Chapter 18
Ygnacio
This time, when Minerva sees me, she is startled, but she doesn’t banish me. She watches me approach, wide-eyed, nostrils flaring. Her fists are balled with stress, but she does not lash out.
I prepared better than I did for our first meeting: at night, as she tossed and turned, I wove visions and slipped them into her dreams. Visions of myself, in this form, talking with her.
Visions that were colored by a sense of safety, of familiarity, so that when I appeared, she would have the unmistakable sense that this had happened before. That there was nothing to be afraid of.
“I know I shouldn’t be here,” I say. “But…I get lonely.”
She turns and sits on the bench. “I suppose you can sit,” she says archly. A cool invitation, but an invitation nonetheless.
I step forward, pretending to be shy. Sitting at her side, I can almost hear chispa crackling heartily alongside her heartbeat. It is a living, burning thing, flaring golden and bright.
I resist the urge to sit on my hands. I leave them in my lap, relaxing them as much as I can. It is a difficult thing to do, as they experience simple sensations long denied: they want to twitch with delight in rare afternoon sunlight, or curl with pleasure at the sensation of breeze on skin.
Minerva stares up at the windows of the house. Sleeplessness hollows the delicate skin beneath her eyes.
“Is something troubling you?” I ask. Of course something is.
I am.
“If it were, why would I tell you?” Her tone has neither warmth nor friendliness. I should not have expected either, but some long-dead part of me remembers what it was like to be a boy talking to a girl. It flinches, pride stung.
We used to be good at this, it scolds.
But we are long dead. Now there is only those who have chispa, and those who lack it.
I shrug. “I’ve had my fair share of bad encounters with the family of my house.”
Memories flash and die like fireflies in the night: the clash of stone on stone; the overseer’s lash of insults shattering a cold mountain morning. The short whip in his hand. The snake strike of its bite.
“How about seeing your senora murdered?” Her eyes do not leave the house when she speaks. Her voice is low, raspy, vibrating with emotion.
She cannot possibly be upset about the death of Encarnación del Valle. They are all murderers, every single member of that family. They prey on the weak and step on the necks of their servants. They use girls like Minerva as shields and cast them aside like refuse.
She’s agitated. She fidgets. I bite my tongue. The more she speaks, the better a window I have into her mind, and the better I can bend it until it cracks.
“What about one of the men of the household grabbing you?” she says, voice wavering.
Leoncio del Valle deserves to die a slow, agonizing death. I’ve seen how he treats other girls in the house. There are dozens of them for him to hurt the way he does his insects. How dare he touch my prey?
But there it is: a door, opening with a creak, revealing an idea to me. The plan shifts and rearranges itself in my mind. This girl has reason to strike. All I have to do is show her that she can.
“Fuck him,” I say softly. “They don’t see us as people.”
“I wish I were invisible,” she says. “I need to keep working, I know I do, but…if only they couldn’t see me. It would be so much easier.”
It is a stupid wish. Invisibility does not lessen the anger. Though it does allow you to strike back at them, as pettily and as frequently as you please.
“Even when you think they’re being kind, it’s all an act,” I say. “And they make it seem like we should be overjoyed that they are even acknowledging us.”
“Yes,” she says. “I’m Minerva, by the way.”
“Ygnacio,” I say.
At first, the name tastes stale. It has been so many years since I have spoken it aloud.
But the aftertaste is rich.
Ygnacio. That is my name. Let her know it. Let her learn to fear it.
The cords of her wrists flex next to delicate blood vessels, green beneath paper-thin skin, as she curls her hands into fists. The thread bracelets on her wrists shift as she stands.
“I’ll be missed if I stay,” she says, her eyes on the windows of the house. “Get out of here.”
I fight against those amulets every night. The walls they place around her dreams are thick and heavy; I can barely see what I am doing. Her nightmares slip past me like instructions in a half-learned language; I should know their shape, I should be able to twist their meaning.
My weaving is clumsy and desperate. But it is working.
I know it is working.
Because that night, as I lurk in the shadowy rafters of the female servants’ quarters, I see Minerva rise in the darkness. She places bare feet on floorboards and creeps through the dark.
I snake through the ceiling, following her overhead to the kitchen. To the back wall, near the door to the courtyard where butchery takes place.
She opens a drawer and reaches for a knife.
It is long and has a thick enough blade to slit a hog’s throat. It gleams like victory in the moonlight.
That gleam vanishes as she tucks it into the folds of her nightdress. As she retraces her steps and slips it under her mattress.
“Soon,” I whisper as dawn breaks through the mist. “Soon.”
Soon, my kin will be free. Soon, I will be strong enough to unleash the kind of terror that this house has only ever had nightmares of.
The next day, I see her walk into the garden again. She passes the bench where she usually sits. She walks deeper into the garden, past the entrance to the labyrinth, far past the lawn where the peacocks strut aimlessly, their feathers dulled by the gray light of the overcast afternoon.
Out of sight of the house.
I flit down from the eaves of the fourth floor, silent as a bird of prey, and glide after her. She skirts the edge of the jungle. There is a marble bench in the shade, and she sits there, beneath the long arms of a jacaranda tree.
She watches her surroundings, expectant.
I slide between the first sparse trees of the jungle behind her and drop into my body.
Head, hands, waist, legs, feet. I straighten, shake my head, trying to clear the bright sparks from my vision.
I shouldn’t spend so much time in my body—chispa used is chispa spent, not to be replenished again until the next time I feed.
But no matter—that will happen soon enough.
A glint of the knife, a spot of bright, molten chispa. That’s all I see as I approach her.
She shifts. She’s sitting like she has a secret. Her eyes are as black as beetles and chispa-bright, yes, but she is a mouse, she is my tool, and she will bend to me—
She’s on her feet. Weight is thrown against my chest. I stumble back a few steps, caught off balance.
My spine slams into a tree trunk. My head snaps back and meets bark. Sparks fly across my vision.
I am imprisoned by weight. Not just my own—but the weight of another body, holding mine against the tree. I want to flit away, a spirit, but I can’t—I am pinioned by wiry arms.
By the butcher knife she holds to my throat.