That was a good question. I imagined Fausto didn’t get tons of customers.
His eyes grew big like Ren had taken him by surprise. “To hide their magic, why else?”
Why would someone want to hide their magic? I wondered as I raised the Red Queen’s mask and took a deep breath. Brooks death-gripped my hand. Her eyes flashed amber. You better still be Zane after this.
Right. What if the Red Queen possessed me or something? Or what if a part of her came back with me? Just the thought of it gave me the creeps.
Brooks hugged me, but it didn’t help as much as I would’ve hoped.
I managed a weak smile as I stepped back and, with a shudder, pressed the mask to my face.
My legs buckled. The world dissolved. And I found myself in a small vaulted chamber about half the size of my bedroom. A single wall torch illuminated the space, which was taken up by a rectangular stone sarcophagus. To my right was a doorway that gave access to the chamber. Red powder was scattered across the sandy floor.
This was not what I was expecting. I mean, I didn’t feel dead. Maybe this death magic was going to be easier than I thought.
“Hello?” I called out, steadying myself with Fuego. My voice echoed.
A shimmering cloud appeared on top of the sarcophagus, and an older woman materialized out of it. She had olive skin, black hair tied up in a tight bun, and a band of jade stones around her forehead. “Zane Obispo,” she said with a smile. “Oh, I h
aven’t had a visitor in so long. So few choose my death mask, but I can tell just by looking that you are smarter than most.”
I didn’t know what to make of her or this place. “Er…am I dead yet?”
“I am dead. You are soon to be masked by death. I should introduce myself.”
“You’re the Red Queen?” I guessed.
“I am, and you must hurry. I can only be here for one minute and thirty seconds. Now, the rules: I cannot provide any information unless you ask the right questions, and you cannot ask the same question twice or more than one question at a time. One minute fifteen seconds.”
My throat throbbed painfully. I tried not to think about the fact that I was standing in an ancient tomb with a dead queen. “I thought…aren’t you supposed to, you know…make me dead?” No one had said anything about a question-and-answer period.
“Here you stand before the great Red Queen and you choose to waste time. I offer you an answer to any question, and by the looks of you, you need answers. I didn’t come all this way for a single death deed. I am fulfilling a debt, and you’re wasting time.”
There was no time to ask about her debt. “I heard a voice in the fire—it whispered to me.”
“That is not a question.”
“Why did the voice whisper to me?”
The Red Queen extended her small hand and called a piece of the torch’s light to her. The fire sphere floated above her palm. “To tell you something.”
I was about to argue that that was the worst answer of all time, like Alice in Wonderland bad, but we were on a tight schedule. Then it struck me—what if the voice that had been whispering to me all this time was the Fire Keeper dude? What else had he said? Time for the story to escalate. Had he been creeping on me since the night Ren got to the island? At Ms. Cab’s I had asked him who he was, and he’d said, You’ll find out soon enough.
“Who does the voice belong to?” I asked.
“I’m not good at voices. Do you have a recording?”
“You said you would offer an answer to any question.”
“That was my answer.” The Red Queen glared at me. “Look at me like that again and I will lock you in this sarcophagus with only worms for company.”
Okaaay, on to the next question. “Can you guys really change the future?”
“‘You guys’ does not make sense to me.”
I sucked in a big breath, trying to keep my cool. “Can fire keepers change the future?”
“Indeed.”