Nadia shook her head. “Couldn’t happen. No man can ever be a Steadfast, no more than a man can be a witch. They’re magic-blind, all of them.”

“All of them?” Verlaine didn’t look convinced. “You can’t be sure.”

“I can be absolutely sure, and so can you. It’s one of the absolute truths of witchcraft. It’s been true as long as there have been witches, so about as long as there’s been human history. No men. Not one. Not ever. Some people say it’s because a witch went evil and cursed them all way back at the start of civilization, but that would have been one badass curse. There’s all kinds of theories. But the old books all say ‘no man conceived of woman’ can ever know or use magic. And it’s true.”

Verlaine frowned. “Isn’t that sexist? You know, reverse sexism?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care. We have bigger problems, okay?” Nadia kept staring down at the black, oily smears on her fingertips. “The spell.”

“Oh, right. Yeah! You told the fortune of Captive’s Sound, and … that is not a good expression on your face.”

Slowly Nadia shook her head.

“I would call that a bad expression. Very bad.” Verlaine began twisting the ends of her long, silvery hair between her fingers, her nails tugging at a small tangle there. “But—you didn’t see much. You couldn’t. It just turned black, that’s all.”

“It turned black,” Nadia said. “Nothing more. That means there’s only one thing waiting in this town’s future.”

Verlaine’s eyes were wide. “Which is not good.”

“Which is destruction. Complete and total.” Nadia stared down at the black oily soot on her hand, which was about as much as would be left of Captive’s Sound in the end. “I don’t know when it’s coming. And I don’t know why. But it’s coming.”

Anxious to be done with his work for the night, Mateo tied off a bag of garbage in the back room at La Catrina and stepped out into the alley.

His eyes widened, and the garbage bag slipped from his fingers, landing on the pavement with a wet crunch.

Mateo couldn’t pay any attention to that, or to anything else besides the fact that the world had apparently gone mad.

7

MATEO STARED AT SOMETHING NOT OF THIS EARTH.

Precisely what it was he couldn’t have said. The first word that popped into his stunned mind was ox, and the second was wolf, and yet it seemed to be a man, too. As it crouched over the dank asphalt of the alleyway, it lifted its heavy, horned head; eyes that burned with white flame stared at Mateo—through him—and he felt a chill so deep that he thought he might actually freeze. Its fur bristled; even though it stood in shadows, Mateo could see that much.

Before he could say or do anything else, though, the thing—disappeared. Which was the only way he could describe how it went from being solid to transparent to just not there.