Charlie Hernández & the Castle of Bones

  Praise for

  CHARLIE HERNÁNDEZ

  AND THE LEAGUE OF SHADOWS

  “Filled with action with fast-paced chapters… a perfect pick for kids who love Rick Riordan’s many series, particularly for those eager for mythologies beyond Greek and Roman stories.” —Booklist, starred review

  “A winner for all kids, but it will be especially beloved by Latinx and Hispanic families who may recognize some of the characters.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  “This magical adventure brings the Hispanic mythologies… to life… the detailed attention to various Hispanic folkloric and mythological traditions is accessible to readers new to the legends as well as old hands, and this multicultural story proves to be a satisfying read for anyone interested in fantasy action.” —BCCB

  “The story is fast paced and jam-packed with many encounters with mythological creatures loosely based on folklore from around the Spanish-speaking world. The glossary at the end is helpful with a description and country of origin for each mythological being. VERDICT A great start to a new series that will be devoured by fantasy fans who enjoy action with ample doses of mythological inspirations.” —SLJ

  To every teacher and librarian who ever put a book in my hands—thank you

  When the dead walk the earth, the living run in fear.

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was raining frogs. That’s the first thing I noticed when we stepped through la bruja’s mirror. Fat ones, green ones, black ones. They tumbled from the sky, bounced off the road, clunked off mailboxes. They croaked and chirped and peeped. They hopped through the tall grass like punch-drunk boxers.

  One plopped down on the toe of my sneaker, glared up at me with its bulging, beady eyes, and said, “Rrriiiibbbbbiiitt!”

  I stared at it for a moment, frowning, then squinted up at the dark churning clouds from where the slimy amphibians were falling in bunches. In knots.

  My name is Charlie Hernández, and over the last few months, my life had been all kinds of freaky; I’d grown horns, sprouted feathers, teleported from South Florida to northwest Spain, made a quick stop in the Land of the Dead, and even faced off against one of the most famous and feared brujas in all of human history—but raining frogs…? Yeah, that was new for me.

  “Estamos aquí,” said the witch queen, her green eyes blazing in the gloom.

  I looked around. We were standing on the side of a narrow dirt track, smack-dab in the middle of… well, nowhere. A huge, grassy field spread out before us, flanked by walls of thick forest. Pines, maybe. The air was cold. The sky was dark, choked with storm clouds. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

  “Where exactly is here…?” I asked, but la bruja didn’t answer.

  Violet said, “And what’s up with the frogs?” but she didn’t answer that, either.

  Maybe thirty yards ahead of us a strip of yellow crime-scene tape had been stretched across the field, from end to end, looped around the trunks of the nearest trees. A crowd of curious people was pressing up against the tape, shouting questions as a dozen or so police officers tried to keep them from busting through. There were even more people wandering aimlessly around; these were dodging the falling croakers while snapping pictures of the sky or recording the whole thing on their smartphones.

  A couple of little kids in denim overalls were trying to catch the frogs as they fell. I watched one of them catch a plummeting toad in her front pocket, then start cheering and jumping all over the place like she’d just won the Super Bowl. Honestly, if I’d been about seven years younger and wearing overalls, I would’ve totally jumped in for a round or two. Looked pretty fun, actually.

  Past the main crowd, more police officers were hauling heavy wooden barricades out of the backs of police vans, their flashing lights turning the woods red then blue, red then blue.

  “Do not leave my side,” Queen Joanna warned us. “And speak to no one. We cannot be seen, ¿me entienden?”

  As we started across the field, the wind kicked up, shrieking through the trees and slinging the amphibians sideways now. I dodged one the size of a Frisbee, then wrapped my arms around myself, wondering where the heck we were and what the heck we were doing here; thanks to the police cruisers (which had the word “polícia” and not “police” emblazoned across the driver-side doors), I knew we weren’t in Miami anymore, but that was about it. And that wasn’t exactly a whole lot to go on.

  “Are they gonna let us through?” Violet asked as we approached the barricade, but again Joanna didn’t answer; she simply touched one pale, ringed finger to the golden brooch pinned to the front of her dress (it looked like some sort of butterfly, maybe—or a giant moth) and whispered, “Vuela,” which means “fly,” and the pin’s wings suddenly beat to life.

  It rose silently into the air, a golden blur in the night, and then flew out ahead of us, floating lazily over to where the large crowd was pressing against the police tape. Leaving dusty, glittery trails, the pin began to fly circles above everyone’s heads, and next thing I knew, all fifty or so people—cops included—were staring up at it, some pointing and smiling, others giggling with childlike wonder in their eyes.

  They were all so mesmerized by it, in fact, that not one of them even glanced our way as we ducked under the ribbon of yellow tape and marched right past them, following the rhythmic swish of the witch queen’s cape.

  Yep, Joanna was awesome like that.…

  We’d made it maybe fifteen yards when a fat, bumpy, squishy toad plopped down on the top of my head and just sort of sat there like a warty green hat.

  Glancing up at la bruja, I said, “So, about the frogs…?”

  “The dark magia in the atmosphere has begun to warp nature,” she replied quickly. And pretty casually, too—like she’d just said, Hey, your shoes are untied. Or, Hey, you dropped your pencil.

  Personally, it was my opinion that whenever the words “dark” and “magic” came together in a sentence, the entire situation should be taken a bit more seriously. But, hey, that was just me.

  “So not a good sign then, huh?”

  The queen stayed quiet, but the frog on my head said, “Riibbbbbiiittt,” then hopped off, and I had to resist the urge to try to catch it in my pocket.

  Up ahead, where the field curved out of sight, a man and woman in white lab coats strode into view, walking this way. They were carrying walkie-talkies and yelling into them in a language that was almost familiar. Portuguese, maybe?

  “¡Escóndanse!” Joanna whispered, and we did exactly that, ducking out of sight and vanishing into the dark woods. Leaves crunched and branches made shifting patterns against the sky as we zigzagged through the trees, leaping logs and rocks. “Do not slow!” she ordered, and Violet and I weren’t about to argue. Joanna, also known as the Witch Queen of Toledo, was one of the most powerful brujas on the face of the planet. Not only that, but she was the leader of the League of Shadows, which was sort of like a superhero team-up of the most legendary mythological beings—or sombras—in all of Hispanic mythology. The first time we’d met, she’d fed me worms, then tried to drown me (and basically succeeded!) But, surprisingly, it had all been for my own good, so I wasn’t holding a grudge. She had dark auburn hair, long dark nails, and even darker lashes framing her glowing emerald eyes. When you topped that off with the golden crown she liked to wear and her elaborate, tiered gown the color of a midnight sky, she might as well have had a big neon sign over her head that read: supernatural royalty coming through.

  As we hurried through the woods, Violet shot me an uneasy look, and finally I couldn’t take it anymore—I opened my mouth to ask Joanna where she was taking us and what in the Land of the Living
we were doing here, but as we emerged from the trees, the words died on my lips.

  My jaw dropped open. My toes seemed to hook themselves into the ground.

  Before us, rising up almost as tall as the great trees that flanked the field, stood the most terrible thing I had ever seen—a thing so mind-bogglingly awful, my suddenly panicking brain could hardly make sense of it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  When I was nine years old, my parents took me on a trip to Spain. It was in early October, during the Concurs de Castells celebration, which is basically this huge festival where people get together to create these awesome body towers. Think cheerleader pyramids, but with a whole lot more people climbing all over each other, trying to see which team can build the tallest, most complex tower, or “castell.” In Catalonia it was a centuries-old tradition, something everyone looked forward to all year. And this looked a lot like that… except a nightmare version.

  This tower stood at least thirty feet high and was made up of the lifeless, shriveled-up carcasses of at least fifty milk cows. Most had been stacked flat on their bellies, one on top of another, but some were lying upside down, their bony, hoofed legs sticking straight up to support the ones above. There was also a whole mess of bones, big ones, picked clean of any flesh—spines and femurs and hip bones—which seemed to act like a kind of glue, holding the whole thing together. The air was heavy with rotting smells and hummed with the buzzing of flies. Everywhere I looked it was all slack jaws, bulging purple eyes, and the saggy black-and-white folds of dried-up cowhide.

  It’s a castle of bones, I thought dazedly. And even with my head spinning and my pulse thudding wildly in my ears, I was positive about one thing: This wasn’t just a random stack of dead cows—no, this was something else, something dark and sinister and otherworldly.

  And even more terrifying, it was alive.…

  I could feel its presence like a physical force—like greedy, invisible fingers reaching out from deep within the bony pile, fingers that would grab me if they could—that would hurt me. Would hurt all of us.

  “Oh my God,” Violet breathed, staring up at it, shaking her head. “What is that thing…?”

  “The abomination you see before you, niños,” said the witch, “has been called many different things by many different peoples. But it is most widely known as a castell.”

  I blinked, not sure I’d heard her right. “Hold up. You mean, like, castell castell? Like, the festival of people pyramids?”

  “That festival began as a celebration of the day the earth was liberated from these ancient altars of dark magic. It is, in fact, its genesis.” Sweat had broken out all over the queen’s face. She wiped it with the back of one hand and stared down at me with eyes that seemed to swim in their sockets. Her cheeks were all red and blotchy. She looked tired—no, she looked exhausted. “We haven’t seen one in many, many years… and… this one here in Portugal has many worried, for… for they are without question an omen of a rising evil.”

  As she spoke, the wind gusted, tugging at our clothes, and I was pelted by a hailstorm of frogs the size of quarters. One somehow managed to drop down the front of my shirt, and I had to shake it free.

  Beside me, the witch queen made an odd, hacking, wheezing sound, as though she was having trouble getting air into her lungs, then began to back away from the terrible pile of bones. “Excuse me a moment… I… Perdónenme.”

  “Are you okay?” Violet asked her.

  “I’m fine… no te preocupes por mi.”

  “Can we, um, look around…?”

  “Sí, sí, cómo no. That is why I brought you both.”

  As Joanna headed farther up the field, away from the castell, Violet began walking slow circles around the castle of cow corpses, looking it up and down with squinted eyes like some crime-scene detective on a TV show. Had this been anyone else, I probably would’ve laughed and told them to get real. But this wasn’t just anyone; this was Violet Rey—or Ultra Violet, as I liked to call her.

  Violet wasn’t a Morphling like me, but she didn’t need any special powers. Mostly because she wasn’t your typical middle school student. Take a peek into her backpack and you’ll find a pair of military-grade wire cutters, an extra-large can of pepper spray, and a professional forensics kit all tucked neatly beside her Hello Kitty pencil case and pom-poms.

  Besides being the captain of both the debate team and the cheerleading squad, Violet was editor in chief of our school’s newspaper (the Leon Gazette) and there wasn’t much she wouldn’t do to get a story. Including blackmail. Trust me, I would know. Violet was as tenacious as she was pretty, pretty as she was smart, and so smart she was practically a genius. Cool part was V wasn’t one of those people who are all into themselves, either. She was caring, sensitive, unbelievably brave, and sometimes even motivational in an army drill sergeant sort of way.

  In second grade she’d convinced me that I possessed the inner strength to do the monkey bars backward and using only three fingers. So I’d given it a shot, banged my head on the edge of the slide, spent the rest of that day in the nurse’s office, and have been madly in love with Violet ever since.

  She might not have been old enough to operate a motor vehicle, but the girl already had detective skills on par with Sherlock Holmes and it was mostly thanks to those skills that I was still alive. So I was happy to stand back and let her do her thing. Currently, Violet was wearing her cheerleading uniform—sneakers, white skirt, crisp white top with gray and blue stripes down both arms. Not exactly the ideal attire for going all CSI on a pile of dead cows, but somehow she made it work.

  “Charlie, what kind of sombras could have done something like this?” she asked me, squatting down beside the castell.

  I racked my brain. “Um, Dips, I guess. Those are vampire dogs. Obviously, a chupacabra, too… They’re probably big and hungry enough.”

  “Check these out.” Violet lifted a fold of skin at the base of a dead cow’s neck, revealing a pair of marks—no, holes.

  “How’d you see that?” I asked, stunned. It was like the girl had X-ray vision or something.

  “I see everything, Charlie. It’s my gift.” She sank even lower into a squat, her face now less than three inches from the cow’s.

  “Ew, c’mon, V… stop touching it. It’s dead.”

  “It’s just a cow, Charlie.”

  “I know, but it’s gross.…” And if I’d thought that was nasty, she then took her other hand and stuck two fingers into the holes in the cow’s neck! There was this sick, sticky, squishy sound, and I nearly barfed on the spot.

  “Definitely puncture wounds,” she said. “About six inches deep.” She jammed her fingers in deeper. A nasty yellowish pus gushed up out of the holes. “Make that eight.”

  “Please”—I burped, tasting this morning’s breakfast (pork rinds and a chicken-and-egg empanada) in the back of my throat—“stop.” Last thing I wanted was to barf all over the coolest girl in the world, but she sure wasn’t making it easy on me.

  Finally, Violet pulled her fingers out of the cow. She wiped them on the front of her uniform, staining it blood red and pus yellow.

  Yuck and double yuck. “I think I’m gonna puke,” I admitted.

  V ignored me. “You think a chupacabra could’ve sucked this many animals dry? I mean, these things got slurped like—like milkshakes!”

  I sighed.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I think you just ruined milkshakes for me. Like, forever.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Charlie, I’m being serious.… Could a chupacabra have done this?”

  “Yeah, I mean, I don’t know… maybe a pack of them?”

  “And are they known to pile up their prey like this?”

  “Nah, I’ve never heard of anything like this.…” And I was pretty sure I wasn’t the only one either.

  “Huh.” Violet was down on one knee now, searching around the stinky, blood-spattered, fly-infested base of the castell as frogs hopped and croaked aroun
d us; this girl must’ve been an ER doctor in a past life, because she certainly didn’t have any problem with blood or guts. Now, for the record, I wasn’t squeamish or anything. Heck, just last summer I’d eaten an entire dung beetle on a dare. Okay, so maybe I hadn’t actually eaten a dung beetle, but I had almost touched its nasty, armored insect legs to the tip of my tongue. And that had to count for something, right? Anyway, I had to draw the line on nastiness somewhere, and shriveled-up cow carcasses seemed like a mighty fine place to draw it.

  “Oh, c’mon, V, get up.… That’s sooooo nasty.” I couldn’t even watch anymore. Seriously.

  “Interesting.” She held up a hunk of wood—no, something else.

  I squinted. “Is that—a chancleta?”

  “Actually, they’re called clogs. That’s what the Dutch call them, anyway.” She paused for a second, thinking. “Looks like Cinderella lost her slipper at the ball.… We should show this to Joanna. C’mon.”

  The Witch Queen of Toledo had been standing in the middle of the field, maybe thirty yards from the castell, staring up at the dark sky, which was still pouring frogs. Now she turned, and I saw surprise flicker in her eyes. “You two are still here?” she asked, sounding baffled.

  “We, uh, never left…,” I couldn’t help pointing out. Geez, what’s up with her?

  Violet held out the clog. “We found this near the castell,” she said, and Joanna smiled weakly.

  “That’s very nice, mi vida.”

  “No, I mean—don’t you think it’s odd? Look at it. This thing’s gotta be at least a hundred years old. And cows aren’t exactly known for their footwear.”

  La bruja nodded like she got Violet’s point, but her glowing green gaze had already drifted past her. “Odd, sí… but we have bigger problems.”

  I turned, trying to see what she was looking at. “Like what?”

  “We’re being watched.”

  “By who?” Violet asked.