After landing safely in my old home, my brain does me the favor of reminding me I have no idea what I’m looking for. Immediately following that thought is the realization I’ve lost everything I’ve ever known. My parents are dead, my brother is in a coma, and the apartment that used to be home has been completely ransacked. I’m alone.

I rise tenderly onto my feet and tiptoe through the wreckage of our meager possessions. If we had owned more, it would be impossible to quietly navigate the mess. My thoughts flicker to the ometeotl patrolling the building. I whisk my way to the opened door and risk a peek into the hall.

I see no one. The blue-green glow reveals the immortal has shifted to the opposite end of the corridor. I return my attention to the interior of the apartment. My shoulders sag. It’s gone, all of it. There’s no going back. In a blinding flash, my life had been taken from me.

Olin’s fault or not, the reality of it remains the same. And it hurts. Wiping away a tear, I huff and straighten. Self-pity is for victims. What I need now is a cure for Olin—something to wake him from his coma. It has to be here.

I shuffle toward the shelf and desk where my mother kept her remedies. It’s too dark to identify anything by label, but I know most of the items by the shape and size of their container. I rummage through the mess on the floor.

Most of the glass vessels are intact, and instantly I recognize several of them. Ground cochineal would turn his tongue bright red. That’s about it. Manganese is a possibility, but if I give him too much it could make things worse. Whatever I’m looking for, it won’t be for its primary use. I’ll have to be creative.

Continuing the search, I find a container of cassia bark, good for digestion problems and snake bites. I find a box of dried nopales and two wooden container filled with logwood and tzapotl bark. A faint dancing light catches my eye. I glance toward the door where the blue-green glow of the ometeotl grows.

I chew the inside of my mouth and fight off panic. Think, Calli, think. Logwood. I’m not sure why, but my brain hovers over the possible uses of logwood bark. I open the box and rub a piece of it between my fingers. I remember my mother using logwood tea for everything from tumors, to infection, to fever.

Still rubbing the bark between my fingers, I watch the intensity of the light thicken in the corridor. I’ve got to go. I can’t get caught here, or we’ll both be dead. But I can’t leave without a cure.

Seizures. It hits me suddenly. My mother had used logwood tea once to treat a man with seizures so bad they incapacitated him. A batch of the tea had snapped him out of it so quickly I had thought he’d come back to life.

A long shot at best, something about logwood tea feels right. I snatch the wooden box and tuck it into my pants while assessing my options for exit. The hall is out of the question, and with every passing second the possibilities dwindle. The window, gaping and dark, is all that remains.

Blue-green light pulses in the corridor, not growing in brightness, but in density. I hear the ometeotl’s subtle footfalls. Strength and determination ripple through me. In three agile leaps, I reach the window and hurdle through it.