Cassie Alexander: Shapeshifted

Maldonado regained control of himself, casting the bone aside. “When he’s the one that found me to implement it.”

“Why? What possible reason could you have for all this?” I looked desperately around the room, with the deaths of so many written on its walls.

“This location lends itself to magic. This place is as old and angry as the land your Shadows call home, and is more watered with fresh blood. It was nothing to buy the warehouse above and block off this storm drain, and easy to use the pathetic tecatos outside. Your zombie friend went among them at night, while they were high, like a junkie reaper.” He paused to consider this, and then continued. “And then this room—even in his sleep, look at the artistry. He’s good with bones.”

I needed more time. Luz needed more time. “But why all the bones? Why here? Why the girl?”

“So we could call Santa Muerte to us and control her.” Maldonado rose again to standing. “It’s a brilliant plan.”

“You can’t own Santa Muerte!” Olympio shouted from behind me. “¡Eres un mentiroso, hijo de la chingada!”

“Shut it!” I ordered Olympio. He didn’t know what I did about Maldonado. The flashlight he held, our only light, shook in his hands.

“We’ll kill you!” Olympio went on.

Maldonado smiled. “There you are wrong. I can see into the future sometimes. And I see myself becoming very powerful shortly.”

Luz stirred beside me. I didn’t see it, but I could feel it, like a presence returning to fill the space, the reverse of dying. I’d never seen a vampire wake up before. I knew she was going to be pissed—and still chained, unable to help us just as she hadn’t been able to help herself before.

The only thing I could think of to do to save us was what she’d been forbidden to do. I carefully spotted Luz’s lips in the near dark. I’d once sworn I’d never let anyone else bite me—I’d already been bitten by Anna once, and feeling vampire fangs slide into your flesh once is enough. But if I didn’t get Luz to wake up soon and even the odds, Olympio and I weren’t going to make it out of here.

“Olympio—run!” I shouted at him, and reached for her mouth. I yanked her lower jaw down, smashed my wrist between her fangs, and slammed her jaw back shut. Olympio took off, his light shining with him toward the tunnel.

Maldonado spotted me half a second too late, as the light disappeared. He laughed. “ Dama —there’s no key for those cuffs.” There was a snapping sound, and then bright flames appeared, without anything to burn, in the high corners of the room, illuminating all the bones. There was a pattern on the walls: They swirled from large to small, all sweeping in toward the cage. Maldonado walked over and yanked me back, making Luz’s teeth lacerate my wrist.

He grinned down at me, his face a rictus. Both hands on my shoulders, he shoved me back with more motion than force. It was his magic that followed through, sending me skidding like a strong wind into the wall, extra bones on the floor clattering away from me. I was pinned to the wall, a great weight pressing against my chest. “Stay here,” he commanded. “Someone should get to see.”

And then he returned his attention to the woman in the cage. “Adriana, mi niña esqueleto, mi mujer delgeda, la más pálida y rubia.” He stroked his hands up and down the bars of the cage, bone and metal both. Bones on the wall behind me were jabbing into my back, but his power held me still. Maldonado leaned back and started waving his arms in the air in front of the cage in a pattern, like he was conducting a symphony. His voice rang out, as the curandero ’s had on the previous night. I couldn’t get free.

A dirty face appeared in the tunnel entrance. Maldonado seemed not to notice. It was the old woman returning. Go away! I tried to shout at her, but the bruja had stolen my voice.

Grandmother walked in like a charmed snake, weaving back and forth. Maldonado’s hands included her in his gestures, and he crooned to her, encouraging her, pleading, begging, telling her where to go. And she listened. She came nearer—not to him, but to the cage.

Inside it, Adriana had risen up. She was impossibly thin, cachectic, and the sleeveless white dress she wore hung off her. The outlines of her bones were clear to see, running just beneath their matching tattoos, and her face was tattooed into a grinning skull mask.

Like a bird dancing for itself in front of a mirror, Grandmother and Adriana mimicked each other. Grandmother came closer to the bars of her cage, and Adriana followed, holding up her weakened body by leaning against the bars. Maldonado’s voice rose in a song-like prayer, and Grandmother stood up straight and leaned in. Adriana met her there, and their lips touched.

Old and broken, and young and broken, different but paired, two halves of the same whole. I realized what I was seeing just as a strange light enveloped the place where they touched—if I squinted it looked like they were merging. Maldonado’s magic was uniting Santa Muerte: the old lost woman, the goddess held prisoner by the Shadows for so long that she was a hollow version of her own self, and putting her into Adriana’s starved, trapped form. Adriana’s hand went up, and Santa Muerte’s matched it, two hands pressing into each other until magic combined matter and only one hand remained.

Maldonado’s voice went from whispers to shouting, and behind him Luz sat up. Night had finally arrived. She licked her lips, tasting my blood, and she looked at me with angry eyes. I’d betrayed her to her maker—but Anna was the only person who could save us all now. Then she saw Adriana and Grandmother, and the strange thing they were becoming, conjoined.

“No!” She lunged at the end of the chains—I heard the bones I’d slid into her cuffs shatter.

If Luz had just woken up—so had Anna. Would she get here in time? Where was she? Was she even still in town? I didn’t know. I started beating against the magic that held me, and it kept slamming me back into the bone wall, tighter each time.

Another voice joined Maldonado’s. A flashlight beam illuminated the tunnel’s entrance, and then Olympio was there.

No! Run! I tried to shout at him, but my voice was still gone.

He came into the room like the boy I’d first seen outside the clinic, confident, and his prayers met Maldonado’s with a cocky tone. He didn’t wave his hands, just set his flashlight in his armpit, lining it up so it’d beam into Maldonado’s face, and kept repeating himself.

Maldonado rebounded—I expected him to attack Olympio physically, but he redoubled his efforts toward controlling the women he held in thrall. The light where Grandmother and Adriana met got brighter—no matter what Olympio tried, Maldonado was too strong. Olympio realized it just as I did, while Luz was screaming obscenities in two languages, lunging like a rabid dog at the end of her chains.

Olympio grabbed the flashlight from under his armpit and threw it at the cage.

It flew end-over-end and only hit the corner of the cage. But it hit the bone there solidly, and knocked off one tiny flake.

Maldonado began waving his hands madly, as if he was sending his orchestra toward destruction. He flung his hand out toward Olympio. His magic slammed into the boy, sending him reeling back into the wall beside me.

I watched the tiny piece of bone drop as I heard Olympio grunt, wind knocked out of him by the force of his landing. The light holding the matched women together began to flicker and shake.

“Edie—” Olympio whispered, gasping for air. There was a spear of tibia shooting out through his right shoulder—a bone from the wall behind us had pierced him through, back-to-front.