Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron Read online

  Ellery took both their hands and swung them as they walked. Both boys lurched a little and leaned heavily, drunkenly, against her. “I want to tell you about something—something happened. A mystery.”

  “The answer is the viscount in the library with the candlestick,” Alastair drawled. “It’s always the viscount.”

  “Are you ever serious?” she asked him. “I don’t think there is an answer. All I wanted was an answer, but what I have is a mystery.”

  He stopped, blinking down at her. Tom stopped, too, and staggered back to lean against a tree, seemingly surprised to find they had halted.

  “I guess I’m—I don’t know,” Alastair said. “Was there ever anything you cared about so much that all you could do was make fun of it?”

  “No,” Ellery said.

  Alastair sighed. “I guess it doesn’t make much sense. But I am … I am serious.”

  “I want to go up to the altar. I want to leave something there.” Ellery didn’t know what she’d offer. Maybe she’d make a chain of daisies like she’d done when she was a little girl. Or maybe she’d leave the liquor. Aspen had seemed to like it.

  “We’ll go with you,” Tom said, pushing away from the tree and offering his arm gallantly, if unsteadily.

  “It might be boring,” Ellery warned him.

  “You know,” Tom said, “one reason for all the rituals we do—the offerings and the ceremonies—is that it’s supposed to help us find our divine selves. The part of us that’s god and goddess. The magic that’s in us.” It was drunken philosophy, but he seemed utterly sincere.

  “So we become little gods,” Ellery said, thinking of Aspen and his necklace, thinking of statues and the tiny toy car glued to Bob’s dashboard.

  “We’re witches, after all,” Alastair said, in a hushed way that seemed strangely sincere. Maybe he was acting like that because she’d said that he was never serious, but he meant it, she could tell. “Our gods aren’t supposed to be distant. Let’s go say hello, one divine being to another.”

  And so they went to the altar and picked enough dandelions to make a bouquet. They poured out a little of the liquor and drank the rest. They sat in the grass and looked up at the stars, waiting for the sun to rise.

  Waiting to wash their faces in morning dew and grow luckier and more beautiful. Waiting for the spirits of the woods to find their gift. And as they sat there, Tom told them how he was trying to sort out whether it was okay to like boys when he was pretty sure he liked girls, too. Alastair told them about moving from Scotland and how much he missed his friends back home. After a while, Dawn found them and stretched out in the grass, complaining that they were having fun without her. And Ellery told them about the necklace and the boy in the woods and they all screamed with joy at the story, whether or not they believed it.

  Ellery had wanted so many things from Beltane, but this was better than all of them. It felt like casting a spell, like opening up her heart and letting the universe flood in, like being hungry and thirsty no more.

  Her heart was full and it was enough.

  BARRIO GIRLS

  CHARLES DE LINT

  RUBY AND VIDA are best friends. They look so much alike they could be twins but Vida is two days older and Ruby is two inches taller. They live next door to each other in a trailer park where the barrio turns into the desert.

  When they were kids, they were in love with fairies and spent a whole summer running around in fairy wings with their hair in ringlets. Nobody had the nerve to make fun of them. Vida’s uncle Crusher is a big deal in the 66 Bandas and he put the word out. In North Presidio, you don’t get on the wrong side of the ’bangers.

  When they turn fifteen, Ruby gets a copy of one of the Shiloh books and now they live, breathe, and dream vampires. They wear black lipstick and black nail polish and black dresses with black combat boots. Vida’s family never notices. Ruby’s does, but they don’t care.

  The girls own all the books and can talk for hours about every little detail. Now when they go into the arroyo behind the park, they go at night. They’re not scared of snakes or coyotes or pervs, or even the meth-heads that use places like this to shoot up.

  Nobody’s going to bother a couple of vampire girls. Out here in the night, they’re the dangerous ones.

  Or they would be if they could find the magical pearlstone the way Crystal did in the second book. They search the arroyo every night, walking along the dry riverbed, kicking at trash. The most unusual stone they find has a petrified snail or something in it. Vida throws it away.

  “Crystal turned it over and over in her hands,” Ruby reads one night before they go out.

  They know this passage by heart, but they never tire of it.

  “It was no bigger than any of the other river pebbles at her feet,” Ruby goes on, “but it glowed with a milky iridescence as though it held a sliver of moonlight deep in its heart. Crystal gave it a closer look. Something seemed to shimmer inside the stone. Her hands took on its glow. Slowly the sparkling gleam rose up her arms.

  “That was when she knew.

  “The shimmer was her dreams coming true. The shimmer was the first step on her journey to win Rafael’s heart, because now she knew she could. This was the pearlstone Auntie Catherine had talked about. The piece of magic that would make her just like him.

  “Now they would never have to be apart.”

  Every night a shadow follows them out of the trailer park. It’s cast by a bulky figure that isn’t the best at staying unnoticed. The girls pretend they don’t see him. They know it’s just Pepé Fernandez, one of Tío Crusher’s boys, keeping an eye on them. He’s built like an engine block and carries a gun, but he dotes on his little Jack Russell terrier, Angelina, so he can’t be all badass.

  Like a million other girls, they dream about being romanced by Rafael and Jonathan, but when they dream about the vampire twins, they don’t picture the actors from the movie. They don’t search the Net for gossip and images because they’re not happy about the casting. They like the actor who plays Rafael well enough, but Jason Mabe, who plays Jonathan, looks too much like a surfer dude for their taste.

  But they love love love Moonstream, who play over the closing credits of the movie. It’s the title song from their one and only album, In Balance with Everything Else. They share their copies of the books, but they both have their own copy of the CD. The lead singer should have played Jonathan. Anthony Denham has long blond hair, too, but on him it looks refined. Classy. Like the difference between having a beer at the taquería or a chi-chi cocktail at the Model T Lounge—not that the girls are supposed to have sampled either.

  They have posters of Anthony Denham on their walls, band T-shirts, a vinyl single that they can’t play because neither has a turntable. Ruby even has a Moonstream promo memory stick that she carries wherever she goes, safely stowed under her shirt, where it hangs on a chain. Her older sister found it for her at Bookmans. Sometimes Ruby lets Vida wear it.

  Tonight they go out like they always do, dressed in black, Pepé trailing along behind them. They tell each other stories that are like dares.

  That owl is the soul of a wicked prince who has to spend one hundred years in flight until he finally learns sympathy.

  Those javelinas are magicked bandas boys who need a kiss from a champion roller derby queen to become human again.

  That old lady is a brujá who tramps up and down the washes looking for—

  They stop and look again. She really is there—an old lady out in the desert at this time of night. She probably is a witch. She’s tall and spooky-looking, dressed all in black just like the girls, but she’s wearing a long skirt and a shawl like someone’s abuela.

  “What are you doing in my river?” she asks the girls.

  Like the wash isn’t the one really convenient path through the desert and only fills with water a few times a year. Like it’s really filled with water right now and they’re walking underwater.

  “Looking for a magic—” R
uby begins, but Vida elbows her as if to say, We don’t tell strangers our secrets.

  “Magic?” the old woman says. “I can show you magic.”

  She fixes each of the girls with a sharp look that would have made them nervous if they weren’t already vampire girls. Then she smiles. It’s not a cheerful smile.

  “Do you want to see something funny?” she asks.

  When the girls nod, the old woman mutters something under her breath. She takes a pinch of pollen from her pocket, throws it into the air, then points a crooked finger to the line of dark mesquite and paloverde that follows the path the dry wash takes through the desert scrub.

  The girls don’t think that’s particularly funny until Pepé comes walking stiffly from where he was hidden behind the mesquite. He’s like a zombie in a late-night horror movie, arms held out in front of him, shuffling down the uneven footing of the wash’s bank.

  First Vida smiles, then Ruby giggles, then the both of them are holding their hands in front of their mouths. Except it’s not at all funny when Pepé loses his footing. The back of his big head hits a rock as he falls and there’s this awful sound like the time Chuy threw a squash at a wall and it burst open. The girls’ laughter dies when they realize that Pepé isn’t getting up. They run to where he lies, dropping to their knees in the dirt on either side of him.

  “This is a bad joke,” Ruby tells him.

  The sand behind his head grows dark with blood. Ruby pushes him with a finger but he doesn’t move.

  “Get up,” Vida says. “Please get up.”

  “Please,” Ruby repeats.

  They know he won’t. They’ve seen enough bodies to know when somebody is dead. The victims of drive-bys. Meth-heads who’ve OD’d.

  Vida leans down and kisses his cooling brow. When Ruby follows suit, a tear falls from her cheek onto his. If this were a fairy tale, had those two kisses not brought Pepé back to life, the tear surely would have.

  But it isn’t a fairy tale.

  Pepé is really dead.

  Vida glares at the old woman, who only smiles back.

  “Why would you do such a thing?” Vida demands of the old woman.

  “The night is mine,” the brujá replies. “It doesn’t belong to foolish girls. Go away and don’t return.”

  Ruby and Vida look at each other. Without another word they get up and leave the wash, leave Pepé, leave the old witch woman. They don’t go home. They go to the taquería, walk right in the front door. They ignore Juan, who rises up from behind the cash register to stop them, and go to the back, where Vida’s uncle sits with his crew at a long table covered with beer bottles and the remains of a late-night meal. The whole place goes quiet as the two vampire girls approach the table.

  “Pepé’s dead,” Vida says.

  Ruby nods. “He fell in the wash and cracked his head on a stone.”

  Tío Crusher stands up. “You’re sure about this?”

  Now Vida nods.

  “You girls go home,” Tío Crusher tells them.

  The girls leave the taquería, but they still don’t go home. Instead they go to the trailer where Pepé lives. Where he lived. They collect Angelina. Taking turns, they carry the little Jack Russell back to Vida’s home. They get in bed. Angelina trembles between them, knowing something is wrong.

  They were fairy girls once. Now they’re vampire girls. In the future they might become something else. Roller derby stars. Famous actors. But that’s just a skin they wear over what they really are and always will be: barrio girls. They know what the bandas do when someone kills one of their own. It’s the reason they didn’t tell Tío Crusher about the old woman in the wash.

  “I really really liked Pepé,” Ruby says, trying to comfort the dog.

  Vida nods. “Me too.” She lays a hand on Angelina’s shoulders, trying to still the little dog’s trembling. “That’s why we have to kill the witch.”

  The next day Ruby and Vida hear that Pepé’s body has been recovered. Tío Crusher and a couple of his boys brought the body to the church. The bandas don’t ever call the police. The cops wouldn’t come anyway—not for something like this. The thing that has everybody talking is that there was no blood in the body. It should have been pooled around the head wound—Ruby and Vida can remember seeing it soaking into the sand—but by the time Tío Crusher reached the wash, the sand was dry and Pepé’s body was pale pale pale.

  Ruby and Vida exchange unhappy looks when they hear about this.

  Bad enough there was a witch in the wash. A tlahuelpuchi makes it even worse.

  Vampire witch.

  “I don’t like vampires anymore,” Ruby says.

  Vida nods. “Me either. But I still like Anthony Denham.”

  “Of course we do. He’s not a vampire. His band just sings about them.”

  “We should tell my uncle. He’ll shoot her dead.”

  “We can’t do that,” Ruby says. “She’ll just kill him, too, and then suck away all of his blood. You can’t just shoot a tlahuelpuchi.”

  In the end, they don’t tell anyone. Instead they put Angelina on a leash and walk with her to the far end of the trailer park where the bottle man lives. He has a shack made of saguaro ribs and cast-off pieces of tin and clapboard. The whole thing has been decorated with spray-painted images of animals and pictographs in bright Oaxacan colors.

  It sits on the edge of the desert, across the wash from the trailer park. An old mesquite tree towers above it, its branches festooned with bottles of all shapes, sizes, and colors that tinkle softly when the wind taps them against each other. The ground under the tree and all around the shack is thick with broken glass, but for some reason the pieces have no sharp edges. It’s like they’ve been rolling against each other in a river for years until they’re smoothed like pebbles, even though they come from when the monsoons blow hard and the bottles smash against each other in the high winds and rain.

  The girls stare out at all the glass. It gleams and glitters in the hot morning sun.

  “Magic,” Ruby whispers as they climb up out of the wash.

  Vida nods.

  The glass slides underfoot. It’s a little like walking on marbles.

  Ruby and Vida have spied on the place many times, but they’ve never actually been this close before. They’ve never talked to the bottle man before, either. Everyone in the barrio calls him Abuelo, and he looks older than the oldest grandfather, but he’s strong and spry and he doesn’t suffer fools. He just likes to be left alone and do whatever it is that he does inside the shack or when he wanders out into the desert. But it’s whispered on street corners that he can cure a curse or make a charm, so people come to him. Sometimes he helps, sometimes he doesn’t.

  The girls used to make up stories about him. They hope he hasn’t heard any of them because while in some he’s the hero, in others he’s a clown who never quite gets things right.

  When they slip and slide their way to the door they find the full-length painting of a coyote looking back at them—or rather, the painting of a man with a coyote’s head. He’s dressed in the colorful garb of the Kikimi, who live in the foothills of the tall range of mountains that can be seen from anywhere on the west side of town.

  “You knock,” Ruby says to Vida.

  Angelina stays close to her, furry body pressed up against her leg.

  Ruby touches the Moonstream memory stick hanging from her neck—for luck, for protection—then offers it to Vida.

  Vida rubs the stick between her thumb and forefinger before rapping a knuckle on the thin sheet of tin that serves as a door. She’s careful not to knock against any part of the coyote painting.

  The tin sheet rattles and though they both know it’s an illusion, the coyote in the painting seems to shiver as though a breeze is ruffling its fur. They almost change their minds and go, except they hear a footstep in the glass pebbles behind them. When they turn around, the old man is standing there.

  He looks older than either of them remember. He also loo
ks more powerful. Maybe it’s because of the brujá in the wash, because now they know that magic is real. Maybe it’s because they’ve never seen him this close up before.

  He’s wearing raggedy cotton trousers and an old Grateful Dead T-shirt that must have been black once but has faded to a pale gray. His hair is gray, too, and hangs in dreads on either side of his dark brown face and down his back. He has more wrinkles than cracked mud that’s been baking in the sun, and his eyes are so dark they seem black. His mouth is a straight line, neither smiling nor frowning.

  Angelina makes a small whine in the back of her throat and hides behind Ruby’s legs. Ruby wishes she had a leg to hide behind. But if Vida’s anxious, she doesn’t show it.

  “Good morning, Señor,” she says in the voice she reserves for people she respects, like her grandmother. “We’re sorry to intrude on your privacy.”

  The bottle man doesn’t say anything.

  “We were wondering,” she goes on, “if we could ask you for a small favor.”

  The corner of his lip twitches with the momentary hint of a smile.

  “What could a pair of pretty girls like you need from an old man like me?”

  His voice is as dry as the dust in the barrio streets.

  Vida shrugs. “Do you know how to raise the dead?”

  “Raise the dead? What do you think I am?”

  Certainly interested, Ruby thinks. The bottle man has straightened up and his dark eyes study Vida carefully. He also seems surprised by the question. She’s surprised herself. But having Pepé back would be much much better than having to kill the witch.

  “I know you are a wise man,” Vida says, “filled with secrets and hidden knowledge.”

  “That may be, but raising the dead is a black art. I don’t dabble in such and neither should you.” His dark gaze continues to study her. “Why do you want to raise the dead?”

  “A witch killed our friend last night. It doesn’t seem fair that he should die just because he was protecting us. She thought it was a joke.”