Shapeshifted

She shook her hand again, playing her opposite forefinger against the stones in her palm, as if she were panning for gold.

“Get in,” I repeated. Surely she knew how door handles worked. I got in my car, and she hit my car hood with one hand.

“Are you coming?” I asked her. She tottered back and opened up the door. When she sat down she threw the wet stones she held across my dashboard. Trails of thin mud poured down from them. “Hey!”

She dusted her hands off on her wet gowns, and crossed her arms. “Gah.” Clearly, the Reinas hadn’t been able to keep her safe somewhere—and before that, neither had County. That left just one place we could go.

* * *

I went back toward the clinic, slowly, the only car on the road, searching for the path Olympio had taken Ti and me on yesterday. I made a few wrong turns but eventually wound up in front of Olympio’s tenement and parked my car.

“Look,” I tried to explain to the old woman. “You just need to be safe for a night. No one should be on the streets tonight. Bad things are going down.” The only thing I saw on her face was frustration, likely with me. “I’m sorry. I wish I could explain.” I ran through what little Spanish I did know and went for broke. “Noche muy malo, mucho dolor. Stay indoors!”

She lunged forward, grabbed up one of the rocks that hadn’t rattled off my dash, and shoved it at me.

I took it. At least it was dry now. And it didn’t look much like a stone to me.

“That’s not a stone. Is it?” I held it up to the fading light outside. “It’s a finger bone.”

Not a lot like the tattoo Catrina and Adriana shared—it was long and slender, gracefully curved. It’d been stained gray by mud, but there was no denying what it was.

I picked up another stone from where it’d fallen on my floor. It was just a rock. All the rest of them were. But not this one.

“Okay—we’re going up to the boy’s house. And then you can talk, all right?”

Wherever she’d gotten the bone from, I’d get Olympio to make her tell me.

* * *

It took time and effort to herd her up the stairs toward the curandero’s door. I knocked three times, and Olympio peeked out. “I knew I saw you outside!” he exclaimed. “You never told me you had a car!”

“You never asked,” I said, and stepped back so he could see the woman I’d brought with me.

“Ugh, her again?”

“Yeah. Sorry. Can she stay here?”

Olympio released a huffing sigh of protest. “I’ll just add it to everything else you owe my grandfather. Don’t forget, you owe him for last night.”

“I’ll write him a check. Honest. Just this one more thing.”

“Fine.” Olympio pulled back and opened the door all the way, so that we could step in.

He went off to get the old woman a towel, and we stood in the same room I’d been in yesterday, only there was no tinfoil cross, and no snakes. The curandero sat on his chair in the corner, surrounded by candles and statuary. When Olympio returned, he looked me over. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah. I just need you to translate for me. And then to keep her safe overnight.”

“Big. Check,” Olympio warned.

“I totally understand.” I looked to the old woman, and pulled the finger bone out of my pocket. “Where did you get this, Grandmother?” I looked to Olympio. “It’s very important. Make her tell me.”

Olympio translated my question, although I got the impression that the woman understood me on her own.

“Mictlan.”

Olympio waited for her to go on. When she didn’t, he asked the question again.

“Mictlan,” she answered again, with a strong nod.

Olympio shrugged. “It’s not a word. I don’t know what it means.” Then the curandero spoke and Olympio began to frown. “My grandfather says … it’s like a word for hell.”

I looked from Olympio to the curandero and back again. “I would guess that whoever’s finger that came from agrees with you.” I went over and put my back against the wall, much as I had the prior night while watching the curandero heal Ti. There was some thread of commonality here; all I had to do was see it. I squeezed the bone in a fist while I tried to think.

The place where I’d seen Adriana trapped had been full of bones—and by the next night, when Luz had gotten there, completely emptied. And the new Three Crosses church, where we’d made our abortive attack, had been empty too.

Adriana and all those bones were somewhere. I’d bet they were still all in the same room.

Ti had said he’d been working at night someplace dark. With no lights. Maybe there was a third location? But if so, where?

The old woman was standing in front of me, her eyes burning, trying to make me understand something that I couldn’t see. I shook my head like the janitor had shaken his head at me earlier, to see her playing in the gutters, while he shoved around all that water that wouldn’t drain away.

Because the gutters were blocked. The same gutters I’d found Grandmother playing in, where she in turn had found bones—and not unlike the ditch where I’d found her in the first place, hidden underground. In a dark place, not unlike hell.

“Olympio.” My eyes took a second to focus on the boy again. “I need you to explain to me how to get to that ditch by Tecato Town.”

“Oh, no—” Olympio began shaking his head violently.

“I need to get over there.”

The old woman started clapping her hands in glee, like a psychotic cymbal monkey.

“If you’re going there, then I want to go with you,” Olympio said.

“No way.”

“You don’t know where you’re going. It could flood—”

“All the more reason that you can’t come.”

“No—I have to!”

I looked to his grandfather and pleaded with my expression for the man to talk some sense into his grandson.

“El siente la llamada, debe contestar,” the curandero intoned.

“See? My grandfather agrees. He says it’s my calling to go with you,” Olympio interrupted as his grandfather went on, and Olympio made a face. “Ugh. Really?”

The curandero nodded, and Olympio looked up at me. “He says you have to take us both.”

I blinked. How were we going to get someone with crutches down the steep cement side of the ditch to the bottom? Much less inside the tunnels afterward?

Olympio read my mind. “Not him. Her.” He made a face at Grandmother.

That was almost worse. “To a flash-flood zone, underground, while it’s raining out?” I looked from one to the other of them and waited for someone else here to be sensible, because it wasn’t going to be me.

“It’s the only way. I was meant to go. So was she,” Olympio said.

“You’re sure about this?” I asked Olympio’s grandfather, and he nodded. I let out a sigh. “I guess you can’t fight prophecy.” 

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

To my dismay, no one had stolen my car while I’d been at the curandero’s. Then