Page 93 of Never Say Die
Antonella Ramírez had always been a beautiful woman. Her round, soft belly was blanketed with an apron, protecting her clothes from grease-spits. Usually, her black hair spilled to her waist, streaked silver and white from temple to ends, but that day, she wore her long, fishtail braid pinned against her nape beneath a floral bandana. She looked like their father—eyes like sugar browning in a pan, slender hands and knobby elbows, and a gorgeous, curved nose pierced with a gold hoop. Aiden realized how long it’d been since he’d climbed that steep hillside in Tijuana and visited her little square house. Guilt panged in his chest.
“Hola, abuelita,” he said, and touched her arm.
She turned off the burners and pointed to a glass slider, leading to the fenced backyard and an outdoor table.
He walked into the dry, summer air. Hummingbirds searched for nectar and bees gathered pollen, and Aiden closed his eyes as he sat in a white, plastic chair, welcoming the sun on his face. For a moment, he forgot where he’d come from. Where he’d been, what he’d done. Citrus perfumed the air, his abuela stood close by, and Aiden had nothing to fear. Still, something tightened in his chest, pulled hard on his heartstrings, and a voice from another life took the place of the vendor across the street. It echoed, so faintly—baby, wake up.
Two plates scraped the tabletop, followed by cups filled with guava juice.
“Am I dreaming?” he asked, listening for that voice again. “Are we awake?”
Antonella sat across from him, yet he hadn’t seen her sit. Sheassessed his face. Pushed a plate toward him, and took his hand, tapping the bandage on his wrist. “No, I don’t think we are,” she said, and didn’t say. Her lips moved incorrectly, like subtitles on a translated film, and her voice was not her own. It was his mother’s voice in her mouth. “I think we’re doing something else, somewhere else.”
Aiden furrowed his brow. “Where, though?”
“Here or there,” she said, and Camila’s voice came forth, rising from inside their grandmother. “You felt it, didn’t you? Hard not to believe in something when it believes in you, no?”
“I’m the only one ofuswho ever believed in me,” he snapped. He stared at the plate, fixed with chicken mole, arroz, pickled radish, and blackened corn. A meal he’d experienced before—several times—over spring break and every November.
A gold flower petal drifted onto his plate, swinging through the air like a velvet glove he couldn’t unsee. When he turned toward Antonella, his abuela was gone, and a severe, inhuman form took her place, so close he gasped and froze. Black paint hollowed her eyes, striped her lips, and darkened her nostrils. Like a calavera, Santa Muerte appeared to him as a lovely, handmade skull. Perfectly coiled ringlets sprouted from the marigolds growing on her hairline, shedding petals as she gazed at him, lips twisted into a sly smile.
“Faith is a selfless act, Aiden Moore Ramírez, and I am not a selfless woman,” Santa Muerte said. He heard his grandmother snuck between his mother’s voice, his sister’s voice, and a haunting whisper he had never heard before. She leaned away from him, just enough to let him breathe.
Aiden searched his memories. Hunted for remnants of whatever he’d left, wherever he’d exited, and came away with a feeling like grief but sharper. Worse. Longing turned inside-out—reluctant and stubborn.
“No estás terminado. I heard you then, I’ve heard you now.This time, you will hear me,” she said, and brought her skeletal hand to his cheek. “I am no devil, Aiden.”
Santa Muerte’s touch jostled him into another realm. He gasped and clutched his chest. Plastered his palm over a wound unstitching on his torso, spreading through him in slow-motion, tearing his skin apart at the seams. Blood soaked his clothes. Darkness flashed, and the sky looked down at him. Someone—Shay—said his name like a prayer. His abuela’s backyard shifted out of existence, into existence. He blinked through the pain radiating in his stomach, in his gums, in his chest, and stared at the saint, goddess, deity,wonderbefore him.
“It was you?” he asked, winded.
“You were foolish to ever think otherwise, and the ones you love are foolish to think you’ve done this for anyone else.”
“Send me back,” he braved, and laid his hand over her smooth white bones, holding her palm to his cheek. “Soy tu sirviente.”
“Yes, you are.” She smelled like a cemetery, like fresh-cut flowers and cooked sugar, like turned soil and washed gravestones. “There is work to be done, mijo,” she whispered, and her touch calloused. She snatched his jaw with her phalanges and met his eyes again. Santa Muerte held him like a child, like a prisoner, like an animal she’d rescued, still biting and clawing. “Faith is a selfless act, Aiden Moore Ramírez, and you are not a selfless man. Tell me, did you truly believe I’d come for you if I hadn’t known your intention? Do you think so little of me, brujo?”
“You wanted a sacrifice. Here I am,” he said, and stared into her black eyes.
“Oh,” she purred, clucking her tongue. “Will you ever learn?”
“I did this for my sister.”
“No, you didn’t,” Santa Muerta whispered, angling her lips toward his ear. “La verdad.”
“I did this for me.” Aiden gritted his teeth. “Quiero poder.”
The truth was a brittle, misshapen thing, wielded like a weapon, braced before him like a shield.Power, he thought,power and life and love and glory.
“I have been waiting for you. Since the night you should’ve died, since the inception of the prophecy you stitched into your soul, all the way to here, now, this very moment.” Santa Muerte grinned. Her icy breath coasted his face. “This is your becoming, do you understand?”
“Yes,” he said, gasping. Suddenly, night chased the day, and his harrowed heart lurched, and his body lightened and plummeted, recoiled and reached.
“Deliver the dead to me,” Santa Muerte said, and pressed her painted lips to his mouth.
The ache in his chest worsened. He reached for breath, but his lungs refused to cooperate. Told his arms to lift, his eyes to open, his body to lurch into life. Pushed toward humidity, toward the stinging, aching fire throbbing above his bellybutton, toward the sound of moving water, and nighttime insects, and Shay, and Shay, and Shay, and?—
Aiden lived again.
