“You did this to me,” he growls.
“I was trying to save you. All I wanted was to save you.”
He whips around, and when he does, the sight of his eyes is startling—the blue has faded to ice white. The jagged scars that cover his body are pronounced and red. When I look at him, I don’t see the boy I loved. I see his walking corpse. A casimuerto.
That’s when I notice it. The thread that binds us together, a silver thread coming undone. Maks puts his hand around it.
“No!”
And he tugs.
The pain makes me fall to the sand. He tugs again, and this time, white-hot pain floods every part of me.
“Why won’t it work?” He grabs me by my shoulders and shakes me.
“Why are you doing this?” I ask him.
“Because I remember now.” His hands trace the sides of my neck. “I remember everything.”
My scream dies in my throat, but I can hear another in the distance. My face feels red and my thoughts darken with a lack of oxygen.
“I remember it all, Lula!” Maks shouts, his grip crushing my windpipe.
Wake up, wake up, wake up.
I open my eyes.
But his hands are still around my throat. And I can’t breathe. And I can’t call for help. And I’m not dreaming.
Maks is killing me.
27
The world burned and splintered and drowned.
To save their creations, La Mama and El Papa
let La Muerte rise.
—Tales of the Deos, Felipe Thomás San Justinio
The air sparks with electricity. Maks’s skin is covered with pinpricks of currents that bring him to his knees. Then rain falls from a dark cloud that blankets the ceiling. Maks’s body is flung to the side, but his nails still rake across the thin skin of my throat.
My dad’s hands hold spheres of electricity. His eyes are black as night.
My mom runs to my side and presses her hand against where I’m bleeding. When I try to talk, my throat burns worse than ever. Even the breath I take is jagged and small.
“Rose,” Alex shouts. “Help me carry her out. Pull the door lever!”
They shoulder my weight and carry me to a bed.
“It’s okay,” Mom tells me. The sight of her face is calming. Her magic floods through me, finding the places that hurt the most. I wince as a bone snaps into place. “It’s okay, nena. We’re here.”
I know this won’t last. They’re going to find out what I’ve done and be angry with me. But for now, I let my mother hold me and brush my hair away from my face. I let her mend the skin around my neck and press kisses on my forehead just as she did when I was a little kid. I let her thank La Mama that I’m alive and threaten to kill me in her name as well. I let her be my mother.
“Lula,” she says, her voice pleading. “What did you do?”
“Yell later,” Alex says. “First, we need to summon the High Circle.”
“No,” I say, trying out my voice. “I should explain. About Maks and the others.”
Dad rubs the soot off his hands on his sweatpants, his gray eyes like perfect storms. “Others?”
I take a deep breath and sit up to face them. “I messed up.”
? ? ?
The important moments in life always seem to happen around kitchens, from holidays and parties to everything in between. So I’m not surprised that, somehow, we end up in the THA kitchen to talk about how I cast a spell that will destroy our city.
Ma makes a strong black tea with Frederik’s herbs. She slams the kettle on the stove. She cranks up the flames. She sets the jar of loose leaf so hard on the counter I’m surprised it doesn’t shatter. The entire time she mutters in the Old Tongue.
“You have no idea what you’ve done.” Her voice is tired and angry.
I stay quiet. Alex and Rose are busy examining the dirt under their nails because they know Mom’s anger is coming for them too.
I’m prepared for her to scream, to tell me how much I’ve let her down. I even brace to have something flung at my head.
Instead, my mother sighs deeply. It’s like a weight pushing down her thick, strong body. She shakes her head from side to side and pours the boiling water into the teapot. She sets the tray on the table between us and I breathe in the scent of bitter roots and jasmine.
I fear I’ve broken more than just the balance of the world. I’ve destroyed the trust my mother had in me.
She just sits there and stares at the door, waiting for my father to return. Dark circles ring her eyes, but her plum lipstick is still somehow unblemished.
As the day breaks and the sunrise shines into this strange, metallic kitchen, a shadow spreads across her neck in the shape of handprints—the same ones she healed from me. And seeing my mother hurt is worse than anything else in the world.
Dad and Nova walk in, a draft following at their heels. My father is still shaking from having used his power, and his face is scrunched up with ire and worry. There’s a brownish-red smudge on his cheek that at first looks like dirt, but when I look at Nova, he too has a bruise on his face. I wonder if we are ever going to be more than a pile of broken bones and bruises.
Dad and Nova exchange glances and something passes between them, something untold that the four of us aren’t privy to. I envy Nova for this.
“The casimuertos are down,” Nova says. “For now.”
My mom gets up and hands them both a cup of tea. Dad shuts his eyes before drinking it, and I don’t know if he’s cursing the Deos or praying to them.
“What happened while we were gone?” Dad asks quietly.
“I wasn’t completely honest about the canto we used on Maks.” I take a sip of tea to wet my dry tongue. Then I confess. “When the bodies went missing, I thought that was the end of it. But they just reappeared in different parts of the city. The day I left the house for a walk, I really went to the boardwalk. That’s where I found Maks.”
“How did you find him?” Mom asks.
“I’m connected to them. Tethered. That’s why I haven’t been healing properly.” I explain about the threads.
“Lula—” Mom starts to say.
“Let me finish,” I say. “Please. Otherwise I might not be able to say it again. La Muerte told me I had to free her, but when I found Maks, I felt like finally something had gone right.”
My lips are so dry I feel like, if I start to cry, they might bleed. So I hold it in. “Alex and I went to see Nova’s grandmother. She let us read a book she had on casimuertos.”
Dad is pacing in a circle around the table. He touches his bottom lip with his fingers, face sunken in with so much burden it makes him look like he’s aged a decade.
“The book,” he says. “El Libro Maldecido?”
“Yes,” Alex says. “How do you know that?”
“Patricio?” Mom asks.
Dad frowns the way he does when he struggles through his memory. “Remember Fausto Toledo back in our circle?”
“That was twenty years ago,” Ma says. “The circumstances were different.”
“Raising the dead is raising the dead. He wanted to create an army to fight against the Knights of Lavant.”
At their name, Nova, Alex, Rose, and I exchange a not-so-secret glance. But we’re not about to interrupt my dad, so we let him keep talking.
“But he failed,” Ma says. “The bodies were taken out to the island and dumped in the sound.”
“That wasn’t in Angela’s book,” I say.
“It wouldn’t be,” Dad says severely. “Fausto wrote it. After his army failed, he started to die. Not even sinmago doctors could treat him. He simply withered down until there was skin and bones. It was his punishment for what he’d done. He tried to figure out a cure for death. Spent years gathering up stories about the undead. You see, casimuertos aren’t created by a virus. They’re bound by magical blood. And the only way to kill them all is—”
He freezes, stormy-gray eyes glassy when he looks at me, like he’s only just remembering the cost. “No. I’m not losing you again. Lula—”