She’s thinner than before. Her skin is the translucent slickness of an amphibian. A black ooze drips from the edges of her twisted thorn crown, and her cracked, blue lips pull back over glistening yellow teeth.
“How can you speak to me this way?” The accusation is drenched with melancholy.
I press my hand over my heart. There’s nothing there.
“Am I dead?”
“Do you want to be?”
“Why can’t you just give me a straight answer?”
“Why can’t you see that I have? You cry for our absence, but we are where we’ve always been.”
She points an accusatory finger at me as I pace around her. In this in-between, I am weightless. There is a rushing dark, like a swarm of bees, but after a moment, you stop noticing it.
“You have seen the outcome of this. The casimuertos are tied to you, and you are tied to me.”
“You could’ve told me there was only one way to end this.”
“It is not the only way. Find my spear—”
“But where is your spear? If you’re here, then where is it?”
“I was born at the edge of this world. It is where I always return; it is where I should be now.” Lady de la Muerte turns slowly, following my quick pace with her molasses-dark eyes. “Do you know why mortals pray?”
I stop in my tracks. Why do I light my candles and sing rezos and keep my altar to the Deos? Why do I scream at her now? “Because we want something.”
“If the Deos had all the answers,” she says, “we wouldn’t have created you.”
I laugh. My heart has stopped beating and back home my undead army is wreaking havoc all over the city. But here is the lady of death, asking the world of me and all I can do is laugh.
“You don’t know,” I say. “You don’t know how to fix this.”
“Lula, you wanted something I could not give you. You didn’t ask for life and here you have it. But you did ask for this burden, and you must free me.”
She extends her long, bony arm, and fissures of light erupt from the tip of her finger, stabbing the bare skin between my breasts.
? ? ?
I start awake on the boardwalk. Whatever Lady de la Muerte did, the silver light appears over my heart once more. This time, there are more threads than before extending in dozens of directions. Except for three of them. They wrap around my shoulders and tug me backward and across the boardwalk, toward an empty lot full of overgrown weeds that are lit by my silver light as I draw closer.
Three figures emerge from the shadows. They squint against the bright threads that pierce their hearts. One of them I recognize as Derek Ferreira, number five on the team. His pale skin is shiny with sweat, and his once-brown eyes are covered by a milky-white film. He takes a step forward, and I can see that his mouth is red with dried blood. He’s wearing a letterman jacket with nothing underneath, displaying a canvas of pink scars.
“Derek?” I say his name, because part of me still doesn’t believe that he’s here. When I blink, I can picture him getting thrown from one end of the bus to the other.
The other two boys are Dylan Monroe and Paul Gopal. Paul doesn’t look like he has a scratch on him. His dark skin is smooth and unblemished. He looks completely alive, and if it wasn’t for his colorless eyes, I wouldn’t be able to tell he’s a casimuerto. Dylan is another story. His pale-gray skin is badly bruised over the right shoulder, where a nasty scar was stitched up and never healed properly. Again, my mind flashes to an image of the bus tumbling and flipping over. A pane of broken glass wedging itself deep into his shoulder.
“I know you,” Paul tells me, blinking a few times.
“You’re Maks’s girl,” Derek says, stalking toward me. He’s my height and made of lean muscles that ripple with each step he takes. He extends his bloody fingers toward the silver thread that links us, but they touch only air. “You’re the one who’s been calling out to us this whole time.”
“Me?”
“Haven’t you felt it?” Derek quirks up a dark eyebrow. “That tug in your heart. That’s all of us.”
I look on either side of me, but the boardwalk is dark. Other than the waves, we’re alone.
“I have,” I say, trying to stop myself from running. If I run, they’ll follow and I don’t know how much longer the elixir can sustain me. “I’m here to help you.”
“Help us?” Paul says. Thick, black hair falling over his stark-white eyes. “I’ve never felt better.”
“It was weird at first,” Derek says, his mouth spreading into a wicked, wide smile tinged with blood as he gets closer. “I couldn’t think straight. It wasn’t until we ate that I felt like myself again. The more we eat, the better we feel. I can smell things I never could. The fear on someone’s skin. How sweet it turns the blood. Like you…”
“There’s a moment,” Dylan says, “right after we eat. All the pain, all the confusion goes away. But beneath that, you know what I feel? What all of us feel?”
I take a step back and hit the metal railing separating the boardwalk from the sand.
“Your heart.”
“Speaking of.” Derek breathes the air around me, dark eyes falling to my chest. “We don’t have to hunt tonight.”
I swing my fist, colliding with his nose. There’s the crunch of cartilage and a soft trickle of blood, but the other two grab my arms. I kick frantically until my knee hits flesh. One of them lets me go, and I pull the other to the ground. They growl like wolves and look up behind me as the sound of footsteps draws nearer.
Derek snarls, and when he lands on me, I grab him by his throat.
“I don’t need to breathe.” He laughs and threads his arms between mine to break my hold.
I scream as his nails rake across my chest. The metallic scent of blood sends him into a frenzy.
I realize he’s going to rip out my heart. I think of my family scattered around the city, my sisters fighting alongside me, La Muerte waiting for me to free her, Maks—and I know, I know I can’t let this happen. If they consume my heart, they’ll be unstoppable, and the city falls. If I have to die, I’m taking them all with me. A primal instinct within me ignites. I punch and thrash and I fight back.
There’s the stampede of footsteps and my name on the wind. A blast of light hits the casimuerto in the face and he flies backward with a thud.
“Alex!” I shout, scrambling to my feet.
But it isn’t Alex. It’s Rose. And her entire body is bathed in light.
25
El Terroz rose, lifting the earth
above La Ola’s drowning waves,
forever scorned by his sister’s wrath.
—Tales of the Deos, Felipe Thomás San Justinio
“How did you do that?” I take her hands and she helps me up.
“I don’t know.” She trembles in my grasp. I brush her hair back to examine her face. She wraps her arms around me and holds me tight. “Are you okay?”
Behind her, Nova’s arms are shaking as he holds a phone to his ear. “Come west on the boardwalk.”
“Is that Alex?” I ask. “What about Frederik?”
“He wasn’t going after you. He could sense Maks’s change,” he says. “That’s what set him off. After we calmed Frederick down, we split up to find you. What happened?”
“I needed space,” I say, the adrenaline in my veins causing me to shake. “I spoke to Lady de la Muerte again. Then I found them.”
I keep a tight hold of Rose and think back to the night of the spell—the way her power shined brighter than Alex’s and mine. The strength of it was raw and pure. Could our canto have changed her power too?
“Since when can you conjure light?” Nova asks Rose.
She shakes her head and says nothing.
We turn around at the moaning sound of the casimuertos getting back up. A hard breeze blows my hair back. When I blink, Frederik is here with a silver tube in his hand. He injects the casimuertos in the chest with a needle.
“What is that?” I ask.
“A serum.” Frederik’s voice is the calm before a storm. “But it won’t last long. We need to go.”
? ? ?
When we get back to the Alliance building, Alex sees me and it’s like the tension in her whole body unwinds. She runs across the room and pulls Rose and me into a hug. I’ve never been happier to just be together.
“What happened?” she asks.
“Before I get to that, we have to talk,” I say.