Nova wipes the blood from his nose. “You act like you’re so much better than me. At the end of the day, you made the same choice I did. You chose yourself. You have no idea what my life has been like.”
“I’m not like you at all, Nova.” I squeeze the mace handle, daring him to make me use it. “I came here to fix my mistakes. You played me. From the very beginning you played me. Did you jump in front of Maks’s car on purpose? Or did it start at Lady’s shop?”
Nova rubs his hands across his head. It’s strange to see them without the marks, but his brown skin is beautiful just the same.
“You don’t want to know,” he tells me.
“I need to know.”
“As you wish,” he says, unable to meet my eyes. “I could hear this energy everywhere I went in the city. It was like a sigh that wanted to be a scream. I thought I could find it. I needed more power to get out of my contract.”
“Contract?” Rishi asks. Her eyes are so dark, I fear she’s going to lunge at Nova with that dagger.
“Sinmagos like to joke that they make deals with the devil. In my case, I really did. The Devourer promised she’d save me. All I had to do was find brujos and brujas. It was the only thing I got from my mother: the ability to charm my way into people’s hearts.”
“I hate you,” I tell him.
“I didn’t want to die, Alex,” Nova says. “The marks started spreading, and I could feel it wrapping around my heart. Haven’t you?”
I hold out my palms, sucking in a breath. Thin, inky marks zigzag around my wrists, up the meaty base of my palm, and finally pool at the center, like two blazing, black stars.
“It happened after you conjured the elements. You were just too”—he looks at Rishi—“preoccupied to see.”
I rub my palms on my pants as if that’s going to get rid of the marks. “Why are you here?”
Nova takes a step toward me, but Rishi gets in the way. Nova smirks, and for a second, I see the boy who traveled alongside us, the boy who shared his magic with me and helped me fly a boat across a river of souls.
“I’m here to tell you to turn back. I’ll make you a portal. I’ll get you home.”
I step around Rishi and get up in Nova’s face. “My home is trapped in that tree. Now, either sound the alarms, or get out of my way.”
I watch his features turn hard. Maybe the marks are gone, but he’s still the same lost boy that wandered the streets of New York.
“If I walk away from you,” he says, “I’m as good as dead.”
But he holds out his hand and disappears into the open path. The hedges change. They ripple, then form into a solid wall that blocks our way.
“Why would he do that?” I ask.
“It’s another trick,” Rishi says.
Maybe Nova is trying to trick me again, or maybe a part of him regrets what he did. I focus on looking for a way out. I need to find the voice again. I close my eyes and listen. The wind stirs and carries with it a whisper.
“Follow the light,” Aunt Rosaria’s voice says.
“I’m not crazy,” I say. “You heard that too?”
Rishi nods. “I heard it.”
The wind whistles as a ball of light appears out of thin air. It bounces in place, then races to the right.
Follow the light.
I follow the ball of light as it travels down the pitch-black path. Creatures hiss and hoot and caw from the shadows, between the leaves, and everywhere, unseen. Something tries to grab my arms. Its flesh is cold. I bash it with my mace and keep running. The earth curves slightly, then becomes a ninety-degree angle that leads left.
The ground beneath me undulates, like a great serpent is traveling beneath it. I lose my footing and fall forward. When I press my hands to the ground here, all I see is black. It wraps around my heart, whispering my deepest nightmares back to me. It is unlike the rest of the earth I’ve touched in Los Lagos. It wants me out.
No, it wants to eat me alive. The dark is moving. I roll over to the side as the ground opens up in a red, red mouth. A black, forked tongue comes up and licks at the air.
The dark has teeth, I think. The dark has teeth.
I roll again and push through the ache in my legs. When I turn around, Rishi is gone. I head back the way I came, but it’s all the same: black hedges and dark earth.
“Rishi!”
The light we were following has disappeared. The labyrinth walls change around me. They retract like curtains to reveal Rishi. She’s on the ground with her hands around her knees.
She whispers, “It isn’t real. It isn’t real. It isn’t real.”
I run to her. Push her head back. Her face is dirty with sweat and tears.
“Rishi, it’s me.”
“No, it’s not!” She pushes me to the ground.
I get up and reach for her, hold her by her shoulders. “Look at me. Remember what Madra said? Look twice. So look at me. What do you see?”
She hiccups with every breath. Her fingers reach out for my face. “There’s something in here. It showed me—I don’t want to say.”
“You don’t have to.”
I pull her into my arms to stop her from shaking. I get that feeling again, that dread that crept along my skin before the ground opened up to swallow me whole. I let my embrace warm her cold skin. She presses her forehead against mine.
“Whatever was in here showed me you,” Rishi says. “You were dead, Alex! You were dead in my arms.”
“I’m right here. You have to know that.”
Rishi presses her hands on my face. “I do know. You gave up your magic for me. I couldn’t stand it if I lost you.”
“You won’t.”
“Please don’t break my heart, Alex.”
I feel like my heart will beat right through my rib cage. “I have all these feelings that I can’t sort out. I think I’ve felt it since the day you found me. But when this is all over, we’ll figure it out, okay?”
Even in the dark, she finds my lips. They’re warm despite the air around us. I press my lips against hers, softly and slowly, like stepping into a wide, unknown ocean one foot at a time.
The labyrinth rumbles around us. A slithering shadow undulates beneath the ground. The ball of light returns. It pulses weakly, and we follow it to another dead end.
“This isn’t right,” Rishi says, pressing her weight against the hedge.
“Alejandra!” Aunt Ro’s voice is clear as a summer’s day. “The moon!”
I look up at the clouded sky. The mammoth clouds part for a moment to reveal the crescent moon. It is inches away from eclipsing the sun, but for now, its moonlight shines down on my necklace. The prism of light returns, revealing a hidden door on the hedge.
Then the clouds gather with more force, and the light is gone.
“There,” I say, and swing my mace. The hedge twists and writhes, but I bash my way through.
Rishi has to hold me up because I feel like I’m falling.
It’s Aunt Ro. I reach out for her smiling face. Her black corkscrew curls billow around her head in a wild halo. She’s really real.
“You’re alive.”
35
Once, the brujas fought the shadows and won.
Twice, the shadows pushed back.
—from the Journal of Juana Luz Sartre de Mortiz “Mostly alive,” Aunt Ro says. The hedge shuts behind us, and the ball of light pulses weakly in our circle.