Ballad & Dagger, page 9
Then she says, “Well, you just found one of them.”
“Wait…WHAT? What did you say?”
“Hmm.” She shrugs an acknowledgment that’s neither here nor there, then grabs the thick rope and Tarzan-swings out over the mats.
Did I say too much? Ruin everything? Who knows? She catches the next rope and reaches the far ledge. Then she turns to look at me, still holding the rope.
I grab the first one easily and swing out. When I get close enough to the platform that I can see a sheen of sweat on her shoulders and forehead, I reach out for her to pass me the other rope.
She doesn’t.
“Urk,” I grunt, hurling myself at the landing and barely grasping its ledge.
Chela looks down at me like I’m a bug she might step on. She’s not smiling, but her eyes are twinkling. “Six o’clock tonight at the betahayim,” she says as I grunt and pant, heaving myself up.
I’m halfway onto the platform, struggling. “Betahayim Cemetery?”
When I get to full height, she’s glaring up at me like she’s about to land a slick comeback. Instead, her eyes go wide at something behind me, then narrow into the stare that I recognize from last night, the one that means death for whoever it’s aimed at.
I turn and catch the faintest glimmer of someone tall and burly making their way toward us. Who is that? They’re huge….
I look back at Chela to find her eyes still firmly set in murder position, but now there’s the slightest smile glinting across her face. She glances up at me. “Oops.”
“What do you mean, OooOOF!” Before I can finish, Chela shoulder-checks me off the platform.
“HOW EXACTLY DID YOU END up like this?” Tams asks, gazing down at me. Maybelline stands beside her, arms akimbo, and Maza’s there, too, shaking their head.
“Chela…pushed me…” I groan from the mat, where I’m still lying on my back.
Chela Hidalgo, who, we can now add, is also one of the three initiated children of the original saints of San Madrigal.
Just like me.
Assuming she’s telling the truth.
And, I realize as I lie here trying to catch my breath, I really hope she is. Because then it wouldn’t just be me. There’d be someone else in this weird predicament. And if we set aside the murder thing for a moment, which I realize is a big if, Chela seems like someone I could talk to. Once I figure out a way around the not-being-supposed-to-trust-her thing, anyway.
Where is she now? Did she go after that stranger? She sure looked ready to kill again.
“Well, that answers that question,” Maza says.
“What question?” There’s no sign of either Chela or the hulking person anymore, at least as far as I can see from down here. When I landed, the whole class had crowded around, mostly curious, Bonsignore shaking her head like I’d messed up somehow. Then she’d shooed everyone off to get changed, because the period was almost over, anyway.
Maybelline hands her twin a dollar. “Does Chela Hidalgo like you?”
“Urg” is the approximate noise that comes out of me.
Maza accepts the money with a magnanimous bow. “Clearly, the answer is an unequivocal yes.”
“Unless…” Maybelline snatches it back. “You didn’t say anything untoward to her, did you, Mateo?”
“What? I would nev—”
“Nah,” Maza says. “He doesn’t seem like the type. Are you, Mateo?”
“No!”
“Half the time it’s the ones who don’t seem like the type that are the worst,” Tams points out. “But Mateo’s actually for real not the type.”
Maza does a little mambo. “Which means she shoved him unprovoked. Which means”—they pluck the dollar away from Maybelline again—“this belongs to me.”
“I feel like people in Shakespeare plays get murdered for making bets like this,” I grumble.
“Well, at least we know who will be doing the murdering,” Maybelline chuckles.
Tams and I trade a wide-eyed look. Do they know about what Chela did?
“What?” Maybelline says. “She just shoved him off a platform.”
“Ah, true, true,” Tams concedes, like it was all just an inside joke.
“A love shove,” Maza adds.
Annoying.
“Are we helping me up, or are we just standing around enjoying my plight?”
“Mostly the second option,” Tams says, “but I guess now that we’ve done that, we could do the first thing.” She and Maza grab my hands and heave me up.
“You all right?” Maybelline asks when she’s done laughing.
“I guess so. Where’d Chela go?”
“See that?” Tams gloats unnecessarily. “Amor!”
“No, it’s not that. She was…There was a…” I look around. Tams I trust like she’s my own family. As for the twins, they’ve just been part of the mass of people I’m pretty sure either don’t like me or don’t really care that I exist, right up until today, basically.
“What?” Maza asks, face serious.
Trust no one. “Nothing,” I say. “I don’t know.”
“Well, we going to next period or what?” Maybelline says, not catching the We’ll talk later look Tams shoots me.
“Yeah,” I say, grateful for the distraction.
Then the overheads flicker and go out.
It’s not totally dark—the fluorescents from the hallway spill in, cast an eerie shine against the edges of Bonsignore’s torture devices and the metal bleachers beyond them. But that means it’s not a school-wide power outage, just this room.
“Um…” Maza says. “What’s going on?”
The four of us backstep close together toward the door.
“I—I don’t know,” I say. But this can’t be unrelated to whoever it was that caught Chela’s attention.
Something moves at the far end of the room—a form dashing behind the bleachers. I barely make them out before they’re gone—a tall figure, maybe the same one from before? No idea.
“Y’all saw that?” Maza gasps.
“Oh hell no,” Maybelline says, backing away faster.
There’s a glint of ethereal light, and the figure steps out from the bleachers. Same one I caught a glimpse of before Chela shoved me. Now that I can look more carefully, it’s clear this isn’t a person, and it’s not like the shimmering visage of Galanika I saw last night. This is a muted, almost-gray glow….
Another figure emerges, and another.
It’s the glow of Muertos, the dead. But they shouldn’t be out and about, away from any ceremony, and they definitely shouldn’t be at J.H.S. 765 during third period.
Don’t be scared of the Muertos, Tía Lucia always says. And she would know—she’s been in love with one for ten years. Just ask them what they want and set clear boundaries, hmm? Just like with a living person.
I gather myself, swallow back a scream, and step forward.
“Mateo!” Maybelline hisses. “What the—”
“We can’t just run away,” I whisper back. It’s not that I’m courageous. It’s that I know my brain, and if I run now, I’ll spend the rest of the day/my life waiting for them to show up again and kill me or whatever, so I might as well get it out of the way now.
“What do you want?” I ask the shadowy figures. My voice doesn’t sound too shaky, at least. Just a little.
There are three of them now, and they’re all tall and raggedy in a way the Muertos at the Grande Fete weren’t. They shamble toward me with a hunched-over, uneven gait. Their heads reach too far upward in an elongated curve and inhumanly huge teeth fill those open mouths. Loose flaps of rotting skin dangle off their arms, which seem crudely long and end in claws.
These phantoms…they’re not human. They never were.
“Mateo,” Tams warns. She’s stepped up just behind me, and I feel her hand slide around my arm, ready to yank me away.
Nearby, Maza takes a deep breath. “If you wanna stay and fight, we got your back.”
Maza Alameda has my back. That’s not a statement I’d ever thought would be true. I wish I could revel in it, but there’s a horrific phantom creature heading our way.
And I don’t want a fight. I don’t have any idea how to fight the dead. I just want to know what’s going on.
“Tell me,” I say again, a demand this time, “what you want.”
Gotta be firm con los Muertos, Tía Lucia always cautions, or they’ll run all over you.
I tried, but run all over us is exactly what it looks like these guys are about to do. The one in front increases its sloppy stomp to something like a charge. The others follow suit, and that’s when I yell, “Okay, run!”
Don’t have to say it twice. Maybelline and Maza are already almost to the door when Tams and I launch into our long-legged sprints to get the hell out of there. I feel a horrible icy tingling along my spine as I run, but I don’t know if it’s fear or the actual chilling touch of one of those things.
It doesn’t shred me open, so that’s something. We reach the doorway and burst out into the regular old school corridor, empty now that third period is fully in swing, but thankfully full of light and away from the dead creatures.
We keep going down the hall in a rapid blitz of body parts and panting and finally stop at the far end, out of breath and still freaked out.
“What…in the…How?” Maza gasps.
Maybelline throws her back against some lockers. “I thought…I thought we were toast.”
“Are they following?” Tams asks.
The double doors leading to the gym gape wide open like an entrance to the Underworld, only darkness beyond. But no phantoms emerge. I shake my head, still breathless.
“You know something about this,” Maybelline says.
I nod.
Maza eyes Tams. “Both of you.”
“I think it’s connected to what happened last night at the fete,” I say. “My tía said raising San Madrigal is giving someone powers….”
Maybelline looks warily back and forth between us. “There’s more.”
So much more. Everyone seems to know more about my own life than I do? Galanika keeps appearing out of nowhere? Chela killed a dude? Also, she’s like me somehow. But I don’t know how ready I am to talk about it all.
“Does this have anything to do with all that mess last night?” Maybelline tries when I just stand there for a few moments, staring internally at all the different ways I’m not supposed to answer that question.
I wonder if she’s genuinely concerned or trying to get info out of me just like I’m supposed to be trying to get info from everyone else.
Easiest lie is a half-truth. “Chela wants to meet up tonight at the cemetery….” I cringe, awaiting the inevitable onslaught of cringey jabs. Instead, everyone stares at the gym doors again. “What is it?”
“You heard that?” Maybelline asks. “Like a click?”
I didn’t, but Maza and Tams must’ve—Tams looks ready to fight. For a second, we just stand there.
Then I hear it—a clack, then a scraping noise.
“Go! Go! Go!” Tams yells like we’re in a bad action movie, and we’re all bursting down the stairs and out the door into a fresh October afternoon, gray skies above.
“What the hell was that?” Maza demands as we catch our breath, all with a wary eye on the corridor behind us.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Do we…do we tell someone?”
Tams shakes her head. “Tell who what? That some ghost demons chased us?”
She has a point, but I don’t like any of this. “It must’ve been what Chela went after when she bodychecked me off the platform,” I tell them. “Maybe she went after them but they got away?” Or were they chasing her? Or were they chasing me?
“And it’s not like any of us are equipped to deal with something like that,” Maybelline points out. “Let’s be gone, sib.”
“We finally agree on something,” Maza says. “See you guys tonight?”
I cock an eyebrow at her. “Tonight? I don’t think Chela wants me to bri—”
Maybelline saves me from awkwarding myself deeper into a hole. “No one’s trying to mess up your creepy goth date, Kid Romeo.”
“It’s not a da—”
“They’re talking about the redo,” Tams says. “Anisette called for the community to come out for an open-air redo of last night, presumably because she got the hint that it wasn’t cool to just hold on to power. Said she’s heard the community’s complaints and is ready to officially pass on the reins or whatever.”
Maybelline rolls her eyes. “I honestly don’t know what the big deal is. She’s been good for the neighborhood, and, like, it really is high time that the world knows who we are! We’re great! People should know about us!”
“That didn’t work out so well for other islands trying to stay out of the way of huge empires,” Maza points out.
“Haiti and Cuba were conquered literally centuries ago,” Maybelline snaps back.
“And how are things going for them these days?” Maza demands.
“Ah, anyway,” Tams says, stepping between them. “It’s at the intersection outside Tolo’s club at seven. It’s gonna be a mess. As you can already tell.”
A redo of last night seems like the absolute worst possible thing ever, but I guess the community has to gather to sort out whatever it was that happened.
“Ain’t you on the listserve?” Maza asks, already calm and chipper again.
I shrug. “I mean, yeah, but…I never check my email really.”
“I actually invented an app that sorts your email for you and only pulls out the important sentences of each one,” they say, somehow sounding slick and not like a super dork. “I’m, ah, still working out some of the kinks, though.”
“Literally,” Maybelline adds smugly. “You should see some of the important sentences that make it through their spam filter.”
The twins say their see-ya-laters and head off, bickering about IP addresses and domain names and colonialism. And then it’s just me and Tams and the autumn breeze whispering through the orange and red leaves above.
“What is happening?” she demands, like I’m supposed to know.
I give the Galerano shrug. “I dunno, but now, with those…whatever they were running around, we gotta find out.”
“Well…” Tams says with raised eyebrows, and I know that whatever comes next is gonna be in poor taste. I CAN SMELL IT A MILE AWAY.
“Here we go,” I mutter.
“At least where y’all are meeting it won’t be hard for her to dispose of the body?”
“Tams!”
“What?” She does her own version of the Galerano shrug, and I can’t lie, it’s better than mine. “I wouldn’t joke about it if I thought she was really gonna kill you!”
“If she does, I will haunt you for the rest of your life to remind you that the last thing you said to me was a corny joke about my death!”
“Yeah, well, it’s a risk I’m willing to— Is that Gerval?” She’s looking past me, to the edge of the schoolyard.
At Maestro Gerval.
He’s waving.
At me.
MAESTRO GRILO JUAN GERVAL BECKONS me closer, his long black hair swinging back and forth on both sides of his face as he sways in the afternoon sun.
“Mateo Matisse,” he says brightly, overpronouncing it.
My heart bleats in my ears; my palms are sweaty; my head spins. The world-renowned kamero—the only kamero anyone outside of Little San Madrigal has ever heard of—knows my name and is calling me over. And now he’s heard me play. (Sure, just a little, but still…)
This is a moment I’ve been waiting for my whole life, and now that it’s here, I have no idea how to feel or what to do about it.
It’s not like under normal circumstances I’d be all easygoing about it, obviously. But now I have to balance my own nervousness against the need to find out everything I can and make sense of this mess. Plus, I saw his buddy Trucks get murdered last night, and I don’t know if he knows or what exactly it means or anything else, really.
So, of course, I Mateo the whole thing up by waving goofily and garbling out, “Ahai, Mestroa!”
Gerval doesn’t notice, though. “Lots going on these days in Little Madrigal. How are you holding up?”
Well, we just got jumped by some phantom creatures, I almost blurt out, but I catch myself. Don’t know who to trust. Well, I do: no one.
“What is it?” he asks because I have no poker face and can’t even keep a secret when I’m absolutely silent.
I laugh and then frown. “It’s just…”
“Did something else happen?” His face creases with worry, and his dark, shining eyes look right into mine.
“Yeah, but…”
The great maestro of Madrigal steps back, shakes his head once with a smile, then bursts out laughing.
“What?” I demand, halfway laughing, too. “What’s funny?”
“No, it’s just…” He sighs, gathers himself. “Someone told you not to trust anyone, huh?”
“I mean—”
“Let me guess: your aunt Lucia?”
“Well—”
“It was Anisette for me. Adults, man.” Gerval gives me an exaggerated eye roll. “Am I right?” He starts walking down the street, away from the school, and after a moment, I realize he’s expecting me to fall in step with him.
“It’s cool,” he goes on. “Whatever it is, I’m sure—”
“There were creatures in the school!” What the hell, Mateo?
He stops, gapes at me. “What?”
Well, it’s out now. “Weird ghosty shadowy creatures.”
“Whoa! Did they…?” He shoots me a quick, concerned up and down. “Did they hurt you?”
“No, we…I’m okay. We ran outta there. It was just weird. I don’t know what’s going on.”
We start walking, and a moment passes. Then I say, “Do you?”
“Man…” Gerval sighs, eyebrows raised. “Where to even begin?”
“Wait, where are we going?” I ask, because Gerval is walking with purpose, and we’ve crossed Fulton now and are moving along through the quiet residential backstreets of Little Madrigal.
“Oh yeah.” His laugh comes out with a gawky rasp; it reminds me he’s only a year or two older than I am. Just a kid, really. “Thought you might want to play some music with me.”
