Cassie Alexander - Shapeshifted

“I have no idea!” I shouted back to him.

The old woman shoved by both of us. “¡Éste, éste!” and went into the nearest mouth.

Olympio shrugged. “She says this one!”

“Fine.” She was probably at least as magical as I was, or anyone else could be. Our chances were one out of three.

We hobbled behind the woman in the dark. Olympio pulled out one flashlight for himself and handed the other one to me.

The old woman was part mole. She didn’t wait for our light, she just dove through the tunnel, her hunchback perfectly suited for our journey. Olympio and I had to cling to the walls to stay upright while the ankle-high water tried to trip us. I got in front of Olympio and started using my bigger size to block him from falls while he tried to shine the flashlight far enough ahead to keep the woman in their spotlight. She took a right-hand turn and disappeared.

“Fuck,” I whispered when she went out of sight.

“Come on, keep up,” Olympio urged me on.

Together we waddled to where she’d taken the turn. Olympio shone his light in the tunnel she’d taken. “Where did she go?” I asked.

“¿Abuela?” Olympio called.

“Wait for us, lady!” I shouted after him.

We took the turn, but she didn’t wait. We reached a T in the tunnels and shone our lights each way. “Where now?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” One of the tunnels looked higher than the other. I couldn’t imagine Maldonado pulling off a ceremony while fighting getting swept away down here. “That way.” I pointed my flashlight toward the slightly drier tunnel.

“Okay.”

We shimmied along it, one step after another, until it took another turn. This new tunnel was longer than the flashlight beam. Could she have really gotten that far in front of us?

“Keep going.” Olympio nudged from behind me.

“Fine.”

The tunnel floor rose, and we had to crouch farther down. The only benefit was that the water we walked through was shallower. Each shuffling step sloshed less and kicked more. There were hard sharp things below us that we were walking on; they ground against one another, making our footing harder to find. I toed up one of whatever it was, my foot numb with prolonged exposure to the runoff.

It was rounded and flat, and curved just like a rib.

“Huesos,” Olympio whispered behind me. “Bones.”

I nodded and put my finger to my lips. I turned his flashlight off and kept the other one, keeping its beam low as we went in.

There was a bend in the tunnel, and the walls turned from metal to stone … to bone. We’d found it. The last bone room. Olympio gasped.

“Shhhh,” I cautioned. I raised the flashlight slowly, scanning around the ground. Scattered bones covered the floor and were affixed to the walls. The same cage I’d seen before, or its sister, sat against one wall, its occupant hard to spot inside. From somewhere in the room came a sound of running water, a faint hissing like a faucet left on.

I didn’t see anyone where the flashlight could reach. I took a few more steps in, and Olympio stayed glued behind me. Together we crept up to the cage. “Adriana?” Olympio guessed.

“Dejala ir,” the girl in the cage whispered back.

I ignored him. “We have to get her out of here—”

“No. She’s saying ‘free her,’ not ‘free me,’” Olympio interrupted. He took the flashlight away from me and shone it down to where Adriana lay collapsed inside the bone cage. Her whole body was wedged against the side, and her arm was reaching out. He shone the flashlight where she was reaching to—and Luz was there, chained to the ground.

“Luz!” I ran over to her at the same time as Olympio did. “Luz—wake up—” She was sprawled across the floor, chained at both wrists, and I realized with sickness that the hissing sound I’d heard was her—the cuffs were silver and sawing through her arms as fast as she could heal. I dragged her back and pulled the silver cuffs out of the divots they’d worked into her wrists.

“Luz, when did this happen to you?” Without Catrina around to guard Luz, had someone attacked the Reinas during the day? Who better to know their schedule than the Three Crosses? I’d hoped the guards I’d seen with submachine guns had been able to defend the people inside the Reina compound.

But it was still daylight outside. Despite the fact that it was pitch-dark in here without our flashlight to see, the daylight above still held sway.

“Why won’t she wake up?” Olympio asked me.

“She’s Reina—and it’s still light out overhead.” I snapped my fingers and pointed to the nearest pieces of bone. “Grab me those, will you?” Olympio did as he was told, and I shimmed them between her skin and the silver cuffs.

There was the sound of boot heels on cement, footsteps louder than the water outside. And another Luz appeared, from a crevice of shadow in the far wall.

“How?” Olympio whispered.

How indeed! My mind panicked, and then I realized I knew. Last night, when Luz had run in first to look for Adriana, or maybe even before then, during a prior fight—she’d touched Maldonado. And he was still a shapeshifter. He’d been able to capture her and take her form.

It was probably how he’d captured Adriana in the first place.

We’d taken Maldonado himself home last night. No wonder he’d left Catrina behind. And because he wasn’t really a vampire, he wasn’t constrained by the sun.

The shapeshifter’s eyes saw us, and he put a hand that wasn’t his on his hip. “So now you see.” The upright Luz looked to her twin on the ground, and then at me. “I knew if my son loved you, you were smart,” said the shapeshifter with Luz’s face. And then he transformed into Maldonado.

Luz’s clothes were tight on him, until they disappeared, changing with him into Maldonado’s black robes, pendant and all. I didn’t know if his transformation was shapeshifting or magic or what.

“So you’re … Asher’s father?” I asked, looking for some way I could appeal to him.

“Only part of me. It’s very complicated in here.” He tapped his forehead with a gloved finger and watched me with glittering eyes. “We only use the shapeshifter when we need him. We do as I say, the rest of the time.”

“Can you,” I began slowly, not sure who I was addressing or how to address him, “let her go?”

He grinned and laughed. “We have a plan, and she’s a part of it. It’s too late to go back now.”

“But she’s just a girl—” I pleaded. “You have to let her go.”

He knelt down a distance away, so we were on the same level. “Why would I do that?” He swept his arm back to indicate the room we were in with the girl in the cage and the bones on the walls. “I have a glorious plan, and you expect me to ruin it over your conscience? Because you think you have a tenuous connection with someone from my past?”

Maldonado was waiting for an answer. The longer I played stupid, and the longer we talked, the greater the chances Luz would wake up, or Asher would come down here and save us. Maybe.

“Do you know how many pasts I have inside me right now?” he asked.

All I could do was shake my head.

Maldonado leaned forward. “I’ll tell you. Thousands. And they’re all so mad. And the shapeshifter, your friend’s father, is the worst of them all.” He grabbed a loose bone off the ground, and scraped its sharp edge across his forehead. “He screams and screams until I want to cut him out of me from the inside. When all this was his idea. His idea!” He jabbed the bone at his forehead with force, and when he moved his hand, a bruise and drops of blood were left behind.