Page 49 of Castle of the Cursed
When I get to the bookstore, Felipe looks beyond relieved to see me. Purple bags betray his lack of sleep, and I’m overcome with guilt.
“Here’s your cart back,” I say before he can speak, wheeling it forward to him.
“Are you okay?” he asks, his eyes bouncing across my face like an anxious parent’s.
“Of course!” I say, waving off his worry. “The banging was a wind tunnel effect that sometimes happens at night. I think it’s why people assume the place is haunted.” I pluck the excuse from a winter we spent in Hanover, New Hampshire, where the wind howled so much that it would slam shut all the doors.
“But there wasn’t any wind—”
“Please thank your parents for everything,” I press on. “I had a really nice time… for the most part.”
He cringes with guilt, and I know the subject change worked. “Sorry again for what I said about you not having anywhere else to go.”
“Don’t say it again, and we’re fine,” I say, even though there’s more to it than that. Felipe may not have outright expressed his feelings for me, but his reaction last night to the possibility of my leaving makes me worry they’ve become more than friendly.
We head to the back of the store and climb the ladder to the attic. “What would you like to read about today?” he asks.
“I’m curious about la Sombra’s history with supernatural creatures… like, have there ever been any vampires?”
“Oh—I have the perfect book!” Felipe’s voice quivers with the same excitement every bibliophile gets when they’re asked to recommend the right read at the right time, and I’m glad he doesn’t pry into my choice of subject.
We settle on the stools, and he sets a large white tome on the high table. “This book’s author was a Brálaga. They catalogued la Sombra’s brushes with the supernatural over the centuries and gathered information to create this almanac of magical creatures and potions.”
Felipe opens it to the index, then he flips to a page near the end with the heading Vampiros.
“Vampires come from another realm,” he translates, and I recall that Sebastián referred to the subway as an interdimensional attack. “They’re made of dark energy… and they survive by sucking the life force of other creatures. In other words, blood.”
“If they’re in this book, does that mean vampires have been in la Sombra before?” I ask.
“Not necessarily. It could also be that another being familiar with vampires provided this information. The author doesn’t cite their sources, and this book was published in the early 1900s, so we can’t know.”
“Does it say anything about how a vampire would cross over, if they could?” I press.
Felipe frowns, and I know I need to back off, or he’s going to start asking questions. He skims the text for a few seconds, then he says, “According to this, the only way a vampire could enter our reality is by making a pact with a witch.”
I feel my face paling. This is all fitting a little too neatly with the narrative Sebastián has fed me. And yet the word pact implies he would be in on the spell.
Is that the real reason he won’t tell me anything about himself? Are he and Beatríz working together?
“Okay, you’re worrying me,” says Felipe, studying my expression. “You’ve gone from skeptic”—he emphasizes the word, like he’s proud to use it correctly—“to believer in no time.”
“I’m not a believer yet. You’ll have to keep reading to fascinate me.”
He reviews the text again. “It says here… a vampire can’t manifest at full power in our realm. They will be limited by the spell that brings them here.”
I have to blink a few times. “Full power? What does that mean?”
He shrugs. “It doesn’t go into detail.”
I pull the book closer. “Show me.”
He leans in, and I feel his breath on my shoulder as he points to the last line on the page. I wait for him to translate, but he doesn’t say anything.
I read to myself: Si un vampiro cruza a la realidad de la Tierra, será limitado por la magia de sangre que lo transportó. When I look up at Felipe, he’s nodding at me encouragingly, so I sigh and try to work it out for myself.
When I was younger, I struggled to read. If I stumbled on a hard word, Dad would cover it up with a ruler, revealing just one syllable at a time, until I managed to pronounce the whole thing. It was one of the first things he taught me: when a problem feels too big, break it down into its smallest possible parts.
So I focus on the first half of the sentence and start with the words I recognize: Vampiro is vampire, realidad is reality, Tierra is Earth. From the context, I gather cruza must mean cross, and I say, “If a vampire crosses into Earth’s reality…?”
