attention to itself, like a balding, middle-aged man with a red sports car. In the middle of this small, dreary town was an enormous, white Palladian creation with pillars and a dome. Nadia thought it looked more like the Supreme Court than the venue for a community chat about how the Halloween carnival had gone wrong.

“Thanks for coming to this with me.” Verlaine was scowling down at her phone as they walked through the square, trying to get her Voice Memo app to work. “Not even a paper as lazy as the Guardian can ignore the haunted house burning down in the middle of town. And of course, the Lightning Rod will be the source for real news, if anybody ever reads it.”

“Oh, come on. Someone has to read it.”

“The week before I went into the hospital? We got fifteen hits, not counting my own log-ins. Eight of those clicked straight through to find out when Shangri-La was having two-for-one drink specials.”

“Shangri-La?”

“The local nightclub.”

Nadia was still new to town, but she would have thought she’d have heard of this place, if only because sources of fun here were so rare. “I can’t believe Captive’s Sound has an actual nightclub.”

“You can’t believe it because we don’t. You have understood our Podunk nature perfectly. But Shangri-La’s just in the next town over. They don’t card.” Verlaine paused. “At least, I hear they don’t card. I never had anybody to go with, so I don’t actually know for myself.”

“We’ll go,” Nadia promised, really without thinking about it. But when she saw how Verlaine lit up, she felt guilty for how much Verlaine needed to hear that.

Remembering the dark magic that screened Verlaine away from the rest of the world was a constant challenge, and tonight it had been one of the last things on Nadia’s mind. Mostly she had come to the meeting to learn precisely what people had seen the night of the Halloween carnival—whether they would mention details that just seemed odd to them but might, for Nadia, be recognizable as signs of magic. Those signs could give her some clue as to what Elizabeth’s master plan really was.

But I have to remember Verlaine, Nadia thought as they went up the steps, falling in with other people coming to the meeting. Verlaine’s gray hair was now in a sloppy bun held back by two cloisonné chopsticks; the hairstyle revealed her neck, and showed just how thin she was, how fragile. She needs me and Mateo. She doesn’t have anyone else.

The meeting hall had rows of seats not unlike those of a theater, the fabric a little shabby in comparison with the high ceilings and big paintings of what Nadia assumed were famous people from Rhode Island history, though none of them was famous enough for her to recognize. For Verlaine’s audio to work, they had to sit in the very front row, dead center. Nadia felt a little self-conscious and glanced around—just in time to see the Prasads come in, Asa behind them.

“Demon in the house,” Verlaine said. “Crap. What is he doing here?”

“Right now he might just be pretending to be Jeremy,” Nadia said. The Prasads obviously hadn’t realized anything was wrong. Mrs. Prasad was even now affectionately pushing Asa’s hair out of his eyes. “But Elizabeth brought him here to help her. So we can’t ever trust him or anything he does. Remember that. Demons can make it hard to deny them.”

Verlaine just kept looking down at her podcast equipment; apparently the phone app was just for backup. “Is his body dead or alive? Like, after a couple of weeks, will he get sort of—zombie-esque?”

“I don’t know. But I doubt it.” Nadia watched the way the Prasads kept talking to the thing they thought was their son. She was repulsed to see the evident love his mother felt being poured out to a demon, a servant of the One Beneath, who was actually using her child’s corpse to do Elizabeth’s bidding. “It’s sick. It’s wrong. I can’t even stand it.”

“Uh-oh—that sounds bad,” said Faye Walsh as she took her seat a few chairs down in the front row; she was chic as ever in a white trench coat and large hoop earrings. Nadia realized she must have looked stricken, because Ms. Walsh held up her hands. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”

Which was probably the truth. But Faye Walsh was one of those guidance counselors who expected to actually counsel, who wanted you to pour out your soul before you took the college brochures. She was already “concerned” about Nadia because of Mom’s vanishing act; the last thing Nadia wanted to do was attract even more of her attention. And while Ms. Walsh might not be trying to pry, she was sitting so close that there was no way she couldn’t hear.

Flustered, Verlaine said, “I, uh, what was that? Sorry. AV equipment gets all, um, tangled, with the cords, and then I lose track of things.” Her eyes widened as if to say, Sorry that wasn’t more believable.

Of the ninety thousand things Nadia had to worry about, was even one of them completely normal? There had to be something she could say that would sound like a completely ordinary problem. She blurted out, “I can’t believe my dad’s already thinking about dating again.”

“Ewww.” Verlaine wrinkled her nose. “Really?”

“Yeah, really. Well, maybe really. Apparently an old friend of his in New York—female friend—tried to ask him out while they were there. Nothing happened, but still, he must be thinking about it.”

“Even if he’s not, they’ll be after him soon.” Verlaine nodded, like she’d seen it coming all along. “Every single, divorced, or widowed woman in Captive’s Sound between the ages of twenty-five and fifty probably already has him in her sights. They’re just trying to figure out the line between ‘too soon’ and ‘too late.’”

“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—

—could Asa be right? Could her love for Mateo be throwing her off balance?

“Nadia?” Ms. Walsh stepped closer. “What are you doing?”

She was staring down at the bracelet, the one with all the charms Nadia required to practice witchcraft.

“Holy Christmas, what was that?” Verlaine came up, already looking at the playback of the video on her phone. “This town is getting even weirder. Now we have possessed PTA moms wielding axes.”

Nadia let her hands fall to her side. To Ms. Walsh she said only, “We should get out of here. Let them sort things out.”

Which didn’t make much sense, but Ms. Walsh simply nodded. She backed away slowly, never taking her eyes off Nadia. The bracelet of charms around Nadia’s wrist had never felt so conspicuous before; she always thought of it as looking like just another piece of jewelry, but now she felt as though she were wearing a flashing sign that proclaimed her a witch.

That was ridiculous, of course. But as she watched Ms. Walsh go, one thought flashed through Nadia’s mind: She knows.