Shapeshifted

“Edie? Olympio!” Our names, shouted from a distance.

“?Estoy aqui! Here!” Olympio shouted weakly from my arms.

I couldn’t spare a breath to yell. If I lost my footing now, there’d be no regaining it; we’d both be washed away, battered against the tunnel walls.

“Edie! Olympio!” The voice was more panicked. Closer.

I saw light just as hands snatched in. I fought them instinctively. Olympio yelped as he was pulled from my arms.

“We’ve got you—Edie—” Ti was there, pulling me forward against the tide, and Asher was at his side holding Olympio.

“She’s down there—so’s he,” I whispered as soon as I felt safe. They hauled us against the current, out of the tunnel, back to the ditch’s open space. Wider here, the water was shallower but not much slower. “He’s insane.” I reached for Asher. “Whatever he tells you—he is insane.”

Asher held up a hand covered with Olympio’s blood. “I know.”

There was a crash of thunder and a lightning bolt nearby. In that frozen second of light, I could see that the man who held Olympio wasn’t fully Asher anymore … or Hector either. His face was pulled between forms, asymmetrical, pieced together with parts from a hundred different beings.

“No—” I fought against Ti to stand on my own.

“Shhh,” Asher whispered to Olympio, hidden again in the dark. Regardless of his form, he applied pressure to the wound like a doctor would. “Shhhhhhh.”

The sound of water grew—rain from a hundred city blocks was slowly channeling down. We turned to walk up the ditch as one.

“Asher!” A man’s voice yelled behind us. Maldonado emerged from the middle tunnel, apparently no worse for the wear. Adriana, Luz, Grandmother? Had magic or water taken all three?

Maldonado reached out his hand. “I knew you were out here. It’s not too late for you!”

Asher stopped, Olympio still cradled in his arms. He turned toward Maldonado, his father, and I couldn’t see his face.

“Asher—come to me,” Maldonado demanded, and I remembered how inside the bone chamber he’d kept me trapped. “The ceremony can go on. They’re all trapped in there. I can save you. Come with me, and see.”

Asher started setting Olympio down. Was he choosing to do that? Of his own volition? Or was he under Maldonado’s control, as I had been?

“No!” I struggled against Ti to find footing with my numb feet. He pulled me close for one moment, helping me stand straight, and his lips brushed my forehead.

“Be careful, Edie,” he whispered. He made sure I had my footing, let go of me, and then ran in.

Ti reached Maldonado before Asher, and hit him like a truck. The bruja was flung back into the cement wall and collapsed into the water at Ti’s feet. I wanted to cheer, but I had to get over to Olympio—maybe this would all be over soon and somehow we’d all survive. I tried not the calculate the odds as I reached Olympio’s side.

Maldonado had recovered—I hadn’t seen it happen, but he was locked with Ti now, arm-to-arm, chest-to- chest. As a zombie, Ti was the only thing a shapeshifter like Maldonado couldn’t become. Asher was still walking toward his father, slowly. I hoped it was reluctance holding him back, but I honestly didn’t know.

I scooped Olympio up out of the water. He was cold and pale. “Hey, hey.” I shook him awake. “You’d better still be with me.”

His eyelids fluttered open. “You haven’t killed me yet.”

“Where’d you want to go, Olympio?” I knelt down in the water to keep him out of it, raising his chest up across mine. I hugged him in an attempt to provide pressure. “In the car, when we get out of here. Where do you want to go?”

He smiled at me. “Disneyland.”

I snorted. “That’s pretty far away from here.”

“Yeah. I know.” I squeezed him tighter.

Out of the farthest tunnel, Grandmother arrived. She was like some mystic cockroach that nothing could kill. As I had that thought, she turned and pierced me with her eyes.

Maldonado shoved Ti back, and Ti stumbled to one knee. Grandmother moved around their battle and walked toward me. As she did so, I noticed something strange about the fight. Asher was at its periphery, moving back and forth in one spot like a paused character in an old video game. Was he fighting his father, or had his father put him there, trapped, while he was wrestling with Ti? I crushed Olympio to my chest with worry.

As Grandmother neared she seemed taller, as if her spine had unwound, and I realized she was producing light, the bright orange-yellow of light pollution tinged with smog.

“Elegir,” she said when she stood nearby. “?Elige!”

“What the hell are you saying?” I asked aloud.

“?Elige! ?Elige uno!”

“She says for you to choose. She says you get to pick one,” Olympio translated for me. I could see the meat of his wound, where I’d mashed him to myself, turning white with no-blood. It wasn’t just the rain that made him cold—he was slipping away from me.

“Ask her what she means!” I almost shook him in my frustration.

“?Elige!” she yelled again, spitting the word at me. “?Elige!” she commanded, and I knew.

If whatever Maldonado had been trying to do in the bone room had worked, with all the magic that’d been swirling around below—then she was the Santa Muerte. The Saint of Death.

I’d been praying to God for my mom to live for a week and a half now. Why not just ask the deity of the damned, the one that was actually here?

“?Elige!” she yelled, and thunder cracked in time with her voice.

Choose. My mom. Or—Olympio.

God help me. 

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

What kind of horrible choice was that? What kind of uncompassionate fucking awful deity asked for you to choose between your friend and your own mom?

“I hate you!” I shouted out into the storm.

“?Elige!” she shouted back.

My mom already believed in a good afterlife. I couldn’t send Olympio, a punk-ass kid I’d dragged into this mess, to his, here.

God. Help. Me.

“Him! Save him! If you can!” I shook him in fear. “Do it if you can—do it now!”

Grandmother squinted at me, then made a thoughtful face and looked down at the boy in my arms. Then she stepped away, taking her phosphoric aura with her.

“Olympio?” I looked down at his face, wet with rain and my tears. “Come on. You have to get better.”

“Dejame en paz, estoy bien.”

“I can’t understand Spanish, remember?” I shook him again. “Olympio?”

“Stop that. I’m fine.” He blew air through half-parted lips and struggled to sit up. I released the wound on his chest—and his skin under my palm was whole.

A wave of water came our way. Maldonado had toppled Ti. The electric feeling I’d had in the altar house returned—Maldonado’s power regrouping around him. Asher stumbled when the wave hit him, falling to his knees.

“Asher—hurry! Come help me! It doesn’t have to be like this. I can set you free!”

Asher put his hands to his head and bent down, as if in prayer. I could hear his anguished voice yell, “No!”