We walk past the counter and into the back. Baker racks are stacked with pastries, and every surface is finely coated in flour.
Angela stops momentarily with her hand on the next doorknob. “Ah, you might want to hold your breath.”
“What? Why?” Alex asks.
I take a gulp of air, like I’m about to dive into the deep end, as Angela opens another door and leads the way.
It’s a small greenhouse with bright lights hanging from the ceiling. All kinds of plants sprout from bins and pots. Some snake around bamboo shoots all the way to the ceiling, and crystal beans sprout from bright-green blooms. There are rows and rows of exotic flowers I’ve never seen before in the lushest hues: reds as bright as love, the blue of sorrow, and black roses whose velvety petals hold beads of condensation.
I can’t help but wonder what these flowers smell like. I want to open my mouth and gasp in awe, but my nose already itches terribly, and my lungs burn with the need to breathe.
Finally, we reach the end, go through yet another door and into a narrow hallway.
Alex and I suck in air, and I bend over and sneeze ten times in a row.
“Ay, Deos, qué dramáticas,” Angela grumbles.
The light above us flickers, and I can tell Alex is nervous. I hold her hand and give it a gentle squeeze.
Angela unlocks the door with a skeleton key, and the hinges whine as she pushes it open. She reaches into the dark and pulls on a chain. The light takes a few tries to turn on, but when it does, I can’t believe what I’m looking at.
There’s a life-size statue of Lady de la Muerte against the far wall. I don’t want to be the one to tell Angela Santiago that Lady de la Muerte doesn’t exactly look like that. The pale skin and the scrawling black ink on her arms is right, but this statue gives the goddess of death a beautiful, young face and a halo of dark hair. She holds a spear, the metal spike splintering a large stone beneath her feet.
Hundreds of small, white flowers and melting candles are lined on the floor. The entire room is her altar. That’s when I notice something else between the flowers. Skulls. Some human, some animal, all covered in traces of dirt as if fresh from the grave.
I resist the screaming urge in my gut to turn around. Instead, I lick the dryness on my tongue and smile.
“What a lovely room of skulls,” I comment.
Angela chuckles in that gravelly voice of hers and turns to a wall of books. They’re all old and mostly the cloth hardback kind you only get at used bookstores. None of them have names on the spine, but she thumbs her finger along them like she knows their contents by touch. When she finds the one she’s looking for, I’m disappointed. It isn’t a giant tome of a book like The Creation of Brujas or The Book of Deos. It’s a thin, worn thing, barely a pamphlet.
“That’s it?” I say.
Angela gives me a look and flips the book in her hands. “Fortunately for the human race, we haven’t had many recorded cases of casimuertos. Zombies…now that’s a different story.”
“See? I said he wasn’t a zombie,” I tell Alex.
“I never said he was,” she says. “I said ‘zombielike.’”
“You two done?” Angela raises her eyebrows, jingling keys around her finger.
I reach for the book, but Angela holds it back. “This ain’t the library. It’s the only copy.”
“Like, ever?” Alex asks.
Angela glances darkly at my sister. “Read it, don’t touch anything else, and when you’re done, come see me.”
She walks out without another word and back through her poison garden.
“Charming,” Alex says in a huff.
“You’re lucky she hasn’t killed us by now and added our heads to her altar of death.”
She doesn’t disagree, and we start flipping through the pages.
“I can’t read in Spanish,” Alex says, handing the book over to me.
I’m not much better, but the diagrams help. The cover has a faded symbol burned on the center, and it takes me a moment of staring to realize it’s an anatomical drawing of a heart. I flip it open. The title page reads El Libro Maldecido.
“The Accursed Book,” I translate for her. I flip the page. There are anatomy drawings of the casimuertos. Arrows point to its heart, eyes, and brain. My fingers tremble when I turn the page. The event is marked by a year and location. 1913. Vinces, Ecuador.
“It says here that there was a case in Ecuador. A circle of brujas was trying to save the life of one of their own after she was murdered by her husband. The woman was presumed dead, and the canto unsuccessful. But the next day, the dead woman rose and started killing people in her town. They too rose as casimuertos soon after.”
My heart sinks like an anchor plummeting to the bottom of the sea. I look around the room for somewhere to sit or some water to satiate my parched throat but find neither. I lower myself onto the floor and Alex follows. My feet throb like my toes have just been smashed.
“What?” Alex asks, staring at the spines of books Angela asked us not to touch. “How did they get rid of them?”
“They didn’t,” I tell her. “The village was razed to the ground.”
“Okay, so not helpful.” Alex reaches over me and flips to the next page. There’s a diagram of an open chest with several lines extending out of it—just like the spool of silver thread that I saw coming from my chest.
Next page. A crude drawing of a casimuerto, blood dripping from its eyes and mouth, a heart gripped tightly in its fist.
“The casimuertos must feed off human hearts to quell their ravenous desire to live,” I read the caption. “It is never sated.”
“Endless supply of human hearts,” Alex says dryly. “Do you think we’ll be able to get that at the supermarket?”
“Stop it,” I growl. “You’re not helping.”
“I’m sorry, but I have to laugh in the face of our impending doom by zombies.”
I glare at her. She holds her hands up in defeat. “Fine, casimuertos.”
“Another case recorded in 1683, outside Salamanca, Spain. An encantrix raised an army of casimuertos to do her bidding. Lady de la Muerte cleaved the bruja in two and struck her undead army from existence with her spear.”
“Then why the hell hasn’t Lady de la Muerte done that to you?” Alex asks. “Not that I want her to.”
“Because she’s trapped between realms,” I say. “Here, this one is recent. Juan Buenavista, a grieving young husband couldn’t see his bride go. Maria Azucena was killed leaving the chapel on their wedding day. Juan, son of a brujo but with no magic of his own, took her to the desert and made a deal for his soul with El Corazón to bind her life to his. The longer she lived, the weaker he became, and the stronger her craving for human hearts grew. Caracas, Venezuela, 1965.
“That’s why I haven’t been healing properly,” I say. I want to shut the book and set it on fire. “So basically, everyone dies. That’s the moral of the story.”
“No,” Alex says, pointing to a thin arrow at the corner of the page. “There’s more.”
I flip the page, something like hope fluttering in my heart. “Upon consuming his heart, Maria Azucena became nearly unstoppable. Her strength quadrupled. Her senses heightened. Even her hunger grew. It took a High Circle and a dozen more brujas to sever her head, but not before she killed dozens. They burned her body parts in separate pyres. El Corazón claimed both their souls.”
“It’s good to know gods only care about souls and blood.” I half cry, half laugh. “Well, if Maks eats my heart, he gets superstrength.”
“That’s not going to happen, not while I’m still breathing.” She grabs the book from me. “We’ll find a way to save you.”
“Save me? What about Maks? What about the others? Are we going to burn New York to the ground? Alex, this is hopeless. It’s called The Accursed Book for a reason.”
I hunch forward and grab hold of my side. The pain is back with a vengeance. I bite back on the cry and breathe until it subsides. I have to keep Alex focused.