by Anna Meriano
“I’m sorry, I have to go,” she told Caroline. “I have to work.”
“Maybe I can stop by later on?” Caroline said.
“Yeah, maybe.” Leo frowned at Isabel and Marisol, even though they weren’t looking at her. “I have to go, okay? Bye.”
She hung up the phone and left it on the counter next to her prosperity honey.
“Wait for me!” She raced into the kitchen in time to see Tía Paloma and the twins disappear out the back door. “I’m coming!”
CHAPTER 2
CANDLE MAGIC
January rain dripped from the gray sky as they left the bakery. Tía Paloma lived in Abuela’s old house, not far from the bakery. But Leo’s aunt drove the way she talked, weaving back and forth between lanes, taking wrong turns and confusing shortcuts. By the time they pulled up to the sagging front porch of the boxy wooden house, Leo was sure they’d circled all of Rose Hill, twice.
“All right, come in, come in.” Tía Paloma ushered Leo and her sisters through the front door. The house was narrow and tall, with a high, pointed roof and wooden boards for walls instead of the brick that made up most of Leo’s neighborhood. The corners of every room were filled with boxes, piles of papers and books, and mysterious knickknacks collected by generations of bakery brujas. Leo loved to inspect them whenever she visited—stone statues with too many legs, wooden paintings of saints that unfolded like books, strings of tiny seed beads on colorful thread, thin rusty keys hidden in drawers. Even before she had known about the family magic, Leo had always suspected that Tía Paloma lived with ghosts.
Alma and Belén headed immediately for the dining-room table. They had taken special lessons with their aunt since their powers came and they were first able to see ghosts, so they were used to coming here to learn. Leo, on the other hand, got all her magic instruction shouted over the whir of the electric mixers and the beep of the oven timers in the bakery kitchen.
Tía Paloma waved a hand to stop the twins before they sat down. “No, not there, not today. I’m showing you the candle room today. I want to demonstrate how to use them in spells beyond just the ones I’ve shown you. We haven’t really discussed . . . what?” She turned her head to the back of the room, and Alma and Belén followed her gaze. “Yes, I did. Well, they know. Well then, I’m about to tell her, if you’ll let me—” Tía Paloma sighed and tossed her ponytail, ending the conversation with Abuela, or whoever she was talking to, much to Leo’s relief. It was hard being the only person in the room who couldn’t hear ghosts.
“Just follow me, girls,” Tía Paloma said. “This is something new.”
Leo shivered and bounced on her toes. She wanted to know every place the magic hid. She followed her aunt and sisters through the large kitchen, the faded fruit pattern of the wallpaper as familiar as the collage of photographs on the fridge that showed the women and girls of Leo’s family smiling in the same kitchen, in front of mixing bowls or trays of perfectly iced cookies or cakes. Whether the photos were old, faded Polaroids of Abuela and her three daughters or newly printed digital snapshots of Alma and Leo filling pies for Thanksgiving, they all contained the same hanging rack of copper pots and pans, the same white-and-blue butter churn that was inexplicably filled with so many pennies and nickles and dimes that it couldn’t be budged from its spot next to the counter.
Just like she did every time she passed the fridge, Tía Paloma brushed her fingers across the photo in the center, which showed little-kid Mamá, toddler Tía Paloma, and a taller third girl with short messy pigtails and a mischievous smile. Tía Paloma cried in the picture, her hand reaching for a cookie held just out of reach by her smirking sister.
Leo’s oldest aunt had died in an accident when Mamá and Tía Paloma were still young, and even though Leo knew her sister Isabel shared her name and her first-born power to influence people’s emotions, all the stories Mamá and Tía Paloma told about their eldest sister made her sound more like Marisol—a troublemaker.
They continued down the cramped hallway, past Tía Paloma’s old bedroom, now full of craft supplies and half-finished projects of all kinds; past Mamá’s old bedroom, now a cluttered guest room. Leo had once found an old collection of polished stones in the boxes under the bed, and Tía Paloma had let her keep her favorite one. Leo had been sure the shiny silvery-black rock was magic, but now she knew that Tía Paloma didn’t give magic objects to little kids. She kept them in special cupboards and bookshelves—and, apparently, candle rooms.
Two doors stood at the end of the hall. One was Tía Paloma’s master bedroom, where her pair of orange cats always lurked to avoid the noisy Logroños, and the other was the only room in the house Leo had never seen before: Tía Isabel’s old bedroom.
The door was covered in black-and-neon stickers, with bundles of herbs taped in each corner and charts of moon phases overlapping posters of angry-looking musicians and photos and drawings of Day of the Dead ofrendas, glowing orange with marigold flowers and candle flames. Leo wondered if Mamá’s door had once been decorated to show her personality, and what it would have looked like. Did she love magic like her older sister? Did she listen to bands that wore black and raised their fists at the camera? Would Tía Isabel have taken all her decorations down if she had lived to be older?
Tía Paloma stopped in front of the messy door, took a breath, and knocked.
Leo tensed her shoulders, expecting something ghostly to happen. Alma and Belén looked around the hallway and cocked their heads, but then Alma caught Leo’s eye and shrugged.
“I always check for Isabel, just in case.” Tía Paloma sighed, shook her head, and opened the door.
Alma and Belén gasped in stereo on either side of Leo. She had imagined that the room, like the door, would be frozen exactly the way Tía Isabel had left it, but there was no bed or any bedroom furniture. It looked more like Tía Paloma’s craft room, with the same easy-assembly plastic shelves filling in the spaces between more antique wooden shelves that leaned against the walls like they might collapse into a pile of dust and splinters at any moment. There was plenty of work space in the form of long wooden tables lined up across the room, the dark wood of the legs carved into familiar shapes and patterns, and Leo smiled when she recognized them. The tables matched the tall cabinets in the bakery, the ones that held ingredients both commonplace and magical. Both the shiny plastic and the weathered wood glowed in the dim light of the room.
Candles flickered in each shelf cubby, their flames dotting the dark room with eerie blue light instead of normal orange fire. One table held jars of powders stacked in rows with neat labels, and another drew her eye with bundles of herbs, folded papers, and a box of matches lying in a pool of bright yellow-orange light from a few candles lit the normal way. It looked almost like an ofrenda from Día de los Muertos, but Leo guessed that this candle cluster stayed up all year round, not just in November. An altar.
Although the candles were all the way across the room, the warmth of tiny flames prickled Leo’s face and danced in her stomach.
“Beautiful,” Alma whispered in Leo’s ear.
Belén giggled and reached around Leo to poke Alma’s shoulder. “Isn’t it kind of a fire hazard, though?”
Tía Paloma flicked a light switch. In the glare of the overhead lamp, all the blue flames disappeared, leaving a smoky odor and hints of other scents both strange and familiar, and only the small group of candles in the center of the room still burned. Leo walked to the cluster and examined a tiny nub of a pink candle, burning at the bottom of a tall glass.
“I lit that one for your mamá,” Tía Paloma said, pushing the candle away from Leo’s outstretched hand. “I thought she would need all the communication help she could get at the conference. You know, in a small community like ours, everybody talks. I’m sure you and your . . . accidents were a topic of conversation, Leo.”
Leo hung her head. Her attempts to learn magic on her own in November had shrunk a boy and attracted the attention of the police, so of course
the other magic workers would know about them. It was scary to think of a bunch of adult spell casters shaking their heads and talking about the out-of-control Logroño bruja. Leo didn’t want to make Mamá look bad.
But now she was initiated, and she was learning magic the right way, and the next time the spell-casting convention met, they would be talking about Leo with pride.
“So,” Leo said, eager to get started, “candles can help when you’re trying to talk to other people?”
“That’s one of the uses of the pink ones,” Tía Paloma said. “But I’m getting ahead of myself. Your mother and I want to make sure you get a rounded education, you know, in spell work. And, well, candles and herbs are so important. I’m sure your mamá feels this, especially after spending a weekend in the larger community—working with your aptitude, your own special ability, is wonderful, but we can’t ignore the tools and traditions that connect us all. That’s why we have the convention, isn’t it? So this is the candle room, where we can prepare and light candles for anything we . . .” She fell quiet for a moment, as if lost in thought. “Oh, and you girls can use them, of course, if you ever need to; they’re not just mine. They’re for the family.”
Leo tilted her head, not sure if it would be rude to tell Tía Paloma that she was making even less sense than usual.
“Right.” Tía Paloma nodded toward the corner of the room. “Of course, that’s not to say you should go running off to tell everyone you know.”
Alma and Belén both turned to look at Leo with raised eyebrows.
Leo rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to.” She realized what the twins must be thinking and looked down. “Caroline isn’t everyone.”
“Oh, goodness.” Tía Paloma sighed. “I should have lit one of these for myself before I started trying to explain all of this to you! I didn’t mean to single you out, Leo. And your friend has always seemed trustworthy.” She frowned as she lifted the glass with the pink candle, inspected it, then covered the top of the glass until the small flame shrank and died.
Leo bit her lip, trying to push down her annoyance. She didn’t want to worry about her family’s disapproval of Caroline right now. She wanted to learn magic.
As if she could read Leo’s thoughts, Tía Paloma clapped her hands and waved them in a sweeping circle around the room. “Veladoras,” she said, “come in all shapes and sizes. Just like the herbs we’ve been learning about, each type of candle has specific properties, and once you’ve learned them, they can be components of larger spells.”
“Like when we summon spirits to speak to the living,” Alma said with a nod. Leo remembered when the twins had used a candle to make her abuela appear as a ghost in the middle of Leo’s bedroom.
“But that’s our special birth-order power,” Belén said. “Isabel or Leo can’t light a candle and talk to ghosts, can they?”
Tía Paloma riffled through one of the shelves. “Well, no one really knows what Leo can or can’t do, since we’ve never had a fourth-born before. But you’re right; your sisters can’t use candles the same way you can. Here, hold this.”
She pulled a tall, skinny brown candle off the shelf and passed it to Belén. The candle was stuck like a straw through a cardboard circle, making it look like a sword when Belén wrapped her hand around the bottom third. Tía Paloma picked up a match from the altar and lit the candle. She squinted at it for a moment before grabbing Leo and Alma each by a shoulder and pushing them close around Belén like they were squeezing in for a selfie.
Leo looked at the twins and they looked back at Leo, eyebrows raised past their colored bangs in mirrored confusion. Leo guessed Tía Paloma was trying to work a spell with the brown candle, casting something on the three girls.
“Rosemary!” Tía Paloma gasped suddenly. “That would kick this up from a suggestion to a real spell. I know I have some around somewhere—it’s used for concentration, you know, which is why I find it handy to keep around. Helps me stay a little more . . .” She tilted her head at Leo, who quickly tried to make her face look less like a gaping fish. “. . . focused. I’m confusing you, aren’t I?”
Leo shrugged, even though the answer was yes.
“Magic comes in many forms, but for our lessons it helps to break magic into two categories: aptitudes and relics. Aptitudes are inherent magical abilities, like our family’s affinity for sugar and flour, and our birth-order powers. Even if you had no magical materials handy, any of you girls could cook up a powerful recipe or spell on your own.”
Leo nodded. Isabel had shown her a spell she could do with just a palmful of flour once.
“Relics are objects that carry power within them. Herbs or candles, crystals or religious symbols or chants, even certain foods can be relics, though usually weak ones.” Tía Paloma spread her hands toward the candles all around the room. “Someone with almost no aptitude could use a candle to channel magic into their life, just like someone with no talent for baking can still follow a recipe and end up with something mostly edible.”
Thanks to her lunchtime snack club, Leo had tasted plenty of cookies and cakes baked by her friends with no baking experience. They tasted all right, but they didn’t carry the same power as Mamá’s baked goods—the power to put a smile on the face of anyone who ate them.
“So candles can help with baking magic,” Leo said slowly, “but baking magic doesn’t really need candles?” It sounded like one of the logic puzzles her teacher, Ms. Wood, gave out as extra credit for math sometimes.
“But we use candles to summon spirits,” Belén said thoughtfully, her eyes glued to the flickering flames of her brown candle. “Does that mean everyone can do that?”
“No, no.” Tía Paloma shook her head. She scooted aside the candles on the table, picking a fat purple candle off a shelf and sprinkling a pinch of powder over the top of it before lighting it. “Relics on their own have broad uses but are more subtle in their effects, opening paths and adding flavor to other magical forces. Aptitude on its own can be flashy, but is usually quite narrow, like how our abilities with spirits are limited to seeing and hearing them.” The light of the candle wavered as Tía Paloma passed her hand through the flame, her fingers casting long shadows that rippled into a rainbow of dark colors and starbursts across the ceiling. Alma yelped, Belén whistled, and Leo opened her mouth in awe.
“When you combine aptitude with relics, then you can really do amazing things. That’s how our family creates our most complex recipes, and it’s why I want you girls to know the uses of herbs and candles. It can help you all do more with your magic.”
Leo felt something bubble in her chest as Tía Paloma’s words finally clicked together to make sense in her head. She wanted to do more with her magic. She wanted to use everything she could to help her channel her powers.
She wanted to learn everything.
“So how do we start?” she asked.
CHAPTER 3
CAROLINE CRASHES
Leo had woken up every day of vacation feeling extra lucky to have more time to spend at the bakery. Even though it meant leaving the house with Mamá and her sisters at five a.m., Leo loved watching the shop lights flicker on, feeling the ovens heat up, and smelling the first batches of conchas and bolillos as they turned golden brown. More time with her family also meant more chances to pick up magic tips; even when no one was purposely teaching her, Leo could listen and learn. Sometimes she even got to help Isabel gather rare ingredients for one of the bakery’s special magical orders. Leo couldn’t wait for the day when Mamá would trust her to bake someone’s lucky birthday cake herself.
The morning after the candle lesson, January 4, started extra early. There were trays of rosca de reyes to bake and box, shelves to fill, and all sorts of dough to make, from pastry to cookie to biscuit. Leo skipped into the bakery behind her line of sleepy sisters, pulling one of the Amor y Azúcar aprons out of the clean laundry bag and slipping it over her braided hair.
Tía Paloma arrived twenty minutes late with a huge
tote bag full of candles and a thin book with yellowed edges and a crumbling cover. “I made copies,” she said, passing Leo a neat paper clipped packet with grainy gray images of tattered paper with scratchy handwriting.
Leo grabbed her pages with delight. There were illustrations of different types of candles, drawn by a shaky hand, next to a chart that listed various uses for all different colors. Though the book was in Spanish, Leo recognized some of the information that Tía Paloma had gone over the day before: pink for smoothing relationships, brown for clearing minds, plain yellow to connect to the spirit world, purple for creating illusions. It felt like figuring out how variables worked in pre-algebra. A few months ago, Leo had barely discovered that magic existed, and now there were a thousand new ways to use it.
Leo set the packet down as her family yawned through their opening morning routine. Mamá and Tía Paloma moved around the kitchen like matching whirlwinds, filling mixing bowls with flour and freeing cartons of eggs from the walk-in refrigerator. Leo helped Alma and Belén unload yesterday’s dishes from the dishwasher while Isabel flipped on the grumbling air conditioner and wiped down all the display cases and shelves. The glow of the ovens matched the glow of the sunrise through the windows. Marisol finished the morning’s first pot of coffee and set the machine to brew a second before Mamá could catch her downing her cup.
The sun lit up the sky and the oven timers pinged steadily when Daddy’s pickup truck pulled into the parking lot. He always said that he was lucky that invoices and receipts, unlike bread, could wait an hour or two when he felt like sleeping in.
