It was an ancient crypt, one that’d probably been hiding under the old church for years. A steady dripping sound echoed off the cave walls. There were candles along the sides, their flames tall and crackling. Tombs were cut into the walls, housing stone sarcophagi. In the middle of the cave, four large slabs of stone were laid out in a semicircle. Light and shadows caught in the small pictorial carvings on their sides. There were shapes and faces, and several jaguar heads—the glyph of Bahlam. A body lay on each slab. Their heads were slightly elevated, and Yadriel could just make out their faces in the firelight.
A breath caught in his throat.
Julian.
Two Julians.
Julian’s spirit remained at his side, barely conscious. But laid out on top of the slab he was slumped against was Julian’s flesh-and-bone body. He was sickly pale, but Yadriel could see the labored rise and fall of his chest. Bright red seeped all over his white shirt.
It was Julian, and he was alive, but barely.
Sticking out of his chest, right above his heart, was a dagger. Yadriel recognized it straightaway. La garra del jaguar. One of the forbidden ritual daggers Lita had been looking for. It was made of oily flint that glistened in the flames. The handle was a carved jaguar head, its mouth gaping, thick fangs biting the hilt. Its eyes were round and bulging. Wisps curled from the handle of the dagger and into the air like golden smoke.
Yadriel shook his head, trying to rattle his thoughts into place, to come up with an explanation that made sense. How could Julian be alive and his spirit be lying next to him?
Julian’s spirit groaned and flickered.
“Keep your eyes open!” Yadriel snapped when Julian’s eyelids began to droop. He didn’t know what was going on, but if they were going to get out of here, Julian—both of them—needed to stay with him.
With effort, Julian forced them back open. His dark eyes swam before finding Yadriel’s face.
“Yads.” Julian’s voice was tight, his eyes wide and more alert. Frightened.
Next to Julian’s body, three more had the matching daggers pierced into their chests. Yadriel’s heart plummeted. He knew the face of the one to the left.
It was Miguel. But, unlike Julian, he wasn’t moving. His body was still, his eyes closed. His skin was ashen, lifeless. The jaguar dagger piercing his heart was dark and still. No wisps floated into the air. The stone under Miguel was streaked with dark, dried-up blood.
Meanwhile, rivulets of Julian’s blood ran down his own stone slab toward his feet, where it dripped into a pool of water sunk into the earthen floor. The water of the cenote was a cool, glowing blue. Dark, undulating shadows coiled in its depths. Julian’s blood dripped into it, slow and steady.
“Sobrino.”
Yadriel looked up.
A tall man stood facing him. A jaguar pelt, golden with black and brown spots, was draped over his bare chest. He wore the upper jaw and head of a jaguar as a crown. Its eyes had been replaced with jade orbs. The thick, yellowing fangs pressed against his eyebrows. Black and venomous green plumage spilled out behind him.
“Tío?” Yadriel said, squinting in the dark and unable to believe his own eyes.
Tío Catriz smiled. “Look at you!” his said, holding his arms out at his sides. His hands were covered in something dark and glistening. “¡Ven, ven!” He reached down for Yadriel and pulled him to his feet.
Yadriel stood there staring at him, in a daze.
His tío held the wrist of his hand that still clutched his dagger. “Your own portaje,” he said in amused disbelief, chuckling as he examined the blade, twisting Yadriel’s arm this way and that. “When I saw you with it yesterday, I knew what it was straightaway.”
An onyx amulet in the shape of a jaguar’s head hung around Tío Catriz’s neck. It stared at Yadriel with glowing golden eyes.
“Tío, what are you doing down here?” Yadriel asked, his voice wavering.
“Does it work?” he asked with keen interest.
Yadriel nodded.
Tío Catriz laughed again, shaking his head. “I knew you could do it,” he said with fierce pride. Still holding his arm in one hand, his tío cupped the side of Yadriel’s neck with the other, pulling him close.
Something deep in Yadriel—a primal instinct—made him start to tremble.
Tío Catriz leaned down to look him in the eyes. “I am so proud of you, sobrino,” he said, his smile genuine, his voice sincere. “They all doubted you.” He removed his hand from Yadriel’s neck and pressed it to his chest. “But I knew you had it in you.” When Tío Catriz dropped his hand back to his side, it left a smudged handprint down his chest.
A bloody handprint.
Yadriel sucked in a gasp and wrenched himself away. “Tío, what are you doing?” His eyes flickered around the cave. To the cenote and the bodies. Miguel and Julian. The daggers and the blood.
“The dawning of a new era, Yadriel,” Catriz told him, bloody palms held aloft at his sides.
Yadriel shook his head. It wasn’t possible. There was no way. “I don’t—”
“For too long, our bloodline has been losing its power. The brujx are a dying breed,” Catriz told him with a solemn expression. “This is the only way for me to regain the powers I was born without. To take back the birthright I was denied.”
“Your birthright?” he repeated.
“By using the ancient ways our ancestors long abandoned, I will become the most powerful brujo to walk the world of the living in a millennia,” his tío said, flexing his fingers.
At Yadriel’s side, Julian managed to get onto his knees—seemingly from sheer force of will alone.
“I don’t understand,” Yadriel said.
“The forbidden ritual. Human sacrifice, Yadriel,” he explained patiently. “With the help of the jaguar’s paw and Bahlam himself.”
Yadriel’s stomach plummeted. “You can’t do that!”
“Tranquilo,” Tío Catriz said gently. “It’s okay, I have to do this for me, for both of us,” he stressed. “The brujx cast us out. They ignored us and denied us our rights without ever giving us a chance.”
Tío Catriz drew himself up. “I was the firstborn son of the brujx leader, but I was denied my right to follow in my father’s footsteps.” The look he gave Yadriel was one of pity. “None of them believed in you, Yadriel. Your father and the brujx have never understood you. They never even tried to. You are different than they are, so they shunned you, just like they did to me. But I have always believed in you,” he said firmly.
“Tío, you can’t do this,” Yadriel tried to argue, frantic and desperate to talk sense into him.
“It is the only way,” Tío Catriz said, gesturing to the four sacrificial stone slabs. “With these sacrifices, the jaguar claws have drained their spirits one by one, trapping them in the amulet,” he said, touching the jaguar head around his neck. “It’s a slow process, having to drain their spirits and their blood, one by one, but soon it’ll be complete. Once the last drop of blood falls into the cenote, it will summon Bahlam. As my reward, the four drained spirits trapped in the amulet will give me powers our people haven’t possessed for millennia.”