Chapter One CHAPTER ONE
There was no need to swim. We were all dead, so we just floated.

Five minutes ago, we hadn’t been so dead. The five of us—that’s Violet, Raúl, Mariana, Esperanza, and yours truly—were steering a small Chilean fishing boat through a dark and stormy sea toward the spot we’d picked out roughly five miles from Chiloé’s rocky shores.

That was when the argument about who would drink the Death Juice first started up.

You could almost say it was like something straight out of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. We had a sparkling vial of poison, and there was at least one pair of star-crossed lovebirds in our gang. But don’t get the wrong idea: This wasn’t some tragic romance or anything like that. We were on a mission. Boldly going where no living souls had gone before. (Or at least not very often.) We were on our way to La Tierra de los Muertos, aka the Land of the Dead….

The vial of poison had been witch-brewed, courtesy of the Witch Queen of Toledo herself. Joanna had cooked it up in this huge steaming cauldron, chanting incantations over the bubbling, hissing mess as she stirred. I didn’t know what was in it. I didn’t want to know what was in it. But I was pretty sure half of her carefully selected ingredients had been alive.

Which, if you think about it, was kind of ironic for a death potion.

If the stuff worked like it was supposed to, we’d all be dead (technically, at least) for about twenty minutes, then okay again. If it didn’t work, we’d die and stay dead. Permanently.

I didn’t know about everybody else, but I had my fingers crossed that we’d dodge that second possibility.

“Who’s ever heard of a plan where the best-case scenario is you wind up dead?” I’d asked my cousin as we all gathered near the front of the little boat, waves swelling around us in the dark, the wind howling, blowing sea spray in our faces.

Raúl was shaking his head like he didn’t want to think about it. “I blame la bruja!” he shouted.

Overhead, lightning streaked and sizzled across the angry sky. Down below, Violet held the vial of poison out between the five of us.

A tremendous BOOM! ripped the clouds, and for a moment, in a flash of blue lightning, we could almost see our own half-terrified faces reflected in each other’s eyes.

“Who wants to go first?” Violet asked.

I swallowed hard and shook my head. “Not me. I’m scared of heights.”

“What does heights have to do with anything?” snapped Mariana.

So I explained: “If I’m scared of something like heights, just imagine how I feel about deadly potions.”

Señorita Warrior Princess smacked me with an eye roll.

“I’ll go first,” she said, blinking seawater out of her ojos. No big surprise there. The girl was as tough as nails, an elite chullachaqui warrior trained by my abuelo himself.

We’d met her back in Cuba, about sixty years ago (long story), in the chullachaqui tribe led by my grandpa. Back in the jungles of Zapata, she’d paraded us up onto a giant carnival float and tried to burn us at the stake. Now we were all besties. Life is funny like that.

Violet handed her the Vial o’ Death. Mariana’s dark eyes stared at the chunky pinkish juice like it was a one-way ticket to an early grave. But she grimaced and gulped some down anyway, growling low in her throat as she did. “¡Qué asco!”

“Was it that bad?” Raúl whispered uneasily, leaning close to his honey bunny.

Mariana eased herself down on the floor of the fishing boat, dragging the back of one hand across her mouth. “I’d rather die than take another sip.”

“Give it a minute,” I said. “You just might get your wish.”

Violet glanced anxiously down at her watch. Tick, tock. Tick, tock. “C’mon, we’re on the clock. Who’s next?”

“The calaca should go next!” shouted Raúl.

“For the millionth time, I’m already DEAD!” Esperanza clapped back. “I don’t need the potion!” It was true, too. As an undead ferrier of the dead, she probably couldn’t get any deader (was that a word?). With Esperanza, though, it was easy to forget. Her glamour was almost always up—like it was now—and the ancient calaca magic was no joke. If you saw her at the local mall, you’d think she was just your typical lanky teenager.

In reality, she was all skin and bones. Minus the skin.

With slightly trembling fingers, Raúl took the vial from Mariana’s hand and held it out to me. “Okay, primo. Let’s do this. You go.”

“ME? Why me?” I yelled. “You first! I have a really bad gag reflex.”

“Cuz, you know I’m scared to drink anything that’s pink!” This coming from an ocelotl soldier who could transform into a werejaguar at the drop of a moonbeam.

Suddenly, his eyes lit up with a bright idea. “Ladies first?” he tried, offering the vial to Violet with that trademark Casanova smile of his. But I snatched it away before she could take it.

“Ladies not first! What the heck, dude?” Now, was I being a little overprotective? Probably. But Violet wasn’t just my girlfriend. She was my lifelong crush. I’d been in love with that chiquita since the second grade, and now that we were officially boyfriend and girlfriend, I was NOT about to let her take even a MICRO sip of that death punch without me or my primo sampling it first.

Plus, she was the only one of the group without some kind of special sombra powers. Don’t get me wrong, though. It wasn’t like Violet was totally helpless or something. Far from it. She had superpowers of her own. She had super smarts, super courage, and a super-huge heart, which made her just as super as anybody. Still.

“Okay, fine!” Raúl snatched the vial back with a growl. “Me first!” He gave the potion a wary sniff. “Think I should start off with a little sip first?”

“Sure. What’s the worst that could happen?” Esperanza needled him. My primo glared at her, then finally jaguared up (figuratively, not literally) and chugged some liquid death.

“It’s awful!” he croaked, shoving the vial back into my hand.

I decided not to drag this out any longer. The last thing I wanted to do was slug a mouthful of Pink Muerte, but I closed my eyes and threw it back anyway, thinking, What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right? Guess we’ll find out.

The funny part? Here I was, a Morphling. The fifth and final, to be exact. Which meant I could manifest practically any animal trait in the entire animal kingdom.

Only right now, I just wished I could morph a second mouth….

Joanna’s death potion tasted like chicken (really, really bad chicken). What didn’t these days? And as it swam down my esophagus and even farther down into my belly, the weirdest sensation came over me, and I slowly eased myself into a squat on the dark, drenched floorboards, feeling… nothing. Nothing at all.

I’d never been a big fan of death. It just wasn’t on the ol’ bucket list.

The world had begun to spin as I watched Violet slurp the last bit of brew and drop to her butt next to me.

Here was the cool thing about Joanna’s potion: We would all be dead without actually being dead. In other words, we weren’t breathing. We had no heartbeat, no pulse, no vital signs of any kind. But we were all still here, alert and awake, eyes jacked wide, able to see and hear everything. It was basically the magical equivalent of suspended animation.

Anyway, it was right about then that the timer/detonator on the “bundle” in Esperanza’s backpack began to beep. The thirty-second countdown had begun.

The bundle was no big deal. Just a six-pack of dynamite with enough KA-POW! to blow a hole in the hull of the Titanic. The reason for the deadly fireworks?

This whole thing had to look r-e-a-l, real. My only hope was that it didn’t end up being real.

I’d made it up to about twenty-seven Mississippis when the world around us exploded. A blinding flash of white lit up the night as a horrible cracking noise reverberated through the boat. That was the sound of the fishing boat’s spine, the keel, shattering into about a million and one pieces.

Our little bundle of fun had been buried deep in the engine room, far away from us, but the force of the blast still rippled through the hull with enough of a shock wave to make our eyeballs hum like tuning forks in our heads. I didn’t feel it. I didn’t feel anything.

That was the plus side of being “dead.”

Next thing, the five of us were flying, crash-test-dummy-style—soaring bonelessly through the air to plunk headfirst into the freezing foamy arms of the sea.

Joanna had promised we’d be safe. This didn’t feel so safe.

The sound of the explosion had probably been heard all the way back in SoFlo. I was just hoping it had been loud enough to attract the attention of a certain legendary ghost ship.