“No men ever, you said.” Verlaine leaned across the table, peering at him. “Mateo, are you maybe—well—transgender? Intersex? No prejudice here. Just support.”

Mateo would have started thudding his face against the table in frustration if his pizza hadn’t been in the way. “I’m a guy.”

“We’ll take your word for it.” Verlaine started in on her salad. “I was the only one who was supposed to be in danger of being … Steadfasted, or whatever you want to call it. I even kind of wanted it to happen. And now you stole it. Accidentally. But still.”

“I wish it were you,” Mateo replied. “This is really—weird.” He glanced around, wondering whether anybody was overhearing them; the last thing he needed was for the school to have yet more reasons to write him off as crazy. But the din of a hundred students eating and talking at once drowned out their words. Also, the cafeteria looked more normal than any place he’d been since the … Steadfast thing began. Apparently the cafeteria was completely devoid of magic. This would come as no surprise to anyone who’d eaten the meatloaf.

Then Nadia reached across the table and tentatively laid her hand along his forearm. The touch shocked him out of his confusion. For a moment he could only look at her dark eyes, accepting in a way almost no one else’s had ever been. “Tell me more about what you’ve been seeing. We’ll figure out what it all means. It won’t be as scary if you understand it.”

She didn’t make him feel bad about being scared; she acted like that was a totally natural way to react. Mateo hadn’t realized how much that could help.

Where to begin? Worst things first, he decided. “What freaks me out the most is that—halo around my head. Halo’s the wrong word, because that’s something gorgeous and holy, and this is terrible. But I don’t know what else to call it.”

“What halo?” Verlaine was staring at his head.

“I see it in the mirror,” he explained. “Since the … spell last night.” Of all the freaky things he’d witnessed, including the weird horned thing, the halo was by far the most disturbing, because it was a part of him.

However, Nadia didn’t seem disturbed at all. Very softly she said, “I suspect that’s the curse.”

The word curse always made Mateo’s skin crawl—but it was different, the way Nadia said it. Everyone else made it sound unspeakable. Contagious. From her, it sounded real.

The curse was real.

The curse was a curse.

Hereditary insanity: He’d prepared himself for that. Superstition: what he’d assumed for most of his life. But an honest-to-God, or maybe honest-to-Satan, curse? Actual, supernatural evil that had been sunk into his family since the dawn of time and now had him, too?

“Excuse me,” Mateo said as he rose from the cafeteria table. “I need a minute.”

Then he stalked through the cafeteria, cut through the gymnasium and the dressing rooms—where he ran into Jeremy running down Charles for his make-out session with another guy, which was as good a reason as any to shove Jeremy into the lockers.