But I’m stopped by the sound of breaking glass.
“That came from the back,” Mom says, picking up the machete on the coffee table. Dad gets up and goes with her.
“Stay here,” they tell us.
Rose and Nova pick up weapons from the table too.
I hold the spear spike-side out and go into the hallway.
“Lula,” Alex tells me. “Stay together.”
“I have the spear. I’ll be fine.”
A cold draft blows in from the front door. I locked it after Rhett left. I know I did. I head straight for it to slam it shut, but a chill runs along my arms.
His voice behind me stops me cold.
“Hey, baby.”
I spin around, holding the spear out as a threat I fully intend on carrying out.
Maks stands in the entrance of my home. His skin is the palest gray, crisscrossed with scars that run along his face and arms like eels skimming beneath the skin. His eyes are stark white with bright-red veins.
I pull the spear back, ready to plunge it into his heart, but then I see them just over his shoulder.
My sisters and Nova held captive by casimuertos.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Maks says. “We dropped by unannounced for dinner.”
34
El Odio could not stand the world
but left his discord buried like seeds.
Beware the souls who eat his fruit.
—Tales of the Deos, Felipe Thomás San Justinio
“I should’ve let them kill you when you turned,” I say, and the bitterness on my tongue tastes so good.
“You’re not strong enough for that, Lula,” Maks says. “Isn’t that why you locked me up and then dragged me all over the city trying to keep my memories from me?”
“I didn’t keep your memories from you,” I say. “That was the magic.”
“Liar!” When he yells, his breath washes over me, rank and metallic. “Everything that’s ever come out of your mouth is a lie, Lula. You lied about being a witch. You lied about what you did to me.”
“Let them go,” I tell him.
But he just looks at me and laughs. “You did do one thing for me, Lula. You freed a part of me I didn’t know was there. That will always belong to you.”
“Screw you, Maks,” I growl. It’s clear he’s not going to play along, and I need a new plan. I turn to the other casimuertos and say, “You want the truth? Maks has been lying to you all. He brought you here to die.”
“What’s she talking about?” Derek asks, his rage deepening the red in his eyes. Beside him Irina cocks her head unnaturally, her white eyes boring into her brother.
“I can make you human again. Maks knew all along.”
All the humor drains from his face, and he growls at me. “Don’t listen to her! She said it herself. There’s no reversing this.”
“Lula,” Alex shouts. “Stop it! I can fight them.”
I look at her and shake my head. She’s still recovering from conjuring the elements. And this is a battle I have to fight myself.
“Nope. That’s what I’ve been keeping from you. In order for you to live again, you need one thing.” I tap the center of my chest.
There’s desire in their eyes. Longing. Not just for my heart. But for life. They shake with the need to consume. A casimuerto is never sated.
“You’re going to have to catch me first,” I say, and I run out the door.
• • •
“Good plan, Lula,” I mutter. “Have your psycho, dead ex and friends chase you around the yard.”
As I sprint down the porch and up the driveway, there’s a shock of white light from the inside of the house followed by a series of blasts. Dad and Alex, I think. I want to picture them fighting side by side, holding back the other casimuertos. We have always fought. They will keep fighting long after I’m gone.
When I look up to the window, I see more casimuertos flooding the house. I want to scream, but I see others too. Hunters and brujas and the blur of a vampire. My heart soars at the sight of them fighting back, and I use that momentum to keep running.
“You can’t run from me for long,” Maks shouts. “I can feel your pain, you know. That’s got to be, like, poetic or something.”
In the dark, I can hear his fists bang against the side of the house. I slip into the garage and hide beside a metal rack.
“Lu-la.” My name is a song on his lips. There was a time when he sang my name, when he sought me out because he missed me, when we couldn’t imagine being apart. That Maks is long gone.
I grab the rack and pull it forward as hard as I can. It falls with a loud crash that shatters the car’s windows and pins Maks to the floor. He groans but doesn’t stay down.
“You’re going to regret that.” He takes out his rage on the car, ripping the door off its hinges. He throws it in my direction but misses.
“All that strength and you’re a terrible shot. What happened to the MVP?” I don’t wait for him to answer and wedge myself through the back door.
Maks smashes his way after me, breaking through wood and glass with his fists. I sprint across my yard but I’ve got nowhere to go. I need a portal and I need one now. Find the spear. Free La Muerte. Destroy the heart and make the sacrifice.
It’s too quiet out here. I look over my shoulder to search for Maks, but he’s gone. I spin back around. A crushing pain fractures across my face. I try to hold on to the spear, but I fall backward and hit grass and loose stones. When my head stops spinning, I focus on getting my hands back on the spear. Maks swipes it in one fluid motion, his knuckles dripping with blood.
“You hear that?” Maks asks, his blue lips bleeding where the skin cracks. There’s the sound of thunder clapping and windows shattering. Someone screams, and I don’t know if it’s from my side or his. “That’s the sound of you losing. Isn’t that what you’re most afraid of?”
As if responding to him, my heart gives a terrible squeeze. I dig my fingers into the grass at my sides because it’s the only thing I can hold on to.
“I figured out why I was having all these weird emotions.” Maks taps his chest right where the white T-shirt is splattered with blood. “After the switch went off in my head and everything became clear, I could still feel you. Even after death, I was tied to you.”
“You’re nothing but a leech, Maks.” I push myself off the ground and keep a distance from him.
“I’m the leech?! I tried to get rid of you first. I tried, and still, we’re connected. You were so afraid of being left alone that you brought me back to life.” He flips the spear to examine the sharp, curved end. “I suppose I do owe you some gratitude. I loved you once, Lula. But between you and me? I’m too young to die twice.”
The fight inside the house is getting closer, moving toward the kitchen. A body crashes through the window and rolls across the back porch. Maks looks at the body facing down on the ground and shrugs. His face contorts as he puts all his strength into stabbing the spear through my heart.
Run. Fight. Hit. Scratch. My mind is a flip book of scenarios, but all I know is I can’t let him touch me.
There’s a scream, but it isn’t mine.
A blur runs past Maks. I feel the wind it trails on my face. Maks and I both stare at his arm, raised toward the sky. There’s a red bracelet where there didn’t used to be. The bloody blade of a machete follows its downward motion, and then my mother rights herself, her face streaming with sweat and tears.
Maks screams. His severed hand falls with a faint thud onto the grass. I’m too stunned to move, but I watch my mother. My mother covered in blood and sweat. My mother shaking with adrenaline. My mother saving me. My mother.
She takes my chin in her hand, runs her fingers across the tears on my face. “The others might have physical powers. But you and I must have a different streng
th.”
I press my forehead to hers. “I’m so sorry.”
“Fuerza.” She presses her palm on my chest. “This is the heart you were born with and you have to decide how strong it will be.”
“I know, Mama. I know.”
Behind us, there’s another blast coming. She looks torn between staying and going, so I make the decision for her.
“Go. I’ve got this.”
She gives me her blessing, pressing her thumb to her lips, then to my forehead. And then she’s gone, running back into the fray inside our house.
I want to run after her, but I know I have to be here.
Maks holds his arm around the wrist and screams. His eyes go completely red and he charges at me. Knocks me on the ground and chokes me with his good hand. I kick my legs but hit air.
This is the heart I was born with, and I have to decide how strong it will be. And though it’s being consumed by the darkness I unleashed into this world, it has never been stronger.
I lash out, dig my fingers into Maks’s red eyes. I feel him blink around my fingertips, slick and wet. He growls, nearly rabid, and rolls off me.
I grab the spear from the ground and get up. Maks’s severed hand is still wrapped around the middle. I try to pry the fingers off but they won’t budge.
Maks shudders, and I realize he isn’t crying. He’s laughing. When he looks up to me, he softens his eyes and puts on a sweet smile. My heart twists and turns, remembering the boy he was. Eyes blue as wild flowers.
“You’d never hurt me, Lula. Deep in your heart you know that.”
“You’re right, Maks,” I say. He’s weak and desperate, swaying on his knees in front of me. “I did love you. I loved you so much I thought it was the only good thing that had ever happened to me. I did everything in my power to save you.
“But between you and me?” I plunge the spike into his chest. “I love myself more.”
I stare into his eyes and watch them change from red to crystal to dark blue. He gasps for air and hits the ground. The spear trembles in my grasp, and suddenly, there’s a golden glow coming from my chest. The threads that spooled from my heart are dimming. Maks’s severed hand falls off the spear and lands on the ground with a final twitch.
I hear the whispers, hundreds of them, all at once. They buzz around my head like a colony of wasps. I can feel the power of the spear coming alive, and I know what I have to do. It isn’t a portal that will free La Muerte. It’s me—it’s always been me. I flip the spear, line it up with my breast.
The back door swings open and my family runs out. Flames rise behind them in the kitchen and spread quickly. Destroy the heart and make the sacrifice. I take a deep breath.
“No!” Alex shouts, her hand reaching for me.
I thrust the spear into my heart.
35
Esa brujita con
ojitos luceros.
Con ella me entierro
sin ella me muero.
—Witchsong #33, Book of Cantos
The light burst is blinding. It spills in a beam of silver from my chest.
I can still see Alex, running down to catch me before I fall. She will always catch me. She pulls the spike out of my chest and throws it on the ground, repeating my name over and over and over again.
“Stay alive, do you hear me?” She shuts her eyes and fat tears slide along her lashes and then onto my face. “This is not how your story ends.”
Rose sits on the other side of me. She takes my hand in hers. “She’s free.”
For a moment, I think she’s talking about me.
I don’t feel free. I feel numb. Cold. Broken. I feel like my world came undone and fell back together in different places. I feel like every breath I take hurts more than the next. But I don’t feel free.
“Step aside,” says Lady de la Muerte in her deep, shadow voice.
Alex and Rose scramble away from Lady Death.
La Muerte takes her spear back and holds it with a firm hand, and I don’t know if I’m hallucinating, but I think she is smiling.
“This is not the sacrifice, Lula Mortiz.” Her skin is no longer translucent, but back to the bone white of the first time I saw her. Her crown of golden thorns is no longer bleeding. Her long, slender fingers twitch as she kneels beside me and shoves her hand into the bloody gash in my chest. The pain is so fierce my vision turns red. I shut my eyes, sure she’s ripping my heart out. I can hear Alex and Rose crying. My parents screaming. Sirens in the distance. Always sirens, the Brooklyn lullaby.
And then, silence.
A serene quiet unlike anything I’ve heard before. I open my eyes expecting to be in a dream, the in-between where La Muerte and I used to meet when I was close to death myself.
But I’m still in my backyard, surrounded by family and friends and allies. The wound on my chest is healed, leaving a scar in the shape of a ring between my breasts. Lady de la Muerte squeezes a slithering black mass in her hand.
“Is that an octopus?” Rose asks.
I would laugh if it didn’t hurt too much.
“This was how the dead were feeding on you. It started off the size of silverfish.”
The thing has dozens of tentacles with pointy suctions. It slithers them in the air, trying to grab at something.
“Shouldn’t we kill it?” Adrian asks.
Lady de la Muerte turns her head slowly in the direction of the boy. The crowd parts, just as the sea parted for me when I went to retrieve the spear. Adrian gulps, but other than that doesn’t move an inch.
Lady de la Muerte bows her head once, then throws the creature on the ground, and before it has a chance to slither away, she stabs it right through its center. Then again and again until it cannibalizes itself and melts into the earth, killing the entire patch of grass it touched and turning dirt to sand.
“That was inside of your chest?” Alex asks. “Gross.”
When I stand, I feel lighter than ever.
“What did you mean when you said that wasn’t the sacrifice?” I ask La Muerte.
“All the lives that were taken as a result of your betrayal,” she tells me, staking her spear in the earth and lifting her chin up. “I will require a year off your life for every person that was taken.”
“The bus accident was not her fault,” Alex says.
“That may be so. But the others. The ones killed by the casimuertos. Those deaths were robbed from me.”
“How many years?” I ask her, afraid to hope.
“One hundred and six.”
I have to laugh. “I’m not going to live that long.”
Lady de la Muerte walks in a slow circle around me. “I know how long every single one of you is going to live. You, Lula Mortiz, could have had a very long life.”
My great-grandfather lived to be one hundred and twenty. Even if I’m meant to live to ninety, it wouldn’t be enough. As much as I want to think I’m ready, I’m not. I look around the backyard full of brujas and hunters and the THA. I look at my sisters and my parents and Nova.
“Then what are you waiting for?” I take a steadying breath.
“Lula, no,” Mom snaps at me, then softens her voice when she turns to Lady de la Muerte. “Please, My Lady. I beg you. Take years off my life instead.”
“No, take mine.” Dad steps in front of my mom.
“What about a deal?” Nova asks. He weaves through the throng of people in the backyard. “How about years taken from some of us?”
Her black line of a smile is terrifying as she sets her sights on Nova. “Not you, Noveno Santiago. With your gift, you do not have enough years to give me.”
Nova’s face blanks, and the bravado he had moments ago is gone.
“But I consent to your proposition,” she says. “Only, I get to choose who gives me their life years.”
“No,”
I say. “I have to do this. I have to pay this price.”
“Lula, we don’t agree all the time,” Mayi says, “but any of us would have made the same mistake.”
“Most of us have,” McKay says, and my heart feels a familiar joy when I see him.
“Enough,” Lady de la Muerte says, her voice deeper, a darkening cloud. “I grow tired of this realm. You and you.” She turns to my father and Alex. “You are the souls I choose.”
“Dad,” I say. “What if she takes your life and then you drop dead? I only just got you back. And, Alex. I’m sorry I made you do my half of the chores. I swear, I forgive you. Just let me do this—”
Alex places a hand on my shoulder and looks at Dad. “We have to. In a way, this all started with us.”
Lady de la Muerte pushes me aside and presses a long, thin finger on Dad’s cheek. “Your timeline is strange. I cannot read you. You’ve been to a realm I cannot follow.” Then she sets her eyes on Alex. “So have you. Brave girl. Powerful girl. I want your years for simply fighting against me.”
“It’s done,” Alex and Dad say at the same time.
Lady de la Muerte raises her hands and makes a pulling motion with her fingertips. Three threads, one from my father, Alex, and me, wind around her wrist and burn into her flesh, a silver tattoo against her porcelain skin.
“Good-bye, Lula Mortiz,” she tells me. Though it’s already dark, her shadows pool around her, twisting into a cloud of smoke. “I don’t want to see you for a very long time.”
36
El Fuego, most misunderstood of his kin,
sought the dark refuge beneath the earth.
Don’t you know?
His flame is destruction.
His flame is rebirth.
—Tales of the Deos, Felipe Thomás San Justinio
The fire spreads faster than we want it to.
It starts in the kitchen, eating its way through layers and years of paint and old curtains. Jars of oils and elixirs blow up like grenades. The stove blows a hole clean through the second floor and into the attic.
Bruja Born Page 25