“Can’t do what?”

“Challenge Elizabeth. Not if it puts everyone I care about in danger. We have to find some way to convince her we’re giving up. And—I don’t know how, but we’ll figure out a way”—Nadia swallowed hard; this was the worst part—“a way to break the bond between us. You can’t be my Steadfast any longer, Mateo.”

He stared back at her. She’d imagined that he might be relieved, but instead he looked wounded … as wounded as she felt. More than anything, she wanted to take it all back, and tell him that of course they were tied together forever. How could it ever be any other way?

Instead she turned and walked away, refusing to look back.

17

NADIA MANAGED TO AVOID BOTH VERLAINE AND MATEO for the rest of the school day, even though she had to hide in the bathroom instead of eating lunch. It felt cowardly, hiding from them—

—no, all of it felt cowardly, period.

I’m not backing down because I’m scared, Nadia reminded herself. It’s because I’m putting too many people in danger. Dad. Cole. Mateo. Elizabeth’s evil—but that doesn’t make her my problem.

That was all true, or true enough. So why did it make her feel so hollow inside?

When the final bell rang, she didn’t even bother returning to her locker, just shouldered her heavy backpack and hurried across the grounds, not looking back. The crowd of laughing, carefree people didn’t seem to have anything to do with Nadia. Even though she’d learned most of their names by now, worked with a couple of people on school projects, they were still strangers, really. And that was how she wanted it.

But it was so easy to imagine them out on the night of the Halloween carnival, acting crazy in their costumes, laughing like this, until the ground began to shake—

“Nadia!” That was Verlaine behind her. Nadia didn’t want to turn around, but she did.

Verlaine and Mateo ran to her, side by side. Why was it surprising to realize they would have talked about this without her? The whole world doesn’t revolve around you, she told herself. But all she could do was grip her backpack straps tightly and stare at the ground as they came closer.

“Wait up,” Verlaine panted, even though Nadia had already stopped walking. “We need to talk to you about this.”

Mateo said nothing, only looked at Nadia with those dark eyes—brown with a touch of gold.

Nadia managed to say, “I realize you guys both need to understand what was done to you. And maybe I can help with that. But this whole thing about figuring Elizabeth out, taking her on—that has to stop.”

“How can you say that?” Verlaine stomped one Converse-clad foot on the ground. “We’re just supposed to let her go on like she has been? Hurting anybody who gets in her way?”

“If we get in her way, then we’re next.” Although she was talking to Verlaine, Nadia couldn’t look away from Mateo’s face. “We’re all fooling around with stuff we don’t understand—not even me. My mom”—her voice choked in her throat; she spat the bitter words out—“my mom didn’t teach me enough. There’s no one else to teach me. I’m not Elizabeth’s equal. I’m not even close. To you two, maybe it seems like I know everything there is to know about magic, but I don’t. Anything I try to do to Elizabeth is doomed to fail. Do you understand that? Mateo, you—you got hurt two days ago. You could have ended up on a ventilator, in a coma, for the rest of your life. And that was just Ginger coming after you because you knew too much! Because of me. It’s nothing compared to what Elizabeth could do. Do you guys get how far over our heads we are here? If you did, there’s no way you’d fight me about this. You’d know the only thing to do is to run as far away from Elizabeth as possible.”

“How?” Mateo said quietly. “We live here. I’m cursed. There’s no getting away from that.”

“I don’t know,” Nadia confessed. “We’ll have to figure something out.” She’d been up all night asking herself this same question. Dad liked his new job, even if they did scrape by on less money, but she figured he’d still put her and Cole in front of everything else. So if she started talking about how desperately she missed Chicago—and said she wanted to go to Yale or Stanford, someplace crazy expensive—maybe he’d talk to his old law firm and get his job back. It was the only plan she had so far, but it seemed possible.

Verlaine was so thin, so pale—a stretched cobweb of a girl—that Nadia sometimes forgot how tall she was. Now, though, when Verlaine’s fury was blazing, there was no forgetting that she towered over her, and even had a few inches on Mateo. “Elizabeth might’ve killed my parents. She definitely killed Mateo’s mom. How can we not take her on? Somebody has to! Do you want to let her get away with it?”

“No!” Nadia shot back. “But she already got away with it! I don’t have the power to stop her, and you two—you have to stop believing that I do. You have to stop believing in me.”

She started to turn away from them, but Mateo’s hand closed around her arm, and just like that, Nadia couldn’t move. Feeling him touch her made her want to melt, even though she knew she ought to push him away.

Mateo looked at her steadily as he said, “I can’t do that.”

“You can walk away from Elizabeth if you have to—you’ve already started—”