Paola Santiago and the Forest of Nightmares

by Tehlor Kay Mejia

  And who would stop him? Pao asked herself, numb. Who could?

  Pao had once believed herself to be a hero, the kind of person who would know exactly what to do in a situation like this one. She’d been so lost in that identity that she’d actually hoped to prove herself a hero again.

  But everything had changed since then. She’d lost her connection to her father, to Dante, and to everyone else she loved. Her life had been crushed beneath the weight of the truth she had so desperately wanted to know.

  Pao was no hero. She was a monster. A product of the woman who had abducted her friends and killed countless people—countless children. The father she’d been dreaming of her whole life was the patchwork result of a tragic experiment, and he had surrendered to his other half.

  A half whose reckoning had been coming for a long time.

  And Pao was powerless to stop it. It had never been her role to play.

  “It’s been difficult to find a suitable conduit for this energy,” the man who was not Pao’s father said, bustling around, checking connections, turning dials. “Humans don’t have a connection to the void, and the fantasmas are too unstable. You can see I’ve tried several of them already.” He gestured upward toward the purple cloud of raw magical power.

  The anomaly, Pao realized. That cloud of corrupted fantasmas was the energy Franco had detected. But she would never get the chance to tell him.

  “But you? A human with a connection to the void? The granddaughter of its most fearsome fantasma? You held the pearl of power in your hands . . . and destroyed it. The void isn’t sentient, of course, but if it could want, Paola, there’s nothing in this world it would want more than you.”

  Of course, Pao thought. She belonged to the void. So did Beto. They had only been living on borrowed time.

  “And now my day has finally come,” he said, his voice high and ringing in his excitement. “The day I unleash hell on this terrible, selfish world. They won’t know what hit them.”

  “Neither will you.”

  The voice came from behind Pao, accompanied by the sound of the trailer door being kicked in. While Pao was wearing her bubble helmet she couldn’t see who it was, but she could hear her captor’s shriek of rage in response.

  And then, “Beto?”

  It was a voice Pao would have known anywhere—her mother’s.

  “Beto, it’s me, Maria. Come back to me, querido.”

  “He’s never coming back!” There was a loud crash as some undoubtedly expensive instrument was destroyed. Bruto started howling. “Never! It’s over!”

  Someone was unhooking Pao’s helmet, disconnecting the wires, and lifting the plastic from her head. Tears began to trickle down Pao’s cheeks again. Tears for the person trapped inside Beto’s body. Tears for the girl she’d believed she was.

  Tears because she wasn’t alone, even though she deserved to be.

  “Pao?” Emma, her face blurred by Pao’s watery eyes, was smiling wide. “Pao, we’re here. We found you. It’s okay.”

  “How . . . ?” Pao asked. “Where . . . ?”

  “It was your friend,” Emma said, loosening the last of the restraints. “Estrella. She led us to you. She’s waiting outside. . . .”

  Pao got unsteadily to her feet. She had a million more questions, but once again, time was against her. She drew the magnifying glass from her pocket and transformed it into a staff.

  There was no need. As Emma clutched Pao’s arm, they watched Maria Santiago approaching the shrieking madman, dodging the blows.

  “Come back to me,” she said, taking his face in her hands.

  Pao, on the outside this time, watched the transition. The pain in her father’s features, the horror on her mother’s. What were they reliving? What memories? What failures?

  After what seemed like an eternity, Beto’s body went still. His features relaxed. His shoulders slumped forward.

  “Maria?” he said, reaching up to touch her face, too. “How . . . ?”

  “Later, mi amor,” she said. “We have to save our daughter.”

  “Yes,” he said, a little dreamily. “Paola, yes. Yes. It’s time.”

  “Time for what?” Pao asked, walking over the wreckage to join them.

  “Let me show you,” he said.

  Taking a deep breath, Pao nodded.

  He nodded back. “We need to hurry,” Beto said (it was hard to think of him as her dad, now that she knew his whole sordid history). “But we can do it. I’ve been developing a machine, and obscuring it from my other . . . from him in my mind.”

  “What do we have to do?” Pao asked, watching him like a hawk for signs of the other soul’s reappearance. Pao could handle being in danger herself, but she wouldn’t be able stand it if anything happened to Emma or her mom. She’d brought them here; it would be her fault if they got hurt.

  “Can I help?” Emma asked, right on time, and Pao was so grateful her tears welled up again.

  “Yes,” Pao said, clearing her throat. “Can you take Bruto outside? Just for a sec, to get some air?” She tried to communicate with her eyes that she needed a few moments with her parents alone but would tell Emma absolutely everything the moment she could.

  “Of course,” Emma said, calling to Bruto, who trotted beside her excitedly, a soldier no more. “Just holler if you need anything, okay?”

  Pao nodded, knowing Bruto would protect Emma, and turned back to her parents, who had resumed their conversation.

  “It’s a device,” Beto was saying to Maria. “Crude but effective. It will harness the void energy he’s been storing here, and I can use it to sever the connection between him and myself. Life from death. Spirit from body. Without a host, he will be a fantasma. Vulnerable. Weak after so long living inside another.”

  “So we draw him out, separate him, and . . .” Pao’s mom began.

  “Kill him,” Beto said. “Paola, that’s an Arma del Alma, is it not?”

  “It is,” Pao said, her voice sounding far away to her own ears. “I got it before . . . before I knew . . .” She didn’t know how to explain that she shouldn’t have it. That she didn’t deserve it because of who she was.

  “You know how to use it?” her mom asked, cutting through her downward thought spiral.

  Throat tight, Pao nodded.

  “Good,” Beto said. “The moment the separation is complete, you must attack. When he’s gone, you take this”—Beto handed Pao’s mom a can of lighter fluid and a lighter—“and destroy the lab. Then you all run—Paola, use the portal. You can get them out with you.”

  He was rushing around again, pushing buttons, powering down screens.

  “The void is eager to be opened, hungry for this feast he’s been promising for months. I don’t want anything pursuing you, understand? No surprises.”

  “He summoned El Autostopisto,” Pao said, her voice finally working again. “I trapped him in a duendecillo prison cell in the forest before I came here, but my friends . . .”

  “If he was summoned, then destroying the summoner should dispel him.”

  Pao nodded. “And Dante . . . my . . . well, someone I was traveling with . . . I think . . . uh, the other has him captive in the void now. He said Dante would be freed when the opening was made, but . . . can we still . . . ? Is he . . . ?”

  Her father looked at her, grief heavy in the lines of his face. “If he’s there, it’s too late to save him, I’m afraid,” he said.

  Pao felt the news like a kick to the chest. Dante had been trying to protect the world from her, she realized. From the monster he knew she was. And now he would die for it—if he hadn’t already.

  It was too much on top of everything else. Pao felt like she was going to be sick.

  “Paola, listen to me,” her father said, taking her hand. “I know I’m putting a lot on your shoulders, but I need you to do this for me. For your safety. And your mother’s. Please, I’m counting on you.”

  Pao privately thought it wasn’t very fair of him to expect this of
her when she’d never been able to count on him, but she nodded anyway.

  A spasm of pain crossed Beto’s face, and a spike of anxiety shot through Pao.

  “Is he back?” she asked.

  Her father nodded. “It’s now or never. Querida Maria, watch over the other girl outside, ¿por favor? Paola will tell you when it’s safe to return.”

  “Are you sure?” Pao’s mom asked, looking torn. “Do you—”

  “I’m sure,” he interrupted. “Paola and I have this under control. Trust me, please.”

  “Be careful,” Maria said after a long pause. “Both of you.” And she stepped out of the trailer.

  “I’m still trying to understand some things,” Pao said when she and her father were alone. Now that she finally had the chance to ask him her questions, she dreaded the answers. “When you said ‘life from death’ before . . . it reminded me of La Llorona’s experiment. After you were . . . alive again . . . you met Mom?”

  “Yes,” he said. “And we fell in love. I thought I could erase my past, start over. I even changed my name to César to leave Beto, my mother, and the void behind. Maria made me want to be human.” His smile was soft and bright, and Pao felt the weight of all the years they’d spent apart. All the fear, and the pain . . .

  “And then you guys had me?” she prompted when her father didn’t continue.

  “That’s right,” Beto said. “The most joyous day of my life.” But his face looked anything but joyous.

  “And we’ll all be together again, right? After we separate you from . . . ? You’re coming with us, right?”

  A terrible silence filled the trailer. “Oh, Paola,” he said. “How I wish that were possible. But . . . I fear he is too much a part of me now. Like I said before, once our life forms are separated, they’ll both be weak. I . . . I don’t believe I’ll survive the process.”

  Pao felt her face sag, and her father leaned forward to put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Don’t feel sorry for me, Paola. This is the way it should be. The few years I spent with your mother and getting to see the young woman you’ve become . . . it’s more than I deserved. If this is how I pay for that horrible experiment, so be it. It was worth it. Do you understand?”

  Pao had already learned so much, and lost so much, in this trailer, that she barely felt this last, greatest blow hit her. She’d been longing for a father her whole life. And now she had to help sacrifice him. It was the only way to save herself. Emma. Her mom.

  The entire world.

  “Why couldn’t you have done this before?” Pao asked bitterly. “Why did you have to drag me into it?”

  “I . . . I was too arrogant,” her father said. “I thought I could keep him at bay, prevent him from taking over. I isolated myself from the world, from everyone I loved, for years, to wage my battle with him. And I was successful . . . for a while.”

  So that was why he hadn’t kept in touch, Pao thought. He hadn’t done it to avoid her, but to protect her.

  Despite the fact that these were her last moments with him, Pao couldn’t help but feel angry. He hadn’t protected her at all. The greatest threat was already a part of her, had been since the day she was born.

  “He upped the ante by reaching out to you,” Beto said gently, drawing her out of her thoughts. “That’s when I knew I had to stop him.” His gaze softened. “But, I confess, I was dying to see you myself, even if just for a little while. See who you turned out to be. Can you understand that?”

  Tears streamed down Pao’s face. Her anger at her father . . . the limited time they had left . . . none of it was fair. Pao had thought she’d defeated La Llorona in the void last summer, but her curse still lingered in Pao’s blood, determined to get revenge in the worst way imaginable.

  “What about Mom?” Pao asked, swiping her tears away forcefully. “Aren’t you even going to say good-bye?”

  “We said good-bye years ago, Paola, when it was obvious I could never be whole. She understands what must be done. You are her first priority, her greatest love. This is what she wants, too.”

  Another spasm crossed his face.

  “Tie me to the chair,” he said hurriedly, handing Pao a length of rope and the machine’s on-off device. It looked like a TV remote with a tiny antenna and one red button right in the center. “Wait until he takes over again. You’ll know?”

  “I’ll know,” she said, wiping her eyes again with the back of her wrists. She secured his hands to the armrests with trembling fingers.

  “Push the button the moment he’s back. Don’t let him speak,” Beto said, beginning to sweat along his hairline, as if the effort of keeping his own consciousness within his body was becoming too difficult. “He’ll do anything to stop this . . . say anything.”

  “I understand,” Pao said.

  “I’m so proud of you, Paola.” her father said, his voice full of emotion now. “Please remember, you’re not bound by what I am. Or what she was. You are your own person—only you get to decide who you’re going to be. And you have an incredible guide in your mother. The best there is.”

  Pao felt his words, his pride, glowing in her chest. She could do what needed to be done. She knew it, because he believed in her. She grabbed his bound hand and squeezed it once, as tightly as she could, not caring if it was dangerous.

  Beto was shaking all over, his face twitching as the war raged inside him.

  “Wait!” Pao said. “There’s so much I want to tell you! I can’t say good-bye. Not yet. Please stay.”

  “Be strong,” he told her. “I love you.”

  And then he was gone.

  Pao waited until the eyebrows went up, the laugh lines disappeared, and the eyes opened wide in surprise and fear. “Beto?” she asked in a shaky voice.

  In response, the man who was not her father roared in anger and agony.

  She closed her eyes, the tears burning behind her eyelids.

  “I love you, Dad,” she said.

  And then she pushed the button.

  The effect was instantaneous. A purple jet shot out of the remote’s antenna like a hose when you press your thumb against the end, blasting the man who was not Pao’s father in the face.

  The void goo encased the body like a cocoon, and for a moment, all was still. The two—er, three of them, alone in the trailer, their fates hanging like a knife above a thread.

  Then the goo began to bubble and pulse and stretch, shapes popping out of it only to be sucked back in again. Pao, both fascinated and thoroughly grossed out, waited with her staff drawn, knowing that soon she would need to fight. To protect her family and her friends. To make her father’s final sacrifice worth the pain it had caused them all.

  In thirty seconds, the ropes around his hands burned away.

  In forty, the goo-coated man levitated into the air and hung there, suspended, laid out flat like a body in a coffin at a public viewing.

  By the one-minute mark, the goo began to stretch farther and farther, pulling one man’s form out of the other like those Russian nesting dolls Pao had played with when she was little (she always lost the tiny one).

  Ninety seconds after Pao had pushed the button, there were two human-shaped purple things hanging in the air above her. Then chaos erupted.

  The first body fell to the floor with a thud. The goo dripped off him, leaving his face exposed. Pao’s father, Beto, with a new streak of gray in his hair. His mouth was open, his eyes closed like he might have been sleeping.

  But Pao knew better.

  She looked at him for a long minute. She hoped he was at peace, finally free of the fight that had dominated his too-short second life. She tried to feel happy for him instead of sad for herself.

  Then cold laughter filled the trailer. Pao had been so fixated on her father that she had nearly forgotten his instructions.

  She turned just in time to see a fantasma like none she’d ever seen before. Black smoke, entwined with purple, with a man’s sharp, clever face and cruel eyes. He laughed a
gain and did a backflip, perhaps testing out his new form and freedom.

  Pao knew her orders. She was supposed to kill him quickly. But she remembered what she had said to this man who was not her father. The two of them were alike, and Pao had understood his fear before she understood her father’s identity. She had to hold on to that.

  “I forgive you,” Pao said, shrinking her staff back into a magnifying glass and putting it in her pocket. She stepped forward, wholly at the mercy of the thing in front of her but feeling stronger and more herself than ever.

  The fantasma swirled like mist scattered by the wind and then re-formed. “You think you have the power to release me?” he asked, his voice swelling like the billowing smoke he was made of. “Stupid, arrogant girl. I’ll kill you for this.”

  He lunged at her, and Pao stood perfectly still, knowing she could die, but trusting her instincts. Her father had told her that she got to decide who she wanted to be. And she wasn’t a killer—no matter who her grandmother might have been.

  “I forgive you,” she said again as he reached her, and his smoky arms passed through her like vapor. She didn’t feel a thing.

  “No!” he shrieked, swirling around, his form shrinking.

  “I forgive you for baiting me into coming here,” Pao said, advancing on him. “I forgive you for taking over my father’s brain. I forgive you for turning my friend against me.”

  “What is this?” he asked, his voice smaller now.

  “What’s your name?” Pao asked, peering into his swirling purple eyes.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” he screeched, swiping at Pao again.

  When the vapor made contact with her skin, she saw snatches of his previous life. Plain as day. A little boy running through his house, a smile on his face. A bedroom door with a nameplate on it.

  Joaquín.

  He’d been happy. He had loved catching frogs and flash summer rainstorms.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Pao said, stepping forward again. “You didn’t do anything wrong. She was wrong to use you, and he was wrong to let her.”

  “Stop it! I don’t need your forgiveness! I don’t need anyone!”