Shapeshifted es-3

by Cassie Alexander

  I took Catrina’s hand into both my own. “You’re right.”

  Information shared, she relaxed again, and soon she began to snore. I stopped by the nurses’ station on the way out and gave them my phone number just in case, and told them I was a family friend. And in the elevator on my way out, despite the fact there were other passengers in it, I knocked on the wall with one hand.

  “Hey—Shadows. You’ve got to protect her. Make sure she’s okay.”

  They didn’t respond, and as we reached the first floor, all the other passengers avoided looking at me.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  In my car again, with hours left to kill before sundown, I wasn’t sure what to do or where to go. It wasn’t too late for me to drop in on my mother, but … no. If I went there, she might sense something was wrong and start to worry. Surely the story of last night and tonight was written on my face. Without thinking, I followed the train on street roads, heading farther downtown.

  While it wasn’t raining now, last night and this morning had filled in the potholes with water, making their depth hard to judge. My little Chevy swayed from side to side as cement rubble caught alternating tires. The market was closed, due to the weather, I assumed, and I drove down to the Divisadero clinic proper.

  Maldonado’s blue sign had been ripped off the door, and a new one put in its place: CLOSED.

  Of course the clinic was closed. With Hector barely himself, and Catrina gone, there’d be no one left to run the ship. The real question was, would it open again? I drove on.

  The distances were shorter, now that I wasn’t on foot, and landmarks were easier to find during the day. The rain seemed to have washed everyone away with it—that, or the gunfight last night, made everyone else but me wise enough not to go out.

  I canvassed streets until I found the one we’d been on the night before. I recognized the fence Hector had parked his car next to. The rain had washed away all of that boy’s blood. I should have looked at County for him too.

  I slowly cruised up the street to where the new Three Crosses church had been. In the day, without the rain, it was much less menacing than the lightning-freeze-frame picture I’d had of it last night. The gates were torn off their hinges—that was all Luz there—and had been reconstructed using woven locked chains. Police tape fluttered, torn down from the places it had been tied, and a lone janitor was shoving water around with a street broom inside.

  I stopped the car. The janitor looked up at me nervously; then, seeing only a girl inside the car, shook his head and got back to shoving water around. I eased off the brake and stepped on the gas—and there was a thump from the front of my car. I hit the brakes again and leapt out to see what I’d hit.

  The elderly woman I’d saved from the storm drain was huddled in front of my car. “What the—I cannot believe you!”

  “¡No te creo!”

  “Did I hit you? Are you okay?” She was still wearing County Hospital gowns, soaked to the bone.

  “¿Estás tan ciego qué no puedes ver?” she complained.

  “Lady, I still can’t understand you. What the hell are you doing out here?”

  The woman put her hands on her hips, and I took her meaning.

  “Okay. Maybe if I can’t understand you, I shouldn’t keep asking you questions. But sheesh.” I looked around. “Where did you come from? I’d swear to God you weren’t here just a second ago.”

  She squatted back down and played her hands in the water streaming down the gutter from higher ground.

  “No no no, you can’t do that. You’ll catch a cold.”

  She angrily hit the water, and splashed it at me.

  “Hey! Come on—that’s not right.”

  She shoved her hands back into the water—there was another storm drain down the street. Some of the water the janitor was brooming out of the Three Crosses compound had made it up to here, a waterfall over the sidewalk’s edge. Looking like some sort of creepy elderly otter, she fished out a handful of rubble and showed it to me.

  “Look—” I began. She shook her hand again, spattering me with cold drops. “That’s disgusting! Stop it!” I walked away from her and opened up the driver-side door of my car. I was done with trying to save her by force. Either she’d get in willingly, or I’d just drive away. I didn’t have to save everyone right now—in fact, my saving-people dance card was fucking full. I pointed from her to my car with an intention that could be understood across tongues. “Get in.”

  She shook her hand again, playing her opposite forefinger against the stones in her palm, as if she were panning for gold.

  “Get in,” I repeated. Surely she knew how door handles worked. I got in my car, and she hit my car hood with one hand.

  “Are you coming?” I asked her. She tottered back and opened up the door. When she sat down she threw the wet stones she held across my dashboard. Trails of thin mud poured down from them. “Hey!”

  She dusted her hands off on her wet gowns, and crossed her arms. “Gah.” Clearly, the Reinas hadn’t been able to keep her safe somewhere—and before that, neither had County. That left just one place we could go.

  * * *

  I went back toward the clinic, slowly, the only car on the road, searching for the path Olympio had taken Ti and me on yesterday. I made a few wrong turns but eventually wound up in front of Olympio’s tenement and parked my car.

  “Look,” I tried to explain to the old woman. “You just need to be safe for a night. No one should be on the streets tonight. Bad things are going down.” The only thing I saw on her face was frustration, likely with me. “I’m sorry. I wish I could explain.” I ran through what little Spanish I did know and went for broke. “Noche muy malo, mucho dolor. Stay indoors!”

  She lunged forward, grabbed up one of the rocks that hadn’t rattled off my dash, and shoved it at me.

  I took it. At least it was dry now. And it didn’t look much like a stone to me.

  “That’s not a stone. Is it?” I held it up to the fading light outside. “It’s a finger bone.”

  Not a lot like the tattoo Catrina and Adriana shared—it was long and slender, gracefully curved. It’d been stained gray by mud, but there was no denying what it was.

  I picked up another stone from where it’d fallen on my floor. It was just a rock. All the rest of them were. But not this one.

  “Okay—we’re going up to the boy’s house. And then you can talk, all right?”

  Wherever she’d gotten the bone from, I’d get Olympio to make her tell me.

  * * *

  It took time and effort to herd her up the stairs toward the curandero’s door. I knocked three times, and Olympio peeked out. “I knew I saw you outside!” he exclaimed. “You never told me you had a car!”

  “You never asked,” I said, and stepped back so he could see the woman I’d brought with me.

  “Ugh, her again?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. Can she stay here?”

  Olympio released a huffing sigh of protest. “I’ll just add it to everything else you owe my grandfather. Don’t forget, you owe him for last night.”

  “I’ll write him a check. Honest. Just this one more thing.”

  “Fine.” Olympio pulled back and opened the door all the way, so that we could step in.

  He went off to get the old woman a towel, and we stood in the same room I’d been in yesterday, only there was no tinfoil cross, and no snakes. The curandero sat on his chair in the corner, surrounded by candles and statuary. When Olympio returned, he looked me over. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I just need you to translate for me. And then to keep her safe overnight.”

  “Big. Check,” Olympio warned.

  “I totally understand.” I looked to the old woman, and pulled the finger bone out of my pocket. “Where did you get this, Grandmother?” I looked to Olympio. “It’s very important. Make her tell me.”

  Olympio translated my question, although I got the impression that the woman understood me on her own. />
  “Mictlan.”

  Olympio waited for her to go on. When she didn’t, he asked the question again.

  “Mictlan,” she answered again, with a strong nod.

  Olympio shrugged. “It’s not a word. I don’t know what it means.” Then the curandero spoke and Olympio began to frown. “My grandfather says … it’s like a word for hell.”

  I looked from Olympio to the curandero and back again. “I would guess that whoever’s finger that came from agrees with you.” I went over and put my back against the wall, much as I had the prior night while watching the curandero heal Ti. There was some thread of commonality here; all I had to do was see it. I squeezed the bone in a fist while I tried to think.

  The place where I’d seen Adriana trapped had been full of bones—and by the next night, when Luz had gotten there, completely emptied. And the new Three Crosses church, where we’d made our abortive attack, had been empty too.

  Adriana and all those bones were somewhere. I’d bet they were still all in the same room.

  Ti had said he’d been working at night someplace dark. With no lights. Maybe there was a third location? But if so, where?

  The old woman was standing in front of me, her eyes burning, trying to make me understand something that I couldn’t see. I shook my head like the janitor had shaken his head at me earlier, to see her playing in the gutters, while he shoved around all that water that wouldn’t drain away.

  Because the gutters were blocked. The same gutters I’d found Grandmother playing in, where she in turn had found bones—and not unlike the ditch where I’d found her in the first place, hidden underground. In a dark place, not unlike hell.

  “Olympio.” My eyes took a second to focus on the boy again. “I need you to explain to me how to get to that ditch by Tecato Town.”

  “Oh, no—” Olympio began shaking his head violently.

  “I need to get over there.”

  The old woman started clapping her hands in glee, like a psychotic cymbal monkey.

  “If you’re going there, then I want to go with you,” Olympio said.

  “No way.”

  “You don’t know where you’re going. It could flood—”

  “All the more reason that you can’t come.”

  “No—I have to!”

  I looked to his grandfather and pleaded with my expression for the man to talk some sense into his grandson.

  “El siente la llamada, debe contestar,” the curandero intoned.

  “See? My grandfather agrees. He says it’s my calling to go with you,” Olympio interrupted as his grandfather went on, and Olympio made a face. “Ugh. Really?”

  The curandero nodded, and Olympio looked up at me. “He says you have to take us both.”

  I blinked. How were we going to get someone with crutches down the steep cement side of the ditch to the bottom? Much less inside the tunnels afterward?

  Olympio read my mind. “Not him. Her.” He made a face at Grandmother.

  That was almost worse. “To a flash-flood zone, underground, while it’s raining out?” I looked from one to the other of them and waited for someone else here to be sensible, because it wasn’t going to be me.

  “It’s the only way. I was meant to go. So was she,” Olympio said.

  “You’re sure about this?” I asked Olympio’s grandfather, and he nodded. I let out a sigh. “I guess you can’t fight prophecy.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  To my dismay, no one had stolen my car while I’d been at the curandero’s. Then I’d at least have been able to leave the hospital-gown-wearing grandmother behind. Olympio, though—the thought of predestined adventure had him clinging to me like a barnacle. Before we left he’d gotten two flashlights from his neighbor for our trip. Now he sat in the passenger seat and played with my radio in between giving me directions. When he realized I didn’t have any Spanish presets, he started slowly twisting the dial. I didn’t enjoy listening to him hop from station to station like he was cracking a safe, but it was a good way for him to kill time. Listening to him made me not stop and think how insane this was. Taking them with me, destiny or not, was like going to war in a clown car.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you had a car,” Olympio said.

  “I wasn’t keeping it from you. It just never came up. Why? Where did you want to go?”

  “I couldn’t go anywhere, until I was called.” Olympio found a station he liked and finally sat back. “I’ve been waiting for my whole life to find my calling. Now, though … who knows? I have to see where the calling takes me.”

  “I thought you’d been seeing things your whole life?”

  “Yeah. So? So’s Catrina. You never know if you’ll really be called.” He nodded along with the song.

  “And you can’t tell it yourself?” I asked, wondering for a dark moment if Olympio’s grandfather had taken out a large life insurance policy on him.

  “No. It comes to you in dreams. Or another curandero can see it. Like I see things on other people.” He pointed for me to go right.

  “Speaking of, how’s my gaping chest wound?”

  “Your black flower?” he asked, and then squinted at me. “It’s smaller. Almost gone.”

  I made a thoughtful sound. “You’re just being nice to me in case we die, aren’t you?”

  He grinned. “I’m not going to die.”

  I stopped at a dented stop sign. “God. If I’m going to die, don’t tell me.” I looked back in the rearview mirror as I made another right-hand turn. “What about her?”

  “She’s just a cloud. Can’t make a thing out about her. I’ve seen people like her before, though. It just means she’s undecided.”

  “About what?” I couldn’t imagine the old woman having big decisions to make. It was clear she didn’t have a house, a lover, or a 401(k).

  “No clue. And I don’t think she’d tell me if I asked her. Park here.”

  “Great. Just great.” I pulled alongside the entrance to an alley. “Is this the kind of place where I might as well leave them my keys?”

  Olympio looked around my car in dismay. “It’s not like you have anything in here worth stealing.”

  “True. All right. All aboard that’s going aboard.”

  “What’s that mean?” Olympio asked.

  I jerked my thumb out the window. “Time to get off the train.”

  * * *

  It was almost sundown. I made them wait while I texted Asher quickly. I should have texted him earlier, but I think I knew he would try to leave me behind again—along with the Three Musketeers that I’d become.

  At the edge of Tecato Town. Think Maldonado’s bone room is underneath. Have guide. Better to tell him that than get into specifics. I eyed Olympio again. “You’re sure about this?” The old lady could suit herself, but Olympio … I wished I could make him stay behind somehow. I hadn’t gotten a choice about a lot of things as a kid—but nobody had told me I was destined for greatness either. Olympio worked harder and deserved a fairer life.

  He nodded brusquely. “I’m sure.”

  “Okay then. Where to?”

  “Through here,” Olympio said, and led the way.

  * * *

  We threaded through the tarps the tecatos had strung up to keep out the rain. The air here was thick with the smoke of wet fires. Skinny men huddled around them, blowing on them to keep them lit, with socks strung overhead. The old woman kept up surprisingly well.

  We reached the edge of the wide cement ditch, half a football field across, filled with a muddy stream. We were closer to the metal mouths this time than we’d been before. I could see them down there, and hear water pouring through them and on into the dark.

  “You ready?” Olympio asked me.

  “I was born ready,” I said, teasing, trying to sound like an action hero. Olympio snorted, and then we started down the steep cement bank.

  I didn’t have time to watch the old woman; I was too busy concentrating on my own feet. The sid
es were slicker now after last night’s rainfall, making the entire thing feel like we really were going into a mouth.

  I reached the bottom with a splash at the same time Olympio did. I wished I’d known when I’d left my house this afternoon to wear rain boots, though the water felt good on my smoke-snake sores. God only knew what I was going to contract tonight. I heard a splash behind me, and the old woman was standing there. I was glad she hadn’t tumbled down.

  “Which one?” I yelled. The sound of the water running over the corrugated metal was loud.

  “I don’t know! What does your intuition tell you?” Olympio shouted back.

  My intuition said it wished that it was dry. I stared, looking from one tunnel entrance to the next, wondering if Olympio was right, if I’d be able to feel the right one.

  I was just like those people at the hospital with their stupid crystals.

  “I have no idea!” I shouted back to him.

  The old woman shoved by both of us. “¡Éste, éste!” and went into the nearest mouth.

  Olympio shrugged. “She says this one!”

  “Fine.” She was probably at least as magical as I was, or anyone else could be. Our chances were one out of three.

  We hobbled behind the woman in the dark. Olympio pulled out one flashlight for himself and handed the other one to me.

  The old woman was part mole. She didn’t wait for our light, she just dove through the tunnel, her hunchback perfectly suited for our journey. Olympio and I had to cling to the walls to stay upright while the ankle-high water tried to trip us. I got in front of Olympio and started using my bigger size to block him from falls while he tried to shine the flashlight far enough ahead to keep the woman in their spotlight. She took a right-hand turn and disappeared.

  “Fuck,” I whispered when she went out of sight.

  “Come on, keep up,” Olympio urged me on.

  Together we waddled to where she’d taken the turn. Olympio shone his light in the tunnel she’d taken. “Where did she go?” I asked.

  “¿Abuela?” Olympio called.