Chapter 27
Ygnacio
I perch in the corner of the ceiling above Octaviana’s bed and watch as Minerva slips into the room.
I can’t see it, but I can feel the amulet slide away from Octaviana’s wrist.
Yessssss.
It’s as if the doors of a kitchen have been flung open, letting light and smells and sounds of fat crackling and spices sizzling tumble forth.
Her dreams bloom out in vivid waves, overwhelming me with richness.
Ah, yes, this is a mind that has been walled off from me for decades, and now I can delight in slicing in.
Then, at once, it fades.
Octaviana wakes.
My attention on the scene below sharpens. Minerva has vanished beneath the bed.
Octaviana walks through the dark to the bathroom. Now is Minerva’s chance. Go, I think. Go.
She doesn’t.
I drop to the ground and see her curled up beneath the bed, eyes wide as a hunted beast’s. I can feel her heart pounding, pounding, pounding.
I open my mouth to whisper in her ear—
Octaviana’s footsteps emerge from the bathroom. They pad close to me. Through me. With a sharp shiver, Octaviana steps back into bed and pulls the blankets up to her chin.
She has not noticed the cut amulet that rests just to the side of her pillow.
She might, when she wakes.
There’s no way Minerva can escape until Octaviana falls asleep, and deeply enough that the opening and closing of the door does not wake her.
I must do my part to ensure that. To ensure that the dreams in Octaviana’s mind keep her tightly trapped in sleep.
I wait at the bedside. Sleepers shift in other parts of the house; some wake momentarily, some drift off immediately. Some are still awake. I home my focus in on Octaviana.
The moment she drifts toward the cliff of sleep and falls, I’m there, waiting for her.
“We need an opportunity, and it needs to be sooner rather than later,” Minerva had said as she paced back and forth before the sarcophagi. “We need as many of the important figures as possible in one place at the same time.”
“Not just one place,” I said. “Here.”
She gnawed on her lower lip, considering this. “Senora Encarnación once said that they used to have parties here,” she said. “Grand parties with dancing and hundreds of guests.”
Decades thinned to moments in my mind; the parties appeared as if they were yesterday, crisp, golden, overflowing with the sweeping trills of violins and laughter.
The clink of fine glassware; the rich pour of liquor into crystal.
The movement and rhythm of hundreds of bodies, hundreds of heartbeats.
Sweat, laughter, breath. In the ballroom.
Through halls. In dark drawing rooms, their windows fogged with frantic breathing and animal moans; in gleaming bathrooms, their ceramic sinks splattered with vomit.
Heat and smell ripples through memory like an instrument strummed.
I hovered in corners and rafters, watching. Drinking in every moment.
But watching never slaked my thirst.
There was so much life, just beyond my fingertips.
Such carelessness, such ease. As if the guests were entitled to whatever they were celebrating.
As if they were entitled to their golden lives and their golden parties and their debauchery and their mess, walking the floorboards that I had laid with my own hands and aching back, resting against walls that I had spread mortar across with my cracked, chapped palms.
I made this house. I built this house. And yet my body rotted in the garden, anonymous, forgotten, fodder for insects until nothing was left but pale bones.
And they had this.
They had robbed me of life, and yet they had the nerve to be so alive in the place that became my purgatorial tomb.
“Do you think their victory over the Valbuenistas in the eastern quarter of the Capital is an important enough occasion?” Minerva asked.
Bitterness welled in me; I swallowed it. In order to get my revenge, I would have to suffer their joy.
“They’ve drunk and reveled over far smaller occasions,” I said. “Rigged elections. Birthdays.”
Eagerness glittered in Minerva’s eyes. Sometimes, I can see chispa in the faces of the living. It glows like lamps, illuminating their eyes with sheer energy.
“A party,” she said. “A party will bring the Viceroy and all of his top officials here, where they are cut off from their support. Where they are easy to surround. They get drunk. Then”—she turned and gestured with aplomb at the sarcophagi where my kin sweated and shifted in their uneasy, hungry sleep—“we release them.”
And if they go mad, the likelihood of them turning on one another, and fatally…those, it occurred to me, were good odds. Good enough for me to agree to Minerva’s plan.
Which is why I step eagerly into Octaviana’s dreams. I slip them on and wear them like my own clothes. I begin to twist them to my will.
She was young for so many of the Viceroy’s parties. I remember seeing her, with fewer wrinkles and blacker hair, watching dancers with an eagerness in her posture, a diver readying to leap.
I remember the light in her face as the servants laid out the crystal and poured the alcohol. She was chispa herself the moment guests entered dressed in silks and glittering jewels.
I lean on my own memories as I spin her dreams. As I pull them into the shape I want. I am a candy maker, melting sugar and transforming it into the Viceroy walking into the golden light of la Casa de las Gardenias. Octaviana greets him; he smiles benevolently at her.
My beautiful niece, he says. Guardian of our stronghold. What would we do without you?
Octaviana’s lips draw into a small, bashful smile, one that is reflected on her face in sleep, in her dark bedroom. In the gold of her dreams, the Viceroy takes her hand and kisses it.
You make me proud, he says. I pull his smile wider. Let us celebrate.
Dancers swirl. Music plays. All is gold and bright and glimmering, like the pleasant shiver of chispa butterflies. I pull the dancers thicker and thicker around Octaviana, drawing her down, down, down into deeper and deeper sleep.
She steadies. Each inhale is indolent; each exhale longer than the one before.
I draw out of Octaviana’s mind, leaving her in a gilded swirl of dreams.
I crouch down beneath the bed. I am invisible, but perhaps not to Minerva, not anymore—her eyes narrow, as if she is squinting through the darkness looking for me.
“Go,” I whisper. “Now.”
Minerva uses both hands to sidle out from under the bed. Past me. Through me, a bit—I can tell by the ripple of gooseflesh that passes over her forearms and the curve of her neck.
She crouches by the foot of the bed; pauses. Listening for Octaviana’s breath. Waiting to see if she is truly asleep. Deep enough that the door won’t wake her.
“Now,” I repeat.
Minerva crosses the room in long, loping strides, catching herself on soft balls of the feet. I grimace—we both grimace—as one floorboard lets out a pained creak.
Octaviana’s breathing remains steady.
Minerva reaches for the door. A soft click, as tongue against palate; she draws the door open.
Octaviana’s breathing stops.
Her eyes fly open.
They stare right through me. They catch on the door and focus there:
A girl slipping through the doorway. Black plaits. White nightgown.
I have watched Octaviana del Valle from the rafters of this wretched house since before she could walk.
I have seen her grow from petulant child into an even more petulant woman, albeit one whose spoiled nature lurks, soft and rotten, under a veneer of iron will and sneers.
This is the kind of woman who will crush a beetle beneath her thumb just to see what color it bleeds.
Many people think Leoncio gets his cruelty from his father. The man who oversees the Viceroy’s vast, labyrinthine prisons.
I know better.
Cirilo is a bureaucrat. A blood-soaked one, but a bureaucrat nonetheless.
If she deduces what Minerva has done, Octaviana will take a carving knife, pin the girl against the kitchen wall, and impale her so hard that the blade will bury itself in the plaster.
She would leave her there, pierced like one of Leoncio’s insects, until every drop drained from her body. As an example. As sport.
I unfurl, fast as a flash of lightning. I roil and thicken, greedily consuming any snatch of light lingering in the room. My reserve of consumed chispa has run lower and lower since meeting Minerva—I am an impulsive spendthrift with her.
I know the moment I become visible to Octaviana. Her eyes widen; the whites reflect wetly in the gloom. Her dry lips part; her breathing hesitates, then hisses sharply in to feed her thundering heart.
I am a cloud of fangs and claws and monstrous, writhing limbs. I draw close. I fill her vision. I exhale, my breath hot and fetid as it washes over her face.
She is paralyzed in horror, eyes nearly popping out of her head.
Then she yanks the blankets over her head, covering even the silk bonnet on her hair.
“It’s a dream,” she mutters, sleep-slurred and muffled by the sheets. “This is a dream.”
Many moments later, when she finally draws the sheets down from her face, the cloud is gone.
The door is shut.
The house is silent.
But after she drifts back to sleep, I make sure my reflection—distorted, its monstrosity manifold—remains in her dreams. I keep a fingertip on the pulse of the nightmare, twisting the vision and making it so powerful that she forgets any sliver of girl caught in the doorway.
Get used to the sight of me, Octaviana del Valle, I think. I tremble, my reserves of chispa sputtering as I twist the dream into something ever more horrific.
Because I’m not hiding any longer.