And a basic spell of liberation might make the magic … unstick.

Well, it was worth a shot, anyway.

Nadia’s fingers found the small ivory drop at her bracelet, and she put the ingredients together:

Helpless laughter.

Washing away what cannot come clean.

A moment of forgiveness.

The first two were easy —

Her thirteenth birthday party, when they put a pair of Cole’s Pull-Ups on her best friend’s Boston terrier and they all got hysterical, rolling on the floor.

Taking her first shower in the new house, three in the morning after the wreck, mud under her fingernails and a piece of car glass in her hair, feeling like it would never, ever all rinse clean.

But forgiveness? Nadia dug deep.

Weeks of wondering if Dad had driven Mom away, if there had been an affair or something Nadia hadn’t known about, all ending the moment she tiptoed to the kitchen late at night and glimpsed her father bent over the table, his head in his hands, so miserable that she knew, just knew, he hadn’t seen any of this coming.

It was enough. She felt the spell swirling outward, invisible but powerful—

—really powerful—

“You know what?” Jeremy said loudly. “I’m sick of this.” With that he shoved all the lab equipment off their table; it fell to the floor with a crash.

“You know what I’m sick of?” The Piranha put her hands on her hips. “You. All of you. This entire school. I could be in yoga right now instead of trying to pour information into the sieves you call your brains.”

Several students started laughing. One girl started crying. Another reached around her own back and unfastened her bra through her sweater, groaning in relief as it went slack.

What the—

Another girl and a guy started making out. So did two guys in the far corner. Jeremy started tearing up his chemistry book, ripping pages out in hanks, then shredding them one by one. The Piranha kicked off her shoes and took a one-footed position that Nadia remembered from her own yoga class as Tree Pose.

Mateo sat up straight. “What’s wrong with people?”

“I don’t know,” Nadia said. But she was starting to put it together. A spell of liberation could make people feel a little, well, uninhibited. But that was normally a minor side effect, enough to maybe give someone the giggles, not to make an entire roomful of people completely forget where they were. The spell had been more powerful than usual—no, more powerful than ever.

That wasn’t the effect of whatever lay beneath this room. If anything, that would have dimmed the spell, not enhanced it.

That—that was the kind of boost you could only get from a Steadfast.

Verlaine was nowhere near here, and besides, Nadia already knew the spell hadn’t worked on her. Which meant the only option—the only possibility—

It can’t be true, Nadia thought wildly. Everything she knew about magic was built on a few fundamental principles, and the most fundamental principle of all was that men couldn’t hold magic. A curse was one thing—you didn’t hold that; it held you. So men could be cursed. But being a Steadfast should be as impossible for a man as the sun circling the Earth.