Shapeshifted

Ti snorted softly.

The curandero said something aloud, and Olympio translated. “Bring him over here. There’s not much time.”

* * *

Ti stood where they showed him to stand, facing us near the door, although he was giving me exasperated looks. The curandero went around the room on his crutches, lighting candle after candle. It was getting later; I could feel it, even if I couldn’t see the sun going down. The curandero started chanting while he moved, crutch-hopping from place to place, gathering herbs strung up from his ceiling to dry.

Any moment now Luz would be waking up. I hoped she listened to Asher and Catrina. And any second now Ti could be going away for the night.

“First the Donkey Lady, and now this—” Olympio tsked. His grandfather glared at him and started praying loudly.

* * *

As the sun disappeared outside, Ti became still. His countenance changed from a grimace as he tolerated my elaborate prank upon him to slack, unemotional smoothness.

“He’s gone,” Olympio whispered to me.

“And Maldonado?” I whispered back.

Olympio shook his head quickly. “Don’t say his name while you’re in here.”

The curandero swung over to Ti, beating him with a bunch of herbs tied together, whisking first at his exposed skin, then starting from the top of him, slowly beating lower, increasingly awkwardly, dangling from one crutch. When he reached Ti’s feet, he stood straight to start over again. I had no idea what he was saying, but he was loud.

“It’s going to be difficult,” Olympio narrated to me. “He’s made of magic—it’ll be hard to pull the malo magic out of him while leaving him whole. How do you know him?”

“He’s an old friend.”

“You and your friends,” Olympio said.

At least Ti was still for the procedure. He hadn’t moved an inch since the curandero had begun. I was getting tired of standing and went to lean back against the wall. Ti’s amber eyes tracked me. Angry, accusing, scared? They were impossible to read, and then they closed, as slack as the rest of him. I hoped Asher was okay.

When the curandero had finished hitting him with herbs, he lit them on fire and set them in a metal pan. When’s the last time the fire marshal visited? I wondered darkly. Then the curandero pulled out a white egg.

I was surprised to see it wasn’t already black. I assumed that part of the procedure was sleight of hand— still might be, I realized. I kept an eye on the egg while the curandero waved it over Ti’s body, praying even more loudly, as if he could shout Maldonado’s influence away.

I nudged Olympio. “What’s the point of this?”

“Same as when he did it to you. My grandfather’s pulling the bad energy out of him and putting it into the egg.”

“Poor egg,” I said.

“Better it than us. The energy has to go somewhere.”

Between the candle smoke in the room and the endless chanting, I started feeling claustrophobic. But I didn’t want to disrupt the ceremony. Gah, did I really believe in magic now? Was I one of those people? I always wanted to punch those people at the hospital, when they’d brought their crystals into their sick friends’ rooms and hung Tibetan prayer banners from the walls.

It wasn’t even the paraphernalia so much as the type of people who enthusiastically believed in it, and tried to convert you to their tantric chanting ways. When you’re performing actual science, those people get irritating fast. And I didn’t want to get started on the patients who believed crazy things, like water was poisonous, and mosquitoes were recording their conversations. Some people’s brains were porous due to stupidity, damage, or drugs, and once bad ideas got in there, they were impossible to shake out again.

But there was magic in the world. The vampires and were-things and shapeshifters, I could blow off as alternative life-forms. But whatever held Ti together was truly magic—hell, he’d been alive since the Civil War.

Magic, and a strange hope he could be happy someday, even if he had to wait until he got to heaven. Ti was strangely like my mom. I snorted and smiled at him, and his eyes opened.

The curandero splashed what must have been pure alcohol on the herbs in the pie tin at Ti’s feet, and lit it into flame with a cheap plastic lighter. It would figure that there was no smoke alarm in this room, and that Ti used to be a firefighter.

“You okay?” I whispered to him, hoping he could read my lips. He didn’t respond. The curandero’s prayers went quiet and intense, then loud again, repetitively, as if his words were ocean surf. He lunged in and pressed the egg against Ti’s forehead.

At first I thought it was smoke from the fire he’d already illegally lit—the blackness swirling around the white eggshell. Then the egg changed color like it was being dipped in weak dye, turning a gray so faint I could hardly see it, then progressively becoming darker, until the shell was night black.

Olympio raced around me into the back room, then returned with another egg. He ran up to exchange this one with his grandfather while carefully setting the black one into the charred pie pan. I could swear it started rocking from side to side.

It was really black. I sat on my haunches against the wall, trying to figure out how the curandero had done that.

The second egg changed colors now. Olympio produced a third fresh egg and set down the second, which began to spin. The curandero’s hand with the new egg in it began to shake.

Ti leaned forward, pressing the curandero back.

“No. Ti—” I ran forward, so if Ti raised his hands I could put myself in harm’s way. Olympio’s grandfather hadn’t asked for this.

The black eggs in the pie tin cracked and things slithered out of them, pouring over the edges of the shallow metal pan. Like snakes made of smoke, endless numbers of them writhed out of the broken shells, trying to crawl toward Ti’s legs. I tried to kick them out of the way. It burned where they touched me, and they bit me like tiny vipers, striking again and again with small black fangs. The curandero stayed still, the final egg trapped between Ti’s forehead and his palm. Ti blinked, coming to eerie life.

“Ti,” I whispered.

My legs were on fire—I could feel their bites through my shoes down to my foot bones. I didn’t know if the snakes were poisonous. I knew this couldn’t be good for me, but I couldn’t leave Ti.

He leaned forward and lifted up one leg like he was going to walk off the foil cross.

“Ti, don’t.”

I got as close to him as I could. His lifted foot dropped, touching down on the carpeting outside the cross.

“Ti—you remember me. I know you do. It’s why you didn’t hurt me the other night.” I reached out for him, and electricity snapped between us like winter static. I grabbed his wrist and it thrummed, quivering like one of those carnival games where they say they’ll test your love power.

And that’s sort of what this was, wasn’t it? Even if we were through. There had been something there between us, once upon a time. It was gone now, but not erased. I’d never let go.

“I know you remember me.”

His other arm swung wide, sweeping the curandero to the ground, crutches and all. Olympio’s grandfather kept praying, even as he landed on the floor, the blackening egg he held smashed. I took his place, centering myself in front of Ti. I couldn’t give up on him, not when him being here was my fault.

“I know you can hear me, Ti. You’re in there somewhere.” His amber eyes were staring down at me. I reached up to touch his chin with my free hand, like the last time he’d touched me. There was electricity there too,