Cassie Alexander: Shapeshifted

Oh God, I yelled, still without a voice.

Luz shouted a triumphant battle cry from behind the cage. She held up mangled hands—she’d broken the bones of her hands to free them from the silver cuffs. She ran for Grandmother and began to pry her back from Adriana with her arms. Maldonado stopped praying now, and started shouting. I dropped the few inches between me and the ground, yelped, and found I could talk.

“Olympio—” I scurried over to where he was pinned. We were the two least magical things in the room—we needed to get the hell out. I reached behind him, where the wall was slick with his blood, and tried to pull the bone free from the wall. It was attached—embedded into cement. I couldn’t break it without hurting Olympio. With piercing wounds you were supposed to try to leave the object in—it might be applying pressure on arteries on the inside, stopping the person from bleeding out. But the shouting and fighting behind us wouldn’t last forever, and in Luz’s damaged state I couldn’t guarantee who would win.

“This is going to suck,” I told Olympio.

He gritted his teeth and nodded. “Do it.”

I took him by his shoulders and yanked him off the wall. The bone slid into his wound again and out the other side. He collapsed into me. I balled his hand into a fist and put it up against his chest, and I pressed the back of him into me, picking him up.

“Come on,” I told us both. “Come on.” I started drag-carrying him to the tunnel’s maw. Behind us, the shouting and sounds of fighting didn’t stop.

I wasn’t sure where we were going. The water fought against us, trying to steal Olympio away from me. We were lower here, so the water was deeper—I didn’t know if that meant I was going the wrong direction, or if it’d begun to rain outside. He whimpered every time I yanked him, and my chest was warm with his hot blood.

“You can’t die,” I explained to both of us. “You can’t.” I felt along the tunnel’s side with my shoulder, hitting it with the top of my head, the sound of the water susurrating around us, making me dizzy. What if I got turned around? What if Maldonado’s magic twisted the tunnel somehow? What if there was no safe place?

“Come on.” I pulled us both along. The air got fresher, and I had to fight the water more. I was soaked up to my thighs; I couldn’t feel from my feet to my knees. The only thing that kept me going was that I was carrying Olympio.

The water rose and I stumbled, wrenching on Olympio’s arm. He cried out then; I heard it echo. I pulled him up again and turned to start sidestepping against the rising water-wall, trying to give it less of me to push against.

“Edie? Olympio!” Our names, shouted from a distance.

“ ¡Estoy aquí! Here!” Olympio shouted weakly from my arms.

I couldn’t spare a breath to yell. If I lost my footing now, there’d be no regaining it; we’d both be washed away, battered against the tunnel walls.

“Edie! Olympio!” The voice was more panicked. Closer.

I saw light just as hands snatched in. I fought them instinctively. Olympio yelped as he was pulled from my arms.

“We’ve got you—Edie—” Ti was there, pulling me forward against the tide, and Asher was at his side holding Olympio.

“She’s down there—so’s he,” I whispered as soon as I felt safe. They hauled us against the current, out of the tunnel, back to the ditch’s open space. Wider here, the water was shallower but not much slower. “He’s insane.” I reached for Asher. “Whatever he tells you—he is insane.”

Asher held up a hand covered with Olympio’s blood. “I know.”

There was a crash of thunder and a lightning bolt nearby. In that frozen second of light, I could see that the man who held Olympio wasn’t fully Asher anymore … or Hector either. His face was pulled between forms, asymmetrical, pieced together with parts from a hundred different beings.

“No—” I fought against Ti to stand on my own.

“Shhh,” Asher whispered to Olympio, hidden again in the dark. Regardless of his form, he applied pressure to the wound like a doctor would. “Shhhhhhh.”

The sound of water grew—rain from a hundred city blocks was slowly channeling down. We turned to walk up the ditch as one.

“Asher!” A man’s voice yelled behind us. Maldonado emerged from the middle tunnel, apparently no worse for the wear. Adriana, Luz, Grandmother? Had magic or water taken all three?

Maldonado reached out his hand. “I knew you were out here. It’s not too late for you!”

Asher stopped, Olympio still cradled in his arms. He turned toward Maldonado, his father, and I couldn’t see his face.

“Asher—come to me,” Maldonado demanded, and I remembered how inside the bone chamber he’d kept me trapped. “The ceremony can go on. They’re all trapped in there. I can save you. Come with me, and see.”

Asher started setting Olympio down. Was he choosing to do that? Of his own volition? Or was he under Maldonado’s control, as I had been?

“No!” I struggled against Ti to find footing with my numb feet. He pulled me close for one moment, helping me stand straight, and his lips brushed my forehead.

“Be careful, Edie,” he whispered. He made sure I had my footing, let go of me, and then ran in.

Ti reached Maldonado before Asher, and hit him like a truck. The bruja was flung back into the cement wall and collapsed into the water at Ti’s feet. I wanted to cheer, but I had to get over to Olympio—maybe this would all be over soon and somehow we’d all survive. I tried not the calculate the odds as I reached Olympio’s side.

Maldonado had recovered—I hadn’t seen it happen, but he was locked with Ti now, arm-to-arm, chest-to-chest. As a zombie, Ti was the only thing a shapeshifter like Maldonado couldn’t become. Asher was still walking toward his father, slowly. I hoped it was reluctance holding him back, but I honestly didn’t know.

I scooped Olympio up out of the water. He was cold and pale. “Hey, hey.” I shook him awake. “You’d better still be with me.”

His eyelids fluttered open. “You haven’t killed me yet.”

“Where’d you want to go, Olympio?” I knelt down in the water to keep him out of it, raising his chest up across mine. I hugged him in an attempt to provide pressure. “In the car, when we get out of here. Where do you want to go?”

He smiled at me. “Disneyland.”

I snorted. “That’s pretty far away from here.”

“Yeah. I know.” I squeezed him tighter.

Out of the farthest tunnel, Grandmother arrived. She was like some mystic cockroach that nothing could kill. As I had that thought, she turned and pierced me with her eyes.

Maldonado shoved Ti back, and Ti stumbled to one knee. Grandmother moved around their battle and walked toward me. As she did so, I noticed something strange about the fight. Asher was at its periphery, moving back and forth in one spot like a paused character in an old video game. Was he fighting his father, or had his father put him there, trapped, while he was wrestling with Ti? I crushed Olympio to my chest with worry.

As Grandmother neared she seemed taller, as if her spine had unwound, and I realized she was producing light, the bright orange-yellow of light pollution tinged with smog.

“Elegir,” she said when she stood nearby. “¡Elige!”

“What the hell are you saying?” I asked aloud.

“¡Elige! ¡Elige uno!”

“She says for you to choose. She says you get to pick one,” Olympio translated for me. I could see the meat of his wound, where I’d mashed him to myself, turning white with no-blood. It wasn’t just the rain that made him cold—he was slipping away from me.