The next morning, I started looking for my quarry. I needed answers, even if they weren’t answers that I necessarily wanted to hear.

As the former Zaniyah queen, Grandmama still had enough power that she sensed my intention to seek her out, and so she made herself scarce. I could have tapped my power and found her easily, but I didn’t want to make her feel lesser than me in any way. I was queen of our Zaniyah nest now, but I existed purely because she’d taken care of me and had managed to keep us all alive until I grew strong enough to help.

Any time she thought of those early years, her eyes took on a haunted look, as if dark memories tumbled through her mind. Which told me that my mysterious friend was probably right. Grandmama had to suspect who my father was and had kept it secret all this time.

She wouldn’t give up that information without a damned good reason.

When even my twin brothers had no idea where Grandmama was, I knew to look for her out back in what I fondly called her witch hut. Her last alpha, Hernando, had built a shed behind the kitchens for her many years ago. She called it her gardening shed, but my skin tingled and my scalp itched as I neared it. She was working her magic.

Grandmama had always told me that she wasn’t like other queens, which was one reason she liked our seclusion and general anonymity among the Aima courts. She didn’t like formality or politics, but preferred the simple, quiet country life. More, she liked to dabble in potions and spells that went beyond blood magic. I had no idea if the kind of magic she worked was typical of other queens or not.

Her potions worked extremely well, though the ones she’d given me for fertility over the years had done nothing to bring about my menses.

I tapped on the door and waited several moments before she finally said, “Come in, child.”

I slipped inside and shut the door behind me. She liked her privacy, and though no one in the nest would ever dare step foot inside this hut without her permission, she’d hopefully talk more freely if we were alone and hidden from prying eyes.

It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust. The hut had no windows, and the only light in the room was an old-fashioned lantern. A high table stood in the center of the room, and the walls were lined with shelves filled with jars and boxes, all carefully labeled. Dried roots, feathers, and special animal bones hung from the rafters, low enough for her to reach them as she needed. I was several inches taller than her, so I paid careful attention to the hanging bundles to avoid hitting my head.

She had an assortment of jars open in front of her. A small pot bubbled away on a portable propane burner. I didn’t need to look at the ingredients to know that she was working on a healing potion. I could feel it in the way my magic responded to hers.

Like her, I didn’t have to bleed to work my healing or earth magic. We saved our blood magic for the truly desperate and powerful spells. When there was no other way to save a life or protect our nest, we bled, gladly. The Zaniyah queens were tightly bound to the land and plants. Our crops were always abundant and large. The rains came when they were needed. Our people stayed healthy.

Because we bled to make it so.

Well, I did, now. Grandmama only offered her blood once a year to make sure our blood circle remained solid, especially with Keisha Skye’s geas laid on top of our nest.

Silently, I helped her with small tasks. Stirring the pot, putting the jars back in their correct locations, retrieving a sterile jar for her concoction. I’d helped her countless times over the years, so we worked well together without instruction.

She turned the flame off to allow the potion to begin cooling and let out a sigh. “I don’t know who your father is. Not for sure.”

“But you suspect.”

She gave me a single nod, though she avoided my gaze. “I’m sorry, child, but silence was the only way to protect you. If I’m right…”

Grandmama had always been a formidable woman, even with her elderly stature. Now, though, she looked fragile and small. Her shoulders were hunched against a chill I could not feel. Her face was lined from horrors I had never faced.

I went around the table and put my arms around her, both for comfort and protection. She trembled with strain against me, and worry squeezed my throat. We Aima were hardy and lived for hundreds of years without issue, but I suddenly felt every single one of her many centuries. “I’m sorry, I know this is troubling you. I’m not questioning your reasoning or blaming you for hiding anything, because I know you were protecting me. But if we want another Zaniyah heir, I need to know how Mama conceived me.”

Grandmama exhaled, and the tension shimmering in her slight body relaxed. “I always told you that Citla passed away when you were born, which is true. But she didn’t die in childbirth. I allowed you to believe that was the case, though that might have made you feel guilty as a child.”

She turned in my arms and reached up to cup my face in both her hands. Gnarled with age and hard work, her hands squeezed me firmly, her gaze locked to mine. “Hernando and I found Citla in the cenote the morning after she delivered you. She’d drowned.”

I blinked, my mind buzzing helplessly in random circles. Suicide. But why? The cenote was miles away, but she could have made it on foot in an hour or so. Why there? If she’d wanted to kill herself, she could have drowned in the grotto. Unless she’d needed the fall to make sure she was successful. The cliff walls of the cenote were at least thirty feet above the water, and no one knew how deep the water actually was.

In fact, some people believed the cenote was bottomless. They said…

My eyes flared wide and I clutched her hands to my face, searching her gaze.

“She believed that she could pass through,” Grandmama whispered, her low voice intent. “She was trying to reach her lover.”

Her lover.

My father.

Through a cenote.

My brain floundered a moment. “The stories…”

She nodded, still holding my gaze.

In the old days, humans had sometimes sacrificed things—including people—to the gods by throwing them into the cenote, because they believed the water was a portal to the otherworld. A portal directly to the gods.

It made a dreadful kind of sense why Mama might have tried to reach her unnamed lover through the cenote. But if she’d drowned, she hadn’t been successful. So how had he found her in the first place?

“About eight months before you were born, Citla disappeared for two days. It’d been a long, terrible winter, and she seemed to be withering. Pale and listless, she barely moved or ate unless I fed her every bite myself. When we finally had a beautiful sunny day that spring, Hernando helped me move her outside, and she beamed with joy at the sun. Every day that we made sure she went outside, she got better and seemed so much happier.

“One day in May, I was in the garden working, and she sat on a blanket beneath the avocado tree. I remember seeing a bird dancing around her, but I thought nothing of it. She had a special way with animals. Even as a child, she’d healed many a broken wing and rescued baby bunnies from the dogs. I carried a basket of vegetables into the kitchen, and when I came back, she was gone. I looked for her myself but couldn’t find her anywhere in the nest. I called Hernando, and he shifted to his jaguar and followed her scent, but he lost it a few paces outside the nest.”

“What kind of bird was it?” I asked hoarsely.

“A hummingbird.”

I closed my eyes. Of course. No wonder she hadn’t told me. “Hummingbird on the Left.”

Even here in the darkness of her hut, I didn’t trust saying the Aztec sun god’s true name out loud. Huitzilopochtli was the patron god of Tenochtitlan, where my family had lived before the fall of the Aztec Empire in 1521. Mainly known as the god of war, he was also associated with sunlight. Once, I’d even heard one of Grandmama’s sibs humming an ancient hymn to him. “See him glitter. See him shine.”

At the height of Tenochtitlan, it was nothing for hundreds of prisoners and captives to be sacrificed to him.

Hundreds.

The temple steps had run red with the blood of his sacrifices.

My father.

According to whispered rumors, at some point, he’d joined Ra, the Egyptian god of light, or perhaps been absorbed by him. None of us really knew for sure. But there was only one sun god now, and he was hellbent on destroying every single Aima queen. Our nests would be destroyed, our houses broken. Forever.

So why would the god of light father a child on an Aima queen?

“She couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell me where she had been,” Grandmama whispered. “But she was glowingly happy. She talked more. She went on walks, both inside and outside the nest. What could I do? She was an adult, and though she’d never been right after the nightmare at Tocatl’s nest, I was relieved that she was coming out of her shell. I’d never seen her so active and present. She told me she was in love, and that he would be coming back for her soon.

“She often sat outside in the full noonday sun and talked to him. Whether he heard her or not, I don’t know. She told him she was pregnant with his child. She told him she was ready to leave with him.”

Grandmama’s voice broke, and she wiped her eyes with her apron. “She swore he’d come for her at the summer solstice, but he didn’t. Month after month passed, and she started to wither again. The weather matched her mood, and I thought she was manipulating the weather, though she’d never had that power before. We had hurricane after hurricane the rest of the summer, followed by weeks of blistering heat and no rain. The bugs were awful. Spiders as big as dinner plates crawled out of the jungle, pushing your dear mother over the edge. She couldn’t bear the sight of spiders, not after surviving the horrors in the Great Goddess’s domain.

“I feared daily that she would lose you. I could feel your magic already. I knew you were a queen, if only she could carry you long enough to let you survive. She delivered you four weeks early, and though you were small, you were healthy and strong enough to survive.”

Tears trickled down my cheeks. My throat ached as if a giant had wrapped his fist around my neck and strangled me. “Did… she not want… me?”

“Oh, no, dearest child, she loved you. She asked me to take you outside and hold you up to the sun and declare you his. To proclaim you both his heir and ours. She swore he’d hear. You were born in the night, and by the time dawn came, she was gone. She left me a note, but all it said was ‘I’m going to find him and bring him to see his daughter.’”

Only to die in the cenote.

“When we found her, I knew I could never announce you as his heir. Not like she’d intended. I couldn’t risk you. As the years passed, I began to suspect so much. He never came to her call, and it definitely seemed like every force of nature was turned against our family that summer. Maybe those weather events weren’t a new power she’d gained, but his attempt to wipe us out. The spiders especially tormented Citla. Only someone who knew her history would know what they’d do to her mental state. To this day, I believe the sun god was trying to kill her before she could have you. Or maybe he never knew about you in particular—but wanted Citla dead, for whatever reason. Because once she was gone, the strange attacks stopped.”

My heart felt painful and swollen, as if my rib cage had tightened like a vise. I swallowed and took a deep breath. Then another. At least now I knew, though I had no idea what to do with such knowledge. What did it change?

In the end, it didn’t matter who my father was. Only what he was.

A god.

As a child, I’d built incredible fantasies about my father. He’d come riding in on a snorting black stallion to carry me away. Or fly into the nest like a massive fire-breathing dragon. I yearned to know him and my mother. At least I had Grandmama’s stories about Citla, but I’d never had a single story or clue about my father. Even a child’s wildest imagination hadn’t conjured the sun god as my true sire.

Fear curdled my stomach, my brain whirling frantically. What if I stepped outside and Huitzilopochtli struck me down? Or he sent a horde of spiders to torment me like my poor mother? I wasn’t as deathly afraid of them as she was, but the last thing I’d want to fight off was a giant spider.

But so much still didn’t make sense. I knew more now, definitely, but why would he want my mother dead? Why would he impregnate her in the first place, if he was going to try and kill her?

“What now?” I whispered.

“First, you’re going to give this potion to Felipa to fix the black rot on her roses,” Grandmama said tartly as she pushed the jar into my hand. “Then, you’re going to call more Blood.”

I took a deep breath and slowly let it out. Yes. I had the capacity to call more Blood to me. Eztli had been with me the longest, and I’d called Maxtla and Luis later as I continued to gain in power. Each of them fed me regularly and deeply, increasing my power.

The more power I had, the more Blood I could call. It was an important cycle for the ruling queen of the nest. Especially if I wanted to breed the next Zaniyah heir. “And then I need a god.”

Grandmama snorted. “Not just any god will do for you, child.”

A slow smile spread on my face, and I laughed softly. “You’re right. I need a jaguar god, don’t I? So how does one go about finding a long-dead jaguar god that no one even remembers anymore, let alone believes in?”

Grandmama patted my cheek. “You call him, of course. And then you take him.”