by Anna Meriano
She just didn’t know what it meant for the bakery.
“. . . Nightshades work as antidotes to aconite,” Mamá was saying. “So with the right intention, we could use potatoes or tomatoes to weaken his invisibility. Even goji berries—I think Paloma got some dried ones a few weeks ago because she wanted to experiment with substituting them. . . .”
“I saw all those binding spells when we were building the portal in January,” Isabel said. “I’m sure I could improvise one using some combination of sugar and salt. . . .”
“Maybe he wouldn’t notice if we just happened to have a circle of candles around the room?” Marisol suggested, not looking very hopeful.
Leo always felt out of her depth in conversations like this. There were so many herbs and ingredients, and in spite of memorizing plenty of them during her lessons with Tía Paloma, Leo couldn’t call them to the top of her head at a moment’s notice the way Mamá and Isabel could. The ideas and suggestions filled her head too fast and congealed into mush too thick to let her think of anything herself. Her brain was like capirotada, sticky and bursting with a million ingredients. Ingredients like almonds to cancel negative energy . . .
. . . sweet cinnamon syrup and salty cheese and dried berries . . .
. . . leftover bread, like the day-old bolillos that carried Amor y Azúcar’s power inside their slightly dried-out crusts.
“Mamá,” she said, “I think I have an idea.”
CHAPTER 20
CAPIRO-TA-DA!
By midmorning, the bakery was open, and the plan was underway. While Mamá and Isabel filled the shelves with a normal day’s worth of baked goods, Leo ripped bolillos into chunks and soaked them with syrup made of brown sugar and cinnamon. She then mixed in almonds soaked in rainwater for purification, dried goji berries for their ability to reveal what was once hidden, and chunks of salted cheese to carry the power of Isabel’s binding spell. On the counter in front of her loomed a tall pile of cake pans and casserole dishes, everything that could be spared in the bakery plus what they had brought from home.
“Are you sure that I should be the one to make it?” Leo had asked when Mamá assigned her to the task. She had expected to be working the register, or maybe pumping out a steady supply of bolillos.
“It was your idea,” Mamá said. “And for this to have the best chance of working, you’ll be the one to initiate everything. So if you feel up to it, I’d like you to do the preparation. Is that okay, ’jita?”
Leo had almost glowed with pride. Mamá wasn’t giving her the easiest job, or the one no one else wanted. She trusted Leo with real magic. Leo balled her fists and smiled. All week she’d wanted to show Abuelo Logroño how wrong he was about her family and their powers. This was her chance to do it.
Now sweat covered her brow as she filled pan after pan and slotted each into the oven, concentrating on pouring her magic into every nook, cranny, and crunchy corner of the capirotada. And every time a warm pan left the oven, Leo sliced it into bite-sized squishy squares and plopped it onto the front counter in front of Daddy, right next to a Marisol-designed sign that read FREE SAMPLES!
JP had put himself on dirty-dish duty, weaving between bakers to clear counters at lightning speed. “This is kind of fun,” he told Leo as he passed with an armful of dirty spoons and spatulas. “Have you ever played one of those apps where you run a busy kitchen? It’s just like that!”
The duendes had disappeared into the dark corners of the bakery. Leo thought it would have been nice of them to at least offer to help prepare for the plan. She was pretty sure she could trust them to complete their part of the trap, but their disappearance didn’t exactly inspire confidence.
Plus, if she was totally honest, she had expected them to be a little more grateful for the help. But then, they had said that they were distant cousins of cats.
Leo worked steadily until lunchtime. She was washing her hands and swallowing her last bite of torta, ready to jump back onto the capirotada production line, when the front bell rang and two familiar voices called her name.
Leo dropped her day-old bread bits and rushed to greet Caroline and Brent. Once she faced them, though, her stomach flip-flopped and her own nasty voice echoed in her ears with all the mean things she had said yesterday.
“Um, hi,” she said. “Did you get my texts?”
Caroline nodded and opened her mouth, but Brent pushed past her to brandish a piece of paper in Leo’s face.
“We figured it out! You were right, sort of. There was something fishy going on. But we were right too—look!”
Leo took the paper he was waving, smoothing out the winkles to reveal a faded but familiar color scheme.
“The Honeybees logo,” she said. “You already showed me this.”
“Yes, but look carefully.” Brent jabbed at the center of the paper, nearly poking a hole straight through it. “Read the fine print.”
Leo squinted at the green-and-yellow lettering, which was even harder to read on an old printout. “‘Honeybees Café,’” she said, just like the logo on the website, and underneath, “‘Coffee, tea, and . . . artisanal honey’? What about baked goods?”
“Exactly!” Brent pointed at Leo, which was more confusing than helpful.
“So . . . they changed it? When? Why?”
“That’s what we wanted to know,” Caroline said. “So we went back to see Becky this morning.”
If Leo still felt a tiny twinge of jealousy that her friends had gone to hang out with the new girl again, it was mostly eclipsed by the warm relief that her friends still cared enough to investigate her problems and to talk to her about them.
“With a little bit of digging,” Caroline continued, “we found out that Mrs. O’Rourke always wanted to open a teahouse, but that she never thought to sell baked goods until a couple of months ago. Becky said her mom talked to a consultant, some friend of a friend, but she couldn’t remember anything about him or which friend of hers he knew. Sounds fishy, right?”
Leo nodded slowly.
“So you think our grandpa planted the idea in Mrs. O’Rourke’s head months ago so that she might start a rival bakery here in Rose Hill?” JP had entered the front of the bakery, and he leaned over Leo’s shoulder to see the original logo better. “How did he know to do that?”
“He might have been planning this for a while,” Leo said. “Maybe he found out about my magic when I started using it in January. Maybe he decided he wanted to train me then, but he knew I might not want to, or that Mamá might not let me. Plus he needed some time to capture and blackmail the duendes.”
“The what?” Brent asked.
She and JP filled in their friends as quickly as possible, even though Caroline kept interrupting them to ask about different duende stories and legends and Brent kept interrupting to make strangled noises of confusion.
“Isn’t it risky to work with them?” Caroline asked. “I mean, they’ve already spied on you and stolen things for your abuelo.”
Leo thought about the duendes and their strange mannerisms. “I believe they hate him, but they’re also afraid of him. I guess that’s why they won’t fight. But I think they want us to win. I trust them.”
“And you’re sure your recipe will work on your grandpa?” Brent asked. “If I were him, I definitely wouldn’t touch any of your baked goods.”
Leo smiled. That was the part of the plan she liked best of all. “We’ve got it covered.”
“Okay.” Caroline smiled. “So how can we help?”
She stiffened in surprise when Leo threw one arm around her and the other around Brent, but then she put her own arms out to complete the group hug.
“What’s this for?” Brent asked.
“I don’t know,” Leo said. They all let go. “Thanks for not being mad at me.”
“I still am, a little,” Brent said. “I’m just putting it aside right now because your family might lose their bakery and their magic if this goes wrong. So . . . what are you thinking?”
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Leo really didn’t deserve her friends, but she was happy she had them. “I think it would be good to see what happens to Mrs. O’Rourke when we try to break my grandpa’s spells,” she said. “If he used magic to change her mind about Honeybees, then she might snap out of it. But I’m not sure how it works, and it would be nice to have y’all there to keep an eye on things. Think you could invite yourselves over to Becky’s this evening?”
“That won’t be a problem,” Caroline said. “Especially if we bring over a board game.”
“I bet I’m going to be way better at Catan now,” Brent said. “I’m getting a crash course in plotting.”
“Oh, and one last thing,” Leo said. “Can you both eat some capirotada?”
Her friends, unsurprisingly, were happy to help with that part.
After a long day of business and free samples, Mamá closed the bakery half an hour early, with everyone too nervous to wait on any last-minute customers. Leo mopped with urgency instead of hanging around letting Isabel take care of it, and it seemed like everyone else had the same energy, because the long list of closing chores shrank like a pat of butter in a hot pan. All too soon Mamá flicked off the lights, leaving the kitchen dim with the evening sun starting to set through the windows.
The whole family loaded into Mamá’s minivan, carrying boxes and cooking supplies out and running back into the kitchen for one last load before finally pulling away, creating enough chaos that anybody spying on the bakery would never notice that Leo was left inside.
The first part of the plan was complete.
Leo tiptoed back through the unlocked back door. Now that she was wrapped in shadows herself, she could see the duendes from last night in the center of the kitchen, whispering to each other. They were joined by another family member, in a black hat, whose skin was pale green with a pink-and-yellow pattern of a flower blooming around each eye,
“Is everything set up on your end?” Leo asked. “You sent a message with the meeting time?”
The old duende dipped its head in a slow nod. “Your abuelo will be here as soon as we give the signal that all is clear,” it said. “Your kitchen area is the heart of your family’s magic and is quite well warded against intruders like your grandfather, but we can circumvent the spells guarding the front of the store, so he will meet us out there.” The duende nodded at the front of the bakery. “That’s where we will deliver the object as planned.”
The second duende touched the tip of the third duende’s black hat. “Our cousin will communicate with your family at your aunt’s house when the time is right. What happens next will be up to you.”
Leo took a deep breath. She was almost past her fear that her spell would simply fail to work—her confidence in her magical ability was growing fast, and she knew the feel of a recipe that hummed with magic by now. But even with all her family’s help and preparation, there was so much that could go wrong. Abuelo Logroño had powerful magic, magic that threatened helpless magical creatures and crept into the minds of innocent honey enthusiasts. Even Mamá had been afraid to face him directly.
There was no time to worry about it, though. The third duende was already nodding deeply to its cousins, and then it tugged sharply on the long tip of its hat and disappeared with a pop. The two duendes looked at Leo expectantly.
She nodded. “Send the signal.”
The young duende opened its mouth and let out a hair-raising screech. It started at a pitch that made Leo’s teeth hurt and then quickly rose until it was so high that she could no longer hear it, like a dog whistle. It was a neat trick—Leo wished Señor Gato could make his yowling too high for the human ear.
After about thirty seconds, the duende closed its jaws. “He will come,” it said. “Prepare yourself.”
Leo pulled a stool next to the swinging kitchen doors and perched so she could peek through the crack between the hinges, legs tucked up so her feet wouldn’t show. With only a little bit of struggling, she managed to go invisible too, just for good measure.
The front door lock clicked smoothly, which never happened when Mamá used the old scratched-up key that took several moments of wiggling and coaxing most mornings. Leo had never thought about using magic to unlock a door. Maybe this was the sort of thing Isabel meant when she said she wanted to learn skills beyond the family traditions.
But then again, Leo had never thought of using magic to kidnap and manipulate people either.
The tolling of the front-door bell sounded soft and ghostly in the dark, and Leo leaned forward to see Abuelo Logroño, his gray hair slicked back and shiny, stride into the bakery. He wasn’t even bothering to walk in the shadows, though his flip-flops were, for the moment, invisible under his perfectly arranged robes. He was holding a small metal cage, like a pet carrier, but the bars glowed with harsh white light. Curled up inside was a baby duende, its chubby wrinkled skin brown like potting soil with sandy sprinkled freckles, one triangular ear poking out of its pointy knit cap.
Leo put a hand over her mouth and bit down on the web of skin between her thumb and forefinger. Her invisibility popped like a bubble, and tears blurred her view. Once she recovered from the shock, she sank back into sadness and invisibility. She had known Abuelo was a monster, but that didn’t make it any easier to see him with a child in a cage.
“Well?” Abuelo Logroño spoke. “I don’t have much time. Do you have it?”
The old duende stepped forward in the dark. It held out the silk-wrapped bundle to Abuelo Logroño.
Leo held her breath. Silence pushed against the walls of the bakery and squeezed her chest tight.
“Funny, isn’t it?” Abuelo Logroño’s voice sounded smug as he set the cage on the floor behind him. “A week ago you assured me it was impossible to rob these homespun brujas, that their wards were just too powerful. And yet with just one day of distraction—and the right motivation, of course—you dismantled those wards so completely that I can walk through the front door. You bichos continue to be a disgrace to the power you could yield. You prefer to be weak.”
Leo chewed a cuticle. Just because the duendes had the power to rob people and chose not to didn’t make them weak.
“Your time is short,” the old duende reminded the brujo calmly. Leo wished it had said something more rebellious. But she saw a tension in the duende’s shoulders and a stillness it its stance that reminded her of Señor Gato about to pounce.
“Hmph.” Abuelo Logroño stepped forward, reaching for the silk-covered lump, large in the duende’s palm but small in Abuelo’s grasp.
“You’re certain this is the artifact?” he asked. “It feels soft. . . .”
With a few tugs he unfolded the silk wrapper to reveal the contents: a squishy, lumpy scoop of Leo’s capirotada.
Almost half a year ago, Leo had sat in the back of the busy bakery and begged to try a spell on her own, her first taste of magic. It was a simple spell, endlessly adaptable, the sort of thing Isabel would add to the family recipe book because Isabel had always been most interested in breaking down and understanding the details of magic, all its rules and possibilities. It was the same spell Leo had used to dramatically reveal her power to Caroline, before her friend knew anything about her own magic. It was the spell that had first connected Leo to her power, and she reached for that connection now, focusing on the smell, taste, and feel of magic and pouring it straight into the food in her abuelo’s open hand.
The capirotada burst like cascarones hitting the sidewalk, like a piñata spilling its sweets, like backyard fireworks. Bits flew in every direction, splattering Abuelo Logroño’s black robes, sticking in his hair, and coating his face.
The duendes shot past the stunned brujo, so fast Leo barely saw them surround the cage before they disappeared with a tug of their hats and a double popping noise, leaving the metal cage broken and empty behind them. Just moments later, the front door opened wide as Mamá walked in, followed by Isabel and Marisol, Daddy and JP, Tía Paloma, and two dragon hunters straig
ht out of the DragonBlood movie.
Alma and Belén had left the con early to make it back in time, but they hadn’t given up their cosplay yet.
Leo jumped off the stool and shook off her shadows, joining the rest of her family as they formed a circle around Abuelo Logroño, who was still stunned by the explosion and frozen by the capirotada’s spell. His arms trembled, hovering in an attempt to shield his face, unable to move.
“Álvaro,” Mamá said curtly. “You’ve sunk to a new low since last I saw you.”
“One flashy trick isn’t going to stop me.” Abuelo Logroño strained to respond. “And I have other duendes hidden away who might come to harm if anything happens to me.”
No snappy comeback or annoying small talk, Leo noted. He had turned immediately to threats. He must be rattled.
“The duendes are taking care of their siblings,” Daddy said. “They’re not much for dueling, but they’re quite good at reconnaissance, as I’m sure you know. They know exactly where you’re keeping your prisoners, and they’ve been waiting for an opportunity to free them all.”
The confidence in the old brujo’s eyes soured. He tried to turn his head to look at Daddy but couldn’t manage. “Well, I guess it’s over then,” he said. “Pat yourselves on the back and eat a cookie. You’ve won.”
“Not so fast.” Alma brandished her cardboard broadsword.
“We’re not done with you yet,” Belén added.
“You look ridiculous,” Abuelo Logroño muttered, which was pretty unfair coming from a petrified old man in wizard robes and flip-flops.
“A traditional ward wasn’t enough to keep you away,” Tía Paloma said. “But our family is nothing if not creative. We decided to learn some new tricks from you: instead of renewing protections on our buildings, we’re going straight for the source of the problem.”
“A restriction spell?” Abuelo Logroño asked. “You don’t know how.”
