Nadia made it to the carnival right after dark. She looked around frantically, but so far nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary—and there was no sign of Mateo or Elizabeth.
Chest heaving, exhausted, she braced herself against a nearby picnic table and tried to think. Where would Elizabeth be? Dead center—right at the bull’s-eye of the target Verlaine had showed her. But where was that? When they’d looked at it before, Swindoll Park had seemed specific enough, but this park was pretty big, and now it was filled with hundreds of people. She should have downloaded Verlaine’s data onto her phone, something like that—
“Whoa. Nadia.” Kendall stood in front of her, wearing a pointy hat and some kind of weird green minidress with a jagged hem. “Are you doing, like, a sexy zombie thing? Because it’s really more scary than sexy. Just FYI.”
Her ripped dress and crazy hair probably would make people stare on any day but Halloween. “Kendall. Hey. No offense—gotta go.”
“What, are you looking for Mateo? I mean, I’m not being insensitive, like, honestly, everybody could tell you were crushed out on him, so I think you should know about him and Elizabeth.”
“I’ve been told.” Kendall must have heard the party gossip, too. Nadia pushed her hair back from her face.
“Plus, you know, he’s got that crazy gene that runs in his family, and I hear they might have, like, stem cell therapy for it someday, but for now he’s bad news. I don’t know what Elizabeth’s thinking. Taking a guy like that into a haunted house? That is basically asking for a total psychotic break.”
Nadia grabbed Kendall’s arm. “Did you say they’re in the haunted house?”
“They said they were going that way.”
All her spells, all her magic, all their desperate efforts to fight Elizabeth, and they’d gotten their single biggest break from Kendall Bender.
“Kendall, thank you,” Nadia said, and then she took off running toward the gnarled old house with orange lights in all the windows—using her last strength to reach Elizabeth and Mateo, if she could only make it in time.
But then the screams began.
23
MATEO STOOD IN ELIZABETH’S ARMS, WATCHING THE world catch fire.
The walls of the haunted house browned, blackened, sparked into light and heat. People began to shriek; parents snatched up their children and started running for the exits. A guy in a Scream mask shouted, “Don’t panic!”
Elizabeth never moved. So Mateo couldn’t, either. She embraced him tightly, closing her eyes in satisfaction as the fire leaped and crackled around them. “A Steadfast,” she whispered. “I’d forgotten how good that feels.”
“You’re going to burn us alive.” Already the smoke stung his eyes and throat, made him cough.
“We won’t have a chance to burn,” Elizabeth promised, and that was when the ground began to quake.
Nadia ran toward the entrance of the haunted house—but already it was impossible to get in that way, with so many people flooding out. She dashed around to the side instead. The windows there were high, but she could climb in.
As she pried it open, though, a middle-aged man grabbed her around the waist. “Get back from there!” he shouted. “It’s dangerous!”
What was she supposed to say? “I know”? Nadia just let herself be pulled back, watched him run off to help others, and then made her leap for the window. It took most of the strength she had left to pull herself up, through, and over, but somehow she made it.
For her reward, she was in a house on fire.
Most everyone inside seemed to have fled by now, but Nadia knew that Elizabeth would still be at the heart of it, and there was no chance she would have let Mateo go. Pulling the neck of her dress over her mouth to filter the smoky air, she dashed up the stairs two at a time.
On the second story, everything seemed to be burning: the walls, the ceiling, even parts of the floor. Nadia squinted against the bright light and the haze of heat—
“Nadia!”
Mateo. He was here. She’d found him in time. Nadia saw him through the blaze—in Elizabeth’s arms.
Nadia had made it, she’d made it, they still had a chance—
But even as Mateo drank in the sight of her, memories of his dreams came crashing in. There was that one dream—the one with the fire burning around them both—the one that ended with her dead at his feet.
No, he thought. This can’t be happening. Elizabeth can’t win.
Elizabeth’s eyes narrowed. “What is it you think you can do here?”
“I don’t know,” Nadia shot back, “but we’re going to find out.”
The ground twisted and bucked beneath them again; floorboards already strained with age and heat began to pop. How much longer could this building stand? Outside, people’s screams were only growing louder; the quakes must be starting up out there, too. Elizabeth was going to bring the whole park down, turn it into so much fire and dust. Bury everyone alive.
Yet within him he felt a surge of something almost like hope—not an emotion, though. Something physical. Something real.
Magic, Mateo realized.
He was a Steadfast. Nadia’s Steadfast. Whatever power Elizabeth stole from him, he had more to give to Nadia, because he belonged to her, completely, in a way that Elizabeth could never match, not with all her curses and all her evil.
Mateo never questioned whether Nadia could be strong enough to defeat Elizabeth. The only question was whether she’d get the chance.