by Ryan Calejo
“Exactly. So she must’ve hidden it somewhere she’d know we’d absolutely have to pass through.”
“Okay, that makes sense. But, like, where?”
“There’s only one place. The exit.”
“The Purple Caves?”
“Maybe. But I don’t even think there, because Joanna is smart enough to know that there’d be a pretty good chance the mukis would be all over us at that point.”
“So where, then?”
Her blue eyes flitted around our surroundings. “How about right here…?”
“Here?” Saci sounded more than a little confused as he looked slowly around. “Like in da trees…?”
“Well, anywhere. See, she’d know that if we made it out, we’d have to pass right through here. It’s the only way out of the city, isn’t it?”
“And she’d also know that the mukis would never leave their mines to chase us,” I said as it hit me.
“Which would make this the perfect place to hide a clue!”
Saci, who was trying to keep up, turned to me with something like awe in his eyes. “Dang, she pretty smart, huh?”
I smirked. “That’s Violet.”
“Start looking!” V shouted. “The clue’s gotta be around here somewhere.”
So that’s exactly what we did; we searched high and low, in the tangle of thorny bushes near the mouth of the cave, behind all the tall trees, under every rock and log, even up in some of the lower branches. But twenty minutes later we hadn’t found a thing. Nothing that looked like a clue, anyway.
“Not seeing anything, V.” I rolled a rock over with the bottom of my shoe and remembered I’d already checked under this one. “There’s nothing out here.…”
“Nutting!” Saci shouted. “We wastin’ our time. We could be halfway to Brazil by now!”
“Just keep looking…,” Violet said. “It’s gotta be here.”
Right as she said that, one member of our search party decided they’d had enough; there was a loud squawk, and suddenly the alicanto exploded into flight, rising up over the tops of the tall trees and disappearing into the fierce jungle sky.
Watching it go, I felt the strangest tug on my heart. Sort of like when I watched Alvin accidentally flush his pet goldfish down the toilet in second grade.
“Charlie, you all right?” Violet asked, putting a hand on my shoulder.
“Yeah, it’s just—the bird and I really bonded, you know?”
“Are you… crying?” she whispered.
I shook my head, blinking my suddenly misty eyes. “It’s just the rain.”
“It’s not raining,” she said.
“Probably that, um, empty-nest syndrome thing, then.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s not it either.”
A moment later there was a loud shout behind us, and I turned to see Saci come scrambling out of the cave, swatting at something around his head.
Violet frowned, and I shouted, “What’s going on?”
“Stupee bug flying in my face!” he shouted back, still swatting at something. “Stupee butterfly! Is all over me!”
Violet sighed. “Oh, just ignore it.”
“I trying!” Saci said. Then he screamed and fell sideways into a bush.
“Are you serious?” I couldn’t believe this guy was getting beaten up by a friggin’ butterfly. Shaking my head, I went over to see if he was all right and found him lying on his back with a bright yellow mariposa poised on the very tippy-tip of his nose. Dude had literally been taken down by something that weighed less than a penny.
“Nobody move!” Saci whispered through gritted teeth. “I gonna get dis sucker myself.…”
Violet was standing over him too, and now, as Saci slowly raised one hand, preparing to squash the butterfly against his face, she yelled, “Wait! That’s not a butterfly!”
Saci shot her an annoyed look. “Ei, menina, please… Saci know a butterfly when he see one, okay?”
“No, she’s right!” I shouted, realizing it. “It’s Joanna’s brooch!” The one she’d used to mesmerize that big crowd of people and the police officers the day she’d taken us to see that first castell!
Then, with a blur of golden wings, the butterfly brooch lifted off Saci’s nose and began flying slow, floaty circles around our heads.
As we watched, it flew ahead of us, toward a path in the trees, and when we didn’t immediately follow, it floated back over to us and tried again.
“It looks like it’s trying to lead us somewhere…,” I whispered.
“That’s because it is!” Violet shouted excitedly. “It’s Joanna’s clue!”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT
We followed Jo’s butterfly pin north through thick jungle and along winding silver streams, occasionally crossing over barely there paths that zigzagged around clusters of grassy foothills and log bridges. The terrain was tough, the ground littered with knots and bumps and twisted roots, and studded with these huge mossy rocks that looked like they’d make good footing but were actually as slippery as banana peels. We all found that out the hard way. Still, no one—ahem, Saci—complained. We were all too jacked up about having found Joanna’s clue. That, and having made it out of El Dorado alive. The only bad part, I guess, was that none of us had any idea where the heck we were or where the heck we were going. The Purple Caves could have let out anywhere in South America, anywhere in the world, for that matter, and it wasn’t like we had a GPS or anything to tell us where we were. Twice, Saci mentioned that the jungle smelled like Costa Rica to him but that he couldn’t be positive because he’d banged his nose pretty hard back when we’d crash-landed outside the cave and still wasn’t sure it was working right. Wherever we were, my only hope was that Joanna was close by, because we were running out of time.
As the sun began to set, we found ourselves following the golden butterfly down a side of the mountain where the land flattened out and formed almost a plain cut into the steep slope. We were now in sombra wood. At least I was pretty sure we were. I could feel the magic in the air like a cool breeze, like electricity. I watched the butterfly flit in lazy, erratic circles near a stand of trees. Then I watched it pick up speed and fly straight into—a rock…?
What the—
Wondering if all this hiking was making me see things, I raced over, Violet right behind me. “How did it do that?” she asked, panting.
“No idea.” I pressed the palms of my hands against the big white boulder, which was a little taller than us, about the size of a minivan, feeling for any cracks or openings, but there were none. Something squawked above us.
We both looked up. A fat black crow with big black eyes was perched on the boulder. It peered down at us, squawked, “Password! What’s the password?”
“Did dat thing talk?” Saci asked as he hopped up behind us.
“Yes, dummy!” the crow answered.
Saci glared up at it. “Wha’ you jess call me?”
“Password!” I shouted. “It’s asking for a password!”
Violet looked at me, and we both look at Saci, who shrugged.
“Wha’? I don’t know no password for no rock.”
V’s eyes flicked back to mine. “Charlie?”
“A password…?” How should I know? I mean, who had ever heard of a password to get into a rock? But the longer I thought about it, the more I felt like there was something familiar about it all… the huge white rock, the black-as-night crow perched atop, asking for a password. Legends began to bubble in my mind, stories of a terrible witch, one who could turn people into animals and entire cities into stone—a witch of the wild… a terrifying sombra people had come to fear for hundreds of years. “Zarate,” I breathed, and the crow’s black eyes sharpened on me.
It angled its sleek, dark head, as if eagerly anticipating my next words. And suddenly I remembered the password: “For the love of the peacock, open the stone!” I shouted, and then knocked three times, just like the legend said to.
On the third knock, the
crow leapt off the rock with a loud squawk and disappeared into the trees in a flurry of black feathers.
“You scare it off!” Saci cried. “Now what…?”
But no sooner had he spoken those words than a gust of laughter swept through the trees. We all froze. Heart leaping into my throat, I scanned the woods around the rock, but didn’t see anyone hiding in there. Nada. Then, a second later, the laughter came again, and this time a great voice—seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once—suddenly spoke up.
It said only five words, but they were five of the most terrifying I’d ever heard:
“BRING LOS NIÑOS TO ME!”
CHAPTER SEVENTY-NINE
At that moment, the ground under our feet began to tremble (which was more than a little freaky, considering earthquakes weren’t exactly rare in Costa Rica), and I saw a circle of pure white light glowing in the center of the large rock.
At first I thought it had to be one of the last dying rays of sunlight piercing the tree cover and shining right onto the rock’s face like a mini spotlight. But the light kept strengthening, expanding outward in overlapping rings of brightness that never wavered or dimmed, until the entire rock shone like a blazing sun.
Shielding my eyes, squinting against the intense glare, I caught glimpses of what looked like dark shapes in the rock… dark shapes moving inside the rock… moving through it, through the light. And they were coming toward us, growing bigger and more defined as they did, their inky black shadows seeming to stretch out behind them forever.
“WHAT THE HECK ARE THOSE THINGS?” I shouted.
But before Violet or Saci could answer (not that either one probably had any clue), the figures emerged from the light, melting right out of the rock itself!
There were maybe ten of them, all oddly shaped, a couple hunched over or seeming to walk on all fours. And now, as they came toward us, walking across solid grassy ground and moving far enough away from the rock that the dazzling light no longer hid their forms, I saw what they actually were—and what they actually were was a gang of wild animals. There was a brown pelican, five white-faced monkeys (capuchins, it looked like), a pair of coatimundis (supercute members of the raccoon family), three collared peccaries (basically hairy pigs), an iguana, and a giant green macaw. But even weirder than what they were was what they were wearing: The monkeys had on pleated white pants and red belts; one of the coatimundis was sporting a pair of tiny diamond earrings on its fuzzy half-moonshaped ears; the macaw wore a necklace of white pearls; and sitting slightly sideways on the pelican’s feathered head was a fancy straw hat adorned with a bright red flower and ribbon. No joke, it looked like they were on their way to a quinceañera—at Zoo Miami. The sight was so bizarre, so out-of-this-world ridiculous that I could hardly process it. In fact, I hadn’t even finished gaping at their clothes when I realized the animals were also carrying weapons—machetes, shovels, and a whole bunch of sharpened twigs and sticks—well, at least the ones with opposable thumbs were. Before I knew it, they’d surrounded us and began herding us toward the glowing rock at twig-point. Like we were the wild animals!
One of the capuchins jabbed Saci on the butt with his sharp little stick, shouting, “Marcha!” and Saci immediately whipped his head around to glare at him.
“Hold up—you can talk, too…?” I shouted at the monkey. But these were Zarate’s woods, after all, which meant that these animals weren’t necessarily animals—or at least they hadn’t always been.…
“Ei, who care if dey can talk?” Saci growled. “Hol’ on to you shirts—I gonna whirlwind these furry little freaks to Rio!”
But Violet grabbed his arm, shouting, “Wait!” Which had Saci and me frowning. I’d thought his idea of sending these militarized mammals on a wild ride sounded pretty good actually. “Joanna’s butterfly pin went into the rock they came out of,” she explained. “We have to let them take us. Might be the only way in.”
And, as usual, she was right.
CHAPTER EIGHTY
As we started into the rock, the intense white light washed over us like a wave, turning everything bright, snowy—and even though I was trying to keep my eyes open, I could already feel them squinting shut. We might as well have been walking into the sun.
Slowly—thankfully—the light began to dim. The back of my eyelids turned from white to red to a darkish golden color, the color of honey in a honeycomb. The heat blazing off the rock was replaced by coolness… a gentle breeze. And a scent—faint but sweet: bananas and coffee. I opened my eyes. We weren’t in Costa Rica, anymore. Well, at least not in the same place in Costa Rica: The grass was still high and wild, but we weren’t up on a mountainside anymore. No, we were standing in the middle of a huge, wide-open garden dotted with flower plantings and ringed by dozens of species of fruit trees, their branches heavy with mangoes and papayas, guavas and bananas.
A stone building sat in the middle, right where the flowers and trees grew thickest. It looked like a regular old thatched-roof hut. What I mean is that there wasn’t anything particularly strange about it, except for the fact that it seemed to be sitting under its very own dark cloud even though the trees were too far back to cast their shade and there were no rain clouds overhead. In fact, there wasn’t a single cloud anywhere in the bright blue canopy of sky. I noticed that the front had no knob, which I found a tad bit weird but didn’t actually turn out to be a problem, because no one bothered knocking, and the door apparently didn’t need any help opening; it just swung slowly inward without anyone having pushed it from our side or pulled it from the other, groaning miserably on oversize steel hinges. Gulp.
“After you, chicos, chica…,” said one of the capuchins, motioning us inside. The monkey clearly had, like, zero intention of joining us inside—neither did any of his buddies.
Saci looked at me, I looked at Violet, and she stared back at me with a look that said, What choice do we have?
Not so surprisingly, the place didn’t get any less creepy on the inside. Actually, the creepiness factor probably quadrupled. The main living area was crammed with all sorts of strange objects: There were fur rugs so thick your feet could get lost in them, and a stack of miniature cauldrons in one corner that gurgled with a tarlike liquid and overflowed into one another. Fancy lamps with what looked like glass eyeballs for bulbs sat on end tables with genuine-looking bones for legs, alongside rows of clear glass jars containing a whole mess of powders and liquids. There were cages, too. A bunch of ’em. They dangled from the ceiling on strings and metal wires. In one a poison dart frog stared out at me with curious bulging eyes; in another was a family of golden silk orb weaver spiders—freaky hand-size arachnids known to catch birds! And as if that weren’t freaky enough, a moment later a low silky growl reached my ears. I froze, following the sound with my eyes to the shadows between two tall wooden bookcases—
And felt my heart stop as the bright yellow eyes of a jaguar rose to meet mine. The huge jungle cat tilted its head curiously to one side as it flashed its deadly fangs, and I’m pretty sure I would’ve let out the world’s shriekiest shriek if some part of me hadn’t noticed that it, like every other animal in here, was trapped behind wooden bars.
Worse, as my eyes cautiously scanned our surroundings, I saw that the jaguar probably wasn’t the most dangerous thing in here. A woman stood at the back wall, hunched over a sink. She was short and fat, bundled up in layers of dark robes, which pooled around her feet. A bright red shawl was knotted around her shoulders, and her eyes, black as liquid tar, stared out at me through the tangles of dark hair hanging over her pale, wrinkly face. I couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked like she was peeling fruit with her left hand, effortlessly working the razor-sharp nail of her thumb under the skin of an apple, maybe, and raising a tight curl of peel. Her other hand hung loosely at her side. In it was a short chain made of glittering silver links. Attached to the other end of it was a studded collar, which had been clamped tightly around the slim neck of a beautiful blue-and-black p
eacock.
“Oh my God,” I blurted out, “you still have that peacock?”
Zarate’s dark eyes slid to mine. “I’ve been very much looking forward to meeting you,” she said in a scratchy, whispery voice that made all the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. “I’ve heard so much about you, many different tales from many different sombras.… But to answer your question: Why wouldn’t I still have my peacock? He is my peacock, and he will always be my peacock.”
“Um, Charlie, what’s going on…?” Violet wanted to know.
“That peacock’s a dude!” I whispered. “Or was. She turned him into that because he didn’t love her back.”
“Wait. She turned a human being into a bird because he didn’t love her? That’s… creepy.”
The witch had been stooped over the sink. Now she turned fully to face us, the peacock turning with her, spreading its huge tail feathers like a fan. The feathers had begun to glitter in stunning iridescent shades of blue, brown, green, and yellow. The large eyespots seemed to blink up at us like a hundred winking eyes.
“Creepy?” la bruja repeated in her raspy, gravelly, grating voice. I had to fight the urge to clap my hands over my ears, but I could feel my lips pulling back into a grimace. “I think not.… I met Governor Pérez at a ball, at the great gathering at the city gates. He was as charming as a mortal man can be, as beautiful as any purple orchid. And like a fool, I fell in love with him… sí, como una loca. But he despised me… despised me for my appearance, for the toll the years and suffering had taken on this body.… A shallow, shallow man he was, so I swore my revenge.”
Saci giggled. “You turn him into a bird.… Now, that’s a good prank! Saci approves!”
“It wasn’t a prank, idiota. I loved him, ¿no entiendes? And he was repulsed by me! How would any of you have felt…?” The witch raised a wrinkled, pockmarked hand in our direction, and without thinking I quickly stepped in front of Violet. I’d done it to protect her, I guess, but apparently Zarate had just been pointing.