Not long now, Elizabeth told herself. It was her only comfort.

Her hand rested on the knob of the door to the back room, the only room of her house she no longer really considered hers. That room belonged to something else.

Elizabeth looked inside. She felt as though her Book of Shadows looked back at her.

It shook free of the cobwebs with difficulty; it had been a long time since Elizabeth had consulted its pages instead of merely drawing upon its inherent power. For a moment she wondered whether it had become illegible, whether it had finally become a book no longer, but the fragile pages fell open to the correct page instantly. Her Book of Shadows still wished to do her bidding, no matter what.

Mateo sat at the cafeteria table, pizza untouched on his tray, staring at Nadia Caldani, who had turned out to be even crazier than he was.

Beautiful. Persuasive. But nuts. She was telling him stuff nobody could ever believe was real.

And yet he believed her.

“I’m sorry about you becoming my Steadfast,” she said yet again, stabbing at her lasagna with her plastic fork like it was somehow responsible for this. “If I’d had any idea it could affect you—any man, ever—I’d never have cast a prophetic spell in my own house. And I still don’t understand how it could be you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, repeating the words she’d been over a couple times already, like he was on autopilot. “No man conceived of woman can hold magic. I remember that part.”

“It’s like finding out that every action doesn’t have an equal and opposite reaction,” Nadia protested. “But, still. Here you are. You’re my Steadfast, and that’s a pretty powerful bond, so we’re going to have to learn to work with it.”

“Hey there!” Verlaine Laughton came up to Nadia, skinny and strange as ever; she’d used two pencils to twist her silver-gray hair into a knot at the back of her neck, and wore the same kind of bizarre clothes she always favored—today, a peasant blouse and bell-bottomed jeans that had orange flower appliqués. She seemed to have been transported directly from 1972. That was about as much as Mateo had ever noticed about her; there was something about Verlaine that almost kept you from paying any attention. Like wherever something interesting was, Verlaine wasn’t. But she seemed to know Nadia pretty well. Verlaine’s face fell as she saw Mateo. “Oh, sorry, am I interrupting?”

Nadia looked up at her. “Mateo’s my Steadfast.”

Verlaine practically slammed the tray onto the table in vindication. “I knew it!”

“Are you a witch, too?” he said. Were there witches everywhere? Was the whole world about a thousand times weirder than he’d ever dreamed?

“Nope. This is all about as new to me as it is to you.” Then Verlaine frowned at Nadia. “Wait. I thought you said men couldn’t be Steadfasts. That they couldn’t know about magic.”

“Well, it turns out they can be Steadfasts,” Nadia explained, “so I figured Mateo needs to know about magic. We’re kind of working off-book here.”