Lalo gazed down at his bloodstained hands. “Maricela turned me. She made me un vampiro just to see me in pain. I couldn’t stand the agony. I broke free, and I killed everyone in my path. Nothing could stop me.”
Fernanda’s eyes widened. “Holy shit.”
“We have to leave,” he said, starting for his room. “We’ve got to get away before Maricela returns and sees what I did to her children.”
His pace quickened, but Fernanda didn’t budge.
“Holy shit,” she whispered.
Lalo slowed in the middle of the hall. “Come on, Fernanda. Hurry.”
She shook her head slowly in disbelief. “Holy shit.”
“Fernanda!”
Her gaze snapped to his and she gasped. “Your eyes are glowing in the light.”
“Yes, I know. I’m a godsdamned vampiro, remember?”
She blinked. “And he cusses now, too! What has become of my poor, perfectly boring brother?”
“Now’s not the time for jests. Let’s go.” He started forward but halted when his sister asked, “Can you fly?”
“What? No. Have you not listened to me talk about my research once during this entire year?”
She shuffled forward, the fire poker still in her grasp. “What about shape-shifting? I feel like I remember you saying something about that. Can you turn yourself into a bear or something?”
Lalo threw up his arms. “It’s like you purposefully get thefacts wrong.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Tecuani is the god of souls. He can be summoned to the Land of the Living and revive the deceased but at a great cost. I found the journals of a father in the southern country of Santemala who begged Tecuani to bring his young daughter back from the dead.”
“That’s so sad,” Fernanda said.
“Indeed.” But that wasn’t the point his sister should be focusing on. “The girl rose to life, but she was different. She took on the traits of Tecuani. He is jaguar-like in every way. He is fast and strong and has exceptional hearing and sight during the night. The man’s little girl no longer wished to play with toys but to hunt for human hearts. She wanted blood, specifically her father’s blood because it was he who called forth Tecuani.” Lalo turned to his sister. “Note that there wasnomention of a bear in that explanation. I don’t even know where you came up with such a thing.”
A single brow raised on Fernanda’s face. “You are telling meyouare now like a jaguar?”
“Yes. To an extent. One that needs human blood to survive.”
“So…” She crossed her arms. “No flying.”
Lalo scoffed and stomped away.
“But where will we go?” his sister called after him. “We can run from that vampiress all we want, but what about you, Lalo? I might not listen much, but I do remember you saying when un vampiro feeds, it steals time from their victim. I know you. I know you’d never wish to do something like that.”
She was right. He refused to steal another person’s life.
So what was there to do? His eyes flicked to the small desk tucked away in the dining room. A year’s worth of research on vampiros lay stacked inside the drawers.
There was one place he could go for help. One place that maybe, just maybe, might offer him a way to turn himself back. But it was a long shot.
“I found one case of vampiros in our country. It is from some two hundred years ago and there isn’t much to go on, but traveling there to get more information is the best plan I have.” He paced across the room and pulled open a drawer. Lalo riffled through parchment and articles he had copied word for word from the Los Campos library catacombs. Stealing the whole book would have been easier, but he had standards of decorum to uphold. A library was a sacred place, after all.
“There,” he said, pointing at an old map.
Fernanda grabbed the candle and held it toward the parchment. She peered down. Her brow furrowed.
“Del Oro,” she read out loud. “Where in the hells is that?”
“By my best calculations, it’s three or four weeks’ ride to the north.”
