Chapter 17
CHAPTER 17
I CAN’T PROCESS. OR THINK. Or breathe.
I need to get out of here. I try to bring the letter with me, but every time I leave the room, the paper vanishes from my grip and reappears on the table. Like it’s spellbound to this location.
Just like Sebastián is spellbound to the castle.
Leaving the letter behind, I race downstairs to the library, then down more stairs, until I’ve left the tower. Running alongside my reflection in the mirror room, I can’t help imagining it’s my sister.
The girl in the glass starts to slow down, my reflection lagging behind me. I blink, and the illusion melts away.
My pulse is pounding in my head, sure to set off a migraine—but I freeze by the gargoyle staircase when I see someone coming down the steps.
Beatríz.
If I look half-dead, she’s half-decomposed. Her skin has a grayish cast, and the whites of her eyes are streaked with red. Smudged black liner raccoons her gaze and stray curls break free of her bun. She looks like she’s aged five decades in five days.
She stares at me like she’s seen a ghost. Then I realize I’m wearing Mom’s hot-pink sweater.
“Are you all right?” she asks at last.
I shake my head. I have never felt further from all right. “I have a sister .”
My voice breaks on the word, and I suck in a ragged inhale. I refuse to cry when I need to speak.
Beatríz says nothing. She stares down at her fingers, and I’m reminded of Lady Macbeth and her bloodstained hands.
“How could they keep this from me?” The question comes out a whisper, and I can’t stop the tears from streaking down my cheeks.
I’m enraged with my parents.
I wish they were here mostly to scream at them and call them out for the liars they’ve been. The salty water falls more forcefully, and I have to dig my nails deep into my palms to keep the dam from breaking.
“How”—a sob escapes my throat—“how could I forget I have a twin? Where is she? ”
“Let’s sit down,” says Beatríz at last, her voice as thin as mine. “You look like a corpse.”
Look who’s talking.
I want to defy her, but she starts moving toward the dining hall, and I have to follow if I want answers. Once she enters the kitchen, I drop into a chair at the long table. It feels like the hole in my chest is widening, letting out all my oxygen. I can’t make it any farther.
My aunt comes back with two glasses of water, and this time she sits next to me, not across the table. There’s just a couple of feet of air between us.
After a while, I realize she isn’t going to speak first. So I start at the beginning. “I know about the fire,” I say, my throat dry even after drinking from the glass. “I found the purple room. And my death certificate .”
I take another gulp of water before I ask, “Is it my sister’s? Was Estela her name?”
Beatríz shakes her head, but her lips stay sealed, almost pursed together. Like a lock.
“Then the certificate is mine?” My hand trembles on the table as I say it.
Beatríz stares at my fingers as she says, “It’s a fake.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Your mother sent it after she disappeared. I believe your father forged it.”
“But why ?”
Today I can make out the small lines in my aunt’s face. It feels like her mask is finally cracking. Yet as the silent seconds march past, I realize she still can’t talk about it.
“Why revisit the past?” she whispers. “There’s nothing good to be found there.”
“ Everything good is there,” I say, the words slicing me on their way out. “The past is all I have.”
My aunt’s hands reach out to grip mine. They are nearly as cold as Sebastián’s, but her breath feels warm on my face as she leans in.
“That’s not true, Estela. You still have your whole life ahead of you.”
This is the first sign of affection she’s shown me, but her warmth means nothing if she’s not going to tell me the truth. “Everyone around me dies. What kind of life is that?”
Beatríz shakes her head, her eyes round with horror. “It’s… it’s my fault.”
“Yours?”
“ Ours. My brother’s and mine.”
“I don’t understand,” I say for the second time.
She shakes her head like she doesn’t want to explain.
When I was little, Dad would take me with him to meet with sources at public places like parks and shopping malls, because he said a child’s presence lowers a person’s guard. I remember he didn’t let any silences creep into those meetings.
If a source stopped speaking, Dad jumped in and moved things along with his own theories, no matter how unformed they were—in fact, the more off base, the more likely the source was to start talking again.
“The fire was Teo’s idea,” I say, studying Beatríz, whose fingers go limp in mine. “It was a spell to send my sister to the other castle, where the original Brálaga lives. And you went along with it.”
Beatríz pulls her hands away, and I think she’s going to take off again. “We were teens,” she says, staying seated, “younger than you are now, when we found the journals.”
“What exactly are the journals?” I ask.
“ Spells. The magical compositions of our twin ancestors, the ones who managed to pull something off. They recorded the successful spells for posterity. Only some of our ancestors warned that the power came at a price. They said once they opened the door to magic, they couldn’t close it. They called it a curse .
“At first, Teo and I were thrilled. We had always felt there was something special about this castle, about us . It made sense that we were destined for power, and the first thing he wanted to try was the spell for crossing to the other castle. He didn’t care that the letter specified age five . We tried igniting the black fire again and again, but it never worked for my brother. I thought it meant the other realm wasn’t real, but Teo was sure it was real and we were just too old. He was devastated.”
Beatríz squints, like she can almost see the past from here. “He lost interest in everything. He dropped out of school and disappeared into drugs for years, until…” She blinks, and her eyes meet mine. “Olivia said she was pregnant. With twins .”
Goose bumps race down my arms, and I realize that moment sealed my sister’s and my fates.
“My brother convinced me that since twins weren’t born into our parents’ generation, we’d missed our birthright, but it wasn’t fair for you and your sister to miss yours. I still didn’t believe in the other castle, but I loved Teo more than anything. I was born a few seconds after him, and the joke in our family was that I was his Sombrita— little shadow . Whatever he did, I did.”
She exhales long, like she’s letting out old fumes along with the words, her eyes shimmering with moisture.
“He had changed so much since we discovered those journals, but with the birth of you girls, we all felt we were seeing the old Teo again. Energetic, excited, hopeful. I didn’t want us to lose him. I figured we’d just go through the motions, that’s all—that nothing would really happen.”
Her voice grows rough, and she clears her throat. “When the full moon rose, you girls were playing hide-and-seek. You were the one hiding. You were always so good at that game.”
The tears brim over her eyes.
“So we took Antonela .”
Hearing my twin’s name, I feel something restored to me. It fills the hole in my heart that had burrowed too deep for anyone to reach, buried beneath tissue and wounds and walls.
“Antonela,” I whisper, and gasp at the familiarity of the word on my tongue. A muscle memory.
“Your mother was inconsolable,” Beatríz goes on. “She tried having us arrested, but all traces of the spell had vanished, and there was no evidence beyond the blackened walls. There was no body .”
She finally drops her hands to her lap. Her cheeks are slick with tears.
“Only Teo believed we could bring her home. He assured Oli that we needed to do another spell, but it required your blood. Olivia panicked and disappeared overnight.”
The air between us has hardened so much, it’s difficult to draw breath. “D-did he do a spell,” I whisper, “on the day of the subway—?”
“ Impossible, ” she says so quickly that I know she’s already considered it, too. “He isn’t anywhere near that powerful.”
“Then what killed my parents?”
“The curse !” She hisses the word, like it tastes foul. “After your sister died, Oli ran off with you, Teo went to a dark place again, and our parents’ health began to suffer. They died soon after, and I took over the clínica. I finally had to get Teo professional help, which left me alone here. We never should have set that fire. We cursed ourselves.”
Part of me wants to forgive her and recover some of the family I lost, but I can’t. She’s still lying. “You left me for five days, without a note or checking in. That wasn’t the curse. It was your choice.”
Her expression hardens, and she doesn’t meet my gaze. “My brother called me five days ago and said he was in trouble, that the curse was bearing down on him and I would likely never see him again. He told me he would be gone by morning, so I was in too much of a rush to be rational. I stopped at the clínica to pick up syringes in case he needed to be sedated, and I realized I forgot to leave you a note, so I wrote a message on the door.”
“Why didn’t you call?”
“I lost my cell phone the second day.”
“Why didn’t you try me from a public phone to the line in your bedroom? Or to the bookstore?”
“I don’t know!” She springs to her feet, and I jump to mine, too, blocking her exit.
“I do! Because you didn’t know if you were coming back,” I answer for her. “I had taken your place at the castle, and you were going to ask your brother to run away with you and leave the Brálaga legacy behind. But since you couldn’t be sure I wouldn’t call the cops, you had to ditch your cell phone to avoid being tracked. So you communicated with him on a disposable phone instead.”
Her eyes grow wide with shock. She doesn’t say anything, and I know I’m right.
“But something drew you back to Oscuro,” I go on. “And it had to be the same thing that lured you away— your brother. ”
“Have you seen him?” she asks, confirming my theory.
“He must want us both here for something,” I continue, thinking out loud. “Another spell?”
“Stop it! I won’t have you talking like him under my roof—”
“You weren’t even coming back to this roof!”
“I never said that—”
“You didn’t have to. I could read it on your face.”
“ I wasn’t sure what I was going to do! ” she shouts, and we both go quiet. It’s the first time she’s told me the truth, and we both hear it.
She sits back down, and so do I. Now that she’s being honest, I ask, “Why don’t I remember Antonela?”
“We think those memories must have been destroyed by the spell that sent her to the other castle. Along with your birth language.”
“What?”
“After Antonela disappeared, you stopped speaking. Nor did you ask about her. It was like you had become a blank slate. I don’t know what happened next because you all took off. I’m guessing that since your parents had spent time in the U.S. and were both fluent in English—they used to have private conversations that we couldn’t follow because they spoke so fast—they must have raised you with the language.”
“So my past was just lost?” I ask incredulously.
“Your parents probably never brought up your sister again to keep from reopening a wound that had magically sealed itself. They chose to carry the grief for you.”
I don’t have the headspace to look at things from their perspective yet—I’m barely processing my own. But one particular word stands out from what she said. Grief.
“Then are you saying—?” I can’t finish the question, and I try again. “Is Antonela—?”
I swallow, trying to control the emotions rising up my throat as I form the words: “Is she dead ?”
Beatríz’s face crumples, and I feel mine falling, too. I have my answer. My aunt and uncle killed my sister.
“How do you know?” I ask, my voice growing heated. “Maybe she’s in the other castle with Brálaga, and she has magical powers by now, and as long as I’m alive in this world to anchor her, she will live on in the other…”
I trail off because what I’m describing sounds a lot like a story we tell ourselves about a loved one when they die.
“You have every right to hate me,” says my aunt. “I hate me, too. I’ve regretted my actions every day. It’s why I devote myself to this castle and this town—to make up for the life I took.”
I feel a knot the size of a baseball rising up my chest. “Why bring me here if you knew how much danger I’d be in?”
“After the subway, I realized you wouldn’t be safe anywhere. I thought I could make amends to my sister by at least attempting to protect you.”
“More like you needed someone to replace you here.” The ball of emotion is at my throat, making the words come out squeezed.
“That’s not true!” she says defiantly. But she seems to catch herself because she exhales and adds, more calmly, “It crossed my mind that I could save my brother. I wasn’t planning on abandoning you here forever”—her words gather speed—“but I wanted to give myself the chance to disappear even for a little while, just to remember what it’s like to be a normal person because I’m tired of being a prisoner chained to this place and feeling so completely alone !”
Her hands cover her face, fingers forming a cage as her cries burst out, like a volcano erupting. Her shoulders shake as she fights against her sobs.
The sound is a trigger that takes me back to the center. I know exactly how that loneliness feels.
Night after night, I would tell myself I knew the truth, remembering the black smoke, trying to hold on to myself until I realized I had no one to hold on for, wondering what if something really was wrong with my brain, and most of all wishing my parents hadn’t left me behind. When she’s calmer, I ask, “Why did you wait so long to find me?”
“I tried to, for months,” she says from behind her hands. “I presented myself at the American embassy, but they lumped me in with all the fanatics. I went through every piece of news, until I read somewhere that you had been institutionalized. I called the center, but as no family was listed for you, they never put me through. The letter was a last resort.”
Her hands finally come down. She looks more like Mom now, messy and raw, not uptight and distant. “Give me a chance, Estela. Por favor.”
“How do I know you didn’t help your brother with the subway spell, just like you did the black fire?”
“I told you, the subway wasn’t a spell, ” she says with a bite of impatience.
“How do you know—?”
“Because I’ve refused to do magic since Antonela died,” she says in a rush. “Teo needs his twin to perform spells. He hates me for keeping magic from him, but I thought it was for the best.”
“That’s not true because he did magic two nights ago,” I say. “He took my blood using your equipment, out in the woods, under the full moon. Felipe was there.”
She shoots up so fast, she knocks over her glass of water, and the liquid pools across the wooden tabletop. “When were you going to tell me this?” she demands, ignoring the spill.
“How am I supposed to trust you when you were forcibly drugging me days ago?”
“That’s not—” She sighs and shakes her head. “I’ll explain later. Right now, we need to find my brother. Maybe we should search the castle, then the woods—”
“No need,” I say, cutting her off. “I know where he’s been staying.”
Beatríz bundles me up like we’re going to the North Pole.
As we walk together to town, my gaze darts to every corner, expecting Teo to jump out at us. I catch Beatríz doing the same thing, so I know I’m not alone in my alertness.
“We should stop by the bookstore to check on Felipe,” I say.
“You said Arturo told you he went out of town.”
“But what if Teo—?”
“Felipe must have panicked after what happened in the woods, and he went to stay with friends out of town to avoid questioning.”
“If you knew Felipe,” I argue, “you’d know that anything to do with la Sombra can only draw him closer.”
Beatríz doesn’t answer me, but when we get to the town plaza, she swings open the door to Libroscuro. “Hola, doctora!” says a smiling Arturo. “Veo que ha vuelto del congreso. Muy bien.”
“Gracias,” says Beatríz, and I smile from her side, grateful she’s here to do the talking. “?Está disponible Felipe para darle clases a mi sobrina?”
“No, sigue de viaje el chaval,” he says with an apologetic smile. “Por una vez que se toma un descanso, no se lo iba a negar.”
“Seguro. Bueno, hasta luego.”
When we’re outside, Beatríz asks me, “What did you get from that?”
“He’s still traveling, and Arturo didn’t want to deny him a longer break?”
“Good,” she says, sounding pleased with my translation. We reach the clínica, and she unlocks the door. Tension tightens my muscles.
We search the whole place in moments, but Teo is not here anymore. It’s only when we regroup by my computer that we find the five-word message he left us, on a sticky note he stuck to the monitor:
Help me bring Antonela home.
12 YEARS AGO
“LET’S GO,” SAYS MY SISTER in Spanish.
She’s shaking me awake in bed.
“Now?” I ask, my throat thick with sleep.
“Look.”
I pop open an eye. “What?”
She tilts her head back, and I stare at the ceiling. The lights are flashing on and off.
I sit up. “Let’s go.”
We open the door slowly, so its creaking won’t give us away. Out in the crimson corridor, the lights are blinking, calling to us.
We follow the trail down the stairs and deeper into the castle. We pass through the string of doorless rooms leading to the windowless cathedral, only now the walls are adorned with artwork and the spaces are appointed with furniture. It’s only when we reach the spot with the trapdoor to the purple room that the blinking stops.
Then the lights turn up to full blast, illuminating the hall.
“Now what?” asks Antonela.
“Maybe we wait here.”
“Or maybe there’s something hidden we have to find.”
By the way her eyes grow round, I know this is the version we’re going with—which suits me fine because I love mysteries. So we begin to look around, inspecting every corner we can reach and casting a close eye along the rug, which looks much brighter and cleaner.
There’s a coffee table at the center of the rug, and I jump in a wide circle around it to see if the floor feels loose anywhere.
“Just pull it back,” says Antonela, grabbing the edge. I join her, and we fold it over together.
Our wide eyes meet. Wow, we mouth at the same time as we spot part of the outline of a trapdoor.
It takes our joint effort to lift the coffee table and open the trapdoor. We climb down a set of steps to a basement where all we see is an empty hall of rocky walls, and I blow out a frustrated breath.
“There’s nothing here!”
Yet Antonela doesn’t seem upset. She gets close to the wall, as if she hears something on the other side. “It’s like a heartbeat,” she says vaguely. Then she reaches up and touches the stone that activates the hidden door.
“Ow!” Blood trickles out from her finger onto the rock.
“Are you okay?” I ask, coming over.
A rectangular outline expands across the stones. “Look!” she says, her voice high-pitched with excitement.
Together, we open the door a sliver, enough for our tiny bodies to squeeze through.
“Purple!” we squeal in unison. It’s our favorite color.
We giggle madly and hold hands as we dance round and round and round, high on the castle revealing this secret just to us, a buried room where we can hide without anyone finding us, and we drop to the floor in a bundle of laughter.
“This room is our secret,” Antonela says to me once we’ve calmed down.
“Our secret sister space,” I say in agreement.
“Forever,” she says.
“Forever.”
We pinkie swear, and then we spring up and go back to dancing. Like we truly have forever.