Charlie Hernández & the League of Shadows: Chapters 10–18

“The blood is on account of my pores being too small for the feathers, so they bleed a little. But you think I'm beautiful? I mean, my plumage?"

“Though I have to say, the headline would be one heck of a grabber: 'Charlie Hernández, the half-avian man-child that stalks our halls.' I mean, c'mon, tell me that's not must-read stuff!”

"Charlie, I don't know if you realize this or not, but your feathers and your parents' disappearance are linked. Just consider the circumstantial evidence. All your life you've been normal, right? Your words. Then your parents vanish, and all of a sudden you start experiencing this kooky transformation..."

Again, not that I'm thinking of doing a story on you or anything, but a chance to investigate something like this—the hours of painstaking research, the thrill of the hunt, the exhilaration when all the pieces finally click together...

When I was little my mom had signed me up for Brazilian jujitsu classes, and even though I'd only made it to a gray belt (which is a rank-two belt for juniors), I'd learned that looking like you knew what you were doing was enough to deter most attackers.

Struggling over to me on her hands and knees like a baby learning to crawl, she gripped the bar with both hands. “On three," she said. “One...two...THREE!"
We pulled. The shaft bent. Gears shuddered and strained.

A sharp right, and a mass of stalactites zoomed by close enough to stir my hair. Close enough for me to actually smell the minerals.

But half a second later, the rope pulled taut and then snapped like a shoelace.

I barely had time to whisper, "Dios mío," before the cart came to a sudden screeching stop and tipped forward, launching us out over the pitch-dark chasm.

Mesmerized, I ran my hand along the intricate carvings.

The brawny ones hacked away at minerals embedded in the cave walls, while the hairy-faced ones collected the fragments into buckets and then passed the buckets along a complicated system of pulleys to other hairy-faced dudes, who stood over giant bubbling cauldrons, forging the minerals into what looked like carpenter nails.

Through the sheer fabric of his jumpsuit (which he now wore unbuttoned), I could see his pointy shoulder blades, the hollow birdcage of his ribs, every bump and curve of his bony spine.

I vividly remembered the stories, too—tales of walking, talking skeletons. Sometimes they were friendly, jovial spirits who would, on special occasions, sneak out of the underworld to celebrate with the living—like on the Day of the Dead in Mexico.

See, I remembered my abuela telling me a tale of a shrewd teenage drifter, an orphan named Juancho Ramirez, who'd cheated death, which in his fable had been personified by a calaca.

According to the tale, Juancho had learned at a young age that calacas were traders by nature, so he spent his life collecting little trinkets he thought he could use to bargain for his life when one eventually came for him.

“Deal," the calaca agreed, holding one misshapen hand out toward me.

He raised the map reverently before him, as if holding a sacred object.

"My tirade was uncalled for. I just get a little irritado when humans try to deny my very existence—and the existence of beings like me—to my face. That, and I am going through a bit of a difficult breakup.''

Because the landmasses currently known as Central America, South America, and the Iberian Peninsula are closer in metaphysical proximity to the spirit realm than anywhere else on the planet.

“Yes, the Hairy Hand. I will not allow you to bring their wrath down upon our heads! We are simple stewards, ferrying spirits from one place to another. You'll condemn us to an eternity of nothingness!”

"Okay, so the bad news is I ran a quick preliminary search of your symptoms and wasn't able to find much. I spent, like, two hours on WebMD, researching cases of weird bodily manifestations—skin abnormalities, autoimmune disorders caused by stress, that kind of stuff—but really didn't come across anything even remotely similar to your case.”

“All right, so, um—what now? We just go door to door or something?”
Violet was shaking her head. “I thought about that, but it would take too long to canvass all those neighborhoods; so I did a little more research and found this."

So, at around six, I took a nice, long shower, downed a bowl of lobster bisque (which, by the way, Mrs. Wilson wasn’t about to let me leave the house without doing; not that I minded, since it was so delicioso that I had to go in for seconds), then jumped on my bike and headed over to Violet's.

Violet lived in a nice single-story house at the end of a cul-de-sac.

One day a lady brought this really old poster of Doublemint gum into our shop. It was the one with the two girls riding a tandem bike.

“The key burned you?" Violet gave me a skeptical look. Then she touched a finger to it lightly. “But it's not even hot."

There was a Quickie Mart, a Sir Galloway Dry Cleaners, a family-owned bodega, and a little body shop.

I was about to tell Violet that we probably just needed to ask more people—turn it into a numbers game—when something across the street caught my eye: a swirl of tiny lights glowing luminescent blue just inside the tree line.

All around us, mangrove roots reached out of the ground like the gnarled, twisted fingers of an old witch.

La Luz Mala continued to light our way as we trekked deeper into the swamp, glowing between the roots and mangrove trunks, glimmering off the ankle-deep puddles of brackish water.

But I did see something: a shabby little hut squatting in the middle of the clearing, maybe twenty yards away. It had a thatched roof supporting a huge neon sign, which read—well, mostly flickered—THE CRYING PSYCHIC.

Spooky black wax candles burned in ancient-looking sconces.

"I discovered my gift completely by accident. One day I was crying near a river"—No surprise there, I thought—"and a lost camper a few miles downstream unwittingly scooped up some of my tears into his canteen. Yada, yada, yada, long story short, he found his way back to civilization safe and sound."

"That information won't be of any use to you anyway. I think we should do your complimentary palm reading now."

"It is as I feared," she said ominously. "Both of you are in grave danger...”