Ballad & Dagger, page 5
Tía thinks she’s invincible! This is ridiculous. Sure, she could defeat Satan with that chancla swipe of hers, but this is a teeming street fight! She’s being ridiculous, and somewhere, deep down, she surely knows it.
But ridiculous or not, I can’t let her get hurt.
I take a deep breath, try to ignore the aching imprint all those eyes left on me—and follow. Bodies tumble and thrash all around me. My hand reaches out to grab her little arm, and someone collapses right between us, yelling and flailing as he falls. Two more people crash on top of the first. And then, very suddenly, what started as a bunch of shoves and a few sloppy punches explodes into something much, much worse.
Yes, weapons come out. That’s the most obvious part—as if some silent understanding passed instantly between friend and foe alike, hands scramble into pockets, flip open leather sheaths concealed beneath pant legs, snap extendable batons into position. But there’s something worse, or maybe that is the secret that leaped from one head to the next—a shift in energy, the difference between a puddle and a whirlpool.…I don’t know what’s caused it, but the fighting seems to catch fire; the hits—once just sloppy, drunken swats—now find flesh and bone and break them with wet, nauseating cracks and thuds.
I try to find my way through it all, dodging swipes and shoves, stepping aside as bodies rumble past. But I don’t know where Tía Lucia went, or how to get us out of here even if I could find her. The fighting has taken over the world; everything beyond it seems foggy, impossibly far away.
“Tía!” I yell uselessly.
In the middle of it all, Tolo stomps back and forth, whacking folks who roll up on him and trying to calm others. I don’t see Tams or Tía or even Chela, who seems made for moments like these.
Someone rams into my side—by mistake, I think—and I stumble out of the way, barely stopping myself from hitting the pavement. Even as I straighten, my foot suddenly slides out from under me and I almost go into free fall.
Blood, I realize, once I manage to regain my balance.
Someone’s bleeding.
“Tía?”
Someone’s bleeding and no one cares, and maybe that’s the moment—the third time tonight? I’ve lost track—when I feel myself breaking inside. It could be Tía Lucia; it could be any one of our other neighbors and loved ones. But the fighting rages on around me, and I’m about to start shoving people myself, just to get out of there—for all I know, my aunt already made it to safety—when a crackly voice blasts out of a loudspeaker: “This is the New York City Police Department! Everyone is to evacuate the premises immediately!”
That gets people’s attention, but probably not in the way the cops expected.
Those words haven’t been heard in Little Madrigal, well…ever, probably. This neighborhood was mid-gentrification eighteen years ago when Si Baracasa staged some elaborate public executions right in the middle of Fulton Street (no one actually died—supposedly) and scared away all the hipsters. He’d won the battle for Brooklyn—our little corner of it, anyway—without a live round fired, taking a page from the Blackbeard book of scaring the crap out of people so bad you don’t even have to fight them. Si was the epitome of the pirate trifecta: showboat, warrior, and businessman. He bought up all that suddenly empty and rapidly devaluing real estate, and Little Madrigal was born. By the time the island sank and the rest of us showed up, Si had already set up his own little criminal empire and laid the foundation for a working arrangement with the cops, the same one Anisette would later codify, that kept them far away from these streets and our business.
Until now…
“Anyone who doesn’t leave will be arrested for trespassing!” the voice continues, and already the people who were just smashing each other to pulp have suddenly worked out their differences and turned all their ire on the cops.
“We can’t trespass on our own streets!” Tolo Baracasa yells amidst thunderous hoorahs. “You’re trespassing!”
Nothing unites Galeranos like bucking authority. Even in our worst moments, we can agree on that much.
“Please evacuate!” the loudspeaker croons, sounding a little more conciliatory now.
The crowd of brawlers moves as one. They shove past me toward the quickly retreating line of police.
And just like that, the intersection around me empties as the yelling, pushing mass tumbles away through the streets.
Well, not all of it.
Around me, the injured writhe and moan, and there, just a few feet away, lies Tía Lucia.
No.
The whole night seems to collapse around her unmoving body.
I drop to my knees by her side, barely aware that I even crossed the distance to reach her.
This is…Somehow this all feels like my fault.
The last thing I did was pull away from her. The last thing I said was I don’t want this.
Something tiny crystallizes inside me. Terror, heartache, regret—they’re all competing voices having a screaming match within. But there’s something else there, too: a quiet certainty, deep down beneath it all.
You are a healer, Mateo. You must heal.
Maybe, just maybe…there’s something I can do.
Suddenly, it doesn’t matter that all this magic and Tía’s spirits in pots have always seemed like over-the-top woo-woo to me. All that matters is that I might be able to help her. I’m all there is right now. Everyone else is off fighting the cops or lying low to keep from getting arrested. There’s no 9-1-1 for us. Calling an ambulance means the cops will come, too, so we make do in other ways the best we can. And if she’s right, if I carry the magical essence of some ancient healing santo, if I have…powers…then I’m all she’s got.
I hate this. I hate all of it.
I have no choice.
Okay, Mateo. I glance down at her body. Dirt and street grime are splattered like gashes across her white dress. There’s a nasty bruise on her forehead, but no bleeding. What did I learn in that CPR class my parents forced me to take a few years ago? See if she’s breathing! Right. Her chest rises slowly as I watch, once, then again.
So she’s alive.
Tía Lucia is alive. I want to cry just realizing that much, but I have to keep it together.
Gently, gently, I touch my fingers to her head. Maybe something will make sense. Maybe a bright light will issue forth and she’ll pop up to her feet and laugh like nothing happened, stroll away.
No dice.
She’s alive but still knocked out.
“Tía…” I try shaking her a little. “Can you hear me?” Nothing works. Not words, not touch. I’m not a healer. I’m just a kid. A mess.
“Mateo!” Tams’s voice cuts through the chaos inside me. When I look up, there are tears in my eyes and she’s running across the street. “What happened to Tía Lucia?”
“I don’t know! I’m…I’m trying to…help?”
Tams looks as confused as I feel. “You don’t…” Even know how your powers work is the rest of that phrase, I’m sure. You didn’t even know you had them until ten minutes ago. Tams doesn’t have to finish it. I’ve been saying it to myself this whole time. But she’s nicer to me than I am to myself, so instead she gets down to the practical. “How?”
“I don’t know, but…I have to try!”
She squats on the other side of Tía Lucia and squints at her like she’s trying to solve one of those impossible trigonometry problems Ms. Fernandez gives to keep us busy when she wants some quiet time. “Probably a concussion,” Tams reports a few moments later.
How is she so calm? And how does she know that? Doesn’t matter. “What do we do about it?”
“Did you try using your…?” She waves her hands around to indicate woo-woo.
“I…Tía made it sound like I’d just know how, but I don’t. ‘You’re a healer,’ she said, ‘so heal.’ What does that even mean?”
“Try again,” Tams says. “Whatever it is, it’s in you.”
I shake my head but bite back a retort. Seeing Tía Lucia’s mostly still body feels like an explosion that rocks through me every couple seconds. All I want to do is run away. Instead, I take a breath and slide my hands along the side of her face to her forehead.
“Close your eyes, Mateo,” Tams instructs.
I do, because why not? And immediately the world seems calmer. I don’t know if my best friend actually knows what she’s doing or she’s just really good at faking it till she makes it, but either way, it’s good to be around someone so chill in a crisis.
A swirl of dots behind my eyelids resolves into a pattern. It dances across my fingertips, shimmers back and forth at light speed along my arms and through my chest. What is it? In my mind, I reach out, grasping for meaning, for a sense of how to move. It feels like I’m slipping down a mountainside as my whole being, all the tiny lights within me, scrambles for…
There…
Purchase.
Just a whisper. It’s not a voice; it’s a sensation—the feeling of a free fall interrupted. Sanctuary, however brief and tenuous. A tiny way forward.
I must’ve gasped a little, because Tams asks if I’m okay. The moment is so crisp, so fragile. I just nod, ever so slightly, eyes still closed. I don’t want to lose whatever tiny thread I’ve found, my only glimpse of what this power entails, a way to save Tía Lucia.
There’s a flow to the swirl of lights now. It seems to resolve itself into a pattern around me, something like a song. I can do patterns. Music is patterns: setting them up, getting them solidified and clear, and then…
There!
…breaking them.
Something is off in the flow of lights in Tía Lucia’s brain. It’s just slight, a little tangle in the flow, but it’s all connected—of course it’s all connected—and already, the regular swirl of movement is self-correcting. I know—I don’t know how, but deep within me, I do know all I have to do is help it out a bit.
Within myself, I reach. Within Tía’s swirling mind, I reach.
Somewhere, something clicks, slides into place.
When I open my eyes, Tía Lucia is blinking up into them like I’m the sun and she’s waking up from a terrific night of partying.
“¿Qué…?” she groans. “¿Qué pasó?”
“I…think I…I think I healed you?”
She rubs her face. That bruise has already faded to a yellowish blotch. Tams and I help her sit up. “I remember the fighting. The yelling. I was trying to get them to stop. Why were they fighting…?” She swats the question away. “Bah. No importa.” Looks at me, eyes suddenly sharp, lucid. “Mateo, you did it!”
“I did.” I half laugh. All that panic swirling through me has nowhere to go now that Tía Lucia’s okay, so it turns into a weird giddiness, like I just drank ten cups of her incredible café. I want to sit here and hold her and celebrate, but there are more injured people around us, and I…apparently, I am a healer.
“We’ll talk back at home,” Tía says, standing and dusting herself off. She must’ve seen me glance around. “I’ll clean up in the club and get one of the fellas to walk me home. Go do what you were born to.”
I still don’t know how I feel about all that, but fear wiped away my anger, and now I’m mostly just confused. She hugs me, those warm arms squeezing all the uncertainty away, if only just for a moment, and lays her head on my chest. “Gracias, Mateo,” she whispers, and then waddles away.
I watch her go. I almost lost her. I also almost cursed her out just before almost losing her.
Ugh. I’ve always been my parents’ son through and through: a wanderer, drawn to things that make sense. Staying with Tía just felt like a temporary stop, just like everywhere else I’ve ever stayed. The Home Everywhere/No Home problem: my whole existence in a nutshell.
Now…in just a few hours, everything has changed. My tía knows things about me, my past; she understands this power I carry.
I almost lost her.
I don’t understand it all, but she’s right—we can deal with that later. Right now, Bernal Balcón is writhing on the ground nearby, clutching his arm.
I’m about to approach him when I notice Tams’s wide stare on something behind me. “Uhhhh…” she says, her voice a dark cloud.
Chela’s standing there in the hazy streetlamp glow, a shiny blade in her hand. The same one I saw her murder someone with earlier. It’s short and forms an elegant curve away from the beaded handle. Her big red hair is pulled back into a single pouf now, and she’s wearing all black again. She’s not moving, looks relaxed even, but there’s no question she’s ready to kill.
“Ahrr…” I say, once again like a doofus. Is it me she’s here to kill? Maybe that whole being-nice-to-me thing earlier was an act so she could get close. I was an eyewitness, after all. That’s what you do, isn’t it? And why can’t I find it in me to just say nothing instead of making random grunts?
For a moment, she and I just stare at each other, like we did a few hours ago, except a little calmer now. I hear Tams stand up behind me, ready to throw down, even though neither of us is armed and Chela is obviously trained in some kind of stabby-death murder style.
Chela raises her eyebrows, maybe smiling ever so slightly? Then she turns around, and I realize there are people gathered at the far end of the street. I recognize some of them—Tomasino Pap, Arco “El Gorro” Kordal, Smernal Colón.…Proud pirate types, most of them, but not part of Tolo’s crew.
I’m not sure what they’re here for, but they didn’t come simply to gawk at the carnage.
Everybody’s just standing there staring.
Whatever their issue is, Chela Hidalgo’s very presence keeps them at bay.
When Beral Balcón groans, I turn, very slowly, and lower myself back down to find that tiny click of connection once again.
I can’t say whether or not it works exactly, this power in me. Or whatever it is.
When it’s all over, I’ve squatted beside all four of the injured and muttered to myself while I waved my hands, closed my eyes, sweated, got dizzy, spoke meaningless reassurances. I only puked once, hey, hey! (That was probably only because there was nothing left to puke, though. I might’ve dry heaved three or four times.)
No one was too messed up, thank the seas.
Tams stuck around, checking in with each person as they managed to get to their feet and hobble off to safety. (Wherever safety is—who knows anymore?)
The pirate guys kept their distance, and Chela stayed stock-still all the while, blade out.
And now, as I do the final made-up hand placing and hopeful healing with the last guy—Vedo, the kid with the bad poem—he lets out a gurgley moan. I’m about to ask if he’s okay when he goes, “She’s so gorgeous.”
I roll my eyes and get back to his bruised forearm. Everyone is always bugging me to introduce them to Tams. I get it—she’s strikingly beautiful, with cheekbones you could do surgery with, and a fashion sense five years ahead of anyone’s time. Plus, she’s the only person at school as tall as I am, but she carries it better, like she was born for height. Even more so when she’s next to my unnecessarily gangly ass.
But when I look up and follow Vedo’s gaze, it’s not Tams he’s gawking at—it’s Chela.
And I mean, she does look kind of radiant there in the street with the blue glow from the club’s marquee turning her into some kind of celestial being. A murdering celestial being, I remind myself.
I’ve never thought that much about her. She hardly speaks, just stays out of the way, mostly. I did play her bat mitzvah, though, three years back, when I was just getting started at this performing thing. Chela had everything memorized perfectly and spoke the words of the Torah like she was having a casual conversation, not with the usual breathy, belabored arrhythmia most kids garble out.
Now that I think about it, she absolutely killed it on the dance floor at the after-party, and I remember being kind of amazed, because she’d never seemed to care about music or, well, anything much.
She’d moved with the same fluidity and abandon to whatever pop song was blaring on the speakers back then as she had tonight, in the run-up to her kill.
I shudder, condense all those thoughts into a mumbled “Yeah,” and realize Vedo and I are both staring at her. Chela realizes it, too, apparently, because she turns ever so slightly and catches my eyes—or maybe Vedo’s, who’s to say. Then she looks back at the goons at the end of the street.
“Just gorgeous,” Vedo says again. Then he gets up and wanders away without so much as a thank-you. There hasn’t been an actual initiated healer for generations, as far as I know, so I’m not sure why Vedo is taking all this so calmly, but I guess he’s in shock. Or too in love to care.
Doesn’t matter. I’m done. I don’t know what I am, or what I did, but it’s over now. I wipe off my suit—it’s filthy from street grime and a little spot of (dry heave) blood. And when I look up, Chela’s gone. The street is empty except for Tams, who’s calling to let her parents know she’s okay.
Then a shimmer catches my eye near the club entrance. I already know what—who—it is before I glance over.
That hooded spirit from before. He’s watching me, a bright enigma in the shadowy night.
I get up from my squat. Everybody seems to be watching me these days.
Tams’s still deep in her phone, and I walk slowly toward the apparition, my whole body a single, thundering pulse. I’m a few feet away when he raises both hands, and I almost leap back, my heart ready to blast out my throat.
But he just places them on his cowl and pulls it back, revealing a stern bearded face over broad shoulders. A single scar runs down the left cheek, over his empty eye and down to his jawline.
I’m low-key impressed that my voice doesn’t shake when I say his name: “Galanika.”
The spirit stares at me for another moment, and then he’s gone.
“What?” Tams says behind me.
“Galanika,” I say again, still staring at the dark emptiness where one of the three spirits of San Madrigal just stood.
“Uh-huh, sure,” says Tams. “I told my folks I’m crashing with you tonight, because obviously we got a lot to talk about. You ready to get out of here?”
