Cece Rios and the Desert of Souls by Kaela Rivera (online e book reading .txt) 📕

pushed, encouraging me to move. I gripped the ladder rungs tightly, despite my trembling hands.

“Cece,” Papá whispered.

I paused.

“Where was she?” he asked. “When it . . . happened?”

I cried so much, I didn’t think I had any more tears left. But my eyes stung, and my throat tightened. When it came to Juana, I would always, somehow, have more left.

“The Ruins,” I whispered.

There was a tense pause.

“Why?” His voice was deep enough to drown in.

I pressed my forehead against the ladder. “I told her I’d be right back . . .”

Papá didn’t say anything after that, but I sensed the anger in his breath, and the unsaid words piled up inside of me until I could feel them in every follicle, every pore, every blink of my eyelids—I had lost my sister. I was the reason she’d been stolen. I had destroyed my familia.

The ladder rungs bit into my hands as I climbed up into the room above. It was terribly quiet. On the far right, Juana’s unmade bed sat in the low moonlight. It was surrounded by opal beads and strips of red fabric from our preparation this morning. My hand shook as I reached out and stroked the dent her body had made in the mattress.

The moment my fingers grazed the empty space she left behind, a powerful thought forced its way inside me.

No. I wouldn’t let Juana be the prisoner of El Sombrerón.

There had to be a way to fix this, and I had to be the one to do it. Somehow, I would find a way to bring my sister home.

5

The Limpia

The next morning, I woke up before the sun. The loft was cold and dark, and leftover nightmares still clouded my brain. I have to save Juana, I chanted over and over in my mind. There has to be a way.

As far as I knew, there wasn’t one. Every year, El Sombrerón stole a bride from one town or another, and none of them had ever, ever come back.

Really, the only way to get her back was to find the place El Sombrerón had taken her—Devil’s Alley, the criaturas’ world. But the secret entrance moved each year, and legends said ordinary human beings couldn’t pass through it and survive without permission from the rulers of Devil’s Alley.

So that complicated any plan I tried to think up. But that didn’t mean I should stop trying. There had to be some human being, somewhere in history, who had descended into Devil’s Alley and returned.

I just had to figure out who’d already done it, and then I could do it too.

Juana was waiting for me.

“Cecelia!” Mamá called from below. “Come down!”

I knew that tone, and my heart immediately raced up into my throat. Without pausing, I stumbled out of bed and practically flew down the ladder rungs to the first floor.

Mamá was waiting in our small kitchen alcove. The downstairs was eerily quiet besides the sound of her rustling through a large trunk filled with papers and bound books.

I walked over to her. “Mamá? What are you doing?”

“We’re going to the Sun Sanctuary,” she said instead of answering me. She made an annoyed sound as she pushed papers around in the trunk. “Help me find the Cantos de Curanderas, mija. It was your abuela’s book, and we need it for what we’re going to do.”

I went to the opposite side of the trunk. It was about three feet long, made of thick wood and intricately carved. I’d seen it only a couple of times before, since Mamá usually kept it hidden beneath her bed, but I knew its significance. It was filled with our family history, with stories older than our adobe home, and records winding far, far back into the history of Tierra del Sol, our town, and all of Isla del Antiguo Amanecer, our country.

It was, to put it mildly, extremely important to Mamá. She’d never even let me look inside before.

Besides the mess of papers, I noticed an image painted inside the lid. It pictured four women holding hands, walking through a sunset with a dark beast before them and Tierra del Sol behind them. I recognized this legend. Though people in my town didn’t like to tell the story, unless it was to emphasize the women’s failure.

It was a depiction of the two-hundred-year-old tale of the curanderas, powerful women who had once guarded Tierra del Sol against criaturas. Except, they’d apparently failed. And our town had nearly been wiped off the map, leaving the Ruins behind. That’s why no one but Abuela had ever really cared to study them and their old magic. Nowadays, people said they had been weaklings at best, and traitors at worst.

I bit my bottom lip and tried to focus on finding the book Mamá had mentioned. I passed by several old papers and even my favorite book, The Legends of Criaturas and Their Beginnings, which Mamá had read to us growing up. After a few minutes, I spotted a book I’d never seen before: Cantos de Curanderas. I plucked it out of the pile, and another, smaller book fell out from between its pages. It landed at my feet, the cover bright red.

The sound made Mamá look up, but she only noticed the book in my hands. “There! You found it, mija.” She took the Cantos de Curanderas and went to place it in her bag by the door. “Now, go get dressed—we need to make it to the Sun Sanctuary before the priestesses wake up.”

“Before they wake up?” I snatched up the red leather book from the floor and headed for the ladder. “How will we get in then?”

“Before most of them wake up,” she said. “If anyone but Dominga del Sol talks to you, look away and say nothing. No one can know why we’re there.”

So that’s why this felt familiar. The last time Mamá took me to the Sun Sanctuary and told me to hide from the Sun Priestesses, it was to perform a limpia. Memories flooded over me, and