TWENTY-ONE
MONDAY DAWNED GRAY AND wet, fat raindrops streaming down windowpanes and into flowerbeds, where the tiniest green shoots were starting to appear. It was a professional development day for the teachers, so Jim, Malachi, and I spent our free hours training, and tracking our friends while trying not to seem creepy. The baseball players had a long practice and were headed for an away game that afternoon, so I had an extremely uncomfortable phone call with Ian about keeping an eye out for the van and warning his teammates to do the same. He kept trying to ask me how I was, and I kept deflecting him. I think we spent more time in awkward pauses than actual conversation.
At lunch, my Guards hit upon the topic I’d tried to avoid thinking about for the past few days: my visit that afternoon with my “mother.” It was the best chance we’d had in a while to track the Mazikin back to their new nest. While Malachi and I were meeting with her, Jim and Henry would patrol outside. We’d text them at the end so that they could follow her when she left. As far as we knew, the Mazikin only knew about me and Malachi, so they wouldn’t recognize the other Guards. If all went well, we might be finishing this thing tonight. The guys seemed grimly determined as usual, but Malachi kept giving me these cautious looks every time I mentioned my mom. Knowing he might be worried I’d do something emotional again set my teeth on edge, and I spent an extra half hour in the training room, beating on one of the wire-and-cloth mannequins to get my frustration out.
When Malachi and I arrived at the Department of Children, Youth and Families building, Jen Pierce was waiting on the front steps, huddled all frumpy and frizzy under a broken umbrella. “Lela,” she called out as we approached. “I wanted to check in with you before you went inside.”
Jen gave Malachi—who looked even more imposing than usual because he had the hood of his black jacket pulled low over his face—a somewhat wide-eyed look, and then shook his hand. I introduced him as a friend who would be translating.
“Rita is already here,” she said. “She’s been here for almost two hours, actually.”
Malachi scowled. Jim and Henry were already posted on corners around this block, but apparently we hadn’t gotten here early enough to see how she’d arrived. I wondered how many Mazikin were watching us right now. The rain made it impossible to pick up their scent.
Jen led us inside, down a long hallway lined with closed doors. “Because you’re seventeen and almost an adult, this meeting will be unsupervised, but you call if you need help, all right? You’re not obligated to meet with her, so you can leave anytime you want.”
“It’s okay, Jen,” I said, shoving my shaking hands into my jacket pockets. “It’s no big deal.”
She threw me a pitying look as we stopped in front of Conference Room 113. The Rita Santos–Mazikin was perched on one of the swiveling chairs, her fingers curled around its armrests. Her wild hair was brushed today. Just a few braids and beads, but she’d managed to comb the leaves and twigs out. She wore an ill-fitting light-blue suit with a stained cream-colored shirt underneath, and I wondered if she’d stolen the outfit from one of the Mazikin victims. Her gold-brown gaze scanned our faces and then fixed on me. She leaned forward suddenly, looking like she might fling herself through the glass wall separating us. I flinched. Malachi whispered something under his breath and shifted closer to me. Jen sighed, and then knocked briskly on the door and opened it. The hallway filled with the faint scent of incense.
“Hola, Rita,” Jen said, “Ella está … here.” She stood back and looked at me. “I’ll be right down the hall, all right? My door will be open.”
I nodded, not sparing her a glance, too busy staring at my mother, who was whispering my name over and over again. Drawing in a lungful of hallway air, I strode into the room and seated myself at the opposite end of the table from Rita. A stranger. My mother. My enemy. A Mazikin. I didn’t know what label to use, what name. She was all of those things to me. She rose from her chair, but at that moment Malachi entered the room and positioned himself between us.
“Quédate sentada,” he said firmly, pointing to her chair. “No voy a permitir que te acerques a ella.”
Rita grimaced, revealing dark yellow teeth. “I … not hurt … her.”
Malachi looked over his shoulder at me. “This is your meeting,” he said, his expression revealing his tension. It was nearly impossible for him to resist killing a Mazikin who was sitting within arm’s reach.
Despite the suit and the hair combing, Rita’s fingernails were black-tipped and ragged. She watched me with pure hunger in her eyes as I gripped my chair tightly and said, “Tell us why you wanted to meet.”
She listened while Malachi translated, never losing her focus on my face. Her Spanish was rapid and sharp as she responded, and I could have sworn it sounded like she’d memorized what she was supposed to say. When she was finished, Malachi turned to me.
“She says the Mazikin are interested in making peace with us. Their numbers are growing, and they could crush us whenever they please, but they see no reason for us all to die if we meet their terms.”
I laughed, even as dread bubbled in my stomach. “If we’re so easy to crush, you would have done it by now,” I said to her.
Rita tilted her head to the side as she listened to Malachi’s clipped response. She nodded, like she’d expected to hear something like that. “One-five-zero Briarcliff,” she said to me, enunciating every syllable.
It was Tegan’s address.
“Twenty-nine Broadway.”
Didn’t Ian live on Broadway?
Her eyes glinted with something dark and intense. “Five-oh-three-one Kingston Court.”
Malachi shot up from his chair as she recited my address, but I grabbed his arm before he managed to reach her.
They might not have gotten Ian or any of the others over the weekend, but it was clear the threat was still very real. I leaned forward as Malachi slowly sank back into his chair, my fingers curling into the sleeve of his raincoat. “Don’t you dare touch them,” I said to the Rita-Mazikin in a low voice, anger heating my skin. My friends. Diane. Now my hand on Malachi’s arm was more of an anchor—I needed him to hold me in place.
Her tight smile told me she didn’t need translation. She chuckled softly and looked at Malachi. “No podrás impedirnos. Los dejaremos en paz solo si nos dés un sacrificio.”
Malachi’s shoulders tensed.
“Did she just say they want a sacrifice?” I whispered.
He nodded. “In exchange for leaving the others alone.”
“What do you want?” I asked her.
Rita’s face was the strangest mix of excitement and sadness. “Tú, mija.”
Malachi tore his arm from my grip. “Eso nunca pasará,” he growled, rising from his chair again.
“Hey, what did you say?” I asked.
I might as well have been invisible. He advanced on Rita with single-minded purpose, sending her scrambling back, rolling the chair along the floor until it hit the wall.
“Debería de matarte ahora mismo,” he said quietly.
Rita squawked as he drew near, plaintive, hoarse cries that got louder by the second. I wanted to clamp my hands over my ears to block out the noise.
“Malachi, back off. People are going to come running. Malachi.” I suddenly wondered if he was armed. Not that he needed a weapon. And from the way Rita was screeching, she knew it.
Malachi’s fists were clenched. “We should take her now, Lela. We can get her back to the Guard house. Interrogate her. We could find out where the nest is. And then we can kill this body and release your mother’s soul.”
He was almost pleading with me, and I couldn’t understand why. Something she’d said had made him desperate, though, and willing to stray from the careful plan we’d laid out. One in which he didn’t kill my mother in the middle of the DCYF building.
“We can’t take her,” I answered. “Listen to her. She’ll pitch a fit, and we’ll get ourselves in trouble.” I glared at him, willing him to remember the freaking plan—to follow her back to the nest.
Malachi stepped back as a few social workers walked by and cast anxious glances into the room.
“Lela,” Rita said, edging around the opposite side of the table. “Sil say you come to him, he let you friends live. We go … away.”
“You’re saying that if I go to Sil, you guys will leave my friends alone and, what? Just disappear?” It was a ridiculous offer. Wherever they went, we’d have to hunt them.
She nodded, her eyes darting across the table to Malachi, who looked like he was about to lose it as she inched closer to me. “Podrías estar con tu mamá.”
“Shut up,” Malachi snapped. “Cuando te matamos, quedará libre el alma de su madre.”
Rita’s eyes grew wide, and her mouth dropped into an O-shape. And then she started to laugh, this high-pitched, hooting giggle. “No,” she said. “Nunca será libre. Una vez que el alma de un humano se atrape, no tiene ninguna salida de la ciudad de los Maziquines.”
Malachi froze. “You’re lying.”
“Translate,” I said. “Now!”
He ignored me and stalked around the table, sending Rita scurrying toward me. Words I didn’t understand flew from his mouth while he followed her. She wasn’t paying attention to him, though; she was whispering to me.
“Sil say you come to him,” she kept saying. “You friends. He kill them if you don’t come. He take them. Make them us.”
“And if I come?” I asked, my heart hammering as she got close, my stomach roiling as I inhaled her sweet, sick scent.
“Lela, do not dare consider this.” The urgency in Malachi’s voice was impossible to miss.
“Translate,” I said from between clenched teeth, refusing to look at him.
He obeyed. Rita smiled and replied in Spanish, and whatever she said was the last straw. Malachi lunged for her, and she pitched onto all fours and scuttled around by my feet, pulling me in front of her. She grabbed my hand and kissed it, and then tossed a crumpled piece of paper onto the table and ripped the door open.
“He wait for you,” she said to me. “But not forever.”
She jumped into the hall, slammed the door behind her, and sprinted toward the front of the building before suddenly turning a corner. Malachi scooped the paper from the table and started after her, but I grabbed him as he wrenched the door open, throwing my arms around his waist. “You can’t run,” I said, wishing we could. “It’ll draw too much attention.”
As I walked quickly into the hall, I pried my cell from my pocket and texted Jim and Henry that she was on her way out of the building—and not by the main entrance. “Please see her,” I whispered, knowing they weren’t expecting the meeting to end this quickly. “Or we’re going to lose her.”
As we got to the front of the building, the sky was steely dark, and the rain was so heavy I could barely see the street. There was no sign of Rita. My phone buzzed with texts from Jim and Henry that came in almost simultaneously:
By side entrance didnt see her come out
One block down. Saw someone come out fire exit but unable to follow in car
We’d failed.
I slammed my way through the first set of double doors and stood in the damp, tiled space, gazing out the last set of glass doors at the pouring rain. Malachi joined me a second later. He handed me the piece of paper, on which was written a phone number. I crammed it into my pocket.
“Nice translating,” I snarled at him. “I still don’t know half of what she said.”
Malachi stared out at the rain, his face a carefully disciplined blank mask. “I’m sorry.”
“I don’t need your sorry. I needed you to do your job, Malachi! What the hell was that?”
He inhaled a slow, strained breath. “She said Sil wants you in exchange for the promise that they will not possess the people you care most about.”
“Got that part. What else?”
“She said that if you go to them, you can be with your mother.”
I squinted at him. “What?”
He didn’t look at me, and his words were controlled, like he was fighting to keep his voice steady. “She meant they will take your body and send your soul to the Mazikin city, where your mother is.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “She won’t be there long. We’re going to kill that body and set my mom free.”
Malachi turned to me. “Lela … she said that nothing, even killing the human body, can set a human soul free once it’s trapped in the Mazikin city.”
“That’s when you said she was lying.” I put a hand on my stomach. If what she’d said was the truth, then that meant every soul the Mazikin had ever possessed was still trapped in their realm. Takeshi, Malachi’s mentor and friend, who’d been taken by the Mazikin years earlier. Aden. My mother. Thousands, maybe millions of others. It also meant that by killing the bodies they possessed, we gave the Mazikin more chances, since the evil spirits could come back and possess others.
Looking into Malachi’s eyes, I could see this idea was destroying him. All these years, he’d thought he was freeing people, and so he’d executed countless Mazikin with his blades and grenades and God knew what else. But if Rita had told the truth, all those souls were still trapped, and there was nothing, not now and not ever, that he could do to save them.
I couldn’t stand for him to suffer like that, so I moved on. “Did she say anything else?”
Malachi’s black stare went straight through me. “Yes,” he said in a hollow voice. “She told me why Sil wants you.”
“And?” I mouthed the word more than said it.
Malachi blinked and looked at the floor. “The Mazikin think you are—” He paused, mouth half-open, like he couldn’t quite force the next words out. The silence stretched between us until I wanted to scream. Finally, he said, “The Mazikin believe your body is the perfect vessel to house the spirit of their Queen.”