Oh, crap. Nadia tried to think of another, better explanation than she’d been able to come up with last night.

But then he said, “Did you do something to me?”

“Do something to you? Did it—did the attic light hurt your eyes?” Maybe cleansing flame was damaging to people who weren’t prepared for it? Nadia had never heard of anything like that, but maybe it was only one of the countless things Mom hadn’t gotten around to explaining.

“After I left your house, for a while I felt kind of dizzy—disoriented—”

Which could happen to a Steadfast, but that had to be a coincidence.

“—then I started seeing things.” Mateo’s hands were clenching and unclenching at his sides, like he had to force himself to get through this. “As in, strange phantom animals in the alleyway. Weird lights and stuff around houses. And the sky—it’s all over town, and I thought it might be better when the sun went up, but it’s not. It’s like Captive’s Sound is completely surrounded by something dirty and cloudy and—and evil.”

This can’t be happening, she thought. There’s no possible way. It was like things falling upward. Or suddenly needing to breathe water instead of air. Men didn’t possess magic. They couldn’t. That rule was absolute.

“Were you maybe—I don’t know—cooking some kind of drugs? Something that makes you trip? The purple flame—that could be a hallucination, maybe.” He held up his hands. “I swear I won’t report you, or anything like that, but if that’s true, please tell me the truth so I’ll know this is going to get out of my system.”

Nadia shook her head no, even though that lie would have been her best out. As she did so, the brief hope in his eyes died.

“You think I’m crazy.” Mateo smiled grimly. “Of course you do. You’ve been in town, what, almost two weeks now? So people already got to you and told you that I’m—that my family—they told you, right?”

“The family curse,” she whispered.

Mateo raked one hand through his dark brown hair, clearly trying to hold himself together—and failing. “So you think I’m insane, like everyone else does. Maybe I am. I guess—I guess—” He seemed to remember where he was, and the look of regret on his face cut her to the bone. “I’m sorry I bothered you about it. Could you just, maybe, not tell anybody about this?”

She nodded. He started to walk away, his shoulders slumped, utterly defeated.

No, he couldn’t have become her Steadfast. But if the curse on his family was real, was it possible that there had been some strange reaction between the curse and the Steadfast spell? That didn’t make any sense according to the magical theory she knew, but the visions he was describing sounded all too familiar. By now she knew that what he’d seen—the shroud of evil hanging over this entire town—was very real.

And if there was any chance that she was responsible for what he was seeing, then she couldn’t let Mateo walk away thinking he was going mad.