MATTHEW FELT ridiculous, sitting in the Rojas’s kitchen wrapped in a blanket like a victim of hypothermia. It was July and about eighty degrees out. But Mr. Rojas had insisted he cover up rather than sit there in his underwear. The man didn’t want his daughters to wake up and see Matthew half naked.
So fine. At least he’d let Matthew call Alejandro. “Thank you,” Matthew told him, handing the phone back.
“De nada,” Rojas grunted. “I have to get some sleep. I have work in the morning. You can stay here until Alejandro comes, but don’t make any noise.”
“Gracias.”
ALEJANDRO DIDN’T bother going to his own apartment when the cab dropped him off. All he had with him was a laptop case and a carry-on bag with wheels and an extendable handle. So he just wheeled it up to Matthew’s apartment building. Before he could ring the buzzer, the front door swung open, and there was Matthew, standing there in nothing but a blanket.
“Don’t ring the buzzer!” he hissed under his breath. “And keep your voice down. If I wake Mr. Rojas again, he’ll kill me.”
Alejandro struggled to keep his gaze from searching the gaps in the blanket, trying to see whether his friend was really naked under there. He knew Matthew slept in his underwear, so it seemed unlikely. But it was hard not to speculate. “What’s going on?”
“Come into the stairwell.”
Matthew stepped back so Alejandro could enter. He helped lift the luggage over the doorstep so it wouldn’t bang against the wood, and while his hands were occupied, the blanket slipped off. Alejandro wasn’t surprised to see the familiar red-and-black checked boxers, but he was certainly disappointed. He’d seen Matthew naked on occasion, changing clothes, but… not enough.
Once they were safely inside, Matthew wrapped the blanket around himself again, though he was sweating in the summer heat. “There’s something wrong with Spartacus.”
That snapped Alejandro back to reality and away from thoughts of Matthew’s smooth butt. “What? What happened to him?” He remembered his bizarre dream on the plane. Had it been some kind of premonition, after all?
“I don’t know. Suddenly he’s acting like Cujo. I barely escaped from him without getting my face torn off.” He was talking calmly, but his voice sounded strained, and Alejandro could tell he was close to tears. “I don’t think he got bitten by anything….”
Alejandro felt a chill go through him. If Spartacus was rabid, that would be it. The poor pup would be put down. The thought horrified him—he’d never known a more awesome dog—and he knew it would kill Matthew. “When did it start?” He had no idea what that would tell them, but it seemed like a good question to ask.
“He was fine before bed….” Matthew hesitated a moment before adding, “Oh, he chewed up your package. I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“He didn’t destroy the book. But he chewed up the box pretty bad.”
“The book?” It finally dawned on him what Matthew meant. Oh shit. Well, so much for owning his own copy of El Gran Libro. It hardly seemed important at the moment. “He attacked you, then chewed up the book?”
“No, the other way around,” Matthew replied, clearly growing frustrated.
It took a few minutes, but Alejandro finally got the complete story. And the more he learned, the more he was disturbed by it. Not only because of what was happening to Spartacus, but because he was becoming more and more convinced it might have something to do with the book. Matthew often poked fun at him for being too superstitious—it was hard not to be, living with Abuela—but Alejandro knew the reputation of the book, and he knew how it had felt when he touched it. The way Matthew had described Spartacus staring intently at it, the way he’d felt about keeping it out of his bedroom… it seemed possible, at least.
Of course, when he explained his theory to Matthew, it didn’t go over well. “Oh please! I said he was acting like Cujo. I didn’t say we were actually living in a Stephen King novel.”
“I had a dream,” Alejandro said quickly, “when I was on the plane.” He described seeing something coming out of the closet where Matthew had admitted hiding the book, slithering through the apartment, and then honing in on Spartacus.
Matthew stared at him openmouthed for a long time after that. At last he gasped, “You fucker!” He glanced at the door to the Rojas’s apartment quickly and lowered his voice. “You sent me a cursed book!”
MATTHEW WAS furious. At least, at first. Alejandro was supposed to be the expert in this kind of thing. He was the one who’d grown up surrounded by all this stuff. He should have known better! True, Matthew had, by now, been around saints and floor washes and Florida Water nearly as much, but still….
Gradually, something occurred to him—something that caused his anger to evaporate. Or, nearly. “Wait a minute. If this is… possession or something… then it isn’t permanent, right? All we have to do is force the spirit to leave Spartacus, and he’ll be just like he was before!”
Alejandro looked uncertain. “Maybe. But I’m not sure how we can do that.”
“There has to be something!” Matthew insisted.
His friend frowned and glanced up the staircase. “What’s he doing now?”
“I don’t know. It’s been quiet for the last hour or so, but I think he got out of the bedroom. I thought I heard him pacing around up there while I was in the Rojas’s kitchen. I’m afraid if I go up, he’ll go nuts again. Even if he doesn’t rip me to shreds, someone might hear him and call the police.”
“Okay,” Alejandro said, surprising Matthew by placing a hand over his. It was an unusually affectionate gesture, coming from him. “Let’s go to the botanica. There are things there we can use.”
Matthew nodded, his gaze still locked on his hand, held in Alejandro’s. Then he recalled, “I need clothes. I can’t walk across town in a blanket.” Technically he could, but he didn’t need the police harassing him.
Alejandro opened his suitcase and dug down past several shirts to a pair of shorts. “These are… well, I’ve worn them. But they’re not that bad.”
“You were wearing underwear, right?” Matthew asked, eying them dubiously.
“Yes. Don’t be an idiot.”
Matthew took them and slipped into them. They fit, as he’d known they would. He and his friend had worn each other’s clothes more than once.
The shirts, however, were a lost cause. Alejandro sniffed them and grimaced. “You don’t want these, huero. They reek.”
“There’s nothing clean?”
“No,” Alejandro replied. “I just brought enough clothes for the trip.”
“Fine.” Matthew was happy with the shorts. It was hot enough to go shirtless, and he was relieved to get out from under the blanket. He folded it and quietly slipped it back into the Rojas’s kitchen. Then he rejoined Alejandro in the stairwell and said, “Let’s go.”