by Ryan Calejo
That I understood. “Yes.”
Joanna studied my face for a quiet moment before saying, “Sí, sí… I perceive that you do, yet I fear I lay too heavy a burden on you, that perhaps you are not ready. However, it is not upon the ready that great tasks are laid, but merely upon the willing.” She paused for a moment, her glowing eyes looking deeply into mine. “Are you willing, Charlie? Will you fight for the soul of this world? Will you fight for those who cannot fight for themselves?”
“I mean, yeah… but my manifestations—”
“They will come.… You’ll get stronger; I have no doubt about that. Cero.”
“Well then, yeah, of course I’ll fight.”
Joanna gave a firm nod. “Alas, your time has come.”
Behind us, a great gusting wind kicked up. It screamed down the block, shaking the trees and sending leaves skittering along the sidewalk. Shielding my face, I turned to glance back. And when I turned around again, the witch was gone.
CHAPTER SEVEN
CARLITO ERNESTO HERNÁNDEZ, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?” my mother shouted the moment I stepped foot through the door. “Sí, sí, acaba de entrar por la puerta,” she said into the phone, then slammed it back into its cradle and stormed out of the kitchen, clutching a saltshaker in the shape of a curly-tailed puerquito in one hand, her dark eyes narrowed in a dangerous sort of way. First thing that worried me—she was using my full name, which, in my experience, usually meant trouble. Second thing, she was saying it in Spanish, which always meant double trouble.
“Do you have ANY IDEA what you’ve put your father and me through today?” she yelled at me. “Tu papá was waiting for you in his car for almost two hours. Joanna said you were going to be TEN MINUTES!” Lynda Hernández—or as I called her, Mom—came from a big family of Cuban immigrants. Like my grandma, my mom was one of the most caring and loving people you could ever hope to meet. But unlike my grandma, she had fiery salsa moves, fiery reddish hair, and a fiery Latin temper to match. My mom taught Spanish at my school (and sometimes dance, when the school had the money to offer it), and even though all her students loved her, they knew she was not a teacher you could mess with. Unless, of course, you wanted to spend the year scraping globs of bubble gum off the bottom of desks.
“You know you’re supposed to call us if you’re going somewhere with her!” she continued, wagging the saltshaker at me now and flinging salt all over the place. “That was the deal. We have to know where you are—AT ALL TIMES!”
Something hissed and popped behind her. She ignored it. Another thing about my mom—when she gets nervous, she cooks. Some people pace, some people call a friend—my mom bakes, broils, and roasts her fears away. Through the door into the kitchen, I could see at least three different stainless-steel pots bubbling away on the stove top. The oven had been set to 350. The microwave was on full blast, and somewhere in the background I could hear the whir and whine of the blender. I smelled arroz con pollo (my mom’s famous chicken and rice), croquetas, which are basically bread-crumb-fried ham meatballs, and the citrusy, tangy scent of mojo sauce. It was all starting to make me kind of hungry.
My mom, meanwhile, hadn’t even paused to take a breath. “I tried texting Violet; she never answered back. We had no idea if you were hurt, if something terrible had happened. How were we supposed to find you? Who were we supposed to call?” Her wide brown eyes slid down to my arms, my legs—and for a second I thought they were going to pop out of her head Saturday-morning-cartoon style. “¡DIOS MÍO, YOU’RE ALL SCRATCHED UP!” she cried.
And since I knew this was only going to get worse the more bumps and bruises she spotted, I decided to make my move.
“Mom—”
“¡No lo creo! I take my eyes off of you for one minute—UN MINUTICO—and look what happens! You’re a mess! No, you’re BLEEDING!”
“Mom—”
“And your HAIR! You look like you went rolling down the side of una montaña! Except there AREN’T any mountains in Miami! What are all those leaves and bits of—”
“Mom!”
She glared at me. “What?”
“I’m okay…,” I said, and that seemed to stop her.
Closing her eyes, she reached out and pulled me into a tight hug, her long hair falling over my face like a curtain. “You know that’s the only thing that matters to me…,” she whispered into my ear. “The only thing.”
“I know,” I said, and thought about how nice it was to have parents who worried about you. Even if sometimes they worried too much.
A small laugh escaped her as she gave me another squeeze. “I was driving your poor father crazy trying to find you.… ¡Lo tenia loco!” She held me for a moment longer, then pulled back to look at me. “So where were you?”
She’d asked it all nice and innocent-like, but I knew my mom well enough to know it was a front; she was still in full-on interrogation mode, which meant that I had to watch my step. And closely. Like walking-through-a-field-of-bear-traps closely. So I decided to play dumb. I was good at that.
“Uh, I was with Joanna,” I said. “You knew that.”
“Yes, I know. But that doesn’t answer my question. I asked, where were you?”
“We… went for a walk” was the first (and only) thing that popped into my head, so I tried it. Lame, for sure, but I pretty much sucked at lying.
Her eyes narrowed in an I know something’s up sort of way. “So you went for a walk with Joanna and came back looking like you got beat up by a gang of angry cacti?”
Actually, it was more like a gang of angry flower elves, but she wasn’t too far off. “Well, uh, no… I played some… tackle football with Violet after.” Why couldn’t they teach Fibbing 101 at school to help kids like me out?
Thankfully, before I could come up with any other ridiculous excuses, the front door swung open, and my dad came in carrying a silver cross that was almost as tall as he was.
The instant his eyes found mine, I saw relief spread across his face, and he let out a long, low sigh. “Ay, gracias a Dios, you’re okay.…”
Now, just to be clear, my dad wasn’t one of those people who likes to dress all matchy-matchy and stuff, but today he was decked out in head-to-toe Hurricanes gear: green baseball cap, green and orange football T-shirt, orange and gray sweats. My dad had been a University of Miami sports fan ever since he moved here and now he worked for the school as an animal geneticist. Crazy thing was when he told certain people that he was a legit scientist, they’d give him this funny look as if his thick Spanish accent (which I thought was awesome) and his dark honey-colored skin somehow disqualified him from being “a smart person.” It sort of sucked that there were people who’d make judgments like that just based on how someone looks or talks, but whatever. My dad was Mexican on his mother’s side and Portuguese on his father’s, but rooted for the Costa Rican team during the World Cup because Costa Rica was known to have the highest density of biodiversity of any country in the entire world. Yeah, my dad always used stuff like that to pick his favorite teams. Go figure. Anyway, he was tall, about six foot two with thick black hair and dark brown eyes that shouted, “Latino and proud!” All my mom’s friends thought that he looked like a telenovela star, which I guess was cool because pretty much everyone told me I was his spitting image.
“Dad? Seriously?” I arched a brow, staring at the ginormous cross he was carrying. “You couldn’t have found a bigger one?”
He sighed. “It’s your mother.… She’s making me take it with me everywhere I go.”
“Ay, sí, I’m the crazy one!” My mom, who was still holding the pig-shaped saltshaker, shook it first over one shoulder, then the other, sending salt racing across the tile floor. “Sure!”
Under normal circumstances, I might’ve found my parents’ behavior a little bit… well… kooky. But I couldn’t blame them—I’d probably be acting a bit kooky myself if I’d been turned into a little kid’s plaything by some bloodthirsty bruja.
My dad kissed me on my
head as he set the cross down on the sofa. I heard the springs squeak under its weight. “You gave us a scare today, Charlie,” he said, ruffling my hair. “That’s for sure.”
“So how long should we ground him for?” my mom asked with a sly smirk.
My dad grinned. “I believe eighteen’s the legal limit.”
My mother wrapped an arm around my shoulder and gave me another squeeze. “You heard your father. Eighteen it is. Now go wash up and get ready for dinner. ¡Tienes que alimentarte porque estás bien flaco!”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Dinner with my parents was usually great; my mom was an amazing cook, and my dad always had some interesting animal-related facts or jokes to tell us. There was usually a lot of laughing and talking to each other about our day and stuff like that, but today just wasn’t the same; I wasn’t sure if it was because I’d almost died at the teeny-tiny hands of arguably the teeny-tiniest sombras on the face of the planet, or the fact that I couldn’t get the image of that gruesome castell out of my mind, but I could barely muster a smile for my dad’s jokes, and I hardly touched my plate of arroz con pollo, which was my mom’s specialty and probably my favorite food in the entire world. My mom, of course—being my mom—figured out pretty quick something was up. She started asking me all sorts of questions, like What happened today with Joanna? Where did she take you? What’d you see? And a whole bunch of other questions I really didn’t want to answer. Mostly because I didn’t want to worry her, but also because I had a whole bunch of my own questions racing through my head, like Why did one of those castell things show up now, after so many years? Who built it? And why did it seem to have such a negative effect on Joanna?
Problem was, no matter how many times I asked myself those questions, I couldn’t come up with any answers. And that bothered me. It scared me. Fortunately, I happened to be best friends with a girl who wouldn’t quit until she’d gotten a few, and she called me just as I was helping my dad wash the dishes.
“It’s all wrong, Charlie,” she nearly shouted in my ear when I picked up the phone. “The minairon attack. The castell. Everything! And I’m pretty sure Joanna is keeping secrets from us.”
“I got that feeling too…,” I admitted, sitting down in the kitchen.
I could hear Violet rummaging around in a drawer. “Anyway, the second I got home, I pulled out a few of my mom’s vintage-shoe-collector books and started researching the clog. Turns out, I was right. It’s old. And by old I mean, like, early 1600s.”
“Whoa.”
“Yeah, and just to be sure, I snapped a picture and sent it to one of the appraisers my parents sometimes use, and she totally agrees—in fact, she says she’s never seen grain patterns like that before, which means the species of tree that was used to make the clog doesn’t even exist anymore.”
“Double whoa.”
“Exactly. So I have to ask myself: What was a four-hundred-year-old shoe made from extinct wood doing in the middle of a field in Portugal?”
Good question. “And let me guess—you have a theory?”
“Working on one, but first I wanna go back to the Provencia. I wanna see if Joanna has any books about those castell things, and I want her to take another look at the clog. My gut’s telling me it’s important.”
And since her gut was usually right, it was time to get the parentals involved.
CHAPTER NINE
My mom agreed to drive us. I didn’t say much—just told her we’d left some stuff back at the monastery, and she was more than happy to play chaperone. I hated lying to my parents (and not just because I sucked at it), but in this case the truth wasn’t going to help.
It was almost eight o’clock, and the moon was a big silver disk glowing above the rows of palms that bordered Dixie Highway when my mom pulled her SUV into the dark parking lot in front of the church. She told us she’d wait for us here, and Violet and I hopped out and started through the high iron gate, the broad green leaves of the banyan trees crisscrossing over us to form a leafy canopy.
The first time we tried to sneak into this place, back when we’d thought it was just an old Spanish monastery in North Miami Beach, I’d almost been made dinner by some psycho shape-shifting sorcerer (aka a nahual) they’d hired to work security. Later, we learned this place was actually a Provencia—an ancient, warded stronghold used by La Liga and its allies. Since then V and I had probably visited here at least half a dozen times and usually hung out in the gardens or in the massive library with all its ancient scrolls and a ceiling mosaic that showed the map of the world as they knew it in the early 1400s.
“Let’s talk to Joanna first,” Violet said. “Show her the clog again and then go from there.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I said, and it did—
Except that the moment we walked through the tall, arched doors leading into Joanna’s study, our plan crumbled like week-old cookies.
* * *
Queen Jo’s study, which to me had always felt like some fancy Spanish museum (you know, the sort of place you’d visit on a school field trip and wouldn’t be allowed to touch anything) now looked like a total war zone.
There were huge, smoldering craters in the marble walls big enough to drive a semi through. Jagged cracks zigzagged their way across the domed glass ceiling, and the slimy green guts of plant life were splattered all over the furniture and floors like bugs on a windshield. I could see muddy handprints on the tile; they made faint tracks over the thick red-and-gold carpets, as though someone had been dragging themselves across the room. Weird thing was, they’d only been using one hand—the tracks all appeared to be right-handed. In the center of the room, the queen’s colossal wooden desk had been overturned. Papers and postcards and small leather-bound notebooks—all stamped with old-school wax seals—were strewn everywhere. Every single drawer had been ripped out, their contents scattered carelessly about.
On the other side of the room, the beautiful oak bookcases had been toppled over; books littered the floor, their covers torn off, pages shredded. Even the paintings had been pulled down. A few were lying on the carpet near the wall with their backs peeled away like an onion skin.
The only thing that appeared to have been left undamaged was El Espejo de Viaje—the magical, body-length mirror we’d stepped through earlier today to get to Portugal.
“What the…?” Violet’s words died on her lips, and the ones inside my brain didn’t get much farther. Slowly, careful not to step on anything, we picked our way to the center of the room, where Violet lowered herself into a crouch, peering around. Her shocked expression was already gone, replaced by her trademark look of concentration.
“What are you doing?” I whispered.
But she ignored me, her blue eyes scanning the room. Yep, she was in full Sherlock mode.
“V? Hello…?”
“There was a struggle,” she said after a pause so long that I didn’t think she’d heard me.
I blinked. “A what?”
“A fight.… Check out the hand and claw marks on the desk.”
I hadn’t noticed those: more muddy prints, along with a few deep, curving scratches in the wood.
“They’re on some of the handles of the drawers, too.” Violet stood up and went over to the desk, stepping carefully around a pile of charred, smoking stuff. “Looks like they were fighting over something…,” she said. “Something in one of the drawers.” Squatting down, she peered into the huge piece of overturned furniture, then narrowed her eyes, gazing around as if she were trying to see into the past. “Here—right here—is where the would-be thief stood.…”
“The who?” I honestly had no idea what she was talking about, and I started to get the feeling she wasn’t talking so much to me as to herself.
“Scuff marks on the tiles indicate a sudden powerful transfer of weight, which makes it pretty obvious that they were the ones who flipped the desk.” She pointed at the floor in front of her, and I could almost make out the outline of footprints on the pinkish tile
s. “Joanna, most likely standing on the other side at this point, would’ve had to jump back to avoid it”—her eyes tracked along the ground, following something I couldn’t see—“but… she stumbled. Hit her back against that wall.” I could see a vertical, almost shoulder-width crack in the marble. V passed a hand over it as she said, “Then, as Joanna struggled to find her balance, the thief tried to end her.” Violet’s fingers traced the charred rim of the still-smoldering crater in the wall; it was just a foot or two to the left of the crack. “But Joanna obviously dodged it or there would be an extremely well-dressed corpse with a smoking hole in it right about here.”
“But there isn’t,” I said, “so that’s good, right?”
“That’s very good. But…” Violet cleared away the blackened remains of some old scroll with her foot, uncovering a small wooden box. It reminded me of one of those fancy boxes people use to keep expensive family heirlooms and stuff, lacquered on all six sides and polished to a rich coppery shine. “Interesting.”
“What is that?” I whispered, still trying to catch up.
“Maybe what they were fighting over.…” There was some kind of fancy combination lock on the box, but Violet didn’t bother with it. Carefully she thumbed the latch, flipped it open… and her lips bent into a frown.
“It’s empty,” I said, not understanding.
“That’s because they weren’t fighting over the box; they were fighting over whatever was inside the box.…”
“So the thief or whoever got it, then? Left the box behind.”
Violet was shaking her head as she gazed slowly around. “No, I don’t think they did get it.…”
“What? Why not?”
“First off, the little combination lock on the box had been opened. I doubt a thief would’ve wasted time trying to figure it out here; they would’ve just taken the box with them, messed with the combination later. Second, check out the craters in the walls.…”