“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—”