Charlie Hernández & the Castle of Bones

by Ryan Calejo

  The witch queen’s voice dropped to a low whisper that told me I wasn’t going to like the answer. “Minairons.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  A moment later a strange sound filled the air. It sounded like bees… a swarm of angry bees.

  Violet glanced around, confused. “What the heck is that?” she breathed.

  And suddenly the minairons took flight. Against the starless night sky, only their tiny elven silhouettes were visible. They began to mass together, hundreds of them—thousands of them—a shapeless buzzing glob rising higher and higher into the air.

  “But there’s nothing to worry about, right?” I shot a panicky look back at Joanna. “I mean, minairons are builder elves. They—they’re, like, super friendly, right?”

  Even as I spoke these words, the mass began to form a shape—first a head, then arms, and then wide, muscular shoulders. Whoa, it was like watching a million tiny pixels come together to form a single massive image. Except this image was in constant motion, which made it all the more awesome.

  “Um, what are they doing?” Violet asked, sounding a little worried as the newly formed “arm” reached down and picked up one of the boulders that littered the field.

  And what it looked like was a) they wanted to play catch or b) they weren’t anywhere near as friendly as I’d thought.

  Joanna hardly had time to say “Get behind me, niños,” before the minairons made it very clear that “b” was the right answer and hurled the boulder at us.

  “BUT I THOUGHT THEY WERE SUPER FRIENDLY!” I shrieked. Thankfully, the queen wasn’t as caught up in the whole minairons-being-sweethearts thing as I was. She stepped forward without the slightest hesitation and raised a hand toward the incoming rock. A beam of bright light exploded out of the center of her palm, crackling through the air like a bolt of lightning and cleaving the stone straight down the middle. The two smoking halves, their insides now glowing molten red, plopped harmlessly to the muddy ground, rolling past us on either side and leaving trails of charred grass in their wakes.

  But she wasn’t done yet. Clearly in pwning mode, Joanna unleashed another blast of energy—this one a shaft of dazzling green light—and another total bull’s-eye, piercing the heart of the minairon mass like a flaming arrow. Instantly the enormous shape dissolved, the teeny-tiny elves scattering, shrieking in terror and surprise. Their buzzing grew even louder, deeper, becoming a snarl of anger.

  “¡Corran!” Joanna shouted. “Into the trees!”

  We ran. My feet flew over the muddy, uneven ground, my heart playing the bongo drums on my rib cage. The funny part was just a couple of weeks ago I didn’t believe things like minairons actually existed. I didn’t believe in witches, either, or acalicas, or calacas, La Llorona, El Sombrerón, or even La Cuca—none of those creepy old myths. Sure, I’d grown up hearing all the stories. My abuelita was totally obsessed with stuff like that. She loved legends and myths and folklore and had spent her life traveling the globe, collecting tales from all over the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world. And I’m not gonna lie—she’d gotten me pretty into them too. In fact, I knew most of the stories by heart. But I never believed in them. Not even a little. Which was what made the fact that I was once again running for my life from one of those “made-up” legends so sick.

  Throwing a terrified glance over my shoulder, I saw that the minairons had already regrouped: They were swarming around the base of an ancient oak near the center of the field, and as I watched, they took the shape of a giant hand, huge brawny fingers closing around the tree’s thick trunk.

  A split second later, there was a loud crack! and an avalanche of dirt came raining down as they ripped the massive tree right out of the ground, gnarled roots and all.

  Man, those things were strong!

  “HERE THEY COME!” I shouted as the so-very-unfriendly minairons surged across the field after us, lifting the oak high into the air. Its huge shadow fell over us. I barely had time to yell “WATCH OUT!” before the colossal tree came screaming down at us.

  In the same instant, Joanna whirled, removing her silky red scarf and whipping it in the direction of the minairons with a shriek. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what I expected to happen, but it certainly wasn’t what did happen. Suddenly, with the sound of air rushing into a huge, empty space, the oak caught fire. Tongues of reddish-purple flames licked up the trunk, setting the branches ablaze, and almost immediately the minairon hand disbanded, releasing the burning tree.

  “¡DALE!” the queen ordered. “We may be able to outrun them yet!” Only I wasn’t so sure about that, because just then another swarm of minairons (they seemed to be coming from everywhere: from inside fallen logs, under rocks—even out of the ground itself!) had joined up with the others, and together they had begun to rearrange themselves into another shape—I could see eyes forming… a crooked nose… something like an open, snarling mouth: It was the humongous face of a furious minairon! For an instant, an image of my tombstone flashed before my eyes: CHARLIE HERNÁNDEZ—FIFTH AND FINAL MORPHLING—CAUSE OF DEATH? KILLED BY THE TEENY, TINIEST, MOST ITTY-BITTY ELVES KNOWN TO MAN.

  I could already hear abuelas across the world telling the story and their grandchildren laughing their little heads off.

  Nah, not this Morphling…

  I gritted my teeth. Ran harder, faster. The world around me blurred. The frenzied, buzzing sound of the minairons began to fade. I started to believe that we could actually outrun those things, that we could make it. Just maybe.

  But then I noticed something strange: Not only had the minairon’s buzzing faded—so had any sound of Violet and the queen.

  Confused, I looked around and realized I’d pulled way out ahead of them—like, way out ahead. Almost thirty yards. But—how…?

  Then, as my eyes drifted down to my legs, I got my answer: My legs weren’t my legs anymore! Well, they were still my legs, but they certainly weren’t human legs. They were almost twice as thick and covered with sleek, black-and-yellow-spotted fur.

  Which could only mean one thing—

  I morphed jaguar legs… JAGUAR LEGS!

  I almost couldn’t wrap my brain around it. I mean, sure, being a Morphling, manifesting something like jaguar legs was nothing to tweet home about. In fact, in some of the legends my abuela had told me, I’d heard of Morphlings who had manifested puma paws, porcupine quills, and gills—all at the same time! But for me this was a pretty huge deal, because I hadn’t manifested so much as a zit in almost a week now… not since I’d battled La Cuca in the kitchen of that little house on Giralda. And to say the rest of La Liga was concerned about my total lack of morphing ability would be, like, the understatement of the millennium. Joanna had actually been planning on calling some kind of emergency gathering of sombras (a Convención, I think it was called), hoping that when the scattered clans saw that the League had found another Morphling, more would join us in the fight against La Mano Peluda, which was basically a cabal of evil sombras trying to expand their dominion from the Land of the Dead into our world. But she’d had to ditch those plans, because since my morphing abilities were apparently on perma-pause, none of the other sombras were going to believe that I was actually a Morphling. Yet here I was, manifesting jaguar legs out of the blue, without even trying to! Talk about total irony.

  Unfortunately, though, I didn’t even make it another five steps on my awesome new legs before they began to change back, slimming out before my eyes, losing all the beautiful fur and rippling bands of muscles. All of a sudden my human legs couldn’t keep up with the speed I’d built up with my kitty ones, and I went sprawling, face-first, onto the damp, squishy ground.

  Dazed—feeling like I’d been sucker punched by Oscar De La Hoya—I pushed unsteadily up to my knees. The world had gone completely silent around me. My thoughts were running through my brain at half speed, like thick syrup creeping down a windowpane.

  Glancing back, I saw the giant angry faces of minairons bearing down on me, maybe half a soccer field
away. Closer, a voice was calling my name.

  I blinked. Slowly. My eyelids felt sticky, heavy. And then came: “CHAAARRRLLIIIEEE!” The voice was everywhere—for that instant it was everything, my entire world—and then I felt hands hooking underneath my armpits, felt them lifting me to my feet and pulling me forward.

  “Charlie, c’mon!” It was Violet. “You have to move! We have to move!”

  And that was enough to snap me back to reality. Instantly, as if someone had hit x2 on a Blu-ray player, the world came rushing back in a flood of sound and movement: the sizzling crackle of Joanna’s energy blasts, the dark trees blurring past, the deafening buzzing of twenty thousand or so furious minairons. And all I could think was, We’re about to get totally owned.

  “GO,” I shouted. “GO, GO, GO!”

  But it was too late. Just as we reached the edge of the woods, the mass of minairons crashed over us like a mighty tidal wave.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  It was like a bee attack, only much, much worse, because these things had teeth and claws and tiny little daggers carved out of splinters, and they used all of it to dish out as much pain as humanly—or, in their case, elfishly—possible. One jammed something sharp into the side of my neck. Another two landed high on my cheek and yanked out a bunch of my eyelashes. I cried out, trying to squash them under my palms, but slapping my own face felt pretty bad too, and it was essentially useless; for every two or three I turned to jam, another fifty were assaulting me somewhere else on my body! Beside me, Violet wasn’t doing much better. She kept shouting, “They’re everywhere! Everywhere! ” as she tore madly at her hair, trying to fend off the vicious little elves. But there were simply too many. She shrieked and dropped to one knee as another buzzing swarm slammed into her from the side.

  “VIOLET!” Ignoring the pain lighting up my entire body, I started toward her but tripped as a cloud of minairons stabbed me in the shin with a branch.

  My left knee buckled, and I fell sideways onto the ground, covering my face, crying out for Joanna.

  Just when I thought it was all over, a gust of freezing-cold air roared through the woods, and suddenly the entire forest seemed to come alive. The earth quaked. The soil churned and boiled. Thick vines exploded out of the ground all around us, stretching high into the sky, like long, crooked fingers, and then began to slice through the air like whips. A few of the minairons managed to dodge their attacks, but most weren’t so lucky, and those were sent screaming end over end into the stormy sky. A heartbeat later more vines—these thinner and leafier—broke through the soil and began to encircle us. They wound around us like coils, stacking one on top of another until they closed over us like a protective, leafy cocoon.

  Next thing I knew, the top section began to unravel itself, opening up like a blossoming flower, and (this part I could hardly believe even though I was watching it happen with my own two eyes) Madremonte, the great protector of nature herself, descended on a nest of writhing, twisting roots.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Her hair was a wild jumble of vines, which coiled halfway down her back, squirming like angry snakes as it changed color from harsh reds to pale yellows to tree-trunk brown. Her skin was a deep, rich green that was almost black. Madremonte’s name basically translates to “Mother Mountain,” which has a warm, friendly vibe to it, but I’d always thought of her as an angry mountain because she hadn’t exactly been my biggest fan when we’d first met. Still, was I glad to see her? You betcha!

  “Madremonte!” I heard Joanna shout, surprised. “¿Qué haces aquí?”

  “I had to see the castell for myself,” she replied coolly, stepping off the roots. As her feet touched down upon the earth, it was as if the soil itself responded to her, gathering itself into soft mounds under her feet to cushion her steps, which I had to admit was pretty neat.  “And fortunately for you three.”

  “You can say that again!” I shook off a dozen or so minairons still clinging to the tops of my socks and stomped them into the ground.

  “Get los niños to safety. I bring news from the south, and I’m afraid very little of it is good.”

  Her bright yellow eyes met Joanna’s. “Can you manage brinco?”

  The queen thought for a moment before shaking her head. “Not with both of them.”

  Madremonte’s gaze did not leave her face. The strips of moss and small blooming flowers that grew wild over her body blew in the wind. “The presence of the castell weighs heavily upon you, does it not?”

  “Like an iron yoke,” Joanna answered, sounding out of breath.

  “Llévate el niño. I’ll take the girl.” Madremonte held her hand out toward Violet. “Vamos.”

  “Hold up,” I said, making a time-out sign with my hands. “You travel through roots. Is that even safe for her?”

  “Quite safe,” Joanna replied quickly, motioning for me to move closer. Then she wrapped an arm around my head, her fingers sliding over my face to cover my eyes. An instant later I felt the ground itself yanked out from under my feet, and I knew that when I opened my eyes again, I wasn’t going to see Portugal.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When Joanna removed her fingers, we were standing on the sidewalk of a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood. Artificial cobwebs covered the front door and windows of the house across the street. Cardboard cutouts—skeletons, broomsticks, and bats—hung from the edge of their neighbor’s roof. There was a CROCODILE CROSSING warning by the canal across the street, and at the corner I could see a wall of palms with their trunks painted white. Translation: We were back in South Florida. Right near my new house.

  My old house, the one La Cuca had burned down the day she’d kidnapped my parents, wasn’t far from here. Maybe five or six blocks down the street, and every time we drove past it on the way to school or to the grocery store and I saw the charred, crumbling walls and the scorched lawn, I’d feel this awful stab of sadness right in the middle of my chest. But our new place wasn’t too bad, I guess. It had been recently built and there were a bunch of mango and avocado trees in the backyard, which was cool. Anyway, truth is, I would’ve been happy in any house. I was just glad to have my parents back.

  “¿Estás bien?” Queen Joanna asked me. “Are you hurt?”

  I rubbed at an ache in the side of my neck. “Nah, I’m good.…”

  La bruja studied me closely. In the glow of a nearby lamppost, her eyes glittered like jewels. It was hard not to stare at them. Finally she said, “You are very fortunate to have made it out of those woods alive… we both are.”

  You can say that again, I thought. “But—why’d the minairons attack us?”

  “We were trampling on their homes. The field was full of Saint-John’s-wort, and it goes without saying that minairons can be extremely territorial this time of year. Fue mi culpa. I should have realized it sooner.” She slipped a hand into her sleeve and brought out a small glass vial. Inside, still buzzing angrily about and pounding on the glass with its teeny-tiny fists, was one of the flower elves; she’d managed to capture one. “Perhaps it can tell us who built the castell. Although I doubt whoever it was would have been careless enough to leave witnesses… even one as tiny as this.”

  As we started down the street, Joanna slipped the vial back into her sleeve and said, “Charlie, I want to speak openly with you, if that’s all right?” When I nodded, she drew in a deep breath and continued in a low, troubled voice. “The time of peace treaties and allegiances, I fear, has come to its inevitable end. La Liga will soon pass away, and in its place there will be chaos. Anarchy. A darkness is descending upon this world, Charlie—no, is already here—and I do not believe we possess the strength, or, in some instances, the will to stand against it.” She shut her eyes briefly. “Even now La Mano Peluda schemes in secret, plotting our demise. Which is why you must know everything that we know, why you must see everything that we see, for it is you they want most.”

  “So that’s why you took us to see the castell?”

  “Sí. The constr
uction of that abomination has set into motion a series of otherworldly events—a doomsday clock, if you will—which will tick and tock until its time runs out or ours does.”

  She hesitated, lifting her eyes toward the sky, and for a moment the moonlight glinted off her crown, casting her features in a pale yellowish light. After a moment, she said, “When I was younger—much younger, in fact—I thought that with a large enough army I could force peace upon this world. That I could save lives with swords and shields. This is, of course, not true. You cannot force people to live in peace or you yourself will become the very tyranny you sought to liberate them from.” Glancing back at me, she shook her head, as if she wasn’t sure what she wanted to say—or maybe just wasn’t sure how to say it. “The world has changed much since my youth,” she went on, “yet the nature of evil has largely remained the same. I find that quite interesting, don’t you?”

  I nodded, not sure what else to do.

  Joanna sighed. “Aye, Charlie, there is so much I want to tell you, but the time is not yet right.… I know I haven’t been myself lately, and for that I apologize. I find myself of two minds, warring against my own nature. The old saying is true: To wear the crown is to bear its full weight. Yet I have learned in the times of greatest testing to look to it for guidance. So that is the advice I now offer you: When you’ve come to the end of your path and can go no farther—look to the crown.”

  Trying to seem like we were on the same page or whatever, I just kept nodding along. But the truth was I still didn’t have the slightest clue what she was talking about.

  Suddenly—and with startling speed—Joanna gripped my shoulders firmly in both hands and whispered, “You are the last of five, the fifth and the final. You, Carlito, are the only one who stands between La Mano Peluda and the soul of this world.… ¿Me entiendes?”