Page 93 of Castle of the Cursed
“Is she, though?” he asks, eyes overbright, and I’m so reminded of Felipe that I understand why Bea never warmed to him. It must’ve felt like seeing the ghost of her brother.
“Stop,” warns my aunt. “I won’t let you traumatize the girl any further.”
“What do you think happened to Oli and Raul?” he whispers, and every part of me stills at the mention of my parents.
“You tell me,” she threatens, narrowing her gaze like a detective zeroing in on a suspect.
“I thought it had to be the curse,” he admits, all traces of humor gone from his face. “But what if we’re wrong?” The spark is back in his gaze and blazing brighter than before. “What if Nela is trying to come home to us, but someone won’t let her cross over? If there’s something we can do, if she needs us, we owe it to her to find out.”
I don’t bother looking to my aunt to see if my uncle’s words have worked on her. Because they’ve already worked on me.
“I’ll do it.”
“No!” cries Bea, her face drawn in despair as Teo’s splits into a smile.
I can feel the hardness in my chest that tells me I’m not going to budge. I came to la Sombra to close my parents’ case, and even if the castle’s curse is what doomed them, there still has to be an identifiable culprit, weapon, and motive. If Teo wasn’t the brujo behind the Subway 25 spell, who was?
And why did they do it?
Felipe is dead, and Sebastián has abandoned me. Prince Bastian is back, and he’s made his priorities clear: he wants to break the spell.
Teo’s methods may be out-there, but he knows a lot more about Brálaga magic than the rest of us, and if he’s not a suspect, then he’s my best source. I couldn’t save my parents, but if there’s even a minuscule chance that Teo is right that Antonela is alive and possibly in danger and we have the chance to do something, then I need to act.
To hell with caution and rules.
“She was my sister,” I tell my aunt, knowing she will understand after everything she’s done for her brother. “I need to know.”
“Let’s get to the mirror.” Teo is already springing into action, and as he strides out of the garden, I follow him.
“How do you know the spell we need to use?” I ask, without waiting for Bea.
“I found it in the journals long ago,” he says. “I have just been waiting for you to return to the castle to try it.”
“But I thought Brálagas could only do magic under the full moon.”
“That’s for big outdoor spells,” he says. “The rules are different in the castle because la Sombra is fueled by our blood.”
He’s really read through the journals carefully. “Who restocks the journals when they run out?” I venture.
He looks at me with a wry smile. “Now you’re asking the right kind of question.”
“What’s the right kind?” I ask as we cut through the string of doorless rooms.
“The ones without answers.”
I roll my eyes. “I bet you’ve tried stealing journals from the attic.”
“I have, but they’re impossible to remove. I even tried photographing them, or tracing them over, but the pictures came out blank, as did the ink in my pen and the lead in my pencils. So I settled for reading through all of them, some over and over again until I memorized as much as I could.”
“Why did you kill Felipe?” I ask when we reach the fork in the road.
Teo stops moving. “I’m not a murderer.”
There’s a harder edge to the declaration now, which only makes him sound guiltier.
“Aren’t you?” I ask, forging ahead of him to the mirror room.
I have to wait a few seconds for him to join me, and he’s back to all-business. “This glass can be used to channel Antonela’s memories,” he says, facing the mirror. “If she made it to the other castle. You won’t get everything, but enough to know she lived.”
