“Well, it turns out they can be Steadfasts,” Nadia explained, “so I figured Mateo needs to know about magic. We’re kind of working off-book here.”
“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.
“My dad knows the city council! I’ll have your rat-ass restaurant shut down!” Jeremy yelled after him. Mateo ignored this. First of all, Jeremy regularly threatened to have people’s businesses shut down; by now everyone knew that if Jeremy’s dad actually even listened to him, the city council didn’t listen to Jeremy’s dad.
Second, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Because he was cursed.
Finally Mateo reached the very back room where they kept the boxing equipment. He grabbed a pair of gloves, pulled them on, and started hitting the nearest bag. Punching it with all his strength. Whaling on it. Every blow jarred him all the way to his shoulder; the solidity of the bag almost seemed to hit back. But he punched over and over and over again, with all his strength, fighting the thing that had haunted him now that he’d finally seen it for what it was.
Verlaine said, “So, that went well.”
Nadia groaned. “I’m making a total mess of this. But—I don’t know what to do! Nothing like this has ever happened before, and I mean ever, as in since the dawn of time.”
Verlaine tapped her fork against her tray. “Well, hey, why don’t we transfer it over? Turn me into your Steadfast instead. Not that it sounds like so much fun, but—if Mateo can’t handle it—I mean, he’s already got a curse to deal with. I don’t. Anyway, I still think it sounds cool. Can you switch us, Nadia?”
Nadia shook her head. “No chance.”
“There’s no fail-safe? Come on.” Verlaine’s eyes narrowed as she folded her arms; she seemed almost suspicious again.
“You remember how it worked. It’s not something I control. It’s something that happens of its own accord, because of the powers of prophetic magic.” Nadia’s head throbbed. She should never have cast that spell. All she’d done was scare them and turn Mateo into something he never, ever should have been.
“You have to have an out.”
The lone possibility swam in front of her, simultaneously as tempting and as traitorous as a mirage in the desert. “I could end my bond with my Steadfast if I broke all my ties to magic and the Craft—”
“Why didn’t you say so before?” Verlaine demanded. “That counts as an out!”