Nadia never took her hand from his. “Elizabeth’s deepened the curse. I’m not sure why she’d do that, though. Your dreams help us sometimes, even though they hurt you.”
Ms. Walsh—no, Faye; she’d told them they could call her that off-campus—shook her head. “Elizabeth may not have a choice. The level of magic she’s performing now goes beyond anything even she would have done before. Right now all her magic may be intensifying at once. She can’t strengthen her influence in the world without strengthening every one of her curses, every one of her spells, at once.”
So, are people going to be even meaner to me? Verlaine wondered, then felt bad about even thinking it. The fate of the world was slightly more important than her social life. Besides, if the world ended, it would kind of be a moot point.
“She needs these people to suffer,” Nadia said. “All the ones she’s put in the hospital. And I’ve learned—the One Beneath uses emotions, a lot. He steals them. He takes them in trade.” She went silent for only a moment. “So maybe He uses them to build. Maybe those people’s pain is exactly what He’s using to build the bridge. I think pain is what the bridge is made of.”
Faye nodded. She looked . . . well, encouraged was too strong a word, but like they might be getting somewhere. “I went through my mother’s Book of Shadows, searching for something like a remedy for illness caused by witchcraft, something like that. I didn’t see anything, but you might.” From her leather satchel she pulled out a clothbound book. The cloth was plain, faded black, the kind of thing that generally didn’t earn a second glance. But Verlaine reminded herself that Nadia had said every Book of Shadows was different. Every Book of Shadows had its own power.
Sure enough, as Nadia reached for it, the pages flipped open of their own accord. “Whoa,” Mateo said. “Did it hear you?”
“Sometimes Books of Shadows do.” Nadia smiled almost fondly at it, then glanced at Faye. “Your mom must have been really powerful.”
For the first time since she’d come to them, Faye smiled. “She was something else. I wish you could’ve seen her in her prime.”
Nadia looked down into the Book of Shadows. At first Verlaine wondered if a light had come on somewhere, then realized the spell book was glowing. The gentle golden illumination revealed Nadia’s dawning excitement. “This isn’t a cure for illness. But it’s a way to ease pain, and end suffering. It’s pretty serious magic, but I think—I think I could do it.”
Wait. Had things suddenly gone from sucky to awesome? Verlaine brightened. “So you can stop Elizabeth from hurting Uncle Gary and all the others. When they stop hurting, she’s not causing them any more pain. And if they’re not in pain, she loses the building blocks she needs for the bridge. The bridge collapses, the One Beneath can’t get here, Elizabeth’s defeated, and it’s the best Thanksgiving ever. Right?”
“That’s the idea.” But Nadia only looked about one-tenth as excited as she ought to. “Verlaine, it’s dangerous.”
Of course it couldn’t be easy. Mateo leaned closer to Nadia. “You mean, you could be hurt?”“Maybe, but that’s just part of working high-level magic.” Nadia didn’t even glance at him; it was Verlaine she spoke to. “I’m not talking about it being dangerous for me. I meant for Uncle Gary.”
“He’s in the hospital with about a zillion tubes in him and a crazy, evil witch keeping him in pain,” Verlaine said. “How much more dangerous could it get for him?”
Quietly Nadia replied, “If I do it wrong, he could die.”
Verlaine sucked in a breath. Faye put one hand on her shoulder, temporarily back in school-counselor mode.
It wasn’t like Verlaine hadn’t been afraid of this before now. She’d hardly been able to think of anything else since Uncle Gary’s collapse. But hearing it from the exact person she’d been counting on to save him—that made it much more real. She whispered, “Why would he die?”
“Right now the magic is holding him in this painful space between life and death.” The amber light from the spell book still played across Nadia’s face. “I’m going to ease his pain, which means easing the spell’s hold on him. He should come back to the side of life. But—I don’t see anything in this spell to guarantee that. I don’t know what kind of condition he’s in, or whether there’s more to what Elizabeth has done. So I’d be cutting all her ties at once, and anything could happen.”
“The spell is about easing suffering, right?” Verlaine demanded. “What kind of loser spell would only end suffering by killing people?”
“It’s probably more about helping people who are sick or injured through normal means, rather than suffering because of magic,” Faye suggested.
Mateo said, “Are we sure this is a good idea? There are a lot of people in the hospital. That’s a lot of lives to take a risk with.”
“I don’t know.” Nadia bit her lower lip. “Maybe—maybe I jumped to conclusions.”
They were jumping to conclusions about something that could kill Uncle Gary? And yet what was the alternative? Her brain was doing the calculations her heart was too weary to handle.
“We should think about it,” Mateo said.
“I know,” Nadia agreed. “I know. We just don’t have much time to think. And the spell has to be anchored—someone would have to be at the hospital, in the thick of it, wearing one of my own witching charms. The pearl. That person would bear the biggest part of the risk. Even if none of the patients died, this person might.”