Magic, Mateo realized.

He was a Steadfast. Nadia’s Steadfast. Whatever power Elizabeth stole from him, he had more to give to Nadia, because he belonged to her, completely, in a way that Elizabeth could never match, not with all her curses and all her evil.

Mateo never questioned whether Nadia could be strong enough to defeat Elizabeth. The only question was whether she’d get the chance.

The spell was spreading around them now, so vivid and electric that Nadia could feel it as clearly as she would ever have been able to see it. Deep fault lines throughout Captive’s Sound were giving way as Elizabeth took away all the town’s dark magic, took it and buried it in the bottomless pit where her soul ought to be.

And no—Nadia wasn’t strong enough to stop her.

The trick was not to stop her in the first place.

She’d never have seen this if she hadn’t been caught in the cobwebs. The answer there had been to stop fighting, to replace the spell imprisoning her with another that would at least appear to do the same thing.

And yet Goodwife Hale had tried to tell her. In her spidery script, the old witch had written that the strongest opposing force was one that went in the same direction. This was what she’d been trying to say, but what Nadia hadn’t understood until now.

So the answer now was not to block Elizabeth or to fight her. Not to do anything to keep Elizabeth from pulling the magic out from under Captive’s Sound.

What Nadia had to do was replace the stolen magic with magic of her own.

As the smoke swirled around her, Nadia met Mateo’s gaze for one last moment, then closed her eyes. What could be soft enough to slip into all the cracks but strong enough to hold them up?

A spell of liberation. Nothing was as simple, or as powerful, as being free.

Helpless laughter.

Washing away what cannot come clean.

A moment of forgiveness.

Nadia grabbed her bracelet, found the ivory, and dove deep:

Cole calling Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear a douche bag, and having to stagger into the kitchen to hide her laughter.

Trying to clear her mind after reading that letter from Mom’s attorney, the one that said she refused to see them no matter how much Dad begged, and watching Toy Story 3 through eyes that kept filling with tears.

Sitting on the kitchen floor next to her father, in the middle of a pile of rigatoni noodles, finally understanding why he fought her so hard about every single dinner—he only wanted to do something right for them, just once.

The spell flowed out from her in every direction, almost uncontrollable, the way it had been when she first cast it in chem lab—but stronger now, because that darkness didn’t pull at her, and because Mateo was here. Before, they hadn’t known how to shape the magic they created together, but now she could feel him beside her.