Now she climbed out of the truck, a shotgun hooked over her elbow. She was no less bitter than she had been the night that Pete and Beatriz had burst onto her ranch. Darkness had only continued to layer on top of her existing grief until now she could barely move for it. All she did was sleep, and look for General MacArthur.
“I’m here about a rooster,” she snarled. She swept her free hand over herself, attempting to clear the chaos of owls away from her. Some of the smaller birds had settled around her feet, flapping and trilling. They barely moved when she nudged the toe of her boot at them.
“Lady,” Eduardo said, “you look like you need a miracle.”
Darlene snapped, “Yeah, have you got any of those lying around?”
The Sorias faced her.
“Yes,” Daniel said. “We do.”
There are quite a few crooked saints I’d like to thank for the making of this book. The team at Scholastic has been a ceaseless champion for years and continues to be, but for this novel, I must particularly point fingers at my editor, David Levithan. He could tell what I wanted this book to be long before it had become the book I wanted it to be, and worked joyfully to close the difference.
Thanks to José de Jesús Salazar Bello, for advice before I began; to Francisco X. Stork, for advice while I was writing; and also to my two sensitivity readers, for their advice after I had finished. They were all incredibly generous with their language and stories; all inconsistences and errors are entirely mine.
A tip of my hat, as ever, to Brenna Yovanoff, Sarah Batista-Pereira, and Court Stevens for hours of wordplay.
Thanks to Ed for holding my hands in the darkness.
And thanks to my old Camaro, which hurtled and lurched its failing way into a small Colorado town years ago. I was looking for a miracle, but I got a story instead, and sometimes those are the same thing.