“Sure, Dad. Nadia and Verlaine were just leaving,” Mateo said. He didn’t sound angry, exactly, but obviously he was glad to have an excuse to end the conversation.

As Verlaine and Nadia walked away from La Catrina afterward, Verlaine said, “Is that possible, what you said? Someone being born over and over again?”

“Well, I’m not sure. I never heard of a spell like that.” If she could only talk to Mom for five minutes …

“If you never heard of that spell before, then why do you think that’s what’s going on?”

Nadia shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable in the early fall chill. Dark visions drawn from her mother’s few whispered warnings about black magic swirled in her mind, and it seemed to her that underneath her feet she could feel the unsteady shifting of demon-haunted ground. An illusion, of course—but an illusion that might have meaning.

To Verlaine she said only, “With powerful enough magic—anything is possible. Anything at all.”

That night, Mateo fell into bed, exhausted, but he couldn’t sleep.

As he lay there, stretched atop his covers with his jeans still on, his mind raced. Even walking down the streets of Captive’s Sound was different for him now; he knew the places he saw the glimmer were places touched by magic, knew the grime between him and the sky was proof that the entire town labored under some malevolent force. And even washing his face meant having to look again at the swirling, sickly blackness that haloed his head.

His curse was as loathsome to look at as it was to endure.

He shook a few extra Tylenol PM into his palm; he knew you could overdo these, and even trying not to have the dreams wasn’t worth frying his liver, but he’d looked up the maximum safe dosage online. With one fist he tossed them into his mouth, gulped them down with water, and hoped again to rest too deeply for dreaming.

With his brain in complete overdrive like this, though, he didn’t see how even regular sleep was possible. Mateo thought he could handle everything he’d learned about magic and witches; it was the stuff about Elizabeth that churned his guts and made him want to be sick.

No, Nadia’s weird theories couldn’t be true; he knew that. But all those pictures—all those generations of women named Elizabeth Pike—

Why had Elizabeth never mentioned that she had a family name? That she looked just like her mother and grandmother? It was the kind of thing people brought up from time to time, or told jokes about. And he and Elizabeth were best friends. They shared everything.

Slowly he took up his phone and hit her name on Contacts. As always, she answered on the first ring. “Mateo. What’s wrong? Did you have another dream?”

“Haven’t fallen asleep yet.” He curled on one side, imagining—like he often did—Elizabeth lying next to him. It wasn’t a sexual fantasy, merely comforting—the idea of her so gentle and sweet and close.