9

“I ONLY WANT TO ASK ONE QUESTION, OKAY?” VERLAINE’S voice sounded tinny on Nadia’s cell phone. “Is this maybe a stupid thing to do?”

“I’m walking through my new neighborhood. There’s still almost an hour of daylight. I already made dinner. It’s baking in the oven, and even my dad can handle taking a casserole out when the timer goes off. So what’s stupid about it?”

“You’re going to confront another witch, who you don’t even know for sure is a witch, but who might be evil? For no reason in particular?”

“Well. When you put it like that.” But Nadia didn’t turn back.

The entire length of Captive’s Sound could be easily walked in half a day, and Elizabeth’s home wasn’t even a mile away from her own. She remembered the way well enough from her trip on Mateo’s motorcycle—

—for a moment she remembered the way it had felt to put her arms around him, and her breath seemed to catch in her throat. Then she shoved that aside, replacing it with the way he’d driven off angrily after school. He’d rather accuse her of being paranoid or crazy than believe one word against his precious Elizabeth. Even though she wasn’t his girlfriend after all—a revelation that had briefly filled Nadia with hope so sharp it hurt—Elizabeth mattered more to him than anyone else. More than Nadia, anyway.

Which of course made sense given that Elizabeth was his best friend and Nadia was a girl he’d known for a few days before she started babbling about witchcraft. But still.

Verlaine kept talking. “I just think maybe this is something you could do later. Or never. Never also works.”

“I’m not confronting her,” Nadia said as she made her way along the cracked sidewalk. Weeds jutted up from every chink in the concrete. Twilight had begun to deepen the blue of the sky, but she had time to get there and back before dark. “I’m simply—checking out the situation.”

“So you’re going to go to her house and sneak around, while hoping she doesn’t catch you in the act. That’s either dangerous for you or creepy for her. Possibly both.”

“Listen. I know she’s a witch. If she’s not dangerous—and maybe she isn’t, I don’t know—then she’s a potential friend, okay? Someone we need to know.”

Unconvinced, Verlaine said, “If you want to make friends with someone, I’m pretty sure snooping around her house at sunset isn’t the way to go.”

She had a point. Nadia knew it. But she couldn’t shake the idea that something was seriously not right about Elizabeth Pike, and if Elizabeth was in any way, shape, or form part of the darker forces at work in Captive’s Sound, then a direct confrontation was a bad idea—at least until Nadia knew more about who she was dealing with. “I swear, I’m not going stalker on her. But if I walk up to her and start talking about witchcraft, and she doesn’t know anything about it, then that’s even worse than my taking a look at her house, right?”