Shapeshifted (7 page)

“Edie,” I corrected him. I looked up and down the block. “How about a trade? A sandwich for a tour?”

“I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” he said. He sounded a little unsure, but now he was looking at the sandwich.

“Just a block or two?” I held it out a little closer to him.

He shrugged. “Sure,” he said, and grabbed the sandwich with practiced nonchalance from my hand.

We walked around the neighborhood. Brightly painted buildings fought with general decay. Signs were in Spanish first, and then English, if at all. Any storefront window had bars or chain link covering it, and the roads did not improve. I wondered if any public services got down here, excepting the clinic.

There were moments of hidden beauty. Old-school murals with block forms from the end of last century, and huge motifs, intentional rip-offs of traditional Mexican art. And graffiti, surprising in its vitality, bold streaks of color, with letters so distorted I could hardly read them. Olympio told me who worked where, short stories from his life. He began by not sharing too much, but when I started asking questions and seeming appreciative, he morphed into a tour guide. When we reached the end of the next block, he pulled up short.

“You see that?” He pointed at a mural with an elaborate triple cross. “That’s where Three Crosses territory begins. That’s how they mark their space.”

I had seen others behind Santa Muerte on the clinic’s wall online. “Like a warning sign?”

“Like we’d better turn back.”

I stood on the street staring at the mural for a little longer. “Those were the guys from yesterday, right?”

“Yeah. The second ones.”

“What are they fighting for?” I hadn’t seen any gold mines along our way.

“Territory.”

“Really? I heard them mention a tithe.” I thought back to the moment. It was a little blurry, seeing as I’d been afraid I was going to get shot. “Yeah—they asked for a tithe, right before Dr. Tovar told them to fuck off.”

Olympio bounced and laughed at this. “Ha!”

I furrowed my brow, trying to understand all the layers at play here. “But—I thought you didn’t like him?”

“We have different business practices. But I never said I didn’t
like
him,” Olympio clarified.

“What’s a gang need a tithe for, anyhow?”

“That’s just the fancy term they’re using for the bribes they’re demanding. You give them money, they protect you from themselves, and then they get to build their fancy church to Santa Muerte. Like she needs a church, or even wants one.” Olympio’s bearing was one of extreme disgust.

I tried not to tense up or show any excitement. “Who is she?”

Olympio gave me an odd look. “She’s one of us. She knows our hearts.”

Person? Saint? Spare alien from
Star Trek
? Whatever. If she was what the Shadows were looking for, and I could trade her in to heal my mom, I needed to see. “Can you take me to her?”

Olympio’s eyebrows rose, and he gave me a mystified look before shrugging one shoulder. “Sure.”

Together we went down a side street, then came back on another block.

Was it really going to be this easy? No way. If it was, the Shadows would have done it themselves. But I couldn’t help hoping as I followed him. I didn’t know how I’d catch her, but I’d think of something. I’d flat-out lie. Anything to save my mom.

Olympio went into a wide alley. Partially hidden by a second-story overhang, one entire wall was covered with a bright mural. A woman stood in rings of primary colors, red, green, yellow on a wall of blue, like she was Venus stepping forward from the ocean inside a rainbow clamshell. She had purple robes down to the ground, which was painted with red roses the size of small cars. The only thing incongruent was that she had a skull for a face, and hands of bone. She held a globe in one hand as though she were weighing it.

There was writing over her head in thick red script, the same color as the roses.
REINA DE LA NOCHE
.

The rest of the blue wall around her image and the roses was covered in names. Names covering names, as though alternating groups were trying to claim her, and numerous solo names written in not by artists, but in pen and ink, or chipped into the stone of the wall.

Olympio stopped in front of the image, and as I realized what he meant, my stomach fell. “This is her, isn’t it.”

“Yeah. The Three Crosses act like they own her. This is the last of the murals that they haven’t put their crosses on. And if they see you praying to one of the other ones, the ones that they control, they’ll come by and try to collect one of their tithes.”

“Tithe of what?”

“Whatever you’ve got on you. And if you fight them, they’ll take you away and you’re never seen again.”

“Oh.” I’d been a fool to think I could succeed where the Shadows had not. The Santa Muerte legend was just an excuse to shake people down.

He side-eyed me. “You’re disappointed?”

“I sort of assumed she’d be a person.”

Olympio laughed. “She’s better than a person—she’s a saint. She can see everything. She protects us. Life is hard down here. She understands that.” He went up and put his hand on her dress. I could tell from the other stains on the paint that numerous other people had done that too.

“So—” I looked at all her imagery. “She’s death?”

“She protects people who know they’re going to die. Which is pretty much all of us. It happens faster down here than it does wherever you live. Faster to us than all the rich people on TV.” He pointed at a particular scrawl. “That’s my name. From the last time I prayed here. Not to be healed, of course. My grandfather can heal anything,” he explained with pride. “But she can grant wishes, when she wants to.”

“Huh,” I grunted noncommittally.

He narrowed his eyes suspiciously at me. “Why’re you looking for her, if you don’t know who she is?”

“The old lady in the waiting room yesterday morning prayed to her when she saw the guns. I was just wondering,” I said, and he made a face like he was disappointed in me. “She is beautiful, though,” I added, because as artwork, she was.

He nodded in agreement, and I could tell I was slightly redeemed. “Well, now you know who she is. We should get back now. We’re still at the edge of safe territory.”

*   *   *

Olympio took us back down another street while I tried to think. I wondered what Reina de la Noche meant. I reached back in my mind for comparable Latin words. Reign, nocturnal—ruler of the night? An apt name for Santa Muerte, I guessed.

“How’s your grandfather heal people?”

Olympio squinted at me. “Trade secrets.”

“What—really?”

“Yeah. You don’t have the
don.
You couldn’t even do it if you tried.”

“So why not explain it to me?”

He sighed exaggeratedly. “It would take up too much time.”

“Can you do what he does—what he claims to do?” I corrected myself.

“Some of it.” He picked up a rock in our path and chucked it across the street. “But I’ll be the best in the world, eventually.”

I looked around at our surroundings, all cement and hot sun. This was an unlikely place for anything to grow, much less a peerless folk healer. Olympio must have guessed what I was thinking. He puffed out his chest like a pigeon and glowered at me.

We were back at the clinic shortly. “So how far could we walk in this direction?” I asked, trying to rescue myself in his eyes.

He resumed his station outside the clinic door, like a dark cloud against its wall. It must be no fun working all day during the summer, all summer long.

“Only place you should be walking is back and forth from the train.” He’d changed from a sensitive kid who liked attention to a proto-adult carrying world-weary exhaustion and heavy pride. I remembered being his age, sitting on the fence of puberty, not sure which way to jump, torn between desperately wanting people to like me and being angry all the time.

“Hey, don’t shut me out like that,” I complained.

“Why not? I hardly know you.”

He had a point. I didn’t know him either. But I knew his type. I shrugged one shoulder. “I just get the feeling, if we were someplace else we might be friends.”

His eyes narrowed at me, the shy kid still coming through. “Yeah, well, I don’t know how to get to that place from here.”

Catrina leaned out of the clinic, interrupting us, and waved at him. “Olympio, I’ve got your grandfather’s test strips.”

Diabetic test strips. I recognized the box. Olympio snatched them from her hand and gave me a hot look before running off.

Guess for all of his powers, Olympio’s grandfather hadn’t mastered the art of healing diabetes yet.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I stepped back into the clinic. There was a family in the waiting room now, a woman with three kids and a man with gang-looking tattoos.

I waved to the receptionist, who buzzed me into the back, and I reported to Catrina because she still seemed in charge of me. “What now?”

“Now you do some paperwork.”

And that’s almost all I did for the rest of the day, until Eduardo, one of the other medical assistants, introduced himself and rescued me from my desk.

“Come explain to my patient why he needs to take his blood pressure meds.”

I looked at his numbers—150/105, oy!—and started talking as Eduardo translated me.

“No—of course they make your headache feel better. But you need to take them every day, not just when your head hurts. Has anyone in your family died of a heart attack? Or a stroke?” I leaned back against the counter behind me so I’d be eye level with the man. It was important he took his pills, or he’d leave his children fatherless.

From my new vantage point, I could see just inside his collar, to a tattoo on the left side of his neck. I tried not to stare at it while I gave him my blood pressure spiel. Two dark tattooed holes, with ink blood dripping down. They could have been tattoos of bullet wounds, but the fact that there were two of them, and on his neck, made me think that they were supposed to be from fangs.

I wanted to ask him about them, but I knew from working at County that it wouldn’t be right.

Not for white kids, who mostly got anything on them that looked pretty on the wall. The hibiscus that reminded them of their trip to Hawaii, a bird because their spirits were free. But for people who had gang lifestyles, tattoos were a code, and you couldn’t just ask them what things were. And you wouldn’t get a straight answer if you did. I’d had to see three people with clown-type comedy–tragedy mask tattoos at my old job to realize that there was a local gang that used those masks to identify themselves. Before that I’d just thought it odd—and somewhat creepy—that middle-aged men were into clowns.

Vampires were a popular motif among a lot of people. Just because not many people knew that vampires were real didn’t mean they weren’t in the popular subconscious. It wouldn’t have been the first time a gang thought that vampires were cool. I supposed they were, up until you actually met one.

I made sure he understood the reasons he needed to keep taking his medicine, as Eduardo translated his questions back to me, and then we let him leave the room.

“You could have told him all that, couldn’t you?”

Eduardo gave me a sly grin. “It sounds more official coming from you. Some of them prefer to hear it from a
gringa
.”

I snorted and pushed forward. “Hey—” There was a test tube of blood on the counter behind me. I pointed at it. “What’s that for?” It wasn’t labeled. He popped it into a plastic bag and opened the door.

“You’d have to ask Dr. Tovar.” Eduardo shrugged, shuffling off into the back.

*   *   *

I waited for Dr. Tovar to come by, to ask him about the test tube, but when it hit five fifteen, my urge to go home—and maybe nervousness about the trip, after walking with Olympio—outweighed my curiosity for the day. The part of me that was trying to be rational thought I was overreacting, a little hyper-attuned to the type of thing that mattered in my now very-former life. As far as Santa Muerte went, that elderly woman hadn’t come back. I could find a Three Crosses gang member and ask about their beliefs, but that sounded potentially injurious and I wasn’t likely to get a better answer from them than I already had from Olympio. I’d have to wait and ask Dr. Tovar about the blood tomorrow.

I couldn’t overlook the irony that I was grasping at anything to give me hope when my mother had already given up. Personally, I blamed her belief in a happy afterlife.

When I left the clinic, Olympio was gone. But I could hear the whispering sound I’d heard in the morning. I looked both ways before crossing the street and crouching to look into a storm drain.

“Drop something?” I startled. Dr. Tovar was locking the clinic door. “Or lose a gun? I’m sure there’s half an armory down there, rusting away.” He stood stiffly, his hands in his pockets, wearing his tweed coat on even this hot day.

“I thought I heard something.”

His right eyebrow raised in a question. “I don’t hear anything.” He jerked his head toward the station. “Care to walk?”

While a doctor wasn’t my preferred companion, walking with him wouldn’t hurt. I made sure to stand far enough apart from him that it wouldn’t look like we were together. Even so, ladies returning from the station made clucking sounds as we walked by. I wished there was a way to signal to them that no matter how handsome he was, I was not interested in him, nor would I ever be. At all.

“So how was your first day?” he asked.

“Interesting, except for the paperwork.”

“I’m glad Frank’s wound didn’t make you run away.”

“Am I going to get hazed every day I’m here? Or is that just your regular clientele?” I asked in a way that I made sure sounded like I was joking.

He outright laughed, maybe the first time I’d seen him pleased. I wondered what it would be like to be him, at the helm of a perpetually sinking ship, bailing water with all his might. We might have more in common than I’d thought.

“As regular as the rising sun. Why did you even apply for this job in the first place?” His eyes tried to read me as we walked, even before I could respond.