by Alisa Valdes
“Look who’s talking!” I screamed.
“My brothers are the ones who are loyal,” he hissed, close to me. “Not the traitors. And my brothers, they party hearty in hell. I’ll be happy to go, but I have some work to finish here first.”
With that, he produced the handkerchief, and once more put it over my nose and mouth, as Kelsey screamed. The world faded, and I was gone, falling into a deep, dark, blank, horrible sleep.
♦
I woke awash in nausea, to the sound of rain on a metal roof. The curtains in the rancid bedroom where I was help captive were drawn, but I saw that outside it was daylight. I felt a small relief because of this, knowing that Hilario and his friends had less strength now, and praying that Demetrio would know I was here, and that he would help me.
I was still on the mattress, and my wrists and ankles were still bound tightly. It felt as though I had no circulation in my hands and feet anymore. I was thirsty, and hungry, and I needed to pee. Kelsey was gone again, and I was alone in the room now. I struggled to maneuver myself to the edge of the bed, and wriggled to get myself to my feet. My high-heeled pumps were long gone, I had no idea where, and the carpet felt like a dry, hard Brillo pad under my feet. I looked about me wildly, hoping to find something. My phone. My purse. But none of it was here. I wondered what my mother thought. There must have been people out looking for us by then. I wondered how long I’d been gone.
Because my ankles were restrained, I could not walk. I barely was able to maintain my balance standing upright. I tried a few pathetic hops, with the aim of getting myself to the door and trying to saw the bindings off my wrists with the help of the doorknob or the edge of the lopsided dresser - but all I managed to do was fall, with a loud whump, to the floor. It was filthy, with dead cockroaches on it, and, to my horror, a few live ones, too. I screamed.
I heard footsteps coming - or, I should say, I felt them. I braced myself, dreading whatever was going to come next. I heard the door open, and I heard a person breathing, and moving slowly, looking for me. From where they stood, they would not have been able to see me because of the position of the bed.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” called Logan’s voice, in sinister imitation of a child’s game.
“I fell,” I said.
“Peek a boo,” he said next, as I saw his head round the edge of the bed, smiling horribly, “I see...”
But the rest of whatever he was going to say was cut off now, as he was tackled by a moving blur that came flying across the room from the doorway. I couldn’t turn my head to get a better look, as I was facedown on the floor, and was working hard just to keep my face up and out of the track of a cockroach. I heard fighting now, rough motions and cursing, and solid thumps of fist on flesh. It horrified me to listen to it, and I tried to escape by remembering the beach in Miami, and the vacation I’d had with my mother, so long ago. It was only a week, maybe, at the most, and yet felt like years.
Soon, I felt hands on my back, and a familiar tingling rush of electricity, the good kind. I smelled sunlight on warm, dry earth.
“Demetrio!” I cried, trying to turn my head to see him, hoping I wasn’t being tricked by my own mind.
“Shh, mamita, stay quiet.”
He sawed at the bindings until they popped, and a wave of blood flowed from my arms to my fingertips in a painful but refreshing tingle. He repeated this process with my ankles, then lifted me, as though I weighed nothing, onto his shoulder.
“Thank God you’re here,” I breathed into his neck.
“Shh, not now. Talk later.”
He sprinted from the room, and down a hall, and out the front door, carrying me across a fallow, frozen field, and leaving me in the bottom of a dry irrigation ditch.
“Stay down. Don’t move. Don’t scream. Nothing. I’m going back for Kelsey. Wait here.”
“He said he was going to kill her,” I told him, remembering now.
Demetrio flew to me, and put his face, deadly serious, directly in front of mine. “I told you to be quiet. I need your cooperation. Now. Life or death, Maria. You feel me?”
I did as he said, my heart thundering in my chest. It was an overcast, rainy day, and I had no coat. I was shivering head to toe, and wanted to peek up and get a sense of where I was, but I knew better than to defy his command right now. Right now, he knew more than I did. I had to accept it.
Demetrio returned a few minutes later, with Kelsey on his shoulder. She did not look well. In fact, she was pale, bloody, and unconscious as he set her down next to me with a grave look upon his face.
“What’s wrong with her?” I cried, hysterically, trying to locate the wound. I found it. Her neck had been cut. Her eyes were dull, half-closed.
“No!” I screamed.
“Maria, be quiet,” he blurted, furious with me. “If you love her, if you care about her, be quiet. Now.”
I held my knees to my chest, and began to rock back and forth, having never been so horrified by a thing in all my life. This couldn’t be happening. I’d gotten her into this, and now she was dead.
Demetrio stood over her, his arms outstretched, and turned his face skyward, the rain pelting him. He chanted something I couldn’t understand, and spun slowly in place. As he did so, dark clouds gathered above him, moving in from every direction, churning in the sky the way they did during a tornado. Lightning began to strike nearby. First, it hit a tree twenty yards off. Then, a rock five yards off. I shrieked from the noise, and placed my hands over my ears, horrified, terrified, and then, as I watched, lightning struck Demetrio, and held him, and he did not collapse or burn. He absorbed it. For several seconds this went on, and his whole body glowed with power. When the bolt retreated back to the sky, he retained a blue electric glow to his skin.
“Omigod, omigod, omigod,” I repeated over and over.
Demetrio knelt next to Kelsey’s corpse now, and he moved his hands along her body, much as he’d done with Buddy and me the first day we met, except that this time, the electricity fell from his fingers and palms like a tiny rain, onto her skin. In each place that a drop fell, it was absorbed in a bull’s-eye pattern, sinking in, and pinkening the white ghostly skin as it went. As his hands floated over her neck, his face grew pained, and sweat sprouted on his face. He looked sick, entranced, lost to me. His eyes rolled back in his head, and the whites showed. I was terrified, panicked, but amazed - because her neck wound, a deep and hideous fatal gash, closed up beneath his hands, and her skin went from dead to alive.
Kelsey’s unmoving chest suddenly burst to life, and she gasped and sputtered, and turned onto her side and spit up, bits of coagulated blood coming from her mouth. Demetrio, meanwhile, fell to the ground at her side, spent, but alive, breathing hard, and weak.
Kelsey finished spitting, and sat up, completely confused.
“Where am I?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I told her as I threw myself at her, and embraced her. “Alive. You’re alive.”
She seemed to be trying to remember something, and her hands came up to her neck, the fingertips feeling along the place where the cut had been.
“He sliced me open,” she said. “I felt it, my own blood, it was so warm, it felt like someone had poured hot tea down the front of my dress.”
She looked at the dress now, and saw it covered in blood. She felt the neck harder, and her eyes searched mine for an answer.
Speechless, I pointed at Demetrio.
Kelsey watched as he slowly recovered, and pulled himself to sitting, tired and dazed.
“He said you wouldn’t care enough to come for me,” she told him.
“Who said that?”
“Your brother,” I told him. “He’s out to destroy you, Demetrio. You have to believe it.”
“He was wrong,” said Demetrio. “He usually is. Of course I’d come for you, Kelsey.”
“Is he still here?” she asked, her voice quaking.
“I haven’t seen him,” said Demetrio. “He ki
lled you. That means he’s probably been taken from this dimension already. Revenants who have been given a second shot at redemption, as we both have, cannot kill a human being, no matter what. If we do, we’re sent away, to The Very Bad Place, for all eternity.”
I could tell as Demetrio said it that, even after having seen Hilario’s handiwork, he was devastated to think of his brother’s soul condemned for all time. He had love in his heart, perhaps too much of it.
“He deserves it,” I told him.
“He’s still my brother,” said Demetrio. “And we need to get out of here before someone see us. Ready to go?”
We said we were ready, and crouched with him. Kelsey seemed to be perfectly whole and strong, as we followed Demetrio up and over the bank. I stepped on a sticker, and the ice hurt my feet.
“Ow,” I complained.
“Here,” said Demetrio, picking me up. He offered to carry Kelsey, too, but she was tougher than I was, and soldiered on in her bare feet. She moved more slowly than Demetrio would have liked, I could tell he was impatient.
That’s when we heard the sound of a motor, and looked back toward the trailer to see a hooded figure on an all-terrain vehicle, speeding toward us, bearing down fast.
“Run!” cried Kelsey.
But it was no use. The four-wheeled motorcycle was upon us in no time, in front of us, blocking our path. The hooded figure removed his hood, and revealed himself to be Logan, atop a machine weighed down with all manner of weaponry, including, to my horror, a large crossbow and arrow.
“I knew I didn’t like that dude,” said Demetrio.
Kelsey put her hand to her neck, and seemed to remember something. “It was him,” she said, horrified.
“What?” I asked, as Logan removed himself from the machine, and unsheathed the enormously intimidating hunting knife his father had bought for him when he made the junior Olympic skeet-shooting team.
“Hello, Maria, sweetheart,” he said to me. “And look who you’re with.”
“He’s the one who killed me,” screamed Kelsey. “It was him!”
“Good memory,” said Logan, licking the blade of his knife as he looked Kelsey up and down. “You struggled nice and hard, too. Good times, good times.”
“Behind me, girls,” said Demetrio, grabbing Kelsey and tossing her behind himself, and reaching for me.
Logan swooped down now, however, faster than Demetrio, and grabbed me first, pulling me close to him and placing the blade hard against my neck. I felt it cut me, just a little, and the pain was unbearable.
“Don’t do it, man,” said Demetrio.
“Don’t you have some ghostly superpowers to stop me, Demetrio?” asked Logan, jovially. “Or are you too good too kill, now that you’ve chosen the path of redemption?”
“I don’t think it has to come to that. Kelsey’s alive, no one has to know what happened here, just let Maria go.”
“Can’t you bring her back if I off her?” asked Logan. “I’d get off on that a little.”
“Let her go, man. She didn’t do nothing to you.”
“Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong. Maria and me, we have a long history. She has lied to me, betrayed me, done so many things to me - even some things I liked, a lot.” He said this last part lasciviously.
“Do something!” screamed Kelsey.
“I’m not going to ask again,” said Demetrio to Logan, as his eyes slipped over to the other weapons on the ATV. “Let her go.”
Logan responded by pushing the knife deeper into my flesh, and I screamed. That’s when Demetrio, moving at, indeed, superhuman speed, in a split second leapt out, removed the crossbow from the ATV, miraculously appeared at the far end of the field from us, where he aimed the weapon and quickly launched the arrow from that great distance, deep into Logan’s heart. I remembered Yazzie’s story now, about the Arrow Boy. Then, as quickly as he’d moved away, Demetrio was back next to us, catching me as I fell from Logan’s now useless arms.
In an instant, Logan was dead, and fallen with a thud to the ground next to me with a look of complete surprise upon his face. Having been pierced directly in the heart, he’d died instantly, and there was very little blood.
“Omigod, omigod!” I screamed, astonished and frightened, all of it having happened so fast. “You killed him!”
“He would have killed you,” said Demetrio, holding me gently. “I couldn’t let him do that.”
Demetrio released me now, and stood there in the rain with a terrible look of remorse and confusion upon his face, trembling as though he could not believe what he’d done. He dropped the crossbow in the mud, shaken. Afraid. He looked at me.
“I’m sorry, Maria.”
“What? Why? You saved me!” I ran to hug him, but my arms went right through him.
“I’m sorry. I, I have to go now.” In a daze, he looked down at his body as it began to twinkle in blue and gold lights, even though it was still daylight out. His voice crackled and began to sound faraway. He took the book and pen from his pocket, and held them as he stooped to pick up the crossbow. “The rules. I can’t kill a human. The Maker is pretty clear about that. I’m sorry. I love you.”
“Why didn’t you just let him kill me, and rescue me like you did Kelsey?” I cried, pawing crazily at the air where he was. “Why does it have to be like this?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It was the only way.”
“Don’t leave me,” I sobbed as he began to erupt in sparkles of light.
“Maria,” he said, fighting to stay with me, watching his own body fade away. “I still believe you are my Kindred Primary. Tell the maker. It might help.”
“No!” I cried, trying to hold on to him, but the warmth was fading. I grabbed at nothing but air. He had saved Kelsey, but we were unable to save him.
“Goodbye,” he said, as he faded, in a great glimmer of lights, and whatever was left of his body and clothes suddenly turned to dust before our eyes, except for the little book of deeds and the fancy quill pen, which fell to the ground at my feet, with a dark and horrible sound. He’d left it, and taken the crossbow with him.
I fell to my knees, sobbing uncontrollably. Kelsey stood staring at Logan’s corpse, stunned motionless. I screamed and wailed. Finally, I grabbed the book, and turned it over in my hands, trying to understand. I flipped through it, amazed that even as raindrops fell upon the pages, they stayed dry.
I read through the words. Each page was a list of names, numbered starting with 1 at the very start; and where there were no names, just descriptions, like “black and white dog,” or “red-haired child,” with dates, and the deed he had done. They appeared to have been written in a code of some kind, initials, with short descriptions of the situation. An example might have been: Rudy, Kelsey cat, RTL, auto. Or Jason Stein, male 37, SR, bridge jumper. I read through page after page, and tried to understand what the code had stood for. I flipped until I found my own name, with Buddy’s, and read the entries.
33. Buddy, black Chihuahua, RTL, car crash
34. Maria Ochoa, female 16, RTL, car crash
With a chill, I read them both again. Buddy and I had the same code.
In a panic, I flipped through the book until I came to Nutmeg’s entry, and I read it.
Nutmeg, chow dog, RTL, auto.
With goose bumps crawling on my arms, and legs, and up my back, and along my spine, I flipped through the book to the very last page, and read the entry he’d just put down.
399. Kelsey Epstein, female 17, RTL, murdered
The initials were familiar to me somehow. I thought, and thought, and remembered that his favorite book had been A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens, a book in which a man thought to be a criminal, Dr. Manette, is returned to life, for a second chance.
Returned to Life.
RTL.
“Oh, my, no, no,” I whispered. “Kelsey. Kelsey! Come here. Please come here.”
“What is it? What’s going on?” She unfroze and stumbled over to me.
“That’s why,” I said, looking at Kelsey in complete and utter astonishment.
“Why what?”
“He had to kill Logan, because I was dead,” I told her, my voice barely rising above a whisper.
“You’re not making any sense. Hello? I’m the one who got killed. Not you.”
“Not today, not here, not now. I died in that crash on Highway 14, Kelsey.”
We stared at each other as the truth sunk in.
“He never said, it but it’s here. Demetrio saved my life that first day. And Buddy’s. That’s why he had to kill Logan today, because he can’t bring the same soul back twice. If Logan had killed me, it would have been forever.”
She knelt next to me and hugged me. “He sacrificed himself for you,” she said. “I told you he was a good guy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You did.”
There, in the rain, next to Logan’s corpse, I let out a bloodcurdling cry, as the reality hit me - Demetrio was gone, and he wasn’t coming back. Unable to betray his brother, even as Hilario plotted his doom, he’d sent his own soul to The Very Bad place, so that I might live.
True to Hilario’s plan, Demetrio, the good brother, had been tempted, and trapped, by me, and now he was gone.
♦
It was the second week of January, and my mother stood on the stage, in the large performance hall at Coronado Prep, along with Headmaster Green, Yazzie and other teachers, and two officials from the state police. I stood on the stage as well. So did Kelsey. We all wore our finest clothes, and smiled nicely for the cameras. After all, it was a press conference.
