Southern Charms

Los Olvidados

 "So," I said, cutting my eyes at Ash as we slipped through the trees. My voice made him jump. We'd spent the last few minutes not talking, the only sounds were the wailing of wind and shuffling of damp detritus beneath our shoes.

"So," Ash replied.

Clearly, he wasn't in the mood to work with me after the strange visit with his grandmother, but considering I'd been snatched away before Abuela could give me the answers I wanted, I wasn't going to accept uncooperativeness.

"I'm not really understanding why you were so concerned about going to see your grandmother. She was really nice."

He snorted so hard I checked to make sure his head hadn't exploded. He turned his cinnamon eyes on me, and I swallowed beneath the weight of his gaze. Fire snapped around his irises, and at his fingertips, magic sparked- a dead giveaway that he was nearing the end of his control.

"When I was six, she caught me stealing cookies from the kitchen. I'd already been told to stay out of them because it would be dinner soon. She told me if I was going to act like a sneaky rat, then I was going to be one. She turned me into a rat for an entire day."

I grimaced. "What is it with witches and turning people into rats?"

"She was always teaching us lessons like that, and when my dad went off the rails, she was the only one who could rein him in. Sometimes with a single word. Her power is..." he stopped and scanned the tree line as if he would find the word he was searching for hanging from a limb. "Unparalleled."

We started moving again, and I let his words sink in. Our destination was the statue Abuela mentioned: Los Olvidados- The Forgotten. I'd seen it before, of course, though I never spent much time studying it. It was a thing of beauty- that couldn't be denied, but it made me uneasy. The artist captured sorrow in every line of the family's bodies, their clothes wet and plastered against too thin frames. But it was their faces, or the lack thereof, that pushed the piece from mere commentary to something emotional.

It would have been easier to teleport to the statue, but if Luis was hiding something there, it was certainly warded. And the wards wouldn't be simple or small, which is how we found ourselves trekking through the woods lining the cemetery.

"Ash, if Abuela is so powerful, why doesn't she stop your father? Why did she let him get away with it for so long?" I grabbed his arm. "What if we're walking into a trap?

He shook his head, the ends of his hair damp from the gentle mist that started about fifteen minutes ago. "I don't think so."

"You thought so earlier."

"Abuela is many things, but she isn't a liar. Most of the time, anyways."

As much as I wanted to know what the last bit of information meant, it didn't seem relevant to our current situation. "Then why?"

"Abuela has a lot of power, but she doesn't really know how to use it. So, someone with half her power could best her if they were prepared. She wasn't raised to understand her power, and even though she lived with other witches in El Salvador, I don't think they were fully trained. They were outcasts from society."

"Forgotten," I whispered then looked away. I didn't like that a small part of me suddenly understood the madness that drove Luis. My hand drifted to the locket around my neck. Until this, I'd been at the mercy of those around me because I was different. Luis's story wasn't so very different. He lost everything because he wasn't normal.

"She's the reason."

Ash dug his fingers into the bark of a tree. Brittle bits of gray broke away and flitted to the ground. Dark, violet smoke curled around the trunk, and I couldn't tell if the water running down his face was from the rain or from fresh tears.