Charlie Hernandez & The Castle of Bones

CHAPTER ONE
It was raining frogs. That’s the first thing I noticed when we stepped through la bruja’s mirror. Fat ones, green ones, black ones. They tumbled from the sky, bounced off the road, clunked off mailboxes. They croaked and chirped and peeped. They hopped through the tall grass like punch-drunk boxers.
One plopped down on the toe of my sneaker, glared up at me with its bulging, beady eyes, and said, “Rrriiiibbbbbiiitt!” I stared at it for a moment, frowning, then squinted up at the dark churning clouds from where the slimy amphibians were falling in bunches. In knots.
My name is Charlie Hernández, and over the last few months, my life had been all kinds of freaky; I’d grown horns, sprouted feathers, teleported from South Florida to northwest Spain, made a quick stop in the Land of the Dead, and even faced off against one of the most famous and feared brujas in all of human history-but raining frogs…? Yeah, that was new for me.
“Estamos aquí,” said the witch queen, her green eyes blazing in the gloom.
I looked around. We were standing on the side of a narrow dirt track, smack-dab in the middle of… well, nowhere. A huge, grassy field spread out before us, flanked by walls of thick forest. Pines, maybe. The air was cold. The sky was dark, choked with storm clouds. Thunder rumbled in the distance.
“Where exactly is here…?” I asked, but la bruja didn’t answer.
Violet said, “And what’s up with the frogs?” but she didn’t answer that, either.
Maybe thirty yards ahead of us a strip of yellow crime scene tape had been stretched across the field, from end to end, looped around the trunks of the nearest trees. A crowd of curious people was pressing up against the tape, shouting questions as a dozen or so police officers tried to keep them from busting through. There were even more people wandering aimlessly around; these were dodging the falling croakers while snapping pictures of the sky or recording the whole thing on their smartphones.
A couple of little kids in denim overalls were trying to catch the frogs as they fell. I watched one of them catch a plummeting toad in her front pocket, then start cheering and jumping all over the place like she’d just won the Super Bowl. Honestly, if I’d been about seven years younger and wearing overalls, I would’ve totally jumped in for a round or two. Looked pretty fun, actually.
Past the main crowd, more police officers were hauling heavy wooden barricades out of the backs of police vans, their flashing lights turning the woods red then blue, red. then blue.
“Do not leave my side,” Queen Joanna warned us. “And speak to no one. We cannot be seen, ¿me entienden?”
As we started across the field, the wind kicked up, shrieking through the trees and slinging the amphibians sideways now. I dodged one the size of a Frisbee, then wrapped my arms around myself, wondering where the heck we were and what the heck we were doing here; thanks to the police cruisers (which had the word “polícia” and not “police” emblazoned across the driver-side doors), I knew we weren’t in Miami anymore, but that was about it. And that wasn’t exactly a whole lot to go on.
“Are they gonna let us through?” Violet asked as we approached the barricade, but again Joanna didn’t answer; she simply touched one pale, ringed finger to the golden brooch pinned to the front of her dress (it looked like some sort of butterfly, maybe-or a giant moth) and whispered, “Vuela,” which means “fly,” and the pin’s wings suddenly beat to life.
It rose silently into the air, a golden blur in the night, and then flew out ahead of us, floating lazily over to where the large crowd was pressing against the police tape. Leaving dusty, glittery trails, the pin began to fly circles above everyone’s heads, and next thing I knew, all fifty or so people-cops included-were staring up at it, some pointing and smiling, others giggling with childlike wonder in their eyes.
They were all so mesmerized by it, in fact, that not one of them even glanced our way as we ducked under the ribbon of yellow tape and marched right past them, following the rhythmic swish of the witch queen’s cape.
Yep, Joanna was awesome like that…. We’d made it maybe fifteen yards when a fat, bumpy, squishy toad plopped down on the top of my head and just sort of sat there like a warty green hat.
Glancing up at la bruja, I said, “So, about the frogs…?” “The dark magia in the atmosphere has begun to warp nature,” she replied quickly. And pretty casually, too—like she’d just said, Hey, your shoes are untied. Or, Hey, you dropped your pencil.
Personally, it was my opinion that whenever the words “dark” and “magic” came together in a sentence, the entire situation should be taken a bit more seriously. But, hey,
that was just me.
“So not a good sign then, huh?”
The queen stayed quiet, but the frog on my head said, “Ribbbbbiiittt,” then hopped off, and I had to resist the urge to try to catch it in my pocket.
Up ahead, where the field curved out of sight, a man and woman in white lab coats strode into view, walking this way. They were carrying walkie-talkies and yelling into them in a language that was almost familiar. Portuguese, maybe?
“¡Escóndanse!” Joanna whispered, and we did exactly that, ducking out of sight and vanishing into the dark woods. Leaves crunched and branches made shifting patterns against the sky as we zigzagged through the trees, leaping logs and rocks. “Do not slow!” she ordered, and Violet and I weren’t about to argue. Joanna, also known as the Witch Queen of Toledo, was one of the most powerful brujas on the face of the planet. Not only that, but she was the leader of the League of Shadows, which was sort of like a superhero team-up of the most legendary mythological beings-or sombras-in all of Hispanic mythology. The first time we’d met, she’d fed me worms, then tried to drown me (and basically succeeded!) But, surprisingly, it had all been for my own good, so I wasn’t holding a grudge. She had dark auburn hair, long dark nails, and even darker lashes framing her glowing emerald eyes. When you topped that off with the golden crown she liked to wear and her elaborate, tiered gown the color of a midnight sky, she might as well have had a big neon sign over her head that read: SUPERNATURAL ROYALTY COMING THROUGH.
As we hurried through the woods, Violet shot me an uneasy look, and finally I couldn’t take it anymore-I opened my mouth to ask Joanna where she was taking us and what in the Land of the Living we were doing here, but as we emerged from the trees, the words died on my lips.
My jaw dropped open. My toes seemed to hook themselves into the ground.
Before us, rising up almost as tall as the great trees that flanked the field, stood the most terrible thing I had ever seen-a thing so mind-bogglingly awful, my suddenly panicking brain could hardly make sense of it.