Cece Rios and the King of Fears, page 3
For a moment, the burning inside me quieted. On the first morning after we’d come home, Mamá had told us what had happened with Papá. After he’d hit Cece (the thought still burned through me like lightning), she had given him an ultimatum. Either he stayed at the oil refinery’s shared accommodations until he got his life back on track, until he stopped drinking, until he made things up to us, until he proved he could be trusted again—or he had to leave our home permanently.
Papá had chosen the last option.
Mamá had answered as many of our questions about it as she could that day. But after that, she hadn’t spoken of him. We hadn’t really either. We’d just reweaved our lives into a shape that fit around the hole he’d left behind.
Mamá’s face softened at my silence. She ran her hand over my cheek. “You are so much like me, Juana,” Mamá said. “Fiery and strong, you have always fought to survive. You have burned deep and burned hard and burned long. I am not surprised you are hurt and angry after being stolen. None of us can know what it was like.” She tucked my shoulder-length hair behind my ear. I remembered when it used to be so long that she’d get her fingers tangled in it. “But after all this time, I can tell you—to be fiery is not always to burn, and not only to survive. It is also to comfort. It is also to thrive.”
“I’m tired, Mamá.” I pulled away, turned my back, and lay down. “I’m going to sleep.”
It was true that I was tired. But I wasn’t going to sleep. Mamá waited for a long, hurt minute before going downstairs. I listened to her and the others discuss Cece’s mission through the floorboards and set my jaw.
Cece shouldn’t be going off on any more quests to save me. I wanted to save myself. I tightened my fists as the thought filled the place my heartbeat used to be. My familia might have forgotten, but I was powerful. I was the one who’d performed the Amenazante dance. I was the one who’d defended Cece from bullies growing up. I was the bright and burning Juana Rios. It was about time I reminded everyone, including myself, exactly what I was capable of.
The plans hardened in my mind. I gripped my sheets in my hands. Sí. Tomorrow, I would leave. Tomorrow, I would take my life back.
And I dared anyone to stop me.
I didn’t say goodbye to Cece the next morning, when she left with her criatura friends before the sun rose. I pretended to be asleep when she whispered, “I love you, Juana” before she went. The words left a wedge where my heart used to beat.
Mamá and I ate breakfast together in the hour that followed. I barely listened as she told me how brave Cece had been when she left early that morning, how she had a plan to avoid the hunting parties. After a while of me not responding, Mamá finally left for the fields alone.
The moment the front door closed behind her, I went for our family knives.
Mamá kept them hidden at the bottom of our familia’s history trunk. I lugged out the giant box from under Mamá’s bed and yanked it open to dig through the papers. Books from my childhood, papers with our birthdates, Mamá and Papá’s marriage certificate—I stared at that for a second too long before throwing it on the ground—until I touched a cold, heavy box toward the bottom. I dragged it up from the dark recesses and yanked it open.
The Rios family knives.
They were a set of three, their fine, sharp blades all inset with crushed fire opal. I picked up the largest one in the center, and it gleamed iridescent orange in the low morning light. This was the hunter’s knife, with serrated metal teeth on one side and a smooth, sharp edge on the other. The next two were twins—small throwing knives, with a hole in the middle of each, where I could hook my fingers to send them flying.
Mamá had made me promise not to tell Cece about the family knives. I’d been nine years old when she’d first shown them to me. She’d pried them out of the trunk in the dim light of a single ocher candle, after Cece had gone to bed. Earlier that night, Cece had set Tzitzimitl—the Criatura of Stars and Devouring—free from execution. It was the first time I’d seen Mamá truly scared. I’d watched her hands shake as she set the knives out before me.
“If anything happens to Cece,” she’d said, “if criaturas come into our home and I cannot protect you both—you must use these to defend yourself and tu hermana.” The low candlelight had burned across her wide face, coating her in oranges and yellows and the sharpest of fears. “I used these to defend our home from the criaturas who came seeking revenge against your tía, Catrina. They are not to be wielded lightly. You use them only when you are certain something stands between you and your life. You only use them when you are prepared to protect—and to kill. That is what these knives were forged for, Juana. Protecting our familia.”
I ran a finger down the hunting knife’s fire opal blade. I’d grown up waiting for the right time to use these. The one night I’d actually needed them, I’d been unprepared.
I wouldn’t be this time.
I stripped the knives out of the box, pulling the small leather belt with sheathes out alongside them, and buckled the belt and knives around my hips. The weight of the weapons was comforting as I yanked on a jacket over my red dress and pulled a bag filled with equipment onto my shoulder. I left home without looking back, already eyeing the southwest.
Envidia was that way. Cece had said so. And if anyone in Tierra del Sol knew where my heartbeat had gone after living in Devil’s Alley, it would be the maker of brujas, Grimmer Mother.
3
The Hunting of Cece Rios
“We’re making really good time!” I said as the moon rose overhead.
Coyote had carried me on his back most of the way. Over the past few hours, the dry, open desert had faded into stretches of long grasses and the beginnings of full, leafy trees. I knew that meant we were getting closer to the coast. My heart soared at the thought.
“Your mamá’s map said the city should be just on the other side of this peak!” Coyote gestured toward the one large cerro that blocked our way. It rose over our head as we crossed into its shadow, readying to climb its rugged slope. “Hey, why don’t we race to the top?” He flashed a grin. “Huh, Ocelot?”
I turned to Ocelot, where she jogged beside us, but she didn’t answer. She was staring back at Kit Fox, where he ran behind us.
Kit’s large fox ears flopped down on either side of his head, and his arms dangled as he struggled to make each flying step. My heart ached, and Ocelot’s eyebrows pulled together as she slowed. How had I not noticed he was so tired? But then, his soul was so quiet. Like he was purposefully hiding his weary, brick-red feelings away from me. Kit had never done that before.
The moment Coyote spotted him, he winced and halted. Ocelot did too. Kit peered up at us, blinking and dazed.
“Hey, Kit.” Coyote walked us over to him. “Are you okay?”
“Huh? Sí, I’m fine!” He made a big show of smiling.
I didn’t believe it for a moment. “Maybe we should rest for a while. Dawn is almost here anyway, and then we can climb the cerro in the daylight—”
“No, no! We promised Señora Rios we’d run the whole way so we wouldn’t get caught.” His face dropped, and he played with his fingers. “What if El Silbón finds us?”
My stomach flipped. I’d been trying to focus on getting where we were going as fast as possible, but that same fear had been waiting, curled up, in the back of my mind too. I checked the sky as I debated between Kit’s exhaustion and what El Silbón would do if he caught me—or, I guess, what El Cucuy would do.
Daylight would be coming soon, if the gray sky was any indication. Semana de la Cosecha’s hunting parties moved only at night. We should be fine, right? I bit my lip. I couldn’t let Kit wear himself down like this.
“We can just take a few minutes, then,” I said, as confidently as I could, but Kit’s face tightened. I rushed to console him. “I mean, Coyote, Ocelot, you’re probably tired too, right?”
They nodded, but Kit’s eyes flashed green in panic as they darted from my face to Coyote’s.
“We can’t!” he squeaked. “The hunting parties—if they find me, I’ll have to go back, and then I’ll be given to another bruja. I can’t do it—I can’t face that again—”
His soul screamed with clashing mustard yellows. I stuttered, trying to figure out what to say. But Ocelot interrupted by swooping down and picking him up.
Kit was my height, but in Ocelot’s long arms, he looked like a little kid. She cradled him to her chest so his legs dangled on either side of her hips, and she folded her arms under him to support his weight.
“We’ll never let a bruja have you again, Kit Fox,” she said in her softest voice. “You’re safe with us.”
She strode forward and gestured for us to follow. Coyote, after a moment’s hesitation, kept moving too. Kit pressed his face into her shoulder as she stroked his hair. A swell of white and blue—fear and sadness—rushed through his soul. But beneath it all, there was a small but powerful center of sunny-yellow gratitude.
Sometimes I forgot exactly how much Kit Fox had gone through. He was so cheerful and warm most of the time now that it surprised me to find how close to the surface his fear still lived. Slowly, he relaxed in Ocelot’s arms. My chest ached. His reaction reminded me of Juana’s the night before, only less angry. As I watched, Kit’s head lolled to one side on Ocelot’s shoulder. Oh. He’d fallen asleep.
“This is the first life where he hasn’t had a bruja, isn’t it?” Coyote said quietly. His brows yanked down, and he shook his head. “I’ll never let that happen to him again.” Something dark—and determined—rolled through his soul as he started forward again.
Ocelot nodded to the statement, careful to balance Kit’s weight as she trekked up toward the last cerro. She wasn’t one for long speeches or unnecessary facial expressions, but she held Kit like he was her own child. I couldn’t help smiling.
“What is it?” Ocelot asked.
“Oh, uh—” I giggled. “I was just thinking you look like you could be Kit’s mom right now.”
Coyote snorted too. We looked at each other and laughed harder. But slowly, Ocelot’s tawny eyes warmed, and her mouth actually moved when she smiled.
“I was a mother once,” she said. “A very long time ago.”
My mouth dropped open. Coyote straightened.
“Really?” I asked. “But—how?”
Criaturas didn’t, as far as I knew, have kids the way Naked Man did. They each had nine lives and could regrow, so it was kind of unnecessary. She just brushed a hand over Kit’s hair and quickened her pace, so we reached the bottom of the mountain. It was a steep slope, but she pushed up its angle easily.
“I fell in love with a human man two lifetimes ago,” Ocelot said as Coyote joined her. I held on tight to his shoulders. “We had the most beautiful daughter this land had ever known.” A burgundy color filled her normally cool stone, and with it, a fond and distant memory. It was so powerful, her stone began to buzz against my skin, and images entered my mind in flashes.
A child with long, silky black hair and a birthmark on her left cheek. A man laughing as he herded goats. Ocelot telling her familia to stay inside their home, protecting them from a pack of angry men with weapons waiting outside.
I gasped as I vaulted back out of the memories. Ocelot paused. The fading night was quiet, the desert listening.
Then Ocelot chuckled. It was a quiet, fragile sound. “That was the past,” she said. “Let’s keep moving.”
Coyote stepped forward to do just that—before halting so suddenly I rocked sideways. I scrambled to right myself and scanned the bushy landscape.
“What is it?” I whispered.
Coyote’s soul flashed with confused, scattered colors. A distant, scratchy whistle echoed across the landscape. I stiffened. The fact that there was more foliage here actually made me nervous. I was used to the desert’s broad and open landscape, but this area was dense with places to hide. Coyote squeezed my legs. Ocelot locked her arms around Kit, and a sharp sneer curled around her mouth.
“Hang on, Cece,” Coyote said.
“What? Why?” I asked.
Right before a mangled skeleton leaped at us from a nearby cluster of trees.
El Silbón carved his long, needly fingers toward my face. “There you are!”
I screamed. Coyote dove back, keeping his front between me and the long, spidery shape of the dark criatura. El Silbón’s white eyeholes didn’t blink, didn’t waver, as Coyote kept dodging back, keeping me out of reach.
“I’m warning you!” Coyote roared. “If you lay a single finger on her, I’ll—”
“Do what?” El Silbón struck forward, so quickly that Coyote didn’t have a chance to move before he was suddenly looming over us, his fingers poised like knives. “You already made me a dark criatura. What punishment could be worse, Great Renamer?”
Coyote’s breath caught as his legs locked up. Bursts of roiling red and ugly blue filled his soul until no other color had room to breathe. I nearly choked on it, and his body froze, paralyzed.
I tugged on his shirt. “Coyote!” I yanked harder as El Silbón reached for our faces. “Coyote, you have to move!”
“You.” El Silbón clasped my cheek.
I grabbed at his sharp fingers, struggling to pull them off my tender skin.
“You will undo the seal the curanderas placed on the head of our king.” His other hand closed down over Coyote’s mouth like a cage. “You will heed the order of El Cucuy.” He gripped us harder, leaning in.
Ocelot leaped in from our right and, with a smooth kick, sent El Silbón crashing into the nearest tree.
I let out a gasp as my cheek throbbed. Ocelot grabbed Coyote’s shoulder with her free hand. Kit, now very much awake, held on to her back like a monkey as she shook Coyote.
“You don’t have time to drown in regret,” she said, sharp and hard. “Move. Fight.”
Coyote jolted to life just as El Silbón recovered and swung his head our way.
“We need to reach the daylight,” Coyote blurted. Ugly, dark colors streaked his soul, but his muscles were focused and ready. I gripped his shirt. He turned with Ocelot, ground his feet into the dirt, and raced up the cerro.
“It doesn’t matter where you run!” El Silbón called after us, following step for step. He kept his free hand with its needly, clawed fingers outstretched toward me, his other gripping the bag filled with the clattering bones of his dead father. “El Cucuy will rule the surface as he does Devil’s Alley, and you will help him do it!”
We were nearly at the top now. El Silbón’s holes widened, and he sprang forward in a wild, deranged leap, wielding a rib bone directed right for my face. I shrieked.
Coyote suddenly turned to face him—and threw me backward, so I flipped in the air, cresting the top of the cerro. I yelped as my stomach flew around in my gut. For a moment, I was weightless there in the sky, wind rushing through my clothes.
“I wish I’d just killed you all those years ago!” Coyote lunged forward and punched El Silbón in the ribs. A terrible cracking resounded from the impact.
El Silbón loomed over him, dark and terrible. “So do I.”
Coyote’s soul curdled with sour, vicious purple. Gravity grabbed me by the legs and pulled me down again. Coyote grappled and shoved El Silbón back. I screamed as the ground rushed up to meet me.
Ocelot dove and caught me, just as dawn crowned the horizon.
I cringed into Ocelot’s arm, and Kit helped steady my landing. Coyote had his teeth bared, facing the dark criatura where they still fought on the peak of the cerro. El Silbón lifted his head—and shrieked the moment the sunlight brushed over him.
El Silbón’s new long, spidery body crumpled inward under the touch of day. The joints in his spine and arms started to snap and crack, shrinking back into the smaller limbs I remembered. My mouth dropped open as he cried out, his skin smoking wherever the sun touched him. His white, glowing eyeholes vanished into the shadow-disguised face I remembered, and he finally collapsed on the ground.
Short and quivering, gasping in pain, El Silbón scuttled back into the shadows on the other side of the cerro. He moved like an animal with a broken leg. I should have been grateful. Relieved too, probably. But despite everything—my soul ached at the agony in his retreat.
“This is not the end, Cecelia Rios!” El Silbón squeezed out. I scrunched into myself as he disappeared over the other side of the cerro. “El Cucuy will have his freedom! The sun cannot protect you forever.”
4
Juana Rios and the Mother of Brujas
About an hour into the ruins around Tierra del Sol, I picked out a light trail of footsteps between the scrub and cacti left behind by brujas. I followed them, weaving my way through the outskirts, until I stopped between two abandoned adobe houses and raised my head to the horizon. Just fifty feet away, nine buildings jutted out of the desert landscape. Crammed together, scrunched, like rotten leftovers. Envidia.
“You shouldn’t go in there.”
I ripped the hunter’s knife out and whirled around. My blade stopped just a few inches from Little Lion’s nose.
I froze. His eyes crossed as he stared at the point of the knife.
“What are you doing here?” I snapped.
His surprise faded into a frown quicker than I liked. “Fire opal knives,” he grumbled, and stepped back to put some space between him and the glowing metal. “I’m here to protect you,” he said.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” I shoved the knife back into its sheath on my right hip. “Cece left you behind to babysit me? How pathetic does she think I am?”
He blinked. “That’s one way of saying that your sister loves you enough to ask me to watch out for you. Specifically, the worst way of saying that.” He pulled a necklace from his shirt and flashed his soul stone at me, like proof of how much Cece cared. I kept my face flat, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t surprised. Cece’d really let him go with his soul? I thought she was obsessed with protecting them.
