“First of all,” Pao said, her face flaming, “telekinesis isn’t in any way related to particle physics—”
“Echolocation?” Naomi screeched. “You really thought all us Niños were just chirping our way through the cactus field? You are so gullible. Give me that staff. You’re going back to sarcasm school. I’m the hero now.”
“Stop,” Pao said suddenly, catching something moving at around knee height in the trees.
“I’ll never stop,” Naomi said, wiping her eyes. “I got you so good, I don’t even care if we get out of here. I want to live in this moment forever.”
“Stop!” Pao hissed again, and apparently there was something in her voice this time that made Naomi sit up and take notice, because she fell mercifully silent.
“Whoa,” Naomi said, standing up as Pao did and moving closer to her while, from between the trees, at least ten pairs of eyes seemed to open all at once.
“They’re from my dreams,” Pao said in wonder, remembering the wide road lined with trees, these very same eyes watching her as she walked.
“What are they?” Naomi asked, huddling even closer in a way Pao would have mocked mercilessly if there weren’t something magical unfolding before their very eyes.
“Duendecillos,” Pao breathed as the closest pair of eyes detached from the trees, their owner stepping forward into the light glowing from Pao’s staff.
It looked like the same creature who had led Pao to the pool that healed her arm. The same one—Pao was now sure—who had drawn the picture of her in the sand during the duendecillo argument in her dream. Pao recognized the round nose, the shaggy green hair, the golden freckles across her brown skin.
“Hello,” Pao said softly, stepping a little closer. “Do you remember me?”
“¡Sí!” the little one chirped, nodding and beaming, gesturing to her own arm, a quizzical expression on her face.
“Oh, my arm?” Pao asked, patting the place where the bite had been. “It’s fine now, thank you. The pool—your pool healed it.”
The nodding grew even more enthusiastic, the duendecillo’s smile wide and bright.
Pao knelt, getting as near as she could while hoping to remain nonintimidating. She had the feeling the other pairs of eyes were the duendecillos who had been on the other side of the argument. This one was breaking ranks by helping Pao.
She wasn’t sure how she knew this, except that one rebel could recognize another.
“What’s your name?” Pao asked, and the little duendecillo crept toward her. From the bushes, clucks of disapproval sounded immediately, like chattering birds when someone got too close to their nest. Pao ignored them for now, but Naomi drew her knife. “Leave it,” Pao said under her breath. “Trust me.”
Naomi dropped her arm, though her expression was still wary.
“Estrella,” said the little creature in a whisper.
“Estrella,” Pao repeated. “Star. I love the stars more than anything.” She closed her eyes for a moment, calling on the Duolingo lessons again, wishing she’d turned more of those little circles gold.
Behind her, Naomi stood at the ready, just in case.
“Necesitamos . . . uh, your help, Estrella,” Pao said, noticing that the duendecillo’s glow had grown brighter, her smile even wider. “Estamos . . . lost. Necesitamos . . . to get through the woods?” Pao said, losing the train at the end, hoping her gesture had been understood.
“¡Sí!” the duendecillo said. “¡Conocemos el camino!”
The sounds of disapproval from the foliage grew louder. Pao glanced at Naomi for assistance with translation.
“She says she knows the way,” Naomi said, still sounding a little suspicious.
Pao nodded, turning to Estrella. “Will you help us?” she asked, not needing to fake her desperation. She tried to remember every moment she’d spent obsessing about duendecillos as a child. Looking up their pictures in her mom’s books, trying to copy them painstakingly in her journals. Dreaming of befriending one. “Por favor,” Pao said, looking the creature right in the eye.
Estrella’s head turned back toward the bush, conflicted for an eternal second. “Sí,” she finally said, causing Pao’s heart to leap into her throat. “Te ayudaré.”
Pao was about to thank Estrella emphatically, to promise her anything she wanted, but this final act of rebellion seemed to have been the last straw for the other duendecillos.
Led by a larger one, half a head taller than Estrella, the owners of the rest of the wide eyes stepped out of the trees. There were nearly thirty of them, circling Pao, Estrella, and Naomi in a vaguely ominous way despite their tiny stature.
Like it was time to deliver a long-overdue verdict.
The first thing Pao noticed about the tiny tribunal was how different they all looked from Estrella, and from one another. They all had green hair, skin in varying shades of brown, and clothes made of what appeared to be stitched-together leaves, but that was where the similarities ended.
Some were pixieish like Estrella, but with hair that hung to their knees, or with bald heads or pointed hats. Some looked like brown-and-green versions of those garden gnomes you always see on lawns in retirement communities.
Others were thin and waifish, with long limbs for their height and tiny nimble-looking feet. Pao couldn’t stop staring, despite the apparent danger of the situation. She and Naomi were stuck in this place, with no way forward or back, and at the absolute mercy of a group of menacing forest spirits who didn’t seem at all inclined to help them. . . .
So why couldn’t Pao stop thinking about how cute they all were?
Naomi, evidently, was not similarly afflicted with awe. She stepped forward in her brusque way, addressing the leader as Pao stood beside fierce little Estrella and listened.
“¿Qué quieren?” Naomi asked them.
“We want you out of here,” the leader said in clear, slow English. He was the garden-gnome type, with a bulbous nose, closely spaced brown eyes, a long green beard, a pointed hat, and a staff made of a thorny twig.
“That’s what we want, too,” Naomi said. “Help us get to where the magic is. Whatever’s causing this. We can help fix it.”
“Why would we want your help?” he asked. “You are not of this forest.”
“No,” said Pao, stepping forward, Estrella at her heels. “But we’re from somewhere like this. Somewhere with a magic opening. We can close it—we’ve done it before. Let us help you. You can trust us.”
The leader’s eyes crinkled, like he was smiling behind his beard, though Pao couldn’t see his mouth. “But that’s just it,” he said, his voice lower now, more ominous. “We do not trust you. We have seen your kind, and they’ve brought nothing but ruin to the forest.”
From nowhere, the duendecillos suddenly conjured very small but ruthlessly sharp spears. Their circle began to close in.
“I know humans are bad!” Pao said, eyeing the spear points. Sure, the duendecillos wouldn’t be able to get her above the belly button, but plenty of damage could be done to her lower extremities. “But we’re not here to ruin your forest—we’re here to save our friend’s abuela! Please, we just need to find my dad.”
“It is not the human in you we object to,” said the leader, who was not carrying a spear. “It is . . . the other.”
“What?” Pao asked. “I don’t know what you mean, but there’s a fantasma in here, okay? It lured us into the forest, and it might be back any minute. If you don’t let us help you, it could come back and kill all of you.”
The duendecillos didn’t answer. Pao looked from Naomi to Estrella, desperate for any idea of what it was the leader was objecting to. Naomi shrugged, her eyes wide, but Estrella jumped forward and began to shout at the others in Spanish, fury present in every line of her little body.
“She’s saying the elders are prejudiced,” Naomi said in an undertone. “That you’re not like the others, and they need to help you or else all could be lost.”
“But prejudiced why?
” Pao asked. She was used to being judged for her skin color, and for the side of town she lived on. . . . Even being a girl sometimes had its pitfalls in the eyes of others. But Pao couldn’t imagine the duendecillos caring about any of that.
She could have understood them hating humans in general, given what the human race had done to most places that looked like this, but they’d said it wasn’t that, either.
So what could it possibly be?
“They’re not saying,” Naomi said, fear tinging the edges of her words. “But it doesn’t sound like it’s going well for Estrella.”
Sure enough, the argument ended less than a minute later. The spears were not put away. One of them was used to poke Pao unceremoniously in the back of the knee as the tiny tribunal moved them forward.
Pao walked where they directed her, her mind still going a million miles a minute. Yes, the duendecillos were small, and Pao probably could have kicked a few over and run away, spears or not. But then what? They were in the middle of a forest force field with no way to find the anomaly.
Best-case scenario, the duendecillos were leading them out of the forest, back to the highway where the bus had left them. They could walk into town, find the post office, and figure out where Pao’s dad was.
Worst-case scenario . . .
“In here,” the leader said, not five minutes after they started their trek. “You will stay. We will decide.” Two duendecillos ran ahead, opening what appeared to be a gate in a clump of trees—an entrance Pao never would have seen if she hadn’t known to look. It swung open noiselessly, easily twice as tall as Pao, and she, Naomi, and Estrella were ushered inside.
They found themselves in a clearing, much like the one where Pao had climbed into the healing pool in her dream—but there was no water here, just mossy ground, a row of bushes, the occasional rock, and a surrounding circle (about twenty yards in diameter) of trees.
Whether it was magically reinforced or not—and Pao was willing to bet it was—the tree border was too dense to pass through. The only way in or out was the gate, which was, as they watched, disappearing again, the duendecillos along with it.
Pao was ready to collapse on the ground and feel sorry for herself for quite a while, but before she could, she was met with another surprise.
Something rustled in the bushes. Pao and Naomi might have been prisoners in this strange forest cell, but they weren’t the only ones.
“Paola?” The voice was hesitant at first, like its owner couldn’t believe she was real, but disbelief gave way to boundless joy as Sal bolted across the clearing and crashed right into Pao, throwing his arms around her.
The young Niño was a little taller now, Pao noted, his hair shorter. But he looked happy. At least, as happy as any nine-year-old could be while locked in a forest cell. She wondered how long he had been in here, and how he had avoided freezing his toes off.
But it wasn’t just Sal. There were at least ten other Niños in here with him. Kids Pao recognized from the camp, whose names she didn’t know but beside whom she’d fought Manos Pachonas and ahogados last summer.
And once she and Naomi had greeted them all, Pao saw Marisa and Franco waiting against some trees in the back.
“Her, I expected,” Marisa said when Pao approached. She was pointing to Naomi, who was avoiding her former leaders by remaining in deep conversation with a pair of white-haired twins a convenient distance away.
“But you?” Marisa continued. “I’ll confess this is a surprise.”
Pao’s former lunchroom bully looked much the same as she had last summer, with the exception of the way she was wearing her strawberry-blond hair—loose and wavy instead of in the severe braids Pao had gotten used to. It made her look more feminine, Pao thought. More beautiful. But less something, too.
“It’s a long story,” Pao said, shaking her head. “But I guess we have time.” She stepped forward to check the wall of trees that separated them from the rest of the forest. As she’d suspected, there was some kind of magical barrier between the pines. There was no way out save for the gate, which had been closed behind them and was currently invisible.
“Sorry, I’m afraid we don’t.” Franco hadn’t even bothered to say hello, Pao noticed. Which wasn’t super polite, considering the last time they’d met, Pao had been rescuing him from certain doom in an underwater palace run by a grieving ghostly maniac.
He was wearing the Niños’ traditional black clothing, his dark, curly hair pushed back from his face in a way that looked disheveled yet somehow still absurdly handsome. But his beauty was impersonal, Pao thought. Like a painting. There was no warmth to him.
“Why’s that?” Pao asked him, her tone a little short. Wasn’t he even a little curious about how she had stumbled upon them?
“We’re about to break out of here,” Franco said, not meeting her eyes. In his hands was a device that looked a lot like one of those old Game Boys, with buttons and a tiny blinking screen.
“Oh?” Pao said, leaning against the barrier beside Marisa.
“I’ve been tracking a void-based energy signature through the forest for the last two hours,” he said. “It makes passes in a pattern, and if my calculations are correct, it should be passing by again in the next seven minutes.”
Two hours? Pao thought. A void-based energy signal . . .
“I know what it is,” she said, the connection sparking in her brain like two live wires coming together. “I know what’s causing the signal.”
“It doesn’t matter what’s causing it,” Franco said witheringly, with a look at Marisa that somehow said Who is this dweeb? and Why aren’t you getting rid of her for me? at the same time.
“You might not say that after I tell you what it is,” Pao said, waving Naomi over when it became clear she didn’t intend to come on her own. Even now, she was dragging her feet.
When Naomi finally joined them, Pao told her, “I was just about to explain why Franco is getting a reading here.”
“We don’t have time for this,” he said, pushing past them without a word to Naomi.
“Marisa,” Naomi said after casting a truly poisonous glare at Franco, “it’s El Autostopisto. That’s why the signal is so strong.”
“Nice to see you, too,” Marisa said, something a little sad lingering around her eyes. And then, “The Hitchhiker? Are you sure?”
“He’s been following us since Silver Springs,” Naomi confirmed. “We fought him on a bus, and he lured us into the forest. It’s a trap, I’m telling you. Whatever Franco wants to do with that energy signal is going to get us all killed.”
“She’s right,” Pao said. “He’s been tracking the signature for two hours? That’s just when we first followed the Hitchhiker in.”
“If it’s really a leyenda . . .” Marisa said, “this is going to be harder than we thought.” She looked at Naomi. “At least we’re together now.”
Naomi stepped toward Pao. “Sure. Let’s just figure out how to get out of here, and then you guys can tell us what you’ve found out about the anomaly.”
“And you said you didn’t want to come,” Marisa said teasingly, but Naomi’s expression didn’t crack. She just nodded to Pao and walked back over to where Sal and the twins were sparring with knives.
“She’s just . . .” Pao began.
“I know,” Marisa said.
Pao was going to say more, but just then Franco’s voice echoed through the clearing.
“Wait a minute,” he said, and Pao turned in time to see him spotting Estrella, who was near where the gate had been, looking utterly lost.
Pao felt awful. Estrella had been ushered in with the rest of them, but Pao had totally forgotten her in the shock of seeing the other Niños. Pao sprinted to reach the opposite edge of the clearing before Franco did, putting herself between the boy and the terrified creature.
“They left a spy?” he asked, trying to step around Pao to get to Estrella.
“Estrella isn’t a spy,” Pao said, narrowing her eyes
at Franco. “She’s a duendecillo, and she tried to help us. She argued with her own people to try to keep us out of here.”
“We need to question it,” Franco said impatiently. “Figure out if it knows a way out.”
“She’ll talk when she’s ready,” Pao said, liking Franco less and less the longer they spent with him here.
“What?” he snapped. “You’re really going to prevent me from questioning . . . her?”
“Estrella,” Pao said, kneeling down beside the duendecillo, “do you want to tell Franco what you know about getting out of here?”
Estrella shook her head, green bangs falling into her eyes in her vehemence.
“Do you mind telling me?” Pao asked.
Estrella seemed to think for a moment, and then she nodded, holding out a tiny brown hand dusted with gold freckles. She led Pao away from the crowd.
As smug as Pao felt about having a source Franco couldn’t get to first, Pao immediately saw the flaw in her plan as Estrella turned to look at Pao expectantly. The duendecillo leader had spoken English, but as far as Pao knew, little Estrella only spoke Spanish.
Unfortunately, Pao’s Duolingo owl hadn’t graduated her to Secret Information Revealed by Magical Beings yet. And Naomi, who had served as translator before, was too busy sulking in the corner to notice the predicament Pao was in now.
Pao was too proud to tell any of the other Niños she didn’t know enough Spanish to help, so she whispered to Estrella, “Speak slowly, okay?”
As it turned out, when Pao quieted her anxiety and told herself she could do it, she understood a lot more than she thought she would. In her memory were the Spanish words her mom had cooed to her as a baby, and on the signs Pao had read, and in the commercials she’d heard on the radio. She also recalled Señora Mata’s voice, and the chanting and gleeful shouting of kids at school.
By listening carefully, Pao learned from Estrella that the elders—“los mayores”—wouldn’t come back to the cell until they had a new prisoner, or if there was an emergency. Otherwise the door would stay closed, maybe forever. They would most likely die in here.
Paola Santiago and the Forest of Nightmares Page 21