“We’re underwater?” Pao asked, though it was pretty obvious.
Bruto cocked his head to the side, his tongue lolling out absurdly.
“You could try to be a little more fearsome,” she said, but he only stretched up and licked her hand.
Turning away from the water outside the dome, Pao surveyed the inside more closely. It wasn’t a graveyard after all—it looked more like a ruin. Stone pillars leaned on their sides—were they the remains of some kind of castle? The faraway structure—glowing faintly green, she realized—was a glass palace, twisted in elegant lines toward the very top of the bubble, ribbons of lightning shooting from its spire. The air here was so thick with magic, you could taste it.
Pao turned in a circle, testing a hypothesis.
Sure enough, there was no sign of the entrance they had just come through. She couldn’t see any exit tunnel, either. And her key had exploded.
“How are we supposed to get out of here?” Pao asked, picking up a stone from the ground at her feet and chucking it almost absentmindedly at the dome.
The green lightning gathered, zapping the rock until it was nothing more than dust motes floating through the air.
“Not that way, I guess,” she muttered, but her last word was swallowed by an earsplitting siren. At the glowing palace, spotlights kicked to life, sweeping the wasted courtyard. “Run!” Pao shouted when one of them illuminated her shoe.
Luckily, Bruto’s survival instinct made up for his obedience issues, and he was pretty fast, even with a bum leg.
Dodging the next beam of light, Pao checked for her knife and sprinted toward one of the broken pillars dotting the landscape. She didn’t know what the green lights were for, but she’d read enough graphic novels to know she wasn’t going to like what happened if she got caught by one.
She wedged herself into a little corner created by two overlapping pillars and waited, every muscle tensed, to see if she’d been exposed. Bruto stayed close, whimpering, with his tail between his legs.
Pao wondered what he had to be afraid of in here. Wasn’t he home? But while she was looking out at the strange world they’d found themselves in, heart hammering, Bruto only had eyes for Pao.
“You’re not afraid of this place,” she said to him quietly, scratching his ears. “You’re afraid for me.”
In response, Bruto whined again, pressing himself into Pao’s calf.
“So much for my fearsome void beast,” Pao she said, but tears prickled her eyes, and she patted his head as he licked her shoe.
Thirty seconds passed, then a minute. Pao peered over the rough stone to see the searchlights making another sweep. The ruins looked eerie in silhouette, but Pao’s heart sank when she realized that a bunch of rocks wasn’t the only thing between her and the glass palace.
There were ears, and tails, and hundreds of waving tentacle-like protrusions. There were long fingers on spiderlike hands. There were snakes standing upright on their tails, heads swiveling like they were just looking for something to latch onto with their fangs.
In the air, bats with green glowing eyes swooped in and out of the beams.
Pao had fought her way through the rift only to be deposited in the world’s most dangerous underworld safari. And unfortunately, she was short a vehicle and a guide.
“What is this place?” Pao muttered, not expecting an answer from Bruto, but glad to have someone to talk to all the same. A few days ago, she would have thought this was some strange experiment being housed at the bottom of the river, some kind of energy plant the government didn’t want people finding out about or something.
But now, armed with her new knowledge of the paranormal, Pao wondered if they were even still on earth. Was this hell? Some kind of purgatory? Was she even alive?
Her skin felt clammy, her head woozy.
What had she done when she walked through that mouth?
Bruto nipped her fingertips, bringing her back to reality.
“Right,” she said, shaking the haziness from her head. There would be time to ponder the nature of existence after they got out of here. “The good news is,” she told him, “it can’t get any worse.”
He whined, and Pao had the sudden urge to knock on wood. She settled for his head, which made a satisfying thunk sound, though he looked mildly offended.
As if some angry ghost gods had heard her ridiculous, clichéd sentiment, the searchlights suddenly went out, reducing everything to shades of gray.
There were hundreds of bloodthirsty void creatures between Pao and that citadel, she knew now, and unfortunately, her magic flashlight was in pieces on the ground somewhere behind them, in a place they could no longer access.
Pao looked at Bruto, then nodded once, decisively. “I have to say, these aren’t even the worst odds we’ve faced.”
She could have sworn he nodded in agreement.
They made slow progress across the field to the palace, doing their best to move in absolute silence.
Well, Pao did her best. Bruto, on the other hand, seemed determined to whimper and whine and bark at everything that moved. Eventually, she stopped trying to keep him quiet. He was a void beast, after all. Hopefully the others wouldn’t consider his presence out of the ordinary.
Pao kept her knife at the ready and the shopping bag with the tiny bit of remaining Florida Water under her arm even though she was sure the latter wouldn’t be of much use to them here. The bag reminded her of Señora Mata, and to distract herself from the terrifying task she was trying to accomplish, Pao thought back to that fateful morning a few days ago when she’d tried to convince Dante to come with her to go looking for a kidnapper.
If only she’d known then that the “kidnapper” in question was an immortal Niño de la Luz in search of the very key she’d just used to cross the barrier into a magical world.
She would have laughed if even the slightest sound wouldn’t have brought a horde of angry fantasy creatures down on her.
That almost made her laugh, too.
Pao had been a scientist. A girl who believed in equations and hypotheses and the accepted rules and physical limitations of the universe. A girl who’d rolled her eyes at her mom when she told stories of wizards taking third daughters for wives and dog-lizards that prowled the desert and wailing women who searched for their drowned children night after night.
What were the odds that Pao, of all people, would end up in some twisted version of one of those stories?
If Dante were here, he’d understand, she thought. But Dante was gone, and so was Emma. Pao was on her own.
She suddenly didn’t feel much like laughing anymore.
The palace still seemed so far off. They’d barely moved a fraction of the way across the dark minefield of murderous creatures, and even over that little distance, it was a miracle they hadn’t been attacked yet.
What would the creatures do to them in here? Were the rules different now that they were through the rift? Would Bruto be safe, since he was one of them? Or would they consider him a traitor for helping her?
“I hope they don’t smell the Starbursts on your breath,” she mumbled to him as they moved from a fallen pillar to a pile of loose bricks. As the terrain stretched on, there were fewer things to hide behind. They’d have to be even more careful.
Miraculously, through a combination of very quiet footsteps and little breathing, they made it to the halfway point. There were as many monsters behind as in front of them, Pao thought, though she wasn’t sure if that was comforting or not.
They wedged themselves behind yet another stone something or other—this one might have been the ruins of a wall—and Pao wondered what had stood there before. What this sinister glass structure had replaced.
Pao could see things more clearly from here, in the palace’s weird green glow. Unfortunately, up ahead, the courtyard was wide open—the ruins had been removed closer to the center—and she spotted more monsters than ever.
Even worse, there appeared to be some kind of
moat surrounding the palace, and from what Pao could tell, it was spanned only by a single bridge—guarded by two giant horned beasts she’d never seen before, not even in the most comprehensive of her mom’s bestiary books.
“How are we gonna get across that…?” Pao whispered, and Bruto sniffed sympathetically. A few feet to the left of their hiding place, a chupacabra the size of a small horse snorted and licked his lips as if to prove that it would be impossible.
A dozen twisted trees dotted the landscape between them and the moat. Pao didn’t think they were large enough to hide even Bruto, but they were the best hope of cover they had for now.
Their only hope.
Between the giant chupacabra to their left and a horrible swarm of Manos Pachonas Pao spotted to the right, there was one very straight, very narrow path to a place where three trees sort of clumped together. They’d make for that, Pao decided, trying hard not to feel like she was on a playground slide hurtling toward a landing pad that was on fire.
She took a deep breath, getting ready to run more silently than ever, when green lightning struck the ground between the trees and the bridge. A black hole appeared in the dome’s ceiling, just big enough for three living people and four ahogados to drop through.
Pao’s heart leaped into her throat. The void had opened again, and there were real, actual, breathing people inside. She wasn’t alone anymore.
If she could get to them, free them from their captors…maybe as a group they’d have a better chance of getting inside the palace. Of getting Emma back. Of finding—
“Let them go!” The voice was loud—too loud—and its familiarity punched Pao in the gut. In the palace’s glow, Pao saw a boy-shaped shadow sprinting across the courtyard toward the new arrivals. “Let them go or I swear to God I’ll vaporize every last one of you!”
“No!” Pao said, forgetting to be quiet, Bruto nipping her ankle as a reminder. But it didn’t matter. Every creature in the vicinity—maybe in the whole field—was looking at the tall, broad-shouldered boy who had decided to make a spectacle of himself in order to save others, even though he was hopelessly outnumbered by enemies.
Only one boy in the world—any world—would be that stupid.
Pao felt tears stinging her eyes as a club came into view, green light reflecting off the streaks of pearl as the boy swung it, shattering three ahogado heads in one swipe before turning to face the fourth.
From the palace, the siren wailed again, and now that she was closer, Pao could see the source of the searchlight. At the top, a bulb of poisonous green light was now scanning the ground for the source of the commotion.
Time slowed, the danger receding as all the memories came flooding back. All the thoughts Pao had repressed just to enable herself to keep putting one foot in front of the other. All the things she’d thought she’d lost forever.
Dante telling her he liked her algae when they were saying good night. Dante losing at video games and trying to be a good sport.
He’d taken her hand when the world was ending. He had brought his Arma del Alma to life by trying to protect her.
He’d kissed her on the cheek.
And he was alive. Alive and fighting.
The ribbons of green light were still sweeping the field, searching for him as growls and hisses and screeches kicked up like wind around them. The monsters were reacting to the presence of the shouting boy as he splintered the last ahogado and turned to face the next foe.
Maybe it was the fact that she had almost lost him and she couldn’t lose him again. Maybe it was his bravery-to-the-point-of-stupidity pheromones changing the chemistry of the air in the bubble. Maybe Pao was just tired of tiptoeing around.
Whatever it was, she didn’t hesitate. She didn’t overthink. She just used the commotion and the distraction he was causing, and she ran toward him, leaving the shopping bag behind.
No longer worried about moving quietly, Pao found the magic-dense atmosphere surprisingly satisfying to sprint through. It snapped and sizzled around her. She flew through the air, and it seemed to take her only seconds to reach the clump of twisted trees.
Only one more dash like that and she’d reach the palace.
Bruto caught up to her just as she was squeezing between the trees. She knew she should stop and make herself at home in the cozy little space while she planned her next move. But she didn’t. Instead, she drew her knife and did the exact thing she had wanted to throttle Dante for more than once since this whole mess had started.
She acted brave to the point of stupidity.
“Over here, you ugly dog!” Pao shouted at a medium-size chupacabra approaching Dante too fast from behind. The three children who had come through were helpless, huddled together at the foot of a pillar as Dante fought to save them.
Unfortunately for him, the searchlights found them all at just that moment. Bathed in almost blinding green light, Pao didn’t panic. Instead, she remembered Naomi’s technique and baseball-slid into the monster’s back legs, taking it out with her dusty sneakers before slitting its throat with her knife.
She hoped Bruto hadn’t seen that.
“Pao?” came Dante’s voice, disbelieving, full of hope and fear and a thousand other emotions.
“Didn’t think I was gonna let you get all the glory again, did you?” she asked, throwing off her fallen assailant as a cloud of green-eyed bats dive-bombed her. She ducked, rolled, and came up right beside him, her heart full even as it pounded in borderline terror.
“How did you…? You were supposed to stay at camp! And what happened to your hair?”
Pao could see the end of her one white braid out of the corner of her eye as she pivoted to avoid a Mano Pachona skittering toward her ankles. “It’s a long story! How did you get here? And why aren’t you—”
“Pao, watch out!” Dante yelled, charging toward her with his club outstretched. She didn’t see the danger, but she understood just in time as Bruto approached.
“No!” she shouted, swinging around to protect the confused pup.
“I know he’s little, but he’s still one of them,” Dante said, a grim look on his face.
“He’s a long story, too,” Pao said, scooping him up and letting him lick her face. “But keep your fancy weapon away from him, hero boy.”
Dante looked like he wanted to argue, but then Bruto’s black tongue flopped out of his mouth in a smiley way. Dante rolled his eyes, flexing his shoulders as he turned to face whatever was coming next.
“I know you’re desperate for a puppy, but geez, Pao, isn’t this—”
But what Dante thought it was, she never found out. Another ahogado had been lurking nearby, and it chose that moment to strike. Dante swung his club, and Pao jumped out of the way as it connected. Unfortunately, she landed facing the bridge, and what she saw there froze her in her tracks.
“Oh no…” Pao said. It wasn’t just the ahogado she hadn’t seen coming.
Heading across the bridge in a slow, almost processional march were the two horned beasts. At first they seemed ram-like, but as they got closer, Pao saw that they were chupacabras, too. Massive, ancient ones whose scales had overtaken most of their bodies. The green protrusions along their backs had grown long, wrapped around their ears, and calcified so they looked like horns.
Their eyes were green, Pao noticed as they drew closer, but not the same bright, toxic shade as the other creatures. This was the milky green of a jade, like the stones her mom put on altars for luck and friendship.
Around them, all the void beasts, including Bruto, went still. Even they seemed cowed in the presence of these chupacabra elders, which, Pao realized, were about the size of those big horses with the furry legs. She could never remember the name of that breed….
Dante came over to Pao and stood so close their shoulders almost touched. The way the chupacabras walked was peaceful—regal, even. Pao knew Dante was thinking the same thing she was: Attacking these creatures would be wrong, unless they attacked first.
&
nbsp; Together, they hoped for the best, even as they expected the worst.
“Sorry I couldn’t—” Pao said at the same time Dante said, “Sorry I didn’t—”
They laughed together, a strange sound in this desolate landscape.
Pao bumped Dante’s shoulder with her own, feeling curiously light considering what was approaching. They were together again, she thought, and so far, they had made it through everything else this crazy week had thrown at them. Why not this?
“It’s okay,” she said as a chill settled around them, shadows trailing the massive, ancient creatures like cloaks. “I’m all about forgiveness these days.”
“You?” Dante asked, raising one eyebrow, not daring to look away from the chupacabras.
Pao shrugged, but her light feeling evaporated quickly as she craned her neck to meet the eyes of the fantastic creatures. They stopped before Pao and Dante, surveying them impassively.
“What do we—” Dante whispered, but Pao elbowed him with the arm that was not holding an immobile Bruto. She didn’t know why, but she felt it would be best for them to stay as quiet and still as possible, too.
The chupacabras in the field had been more dog than lizard, but these two were almost dragon-like. Their scales glimmered a pale green, and their few remaining patches of coarse hair were pure white. Their faces were scaly, too, with reptilian noses, and the calcified protrusions were even more majestic up close. Like crowns.
“Put the club away,” she whispered to Dante. The part of her that had felt welcomed by the rift was telling her that showing any kind of aggression toward these creatures was a line they shouldn’t cross.
She had an almost reverent feeling, like she wanted to kneel or make an offering, as ridiculous as she knew that was. But before she had a chance to freak out Dante even more, something detached from the top of one of the beasts and slid neatly to the ground.
Paola Santiago and the River of Tears Page 22
