He’d forgotten; whatever Elizabeth had done to him to make him stop seeing had also made him lose his memory of it. She had acted quickly, and her counterspell had been completely effective.

With a rush of horror, Nadia thought, The dark magic in town—it’s her! It’s Elizabeth; it has to be.

But no. How could Elizabeth be behind everything happening in Captive’s Sound? According to the increasingly worried Google searches Nadia had been running lately, the problems here seemed to go way back—since long before Elizabeth would even have been born, much less practicing magic. Plus, she and Nadia were about the same age, which meant they were only just now coming into their power.

Still—any other witch would have reached out at that moment. When Elizabeth saw that Nadia’s spell had misfired, she should have helped to quiet it, and sought Nadia afterward. The secrecy that bound the Craft didn’t extend that far.

Instead, Elizabeth had given her that cool, appraising smile, covered her tracks with Mateo, and slipped away.

So maybe she wasn’t the cause of everything going wrong in Captive’s Sound. Yet Nadia knew, deep down, that whatever it was twisting things here up in knots—Elizabeth was in the thick of it.

As they got into the cafeteria line, Mateo said under his breath, “Okay, either you were cooking some kind of drugs that can make the whole school start hallucinating at once, or something else seriously strange is going on. Because I did not imagine that. Are you going to explain what this has to do with what happened last night?”

She reached for her tray on autopilot, thinking fast.

One of the First Laws was to never, ever reveal the secret of the Craft to a man. Any man.

Every principle of the Craft also said that it was impossible for a man to be a Steadfast. Yet she couldn’t deny that this was exactly what Mateo had become.

Nadia might never understand how that was possible, but as long as it was—then he had to be told. It was wrong that this had happened to him without his knowledge or consent, wrong that someone already so troubled had been forced to carry that burden. The least she owed him was the truth.

“I’ll tell you,” she promised, feeling almost light-headed. It was like skydiving, terrifying and liberating at once. “I’ll explain everything.”

Elizabeth went home.

Her teachers would remember her being in class, whether or not she attended. Really, going to Rodman was something she did only to be near the Chamber once in a while, and these days also occasionally to keep Mateo Perez soothed and unquestioning. Today she finally had something new to think about.

Nadia Caldani was a witch. Elizabeth had suspected as much, given the family’s arrival in town immediately after the night of the storm, when her barrier had torn and shrieked as it was pierced through. What she had not suspected was that Nadia would possess such extraordinary magic.