Bruja Born (Brooklyn Brujas #2)(60)

McKay lifts his cap to smooth out his hair. He sighs uncertainly. “A week? If we’re lucky. It’s not viral, but they’re still multiplying somehow.”

This is the future I’ve given my city. I look at Alex, and she shakes her head slowly, her lips taut, her eyes pleading.

Frederik doesn’t miss the movement. “What is it?”

“Lula.” Alex says my name like a warning.

“Lula, something’s wrong.” Maks reaches for my hand, but a pain makes him double over. His eyes flash white and then back to blue. He’s going to turn. He’s going to turn in front of everyone the way Raj and Dale and Kassandra did. I tell myself that Maks is different. Because I healed him before he died, before I tethered him. The others didn’t get that kindness.

“What aren’t you saying?” Frederik’s posture becomes predatory as he turns to me.

Alex tries to reach for me just as Frederik fades into a blur. Alex hits him with a ripple of magic, and the vampire bares his fangs and punches against the inviable barrier she creates between me and the others. “Lula, run!”

“Fred—he’s turning,” McKay says as Maks falls to his knees.

And in this moment, I know I can’t watch what he’ll become.

I run out the room and out the way we came. Red dots dance in front my eyes, residual lights from staring at the screen McKay showed us. My legs move slower than usual, but I keep going until there is only the ocean and me.

The night sea breeze hits my face as I hurry down the boardwalk, away from the lights and the rides, away from the Thorne Hill Alliance building, away from my family and Maks.

A cramp works its way back into my chest and sides, and I stop. I grip my knees and wait for the dizziness to pass. I look up at the night-blue sky, dotted with speckles of stars and a waning moon, hoping to find the answers there that no one has been able to give me—not even La Muerte.

Where are the Deos? I asked her.

In the place where you least expect them, she said.

You must free me, she said.

All I wanted was for my life to go back to the way it was. All I wanted was for Maks to live.

Emergency sirens blast in the distance, and I have to wonder if they’re going to find a heartless body when they get to where they’re going. I press my hand over my heart. When I read The Accursed Book, I knew my fate. Despite what Alex said on the train, this is where my story ends. Maybe not in this moment, standing on this boardwalk in the dark, facing the ocean, but I can feel it drawing near, and I don’t know if I can right the wrongs I’ve set in motion.

“How am I supposed to do this?” I shout at the sea. The sky. The empty space that surrounds me. “Answer me!”

I breathe sharply, but my insides tighten like rusted springs and I can’t exhale. A thread pierces the core of my heart, and in that moment, the agony is so acute I can see only darkness.

Everything fades, and the same room in which I last saw La Muerte comes into focus.

She’s thinner than before. Her skin is the translucent slickness of an amphibian. A black ooze drips from the edges of her twisted thorn crown, and her cracked, blue lips pull back over glistening yellow teeth.

“How can you speak to me this way?” The accusation is drenched with melancholy.

I press my hand over my heart. There’s nothing there.

“Am I dead?”

“Do you want to be?”

“Why can’t you just give me a straight answer?”

“Why can’t you see that I have? You cry for our absence, but we are where we’ve always been.”

She points an accusatory finger at me as I pace around her. In this in-between, I am weightless. There is a rushing dark, like a swarm of bees, but after a moment, you stop noticing it.

“You have seen the outcome of this. The casimuertos are tied to you, and you are tied to me.”

“You could’ve told me there was only one way to end this.”

“It is not the only way. Find my spear—”

“But where is your spear? If you’re here, then where is it?”

“I was born at the edge of this world. It is where I always return; it is where I should be now.” Lady de la Muerte turns slowly, following my quick pace with her molasses-dark eyes. “Do you know why mortals pray?”

I stop in my tracks. Why do I light my candles and sing rezos and keep my altar to the Deos? Why do I scream at her now? “Because we want something.”

“If the Deos had all the answers,” she says, “we wouldn’t have created you.”

I laugh. My heart has stopped beating and back home my undead army is wreaking havoc all over the city. But here is the lady of death, asking the world of me and all I can do is laugh.

“You don’t know,” I say. “You don’t know how to fix this.”

“Lula, you wanted something I could not give you. You didn’t ask for life and here you have it. But you did ask for this burden, and you must free me.”

She extends her long, bony arm, and fissures of light erupt from the tip of her finger, stabbing the bare skin between my breasts.

? ? ?

I start awake on the boardwalk. Whatever Lady de la Muerte did, the silver light appears over my heart once more. This time, there are more threads than before extending in dozens of directions. Except for three of them. They wrap around my shoulders and tug me backward and across the boardwalk, toward an empty lot full of overgrown weeds that are lit by my silver light as I draw closer.