A Sprinkle of Spirits Read online

  DEDICATION

  To Mary Lou and Vince (Grandma and Grandpa) Meriano, thank you for your wisdom, humor, and unwavering support

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: Welcome Back

  Chapter 2: Candle Magic

  Chapter 3: Caroline Crashes

  Chapter 4: Choices

  Chapter 5: Surprise

  Chapter 6: Del Otro Lado

  Chapter 7: The Heist

  Chapter 8: Detour

  Chapter 9: Questions and Answers

  Chapter 10: Caroline’s House

  Chapter 11: Stories

  Chapter 12: Cry for Help

  Chapter 13: Calling All Spirit Hunters

  Chapter 14: Ojos de Buey

  Chapter 15: On the Hunt

  Chapter 16: A Secret Promise

  Chapter 17: Spellcraft

  Chapter 18: The Gate

  Chapter 19: Goodbyes

  Chapter 20: Everywhere

  Epilogue: April Visitor

  Leoñora’s Lucky Recipe Book #2

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Books by Anna Meriano

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER 1

  WELCOME BACK

  “Leonora Elena Logroño, where did you disappear to?”

  Leo jumped at the voice, glancing over her shoulder at the swinging blue doors that separated the kitchen from the front of the bakery, where she was, and her family’s prying eyes from Leo’s experiment.

  Mamá was back!

  “’Jita? We have luggage to unload, and I want a welcome-home hug!”

  “She’s out here, Mamá.” Leo’s sixteen-year-old sister, Marisol, peeked her head over the doors and smiled treacherously as she added, “Avoiding work.”

  “I am not,” Leo yelped, hopping off the bakery counter she wasn’t supposed to sit on. “I was running the register like the schedule says.” Leo grimaced. The bakery wouldn’t open for another twenty minutes, but she wasn’t quite as quick as her friend Caroline when it came to inventing excuses. Luckily, no one seemed to be listening.

  Mamá’s head joined Marisol’s to peer into the front of the bakery. The large purple duffel bag over one shoulder and the smaller backpack on the other smacked the doors and sent them swinging open and shut. “Well?” she asked. “What about that hug?”

  Leo smiled and rushed into the kitchen. “Welcome home,” she said into her mother’s shirt. “How was the convention?”

  Mamá dumped her bags next to the long wooden table in the center of the kitchen, pushed strands of dark hair out of her face, and smiled. She had dressed for the early-morning road trip in jean shorts and a black T-shirt. “It was nice, ’jita.”

  Mamá and Isabel had spent the weekend at the Southwest Regional Brujería and Spellcraft Convention, the one time a year that brujos and brujas, witches and sorcerers from around Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana met up to swap stories and stock up on crow feathers and spider eggs and other components for spells. The SRBSC had a monthly newsletter too, but it almost always ended up unread in a pile on the Logroño kitchen table.

  “Everything went perfectly while you were away,” Leo said, puffing her chest out a little. Since school was still out for the rest of the week, she had been allowed to help at the bakery almost full-time. “We didn’t even need you or Isabel to get ready for Día de los Reyes.”

  Amor y Azúcar Panadería smelled sweet and yeasty, two counters lined with trays of thick dough rings and the long wooden table scattered with dried fruit and bowls of sugar icing. Today was January 3, and that meant the next three days would be all about baking and selling rosca de reyes—kings’ cake—to help the town of Rose Hill, Texas, celebrate Día de los Reyes.

  “It does look good around here,” Mamá said, nodding. “And it smells good!”

  “Like Leo said.” Marisol smirked. “We did just fine on our own.”

  “Well.” Mamá stepped back and pretended to cover her injured heart. “Don’t let me interfere with your preparations.”

  “We didn’t mean it like that,” Leo protested, hugging Mamá a second time in apology. “I’m glad you’re back.”

  Mamá laughed. “Me too, ’jita. The holiday wouldn’t be the same away from my family.”

  Three Kings’ Day happened twelve days after Christmas, the day the wise men brought gifts to baby Jesus. There weren’t as many movies about January 6 as there were about December 25, but Día de los Reyes always meant candy and cake and gifts left in kids’ shoes overnight, and most important, parties with the people you loved.

  “Did you see the new window display?” Leo asked her mother. “I did most of it. Well, and Marisol helped a little with the arranging.”

  Besides adding golden crowns and rosca de reyes into the bakery’s front window, Leo’s favorite part of the holiday was adding statues of the three kings—Balthazar with his dark skin, Gaspar with flat black painted hair, and Melchior, who looked like Dumbledore—to the nativity scene. About a week after Christmas, the family would set the statues in one corner of the window, and every day they would move them closer and closer to the manger.

  “You would have been so proud of Leo,” Tía Paloma said, bursting in through the back door of the bakery carrying two more of her sister’s bags. “All the girls were a big help, which of course I expected, but Leo was especially focused this weekend. This whole break, really. We’re all very proud of her progress.”

  Leo’s smile bloomed and then wilted. Just this weekend? Wasn’t she always focused? She studied her herb packets almost every day, so much that even her best friend, Caroline, could recite the uses of most of the basic bruja herbs.

  “Except today, when she was supposed to be helping with the babies,” Marisol muttered, leaning against the wall picking at her dark purple nail polish.

  “I did help with them!” Leo made a face at Marisol. “I finished all the trays that were on the counter.” All morning she had hidden tiny plastic babies in the dough of the cakes Tía Paloma lined up for baking. Rosca de reyes was special not just because of the cake’s delicious sweet-bread taste or its colorful decoration, but also because of the baby figurine hidden inside. Whoever ate the slice of cake with the baby—which represented baby Jesus, born twelve days earlier—was in charge of making the tamales for the Día de la Candelaria party a few weeks later. Leo didn’t know any other cakes that planned their own parties.

  Before Marisol could say anything else snooty, Isabel walked in from the parking lot, her arms empty and her button-down shirt wrinkled from hours in the car. Leo ran to hug her oldest sister, who smoothed the top of Leo’s hair and laughed.

  “Hi, Little Leo. I was only gone for two days, you know.”

  “It felt longer,” Leo protested.

  “Only because you had to cover my shifts here,” Isabel teased. Marisol snorted and muttered something rude, but Isabel ignored her. “It felt too short to me. There was so much to learn! Mamá barely let me talk to anyone, she was so busy using me as a pack mule for all the ingredients she bought.”

  This had been Isabel’s first year to join Mamá at the convention. Going the whole weekend without her made Leo worry about next year, when Isabel would start college and move away, maybe even as far as San Antonio or Houston. Who would stand up to Marisol then? Still, it was exciting to think that someday she too could accompany Mamá and represent the bakery at the convention.

  Isabel gestured at the bags, which Mamá and Tía Paloma had started opening to reveal jars of liquids and powders, bundles of herbs tied with string, and Ziploc bags full of everything from wooden beads to crystals to sand. Leo’
s fingers itched to touch everything, to sniff the packets for the telltale cinnamony smell of magic and ask what each ingredient was used for. She wanted to learn everything all at once, but Tía Paloma and Mamá wanted her to master the basics—which meant learning magic as slowly as bread dough rising. Leo had spent the last three months studying page after page of herb properties and running the cash register at the bakery, when what she really wanted to do was bake her own bona fide spells.

  If Leo was honest, though, she did understand why Mamá and Tía Paloma wanted to take things slow. Three months ago, when Leo had first discovered her family’s magic, she had tried to learn spells herself in secret, only to have her recipes make a mess so big, it took inventing a whole new spell just to clean it up. And if she was completely honest, she would admit that the rising time was an important part of the bread-making process. But none of that changed the impatient voice in her brain, whispering that she would never learn anything about magic if she didn’t starting doing it.

  Which was why she sometimes secretly entertained herself with . . . experiments. Nothing like her bungled love potions from last year. Just small magic charms. Like the one she’d been working on at the front counter that morning.

  Isabel took charge of loading the ovens, while Mamá and Tía Paloma sorted the new magic ingredients into the tall cupboards along the far wall. Daddy poked his head out of the bakery office to welcome everyone home, but he quickly returned to his paperwork after Mamá shooed him away from sniffing a jar of dark powder. Leo had just started to shuffle toward the front of the bakery to continue her spell experiment when the bakery phone rang and two matching heads popped out from the office.

  “Leo—” Alma said.

  “—phone for you,” Belén finished. The twins had celebrated their fifteenth birthday last month by dyeing the fading pink and blue stripes in their hair green and purple. You could tell the twins apart if you looked carefully, but most people didn’t and just mixed up the two girls.

  “Tell Caroline that we need that phone line for orders.” Mamá sighed, guessing who was on the phone. “I’ve told you this before.”

  “Sorry,” Leo said. Another day she might grumble at Mamá, or even argue that this was why she needed a cell phone of her own. But today she was happy to have her family all together, and she didn’t want to argue.

  Leo glanced at the blue swinging doors, anxious about leaving her experiment out in the open, but nobody seemed to be in any rush to open the bakery. She walked back to the office, where Alma and Belén crowded Daddy out of most of his desk space with yellowed index cards spread everywhere. Belén held a stack of them, which she was sorting into different piles. She kept looking to the empty corner of the office, nodding and whispering questions as she went along.

  If Leo hadn’t known that there was an invisible person in the room holding the other side of the conversation, her sister would have looked pretty strange. But the twins, sharing the third-born spot in the family, had the special ability of seeing and talking to ghosts. Their winter-break project was consulting with Abuela, Bisabuela, and other ancestors from their mother’s side of the family to decide which of their old family recipes were worth typing up to save in the bakery’s computer system, and which could be retired and replaced.

  Leo didn’t have her special ability yet, or any special projects.

  “Hello?” Leo took the phone from Daddy, who tapped her head with his pen and went back to his inventory lists.

  “Hi, Leo!” Caroline Campbell, Leo’s best friend and sometimes coconspirator, chirped excitedly. “I’m back!” She had been gone for two whole weeks, visiting her grandmother and aunts in Costa Rica for Christmas and New Year’s.

  Leo laughed. “Join the club. My mom and Isabel just got back from their convention.”

  “You want to come over?” Caroline asked. “Later maybe? After you’re done working? I have souvenirs.”

  Leo hesitated. Mamá probably had a family dinner planned to celebrate being back home from the convention. Leo really wanted to see Caroline, but she didn’t want to miss any stories about other Texas brujas or different types of magic.

  “Maybe . . . ,” she started to say.

  “What is this?” Marisol’s voice rang out from the front of the bakery.

  Leo closed her eyes. “Oh no . . .”

  “Mamá!” Marisol yelled. “Leo’s doing spells again!”

  Alma and Belén looked up from their jumbled stacks of notecards, eyebrows lifted. Leo cringed. Of all the people she didn’t want finding her experiment, Marisol was number one.

  “Caroline, do me a favor? Wait five minutes and then call back?” With any luck Leo could use the phone call as an excuse to end the lecture she was about to get. She hung up the phone and scampered through the kitchen and into the front of the bakery.

  Marisol, Mamá, Isabel, and Tía Paloma all stood around the counter, where a jar of honey and a tray of sticky plastic babies sat, the pieces of Leo’s experiment.

  “Leo, what’s this?” Mamá asked.

  “It looks like a mess,” Marisol said, tilting the tray and watching the babies slide down the slant in slow motion, leaving sluglike honey trails. Isabel clicked her tongue at Marisol’s rude comment, but she looked equally confused.

  Leo’s face felt like she was standing in front of an open oven door. “I wasn’t going to do anything sneaky with it,” she promised. “I would have shown you as soon as I finished.” She stuck her tongue out at Marisol.

  “Good,” Mamá said. “Why don’t you go ahead and show me now?”

  Leo squinted at her mother. Was she hiding her anger behind curiosity? Or did she really want to know? All she could see in Mamá’s face were tired lines from a long weekend.

  “You’re initiated,” Mamá reminded her. “You’re not going to get in trouble for some little spell. However, we don’t want any more unsupervised fiascos. Just be honest, ’jita.”

  Isabel leaned over the tray for a closer look. “I can feel some magic in them,” she said. “What were you trying, Little Leo?”

  Leo tried not to roll her eyes at the babyish nickname. She tried to remember that she had been officially initiated into the family magic even after Mamá caught her messing with magic last November, before she was allowed to. That she was a bruja, just like her older sisters.

  “It was going to be a prosperity charm,” she explained, lifting the honey jar and shaking it to show them the clinking quarters at the bottom. “I thought whoever got the baby could use a little help paying for a whole party’s worth of tamales.”

  Mamá reached for the sticky jar and sniffed it. “Not a bad idea,” she said slowly, “but a little messy. It might make the babies sink in the dough, too. Why not put the spell on the dolls without the honey?”

  “They’re made of plastic.” Tía Paloma spoke up, her head cocked to one side. “Not a good conductor, even in human shape, which of course will strengthen it, but . . . right.” She nodded, either forgetting to speak her thoughts aloud or listening to a ghost—it was hard to tell with Tía Paloma, who tended to live in her own world, just like the twins. “I think getting some sugar in there is smart for a beginner.”

  Leo nodded. The magic of her mother’s family was the magic they had named their bakery after: Amor y Azúcar. Love and Sugar. Anything sweet and delicious held their magic easily, which was why the magical recipes they saved in the family spell book all included ingredients like sugar or flour (which broke down to make sugar). Leo studied the magical properties of herbs and plants with her Tía Paloma most afternoons, but she had never tried to work a spell that didn’t involve sugar.

  Tía Paloma and Mamá stared at the honey, both of their mouths twisted in thought. The heat in Leo’s face crept into her ears, but now it was warm pride that her silly experiment was being considered like a real spell. Maybe this would be her first entry into the spell book. Maybe she was a magical prodigy. Maybe . . .

  “Leo!” Belén poked her h
ead through the swinging doors. And held out the bakery phone. “Your friend is on the phone again.”

  Had it been five minutes already? Leo took the phone from her sister. “Hi, Caroline . . . sorry, I’m actually sort of—”

  “It’s fine,” Caroline said. “I just really wanted to tell you about my trip.”

  “If the dolls were made of wax,” Isabel was saying, “they’d hold the spell pretty well, I bet.”

  “Yeah, but they’d also melt as soon as they went in the oven,” Marisol said, rolling her eyes.

  Caroline was still talking, but Leo leaned toward her family. She didn’t know wax held magic better than plastic. She wanted to hear about Caroline’s trip, but she didn’t want to miss learning anything about magic—especially when it was about a spell she had created!

  “Oh, Paloma! You should start the little girls on candle work,” Mamá said. “Alma and Belén will need to know more about using candles for summoning, and Leo’s curiosity is a lot less messy when it’s satisfied.” She winked at Leo, who smiled back and let the phone drop from her ear.

  “After Dia de los Reyes?” Tía Paloma asked.

  “Why wait?” Mamá asked. “I’ve missed my kitchen, and with the rosca de reyes lined up, we’ll be fine here until noon at least. Take them to your house and get them out of my hair for a little bit.”

  “Hello? Can you hear me?” Caroline said.

  Leo put the phone back up to her ear, feeling guilty. “Yes, I’m here,” she said.

  “Stupid reception.” Caroline sighed. “So do you think you can come over? I have so much to tell you. I missed you!”

  “I . . .”

  Tía Paloma clapped her hands and called for Alma to leave the office. “Come on, Leo! Magic lesson at my house. Tell Caroline you’ll talk to her later.”

  “That’s why she’s been focused lately,” Marisol said. “Caroline has been out of town.”

  “That’s right.” Isabel nodded. “I noticed she wasn’t as distracted, but I thought it was just because we didn’t have school.”

  If Leo’s brain weren’t being stretched in ten different directions, she could have told Marisol and Isabel that Caroline wasn’t a distraction, thank you very much. Caroline did stop by the bakery after school almost every day, but most of the time she was helping Leo study the new herbs on her list or helping her brainstorm cool ideas for spells. But Belén tugged on Leo’s sleeve, and Tía Paloma’s smile held the promise of new magic, and Leo didn’t want to be distracted or left behind.