Hidden within the swamps and once-thriving citrus groves of Florida, at a crossroads that led nowhere new, was an abandoned miniature golf course that a charismatic Cuban showman swore he could turn into a kingdom. The alligator wrestler across the way from him disagreed. They fought about everything, but the wrestler figured he was right about this one since their dying neon signs only attracted mosquitos and moths. No one ever took their exit off the highway. Not when those vacationing families and tourists were headed to see magical castles, roller coasters that shot out to space, and water parks that called themselves paradise.
Luz Pérez had been exiled to that rusted kingdom.
Selling magic to sad girls again? Her mother was furious.
They were small spells! Luz argued. Simple rituals to find lost things—charms for luck. Ways to conjure up good news and grades for them. And extra cash.
Magic is never small, her mother said to Luz, again and again, like a lullaby. Or a curse. One day you’ll open a door you don’t know how to close.
This time the pastor’s daughter complained all over town about a failed love spell, and angry mothers had screamed witch. Getting kicked out of another high school and being sent to the alternative one was one thing, but getting kicked out of that one just days before graduation was her mother’s final straw. Because Mami finally felt settled. She had a good job bartending for old vets at the Legion and a breezy apartment with gleaming white tile by the beach. She didn’t have another move in her to escape whatever mess Luz had gotten herself into this time.
From the bus window beside her, Luz watched the sunrise over an interstate lined with trucks selling orchids and billboards warning travelers about their mortal sins. Luz had been born not too far from here in a tiny house that stood on stilts at the edge of the swamp. She could still sometimes hear the raucous song of rowdy frogs.
She hadn’t been back in so long.
The relief of arriving shriveled the moment she stepped off the bus into a heat that bore down on her without mercy. There wasn’t a single breeze to cut through it out here. She was so far from the sea.
“Lucero!” Abuelo Berto waved from beside a pickup truck so old and rusted she couldn’t even begin to guess the color. Berto Pérez still had a full head of dark hair, but it was now going gray. There was grease on his linen shirt and probably new gold in his teeth. She loved the rasp of his Cuban accent when he spoke Spanish and how his English tumbled into a Southern drawl.
He wrapped Luz in a big bear hug that she was vulnerable enough to lean into for one, shoring moment. She’d missed him so much.
“I’m so happy you’re here!” he said, not minding the scandalous reason for her arrival, simply ecstatic that she was finally back. He grabbed her bag and tossed it into the truck’s bed before moving around to the other side and grandly opening her door. “Your chariot, mi amor.”
Ten minutes and three dirt roads later, Abuelo Berto pulled up in front of a small house that reigned over a pile of junk.
“You like it?” he asked proudly, his chest all puffed up.
It was something between a junkyard and a broken-down carnival. The putting greens were overgrown with tall, weedy grass, and all the supposed obstacles were either falling apart or strewn about with empty shells of cars and appliances. A windmill that had fallen over, a water tower painted to look like a lighthouse. The lightbulb up top was hanging by a wire for dear life.
“It’s definitely something,” Luz said as they got out of the truck, and he led her deeper into the mess.
“Every time I saw this place, I knew I could fix it up. Your abuelo Berto knows this land, and a big idea when I see one.”
A bold statement about a place that looked like a graveyard of bad judgment, but her abuelo was an incurable optimist who always had his eye on his next big scheme. She picked up a broken bicycle tire. “This is where big ideas go to die.” She tossed the tire back.
“Ay, you’re just not thinking big—”
She laughed, and it was a relief after this never-ending day. “Oh, I’m thinking and seeing plenty. I’ve been cast out from another town, and my punishment is to help clean up this mess.”
Something sad shadowed her grandfather’s eyes. “You used to believe too, mi niña.” He led her forward through the tall grass. “When you were growing up, you told me silly stories about frogs and lizards who knew your name. You chased them into the woods before running out with your hair braided with orange blossoms and rosemallow.” A shadow darkened his bright smile before it fell away.
“And then I disappeared.”
For an entire week, no one could find seven-year-old Luz Pérez after she slipped into the woods to play. The whole town had searched for her. Luz’s memories were hazy, painted strange by her wild imagination. When she reappeared seven days later—telling stories about feasts beneath the moonlight and a king who sat on a throne of roots—everyone’s fear had turned to anger.
They called her a troublemaker. They called her single Cuban mother much worse.
Mami had flown through the house like a hurricane, packing whatever would fit in their car, and with Abuelo Berto in the rearview mirror, they’d left their tiny house at the edge of the swamp.
Luz hadn’t been back since.
“Yo las extraño a las dos.” Abuelo Berto scratched his neck and sighed forlornly. “You were so young, and she would never come back. Pero está bien. I’ll fix this place, and then you can both come home.”
Home. Standing here, between her abuelo’s dreams and these woods beyond it, the word had weight.
They reached the back of the property that butted up against dense swampland. Crooked trees draped in moss hid much of the land beyond it, but Luz could see murky, still waters and the low-lying fog that rolled over scattered islands. From here, the wetlands looked like they went on forever. A sharp whistle sounded, and Luz continued in that direction until her abuelo stopped her in front of a broken tractor.
“Ah, now I see,” she said, and her lips quirked into a smile. “You need a mechanic.”
He grinned big and snapped his fingers. “You’re a magician with metal, mi amor, and I need this thing to move all this stuff around.”
She kicked at the flat tire then screamed bloody murder as an alligator crawled out from behind it.
Her abuelo set her aside from him and grumbled a curse about the wrestler across the way. “Voy a matar a ese tipo.” But instead of acting on the threat of murder, her abuelo approached the huge alligator as if it was a neighbor’s dog that had gotten into the house, snapping his fingers and whistling as he called, “Let’s go, Shakey.”
Luz leaped back as the alligator patiently followed after him. Baffled, she asked, “Shakey?”
“Shakey the gator,” he grumbled on a sigh. “He lives with the loco wrestler across the street, but Shakey gets lonely over there.” He puckered his lips and blew an air kiss at the reptile as they left. “He’s a good boy, but if you feed something, it always comes back.”
The gator wrestler. Right. This place was too hot, sticky, and so far off the map and its rocker. And yet, part of her had missed it. There was a peaceful stillness here, even though it was never truly quiet. It hummed, sang, and growled. The land was a wild green that wasn’t afraid of death.
Luz lifted the corroded hood on the tractor. The elements had not been kind to it. No hoses, no belt. Not even an exhaust or steering wheel. It was true she knew her way around some engines, though she wouldn’t call herself a magician. But she hadn’t thought herself a witch either.
She had to hand it to her latest school, where she’d learned her new favorite thing ever: welding. Teaching a lovelorn teen how to burn the right candle and braid their hair with someone else’s before slipping it beneath their pillow hadn’t made Luz feel powerful. But an electric current sparking from her and shaping metal to her will? She’d become a goddess.
Luz didn’t feel anywhere close to that power as she smacked away a mosquito and sighed at the rusted tractor in front of her.
Inside the house, she dropped her bag off on the couch and plugged in her phone to check in with her mother. Mami had been worried about Luz returning. But she wasn’t seven anymore. And her imagination was locked tight.
Her phone showed zero service. “Abuelo, you got Wi-Fi?”
From the kitchen, he laughed like that was the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “Wi-Fi? ¿Qué Wi-Fi? I got Lo-Fi!” He handed her a battery-operated radio.
Luz held up the artifact. “Let me guess,” she said and yanked the antenna out. She pointed it toward the junkyard outside. “You found this out there?”
“¡Claro! All of this is ours now.” He offered her a hopeful smile. “Y no te preocupes. Yo voy a llamar a tu mamá.” He picked up the old landline phone and dialed. He shot Luz a confident wink before turning his attention to the call. “¡Hola, mi amor! ¡Sí, Luz está aquí!”
His big smile slipped at whatever her mother was saying. He turned away and lowered his voice into an urgent whisper, reassuring her that Luz would be too busy working to mess around in town with locals or get caught up in any more brujería.
Luz slipped outside to avoid hearing more. She stood on the porch from where she surveyed their prized loot. Despite her abuelo’s infectious optimism, it really was a junkyard of half-formed dreams. She walked amongst the busted theme park castoffs and abandoned garbage, following the radio’s every crackle. It finally clicked with a promising sound when she reached the tractor. The scratchy blues song was a relief. Luz set the radio down on the tractor just as another sharp whistle brought her head up.
She expected to see a crow or her abuelo. But there was only a barren tree.
It looked different than the many ancient cypress trees beyond it. Those dug into the dark water with their thick, gnarled roots, but this one stood apart. Closer to the edge of her abuelo’s land. It was only a couple feet taller than her, the leafy top gone. A lone branch on the right side stretched out like an arm. The trunk narrowed into two roots. On this tree, they looked like legs.
Luz moved closer to touch the bark. She found herself humming along to the song as she dragged a finger down the solid branch. When she reached the end, she stopped and did a slow spin beneath it.
A tiny laugh flew out of her. It felt good to laugh and let go a little. The song sped up, and Luz spun faster, too, kicking up dirt. The song grew stormy. The rhythm shook and stomped. The world around her flickered as moonflower petals scattered. Memory and dreams. Static and song. A deep laugh. Spongey grass beneath her bare feet. Eerie lights floating in the dark mist, leading her off the path. A table made of wild vines overflowing with a feast. A tiny strawberry cake drizzled with wildflower honey that had tasted like home.
“¡Lucero!” Abuelo Berto desperately called out from beyond the door.
Luz crashed to a sudden stop.
She stumbled against the tree, shaky and dizzy. The music was gone. With both hands gripping the trunk, she tried to catch her breath. The radio had lost signal, and the clamorous static sounded as loud and grating as Abuelo Berto’s next shout. “¡Sabes mejor que eso!”
That strange daydream crumbled and blew away like dust. Frustrated, she returned, “I’m not disappearing or getting into trouble, Abuelo. I was just … dancing.” She pointed an accusing finger at his radio like it was the one to blame.
A battle took place on her abuelo’s usually warm and charming face. “Whispering voices out there,” he warned, then prayed protective words in Spanish under his breath before kissing the charms at the end of his gold chain.
She recognized the small, black azabache stone and pair of protective eyes—ojos de Santa Lucía. Her abuelo was one of the bravest people she knew. He’d lost an island but was always trying to find them a new home—one with roots that would last. Something soft in her gave when she looked at this mess, knowing he was trying to build something great here.
But he was afraid of these woods. Maybe of her, too.
Luz woke the next morning to a rooster crowing and her abuelo shouting at the gator wrestler. The sheets stuck to her bare legs, and the useless, slow-moving fan above her could do nothing to combat the burdensome heat. She stretched but stayed in bed for a long moment. She pressed a finger to her lips and wished she could recall yesterday’s daydream and the taste of wildflower honey.
After a cool shower, she found a pair of boots waiting for her out in the hall. Abuelo Berto was in the kitchen, where it smelled like burnt bacon and sweet cigar smoke. When he saw her, he laughed, delighted by her getup of cutoffs, T-shirt, and busted-up boots.
“¡Bueno!” he cheered from the corner of his mouth, the cigar held tight between his teeth. “¡Pareces a una guajira!”
“Yup, I’m a regular country girl now.” Her chair squeaked against the linoleum. She smiled as she twisted her wet hair up into a knot before carefully asking, “What did Mami say?”
Her abuelo scooped up the charred meat and dropped it on plates. “Tu madre está feliz de que estás aquí.”
“Abuelo,” she deadpanned.
He shrugged like he’d been caught. “You are eighteen now, mi niña. She knows you have to live your life, and you weren’t happy there.”
Luz and her mother had moved from one sunburnt seaside town to the next, and no matter what she did, trouble always seemed to find her.
“What’s the plan?” Abuelo Berto asked—optimism back in his voice. He puffed on his cigar. “The tractor?”
Luz made a big show of getting to her feet. “The plan is to help you turn this pile of sh—”
“Shiny treasures!” he interrupted.
“Right,” she agreed with a quick laugh. “Let’s turns these treasures into a tourist trap.”
He clapped then pointed at her with his cigar. “¡Eso!”
Just a couple of dreamers and schemers. Luz grabbed an orange on her way out.
The day was as suffocatingly hot and humid as yesterday. The tall grass tickled her calves as she walked and peeled the fruit slowly. The orange was bright and juicy on her tongue.
She reached the strange tree she’d danced with and considered its oddly humanoid frame.
“How’d you lose your arm?”
The way it stood separate from the other trees felt sad to her. And Luz understood loneliness. The shape of it. How quiet it could be. The way that silence sometimes felt like loss.
“What’s all that behind you?” she asked before popping another orange slice into her mouth. She couldn’t help her curiosity over the swamp beyond it.
“Do you remember me?” It felt dangerous to ask, and her pulse drummed. Luz’s disappearance all those years ago changed everything, but because they never talked about it, and because she couldn’t remember it, that lost week sometimes felt like it had happened to someone else. One Luz slipped into the forest, and a different one returned.
Sweat dripped down her neck, and her hands felt sticky from juice. She finished the last slice of sweet orange and then tossed the peel toward the tree. It had no answers, but Luz found that she liked talking to it. Her sad, lonely tree.
She turned on the radio and set off to search the maze for parts to build the tree’s other arm.
After dinner, Abuelo watched her weld the sheet metal and spark plugs into fingers at the kitchen table.
“That’s for the tractor?”
“No, that has a diesel engine.”
“¡Diesel, qué diesel!” The eternal optimist, he then assumed she was making some kind of robot for his twisted little golf course. Perhaps she could eventually.
Beneath the summer evening sky that still burned with light, Luz kicked over a nearby bucket and stepped up onto it to attach the arm. Another silly impulse, but it didn’t matter out here. Because for the first time in a long time, Luz no longer felt so lost. She could weld and create something whimsical. She could talk to trees and play in the woods and not be called a witch or troublemaker for it. Fixing this tree was like a lodestone that grounded her here.
She held the new arm up with her shoulder then fastened the base to the trunk. The radio’s static won over the song, becoming a cacophony of noise. After the third screw, she felt a tickling sensation on her neck. She finished the fourth and hopped back. She grinned brightly at her work.
Two arms, two legs. A face, though still sad. The sight inspired Luz to find more parts.
Buried away in a shed, she found the tanned hide of an alligator that must’ve been first cousins to a damn dinosaur. Luz dragged it back to the tree, where it became a sort of hooded cape around the tree’s shoulders.
Next came the chain of gator teeth she draped like a necklace. A piece of cowhide was cinched tight around the middle with a rope. Nearby cattle ranches had mostly died out with the citrus groves, making her wonder what other wayward animals Abuelo’s neighbor found to wrestle out here. She tied off the knot and stepped back to consider her work. It made an imposing figure now, with its metal arm sticking out from beneath the alligator cape.
But it all came together when she found the bull skull.
One of the horns was cracked in half, and the bottom part of its snout was gone. Inexplicably mournful over the broken face, Luz dragged her thumb across the rough edge.
And sliced her skin.
“Son of a—!” She nearly dropped the skull but grasped it tight to her chest for a moment of dizzying relief that it didn’t break further.
The skull fit perfectly on top. She looked closer at her work, and her heart dropped when she saw the blood that stained it. Her blood. Her mother’s dire warnings rang out in her mind. Doors and windows. Blood and demands. Luz wasn’t even allowed to get her hair cut if she was on her period. She hurriedly pressed her shirt against the cut then swore at herself.
Superstitions. That was all they were—silly stories to scare kids about their own bodies. There was nothing magical about her; a nowhere girl and troublemaking dropout. Her pulse pounded in her thumb and a cold sweat prickled along the back of her neck.
When a whistle sang out sharply, spooking the nearby birds that had been picking through the dark water for bugs, Luz’s head jerked toward the thick grove of cypress trees. Another piercing whistle had her backing away from her tree, which now looked every bit the sentinel at the entrance of a forbidding swamp. Luz’s heart battered her ribs like a wild thing trying to get free. The whistling sounded further away now, and she tried to find comfort in that. Her pulse continued to pound in her bleeding thumb as she turned on the radio for noise and found another song from whatever pirate radio station was able to reach her, the reception rough enough to sound miles and years away from broadcast.
“¡Oye!” Abuelo marched over to her, and she was relieved to be snapped free of her spiraling imagination. “¿Qué es esto?” He stopped and considered her work for a long, strained moment. She had no idea how to explain before he moved up to it, the intention to take it apart clear.
She leaped between them. “¡Abuelo, no!”
Abuelo Berto’s face fell. “Luz,” he said, her name filled with confusion and wariness.
Her arm hairs rose in warning just before a crack of lightning lit the sky and struck somewhere in the swamp beyond them with a thunderous boom she felt in her teeth. It stole her breath, and before she could even scream, a heavy deluge of rain fell in a sudden, violent downpour. She and Abuelo Berto ran toward the small house, and after crashing inside, he looked at her cut hand, and his brown skin paled.
How could a girl feel so inconsequential and dangerous at the same time? Luz said nothing as she went to wash the blood off her hands.
Rain continued to lash at the windows for hours as the summer storm raged. Near midnight—unable to sleep—Luz dug into her bag, past her cards, herbs, and stones, and plucked out a candle. She prepared it, and the space around her as best as she could then struck a match. The lights above her and the candle before her flickered. It had been a long time since she’d done any kind of ritual for herself. Magic had become orderly—spells her currency. But now she sat on the floor as she whispered the wild words that grew somewhere in her middle, bloomed up her throat, and tickled her tongue. The promise of them jingled like keys.
Doors and windows. Blood and demands.
Monsters and magic.
Luz and the thunderstorm continued long into the night.
When a harsh shout sounded, Luz blinked against the bright sunlight. Still on the floor, she jerked up to sitting, guilty over last night’s magic and disoriented by the hour. Another angry curse outside her window made Luz throw herself out of bed, panicked that Abuelo Berto was acting on the fear she’d seen in his eyes by the tree. In her haste, she knocked over the still-burning candle. She snatched it up off the floor, hissing at the burn of melted wax spilling over her cut hand as she raced outside. She crashed to a stop on the porch. Abuelo wasn’t on his way to the tree with a pitchfork—he was out by the road, embroiled in another morning shouting match with the wrestler across the way. This time it was a custody battle over Shakey, the gator, who waited in the dirt between them.
“Come on, gator!” the wrestler shouted as her Abuelo called, “¡Shakey, vámonos!”
She tried to catch her breath. But right off the porch, in the dirt, was a trail of seeds that led toward the woods. Luz was still holding the candle. She was a mess. A loose cannon who had promised her mother she’d stop getting into trouble. But she very badly wanted to know where those seeds led.
Luz set the candle aside and tugged on her boots, her heart pounding with an undeniable sense of anticipation as she set off to follow.
The trail led right to the tree. Oranges were piled on the ground around the base of it. They sat purposefully, like an offering. Her confused gaze traveled up the tree. The skull and cape were in the same place, but it all looked … different this morning. More, somehow. Luz took a careful step closer. The branch was now bent halfway down like an elbow. And the bark looked softer. Luz touched it and found it inexplicably warm. As she pressed her fingers harder against it, the tree tore itself away from its place and sprang toward her.
Luz screamed and fell back hard. The tree was no longer buried in the ground. What had just been roots were shuffling like feet through the dirt as it circled her. She slammed her eyes closed. The bull skull was right in her neck.
She choked on a strangled whimper as a hot, frustrated huff escaped the mask and heated her neck. Breath. Skull. Bones. Her mind frayed from the disconnect between reality and the living, breathing tree standing over her.
And then it was gone. Luz jumped to her feet and ran like a bat out of hell.
“¡Abuelo! ¡Abuelo!” He was right. They were all right. Luz was a troublesome witch who played too much and had now awoken a monster.
“What? What?” he called from the driveway.
She grabbed his hand and made him run with her, which he complained about the entire way. But once there, the tree was just that again. Back in its place. Her decorated silent sentinel.
Abuelo studied it for a long, strained moment before stepping back. “Desarmarlo, Lucero. ¿Me entiendes?”
She nodded, her throat dry.
“And burn everything.”
Her gaze skipped to the tree. As afraid as she was, the idea of taking it apart was immediately unthinkable.
Abuelo turned away then patted the tractor’s cold, dead engine. With a determined look, he solemnly promised her, “We are going to fix this place, and then everything will be okay.”
Luz watched him go. And then she went to look for a machete.
She found one in an old freezer of all places. She sharpened the blade then hid behind a broken gas pump to lay in wait. Several feet away, the radio sparked to life with another ancient song. It sounded like a big band war relic.
Luz gripped the machete tighter and exhaled slowly. She searched around the tractor and radio. A shuffling sound brought her gaze swinging back to the tree.
Luz glanced up, and her bravado crumpled as she watched the very humanoid tree lean forward. The form beneath the alligator cape shifted like shoulders as the metal hand—the one she’d built—picked up one of the oranges. It straightened, and she saw a wide chest of living bark. Those spark plugs worked as fingers as it studied the peel. The branch now bent into the shape of an arm, too, but both metal and wood appendages struggled. Luz muttered her abuelo’s favorite prayer, and then, with the machete firmly in hand, she left her hiding spot and carefully moved closer.
The bull skull was turned away as the tree monster continued to struggle with the fruit, ignoring her. Or at least pretending to.
Luz stopped beside the tractor and climbed up to take a seat, never giving the tree her back. This close, she could see that the bark beneath the bull’s skull was greener now.
She wanted to see it eat. She needed to know what she was up against.
The metal hand finally broke through the peel. She watched it tear off a slice and slip it beneath the broken end of the skull. She couldn’t help but lean closer. There was new growth behind the bull skull. Lips parted.
Swamp thing, Luz thought, both terrified and a little bit fascinated.
Another slice of orange disappeared into its mouth, and that new neck moved like a throat. Once it finished eating the orange, it finally looked her way. Luz gripped the machete again, but the tree monster simply tossed the peel toward her just as she had yesterday.
Luz waited for it to do something else, but it only proceeded to eat another orange. The broad, tall form moved fluidly now. Roots had twisted into thick, corded legs. The right branch bent as smoothly as a limb, the bark now green with life.
Luz tried to mentally measure their height difference. She stood at five and a half feet, but the tree had to be … eight? It studied its metal arm, flexing the spark plug fingers.
It had been a tree—a stuck-in-the-ground, typical tree. She was sure of it. But now, it looked up and watched her steadily. The wooden hand went to the corner of the skull and touched the spot with her blood. Luz couldn’t breathe as that hand went to its mouth. Shadows stirred behind the skull’s empty eye sockets just before they glowed.
The monster was quick because before she could even react to it tasting her blood, it was right next to her as it leaned into her throat again. Luz swallowed a scream and froze. Was it smelling her? She felt hunted before it let go of another unexplainable huff of frustration and stormed away.
Luz scrambled off the tractor and bent at the knees to greedily inhale a much-needed breath. After another minute, she dragged her shaking hands through her hair and stood. The agitated monster paced the edge of the property. The radio became lost to static. Within that scrambled white noise came a deep voice; garbled, angry, and low. It sounded far away and crackled like thunder. “This … is your … language?”
Luz’s head shot up. The monster moved closer. She snatched up the machete and uselessly held it up between them as her arms trembled.
The monster stopped beside the radio and static cleared as if an antenna had found an open window. The skull cocked to the side.
“These … are … your … words.”
The tree had a voice. A brooding growl that matched those hot exhales of irritation she could still feel on her neck.
“Who are you?” Luz’s gaze darted to the shadows and hint of the full mouth she’d seen.
Grainy static echoed again, and the volume jumped erratically. “What … are … you?” The words were sulky and feral.
Luz took another step back, putting the tractor between them. “I’m just a girl,” she said as the monster circled her, moving closer. She tracked it in return. “I’m no one.”
It stopped in front of her.
“I … am…” The metal hand went to her chin, but she jerked back. “A … huntsman,” he continued solemnly. The cold hand fell to her throat, gently circling her skin.
She stilled. “A what?”
“And … you … are…”
She waited, breathless and desperate for answers.
“… a curse.”
Stunned, she shoved his arm away. “I am not the curse. You’re a talking tree!” Luz paced. “Jesus, this is nuts. It’s not real. Monsters aren’t real. Magic isn’t—”
“Luz…”
She stopped. Not only did he know her name, but the exposed rage in his voice rang louder and clearer now through the radio’s speakers. He moved close again, his metal hand carefully returning to her neck. She couldn’t say why she didn’t push him away this time, only that she couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that she’d built that hand. Welded those fingers. And now they were slowly exploring where her neck met her shoulder. This monster huntsman seemed confused as he explored the soft skin there. Confused but bold.
Luz felt the same.
She carefully placed her palm against his chest. She didn’t find a heartbeat, a racing, pounding pulse to match and ground her own in this impossible moment, but he radiated with life as his hand slipped down her arm.
“What are you hunting?” she dared to ask.
The radio scrambled and screeched. The huntsman swung both hands up in front of her. He shook them at her.
“Unchain me!” he demanded.
Nothing was binding him.
“Unchain … me … witch!”
Luz scrambled back, accidentally dropping the machete into the dirt between them in her haste. Her terrified gaze swung between the weapon and the furious being. Was she faster? She didn’t want to get close enough to see. The monster leaned forward and reached for the machete. She was deathly still but prepared to run in the other direction. The metal hand picked up the sharp end. And then handed it back to her.
The radio found a song again as Luz took the offering.
“Luz!”
She spun toward her abuelo’s shout, afraid of a hundred things at once. The radio scrambled, clicking impatiently between stations.
“¡Teléfono!” Abuelo Berto called from closer to the house.
The monster’s attention snapped beyond her and her machete shot up between them. Her hand didn’t shake this time. Not with Abuelo somewhere behind her and this mystery in front of her. The huntsman watched her, measuring her conviction. The hood had fallen back off his broken horn. After a moment, he slipped back into place at the edge of the swamp. She knew that was as close to compliance as she would get.
Luz hurried inside. Abuelo glanced at the machete but didn’t ask as she reached for the landline in the kitchen. Luz tried to keep her voice level for her mother. She listened to her latest funny stories about the old veterans who looked out for her and even smiled as her mother considered signing up for surfing lessons.
“I think you should go for it,” Luz said, meaning it. She wanted more than endless work and worrying for her. Mami deserved rest and adventures.
“Maybe I will,” she said with a laugh before sobering. Luz braced herself. “And you’re okay? Everything is … okay there?”
Luz still clung to the machete in her clenched fist. The monster she’d awoken had just called her a witch. She wished she could rip herself open like a book and give her mother satisfying answers for everything. Ones that would erase the years of worry and make all the heartache worth it. Maybe then Luz wouldn’t have to hide or lock up all the messy parts of herself. She could own her wildness, the words that bloomed in her heart, the power that stirred in her blood. The mystery of it all would be hers to solve instead of bury.
She just needed to remember.
“Sí, Mami,” she told her now as the sun sank into the horizon in a glorious painting of oranges and pinks. The sweet smell of cigar reached her through the window screen from where her abuelo smoked on the porch, in his old rocking chair, his one heirloom from the island. A familiar gator sat comfortably at his feet as if it was a dog. “I’m happy here.”
The next morning when Luz headed toward the woods, she feared she would find nothing waiting for her. Another memory lost like a forgotten dream.
But the huntsman waited.
He loomed at the edge of the swamp, and instead of oranges at his feet, there were now salvaged parts beside the broken tractor. A new tire. A water pump. A steering wheel.
Luz swallowed around a lump of helplessness as she considered the offerings. “I don’t know how to unchain you,” she admitted and gestured to his unbound hands. “There’s nothing there.”
The radio clicked on. Static crashed and clattered. He shifted closer and held his metal arm out toward her. The hand snapped closed into a fist. “I … am … here. Witch.”
“I heard you the first time!” she snapped.
Witch or not, she had no idea what to do with a chained tree monster throwing a temper tantrum. But with these parts, she did know how to fix that tractor. After a frustrated exhale, she turned away to gather some tools. The huntsman brooded from the edge of the wood as she worked. His hooded robe flared around him as he paced. She took the engine apart and racked her brain for some mythological answer. He strode along the edge of the woods, then turned and did it again over the same ground. She measured it at about fifty feet. Was he cursed? Could she break it? She rubbed her finger across the healing cut on her thumb.
His focus turned to his hands, but she could see no chains between them. He studied his right arm. The metal one scratched and tore at the wood. They both stared as new vines grew like veins. The song on the radio drowned beneath the defeated static that rang out like a howl.
Her hand tightened around a wrench as his anguish reached out to her.
“I don’t have any answers,” she pleaded with him. “Do you? Because I disappeared into those woods, and it ruined everything. I ruined everything, and I can’t even remember it. So, no, I don’t know how to help you or fix this damn golf course for my abuelo or make sure that my mother is happy enough that I don’t drown from the guilt or fear that I’ll ruin it all again.”
He moved closer, and his metal hand tentatively reached for her. She pushed him away.
“I don’t have your answers,” she answered hollowly.
“Witch,” his deep, despondent voice called from the radio.
“Fine! I’m a witch,” she shot back. “You want me to light you a candle? Read your cards? Connect with your ancestors?” Luz dragged her hand through her hair and returned to the tractor. “Or some seed, I guess,” she muttered.
“Witch,” he said again, slower this time, and she nearly crumpled beneath the suffering in it.
He was so much bigger than her. So terrifying and monstrous and … trapped. He was a beast caught in a snare. The trap was invisible to her, but it was there all the same because why else would he be pacing the fifty feet of dirt between those wild woods and her abuelo’s attempt at a tourist trap?
Her gaze moved to the abandoned miniature golf course. The pirate’s shipwreck. The overgrown maze. The rusted castle with a broken drawbridge. Her abuelo’s busted kingdom was like a twisted fairy tale, monster included. Luz studied the enigmatic space where she’d first found the huntsman and noted the way the light shivered there.
Witch, they all said.
So be it.
“Come here,” she told him, surprised by her command.
The radio crackled. The way the huntsman focused on her felt predatory. He stalked closer, stopping just in front of her. The air around them was electric and hazy, like a brewing storm. She trailed her finger along the edge of the skull, still stained with her blood. He dipped his head closer to her, and she didn’t flinch when his broken horn brushed through her hair. The skull slipped into the crook of her neck, and she tipped her head back as bark scraped gently against her throat.
Luz touched his metal forearm. Her hand sliding carefully higher beneath the leather cape. Over the ridge of his shoulder and up to his neck.
“Luz.”
Her heart pounded, but not from fear. New words stirred within her as unexpected warmth rushed her skin. A sweet heat sparked before magic melted over her tongue. It felt like sunlight but tasted of wildflower honey. She wanted to free them both. Because maybe it wasn’t a curse or sad story. Perhaps it had always been a fairy tale.
And those had taught her one way to break a curse.
She lifted up onto her toes and pressed her lips against the column of his neck. She closed her eyes and saw a wild, green field of orange blossoms. Her lips moved beneath the edge of the skull, and she found his mouth, as real and alive as hers.
A shocked inhale just before strong arms wrapped tightly around her, and he kissed her back. Whispered words bloomed between them. Her mind and world flickered, and the discovered memories played like long-lost songs. A young girl slipping into the woods, her wild magic opening a door between worlds. The huntsman who traveled its crossroads, cursed to stand at the edge, to now guard it. Stuck until the witch returned.
Doors and windows. Blood and demands.
Heat sparked from Luz’s hands, and the huntsman flew back from her, startled, his eyes glowing as he raised his own hands and studied them with wonder.
“Luz,” he said, the word ringing out from the radio with wonder and reverence. He was free from his post at the crossroads that led somewhere else, but didn’t leave. He was staring at her.
He offered her his metal hand.
Monsters and magic.
A marvelous world waited for her on the other side. One she had played in as a child, leaving a piece of herself there. Luz had tried to seal it all away, locking up her memories tight along with her enigmatic imagination. But it hadn’t worked. The potent magic inside her had sung out through these wild woods and opened the door again. Luz had never felt so awake.
But there was also her whole world here. Abuelo was working on the fence today. Her mother was paddling out into the Atlantic Ocean.
Magic is never small, her mother said, again and again.
But perhaps Luz never had been either.
At midnight, she slipped into the kitchen with a letter for Abuelo Berto, reassuring him and her mother of her return. She unexpectedly found a note addressed to her. She opened it, and Abuelo’s gold necklace with the black azabache stone and charm of Santa Lucía’s protective eyes fell into her hands.
Lucero,
Sometimes home isn’t where we begin. Be safe, and don’t be a stranger.
And thank you for the tractor, mi amor.
Te quiero siempre,
Berto Pérez de Shakey’s Gigante Putt-Putt Kingdom (coming soon)
Luz smiled. Just a couple of dreamers. She slipped the necklace around her neck then tugged on her boots. She picked up the ancient radio, and by the light of the full moon, she followed the huntsman’s voice to the edge of the liminal land. She stopped at the crossroads. He towered above her—fearsome and otherworldly—but she felt just as mythical as him. She offered the waiting monster an orange.
The radio sounded with a low chuckle.
He reverently bent his head and offered her his cold metal hand again. Luz took it as she followed her huntsman into the wood. The radio crackled between static and song as they slipped between the exposed roots of a huge, ancient cypress tree. They followed a pathway within the dark water, only a bit of moonlight peeking between the trees to guide them until strange, eerie lights floated out from the mist. Vines slithered like snakes, and unseen beasts called out to each other. The huntsman’s hand tightened protectively around hers. The lights drifted closer, surrounding her. She now had the undivided attention of a curious, growling swamp. The radio whined as it tuned to a new station.
“Luz,” they called.
Light gathered and shimmered around her like sunlight, illuminating an open door. Luz stopped and kissed the black stone at the end of her necklace. She took one last deep breath before grabbing the huntsman’s hand again. They moved forward and crossed the space between worlds together. Roots and moss swallowed the entryway behind them on the final notes of an old love song.