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Quill stuck his hands in his pockets, raising a questioning eyebrow at me “How do you mean?”

I shrugged “I guess I just, I don’t knoouldn’t want to stick my parents in a place like this That is, if they had ever survived to grow old enough to belong”

The se Not quite sad, but not quite sys, aren’t they? I’er have either of your parents around”

I chewed ain, this time with just one shoulder “It is what it is But thanks”

“And you shouldn’t worry about Leonora She’s perfectly happy living here It’s a good place for her, plus when she’s unhappy with the service, she still has enough ic to make them, shall we say, disappear”

“What? I don’t think I like the sound of that”

Quilliahed “Oh, I don’t h trouble for theet fired Plants soet them out of there”

“Oh my God Quill, that sounds terrible” I wasn’t sure I wanted to work for soain, I needed the daars can’t be choosers Well, they can, if they like not having beds and sleeping in cardboard boxes Never again

“Oh, you know,” Quill said, looking up at the facility’s signage as we approached “It is how it is That’s just how brujas are”

Bruja? I knew that word I stopped walking and squinted at Quillia in my chest “Wait You never mentioned that before Leonora’s a bruja?”

Quill stopped walking, too, fixing me with a blank, innocent smile “Oh, come now, Mason You’re not afraid of witc

hes, are you?”

10

You wouldn’t have known at all frouez, as was her full name, was a bruja That was the Spanish word for witch, or a very specific kind of witch, found in traditions as diverse as the South Alance, Leonora looked like a sweet old lady, wearing those thick cat’s eye spectacle frames that old ladies love, a woven shawl draped across her lap for warrandmother, basically, or abuela, which was a word I learned from one of my pals at the Boneyard

Incidentally, that was also where I learned what bruja meant I’d only known one bruja before, but she was froic followed a different tradition They spelled it bruha, with an H I realize it’s a difference of a single letter, but you change one letter on the word ‘witch’ and you’ll quickly coeneral It was a witch, after all, who started the chain of events that led tothe Boneyard