“The Piranha?” Nadia shrugged. She kept glancing over at Mateo, who looked as exhausted as he had this morning, though apparently it was comforting for him to be near Elizabeth. Every time their eyes met, he smiled. They must really be in love. How awesome for them. “Basic teacher snark, if you ask me.”

“She shouldn’t talk down to us. Somebody should teach that woman her place. We pay her salary.”

Nadia wondered how many checks Jeremy had written to the school board lately. “We’re supposed to write down our impressions of all the equipment and materials for the experiment.”

“We get to write down our impressions of baggies? This is supposed to be a good use of our time?”

“If you do that part, I’ll do the harder stuff later,” Nadia promised. Not that Jeremy deserved a break, but she had better things to do.

Once again she turned her attention to the power she sensed underfoot. The burial was deep underground; that meant she was unlikely to be able to get to it through non-magical means. Which meant that if she wanted to use magic to get the buried thing out again, she would be taking it out sight unseen, with no idea what the source of that powerful magic was. That was an extremely bad plan. Possibly whoever had buried this … whatever … had had a very good reason.

And yet—she was tempted. Nadia itched to discover it, even if it were likely to blow up in her face like Pandora’s box.

To have power—real power—beyond anything Mom had ever known, to be able to stand up and say, See what you walked away from? I’m stronger than you. Stronger than anyone. You shouldn’t have left me behind.

Nadia blinked, shook her head. The shudder of vengeful fury that passed through her was gone in an instant, but the uneasiness it left behind lingered.

And she realized—that fury hadn’t entirely been her own. It had belonged, in part, to whatever lay beneath the lab.

Now Nadia understood that mysterious presence as she never had before. It did not merely wait there: It lurked. It seethed. It longed to break free—

—and wreak vengeance.

Vengeance on what, she didn’t know. She no longer wanted to. The only thing she understood was that it couldn’t be directly causing any devastation in Captive’s Sound; it lacked that power, and she was grateful.

Whatever lay imprisoned beneath the school had been put there for good reason. The entity she sensed was buried beneath any retrieval, and they were safe from it, and that was actually all she needed to know for now.

Besides, at the moment, her attention should be focused on whatever she’d done to Mateo.

It wasn’t as if she could cast any elaborate spells right here in the middle of class. But something basic might be effective, if Mateo’s problem was what she suspected.

If he was cursed—truly cursed, the inheritor of a dark magic hundreds of years old—then that meant he might potentially react to magic in a different way. Nadia wasn’t exactly sure how that would work, but it seemed plausible.