Highway to Hell

by Rosemary Clement-Moore

  I sank my head into my hands, my elbows on the table. “If I'm going to die, I'd really like some answers before I go.”

  “It would help if you remember where you really are.”

  “Doña Isabel's grotto.” As soon as I said it, the glade appeared through the window, and Doña Isabel herself appeared in the chair across from my gran. At least they didn't acknowledge each other, because that would be weird.

  “But you didn't construct the spell on your own,” I said, pointing to the matriarch of Velasquez County.

  “No. I am not a witch.”

  “So someone helped you.”

  Doña Isabel didn't deny it. “You have to see the patterns, niña.” She held a saucer in one steady hand, a dragonfly cup in the other. “How do the lines connect?” she asked.

  Gran pushed my own cup across the table to me. “You need to drink your tea.”

  I ignored her, which I never would have done in real life. “What lines?” I asked with a rising urgency, feeling my time running out.

  “Listen to your abuela,” said Doña Isabel. “And drink your medicine.”

  Gran was suddenly standing beside me, and I had a flashback to childhood as she grabbed my nose until I opened my mouth. Instead of cough syrup, though, she poured tea down my throat. It was tepid and unbearably salty, which didn't make sense unless I remembered that I had a body somewhere, and friends who were smart enough to figure out how to save one astral-projecting psychic not-so-supergirl.

  The liquid hit my stomach and immediately began to come back up again. Lurching out of the chair, I fell to my hands and knees, retching up the salt water and with it the black, viscous substance of the demon that I'd swallowed. Only it seemed to have grown, because the blackness kept coming, spreading in a pool like the one at the Velasquez ranch.

  “Gran?” I gasped between heaves, clammy with nausea and fear. I thought this was my safe and happy place.

  “You brought it in,” I heard her say as the pool reached out dark tendrils to wrap around my arms and drag me under. “And the only way out is through.”

  The blackness enveloped me, clogged my eyes and ears and nose, and dragged me down.

  25

  There was a tunnel, and a bright light at the end of it. From far away, I could hear a voice calling my name.

  “Maggie?” My favorite baritone voice. Not gravel deep, not tenor smooth, but pleasantly in between. “Can you hear me? Come back, baby.”

  “Wake up, Mags.” Someone slapped my cheek, hard enough to sting.

  Only Lisa called me Mags.

  “Hey!” Justin protested sharply. “Watch it!”

  “Well, don't call her baby. Could you pick a more chauvinist endearment?”

  “I'm not the one hitting my unconscious friend.”

  I cracked open an eyelid, blearily focusing on the familiar faces above me. Justin and Lisa argued over my prone body. I saw Henry by my feet, and sensed Zeke somewhere near my head. My chest hurt and my throat burned like I'd swallowed battery acid.

  “What happened?” I croaked, my thoughts hazy, as if some part of me hadn't caught up with the rest.

  They were so busy glaring at each other, it took a moment before they realized I'd spoken. Then Justin, with a wordless sound of relief, yanked me into his arms, holding me so tight that my abused body creaked in protest.

  “Ow, ow, ow!”

  “Sorry!” He would have let me slip back down to the ground, but I found the strength to wrap my arms around his waist.

  “No. It's good to feel stuff.” He was hot and sweaty, his neck red with sun and exertion. Nothing had ever smelled so good.

  Lisa flung herself to her feet and paced away from me, as if to hide her discomposure. When she turned back, her wan face had flushed with relief disguised as anger.

  “What is the matter with you?” she asked. “Did we not talk about how I didn't want to call your parents to tell them of your demise by supernatural creature?”

  “I love you, too, Lisa,” I said, without lifting my head from Justin's shoulder.

  She opened her mouth, then pressed her lips together with a scowl. “Whatever.”

  I tried to get my bearings, which wasn't easy after the disorientation of my head trip. We were still under the tree in front of the grotto. The sky was light again, but mottled with dark-bottomed clouds. Not a chupacabra or mosquito in sight. Water dripped into my face and my clothes were soaked. I shivered and touched my soggy and sandy hair. “Why am I wet?”

  “We had to get you cooled off.” Zeke twisted open a bottle of sports drink. “Sip this slowly. You don't want to throw up again.”

  “Again?” On the ground was a water bottle, uncapped and on its side, a little bit of liquid left inside. Next to it was the package of sea salt I kept in my backpack with the rest of my don't-leave-home-without-it stuff.

  There was a sudden, musical sound, so mundanely incongruous with my otherworldly adventures that it took me a minute to figure out what it was. Zeke pulled his cell phone out of his pocket, checked the caller ID.

  “I'd better get this.” He stood and walked a few steps away to take the call.

  I sipped my Gatorade and grimaced as it went down. “Why does my chest hurt so bad?”

  Lisa looked at Justin, who looked at Henry, who was finally the one who told me. “You stopped breathing for a minute or so. Justin had to give you mouth-to-mouth until you started again and Lisa could get you to swallow the salt water.”

  I stared at my friends, who couldn't get along except when it came to saving me. “Thank you,” I said inadequately.

  Lisa waved a hand and Justin gave a no-big-deal shrug. Like it would kill them to admit that they'd worked together.

  Zeke closed his phone with a snap, his expression grave. “I've got to go. It seems that while the sun was behind the clouds, the chupacabra was busy all over. I've got two more dead heifers, and they haven't heard from the guys out in the west quarter yet.” His tone was frustrated, and not just at the situation. I hoped that he wasn't backsliding into denial. “I should have been there.”

  “You can't be everywhere.” Lisa dusted off the seat of her jeans and gathered up the empty water bottles. When she looked down at me, her composure was fully in place. “I'll go with Zeke so I can report back. We'll reconvene before nightfall at the Duck.”

  I smiled, in spite of everything, at the Scooby-Doo-ness of the plan. “See you then.”

  “You sure you're going to be okay?”

  “I'm fine.” To prove it, I lifted a hand to Justin, and he helped me to my feet. “See?”

  Zeke waited impatiently by the trail. “We need to go, if we're going.”

  As soon as they were out of sight, I sank onto the stone bench with a groan. Being stoic is hard work. No wonder I never bother to hide anything.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  Justin checked his watch. “About three.”

  “Really?” It felt like we'd been there for days, even allowing for my perceived time in dream space.

  “Yeah. We have four and a half hours until sunset. Depending on how long the sky stays clear, I guess.”

  That was a big if. I shivered in my wet clothes, despite the warmth of the afternoon.

  Justin sat and put his arm around me, rubbing my shoulders. “We should get you some dry clothes.”

  “I have a shirt in my backpack.”

  He smiled slightly. “Of course you do.” Fishing in the pack, he found the shirt that Hector had loaned me, and dropped it over my shoulders. I began to feel better, and even if I still didn't understand Hector's role in all this—Mysterious but sage old man? Brujo? Red herring?—I wasn't going to look this denim gift horse in the mouth.

  Henry rubbed his head as if it ached. “Okay. I know I came late to this party. But I have a lot of questions.”

  “Join the club,” I said.

  He paced as he shot off a rapid-fire inquisition. “If there's more than one chupacabra, does that mean there
's more than one demon? Does that swarm mean there are a bajillion demons? How are we going to fight that?”

  The only way I was going to be able to sort through the junk drawer of info in my head was to take each piece out and examine it individually. It was too overwhelming otherwise.

  “I think it's all one demon.” I turned that nugget over, mentally testing its shape. Yes. It felt true.

  “One demon that can be in more than one form at a time?” Justin asked.

  “How can it have a form at all?” The inquiry volleyed back to Henry. “Isn't a demon, by definition, incorporeal? From the Greek daemon, which means ‘spirit.’

  I slid my arms through the sleeves of the shirt. “This is still just a working theory. A demon's natural state is spirit, like you said. Nonsubstance. And then you have human beings”—I knocked on the bench beneath me—“and everything we can see and hear and touch. Our natural state is matter. Substance.”

  Henry nodded. “I'm with you so far.”

  “This is the easy part,” warned Justin.

  I went on. “If a demon wants to affect our world, it requires power. The amount depends what it wants to do. Influencing something nonphysical, like someone's emotions or mental state—which is probably how you're used to thinking about spirits, Henry—takes less power. Directly affecting the physical takes lots more power. Usually not cost effective.”

  “Actually becoming physical is the most costly of all. It takes huge energy, because it's transforming a stable non- substance into something that's not a natural state—matter. It's like chemistry: it takes energy to go against the balanced equation.”

  Henry's eyes had glazed over. “No offense, but I became a theology major so I wouldn't have to deal with the physical science stuff.”

  “I'm not sure you can separate the two.” I'd had almost a year since my first eerie experience to mull this over. “The universe is about balance. Molecules want to be neutral and grab up atoms that balance their charge. Our nerves fire because of positive and negative potentials in the neurons. Too much emotional high or low and we become manic or depressive.”

  I wrapped the warm, dry shirt more tightly around me. “This is what I think. Good and Evil are opposing forces, and they have to stay balanced or everything breaks down. Maybe that's why God can't just smite serial killers or stop earthquakes.”

  “Can't?” Henry raised a brow.

  “Fine. Doesn't. Because Team Good cares about the consequences, respects what breaking the rules would do to existence.”

  Here I did think about my vision, opened the lid on the box where I'd tucked it for now, to be fully analyzed later, when I had the luxury of time to freak out. “It's the nature of Evil to destroy. Team Evil wants power at any cost. They'll annihilate humans, each other, even the universe.”

  Justin blinked. “I can't decide if that's brilliant or deranged.”

  Henry's expression was assessing but otherwise impenetrable. He seemed to see past my intellectualization to the disquiet left by the nightmare. “You got all that from a dream?”

  “Well, and that Matt Damon movie Dogma, where that one demon planned to end creation just to get what he wanted.”

  The roll of his eyes broke the tension. “Nice.”

  More used to my illustrative style, Justin moved on to the important stuff. “So, your theory is that our demon, the chupacabra, steals power for transformation through blood. That's why its prey have gotten bigger, and it seems to be multiplying.”

  “Right. Ol' Chupy is stuck underground. Somehow it gets a little bit of itself out of its prison in material form. It's like a space probe. It can go out, feed, and beam back the energy to the mother ship, because it's really all the same entity. There's an alchemy principle that Lisa says and I can't remember.”

  Justin supplied it. “As above, so below.”

  “That's it.”

  Henry chewed on that. “And it could generate all those mosquitoes because they're small. A thousand bugs might have the same mass as one chupacabra.”

  “Pretty good,” I said. “For someone who'd rather give up women than take a physics class.”

  He didn't take the bait. “So how did the demon get trapped?”

  It figured that eventually he'd get to a question for which I didn't have an answer. “Maybe it's always been here. Since before history. I think that artifact in the museum wasn't put in the ground as part of a burial. It was put there for the same reason as Doña Isabel's shrine—to keep the demon contained.”

  “‘Before history’ isn't the same thing as ‘always,’ ” said Justin.

  “What do you want? Last night I was still trying to convince myself it was a giant squid.”

  While we'd been talking, I'd finished the bottle of Gatorade and managed to stop shaking. Even better, my legs had decided to work again, which was nice of them, considering I hadn't abused them so badly since high school gym class.

  Once I was on my feet and sure I was going to stay there, I looked at the guys. “Ready? I want to get back to town and—” I broke off, my attention caught by something rhythmic and familiar. “Are those hoof beats?”

  “Yeah.” Justin grabbed my backpack. “Let's go look.”

  Instead of going out via the path, which would take us around the grotto's hill and back to the car, the three of us hurried through a gap in the trees that shaded the shrine, and found ourselves in the pasture, facing east.

  The wind had picked up, and whipped my hair into my eyes. I pushed it back and saw a horse, galloping riderless across the desert dunes. I recognized the root-beer brown of the horse's coat, and saw she had an empty saddle on her back. “That's Sassy!”

  “Who?” Justin asked.

  “It's Doña Isabel's horse.” The mare had kept going, headed—if I had my bearings right—back toward the barn.

  Justin's mouth tightened and we exchanged grim looks. “Henry, maybe you'd better bring the car.”

  Henry ran to the Escort, and Justin and I hurried to backtrack Sassy's path, following the dirt road. As we neared a cluster of palm trees, I felt a pull of urgency and sped up the pace as much as my tired legs would stand.

  Doña Isabel lay crumpled on the ground, unmoving. Her hair was disheveled and her clothes tangled from her fall. I dropped to my knees beside her, relieved to see her breathing.

  She stirred as I bent close. “El Diablo,” she murmured. “No vi que no esta muerta.”

  Justin knelt on her other side. “Don't move, Doña Isabel. We'll call an ambulance.”

  Her eyes opened and focused on my face. “Magdalena. ¿Usted entiende? Está en la sangre.”

  I heard tires on the dry road, then the slam of a door and running footsteps. “Is she okay?” asked Henry as he joined us.

  Justin frowned. “We need to get her to the hospital.”

  “No!” Doña Isabel shook her head emphatically. “No hospital. I cannot leave. The storm is coming.”

  She tried to sit, and I put a hand on her shoulder. “Don't get up. You need to get checked by a doctor. You fell off your horse, and at your age …”

  Her black gaze was sharp as a raven's, which put to rest my fears of a head injury. “My bones are old but not broken.” Grabbing Justin's arm, she beckoned to Henry as well. “Help me up. You may take me home, then call the doctor.” When the guys stood unmoving, she gestured imperiously. “Come along. The day is fading.”

  After a silent conference of significant glances, we gave in. Justin and Henry helped her up, and she allowed them to assist her into the front passenger seat of the Escort. Her white-knuckled grip on their arms was the only indication that she wasn't merely out for an afternoon stroll.

  Justin closed her door, and I started to open the back one, then paused. “Sangre means ‘blood,’ right?”

  “Right,” said Henry.

  It's in the blood. Nothing enigmatic about that.

  Doña Isabel tapped on the glass, and when she had our attention, swept her hand to indicate the road
home. We scurried to obey. The day, as she said, was fading.

  26

  Connie was waiting when we arrived at the house; I'd called her from the car, and she'd called Doña Isabel's doctor. I'd also left a voice mail for Zeke, and a text message for Lisa, trying to cover my bases.

  The matriarch was whisked away in a flurry of activity. When the furor died down, Henry, Justin, and I found ourselves in the front parlor, with the prim antiques and the staid family portraits. The guys sat—carefully—while I paced and scratched at mosquito bites.

  “Aren't you exhausted?” Justin asked.

  “I think better when I move.” I certainly had no shortage of things to think about. I played my dream over in my mind, searching for any clue. The problem was, there were so many parts of it that I wasn't ready to revisit.

  “Hey, Justin. What does Ruach mean?”

  He had picked up a book from a side table, and looked up from it in surprise. “That's very random.”

  “Just something I heard and I can't remember where.”

  “Ruach is Hebrew for ‘the breath of God.’ ” Henry's brows knit, making his nose look, if possible, even more Roman than usual. “Ruach Elohim. Literally, the Breath of God. Figuratively, the divine spirit of creation. Where did you hear that?”

  My mind cleared, relieved to attribute the word to something I should know. “I remember now. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”

  I turned to resume my pacing, and bumped into a chair. Something clattered to the floor, and I thought at first I'd broken some priceless antique. Other than Doña Isabel, that is. But it was only the matron's cane.

  “Dragonflies again.” They were carved down the length of her walking stick; I remembered seeing them the day we'd met.

  “What dragonflies?” asked Justin. I hadn't realized I'd spoken aloud. “The ones in the pasture eating the mosquitoes? That's what dragonflies do.”

  Henry sank lower in his chair. “We used to call them mosquito hawks back home.”

  “No. I'm seeing them everywhere—on the stained glass in the chapel, on the weather vane on the tower.” The motif had worked its way into my subconscious as well, appearing with significance in my dreams. “The first day we came to the house, Zeke said something about it being a kind of good-luck symbol.”