Shapeshifted es-3

by Cassie Alexander

“Wait for us, lady!” I shouted after him.

  We took the turn, but she didn’t wait. We reached a T in the tunnels and shone our lights each way. “Where now?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” One of the tunnels looked higher than the other. I couldn’t imagine Maldonado pulling off a ceremony while fighting getting swept away down here. “That way.” I pointed my flashlight toward the slightly drier tunnel.

  “Okay.”

  We shimmied along it, one step after another, until it took another turn. This new tunnel was longer than the flashlight beam. Could she have really gotten that far in front of us?

  “Keep going.” Olympio nudged from behind me.

  “Fine.”

  The tunnel floor rose, and we had to crouch farther down. The only benefit was that the water we walked through was shallower. Each shuffling step sloshed less and kicked more. There were hard sharp things below us that we were walking on; they ground against one another, making our footing harder to find. I toed up one of whatever it was, my foot numb with prolonged exposure to the runoff.

  It was rounded and flat, and curved just like a rib.

  “Huesos,” Olympio whispered behind me. “Bones.”

  I nodded and put my finger to my lips. I turned his flashlight off and kept the other one, keeping its beam low as we went in.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  There was a bend in the tunnel, and the walls turned from metal to stone … to bone. We’d found it. The last bone room. Olympio gasped.

  “Shhhh,” I cautioned. I raised the flashlight slowly, scanning around the ground. Scattered bones covered the floor and were affixed to the walls. The same cage I’d seen before, or its sister, sat against one wall, its occupant hard to spot inside. From somewhere in the room came a sound of running water, a faint hissing like a faucet left on.

  I didn’t see anyone where the flashlight could reach. I took a few more steps in, and Olympio stayed glued behind me. Together we crept up to the cage. “Adriana?” Olympio guessed.

  “Dejala ir,” the girl in the cage whispered back.

  I ignored him. “We have to get her out of here—”

  “No. She’s saying ‘free her,’ not ‘free me,’” Olympio interrupted. He took the flashlight away from me and shone it down to where Adriana lay collapsed inside the bone cage. Her whole body was wedged against the side, and her arm was reaching out. He shone the flashlight where she was reaching to—and Luz was there, chained to the ground.

  “Luz!” I ran over to her at the same time as Olympio did. “Luz—wake up—” She was sprawled across the floor, chained at both wrists, and I realized with sickness that the hissing sound I’d heard was her—the cuffs were silver and sawing through her arms as fast as she could heal. I dragged her back and pulled the silver cuffs out of the divots they’d worked into her wrists.

  “Luz, when did this happen to you?” Without Catrina around to guard Luz, had someone attacked the Reinas during the day? Who better to know their schedule than the Three Crosses? I’d hoped the guards I’d seen with submachine guns had been able to defend the people inside the Reina compound.

  But it was still daylight outside. Despite the fact that it was pitch-dark in here without our flashlight to see, the daylight above still held sway.

  “Why won’t she wake up?” Olympio asked me.

  “She’s Reina—and it’s still light out overhead.” I snapped my fingers and pointed to the nearest pieces of bone. “Grab me those, will you?” Olympio did as he was told, and I shimmed them between her skin and the silver cuffs.

  There was the sound of boot heels on cement, footsteps louder than the water outside. And another Luz appeared, from a crevice of shadow in the far wall.

  “How?” Olympio whispered.

  How indeed! My mind panicked, and then I realized I knew. Last night, when Luz had run in first to look for Adriana, or maybe even before then, during a prior fight—she’d touched Maldonado. And he was still a shapeshifter. He’d been able to capture her and take her form.

  It was probably how he’d captured Adriana in the first place.

  We’d taken Maldonado himself home last night. No wonder he’d left Catrina behind. And because he wasn’t really a vampire, he wasn’t constrained by the sun.

  The shapeshifter’s eyes saw us, and he put a hand that wasn’t his on his hip. “So now you see.” The upright Luz looked to her twin on the ground, and then at me. “I knew if my son loved you, you were smart,” said the shapeshifter with Luz’s face. And then he transformed into Maldonado.

  Luz’s clothes were tight on him, until they disappeared, changing with him into Maldonado’s black robes, pendant and all. I didn’t know if his transformation was shapeshifting or magic or what.

  “So you’re … Asher’s father?” I asked, looking for some way I could appeal to him.

  “Only part of me. It’s very complicated in here.” He tapped his forehead with a gloved finger and watched me with glittering eyes. “We only use the shapeshifter when we need him. We do as I say, the rest of the time.”

  “Can you,” I began slowly, not sure who I was addressing or how to address him, “let her go?”

  He grinned and laughed. “We have a plan, and she’s a part of it. It’s too late to go back now.”

  “But she’s just a girl—” I pleaded. “You have to let her go.”

  He knelt down a distance away, so we were on the same level. “Why would I do that?” He swept his arm back to indicate the room we were in with the girl in the cage and the bones on the walls. “I have a glorious plan, and you expect me to ruin it over your conscience? Because you think you have a tenuous connection with someone from my past?”

  Maldonado was waiting for an answer. The longer I played stupid, and the longer we talked, the greater the chances Luz would wake up, or Asher would come down here and save us. Maybe.

  “Do you know how many pasts I have inside me right now?” he asked.

  All I could do was shake my head.

  Maldonado leaned forward. “I’ll tell you. Thousands. And they’re all so mad. And the shapeshifter, your friend’s father, is the worst of them all.” He grabbed a loose bone off the ground, and scraped its sharp edge across his forehead. “He screams and screams until I want to cut him out of me from the inside. When all this was his idea. His idea!” He jabbed the bone at his forehead with force, and when he moved his hand, a bruise and drops of blood were left behind.

  Maldonado regained control of himself, casting the bone aside. “When he’s the one that found me to implement it.”

  “Why? What possible reason could you have for all this?” I looked desperately around the room, with the deaths of so many written on its walls.

  “This location lends itself to magic. This place is as old and angry as the land your Shadows call home, and is more watered with fresh blood. It was nothing to buy the warehouse above and block off this storm drain, and easy to use the pathetic tecatos outside. Your zombie friend went among them at night, while they were high, like a junkie reaper.” He paused to consider this, and then continued. “And then this room—even in his sleep, look at the artistry. He’s good with bones.”

  I needed more time. Luz needed more time. “But why all the bones? Why here? Why the girl?”

  “So we could call Santa Muerte to us and control her.” Maldonado rose again to standing. “It’s a brilliant plan.”

  “You can’t own Santa Muerte!” Olympio shouted from behind me. “¡Eres un mentiroso, hijo de la chingada!”

  “Shut it!” I ordered Olympio. He didn’t know what I did about Maldonado. The flashlight he held, our only light, shook in his hands.

  “We’ll kill you!” Olympio went on.

  Maldonado smiled. “There you are wrong. I can see into the future sometimes. And I see myself becoming very powerful shortly.”

  Luz stirred beside me. I didn’t see it, but I could feel it, like a presence returning to fill the space, the reverse of dying. I’d never see
n a vampire wake up before. I knew she was going to be pissed—and still chained, unable to help us just as she hadn’t been able to help herself before.

  The only thing I could think of to do to save us was what she’d been forbidden to do. I carefully spotted Luz’s lips in the near dark. I’d once sworn I’d never let anyone else bite me—I’d already been bitten by Anna once, and feeling vampire fangs slide into your flesh once is enough. But if I didn’t get Luz to wake up soon and even the odds, Olympio and I weren’t going to make it out of here.

  “Olympio—run!” I shouted at him, and reached for her mouth. I yanked her lower jaw down, smashed my wrist between her fangs, and slammed her jaw back shut. Olympio took off, his light shining with him toward the tunnel.

  Maldonado spotted me half a second too late, as the light disappeared. He laughed. “Dama—there’s no key for those cuffs.” There was a snapping sound, and then bright flames appeared, without anything to burn, in the high corners of the room, illuminating all the bones. There was a pattern on the walls: They swirled from large to small, all sweeping in toward the cage. Maldonado walked over and yanked me back, making Luz’s teeth lacerate my wrist.

  He grinned down at me, his face a rictus. Both hands on my shoulders, he shoved me back with more motion than force. It was his magic that followed through, sending me skidding like a strong wind into the wall, extra bones on the floor clattering away from me. I was pinned to the wall, a great weight pressing against my chest. “Stay here,” he commanded. “Someone should get to see.”

  And then he returned his attention to the woman in the cage. “Adriana, mi niña esqueleto, mi mujer delgeda, la más pálida y rubia.” He stroked his hands up and down the bars of the cage, bone and metal both. Bones on the wall behind me were jabbing into my back, but his power held me still. Maldonado leaned back and started waving his arms in the air in front of the cage in a pattern, like he was conducting a symphony. His voice rang out, as the curandero’s had on the previous night. I couldn’t get free.

  A dirty face appeared in the tunnel entrance. Maldonado seemed not to notice. It was the old woman returning. Go away! I tried to shout at her, but the bruja had stolen my voice.

  Grandmother walked in like a charmed snake, weaving back and forth. Maldonado’s hands included her in his gestures, and he crooned to her, encouraging her, pleading, begging, telling her where to go. And she listened. She came nearer—not to him, but to the cage.

  Inside it, Adriana had risen up. She was impossibly thin, cachectic, and the sleeveless white dress she wore hung off her. The outlines of her bones were clear to see, running just beneath their matching tattoos, and her face was tattooed into a grinning skull mask.

  Like a bird dancing for itself in front of a mirror, Grandmother and Adriana mimicked each other. Grandmother came closer to the bars of her cage, and Adriana followed, holding up her weakened body by leaning against the bars. Maldonado’s voice rose in a song-like prayer, and Grandmother stood up straight and leaned in. Adriana met her there, and their lips touched.

  Old and broken, and young and broken, different but paired, two halves of the same whole. I realized what I was seeing just as a strange light enveloped the place where they touched—if I squinted it looked like they were merging. Maldonado’s magic was uniting Santa Muerte: the old lost woman, the goddess held prisoner by the Shadows for so long that she was a hollow version of her own self, and putting her into Adriana’s starved, trapped form. Adriana’s hand went up, and Santa Muerte’s matched it, two hands pressing into each other until magic combined matter and only one hand remained.

  Maldonado’s voice went from whispers to shouting, and behind him Luz sat up. Night had finally arrived. She licked her lips, tasting my blood, and she looked at me with angry eyes. I’d betrayed her to her maker—but Anna was the only person who could save us all now. Then she saw Adriana and Grandmother, and the strange thing they were becoming, conjoined.

  “No!” She lunged at the end of the chains—I heard the bones I’d slid into her cuffs shatter.

  If Luz had just woken up—so had Anna. Would she get here in time? Where was she? Was she even still in town? I didn’t know. I started beating against the magic that held me, and it kept slamming me back into the bone wall, tighter each time.

  Another voice joined Maldonado’s. A flashlight beam illuminated the tunnel’s entrance, and then Olympio was there.

  No! Run! I tried to shout at him, but my voice was still gone.

  He came into the room like the boy I’d first seen outside the clinic, confident, and his prayers met Maldonado’s with a cocky tone. He didn’t wave his hands, just set his flashlight in his armpit, lining it up so it’d beam into Maldonado’s face, and kept repeating himself.

  Maldonado rebounded—I expected him to attack Olympio physically, but he redoubled his efforts toward controlling the women he held in thrall. The light where Grandmother and Adriana met got brighter—no matter what Olympio tried, Maldonado was too strong. Olympio realized it just as I did, while Luz was screaming obscenities in two languages, lunging like a rabid dog at the end of her chains.

  Olympio grabbed the flashlight from under his armpit and threw it at the cage.

  It flew end-over-end and only hit the corner of the cage. But it hit the bone there solidly, and knocked off one tiny flake.

  Maldonado began waving his hands madly, as if he was sending his orchestra toward destruction. He flung his hand out toward Olympio. His magic slammed into the boy, sending him reeling back into the wall beside me.

  I watched the tiny piece of bone drop as I heard Olympio grunt, wind knocked out of him by the force of his landing. The light holding the matched women together began to flicker and shake.

  “Edie—” Olympio whispered, gasping for air. There was a spear of tibia shooting out through his right shoulder—a bone from the wall behind us had pierced him through, back-to-front.

  Oh God, I yelled, still without a voice.

  Luz shouted a triumphant battle cry from behind the cage. She held up mangled hands—she’d broken the bones of her hands to free them from the silver cuffs. She ran for Grandmother and began to pry her back from Adriana with her arms. Maldonado stopped praying now, and started shouting. I dropped the few inches between me and the ground, yelped, and found I could talk.

  “Olympio—” I scurried over to where he was pinned. We were the two least magical things in the room—we needed to get the hell out. I reached behind him, where the wall was slick with his blood, and tried to pull the bone free from the wall. It was attached—embedded into cement. I couldn’t break it without hurting Olympio. With piercing wounds you were supposed to try to leave the object in—it might be applying pressure on arteries on the inside, stopping the person from bleeding out. But the shouting and fighting behind us wouldn’t last forever, and in Luz’s damaged state I couldn’t guarantee who would win.

  “This is going to suck,” I told Olympio.

  He gritted his teeth and nodded. “Do it.”

  I took him by his shoulders and yanked him off the wall. The bone slid into his wound again and out the other side. He collapsed into me. I balled his hand into a fist and put it up against his chest, and I pressed the back of him into me, picking him up.

  “Come on,” I told us both. “Come on.” I started drag-carrying him to the tunnel’s maw. Behind us, the shouting and sounds of fighting didn’t stop.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  I wasn’t sure where we were going. The water fought against us, trying to steal Olympio away from me. We were lower here, so the water was deeper—I didn’t know if that meant I was going the wrong direction, or if it’d begun to rain outside. He whimpered every time I yanked him, and my chest was warm with his hot blood.

  “You can’t die,” I explained to both of us. “You can’t.” I felt along the tunnel’s side with my shoulder, hitting it with the top of my head, the sound of the water susurrating around us, making me dizzy. What if I got turned around? What
if Maldonado’s magic twisted the tunnel somehow? What if there was no safe place?

  “Come on.” I pulled us both along. The air got fresher, and I had to fight the water more. I was soaked up to my thighs; I couldn’t feel from my feet to my knees. The only thing that kept me going was that I was carrying Olympio.

  The water rose and I stumbled, wrenching on Olympio’s arm. He cried out then; I heard it echo. I pulled him up again and turned to start sidestepping against the rising water-wall, trying to give it less of me to push against.

  “Edie? Olympio!” Our names, shouted from a distance.

  “¡Estoy aquí! Here!” Olympio shouted weakly from my arms.

  I couldn’t spare a breath to yell. If I lost my footing now, there’d be no regaining it; we’d both be washed away, battered against the tunnel walls.

  “Edie! Olympio!” The voice was more panicked. Closer.

  I saw light just as hands snatched in. I fought them instinctively. Olympio yelped as he was pulled from my arms.

  “We’ve got you—Edie—” Ti was there, pulling me forward against the tide, and Asher was at his side holding Olympio.

  “She’s down there—so’s he,” I whispered as soon as I felt safe. They hauled us against the current, out of the tunnel, back to the ditch’s open space. Wider here, the water was shallower but not much slower. “He’s insane.” I reached for Asher. “Whatever he tells you—he is insane.”

  Asher held up a hand covered with Olympio’s blood. “I know.”

  There was a crash of thunder and a lightning bolt nearby. In that frozen second of light, I could see that the man who held Olympio wasn’t fully Asher anymore … or Hector either. His face was pulled between forms, asymmetrical, pieced together with parts from a hundred different beings.

  “No—” I fought against Ti to stand on my own.

  “Shhh,” Asher whispered to Olympio, hidden again in the dark. Regardless of his form, he applied pressure to the wound like a doctor would. “Shhhhhhh.”