One
Finch
Well, wearing black was a bad choice. I’d been going for ninja vibes and now I was paying the price—baking in the Cuban sun, my T-shirt sticking to me like a slug on a window.
Smearing my sweat even further across my face with the back of my forearm, I paused beside the edge of a nearby wall and peered around it. This was my version of incognito sneaking, though I did have some cloaking magic at my disposal to make it easier.
Morro Castle was beautiful, all sandstone and cannons and fortifications that looked like they’d come right out of a George R.R. Martin novel. No dragons, though, unfortunately. Even though I’d seen an impressive array of creatures in Tobe the Beast Master’s massive Bestiary, I still hadn’t seen a dragon. Disappointing didn’t even cover it.
Catching my breath, I looked over the nearest wall. The ocean crashed against the rock promontory below, on which this whole fortress had been built. Taking a dip in the chilly water would’ve been a mercy right about now—I didn’t understand how there could be any sweat left in my body.
“Morro” sounded so very mystical and exotic to dumb foreigners like me, but the funny thing was, it just meant “rock.” Rock Castle. Not very inventive, really. Still, it was crazy beautiful, standing alone on this outcrop where it had defended Havana against the British. Not that it had done a very good job. Those sneaky Brits had slipped in anyway.
I know of another slippery Brit I could mention. Davin Doncaster, the Necromancer and slime-ball extraordinaire who’d been a major pain in our asses during the Katherine campaign. He was still off the radar.
But that wasn’t why I was here. And this place was just a tourist destination now, diminished to nothing more than an opportunity for vacation photos in front of a cannon.
Why did I never get to just enjoy these exotic places? Why didn’t I ever get to pause and take selfies? Nope, this was no vacation, and sneaking through the narrow, boiling-hot paths of this fortress wasn’t exactly my idea of a lazy Sunday.
I’d spent the past year doing insane errands for Erebus, the Prince of Darkness—my constant, irritating shadow. It was the price I’d paid for killing Katherine, but the debt was starting to wear thin.
I mean, how many more errands could Erebus possibly have left? Sometimes, I got the feeling he was just messing with me. Asking me to fetch the Easter Bunny had definitely been a joke at my expense. As it turned out, when I’d reached Easter Island, what he’d actually meant was a sacred jade rabbit that had been hidden there by Chinese magicals way back when. What’s next—the Tooth Fairy? Santa Claus? Meryl Streep?
I had to keep telling myself that it was actually a pretty small price to pay. He could’ve asked for my life, or my sister’s life, or one of my friends’ lives. He liked death deals more than anything, and he had a weird fetish for making exchanges. So I supposed I should’ve been thanking my lucky stars, but there was only so much thanking a guy could do when he was hightailing it around the globe in search of a million bizarre wish-list items.
At least the magical world had recovered pretty well after my mother’s demise, so I couldn’t complain there. We had good leaders and a decent new setup, which seemed to be lasting. Our world was definitely in a better state than it had been pre-Katherine. That was how we defined time now—post-Katherine and pre-Katherine.
Magicals were still a secret to humans, which meant the biggest danger had been averted. If the humans had found out, it would’ve just caused more unrest, and nobody wanted that. In their eyes, we would have become a powerful threat that would need to be stopped, and they would’ve come up with some military tool to detect us all, like in the X-Men comics. Nukes, advanced weaponry, special cells, the whole shebang. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—folks could learn a lot from comic books.
Seeing that the coast was clear, I hurried along the narrow path leading toward the lighthouse—the tip of the fortress, so to speak. Since I was armed with my cloaking magic and a bunch of knockout powders, this was finally going to go my way.
After a year’s worth of in-depth research, and a whole bunch of antihistamines to stop my allergies from going crazy while digging through all those dusty tomes, I’d found out that this fortress was the resting place of Ponce de León’s spirit. Now, most people thought he had been buried in San Juan Bautista Cathedral in San Juan, Puerto Rico, but those people hadn’t endured sneezing fits and watering eyes after devouring book after book on the subject. They also hadn’t endured going to San Juan and finding out they were wrong, the hard way. It was just one of many lies surrounding the conquistador’s life and death.
“Conquistador” is a great word. Finch the Conquistador. Maybe one day, when I’d conquistador-ed my way out of my deal with Erebus.
This wasn’t the first time I’d broken into a famous monument. San Juan Bautista Cathedral hadn’t even been my first, and this wasn’t the first time I’d broken into Morro Castle, either. I’d tried it five times. That’s right, five. But I’d only gotten myself arrested once, so I was going to chalk that up as a win.
Those previous attempts hadn’t been failures, though—they’d given me the opportunity to fully understand the layout of this labyrinth. How the British had done it on their first try, I wished I’d known. I supposed I had to give them props for that.
After my last attempt, now broke thanks to paying my bail, I’d realized there was one place I hadn’t checked out—the very lighthouse I was edging toward, slow and steady, like the proverbial tortoise. It was the only place left to search through, which meant it had to be hiding what I was looking for.
Mr. Conquistador himself.
I rounded another corner, where the path opened out. Sand covered the ground, leading to a wall on my left and a Spanish-style chunk of the castle to my right. The lighthouse rose up ahead, like a proud…well, lighthouse. Now, why wasn’t I doing this in the dark? A good question. I’d tried that, and it hadn’t worked. This way, if anyone caught me creeping around, I could just pretend I was an idiotic tourist who’d somehow gone somewhere they weren’t supposed to. But I hoped the cloaking magic would spare me that embarrassment.
I needed to get past the security guards to reach the lighthouse. The cloaking magic covered me visually, but if I touched anyone, they would feel it.
Heading back the way I’d come, I almost barreled into a pair of guards doing their rounds. I pressed against the wall again and waited for them to pass. They were almost clear when one brushed a hand right across my abdomen. I froze. He paused, too, looking around.
“Did you hear something?” he asked.
Crap.
I darted along the wall behind them until I reached an open expanse of path with no tourists or guards in sight. Turning, I sketched a doorway on the wall and whispered, “Aperi Si Ostium.” The edges of the door fizzed and cracked, causing way too much of a scene. However, I’d started the process now, and no guards had caught up with me yet. As soon as the lines sank into the wall, forming a three-dimensional indent, I pushed it open and rushed through, slamming the door shut behind me.
Unfortunately, I’d misjudged the location of the far side of the lighthouse. I stepped through the doorway into air. The ocean crashed below, waves frothing up like jaws ready to devour me.