“But why? There have to be other single men in town.”
“First of all, not so much, seeing how small Captive’s Sound is. And second, your dad’s hot.”
Nadia made a face. “Oh, gross, Verlaine.”
“I don’t mean hot hot. I mean dad hot. Listen.” Verlaine started counting off points on her fingers. “He hasn’t gotten fat, he still has his hair, he has a job, and it seems like he looks in the mirror when he gets dressed in the morning. After forty, that’s all hot is.”
Okay, that was disturbing. Before Nadia could think any more about it, mercifully, the meeting began with the banging of a gavel. A half dozen people seemed to make up the city council—including Mr. Prasad, which was probably why his family was here. All of them seemed grumpy in the extreme, though Nadia couldn’t blame them once the questions got going.
“Why wasn’t there a fire extinguisher in the haunted house?”
“Well, if there was an extinguisher, why didn’t anyone use it? Isn’t that someone’s job?”
“First the roads start collapsing from the sinkholes, and now this? What exactly is the city council spending the infrastructure funds on? We demand an audit!”
“All I know is my salary pays for the fire department of this city, and if the fire department can’t find a damn three-story house ablaze in the middle of town in less than twenty minutes, they’ve got a problem!”
“For once,” Verlaine whispered, “this is almost interesting.”
Almost—but the novelty wore off fast. Within a few minutes, Nadia was back to staring over her shoulder at Asa—at the demon—with the woman who believed she was his mother.
She was just so loving. So much so that any real kid of hers would have been annoyed. Mrs. Prasad kept petting his arm, glancing over at him, smiling . . .
Mom had acted that way with Nadia and Cole sometimes—when Cole had gotten done singing a song with the rest of his kindergarten class at their “graduation” ceremony, or when Nadia had managed to cast a really tough spell that day but Mom couldn’t say anything directly because Dad and Cole were around. Instead she just did that thing Mrs. Prasad was doing now, radiating pride, so much that you almost hated it but didn’t really.
All at once Nadia couldn’t stand it any longer. It was wrong—beyond wrong—for Asa to sit there soaking up love he didn’t deserve. He was working for Jeremy’s murderer. This was sickening, and it couldn’t go on any longer.
She has to know, Nadia thought, looking at Mrs. Prasad. She has to at least understand that something’s seriously wrong with her son. I want her to look at him and see that something’s not right.
So. A spell of revelation.
Never taking her eyes from Mrs. Prasad, Nadia’s fingers found the pearl charm on her bracelet. For a moment she wished Mateo were here with her instead of on shift at La Catrina; still, she shouldn’t need a Steadfast’s power for this. It was a stronger revelation spell than she’d ever used before. She’d never had the emotional ingredients for it until now.
Laughter at a time of sorrow.
Bloodshed at a time of joy.
Salvation at the moment of despair.
Nadia kept her gaze on Mrs. Prasad as she lived each emotion in turn:
Packing to leave Chicago forever, going through the dressier clothing Mom had left behind, watching her dad’s face fall with every nice gown or glittery shoe Nadia pulled from the closet to reluctantly throw away, until he said, “I guess I could perform a drag show,” and then the two of them rolled on the floor laughing until they cried.
The laughter at the Halloween carnival, popcorn and cotton candy in everyone’s hands, all the little kids running around in their costumes, never realizing what was about to unfold within the haunted house.
Being trapped underwater in the sound, seaweed tangling around her ankles, binding her with the force of a magic so old she couldn’t fight it, desperate to breathe and sure she was about to die—until Mateo found her there in the cold and dark, pressed his mouth to hers, his breath to hers—
Mrs. Prasad screamed.
Everyone in the room turned to stare—except Nadia, who had been staring already. But she hadn’t expected a reaction like this. Suspicion, maybe. Trepidation. Caution, which would be a good thing around a demon from hell.
Instead Mrs. Prasad had gone straight to full-blown panic.
“Get away!” she cried, plowing over a few other people as she tried to back away from Asa. For his part, though he must have sensed what was going on, he looked nearly as shocked as everyone else. “Get away from me!”
Mr. Prasad’s voice came over the microphone from the city-council podium. “Honey? Honey, calm down. Nobody’s making this personal.”
But Mrs. Prasad had completely lost it. Her screams kept rising in pitch, and when Asa rose as if to go to her, she staggered back like she might pass out.
It’s too much, Nadia realized in horror. This spell’s too powerful. She’s seeing the demon within in a way that I can’t—a way even Mateo can’t. That’s going to drive her crazy, if it hasn’t already. I have to take it back!
Quickly she grabbed her quartz charm and called up the first useful spell she could think of: a spell of equation, one that witches sometimes used to cover up evidence of their magic, to convince people that the phenomenon they’d just seen was something totally regular—that the thing that had seemed so different to them a moment before was in fact just like everything else around them. This, too, was one Nadia had never cast before, but this seemed like the time to try it.
Snow turning into rain.
A fear suddenly realized to be false.
The interruption of the extraordinary by the ordinary.
Nadia closed her eyes, the better to concentrate:
Mom saying, “Oh, shoot,” as she stood on the balcony of their Chicago condo one unexpectedly warm Christmas, as the snow that would have made the day perfect vanished into rain, turning the whitening scene below almost instantly gray.
That time on the bus when she’d been sure this weird guy was following her, and it was only the second week her parents had let her take the bus on her own, and her heart had been pounding as he got off the bus behind her, but then he’d walked right past her into the Billy Goat Tavern and she’d laughed at her own stupidity.
The moment in her attic when she’d just finished cutting Mateo’s hair, and they’d never been so close for so long before, and they leaned into each other for what would have been their first kiss—except that Cole came in, and they’d laughed and pulled apart even though she still yearned for him so badly it hurt—
“Oh, my God!” Mrs. Prasad screamed. She didn’t sound better. She sounded a whole lot worse.
Nadia opened her eyes—just in time to see a crazed Mrs. Prasad run straight to the emergency fire ax and break the glass with her elbow.
“She isn’t—” Verlaine gasped. “Oh, crap, she is!”
Mrs. Prasad swung the ax at the people nearest her; everyone started to run and shriek. Horrified, Nadia realized that the spell of equation hadn’t made her see Asa as normal again; instead Mrs. Prasad thought everyone in the room was a demon.