by Aiden Thomas
As the first chime rang, Julian’s voice died in his throat and his eyes rolled back into his skull.
TWENTY-TWO
“Julian!” Yadriel pushed his portaje back into its sheath and scrambled to reach him.
Flat on his back, Julian’s entire body convulsed. He flickered in and out of existence, one moment there and the next nothing more than a blurry outline. Yadriel could only see the whites of his eyes.
Julian’s back arched off the stone, his face contorted in pain. The muscles in his neck bulged and strained. His fingers scrabbled against the stone floor. Terrible groans gurgled in his throat as the bells continued to chime.
“JULES!” Yadriel shouted.
Crimson bloomed on Julian’s white tee, blood seeping from his chest.
He didn’t know what to do, he didn’t know what was happening. Frantically, he tried to press his palms to Julian’s chest, to stop the flow of blood, but his hands sank right through him. Yadriel called Julian’s name over and over, tried to get him to look at him, to bring him back, but nothing worked.
When the twelfth toll rang, everything stopped.
Julian’s body went limp. His expression went slack. He exhaled a wet, rattling breath, and then he disappeared.
This time, he didn’t come back.
“JULIAN!” Yadriel panicked, twisting left and right, searching. He half expected to find Julian’s maligno spirit hiding in a corner, but the church was empty.
What the hell just happened? Where did he go?
The church doors flew open. “Yadriel!” Maritza sprinted between the pews, her skirts flying out behind her, her colorful curls wild. “What’s wrong?” she asked, her cell phone clutched in her fist as she looked around. She was confused but poised to fight.
“He’s gone!” Yadriel managed.
Her expression softened. “I’m so sorry—”
“No! I—I couldn’t; it didn’t work!” Yadriel scooped up the necklace and his portaje from where he had dropped them. His dagger was back to normal. “He suddenly collapsed and—and he was dying—” The terrible scene played itself over in his head.
“Yads,” Maritza said gently, taking a tentative step closer. “He’s already dead.”
“I know that!” Frustration growled in his throat. “But he was dying and then he just vanished! And I didn’t release him!” he added when Maritza started shaking her head.
“Something’s wrong,” she said.
“Clearly!” he snapped.
“No, not just Julian,” Maritza told him impatiently. She held up her phone. The screen lit up with text messages. “Paola texted me,” she said, the color draining from her face. “Miguel didn’t come back.”
“He didn’t?” Yadriel’s heart sank, confirming what he’d been so afraid of. It was officially Día de Muertos. All of the brujx spirits were in the cemetery now, returning to their families. “Then his spirit really is trapped somewhere! Why haven’t we been able to find him?” Yadriel demanded. “How is there still no trace?”
“I don’t know, but something else is going on here.” Maritza drew herself upright with a look of determination. “I—”
Maritza stumbled, clutching her chest just as a searing pain struck Yadriel in the heart, doubling him over. Yadriel instinctively clawed at his chest, trying to rip out whatever had pierced into him, but nothing was there.
“What is that?” Maritza asked through gritted teeth.
“Who is that?” Yadriel said.
Maritza’s voice hitched. “Did someone die?”
Yadriel shook his head, frenzied eyes searching the church. No, someone didn’t die. “Someone’s dying,” he said through ragged breaths. The pain was intense, but had started to dull. Something tugged urgently at his ribs. Whoever it was, they were close, and they were in great danger.
“Where are they?” Maritza asked, eyes searching the wooden beams and empty pews. “Can you tell where it’s coming from?”
He didn’t know, but the tugging feeling was too familiar. It was just like the feeling he had when they had been drawn to the church the first time and he’d found Julian.
But how could this be Julian? How could he be dying when he was already dead?
They needed to find him, but how?
Yadriel grabbed his dagger and smeared some of the pig blood along the blade. “¡Muéstrame el enlace!” he called, holding up Julian’s necklace.
The golden thread sparked to life. It shot through the air, past the altar of Lady Death, and through a door. “It’s not going to stay lit for long,” Yadriel said, already making for the door. “But we can follow it to him—”
“Wait!” Maritza caught his arm. “Should we get help?”
“He doesn’t have time, Maritza! You felt it!” he said.
Maritza’s eyes swept to the front doors, then back to Yadriel.
He was prepared to wrench free of her grip and make a run for it if she tried to hold him back.
Instead, she released him and stomped her foot. “Shit!” With a huff, she tossed back her curls and puffed out her chest. “Let’s go!”
Yadriel didn’t need to be told twice.
He had to throw his shoulder into the worn wood door before it groaned open, wood scraping against stone. The old sacristy was dark and dusty. Bookshelves filled with old texts lined the walls, along with an array of brujx sculptures of Aztec warriors and a slab of Maya glyphs. A golden mask of the Incan sun god was tucked safely into a glass display case. At the back of the room was a heavy desk. A toppled-over chair lay next to it.
Yadriel crossed the room, following the golden thread to where it disappeared into the floor behind the desk. In the near pitch dark, Yadriel smoothed his hand over the worn stone. As his eyes adjusted, he could just make out a square outline of green light coming from under the floor. His fingers found a hold and he yanked hard.
With effort, he lifted the trapdoor and slid it to the side. A set of earthen steps sank into the ground. The thread plunged down them.
He only hesitated for a moment. Following a mystery flight of stairs down into the bowels of an old church sounded both stupid and dangerous, but if Julian was down there, Yadriel was going after him.
“Be careful,” Maritza warned as she followed him down.
The stairs coiled down into the earth. Yadriel pressed his hand against the slick stone walls as they descended to keep himself steady. He used his portaje and the golden thread to light the way, but too quickly, they began to fade.
Yadriel cursed under his breath. The bottle of pig blood was back at Lady Death’s altar.
But as the warm glow faded, faint blue-and-green lights danced along the walls. They were like the lights that danced in Maritza’s pool when they swam late at night during the summer. They undulated and flickered, growing brighter the deeper they went. Yadriel followed them.
The air grew damp and heavy with the smell of copal incense.
When the steps finally bottomed out, they opened up into a room.
Or, not a room, but a cave. Yadriel only got a quick glimpse—clear water, burning candles, wet stone—before he saw Julian’s ghostly form slumped against a huge block of stone.
“Wait!” Maritza hissed behind him. He felt her fingers graze his back as he ran to Julian’s side.
“Julian!” Yadriel dropped to the floor and reached for him, but his hands slipped right through Julian’s shoulder. His edges blurred and washed out, barely there. Yadriel was frightened that, any second, he’d disappear altogether.
Julian’s breaths were shallow and rapid, his face contorted in a grimace. “What happened? Where are we?” he asked, words slurred as his fingers knotted into the blood-soaked shirt that clung to his chest.
“I don’t know,” Yadriel confessed, tearing his eyes from Julian’s face long enough to take in their surroundings. It took effort to understand what he was seeing.
It was an ancient crypt, one that’d probably been hiding under the old church for years. A s
teady dripping sound echoed off the cave walls. There were candles along the sides, their flames tall and crackling. Tombs were cut into the walls, housing stone sarcophagi. In the middle of the cave, four large slabs of stone were laid out in a semicircle. Light and shadows caught in the small pictorial carvings on their sides. There were shapes and faces, and several jaguar heads—the glyph of Bahlam. A body lay on each slab. Their heads were slightly elevated, and Yadriel could just make out their faces in the firelight.
A breath caught in his throat.
Julian.
Two Julians.
Julian’s spirit remained at his side, barely conscious. But laid out on top of the slab he was slumped against was Julian’s flesh-and-bone body. He was sickly pale, but Yadriel could see the labored rise and fall of his chest. Bright red seeped all over his white shirt.
It was Julian, and he was alive, but barely.
Sticking out of his chest, right above his heart, was a dagger. Yadriel recognized it straightaway. La garra del jaguar. One of the forbidden ritual daggers Lita had been looking for. It was made of oily flint that glistened in the flames. The handle was a carved jaguar head, its mouth gaping, thick fangs biting the hilt. Its eyes were round and bulging. Wisps curled from the handle of the dagger and into the air like golden smoke.
Yadriel shook his head, trying to rattle his thoughts into place, to come up with an explanation that made sense. How could Julian be alive and his spirit be lying next to him?
Julian’s spirit groaned and flickered.
“Keep your eyes open!” Yadriel snapped when Julian’s eyelids began to droop. He didn’t know what was going on, but if they were going to get out of here, Julian—both of them—needed to stay with him.
With effort, Julian forced them back open. His dark eyes swam before finding Yadriel’s face.
“Yads.” Julian’s voice was tight, his eyes wide and more alert. Frightened.
Next to Julian’s body, three more had the matching daggers pierced into their chests. Yadriel’s heart plummeted. He knew the face of the one to the left.
It was Miguel. But, unlike Julian, he wasn’t moving. His body was still, his eyes closed. His skin was ashen, lifeless. The jaguar dagger piercing his heart was dark and still. No wisps floated into the air. The stone under Miguel was streaked with dark, dried-up blood.
Meanwhile, rivulets of Julian’s blood ran down his own stone slab toward his feet, where it dripped into a pool of water sunk into the earthen floor. The water of the cenote was a cool, glowing blue. Dark, undulating shadows coiled in its depths. Julian’s blood dripped into it, slow and steady.
“Sobrino.”
Yadriel looked up.
A tall man stood facing him. A jaguar pelt, golden with black and brown spots, was draped over his bare chest. He wore the upper jaw and head of a jaguar as a crown. Its eyes had been replaced with jade orbs. The thick, yellowing fangs pressed against his eyebrows. Black and venomous green plumage spilled out behind him.
“Tío?” Yadriel said, squinting in the dark and unable to believe his own eyes.
Tío Catriz smiled. “Look at you!” his said, holding his arms out at his sides. His hands were covered in something dark and glistening. “¡Ven, ven!” He reached down for Yadriel and pulled him to his feet.
Yadriel stood there staring at him, in a daze.
His tío held the wrist of his hand that still clutched his dagger. “Your own portaje,” he said in amused disbelief, chuckling as he examined the blade, twisting Yadriel’s arm this way and that. “When I saw you with it yesterday, I knew what it was straightaway.”
An onyx amulet in the shape of a jaguar’s head hung around Tío Catriz’s neck. It stared at Yadriel with glowing golden eyes.
“Tío, what are you doing down here?” Yadriel asked, his voice wavering.
“Does it work?” he asked with keen interest.
Yadriel nodded.
Tío Catriz laughed again, shaking his head. “I knew you could do it,” he said with fierce pride. Still holding his arm in one hand, his tío cupped the side of Yadriel’s neck with the other, pulling him close.
Something deep in Yadriel—a primal instinct—made him start to tremble.
Tío Catriz leaned down to look him in the eyes. “I am so proud of you, sobrino,” he said, his smile genuine, his voice sincere. “They all doubted you.” He removed his hand from Yadriel’s neck and pressed it to his chest. “But I knew you had it in you.” When Tío Catriz dropped his hand back to his side, it left a smudged handprint down his chest.
A bloody handprint.
Yadriel sucked in a gasp and wrenched himself away. “Tío, what are you doing?” His eyes flickered around the cave. To the cenote and the bodies. Miguel and Julian. The daggers and the blood.
“The dawning of a new era, Yadriel,” Catriz told him, bloody palms held aloft at his sides.
Yadriel shook his head. It wasn’t possible. There was no way. “I don’t—”
“For too long, our bloodline has been losing its power. The brujx are a dying breed,” Catriz told him with a solemn expression. “This is the only way for me to regain the powers I was born without. To take back the birthright I was denied.”
“Your birthright?” he repeated.
“By using the ancient ways our ancestors long abandoned, I will become the most powerful brujo to walk the world of the living in a millennia,” his tío said, flexing his fingers.
At Yadriel’s side, Julian managed to get onto his knees—seemingly from sheer force of will alone.
“I don’t understand,” Yadriel said.
“The forbidden ritual. Human sacrifice, Yadriel,” he explained patiently. “With the help of the jaguar’s paw and Bahlam himself.”
Yadriel’s stomach plummeted. “You can’t do that!”
“Tranquilo,” Tío Catriz said gently. “It’s okay, I have to do this for me, for both of us,” he stressed. “The brujx cast us out. They ignored us and denied us our rights without ever giving us a chance.”
Tío Catriz drew himself up. “I was the firstborn son of the brujx leader, but I was denied my right to follow in my father’s footsteps.” The look he gave Yadriel was one of pity. “None of them believed in you, Yadriel. Your father and the brujx have never understood you. They never even tried to. You are different than they are, so they shunned you, just like they did to me. But I have always believed in you,” he said firmly.
“Tío, you can’t do this,” Yadriel tried to argue, frantic and desperate to talk sense into him.
“It is the only way,” Tío Catriz said, gesturing to the four sacrificial stone slabs. “With these sacrifices, the jaguar claws have drained their spirits one by one, trapping them in the amulet,” he said, touching the jaguar head around his neck. “It’s a slow process, having to drain their spirits and their blood, one by one, but soon it’ll be complete. Once the last drop of blood falls into the cenote, it will summon Bahlam. As my reward, the four drained spirits trapped in the amulet will give me powers our people haven’t possessed for millennia.”
Tío Catriz moved to the cenote where Julian’s blood dripped into the roiling pool. “I had to find the sacrificial bodies, of course, but it was surprisingly easy to just pick people off the street. People with no homes or families.” He sighed and shook his head. “People no one would miss.”
Anger swelled in Yadriel’s chest, nearly robbing him of his ability to see. “You—”
“It did pain me to use Miguel,” Catriz said, stepping aside and looking back at the altar. “He stumbled upon what I was doing, saw me dragging your friend here through the back gate. He left me with no other choice.”
Yadriel thought of the night they all felt Miguel die. How everyone had gone looking for him. The painful stab Yadriel had felt in his chest. How it’d brought him to his knees. He remembered how he’d felt the stir of energy coming from the old church. How Miguel had been under his feet the whole time, dying. How Julian had been right next to him.
That was why he had been drawn to the old church. He’d sensed something was wrong, he just didn’t know how much.
For the first time, Tío Catriz spared Julian a glance. “I’m sorry your friend has to be the one to complete the ceremony.”
Julian bared his teeth, his face contorting in anger and pain. He was more awake—more himself—and seething.
“Has he been with you all this time?” Catriz asked Yadriel with a curious lift of an eyebrow. “You did a good job hiding him.”
“You can’t summon Bahlam!” Yadriel all but yelled, his hands clenched into fists at his side. “If he crosses over from Xibalba, he’ll—”
“I know,” Catriz interrupted with a solemn nod. “When Bahlam rises, the cemetery will be filled with the spirits of the passed brujx. He will be unleashed to do what he did in ancient times. He will drag their spirits down to Xibalba and trap them there for all eternity.” A cruel smile twisted his tío’s mouth. It made Yadriel’s blood run cold. “They will suffer, and the living brujx will be made to face the consequences of their actions. I will show them what a grave mistake they’ve made, and I will show them no mercy.”
Yadriel wanted to vomit. He thought of his grandparents, his aunts and uncles, his mom. They were all in the cemetery, celebrating and probably worried sick about him. They had no idea what was coming. What would happen to them if Yadriel didn’t do something? He would lose them. He would never see them again.
“Finally, they will see us as equals,” his tío said, turning his full attention back to Yadriel. “They will never value us, or give us the chance to show them what we’re capable of. We can show them how wrong they are, together.” When he smiled, Yadriel barely recognized him anymore.
How was he the same man who had comforted Yadriel when he felt so alone? How was he the man who took Yadriel under his wing when even his own dad avoided him? Yadriel didn’t want to believe it.
“They will never accept us, Yadriel,” he said softly, reaching for him. “This is the only way to show them.”
Yadriel stepped out of his reach. “No, it’s not!”
