Chapter 19
Minerva
His chest didn’t move. He was still, eyeing the knife with surprise and perhaps some fear, but it was not merely that he was still.
It was that he wasn’t breathing.
His shoulders sparked with flecks of gold when I flung him against the trunk.
It was strange, and this was strange, but I expected strange when confronting him.
Even though my heart was a live animal in the cage of my throat, even though my pulse raced, even though parts of my mind still wanted to deny that this was the case—that he was not breathing—I know it was true.
Some part of me recognized it when he first appeared. Since yesterday, when he sat by my side I saw my reflection in the windows of the house.
My own reflection: a smudge of a girl on a bench.
Alone.
Even though, out of the corner of my eye, I saw that he sat right next to me.
Sara’s voice echoed in my chest that day. People see things.
I had seen enough.
“What the hell are you doing?” His fine features were fixed in a glower, centimeters from my own face.
His irises were darker than I thought—as dark as the billowing mass that descended on Senora Encarnación and sucked the life out of her, leaving her an empty shell. A shed snakeskin. Hollow, dry, ruined.
“You killed Senora Encarnación,” I hissed.
“Ha!” It’s dry and mocking. “That’s not possible. Even if I—”
I brought the tip of the knife closer to his skin. Close enough that it brushed cold metal to flesh, but not enough to scrape.
A flicker of gold beneath the blade. It was chispa, sparking as if I had placed stone to flint.
The glower on his face shifted; it crept toward amusement, slow as a shadow at dusk. Like the shadows that had followed me since I first arrived at this cursed house.
“You killed Senora Encarnación,” I said. “Maybe you poisoned her. Maybe someone else did, but you are what took her in the end. I know you did.”
The amusement in his face deepened. “I am just a servant from—”
“I’m not stupid.” I tightened my grip on his collar and brought the knife close.
He flinched from the sparks. He leaned his head back from the blade, craning away from it.
“I want the truth about you,” I said.
“Put the knife down,” he said. “It impedes civilized conversation. You can’t hurt me, anyway.”
I tightened my grip further still. “Then why do you flinch?”
The amusement in his face evaporated. He was still, too still. Nothing shifted but this: narrowing of eyes, as calculated as that of a predator’s.
“An old habit,” he drawled, cold as the mist, and not without a touch of venom.
Run, my heart cried. Run, run, run.
But I braced my heels against the rain-soft earth. I tightened the muscles of my stomach and arms, hungry for a fight. I will have my vengeance.
“How old?” I countered. “How long have you been spying on me? Since I came here? You’re as bad as Leoncio,” I spat. “What are you?”
“Asked as if I owe you answers,” he said. His muscles flexed beneath my forearms; I shoved him back in response. Hard against the tree. With all my weight, all my grief, all my spite.
He wheezed a curse.
“You do,” I said. “You killed Senora Encarnación.”
“I didn’t,” he said, struggling against me. He was taller than me, but though I knew I had grown softer since leaving the slums, I was still made of wire and will.
“You’re not supposed to be able to—”
“Tell me the truth,” I snapped.
“I have.” He punctuated the syllables with flint. “It’s not my fault you seem loath to trust.”
“You haven’t proven yourself worthy of trust,” I said. “You’ve stalked me, lied to me, and you killed Senora Encarnación. I know it was you.”
This time, I allowed the tip of the knife to scrape his skin. The flecks of chispa looked like shed feathers. “Tell me what you did.”
His eyes fell to my wrist. My right one, the one that held the blade.
There were seven threads there now, all knotted with seven knots and blessed by my breath. I had added them at daybreak.
“Clever girl,” he murmured. “You came prepared.”
“What are you?” I said. “Talk.”
“Put the knife down,” he said, “and I might.”
I kept the knife close to his throat. I waited. He was going to keep talking. He paused like Senora Encarnación used to, when she was filling a moment in a story she was telling with weight. When she looked at me over her spectacles, rheumy eyes unexpectedly sharp, to make sure I was listening.
“I died in this house.” His voice was gentle, soft as the brush of a sheet falling over a bed in silence. “Many, many years ago. I have lived in it ever since.”
People see things.
I had expected something strange. I think I did long before Sara said it was impossible that a servant from an alleged neighboring house had stumbled into the garden.
I prepared for strange: I took thread from my mending kit and tied knot after knot, my whispers incantation-thick; seven bracelets with seven knots hung clustered on my right wrist like crows on a roof.
But I was not prepared for this.
“So you’re a ghost?”
“I’m trapped is what I am,” he said. “And it’s all their fault.”
“Whose?”
His eyes—so black they were almost reptilian, iris bleeding into pupil—flicked to the house behind me. “Theirs.” Then his eyes were back on me, the intensity of their focus sending a chill down my spine. “You want to know what I am?”
I nodded. He wanted to tell me, after all. All he needed was a little encouragement.
“I was a boy,” he said. “I was obsessed with my studies. My father was a member of the clergy and everyone in my family expected me to become the same. It would have been a boring life, but it was a life.” His eyes went as glassy as Senora Encarnación’s would when she shifted course and drifted into an old memory.
“Then news came from the coast. Ships on the horizon, as black and as many as fleas. Strangers set foot onshore. At first it seemed like they would ignore us, or at least live alongside us—they set up their own way of rule and kept their own counsel. Then they picked a leader: a viceroy, a representative of some distant god or king, called del Valle. That is when they started taking.” His voice sharpened like a knife on a whetstone.
“They hunted for metal, but they found something more precious. Chispa.”
“In the mines,” I said.
His eyes refocused on me, and suddenly I was a weak thing of shivering flesh and breakable bone before something uncanny. Something hungry.
“You think they’re mines,” he said, voice lowering to a growl.
“They’re not. Chispa did not come from the earth.
Chispa comes from here.” He lifted a hand; I tightened my hold on his collar, but all he did was tap my sternum—once, twice, for emphasis—with an index finger.
“And there it lives, from birth until you are put in the earth. There it stays. Or so said the customs I knew, long ago.”
“You stole Senora Encarnación’s chispa.” Disgust twisted my voice.
“And she deserved it,” Ygnacio snarled. Those reptilian eyes darkened with anger. “Her family gained all they have from desecrating graves. They are monsters.”
“And so are you,” I snapped. “You killed her.”
“I cannot kill,” Ygnacio said. “I only took what was being released anyway. What would have been caught in the rafters of the house and stayed there forever because these interlopers, these greedy ship rats, do not know how to bury the dead.” His voice raised with every passing moment; it hummed through his chest. “My fate is torture enough without having to share it with that particular del Valle for eternity, thank you very much.”
“That is as good as killing her,” I snapped.
“I stole back what was stolen from me,” Ygnacio said. “They are murderers, pillagers, rapists. I would do it again. I will do it again.”
The hairs on the back of my neck lifted. That was not an empty threat. Those words had the resonance of a promise.
A voice rose behind me, faintly, as if calling from the far side of a dream. It might have been calling my name. I couldn’t tell.
I startled; my hold on Ygnacio’s shirt loosened. He slipped away from me, and, faster than should have been possible, was several steps beyond the tree, straightening his shirt and running a hand through his thick, dark hair as if to smooth it.
I retreated a step, holding the knife out defensively. “Stay away from me.”
“Or what?” It was coy, almost flirtatious, and it made me want to smack the smug look off his face. He knew he had rattled me.
“You flinch,” I said, “which means you can be hurt. I will find out how.”
If I caught any doubt slipping over his shoulder, he shook it off like a chilly breeze.
“I dare you to try,” he said.
There, before my disbelieving eyes, he vanished without a trace.