Read Online Spellcaster (Spellcaster #1) by Claudia Gray - Free Book Online Page B

That’s not the worst thing I could do. The worst thing I could do is nothing .
    There have to be ways I could look out for her without talking to her about the visions. I can … watch from afar. Guard her as best I can without putting her in danger .
    But is that even possible?
    Right as he was trying to work it all out, table eight decided they each had a complicated special order—no refried beans here, extra guacamole there, so on and so forth—and Mateo was too busy to do anything but hurry back and forth between his tables and the kitchen for the next half hour. By the time he was able to look back at Nadia’s table again, she was gone, and Melanie was wiping it down to get it ready for the next customers.
    Okay, fine. She was home. That had to be safe, right? Maybe not, though. He hadn’t taken a close enough look before to see whether it resembled the setting of any of his dreams. Why hadn’t he done that?
    “Hey, Mateo.” Melanie held up a cell phone. “One of them left this. You too brokenhearted to take it to her at school tomorrow?”
    “I can handle it,” Mateo said.
    Maybe he’d get his chance to look out for Nadia after all.
    Nadia had never realized there could be so many questions about witchcraft; she didn’t remember asking this many even when she was a little kid. Then again, she’d grown up in the constant company of her mother’s powers, naturally understanding so much of it that there was no need to ask.
    Verlaine, on the other hand, felt the need to ask everything.
    “Can you fly?” she said as she and Nadia walked along the main strip of Captive’s Sound, Nadia trying her best to be sure she knew her way home. “I don’t mean on a broomstick, Gryffindor-style. That would be stupid. Unless you do use broomsticks.”
    “No broomsticks,” Nadia said. “I can’t fly. There are spells—really advanced spells—they could let you, I don’t know, defy the laws of physics for a while. Sort of souped-up versions of what I did to your car. But I’m not that skilled yet. Not even close.”
    “So your mom was a witch?”
    “Yeah. She taught me.”
    “Will she be mad that you told me?”
    “Mom’s not in our lives anymore. She left my dad back in the spring, and she pretty much washed her hands of me and Cole then, too.” The facts were harsh enough, but somehow they sounded even worse spoken aloud like that.
    Verlaine bit her lip, less confrontational than she’d been at any other point during this endless interrogation. “I’m sorry. That sucks. I mean, I don’t even remember my mom and dad—but it would be worse to remember them and then lose them. At least, I think so.”
    So, actually, I’m not the only person who’s had it bad . Nadia felt like a jerk. “It sucks either way. But it’s okay. We’re still here, right?”
    “Right.”
    “And here is—three blocks from my house, if I turn left at this corner?”
    “You’ve got it! Congrats. You’ve learned your way around all ten square feet of Captive’s Sound. Once you get all the gossip down, nobody will be able to tell you from the native population.”
    The one piece of gossip she’d learned—about Mateo Perez—echoed in Nadia’s mind again. The family curse .
    A cool breeze stirred past them, tangling Verlaine’s silvery hair, which already stood out in the early-evening gloom. After spending most of her life in Chicago, Nadia had thought she was pretty much winter-proofed—but cold came early here, and it cut to the bone. Slowly she said, “Has the town always been like this?”
    “Like what?”
    “Not right.” Then Nadia said what she really thought: “Dead inside.”
    Verlaine stopped. For a long moment they stood there beneath one of the streetlamps, the first fall leaves scudding across the cracked sidewalks. “I always thought—I figured it was just because I hate it here. The same way a lot of people want out of their hometowns, you know? When I looked around and only saw the bad side