He would show her he was a true brujo. A son she could be proud of. He would perform the tasks that his father and his father’s father had as the children of Lady Death. Yadriel would prove himself to everyone.
“C’mon, brujo,” Maritza called gently, waving him forward. “We need to get out of here before someone finds us.”
Yadriel turned and grinned.
Brujo.
He was about to bend down and pick up the bowl from the ground when the hairs on the back of his neck prickled. Yadriel froze and looked to Maritza, who had also stopped mid-step.
Something was wrong.
“Did you feel that?” he asked. Even in a whisper, his voice seemed too loud in the empty church.
Maritza nodded. “What is it?”
Yadriel gave a small shake of his head. It was almost like sensing a nearby spirit but different. Stronger than anything Yadriel had felt before. A sense of unexplained dread swarmed in his stomach.
He saw Maritza shiver just as he felt a tingle shoot down his spine.
There was a beat of nothingness.
Then searing pain stabbed into Yadriel’s chest.
He cried out, the force knocking him to his knees.
Maritza fell, a strangled cry lodging in her throat.
The pain was unbearable. Yadriel’s breath came in sharp bursts as he clutched at his chest. His eyes watered, blurring the vision of Lady Death standing above him.
Just when he thought he couldn’t stand it any longer, that, surely, the pain would kill him, it stopped.
Tension released his muscles, and his arms and legs went limp, heavy with exhaustion. Sweat clung to his skin. His body trembled as he gulped air. Yadriel’s hand clutched his chest, right above his heart, where the throbbing pain slowly faded to a dull ache. Maritza knelt on the floor, one hand pressed to the same place. Her skin was ashen and covered in a sheen of sweat.
They stared at each other, trying to catch their breath. They didn’t say anything. They knew what it meant. They could feel it in their bones.
Miguel was gone. One of their own had died.
TWO
“What happened? What the hell happened?” Maritza panted at Yadriel’s side as they raced through the cemetery. She kept saying it over and over again, like a haunting mantra.
Yadriel had never seen her so shook up before and it made everything so much worse. Usually, he was the one panicking under tense situations while she just shrugged things off with a joke. But this was no laughing matter.
There was no sign of Tito. Yadriel could hear frantic voices across the cemetery. They sprinted past a couple of confused-looking spirits.
“What’s going on?” Felipe called to them, anxiously gripping the neck of his vihuela as they ran by.
“I don’t know!” was all Yadriel could say.
Because the brujx were tied so closely to life and death, to spirits and the living, when one of their own died, they all felt it.
The first time it had happened to Yadriel, he was only five years old. He woke up in the middle of the night, as if from a nightmare, with only the thought of his abuelito in his mind. When he got out of bed and crept to his grandparents’ room, his abuelito lay motionless. His abuelita sat by his side, holding tightly to his hand, whispering prayers into his ear, tears streaming down her wrinkled cheeks.
His father stood on the other side, Diego tucked under his arm. His dad’s expression had been stoic and pensive, a deep sadness in his dark eyes. Yadriel’s mother folded him into her arms, gently rubbing his back as they said their goodbyes.
His abuelito had died in his sleep. It had been gentle and painless. The only thing that had woken Yadriel was a sudden sense of loss, like cold water dropping into his stomach.
But this was different. Whatever had happened to Miguel was not a gentle passing.
There had to be some sort of mistake. It didn’t make sense. Even though he’d felt it, even though he knew exactly what it meant, there was no way Miguel was dead.
Miguel was Yadriel’s cousin and only twenty-eight years old. Yadriel had just seen him earlier that night when he stopped by the house to snag some of Lita’s concha before he started his graveyard shift.
Had there been an accident? Maybe Miguel had left the cemetery and had been hit by a car? There was no way he could’ve been killed while in the cemetery, was there?
They needed to get home and find out what had taken