Cece Rios and the Desert of Souls Read online

  It was El Sombrerón, the Bride Stealer.

  He only stole the most beautiful of women, ones with big eyes and long, flowing hair. Like Juana’s. The only way to save yourself was to plug your ears, block out the strumming of his guitar, and lock yourself inside so you wouldn’t succumb to his siren song.

  Only, Juana hadn’t covered her ears. Her stance looked brave, but it trembled at the edges.

  “I will steal your soul!” she cried. Her voice wavered more now. “I-If you come any closer, I will rip it from your throat and wear it myself. I will become your master.”

  It was what our mother had taught us to say to all criaturas. The prospect of being enslaved by a human was frightening to most of them. It made the weaker ones run away.

  But El Sombrerón was a powerful dark criatura; he only chuckled.

  The sound of his laughter merged with the shadows and ran over every surface in the old street. Everything felt muffled. His hand shifted in front of him, pulling a metal guitar into the light of the half moon. Silver strings lit up, glowing beneath his fingertips. My heart tripped over itself. Once he started playing, it would be nearly impossible to save Juana. I had to get to her before he played his song.

  “Juana, run!” I threw myself forward.

  Juana half-turned, her dark eyes wide and glistening and desperate. “Cece!” she said. Her bravado broke the moment she saw me. Her face crumpled; her hands shook. I’d never seen my sister this afraid.

  But terrified as she was, she waved me away. “Run, Cece! He’ll hurt you!” she said just as El Sombrerón strummed his first note.

  The music poured through the alley, warm and brilliant. It moved over my skin like the distant smell of roses, an old memory of sweet and sticky cactus fruit. But it didn’t drown me. My senses didn’t fall away.

  Because the song wasn’t meant for me.

  Juana’s face clouded over in an instant. She turned her back to me, her tense muscles relaxing.

  “Juana?” I called hesitantly.

  She was closer to him than I was to her. As she reached out for him, El Sombrerón’s head tilted, welcoming, watching.

  I ran and tackled my sister to the dust.

  She fought me. Her movements were jerky and limp, the way Papá moved when he came home late from the bar. Her eyes didn’t see me. They turned upward, searching for the song, for El Sombrerón, for the Bride Stealer. I slapped my hands over her ears.

  She blinked, stunned, as we fell to the ground, my hands tight to her head. Her eyes found mine, and they were clear again.

  “Cece,” she whispered. Her voice was twice as frightened as it had been moments ago.

  “Juana, we have to—”

  I didn’t notice El Sombrerón’s guitar until it slammed against the back of my head. I spiraled off Juana, rolling through the dirt. Metal strings twanged in the air. I squeezed my eyes shut, clasping my throbbing head through tangled hair. The impact shook through my entire body. I gasped through the pain.

  “I’m not here for you.” El Sombrerón’s voice reverberated through the ground, almost more sensation than words.

  Juana stumbled up from the ground. “Don’t you dare hurt her!” She raised her fists. “I’ll show you how the Rios women treat criaturas!”

  El Sombrerón paused. His black hat tilted toward her, like he found her curious.

  Juana shoved a hand into her hair and tore curls from her bun, gathering beads of the fire opal. She balled them into a fist. They glowed bright orange as she pulled her arm back to throw them at him—but just then, El Sombrerón flicked his fingers over his glowing, silver guitar strings.

  Her arms went limp. The beads poured out across the ground and ceased to shine.

  Panic thundered between my ears. El Sombrerón had knocked me clear to the opposite side of the street, so I lay at the foot of a crumbling adobe building. Juana was nearly fifteen feet away, facing El Sombrerón, just four or five steps from being in his grasp. I forced myself to stand. Impossible as it seemed, I had to do something, anything, to save her.

  I glanced at his neck. In the shadows of his figure, the silver line of a necklace peeked out from beneath his collar.

  His soul.

  No matter how powerful a criatura may be, each wore its soul around its neck. And all a human had to do was steal it to become their bruja or brujo—their witch master.

  I couldn’t hide Juana somewhere. I couldn’t use fire opal to burn his shadowy skin. But I could steal his soul. I wouldn’t keep it permanently like a real bruja, of course. Just long enough to save my sister.

  I sprinted in between the two before he could grab her and leaped for his chest.

  He jerked back as I slammed into him. He let out a grunt that shook the street like an earthquake. I latched onto his collar and reached for his necklace.

  His hand caught me by the throat.

  He lifted me into the air. I struggled to breathe. He looked so ethereal—more shadow than person, more painting than creature—but his grip was as solid as a rock. I scratched at what I thought should be skin on his hand, but only smoke rose from the wounds.

  “You have heart, child,” he said. “And that will be your undoing.”

  He slammed me into the ground beside him.

  My air escaped in a rush. I lay there, bruised, back aching, muscles frozen. And incapacitated on the ground as I was, El Sombrerón had two hands free to wrangle my dazed sister onto his shoulder. He threw her over it like a limp sack. I watched helplessly as the last of the opals fell from her hair in a rain of fire. Through her obvious terror, her hand stretched for mine. Desperate. Shaking. Pleading.

  “Cece!” Juana screamed.

  It was ragged. The voice of a child wrenched out of a woman.

  My vision swirled as I struggled to get up. Juana. I had to—had to save—I blinked desperately and finally found my feet. I stumbled forward to find nothing.

  The world righted, and my vision cleared, but there was only nothing. El Sombrerón had disappeared.

  And taken my sister with him.

  4

  The Burning Familia

  The fires of the festival were still roaring bright when I made it to the town square, shoving my way through the crowd.

  “Mamá!” I cried. “Papá!”

  I was average height for my age, but still so many people loomed over me that I felt as if I were lost in a cluster of cacti. I stumbled into one of the señores. He pulled away from me.

  “Ey, chiquita,” he snapped. “Get ahold of yourself. What, did you see your own shadow?”

  The man laughed and shoved me away. I barely found my footing, searching for my parents. “Please, I need to find my mamá and papá!” My side burned with the bruises left over from El Sombrerón, but I pushed through people and toward the stage where the band was performing. The sound of blaring trumpets, drums, singing, and clapping drowned me out—until I bumped into the wooden edge, and a microphone toppled toward me. “Please, El Sombrerón took my sister!”

  My voice echoed through the town square.

  The dancers stopped dancing. The musicians lowered their brass instruments. Everyone stopped clapping. The mayor and the head of police looked down at me from the stage.

  A ripple moved toward me through the masses. Through dark heads of hair and colorful hats, I spotted Mamá’s broad frame and Papá’s leaner one pushing toward me.

  “Mamá! Papá!”

  Papá reached me first. His brown face was lined and hardened from the sun, and his thick black eyebrows weighed down his forehead, his frown framed with wrinkles.

  “Cecelia,” he said. “What did you say?” He cupped my cheeks, his touch surprisingly gentle. “Mija, where is Juana?”

  Tears filled my eyes, but my words vanished. Mamá toppled out of the masses beside him. Her gaze swept over me, and in a moment, I knew she saw my hair in disarray, the bruises on my neck, the terror in my eyes. I pulled from Papá’s grasp and rushed into her arms.

 
“Cece.” She took my face in her hands. “Is it true—”

  “He took her,” I burst out. “Mamá, El Sombrerón stole her. I tried to do what you said, but he—he was taller than I thought, a-and—”

  “You tried, mija.” She swooped her arms around me and buried her nose in my hair. I curled into her, trying to get smaller, safer, in her warm arms. Papá came closer and wrapped us in a tight hold. Together they cocooned me, but the news still sent shudders through them.

  Footsteps rumbled across the stage behind us. “El Sombrerón has taken Juana Rios!” The head of police’s voice grated with anger.

  “Can we believe her?” Someone cried out. “She’s cursed!”

  “Yes, what if the Rios girl is leading us into a trap?”

  “Quiet!” The head of police hollered. “El Sombrerón has not taken one of our girls in years. He was bound to come again. Quickly, send notice to the police posted at the edge of the Ruins! We may be able to find her before the criatura escapes.” He turned to the police guarding the stage. “Tell the priestesses to return to the Sun Sanctuary. Ask them to light candles for our success.”

  Under his command, civilians, dancers, and police alike leaped into action and raced for the Ruins. Dust rose in their wake. It settled on my face and stuck there, to my tears, until I felt as much like mud as I did human.

  The rescuers moved with determination, but we knew they would fail. No person had ever been quick enough to rescue the stolen brides of El Sombrerón. He was too fast. Too powerful.

  Juana was never coming back.

  “Go to bed, Cece,” Papá said.

  It was just him, Mamá, and me now, in the silent tomb of our home. The adobe walls felt barren, coated in darkness. No one had the heart to light a candle or the stove.

  I stood at the edge of the living room, where it met our small kitchen. I leaned on the ladder that led up to the attic entrance above me, where Juana and I shared a bedroom. It would be so quiet in there without her.

  Mamá stood a few feet away, facing the front window, looking out into the cold desert nighttime.

  Before he died, Abuelo used to say Mamá was made of fire. Right now, trembling but with wide and silent shoulders, she looked just like a fire that had gone out. She was stiff coal abandoned in pieces, with just a hint of something too hot to touch beneath.

  Papá stopped beside me. He was so close, I could feel his body heat.

  His hand landed softly on my head. “You need to rest, Cece,” he said. His voice was quiet, maybe even tender. “Straighten up and go upstairs. Go to bed.”

  Did he think I could sleep? Maybe he just wanted me out of his sight. Hidden up in the loft where my face wouldn’t have to remind him of Juana, where he could pretend he wasn’t stuck with the worst of his daughters.

  I expected him to push me upward when I didn’t stop hunching over or move up the ladder. Usually he would make me stand tall and straight. I was an educated girl, he often reminded me. I must do my familia proud and act like it. He’d sacrificed so much to put me through school. But right now, there was no mention of his sacrifices or our familia’s pride. There was no mention of how high my chin should be.

  Maybe even my papá, beneath his hard face, felt the thing falling between us now: el vacío. The emptiness.

  Slowly, he lowered his hand, placing it between my shoulder blades, and pushed, encouraging me to move. I gripped the ladder rungs tightly, despite my trembling hands.

  “Cece,” Papá whispered.

  I paused.

  “Where was she?” he asked. “When it . . . happened?”

  I cried so much, I didn’t think I had any more tears left. But my eyes stung, and my throat tightened. When it came to Juana, I would always, somehow, have more left.

  “The Ruins,” I whispered.

  There was a tense pause.

  “Why?” His voice was deep enough to drown in.

  I pressed my forehead against the ladder. “I told her I’d be right back . . .”

  Papá didn’t say anything after that, but I sensed the anger in his breath, and the unsaid words piled up inside of me until I could feel them in every follicle, every pore, every blink of my eyelids—I had lost my sister. I was the reason she’d been stolen. I had destroyed my familia.

  The ladder rungs bit into my hands as I climbed up into the room above. It was terribly quiet. On the far right, Juana’s unmade bed sat in the low moonlight. It was surrounded by opal beads and strips of red fabric from our preparation this morning. My hand shook as I reached out and stroked the dent her body had made in the mattress.

  The moment my fingers grazed the empty space she left behind, a powerful thought forced its way inside me.

  No. I wouldn’t let Juana be the prisoner of El Sombrerón.

  There had to be a way to fix this, and I had to be the one to do it. Somehow, I would find a way to bring my sister home.

  5

  The Limpia

  The next morning, I woke up before the sun. The loft was cold and dark, and leftover nightmares still clouded my brain. I have to save Juana, I chanted over and over in my mind. There has to be a way.

  As far as I knew, there wasn’t one. Every year, El Sombrerón stole a bride from one town or another, and none of them had ever, ever come back.

  Really, the only way to get her back was to find the place El Sombrerón had taken her—Devil’s Alley, the criaturas’ world. But the secret entrance moved each year, and legends said ordinary human beings couldn’t pass through it and survive without permission from the rulers of Devil’s Alley.

  So that complicated any plan I tried to think up. But that didn’t mean I should stop trying. There had to be some human being, somewhere in history, who had descended into Devil’s Alley and returned.

  I just had to figure out who’d already done it, and then I could do it too.

  Juana was waiting for me.

  “Cecelia!” Mamá called from below. “Come down!”

  I knew that tone, and my heart immediately raced up into my throat. Without pausing, I stumbled out of bed and practically flew down the ladder rungs to the first floor.

  Mamá was waiting in our small kitchen alcove. The downstairs was eerily quiet besides the sound of her rustling through a large trunk filled with papers and bound books.

  I walked over to her. “Mamá? What are you doing?”

  “We’re going to the Sun Sanctuary,” she said instead of answering me. She made an annoyed sound as she pushed papers around in the trunk. “Help me find the Cantos de Curanderas, mija. It was your abuela’s book, and we need it for what we’re going to do.”

  I went to the opposite side of the trunk. It was about three feet long, made of thick wood and intricately carved. I’d seen it only a couple of times before, since Mamá usually kept it hidden beneath her bed, but I knew its significance. It was filled with our family history, with stories older than our adobe home, and records winding far, far back into the history of Tierra del Sol, our town, and all of Isla del Antiguo Amanecer, our country.

  It was, to put it mildly, extremely important to Mamá. She’d never even let me look inside before.

  Besides the mess of papers, I noticed an image painted inside the lid. It pictured four women holding hands, walking through a sunset with a dark beast before them and Tierra del Sol behind them. I recognized this legend. Though people in my town didn’t like to tell the story, unless it was to emphasize the women’s failure.

  It was a depiction of the two-hundred-year-old tale of the curanderas, powerful women who had once guarded Tierra del Sol against criaturas. Except, they’d apparently failed. And our town had nearly been wiped off the map, leaving the Ruins behind. That’s why no one but Abuela had ever really cared to study them and their old magic. Nowadays, people said they had been weaklings at best, and traitors at worst.

  I bit my bottom lip and tried to focus on finding the book Mamá had mentioned. I passed by several old papers and even my favorite book, The Legen
ds of Criaturas and Their Beginnings, which Mamá had read to us growing up. After a few minutes, I spotted a book I’d never seen before: Cantos de Curanderas. I plucked it out of the pile, and another, smaller book fell out from between its pages. It landed at my feet, the cover bright red.

  The sound made Mamá look up, but she only noticed the book in my hands. “There! You found it, mija.” She took the Cantos de Curanderas and went to place it in her bag by the door. “Now, go get dressed—we need to make it to the Sun Sanctuary before the priestesses wake up.”

  “Before they wake up?” I snatched up the red leather book from the floor and headed for the ladder. “How will we get in then?”

  “Before most of them wake up,” she said. “If anyone but Dominga del Sol talks to you, look away and say nothing. No one can know why we’re there.”

  So that’s why this felt familiar. The last time Mamá took me to the Sun Sanctuary and told me to hide from the Sun Priestesses, it was to perform a limpia. Memories flooded over me, and I shuddered. I didn’t mind the ritual cleansing, but I didn’t like all the sneaking around we had to do to perform it.

  I scampered up the ladder and back into my room. After tugging on proper clothes, I scanned the red leather book I’d grabbed. Strange. It looked much newer than anything else in the trunk. I frowned and flipped the book open.

  The first page was signed by Catrina Rios.

  My heart nearly stopped. What?

  After my run-in with Tzitzimitl when I was seven, I’d learned that Catrina, my tía, had left home to become a bruja—and disgraced our family in the process. Mamá couldn’t even say her name without looking disgusted.

  So why was her diary still in our family trunk?

  “Mija,” Mamá called from below.

  I dropped the journal, and it landed on Juana’s bed, in the dip she’d left behind. “Coming, Mamá!”

  I gave the journal that shouldn’t exist one last look before running after her.

  Mamá pressed her hand against my back, guiding me through the still-dark streets toward the Sun Sanctuary.

  “Almost there, mija,” she said.