A blur runs past Maks. I feel the wind it trails on my face. Maks and I both stare at his arm, raised toward the sky. There’s a red bracelet where there didn’t used to be. The bloody blade of a machete follows its downward motion, and then my mother rights herself, her face streaming with sweat and tears.
Maks screams. His severed hand falls with a faint thud onto the grass. I’m too stunned to move, but I watch my mother. My mother covered in blood and sweat. My mother shaking with adrenaline. My mother saving me. My mother.
She takes my chin in her hand, runs her fingers across the tears on my face. “The others might have physical powers. But you and I must have a different strength.”
I press my forehead to hers. “I’m so sorry.”
“Fuerza.” She presses her palm on my chest. “This is the heart you were born with and you have to decide how strong it will be.”
“I know, Mama. I know.”
Behind us, there’s another blast coming. She looks torn between staying and going, so I make the decision for her.
“Go. I’ve got this.”
She gives me her blessing, pressing her thumb to her lips, then to my forehead. And then she’s gone, running back into the fray inside our house.
I want to run after her, but I know I have to be here.
Maks holds his arm around the wrist and screams. His eyes go completely red and he charges at me. Knocks me on the ground and chokes me with his good hand. I kick my legs but hit air.
This is the heart I was born with, and I have to decide how strong it will be. And though it’s being consumed by the darkness I unleashed into this world, it has never been stronger.
I lash out, dig my fingers into Maks’s red eyes. I feel him blink around my fingertips, slick and wet. He growls, nearly rabid, and rolls off me.
I grab the spear from the ground and get up. Maks’s severed hand is still wrapped around the middle. I try to pry the fingers off but they won’t budge.
Maks shudders, and I realize he isn’t crying. He’s laughing. When he looks up to me, he softens his eyes and puts on a sweet smile. My heart twists and turns, remembering the boy he was. Eyes blue as wild flowers.
“You’d never hurt me, Lula. Deep in your heart you know that.”
“You’re right, Maks,” I say. He’s weak and desperate, swaying on his knees in front of me. “I did love you. I loved you so much I thought it was the only good thing that had ever happened to me. I did everything in my power to save you.
“But between you and me?” I plunge the spike into his chest. “I love myself more.”
I stare into his eyes and watch them change from red to crystal to dark blue. He gasps for air and hits the ground. The spear trembles in my grasp, and suddenly, there’s a golden glow coming from my chest. The threads that spooled from my heart are dimming. Maks’s severed hand falls off the spear and lands on the ground with a final twitch.
I hear the whispers, hundreds of them, all at once. They buzz around my head like a colony of wasps. I can feel the power of the spear coming alive, and I know what I have to do. It isn’t a portal that will free La Muerte. It’s me—it’s always been me. I flip the spear, line it up with my breast.
The back door swings open and my family runs out. Flames rise behind them in the kitchen and spread quickly. Destroy the heart and make the sacrifice. I take a deep breath.
“No!” Alex shouts, her hand reaching for me.
I thrust the spear into my heart.
35
Esa brujita con
ojitos luceros.
Con ella me entierro
sin ella me muero.
—Witchsong #33, Book of Cantos
The light burst is blinding. It spills in a beam of silver from my chest.
I can still see Alex, running down to catch me before I fall. She will always catch me. She pulls the spike out of my chest and throws it on the ground, repeating my name over and over and over again.
“Stay alive, do you hear me?” She shuts her eyes and fat tears slide along her lashes and then onto my face. “This is not how your story ends.”
Rose sits on the other side of me. She takes my hand in hers. “She’s free.”
For a moment, I think she’s talking about me.
I don’t feel free. I feel numb. Cold. Broken. I feel like my world came undone and fell back together in different places. I feel like every breath I take hurts more than the next. But I don’t feel free.
“Step aside,” says Lady de la Muerte in her deep, shadow voice.
Alex and Rose scramble away from Lady Death.
La Muerte takes her spear back and holds it with a firm hand, and I don’t know if I’m hallucinating, but I think she is smiling.
“This is not the sacrifice, Lula Mortiz.” Her skin is no longer translucent, but back to the bone white of the first time I saw her. Her crown of golden thorns is no longer bleeding. Her long, slender fingers twitch as she kneels beside me and shoves her hand into the bloody gash in my chest. The pain is so fierce my vision turns red. I shut my eyes, sure she’s ripping my heart out. I can hear Alex and Rose crying. My parents screaming. Sirens in the distance. Always sirens, the Brooklyn lullaby.
And then, silence.
A serene quiet unlike anything I’ve heard before. I open my eyes expecting to be in a dream, the in-between where La Muerte and I used to meet when I was close to death myself.
But I’m still in my backyard, surrounded by family and friends and allies. The wound on my chest is healed, leaving a scar in the shape of a ring between my breasts. Lady de la Muerte squeezes a slithering black mass in her hand.
“Is that an octopus?” Rose asks.
I would laugh if it didn’t hurt too much.
“This was how the dead were feeding on you. It started off the size of silverfish.”
The thing has dozens of tentacles with pointy suctions. It slithers them in the air, trying to grab at something.
“Shouldn’t we kill it?” Adrian asks.
Lady de la Muerte turns her head slowly in the direction of the boy. The crowd parts, just as the sea parted for me when I went to retrieve the spear. Adrian gulps, but other than that doesn’t move an inch.
Lady de la Muerte bows her head once, then throws the creature on the ground, and before it has a chance to slither away, she stabs it right through its center. Then again and again until it cannibalizes itself and melts into the earth, killing the entire patch of grass it touched and turning dirt to sand.
“That was inside of your chest?” Alex asks. “Gross.”
When I stand, I feel lighter than ever.
“What did you mean when you said that wasn’t the sacrifice?” I ask La Muerte.
“All the lives that were taken as a result of your betrayal,” she tells me, staking her spear in the earth and lifting her chin up. “I will require a year off your life for every person that was taken.”
“The bus accident was not her fault,” Alex says.
“That may be so. But the others. The ones killed by the casimuertos. Those deaths were robbed from me.”
“How many years?” I ask her, afraid to hope.
“One hundred and six.”
I have to laugh. “I’m not going to live that long.”
Lady de la Muerte walks in a slow circle around me. “I know how long every single one of you is going to live. You, Lula Mortiz, could have had a very long life.”
My great-grandfather lived to be one hundred and twenty. Even if I’m meant to live to ninety, it wouldn’t be enough. As much as I want to think I’m ready, I’m not. I look around the backyard full of brujas and hunters and the THA. I look at my sisters and my parents and Nova.
“Then what are you waiting for?” I take a steadying breath.
“Lula, no,” Mom snaps at me, then softens her voice when she turns to Lady de la Muerte. “Please, My Lady. I beg you. Take years off my life instead.”
“No, take mine.” Dad steps in front of my mom.
“What about a deal?” Nova asks. He weaves through the throng of people in the backyard. “How about years taken from some of us?”
Her black line of a smile is terrifying as she sets her sights on Nova. “Not you, Noveno Santiago. With your gift, you do not have enough years to give me.”
Nova’s face blanks, and the bravado he had moments ago is gone.
“But I consent to your proposition,” she says. “Only, I get to choose who gives me their life years.”