As weird, screwed-up, and freakish as this whole scene was, Verlaine couldn’t help thinking Nadia had skated over a pretty critical point. “But—if they got captured—if they didn’t choose to be bad—then they’re the victims of the One Beneath. Slaves, you said. That’s wrong, isn’t it?”
Asa turned his head toward her as though he’d never seen her before. And then, in his dark eyes, she glimpsed something that had never been there when this was Jeremy Prasad.
No. Something that had never been there when anyone looked at her, ever. It was as though—as though he could see her, but he didn’t mind what he saw—
“Don’t waste your pity,” Nadia said. “Asa can only be here because Elizabeth brought him to do her bidding. I never thought they could walk in our world like this, but apparently there’s some kind of spell to put a demon inside a dead body.”
“A spell that involves digging out the eyes.” Mateo’s face was ashen, and Verlaine remembered the horrifying story he’d told them about having to stand there motionless, bound by Elizabeth’s magic, watching her slice into Jeremy with the serrated edge of a seashell. “The big question is why you’re telling us all this.”
Verlaine half raised her hand. “Actually, I think the big question is how he stopped time. And also why.”
Asa stepped closer to them, and Verlaine imagined that she could feel a kind of heat radiating from him . . . but it wasn’t her imagination. It was as though he were running a fever, one so high no human could ever have survived it. “I stopped time and told you who and what I am because I thought it would be much less annoying than listening to you whispering and guessing and carrying on. I only get so long here on Earth. I intend to enjoy it.”
That wasn’t all. It couldn’t be all. Verlaine sensed that much.
Apparently there was also something about saying his real name, whatever it was. He found it difficult.
“We know one thing,” Mateo said, folding his arms. “You don’t like Elizabeth much more than we do.”
“Are you honestly surprised? With that charming personality of hers.” Asa just smiled. “Still, I never forget: She’s the boss.”
With that, he clapped his hands together—and time began again, everyone rushing past them in the hallway like before. Nadia had stepped right into that cheerleader’s path, and she huffed and said, “Excuse you” before sweeping by the three of them.
The assistant principal glanced over her shoulder at them. “Move along. There’s nothing to see.”
“How wrong she is,” Asa whispered in Verlaine’s ear. His breath was so hot—like steam against her skin.
He walked away, quickly blending into the crowd.
Mateo turned to Nadia. “Demons?”
“What do they do?” Verlaine asked. “What is Elizabeth going to use him for?”
Nadia shook her head. “I—I don’t know. There’s too much I don’t know.” She bit her lower lip, so obviously troubled that Verlaine didn’t have the heart to ask her any more questions. “I’ll dig into Goodwife Hale’s Book of Shadows tonight. Go over my own materials. See if I can find anything else. But demons . . . that’s arcane magic. High-level magic. The kind of stuff I don’t know nearly enough about.”
Well, that wasn’t encouraging. Mateo responded to Nadia’s disquiet the way he responded to her happiness, or her absentmindedness, or anything else these days—by hugging her tightly.
Verlaine was sure of only one thing: The situation had just gotten worse.
Elizabeth opened the door to her back room. She had not entered it in years, but knew that until very recently, it had not looked like this.
Spiderwebs shivered as the wind blew through the room behind her, ruffling her chestnut curls. The room was thick with them, corner to corner, floor to ceiling. The one chair in the corner was nothing but silver white now, as though it were made of wool instead of rotting wood. Some chips of the remaining paint dangled in the webs, wrapped in cocoons as though they were prey. Elizabeth stretched her hand forward, her long fingers breaking web after web; spiders skittered along her skin, and she paid them no mind.
Here her Book of Shadows had attempted to trap Nadia Caldani—and had failed.
The webs thickened, breaking across her face, sticking to her hair. Elizabeth bent to kneel on the floor; through the misty grayness of the webs she could see the Book of Shadows. She smiled, almost fond. If Elizabeth had ever had a friend, she had long since forgotten what that felt like. The affection she felt for this book, and the primal, unthinking loyalty it gave her in return, were the closest Elizabeth would ever come to friendship again.
“I would have thought you could hold her,” Elizabeth murmured. She knew the book did not hear, but she spoke gently all the same. “There is something uncanny about her power. Something I must understand.”
Her fingers closed around the Book of Shadows. Its leather was dark with age, but not brittle in the way any ordinary binding would have been after nearly four hundred years. Instead it felt rough, too thick—like scar tissue that had never quite healed. When she lifted it from the floor, she could see the rectangular space where it had long been, free of dust or cobwebs. But one long-legged spider, as large as her palm, scurried into the spot as though to fill it up.
Elizabeth folded the book close to her chest. For so many years she had not consulted it, only drawn on its power.
But this close to the completion of her great work, she could not allow anything to go wrong. She would have to draw on every resource she had. Permit no interruptions. No mistakes.
She walked back into the area of the house where she spent most of her time. For a moment, Elizabeth saw it as a human would have seen it, were they free of her glamours: a derelict place, furnished with only a few threadbare chairs and a sofa that had not been sat in for decades and probably would no longer bear weight. Faded walls. Water bottles left over from the terrible thirst that had so long racked her but had now departed along with her immortality. (Elizabeth found that she still drank from them often, but it was now merely a matter of habit.) Her old stove, the same one that had once burned wood in the nineteenth century, which now glowed with a very different kind of flame. Broken glass strewn along her blue floor, the shards so familiar to her that she stepped through them easily, without hesitation.
Nadia would have had to wind her way through all this to reach the back room.
Elizabeth sat cross-legged in the middle of her floor, book in front of her, then unbuttoned her dress far enough to allow the shoulders to slip down her arms. The burned flesh there stuck to the fabric, and she had to tug it away; the pain was as meaningless as the stray spider at the hem of her skirt.
Without her having to speak, or even consciously think of what she wanted, the Book of Shadows fell open to a symbol she had drawn there long ago. The One Beneath had showed her this more than a century past, pooling a victim’s blood into the precise markings He needed. She had pressed this page against the symbol, and the maroon stains still held every line perfectly.
She held two fingers to the symbol, checking the sweep of those two lines—then lifted her hand to her upper arm. Yes, the arc and angle were correct. Although Elizabeth knew this by heart, when it came to this, she wanted to make utterly, completely certain.
The front door opened.
Elizabeth was only startled that so much time had passed without her realizing it, but communing with her Book of Shadows could have that effect. “Enter, beast.”
“You know, if Asa doesn’t work for you, you could just call me Jeremy.” The demon sauntered in as if she were to do his bidding, instead of the reverse. “Beast is rude.”