by Aiden Thomas
He heard Maritza walk in behind him. “Yads?” she asked. “What are you doing?”
“Grabbing supplies,” he said. His fingers closed around the flashlight, and he yanked it out.
She frowned at him, her arms crossed. “For what?”
“If I have to prove myself in order to get them to listen, then I will.” He clicked on the light to make sure the batteries still worked. “If I can find Miguel’s spirit, figure out what happened to him, and release him to the afterlife in time for Día de Muertos, they’ll have to let me be part of the aquelarre.” Yadriel turned the beam on Maritza. “You coming?”
A large grin curled her burgundy-painted lips. “Oh, hell yes I am.”
Yadriel smiled back. He felt dangerous and electric, adrenaline tingling through his fingers. “Good.” He tossed her the flashlight, which she easily caught out of the air. Yadriel stuffed an LED camping lantern and box of matches into his backpack and double-checked that the candles, bowl, and the rest of the tequila were still in there.
He pulled his portaje out and removed it from the leather sheath Maritza had fashioned for it. He turned the blade over in his hands, feeling the even weight, running his thumb along the painting of Lady Death.
In a few short days, his mother would return for Día de Muertos. He would be able to see and speak to her. He would show her his portaje, and she would see he’d done it. All that was left to do was find Miguel.
Yadriel turned to Maritza. “You ready?”
She smirked, tipping her head toward the door. “I’ve got your back.”
THREE
By the time they went back downstairs, all the brujos had dispersed to help search for Miguel. While Lita was back to work in the kitchen, a handful of women remained gathered around Claudia. They were all too happy to look the other way as Maritza and Yadriel bolted out the front door. The brujx cemetery was right in the middle of East Los Angeles, surrounded by a tall wall that concealed it from prying eyes. Yadriel could hear dogs barking in the distance and the thudding bass of reggaeton blaring from a passing car.
They passed by some brujx still looking for Miguel.
“Anything yet?” an older one asked.
“Nothing behind the eastern columbaria,” said another.
“No sign of him near his family’s mausoleums, either,” said the spirit of a young bruja, a worried but determined expression on her faintly transparent face.
“What’s the plan?” Maritza asked, her long legs easily keeping stride with Yadriel. She wove between tombstones, careful to step around flower vases and framed pictures.
“Find Miguel’s portaje, summon his spirit, find out what happened, and release his spirit before Día de Muertos starts,” Yadriel said as they started jogging through rows of brightly painted tombs. “That way, he can come back to celebrate with the rest of the brujx, and I can be in this year’s aquelarre.”
“Uh, there’s a lot of gaps in your plan,” Maritza told him.
“I didn’t say it was a good one.”
“Where are we going to look?”
“His parents’ house.” Clearly the brujx weren’t having any luck finding Miguel in the cemetery, so where he lived was the next logical place to look. The quickest way there was over the abandoned back gate in the oldest part of the cemetery.
The closer they got to the original graveyard, the older the tombs and headstones became. By the time they were in sight of the old church, the cemetery was mostly a collection of simple, cross-shaped tombstones. On most of them, you couldn’t even read the names.
Yadriel and Maritza slowed to a stop. The old church loomed before them.
When the first brujx immigrated to Los Angeles, they had only built a small church and graveyard. But as the community expanded, so did the cemetery, and eventually, the original church was just too small to hold them all. Finally, a couple of decades ago, the new one had been built, along with Yadriel’s home.
In comparison, the old church looked like an ancient ruin. Wild vines had overrun the two brick walls that met behind the church, giving the building a backdrop of dense, shadowy green. There weren’t many street lights nearby, but it was East LA, where the sun never seemed to set. Hazy pollution and city lights washed everything in an orange glow, even in the middle of the night.
The church itself was made of a variety of differently shaped and colored stones, all patched together with clay. There was a small bell tower on the roof, directly above the wooden door, that didn’t seem to house an actual bell anymore. A small wrought iron fence about waist-high surrounded the church. A few headstones lined the inner graveyard.
“Mira, there.” Yadriel nudged Maritza and pointed to the back wall. There was a spot through the veil of ivy where the old entrance to the cemetery was located. Yadriel couldn’t help but grin as he jogged around the edge of the fence to the gate.
“See?” Yadriel shoved a fistful of ivy out of the way. The iron bars towered over them. Two handles met at a very sturdy-looking lock meant to keep non-brujx out, and their secrets safe. “Shortcut!”
Maritza let out a low whistle. “Good thing I’m not in a skirt,” she grumbled to herself before wedging her foot onto a crossbar and hoisting herself up.
Yadriel tightened the strap on his backpack, ready to climb up after her, when he got the feeling someone was behind him. It wasn’t an all-at-once realization, more like a slow creeping on the back of his neck. Yadriel turned, but there was only the old church and graves. The hum of traffic and the far-off sound of a car alarm drifted from the distance.
With a shake of his head, Yadriel turned back to the gate. He needed to focus on the task at hand. He gripped the ornate handle to pull himself up, but as soon as he applied pressure, it turned.
He scrambled out of the way as the gate swung open. Maritza yelped. Yadriel clamped a hand over his mouth, laughter leaping from his throat as Maritza nearly toppled off. When the gate groaned to a stop, she was halfway up and holding on for dear life.
“It was unlocked?” she hissed angrily through the ivy, her face pressed between the bars.
“Guess so?” Barely contained chuckles shook Yadriel’s chest, but his brow furrowed. He examined the lock, jiggling the handle up and down. “Wait, why is it unlocked?”
The brujx went to great lengths to keep outsiders from getting into their cemetery.
Maritza landed next to Yadriel, a little less than graceful. “Some idiot probably forgot to lock it up,” she grumbled, bottom lip jutting into a scowl.
“But why would anyone even use this gate?” Yadriel asked. People were supposed to come in or out of the cemetery only at the main gate by his family’s house.
Maritza turned to him, arms folded across her chest, an expertly lined eyebrow arching. “Uh, you mean aside from sneaking out in the middle of the night?”
Yadriel threw her a withering look. “But—”
A chill dropping down his spine sucked the breath out of Yadriel’s lungs.
He and Maritza spun toward the abandoned church at the same time. Yadriel’s eyes skipped across the windows, half expecting to see someone staring out at him, but they were just black, empty cutouts in the wall of stones.
“Did you feel that?” Maritza asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
Yadriel nodded, unable to pull his eyes away from the church, afraid to blink and miss something. The hair on the back of his neck prickled and goose bumps ran down his arms.
Maritza shifted closer to his side. “Is it a spirit?”
“I don’t know,” he murmured. “It doesn’t seem quite right…”
It was normal to feel spirits: the cemetery was crawling with them, after all. It became background noise, kind of like the hum of Los Angeles traffic; after being around it long enough, you stopped noticing.
But this feeling was something else. It was an odd tingling, one that felt like the presence of a spirit but also pricked at that certain spot in his head, suggesting pain.
&nbs
p; “Is it Miguel?” Yadriel wondered, squinting as he tried to latch on to what he was sensing.
“I’m going to go check it out,” he told Maritza, heading for the church. Even if it wasn’t Miguel, whoever it was—a spirit or the living—might be in trouble.
“If I’m a brujo, then it’s my responsibility to help lost spirits cross over, right?” he said over his shoulder as he hoisted himself over the small fence.
Maritza didn’t look so sure, but she followed him anyway.
Yadriel searched the leaning headstones, trying to catch sight of movement, or a clue, or anything as they crept toward the old building. The tingling sensation was now a steady buzzing under his skin, like when he got phantom sensations of his phone going off in his pocket.
“This place kind of gives me the creeps,” Maritza whispered at his side, rubbing her arm. “What if it’s haunted?”
Yadriel huffed a laugh. “Of course it’s haunted, this is literally a cemetery full of spirits,” he said, trying to use sarcasm to calm his own nerves.
Maritza punched his arm. “I mean like a monster or something.”
“There’s no such thing as monsters.” Yadriel went to one of the tall windows, but, even after wiping at it with his sleeve, he still couldn’t see anything but blackness inside.
Maritza stopped and stared at him, wide-eyed. “You didn’t just say that—did you really just say that?” she demanded before throwing her arms in the air. “That’s classic start-of-a-horror-movie dialogue you just threw out into the universe!”
“Oh my God, you are so dramatic,” Yadriel told her. “I’m going to check it out,” he said, more to himself than anything. “You can wait out here alone or go inside with me,” he told Maritza.
He got all the way to the front steps of the church before he heard Maritza cuss under her breath and chase after him.
The wooden door to the church was dark and warped. Yadriel crept up the steps, barely catching himself from stepping on a long, rusty nail. He swept a few more scattered nails to the side with his shoe and noticed some boards in a stack to the left.
He tried the door handle, and it turned easily under his grip. He lifted his eyebrows at Maritza, and she scowled back. With effort, he pulled the door open. The wood groaned as it dragged over stone.
Through the doorway, darkness yawned into the depths of the church. The odors of dust, wet soil, and mildew tickled his nose. Before Yadriel could dig the lantern out of his backpack, Maritza flicked on her flashlight. Yadriel’s fingers brushed against the cool steel of his portaje and he pulled it out. The weight of it in his hand was reassuring. If there was a malevolent spirit haunting the old church, he would need his portaje to release it.
And if it was a criminal on the lam, well, it’d come in handy for that, too.
“After you, fearless brujo,” Maritza said with a grand gesture.
Yadriel cleared his throat and, with lifted chin, went inside.
The lantern doused everything in a cool blue light. The beam of Maritza’s flashlight swept back and forth between several pews that stretched toward the front of the church. When Yadriel closed the door behind them, it became oddly quiet. The heavy stone muffled the constant thrum of noise that came with living in the city.
Yadriel tried to ignore the strange pressure in his chest, like someone had tied a string to his ribs and was pulling him farther into the church.
A carpet ran down the aisle. At one point, it had probably been red, but time had turned it coppery brown. Lancet windows lined the walls, set in intricate molding. Wooden beams arched high into the apex of the ceiling where the light of the lantern couldn’t reach.
“I haven’t been here in ages,” Maritza said, her voice uncharacteristically soft as they moved between the pews.
“Me either.”
Up ahead, several glass prayer candles winked in the blue light from the altar. “Not since your mom caught us playing hide-and-seek and we got grounded for being ‘disrespectful,’” he added.
Maritza laughed fondly. “Oh, yeah, I forgot about that,” she said, her beam of light now focused on a door to the left of the apse. An identical one stood to the right.
“If Bahlam appears and drags us down to Xibalba, I’m going to be pissed,” Maritza hissed.
Yadriel rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I’m sure Bahlam, the jaguar god of the underworld, is hanging out in this old church, waiting for a couple of teenagers to—”
The feeling in Yadriel’s chest tugged more urgently, cutting off his words.
Something dark stood in the middle of the altar, but Yadriel couldn’t quite make it out.
He nudged Maritza. “What’s that?”
“What’s wh—”
The flashlight’s beam swept to the altar. Hollowed eyes stared back at them.
“Santa Muerte,” Maritza gritted through her teeth.
A semicircle of dusty candles in ornate golden holders stood at various heights. In the center stood a figure in a dark shroud. The skeleton was covered in a black robe. The linen material was moth-eaten, and gold thread accented the hems and sleeves in lacy patterns.
Yadriel only realized Maritza was gripping his arm when she let go.
Uneasy relief had Yadriel chuckling as he grinned over at her. “You’re real jumpy tonight.”
That got him two swift punches to the arm.
He leaped out of her reach. “She’s just the original Lady Death from when this place was first built,” Yadriel said, lifting the lantern to cast the lady in bluish light. It was an older representation, one that incorporated the more ancient symbols. A very real scythe was held in one hand, and a clay orb rested in her upturned palm.
The skeleton itself was smooth and yellowing. Her jaw was open wide, and she was missing a few teeth. Yadriel wondered if they were real bones and she was an actual skeleton.
But he was distracted by the headdress she wore. Layers of spotted-owl feathers made up the smaller inner semicircle. These were sewn together and fastened with small plates of gold in the shape of crescent moons, almost like buttons. The feathers layered under the owl’s were the unmistakable plumage of the sacred quetzal bird. They were an iridescent green with hints of blue, like peacock feathers but twice as vibrant.
“Why would they just leave her here?” Maritza asked from somewhere behind him.
“I don’t think she was abandoned.” Yadriel shrugged, gently brushing cobwebs from Lady Death’s shoulder. “I think this church is just her home.”
He found himself smiling. He liked this classic version best.
Yadriel moved in closer, and he could feel energy swarming beneath his feet, like standing on a geyser, water rushing just below ground.
“Do you feel that, too?” Maritza asked.
He nodded. “It’s stronger in here,” he said. Whatever spirit had led them here was close.
Yadriel took a step back, and something crunched under his shoe. Hopping to the side, he found a silver chain with a small pendant lying on the dusty floor.
Maritza moved in. “What’s that?”
“I think it’s a necklace,” Yadriel murmured, setting the lantern on the ground.
Carefully, he picked it up. As soon as his fingers made contact, a shiver rolled through his body. He held it up to the light. A medal hung from the chain, barely larger than his thumbnail. The edge of the medal read SAN JUDAS TADEO across the top, and RUEGA POR NOSOTROS along the bottom. In the center stood a man wearing long robes with a book held against his chest and a staff in his hand.
The medal was in bad need of cleaning. The silver was tarnished, but it certainly wasn’t old enough to have been abandoned in the old church all this time. Only the raised form of St. Jude himself was bright silver, as if it had been polished by someone rubbing their thumb against it over and over.
Yadriel reached for the medal, and as soon as his fingers touched the cool silver, electricity flooded through his veins. He sucked in a sharp breath. Something pulsed under his feet in
rhythm with the thudding of his heart.
“What’s wrong?” Maritza demanded as Yadriel tried to catch his breath.
“It’s a tether,” he said, and a spike of adrenaline made him feel light-headed.
Once a spirit was attached to a tether, they couldn’t venture very far from it, which was why things like haunted houses existed, but there weren’t many stories about a single ghost who roamed an entire city. It was only when the spirits were free of their earthly bindings that a brujo could release them and help them pass peacefully to their eternal rest.
Yadriel had never actually held a spirit’s tether before. They were incredibly powerful. Some of the brujx claimed mishandling a spirit’s tether would get you cursed.
But Yadriel had never heard of anyone ever actually getting possessed, and he had no intention of disrespecting this tether.
“But it’s not Miguel’s, that’s not his portaje,” Maritza said, reaching out as if to touch it before thinking better.
“It could be Miguel’s,” Yadriel tried to reason, his hope of finding his cousin fighting against logic. He squeezed the medal in his hand. Warmth spread through his palm and up his arm.
He turned to Maritza with a smile. “There’s only one way to find out.”
Maritza gave him a skeptical look.
“I have to try—what if Miguel’s spirit got tethered to this instead of his portaje?” he said, twisting the chain between his fingers.
“It might be attached to someone who’s gone maligno,” Maritza said, casting a pointed look around the dilapidated church.
“Then it’s a good thing I’ve got this, isn’t it?” Yadriel said, pulling out his portaje.
Maritza eyed the dagger but then grinned. “All right, brujo, work your magic.”
The rush of excitement made Yadriel feel giddy as he knelt before Lady Death. Maybe it was the feel of the dagger in his hand or the magic he now knew flowed through his veins, but for someone who usually erred on the side of caution, Yadriel felt recklessly brave.
He dug into his backpack and pulled out the clay bowl. Quickly, he poured in the rest of the small tequila bottle and some chicken blood, then grabbed a box of matches. He stood and tried to take a deep breath, but he was too excited, practically buzzing. His palms were sweaty, making it difficult to light the match, but it finally caught.
