Bruja Born

by Zoraida Cordova

  Rose’s eyes become black again, the same way Lady de la Muerte’s eyes turned when she took the bodies at the bus crash.

  “Rosie, what do you see?” Alex asks, her hands vibrating from the strain of trying to hold on.

  “I can feel the others,” Rose says, her dark gaze traveling all around the room seeing things we cannot. “She’s here for all of them.”

  “We have to let go!” Alex hisses.

  “Keep going,” I shout, squeezing both of their hands, palms slick with sweat and blood.

  “We can’t!” Alex says, breathless. “There’s a block on his body, Lula. I can’t—”

  “Then fix it!”

  Her hand trembles in mine, but she doesn’t let go.

  “I can see their spirits,” Rose says, her breathing rapid and labored. “Maks is there too. They’re wandering in a room with a thousand doors. She circles them. Wait—she’s circling us.”

  We’re out of time.

  Then I realize—what makes this magic powerful is the desire to want to do good. To value life. To save those who are hurt. Healing is the purest magic there is, and it’s part of my life force. When I look at Maks, I see the parts of me that used to be whole, and maybe it’s desperate, maybe it’s wrong, but I can’t let him go.

  “It’s over,” Alex says.

  “Did you just read my mind?” I shout at her.

  “I can’t help it! The channels are open. I’m picking up thoughts from all over the building, and I can tell you that Maks isn’t in there anymore. I told you we’d try once. Once. Let him go.”

  I look down at his unmoving body. He has to be in there. The machines are picking up his vitals. His heart is still beating.

  The door behind us blasts open.

  Lady de la Muerte walks in.

  What I thought was a cloak before is a gathering of shadows that trail behind her, like she wears the dead she collects. Her spear clicks on the scuffed hospital tiles. Names race across her powder-white skin and her lips are the blue of corpses.

  “Stand aside, Lula Mortiz.”

  Nothing good can happen when the goddess of death knows your name.

  “Please.” I look at Alex and beg. “Please, Alex, please.”

  Because we’re connected by our magic I can hear Alex’s heart racing. Because we’re sisters, I know she’s going to come through for me, even if she thinks I’m making a mistake.

  Alex’s face is pained with indecision, but finally she turns. Her magic ripples around the room. Lady de la Muerte looks up, almost surprised that I’m still standing in her way. She tries to grab to me, to push me out of the way, but Alex has formed a barrier between us.

  “I can’t hold her for long,” Alex says, struggling.

  And I realize, Lady de la Muerte can’t take Maks if he’s tethered to the living.

  I let go of my sisters and press my blood-drenched hand on his chest and recite the Binding Canto. I can hardly hear my own voice over the thundering pulse in my ears, but I shout the words. “These bodies, these spirits, together as one. This union eclipsed like the moon and the sun.”

  The air around us crackles and splinters with light. Lady de la Muerte pounds her fists on Alex’s barrier, and it sounds like someone is punching on bulletproof glass.

  The red light that ties Maks to me is like a harpoon, digging into my chest. When it finds its mark, it pulls hard. I fall forward on my knees, trying to hold on to the side of the bed, but I slip on my own blood.

  The floor tilts, and the room spins, forcing me all the way down. The pain in my bones keeps me from moving. I’m swathed in light, but I can see Maks’s hand dangling over the side of the bed.

  Slowly, his finger twitches. He lifts his hand, reaching, reaching. And I’m not there to hold him. I need to be there.

  My sisters are shouting. Lady de la Muerte calls my name. I turn to her. She uses her spear to stab at Alex’s shield. The red light fills the room, pulsing to the beat of my heart. Death stares down at her hands. Her spear vanishes in an iron-gray cloud.

  Then Death is still.

  The shadows that trail at her back disappear. The names that scrolled on her forearms are gone, leaving nothing but translucent white skin.

  There’s ringing all around, but I realize it’s not in my head. The machines Maks is hooked up to are emitting a round of sirens, whistles, and rapid beeps.

  Maks’s finger twitches again. I try to raise my hand, but it’s like I’m magnetized to the floor, like I’m at the eye of a storm and for the first time in so long, my heart is full. The wound on my arm is starting to sting. But I have to let him know that I’m here, that I saved him. I push and push until I’m there.

  When I touch Maks’s hand, hold it in mine, the sound of sirens disappears. Even La Muerte is gone. No one calls my name anymore either. There is just his hand in mine. He squeezes once. Just once.

  Then, his hand goes slack, and I hear one more thing—the endless, unforgiving trill of a flat line.

  8

  La Tristesa lives alone in a river of salt,

  filled by all the world’s tears.

  —Book of Deos

  “What have you done to yourself?” a doctor asks me, her voice full of pity.

  I float between waking and unconsciousness as my body is rushed down a hallway. Dark faces surround me, each one is like staring an X-ray, down to the radioactive skeletons beneath their skin.

  “You have betrayed me,” La Muerte says. Her voice is inside my head, louder than my own thoughts and memories.

  “You betrayed me first!” I shout. “Where did you take him?”

  Strong hands pin me down to the bed. Something pricks my arm, then a numbness travels along my skin. I lift my head to look at the hands sewing up my cut, but the fingers that holds the needle are nothing but bone.

  “You’re all dead,” I say, thrashing and kicking. I scream until my voice is hoarse and it takes half a dozen people to strap me down. My body no longer feels like it’s mine. The pain is there, like it has become part of me and I’ll never be rid of it.

  “I need a psych eval,” one of the skeletons shouts into the darkness, shoving a syringe into my good arm.

  And for a long time, I lie still, staring at the lights on the ceiling, like white suns floating over me. I don’t realize I’ve been asleep until I hear the steady beep of the heart monitor.

  • • •

  Maks was pronounced dead at 2:18 a.m. two days ago.

  Two days since both my cantos failed, since my magic failed, since I failed. Two days of questions and tests and people walking on eggshells around me.

  When I woke up today, I pretended to still be asleep to avoid the shrink they keep sending in. I don’t want to see anyone. Not doctors or nurses or my parents or Alex. Rose is the only comfort because when she’s with me, she doesn’t force me to talk.

  Maks is dead, I think.

  Lady de la Muerte took him. Then, she just disappeared. One minute she was there, and the next she was gone. Like Maks. One minute he was awake. The next he was gone.

  I try to swallow the terrible taste on my tongue. I’m thirsty. I ache in parts of my body I didn’t know could ache. Through the open blinds, I can see Alex talking to the police as Rose lingers against the wall by herself. My parents talk to the doctors. Maks’s mother is there too, dressed in mourning black. She keeps her head bent into her husband’s chest and a fresh swell of tears streams from my eyes.

  None of them are aware I’m awake except for one person—the nurse that stopped to speak to me on the way to Maks’s room. I wonder if he’s mad, if he regrets not making me go back to my room the night of the canto. I want to close my eyes again, but it was so hard to open them that I stare back at him. He makes for my room, and I sink my face deeper into the covers.

  The door opens, and I hear him walk
across the floor. I can feel him standing beside my bed.

  “I’m sorry about your boyfriend,” he says, picking up my medical chart.

  He’s the first person in this hospital to say that to me. I choke on a sob because I don’t want sympathy. I want Maks’s mother to shout at me. I want Detective Hill to throw me in jail for murder. I want blame, not forgiveness.

  “But you’re stronger than this,” he says softly.

  “How would you know something like that?” I ask reflexively.

  “I suppose I’m speaking from what I’ve seen so far.” The sound of his pen scratching against paper bothers me, and I pull up the covers over my ears.

  “Your family wants to see you. Should I tell them you’re awake?”

  “I don’t want to see anyone.”

  “Well, you have to. No one has ever seen anything like this.”

  “Like what?” Not even Rose would tell me what happened after I passed out the first time. I bring down my covers and look at him. His brown hair is still tied back, and the dark circles around otherwise young eyes are deeper than last I saw him. I wonder if he’s gone home at all.

  “I’ll tell you everything I know if you promise to let your family see you.”

  “Yes, okay. Tell me.”

  He takes a seat on the chair beside me. He sighs and shakes his head slightly. “One of your sisters went to get a nurse because Maks’s vitals were showing he was waking up. You were on the floor. They carried you out and gave you a blood transfusion. Thankfully, you didn’t damage anything vital when you slashed open your arm.”

  That doesn’t make sense. I heard him flatline. How could I have heard him flatline if I wasn’t in the room? But saying that would send me to the psych wing.

  “Are you sure they took me away?” I ask.

  He nods. “We took him off life support because he was trying to breathe on his own. For all intents and purposes, Maks was awake. I checked his vitals. He called out for you. Said your name once. He tried to fight the nurses and ripped the stitches in his abdomen. We were able to sedate him. When we sent him for X-rays, they showed that his bones were healed completely. The bleeding stopped in his stomach. He didn’t look like he’d just had his spine shattered or had a metal pole driven through his torso. But by all scientific reasoning, he shouldn’t have been alive.”

  I shut my eyes, fighting the ache in my skull. “Where did you learn your bedside manner?”

  “I guess that happens when you’re around a lot of dead people. You forget how to talk to the living.” The corner of his mouth quirks up, not quite a smile. He licks his lips and sits forward, like he caught himself getting too comfortable. He looks over his shoulder at where my family is huddled, gripping coffee cups like lifelines. Maks’s parents are gone.

  “Keep going,” I urge him on. Maks was alive. I didn’t completely fail. So what went wrong?

  “We called his parents and told them that Maks was awake. They’d gone home for the first time in five days. They came in to see him. He even smiled at his mother. Then, he started seizing. Apparently when he was born, he had a hole in his heart. It was repaired, but the doctors say despite the miracle, his heart gave out.”

  I try to stifle a cry and it comes out as a whimper.

  “Sometimes there are signs of recovery, and then—”

  “I don’t need to hear that.” My canto went wrong. My magic failed me. I’ve never felt so helpless and alone, and I don’t know how to start fixing all the things I’ve said to my family. “Please leave.”

  He nods once and moves toward the door. “I’ll send your family back in. We had a deal.”

  I sit up, every muscle in my core and arms throbbing angrily.

  “What were you thinking?” Mom says. Now that she knows I’m alive, she’s gone from worried to angry. No, the look on her face tells me she’s more than angry. Scared. Disappointed. “What if we couldn’t get to you in time?”

  “It worked,” I say and look at Alex. “For a moment, it worked.”

  My dad sits on the chair beside me. Alex and Rose hover around my bed with guilty looks on their faces.

  “You of all people should’ve known better, Alejandra.”

  Alex shuts her eyes, prepared to take whatever comes. There’s a green ring around her eye when she takes off her sunglasses. I can see the bruises on her chest, barely covered by her shirt. “Ma—”

  “Don’t Ma me right now. All three of you have no idea what forces you’re dealing with. You’ve put a target on this family.”

  “Carmen,” my father says. His voice is even and calm. “She just lost him. Let her grieve.”

  My mother’s chest rises and falls quickly. Her brown eyes glisten. My mother doesn’t cry. Ever. Now, she blinks the tears back so not a single one falls.

  “Don’t tell me about loss, Patricio. I lost you for years.”

  We’re silent.

  The steady beep of the heart rate monitor reminds us that we’re here, that there is nothing being said for minutes that stretch out, long and painful. Rose trembles and cries silently. Alex frowns at the floor. They hold each other’s hands, and a distance grows between them and me.

  I’m so weary all I say is, “Can we go home?”

  Before my mother can answer, a new nurse comes in.

  “You’re awake,” she tells me, holding up her clipboard to write something. “I’ll check on you in just a minute.”

  “The other nurse already checked them,” I tell her.

  “What nurse?” Her smooth forehead crinkles.

  “The guy,” I say. I try to think of his name but can’t remember if he ever told us. I look to Alex. “We saw him the other night…”

  I leave it implied that it was when we were going to Maks’s room.

  Alex shakes her head. “I don’t think he told us his name.”

  “What did he look like?” the nurse asks, a hand to her hip. Her voice is high-pitched, and I can sense her sudden nervous energy.

  I can’t really remember his face, but I can remember the most striking parts about him. “Young. Long ponytail. Tan. He was wearing blue scrubs and dress shoes.”

  “Long ponytail?” Now she looks concerned. “I don’t know any male nurse or attending in peeds who looks like that. Give me a minute.”

  “What’s going on?” Mom raises her voice.

  The nurse starts to leave. But I have to know. Who was he? Was everything he said to me true?

  “Wait!”

  “I’m sorry,” she says, “but I have to report this right away.”

  Then she’s gone, rushing out the door with her sneakers squeaking against the floor. We sit in silence for a little while longer. Mom keeps pacing and muttering prayers. Dad hesitates before placing his hand on top of mine, like he thinks he won’t be welcome. I’m surprised at how foreign it feels, so much so that I almost pull away. Instead, I just lie there and retrace my steps during the canto—the brightness of our magic and the dark that slithered in there. La Muerte breaking through Alex’s barrier. You have betrayed me.

  Then, my nurse runs past my room and points down the hall. A trio of security guards rush in the direction she’s pointing. The static of their walkie-talkies alerts others to a potential threat. I pull off my covers, but my mom presses her hand on my shoulder.

  The nurse comes back in. Her cheeks are flushed and she places her hands on her heart.

  “What happened?” my dad asks.

  “Lula,” the nurse says, her voice slow and deep. “I need you to tell me everything that man said to you. Try to remember exactly what he looked like and what he said.”

  You’re stronger than this. That’s what he said.

  “Why?” I ask. I rip off the tabs that measure my heartbeat to make the beeping stop. “What did he do?”

  “He doesn’t work here.”
She traces the symbol of the cross over her chest.

  “How can he not work here?” Alex asks. “We’ve seen him for days.”

  There’s a loud commotion outside my bedroom. Alex goes to the window and pulls open the blinds. Detective Hill runs past with the three security guards from before. More police officers join them.

  “Are you saying someone’s been posing as a nurse?” my mom asks protectively.

  The nurse is in a daze, like she can’t believe what she’s about to say. “We caught him on security camera entering the morgue. That’s where the cops are going now.”

  I feel my heart sink. “What would he want in the morgue?”

  Maks.

  “The bodies,” she says, trembling. “They’re all missing.”

  Part II

  The Body

  9

  Through and through

  the passage of time.

  Upward and downward,

  your love will be mine.

  —Witchsong #12, Book of Cantos

  This could’ve been a love story.

  But Maks is dead and I have to come to terms with everything I’ve done.

  I hurt myself. I corrupted my magic. I betrayed my mother’s trust. I made my sisters complicit. I have more questions than answers, more regret than hope, and a pain that might never go away. Yet I’m still alive when others aren’t. The world is upside down, but there’s a twisting, unshakable hurt in my chest that just wants Maks back.

  Maybe I shouldn’t. Maybe it’s wrong. But I do.

  “Lula.” Rose’s voice brings me back to the present. Her eyes glance toward the news. “Do you want me to turn it off?”

  I shake my head and try to smile. She hits the mute button anyway.

  I should focus on my visitors.

  It’s mid-June and two days since I’ve been home. Our summers are usually spent darkening our skin at Coney Island. But I know this summer will be different because I’m different in ways I can’t even explain.

  Today would’ve been prom, but it was canceled out of respect for the families of the dead. My dress is hanging in my closet, wrapped in clear plastic from the dry cleaner. I was going to go to Kassandra’s house to get ready, and Paul and Maks were going to pick us up.