Shapeshifted (Edie Spence 3)

“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 I’d at least have been able to leave the hospital-gown-wearing grandmother behind. Olympio, though—the thought of predestined adventure had him clinging to me like a barnacle. Before we left he’d gotten two flashlights from his neighbor for our trip. Now he sat in the passenger seat and played with my radio in between giving me directions. When he realized I didn’t have any Spanish presets, he started slowly twisting the dial. I didn’t enjoy listening to him hop from station to station like he was cracking a safe, but it was a good way for him to kill time. Listening to him made me not stop and think how insane this was. Taking them with me, destiny or not, was like going to war in a clown car.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you had a car,” Olympio said.

“I wasn’t keeping it from you. It just never came up. Why? Where did you want to go?”

“I couldn’t go anywhere, until I was called. ” Olympio found a station he liked and finally sat back. “I’ve been waiting for my whole life to find my calling. Now, though … who knows? I have to see where the calling takes me. ”

“I thought you’d been seeing things your whole life?”