Nothing was worth more than Nadia’s safety. If he had to suffer for it—go crazy for it, be like his mother and grandfather before him—then that was just how it was.

“Hey, are you okay?” Gage looked worried. “You kinda went away for a second there.”

Verlaine nodded. “Your eyes did this kind of misty thing.” She shot Nadia a look like, Is that magic?

Nadia didn’t see it; she was looking only at Mateo, and a shadow of the yearning he felt flickered in her eyes, too.

Even Verlaine must have been able to see it, because she hurriedly said, “Gage, Mr. Perez, could I talk to you guys for a second?”

They glanced at each other, then back at Verlaine. Gage shrugged. “Yeah, but why?”

“We’re doing a special on this in the Lightning Rod. About how even teenagers need to watch their health, because stuff like this can happen to anyone.” Verlaine’s expression was so serious and businesslike that Mateo had to cover his mouth like he was yawning, just to hide the smile. “Mr. Perez, your eyewitness account would of course be the most compelling—and Gage, you’re the ‘guy on the street,’ the average high school student confronting his mortality for the first time.”

“Confronting my mortality?” Gage didn’t look too thrilled about that.

Dad, though, seized on the idea. “This is definitely something you kids should think about. Come on. We’ll get snacks in the cafeteria. Healthy snacks!”

“Absolutely,” Verlaine said, shepherding them both out the door. “Mmm. Fruit.”

As soon as the hospital-room door swung shut, both Mateo and Nadia burst out laughing. “How does she do that?” Nadia said.

“No idea.” But already Mateo’s attention had returned to Nadia, and to whatever witchcraft had brought him here. “Nadia—what happened? How did you save me?”

She pressed her lips together in a thin line for a moment before answering. “Ginger tried to cast a spell of forgetting. So you wouldn’t remember what you’d learned about her. Of course, she didn’t know you were a Steadfast. You boosted the power of the spell, and basically—you forgot everything. Your body forgot how to live. It was dangerous, way more than she meant it to be.”

It helped a little to know that Ginger hadn’t really tried to kill him. They were hardly friends, but still—she’d given him his first haircut, back in the days when he was so little he’d thought it would hurt. “But you made me remember, huh?”

“I was going to try,” Nadia said, “but I didn’t get the chance. The spell was lifted as soon as I reached you.”

“How?”

But he knew. He knew even before Nadia said her name: “Elizabeth.”

Why? Why would she save him? She was trying to destroy him.

It made him angry, so angry he wanted to stalk out of the hospital right now, go straight to Elizabeth’s house, and demand the answers.

He wanted to shake her by the shoulders until her chestnut curls tumbled around her blank, beautiful face. Wanted to scream at her until he didn’t have any breath in his lungs. Why did you curse me? Why did you make me believe you were my friend? Why did you do all that and then save my life?