Fated

Lowerworld, I have yet to run into her. But maybe you will, nieta, who knows?”
    “A skull face, a snake skirt, and a steady diet of stars?” I shake my head and balk. “No thanks, I’d prefer to avoid her if it’s okay with you.”
    “You don’t always get the journey you want, nieta. Though you always get the journey you need,” she says—yet another sage statement in a collection of many.
    “You paraphrasing Mick Jagger now?” I laugh. It feels good to laugh, lessens the creepiness of her story.
    Paloma grins, but it’s not long before she tucks a leg underneath her and says, “Now, back to Chepi—while she had no interest in Leandro, no interest in hooking up with bad boys as you put it,” she winks at me, “she was no match for Leandro, whose proficiency in the black arts is unrivaled. The Richters have misused the power of the Day of the Dead for centuries. They don’t so much honor and commune with their relatives as resurrect them.”
    I lean toward her, chin tucked to my knees, eyes practically popped from their sockets.
    “Oh, not for long, nieta, and not physically. They’re not necromancers, or at least not yet, anyway. It’s more like they call upon the energy of the dead and infuse themselves with the dark power of their lineage—an effect that lasts a few days at best. But, as it turns out, on that day, it proved enough. And that, coupled with Leandro’s ability to alter perception, is what made it so easy for him to seduce Chepi. He knew about the powerful magick that flowed through her bloodline, and he was desperate to harness it and merge it with his. The Richters’ power was beginning to falter. While they’ve never had access to the Upperworld, on the occasions they’ve managed to breach the Lowerworld, they were quick to corrupt it along with the spirit animals, which caused chaos to reign here in the Middleworld, leaving people unprotected, easily misled—becoming both victims and supporters of insane, corrupt leaders. The rise of Atilla the Hun, Vlad the Impaler, Stalin, Robespierre, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Hitler…” She looks in my direction, but her gaze remains far away. “It can all be traced to the Richters’ dark influence in the Lowerworld, and it took great sacrifice on behalf of Seekers and shamans everywhere to evict them. The Lowerworld, just like the Upperworld, is populated by loving, compassionate beings that guide us and aid us without our even realizing. We are dependent on their well-being and wisdom in more ways than we know. It’s only the Middleworld that contains beings that both help us and harm us.”
    It’s not until she pauses that I realize I’ve been holding my breath, doing my best to take it all in and try to make sense of it.
    “And so, desperate to beef up their ranks, Leandro purposely set out to father a son whose blood would run thick with the magick of both sides, hoping that would enable him to infiltrate the other worlds so long denied him. Chepi didn’t stand a chance—he kept her captive for the entire ceremony—and when she awoke, she was nude, battered, and her body was covered in black-magick symbols.”
    I’m speechless, haunted by the images that flare in my head. Remembering the night I met Leandro in the office at the Rabbit Hole, the creepy impression I got when he caught my hand in his.
    “Leandro wasn’t looking for just any son, he wanted a son with a soul even darker than his own. Knowing the soul contains equal parts light and dark—that a person’s life story and the sort of nurturing they receive often determines which side emerges as the dominant one—he set out to dissect the child’s soul right from the start. He called upon his long-deceased ancestors to aid him, worked terrible magick and ritual to split the soul and nurture the dark part at the expense of the good. Though, in the end, things didn’t go quite as planned. Instead of giving birth to one black-hearted son, Chepi gave birth to twins, one with a light soul and one with a dark one.”
    My mind spins with the news—unable to think of one good response.
    Twins.
    One evil. One good.
    The stuff of myth—only in this case it’s real.
    “Okay,” I say, struggling to understand. “But if Chepi’s dad, Jolon, was so powerful, why didn’t he stop it?”
    Paloma nods as though she was expecting the question. Wasting no time in replying, she says, “When Chepi arrived home disheveled and disoriented, Jolon was distraught to find his