Powerful—but undisciplined. Elizabeth had to smile as she remembered the ridiculous scene in chemistry class. Nadia must have suspected some magical hold on Mateo Perez; her crush was so painfully obvious, the way her eyes flickered over to him countless times during their lessons. Had she thought to free him with a spell of liberation?

The curse on the Cabots was far too old and too strong to be shaken loose by such feeble methods. She smiled around the rim of her water bottle.

And what ridiculous overkill. Clumsy, stupid, to have cast that spell with such force that it affected the entire class. Obviously Nadia was raw and new to the Craft. Her inherent abilities weren’t matched by technique.

Yet she had, however briefly, somehow allowed Mateo to glimpse Elizabeth’s true hold on him—and that wouldn’t do. Elizabeth wasn’t quite done with him yet.

Elizabeth reached the pale gray house, opened the door, and went inside. When one of her rare guests came here—Mateo, or the delivery service with her cases of bottled water—they saw whatever it was they expected to see. Mateo had commented once on the paintings; his mother had always talked about how soft the carpet was underfoot.

In reality, the creaking wooden boards of the floor had long ago been painted blue, and they were overlaid with decades worth of shattered glass.

Her feet wove through the shards easily; the gaps for her steps were as familiar to her as everything else in Captive’s Sound. The yellowed plaster walls were all but bare; one held a mirror, draped with heavy old red velvet, which she could rip away in case of emergency. A few pieces of furniture from various centuries slumped against the walls, their wood crumbling, their upholstery threadbare. Elizabeth had no idea whether any of them could still bear her weight. In one corner was the old cast-iron stove, which as always glowed with a heat that was bright and constant, even beautiful, in the same way that a spectacular tropical bird could be beautiful even when kept in a cage too small for its wings. Between two of the walls hung the rope hammock, piled high with quilts and coverlets. The most powerful spells of imprisonment always worked from the ground up, and Elizabeth did not intend to be caught while sleeping.

On every surface sat empty bottles—water bottles, mostly, though there were some for soda, some for the green tea that seemed to be popular these days. Once every few months or so, Elizabeth would get rid of them, but she accumulated them so quickly that it was pointless to throw each out in turn. The thirst—the terrible thirst—it cracked and dried her from within every single moment, as it had for almost as long as she could remember. Even now she tossed aside the bottle that had seen her home and took up another one, gulping the water down desperately.

She’d tried drinking almost anything over the years, to see what might help. She’d drunk mud. She’d drunk wine. She’d even tried blood a few times, before she realized it was too salty to be any help.