I take the list from my mom’s hand. Everything is crossed out except for one: blood of the guide. I shut my eyes and think of Lula’s Deathday. We strung white fairy lights in the yard and spent all night hot-gluing sparkles on her midnight-blue dress. I glued my fingers so many times that they were raw and bloody. I probably bled as much for her Deathday as the sacrificial dove. If I think on it, I can see Lula’s slender hands holding the dove, red dots smattered all over her perfectly calm face.
Lady punches numbers into the register. “Love canto? Finally met one you couldn’t charm with your pretty green eyes.”
In this light, they’re more blue than green. But I don’t tell her that.
“Nah, Lady,” he says. “Ain’t never had no trouble with love.”
“That’s a double negative,” I say.
Lady’s grave laugh fills the store. Then she says, “Twenty-five dollars.”
“You raised the price on liar tongues? What the hell, Lady?”
He takes out crumpled-up bills from his pocket and smooths them out like each dead president just insulted his mother.
Lady shrugs. “You think rent here’s getting any cheaper? You want to do your love canto or don’t you?”
“It’s not a love canto!” He pushes the money toward her, a sudden jerk going through his body. He glances at me, then gives me his back. Beneath the close crop of his hair is a crescent moon tattoo, El Papa’s symbol, right behind his ear.
“Just put the rest on my bill,” my mom says.
“Five bucks,” Lady tells my mother, shoving his candle and tongues and feathers into a black plastic bag. “What do you say, Nova?”
Nova looks to the floor for one, two, three, before facing my mother and saying a somber, “Thank you, Ms…”
“Carmen,” she says.
“Nova Santiago.”
“You’re a bleeding heart,” I tell my mom.
My mom is always the lady who gives a dollar to the young, homeless kids on the street. She always says, “If it were you, I’d want someone to help you too.” This is different. So he’s not doing a love canto. He could be doing a canto to make someone lose their voice. Who needs liar tongue for any kind of good magic?
“Santiago?” Mom asks. “Are you Angela’s grandson?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Nova nods, losing the confident posture from before. “Angela the Great.” He says her name like he doesn’t think she’s great at all, like he doesn’t understand why people call her that. My mom doesn’t seem to catch that, but I do.
“I ordered some of her sweets for Alejandra’s Deathday next week,” Mom continues.
“Alejandra,” he says, and I realize I never told him my name.
“Alex,” I correct him.
“I work at the bakery,” he tells me. “I’ll probably be the one delivering them.”
“Oh, you’ll have to stay!” Mom says.
I tug on my mom’s sleeve, but she slaps my hand away.
“Alex doesn’t have many friends.” The traitor who birthed me pleads my case. “It’ll be nice to have some young blood.”
I want to cut off my head and add it to the mounted wall. They can label it “Head of a Friendless Girl.”
“It’s okay if you’re busy,” I say. What’s more embarrassing than your mother trying to recruit friends for you?
“It’s okay,” Nova says, walking toward us on his way out. “I’ll probably be out on deliveries. But I got you, Ms. Carmen. I’ll have Angela throw in some extra goodies just for ya’ll.”
My magic swirls at the base of my stomach and I yell at myself internally to quell it. He takes my mom’s hand and thanks her once again. Then he stops right in front of me. The studs in his ears twinkle like faraway stars. He lowers his face, and I don’t know if he’s going to hug me or kiss me on the cheek good-bye, but either way, I feel like a deer in headlights when he smiles. It seems sincere. Although, what do I know about boys?
He whispers, “I’m sure you’ll look beautiful surrounded by your dead.”
Seashells chime when he leaves.
I look around the store to see if that was weird for anyone else, but Mom and Lady are already deep in conversation. Rose is still chatting with the mounted jackalope. Lula’s on the phone, probably with Maks.
My mom pays for our ceremonial supplies. The blood of the guide we have to get somewhere else.
I think of Nova saying, You’d be foolish to try.
Except, I’d be foolish not to. Nova is wrong. It’s not like getting my period or having a growth spurt. It’s a choice, like my dad leaving, like Mom raising three girls by herself, like me studying hard to get far, far away. It hits me like a cold wave. I can choose to not have a Deathday. Can’t I?
As we leave Miss Trix and drive to the exotic pet store, I repeat his words over and over. My mom picks out a parakeet with powder-blue feathers and a yellow part in the center shaped like a heart. I rest her cage on my lap on the way home. She flutters restlessly the entire time. A part of me wants to open the cage, roll down the window, set her free. But I don’t. I hold the cage tighter.
For the longest time I feared this magic would get loose, and now it has. Everyone keeps telling me that this is a normal part of being a bruja. That I can’t stop this from happening.
And for the first time, I wonder: What if I can?
7
Protect me from the living,
protect me from the dead.
—Rezo de El Guardia, Protector of All Living Things
My answers are going to be in the Book of Cantos. As much as I hate to admit it, Nova is right. If there are hexes that give unfaithful lovers groin gangrene and potions that melt warts in the blink of an eye, then there has to be something to get rid of my powers. What will my family say? Lula and my mom, they don’t see themselves the way I do. They see themselves as beings of a higher calling. Chosen. All I see is their bruises from the recoil. It has to end somewhere, and it has to end with me.
Rose watches me curiously on the ride home. I wonder if she can see my intent. But as Mom drives down the Brooklyn streets, Rose shakes her head and keeps watching the night fall.
“Alejandra, are you even listening?” Lula says.
“What?” I ask.
“I’m just saying how cute it is to see you flirting.”
I scoff. “I wasn’t flirting.”