Chapter 10
Jasper's elbow was in my kidney, and I woke up with a cot spring trying to redesign my spine, which was fine because every second of last night was worth the structural damage.
He had me pinned, face buried in my neck, the whole length of him curved against me like he'd been doing it for years instead of one night on the world's worst cot.
I gave myself thirty seconds. His chest rose and fell, deep and even, while I pretended the rest of the day wasn't waiting.
In an hour I'd climb a mountain and bleed in front of everyone I'd ever known. Thirty seconds was a fair trade.
He tightened his grip when I tried to shift, still asleep but holding on anyway, and mierda I wanted to stay.
But Danior was probably already awake doing pushups or meditating or whatever the hell Danior did to prepare for ritual combat.
Staying in this cot wasn't an option, no matter how much my body disagreed with that assessment.
I lifted Jasper's arm off my chest and slid out. The cot springs protested. I wasn't careful. He turned into the pillow without waking, pulled the blanket into the warm spot where I'd been, and I stood there for five seconds I definitely didn't have, staring at him like an idiot.
Then I grabbed my jeans off the floor and made myself walk down the hall to the bathroom.
I turned the tap on and stepped under it.
The cold slammed into my shoulders, and I worked my grandmother's rough yellow soap over my chest until the lemon smell cut through everything else.
You went up the mountain clean; that was the rule.
You started with your body washed and your face shaved and nothing on you that didn't belong there.
The fight was supposed to be about who you were, not what you carried.
I scrubbed until my skin hurt and the water finally started running clear.
I stepped out and grabbed the razor from the sink.
My mother gave me these steady hands, along with the grudges and the inability to quit anything, even when quitting was the smart move.
The blade scraped over my jaw, and I rinsed it between passes, kept going until my face was smooth, and I looked at myself in the mirror without thinking about how Jasper's stubble had scraped against my neck.
My boots were by the door where I'd left them. I sat on the edge of the tub and laced them up, pulled each knot tight, tested the tension. The mountain wasn't going to care about my comfort, and neither was Danior, so the boots needed to understand what we were doing today and commit to it.
Then I went to find Jasper.
He was exactly where I knew he'd be, sitting on the front steps with a cigarette and his elbows on his knees, watching the valley wake up.
He'd been awake for a while. The cigarette butts next to his boot told me that.
He'd left the room when I did and hadn't said anything.
That's what Jasper did. He gave you space and then he waited at the edge of it until you came back.
He moved over when the door opened, and I sat down next to him.
He held out the cigarette without looking at me.
I took it and drew deep, letting the smoke sit in my chest for a second before I handed it back.
We didn't talk. The valley spread out below us in the early light, all red dirt and scrub and the thin line of the road cutting through it, and somewhere down there the Pantheon was still parked and waiting, but up here it was just us and the mountain and the quiet.
Jasper put the cigarette out under his boot and turned his head to look at me.
He didn't say anything, didn't need to. Two months in that farmhouse kitchen had taught me how to read every one of his silences, and this one said I know what you're walking into, and I can't go with you, and I'm going to be right here when you come back.
"Don't bite anyone while I'm gone," I said.
His mouth twitched at one corner. "No promises."
I stood up, and he caught my wrist for half a second. Then he let go, and I walked away before I could do something stupid like stay.
The cauldron was waiting behind the house, where it always was.
It was black iron on three legs over a low fire, old enough that nobody in the family could agree on where it had come from or when.
My grandmother said one thing. Emilio had said something else entirely.
I'd believed Emilio when he told me the cauldron had just always existed, the same way the mountain existed, and somewhere along the line the family had found it and decided it belonged to us.
Danior was already there. He was clean-shaved, shirt buttoned, jaw still carrying yesterday's conversation on the left side where I'd caught him. He looked at me across the fire, and we said nothing. Everything that needed saying had already been said with fists.
My grandmother stood beside the cauldron with a ladle and the expression she saved for men about to do something stupid.
She filled two clay cups, and the steam came off them looking innocent, which was a lie because nothing that came out of that cauldron had ever been innocent in its entire existence.
Danior picked up his cup first. I picked up mine.
"Don't think about it," my grandmother said. "That's always been your problem, Diego. You think too much."
Danior drank. He locked his jaw and his eyes went wet before he could stop them, and he set the cup down without making a sound, which told me everything I needed to know about how bad this was going to be.
I brought the cup to my mouth and drank it in one go.
The drink hit my throat like liquid fire and kept going south, burning a path straight through my stomach.
I squeezed my eyes shut. The heat locked my whole chest tight.
It tasted like scorched earth and grudges, like my grandmother had put forty years of unsolicited opinions in a pot and boiled them down to their meanest concentrate.
And somewhere underneath all of that was something almost sweet, which was worse, because my body tried to want more of it.
I handed the cup back and kept my face together. My grandmother took it without looking at me, which meant I'd passed, and honestly, that was the best I was going to get from Amparo Lucenio, so I'd take it.
We stripped down to the bare minimum and, Jesús, the morning air bit into every inch of skin. Danior kicked his boots off faster than me, and I let him have it because pequenas victorias, small victories. The boots were all he was getting today.
The path went straight up.
This wasn't just about the family name. Whoever came down off this mountain controlled the Kalderash network across southern Europe: the border crossings, the safe houses, the smuggling corridors that ran from Andalusia to the Aegean.
Every intelligence channel Emilio had spent forty years building went to whoever bled for it today.
Danior was three paces ahead of me, shoulders working, already settling into his rhythm. I tracked how he moved. He favored his left side on the uphill, shifting his weight before he committed. He was faster than me, always had been. Speed wasn't going to save him.
Tío Beno waited at the first marker, sitting on the flat boulder with a paint pot between his knees and a brush in his hand.
He had the look of a man who'd gotten up before dawn and wanted credit.
He was seventy-nine years old, had buried two wives and one of his sons, and still showed up for this at ass-crack of dawn.
It was devotion or stubbornness or both, wearing the same face.
He painted Danior first, one stroke across the collarbone in blue-white. Danior worked his jaw but stayed silent, stayed still, which I had to respect even if I was planning to kick his ass in about an hour.
Then Tío Beno came to me and did the same blue-white, shoulder to shoulder. The brush was freezing. The paint smelled like wet clay and something sharp I couldn't place, and it hit my chest like a brand.
Tío Beno stepped back, capped the pot, and sat down on his boulder like we'd already left, which was extremely on brand for Tío Beno.
We kept climbing.
The rock face came next, and Jesus Christ, I'd forgotten how much I hated this thing.
The slope stretched up with basically no handholds, just rough stone and prayer.
I let Danior pull ahead on the steep parts and paced myself, letting him burn himself out while I saved my energy for the part where I was going to put his face in the dirt.
I found holds and pulled up. The stone bit into my palms, and I kept going, one reach at a time, and somewhere in the back of my head Emilio was laughing about the time he'd done this climb hungover on a dare.
Father Gomes waited on a boulder at the top with his bandaged foot propped up. He looked at me and pressed his thumb above each of my eyes, and I stood still and let him paint my face.
Then came the river.
The river was snowmelt straight off the mountain.
I went in first, and the cold hit my chest like a fist and kept squeezing.
I couldn't breathe for the first three steps, legs going numb, everything in me reorganizing around one task: get across before my body quit.
The current pulled at my knees, and the stones under my feet were slick, and every step was a negotiation between my legs and the river, and the river was winning.
Danior came in behind me and made a sound I was going to remember on my deathbed, which almost made the whole thing worth it.
I hauled myself out on a root, chest heaving. An older cousin grabbed my jaw before I'd finished standing, tilted my head back, and dragged a freezing brush under my throat in one stroke. He did the same to Danior, and we stood there shivering, painted, bleeding from cuts we'd picked up on the way.