“No!” I shout.
The snake freezes, turns its head in my direction. That red tongue flicks at me. It nods. It knows me. Then, the snake slithers out the door and into the halls.
“Alex.” Someone calls my name. I turn around but no one is there.
“Who’s there?” I whisper. The temperature in the room drops.
“We need to go!” Rishi holds her bloody hand out for me to take.
But there’s that voice again. I fall backward onto the gym floor. I can hear the rush of waves, the crackle of static. Rishi tries to help me stand. I stare at her fingers. Pink nails. Brown henna. But then she’s gone as Aunt Rosaria appears between us.
“Alex, what’s wrong?” Rishi shouts.
I crawl backward, my insides clenching and twisting painfully. Recoil. My skin burns from the inside like there’s fire in my veins. Aunt Rosaria’s open lips are a black hole, but the sound is lost. She grabs her throat with one hand and points at me with the other, a long, accusatory finger. I hold up my arms to shield myself from her. My magic slips defensively. The blast sets off the sprinkler systems. It shudders the windowpanes. It fills the air with the howling winds of a storm. Magic flares in my veins, and I panic, pulling it back like a lifeline that is slipping from my fingers. Aunt Rosaria starts to fade into the shadows, my name the last word on her cold, dead lips.
5
The Deos created the brujos and brujas.
Bless our kind, vessels of their Eternal Gifts.
—from the journal of Philomeno de las Rosas
I run all the way home. The last thing I heard before I took off was Rishi and Lula looking for me in the throng of students. I went out the side door and bolted down the street. I realize running from this is like trying to outrun the sun. Sometimes I feel like all I want to do is run. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if I never stopped.
When I get to my street, I slow down. Sweat drips from my temples and down my nose. My muscles burn down to the core. I run into my house. I press my head against the kitchen door until I stop shaking. I practice my breaths like Mrs. Castellano, my guidance counselor, once told me, “If you hold your breath, Alejandra, your panic attacks will get worse. Breathe and you will see how much easier it is to make sense of your emotions.”
She was wrong then and she’s wrong now. There is not enough air in the world to calm me down. So I do the only thing that makes me feel better—I clean. I attack the dishes with soap and a sponge. I run the soapy dishes under water. I place them on the drying rack so hard I break one. I grip the sink and try to rationalize today’s events.
I couldn’t have done that to Ivan. It had to be Aunt Ro’s ghost. But why would she do that? Why would she point at me? Aunt Rosaria hasn’t shown herself to any family member since her death. Not even on the night of the Waking Canto. My mother’s circle blamed me. I broke the enchantment with my midnight appearance. They would never find the true reason for my aunt’s death. They’re afraid she’s lost to the realms beyond the veil. But if she’s lost, why appear to me when I didn’t even summon her?
The back door slams shut.
“Why didn’t you wait for me?” Lula asks. She drops her backpack and stares at me. Her face is a mixture of awe and glee.
She knows.
“Too many people,” I say, turning up the water even though it’s already sloshing over the sink and onto the floor. She lets me wallow in my guilty silence. “What happened to Ivan?”
She walks across the kitchen and leans against the wall beside me. Her cool, gray eyes watch as I scrub away the remnants of chicken parm from two nights ago.
“Oh, he’s fine. Animal control had the snake cornered, and then it did the most curious thing.”
“What?”
“It vanished into smoke. Poof.”
I chance a glance at Lula. Her curls are wild and her pouty lips glisten pink. Then I look at myself in the mirror on the kitchen wall: tangled, sweaty hair; bags from sleepless nights under my big, brown eyes; the sickly green pallor to my tan skin.
Lula lets out an excited squeal and hugs me. She bounces up and down, then leaves a sticky kiss on my cheek.
“How did you do it?” she asks.
I shake my head. I rinse the plate in my hands. I grab for another glass to clean. I breathe. And breathe. And breathe. And Lula bounces around me, doing a bruja dance of joy.
“Do you know what this means?”
“Rose gets to eat all the ambrosia?”
“Smart-ass. This means the three of us finally have our powers!” If she had peacock feathers, they’d be proudly displayed. “This is huge! Think of the things we could do. Why aren’t you more excited?”
“Because I made a snake come out of a boy’s throat!”
“You conjured, Ale! I mean, he’ll probably have nightmares for a few nights, but the snake disappeared when you did. What did he do to you?”
He broke Rishi’s nose. He attacked me. He had the same red eyes Miluna had on the day…
“I wonder the extent of your powers.” She keeps going, pacing around the kitchen table. “Maybe you’ll learn to heal, like Ma and me. Pa could control weather a little. Do you remember? Before his disappearance—”
“Dad left,” I shout. The glass cracks in my hand. “He left us.”
Lula stops her frantic pacing. I stare at myself in mirror again. You are not a bruja. You are a girl who needs to get far, far away, where the blood dreams can’t follow.
“You don’t know that,” Lula says. Her bottom lip trembles and her stormy-gray eyes are glossy with tears.
But I do know that. I was there.
Everyone has a theory of why Patricio Mortiz, benevolent brujo and loving family man, disappeared without a trace. Some think my father was taken by the kind of people who still hunt people like us. But there was no struggle or ransom note. I know in my heart that he left because of the magic inside me. No matter how much I try to forget, the memory floats on the surface of my mind.
It was an accident. Back then, I repeated that like a mantra.
I was ten years old and suffered from nightmares and paralyzing headaches. No one could figure out what was wrong with me. My parents’ Circle came over one day and bathed me in seawater and rubbed ashes on my face to scare away the ghosts. But it wasn’t ghosts. It was something inside that wanted to rip me in half to set itself free.
One day, the pain was so bad I stopped going to school. I was alone in the house. Something woke me, a voice calling from the shadows. Claws scratched against the wooden floor. Miluna prowled toward me, her paws trailing ragged, black shadows. Her normally green eyes were red as rubies, and her pearly white teeth were bared and covered in yellow froth.