Chapter 12 Ignacio
Ignacio
A rumbling purr emanated from underneath Ignacio’s ear, luring him awake. But awake was not what he wanted to be. He was so cozy. So relaxed. He shifted his body, nuzzling deeper into his unbelievably soft mattress. With a sigh, he drifted back to sleep.
Until something hot and rough, like wet sandpaper, slid over his cheek.
He frowned but wouldn’t let whatever it was interrupt his rest. When the strange sensation happened again and again and again, Ignacio had no choice but to pry his booze-heavy eyelids apart.
The world spun. He thought he might vomit. This had been exactly how he felt after he and the Blackbirds in training attacked that village. Like the edges of his vision were squeezing in. Like he would be sick all over himself.
With a shaky breath, he forced his eyes to focus on the pink dot directly above him until the dizziness waned. But the pink dot wasn’t a dot at all. It was a moist triangular nose with long whiskers sprouting out on either side.
He didn’t understand what he was seeing.
Never in all his days had he witnessed such a large cat.
The massive feline bent down, and its wide tongue lapped over his forehead.
Unnerved, Ignacio went still. His eyes traveled left, then right.
Sleeping soundly around him lay three pearl-white tiger cubs.
Ignacio’s gaze flicked to the beast hovering above him.
“Holy shit,” he mouthed, his pulse thundering.
He’d somehow locked himself in a cage with a tigress and her offspring.
The only comfort was the fact that he wasn’t already dead. But how did this happen? When did this happen? Last thing he remembered was entering that impossibly large speakeasy somehow stuffed into the caboose. And then being handed a drink. Well, several.
Ignacio shifted ever so slightly but accidentally pinched one of the cubs’ tails. It whimpered. The tigress’s ears flicked back.
“Easy girl,” he said in a singsong way.
The tigress hissed. That horrifying sound was all Ignacio’s body needed to set itself into motion. He shoved himself over the cubs and lunged for the cage bars. His fingers wrapped around the metal. He shook with all his might.
This wasn’t the same sort of rusted cage like the jailor’s cart.
There was no getting out of this. It would only be a matter of seconds before the beast sank her claws into his back.
He could picture it now. Steel-sharp daggers digging into his flesh, tearing him into shreds.
And before he had a chance to take down his father, before he had a chance to right his failures from battle, before he got to see Esmeralda again.
He shook the bars harder. “Help!”
Howls of laughter echoed from the shadows beyond. Young people with rolled-up sleeves, aprons, and dirt on their faces clapped each other’s backs and pointed at Ignacio as if him being eaten by a ferocious animal were hilarious.
“Let me out!” he roared.
A boy who appeared to be a year or two younger than Ignacio jogged forward. He sported a fedora that was tilted low over one eye. “Look behind you, cabrón!” he hollered.
Ignacio forced himself to peer over his shoulder. The mother tiger had one leg up in the air as she primped herself.
This brought out wails of laughter from the people outside the cage.
“Here,” the boy in the cap said, lifting a latch.
The cage door swung open with a squeak. Some of the onlookers grumbled and called the young man a wet blanket for ending their fun.
As the rest of the pranksters dispersed, Ignacio scrambled out.
He recognized the boy. He’d been the one to offer Ignacio a drink when he first entered the caboose. Several drinks.
The boy—Gabriel, he had introduced himself as—checked the timepiece hanging from his pocket and started to walk away.
“Aren’t you going to lock up the cage?” Ignacio called after him.
“Nah. The animals are free to do whatever they like within the menagerie confines.” He gestured around them.
Ignacio hadn’t even realized they were inside a colossal tent.
Animals he’d only seen in the storybooks his mother read to him when he was little milled about, munching on bones or grain while being groomed by their human keepers.
Long oval mirrors hung on either side of the entrance.
They reflected the sunlight from outside, making the tent appear as bright as a spring day.
Gabriel motioned toward the tigress. “Isadora here prefers to sleep in the cage with her cubs so they stay out of trouble. She’s a sweetheart, though. She’s only bitten off a man’s leg once that I know of.”
“What?”
“Might have been an arm.” Gabriel shrugged. “We usually throw the newbies in with the ostrich, but the manager of the menagerie put him in his enclosure and brought it outside because he causes a ruckus whenever the menagerie mirrors first go up. He goes nuts for anything that sparkles.”
“You’re telling me you and your cohorts put me in a cage with a beast that has dismembered someone? I could have been next. Or killed. Do you find murder amusing?”
“Only sometimes.” Gabriel chuckled. “I’m just kidding. The prized animals at Carnival Fantástico are treated so well and fed so often, they hardly ever attack. And if they do, the ringmaster says they must have had good reason.”
Ignacio couldn’t tell if Gabriel was joking again or not.
A bell clanged from somewhere outside the menagerie.
“Come on,” Gabriel said. “I’ll show you where to get some grub.”
He took off at a surprising pace for someone who’d also drank far too much the night before. Ignacio lengthened his stride to catch up. It wasn’t hard. He towered over Gabriel and his legs easily matched his speed.
“Who’s in charge of the menagerie?” he asked.
“That would be Jade.” Gabriel jerked his chin toward a young woman who was busy scrubbing down the back of a tutu-clad alligator. “Are you looking for a gig?”
Ignacio shook his head. He couldn’t help but notice that every worker and performer he had seen within the carnival seemed conspicuously young. The ringmaster and supposed owner of the carnival himself couldn’t have been older than twenty-five.
“How long has ángel Veracruz been the ringmaster?” he asked.
“Couldn’t say. I’ve been here less than a year, and no one except the main act stays on beyond their twelve months. But I think he got the position from his father years back.” He elbowed Ignacio. “Nepotism, am I right?”
Ignacio huffed a weak laugh. If nepotism had its way, he would be next in line for his father’s title too.
If his father had his way, Ignacio would be leading a battalion deeper into Dos Palos to murder more innocent people.
But for what exactly? He still didn’t know what General Keara had been stuffing into those satchels.
He’d tried to track her comings and goings across the northern border of Costa Mayor for the last month in hopes she might lead him to wherever she brought those bags, but she was a slippery eel.
He’d lost the general in a major city and only spotted her again through the window of a train heading west. That was when he decided he had to go to his father’s home and see if he might have better luck gathering information there.
They neared the exit. The mirrors hanging on either side had the same inky coloring as the one he’d looked into before entering the caboose.
“They’re enchanted,” Gabriel said. “They keep the animals in.”
A strange feeling of wrongness spread through Ignacio’s core as he passed between the mirrors.
As if his body was trying to tell him something.
What that something was, he had no clue.
He stopped. After the cowardice he’d shown in Dos Palos, he had promised himself he’d never turn his back when he sensed trouble.
He’d failed those people, and it haunted his every waking moment.
“What are the mirrors made of?” he asked.
“For as dark as the surface is, my best guess is that it’s some sort of obsidian, but what do I know, I’m no glazier.
Never mind that,” Gabriel said. “The parade is going to start in half an hour, and we haven’t had lunch.
I’ve been hungry enough times in my life to know never to take meals for granted. ” He shoved Ignacio on.
Commotion washed over him the second he stepped out of the menagerie.
Brilliant sunlight beamed in his eyes. He squinted and blocked the strongest rays with his arm.
To his surprise, an entire tent city bustled before him.
Almost every game and ride was up and in place.
People shouted orders at one another as they decorated their booths.
Others sweated and sang a merry tune as they built up the sideshow stage.
“How long have we been stopped?” he asked, impressed.
Finding Esmeralda amongst this chaos would not be as easy as he thought. In the daylight, he could see that the carnival grounds stretched on for acres.
“We pulled up to Aldama in the morning. It’s lunchtime now. So…a few hours, give or take.”
Ignacio had boarded the train at roughly eight o’clock in the morning yesterday, which meant he’d been out cold for nearly twenty-four hours.
That wasn’t true. The memories were less fuzzy now.
He spent quite a bit of time inside the caboose, raising his cup and shouting, “Death to love!” a few too many times.
Still, building an immense carnival with so many intricate parts in a few hours was no small feat.
“I can’t believe all of this was constructed in that time.”
“Carnival Fantástico is a magical place,” Gabriel said.
They passed by a cart that popped outrageously large kernels of corn. The scent of salt and butter permeated the air.
“Where does the magic come from?” Ignacio asked.
Gabriel eyed him with suspicion. “Why the inquisition? First the mirrors, now this. Are you a Blackbird or something?”
Ignacio huffed. “Far from it.”
A pair of young ladies who might have been twins passed by. Ignacio locked eyes with the taller of the two. She gasped then shielded her mouth, whispering into the other girl’s ear. The girl inhaled sharply.
“Gabriel!” the taller one shouted. “Who is that?” She pointed at Ignacio as if he were a rotten egg.
Ignacio’s fingers wrapped around the ring on his pinky. He twisted it in circles whenever his stomach made that weird sort of nervous lurch.
Gabriel jerked his thumb toward him. “This is…erm…actually…I don’t think I caught your name. We were just calling you cabrón all night.”
The girl’s gaze flicked to Ignacio’s hand. Her focus zeroed in on the ring. A startled laugh escaped her. She whispered into her companion’s ear again before grabbing her by the arm and jerking her away.
Gabriel rubbed the back of his neck in confusion. “Do you know the Sánchez sisters?”
“I doubt it very much.”
The girls were both beautiful and had faces one wouldn’t easily forget, but Ignacio had never had eyes for anyone but Esmeralda.
Even after she turned her back on him. Perhaps that was his problem.
Perhaps he should have tried harder to move on.
But Esmeralda wasn’t the kind of person one simply got over.
Her smile was engrained into his heart. Her laughter fused into his marrow.
He wished it weren’t so, but she was as much a part of him as his own soul.
The smell of fried eggs and perfectly burnt chorizo wafted into Ignacio’s nostrils. His stomach growled viciously.
Gabriel chuckled. “Cook’s food does that to me too.”
He led Ignacio into an open-sided tent littered with picnic tables that were filled with carnival performers and staff. People laughed and gossiped while sipping their café or scraping their utensils over empty plates. Ignacio’s heart thumped a bit harder as his eyes scoured the bustling throng.
Was she here?
He grinned as he imagined what her pretty face would look like when she saw him. Her nose would scrunch up like it always did when she was mad. Her upper lip would quirk to one side.
“Here,” Gabriel said, offering Ignacio a tray. “Best hurry and eat before the fire breathers get in line. Those guys must consume three times as much as us on account of all the smoke in their guts.”
Ignacio hardly heard a word Gabriel was saying because the world around him had frozen in place.
There she was.
The girl with wild curls and a mouth that could kiss you into oblivion or curse you into the dirt.
She was sitting alone at the opposite end of the tent. She tapped her empty fork against her chin. Her eyes looked glossy with worry, and she was mumbling to herself like she so often did.
Her talking to herself was how Ignacio knew they could communicate through the vents connecting their rooms when they were children. At first, he thought he was being haunted. But it was only Esmeralda arguing with her own conscience.
The Sánchez sisters ran to Esmeralda’s side. Their arms flailed about as if telling her a horrifying tale.
Ignacio’s muscles tensed.
The fork in Esmeralda’s grasp clattered onto her plate. She gaped. Even from across the busy tent he could see her lips form the question “Where is he?”
She jumped to her feet. Her furious eyes scanned the open space.
Ignacio’s fingers tightened around his tray. His heart hammered in his chest.
He knew then and there—he was a dead man.