Chapter XXIV
XXIV
Elías
Whether by luck or by the grace of God favoring Padre Bartolomé, the house was still silent as Elías and the priest escorted Alba to her room in a funereal line.
Elías waited in the sitting room that was connected to Alba’s bedroom, listening to the murmured prayers that Bartolomé made over Alba.
His feet itched to move; he could not be still.
They needed Bartolomé. They could not do this alone.
Elías’s very bones still shook with what he had done in the workshop, and yet it had not been enough.
He was not strong enough. He was not smart enough, not even if he memorized El Libro de San Cipriano from cover to cover.
They were outmatched. Coming to the priest made sense .
And still he paced. Still his agitation hummed as Bartolomé left Alba’s bedroom and sprinkled holy water over the doorway.
The priest stepped back from the doorway with a soft sigh.
“I need incense. More holy water. Candles, yes. Another crucifix.” He cast a look around the room.
“There should be one in here…unless, perhaps, she destroyed it.” He laughed to himself; it was thin, humorless.
“Dear God,” he said. “What are we doing?”
Each moment Elías spent with Bartolomé made the priest seem more human. He would have preferred to hold him at a distance, a faraway painted saint in a gilded chapel. But here they were: two men facing each other, empty-handed, at a loss.
“I was hoping you’d know,” he said.
Bartolomé ran a hand over his face and rested it on his cheek.
“So was I.” The tilt of his mouth could have been either amusement or despair.
Elías felt strung between the two sentiments himself.
“We don’t have much time to talk now,” Bartolomé said, “before people begin to wake. I plan to get tools from the chapel. If you stay here and keep watch, I will return as fast as I can. But first—”
He turned and searched the room, then moved to a small table that appeared to have been used as a writing desk—papers and ink lay scattered haphazardly across its surface. He took the chair before the table, gesturing for Elías to sit near him.
“I need to know more before I write to my superiors,” Bartolomé said in a low voice, casting a nervous look over his shoulder at Alba’s bedroom as he took a pen and filled it with ink.
A cold bolt of fear shot through Elías’s gut.
“You’re writing to the Inquisitors?” What a stupid question. Of course Bartolomé would. This was a case of demonic possession. To whom else would he write?
Bartolomé gave him a level look. “Is there a problem?”
“In my family, there are stories of great suffering. Unjust treatment.” His heel began to tap rapidly; his knee bounced, jittery with nerves. “I will not stand by and allow harm to come to her.”
Bartolomé tapped the tip of the pen against parchment. A drop of ink pooled; he was thinking, and he ignored Elías.
“She is in harm’s way now,” he said.
Elías cursed softly. “I know.”
“The Inquisition in Spain has a history,” Bartolomé said slowly, as if choosing his words with care.
“Some would say it has been overzealous. Legends abound. I do not mean to invalidate your ancestors’ suffering,” he added, seeing that Elías’s expression had shifted to one of offense and that he had opened his mouth to combat the term legend .
His mother would never have lied about what had happened to her great-uncles and cousins.
“I wish to point out that the Inquisition in Nueva Espana is different. I know you heard me threaten Heraclio with them, but it is a methodical body. A lumbering bureaucracy, if you will,” he added, with a touch of dryness.
“I can only pray that it moves quickly enough to help us. Which it might, if I can provide enough detail about Senorita Díaz’s condition. ”
“Do you swear no harm will come to her?” Elías said. “Do you swear that you will tell no one else?”
His voice resonated with more passion than he intended. Perhaps too much, for Bartolomé’s reply—though quiet and measured—had a precision of diction that felt pointed.
“She is the fiancée of my oldest friend,” the priest said. “No harm will come to her under my watch.”
Elías chewed the inside of his lip. He and Alba had made the choice to trust Bartolomé; he must face the consequences of that decision.
“Now,” Bartolomé said, noticing the growing pool of ink on the paper and moving the pen. It smeared, marring the top of the page where he had written the date. “How did you come to understand that Senorita Díaz needed the Church’s help?”
Elías’s shoulders corded tight; he let out his breath in a firm, determined huff.
Pen scratched across paper as he described the last few days: Alba sleepwalking; his shock when Romero turned up dead. But when Elías described Alba’s fear that Bartolomé was in danger, color began to drain from the priest’s cheeks.
“But instead of you, I was attacked next,” Elías said.
“Attacked? By whom?”
Elías jerked a thumb at Alba’s bedroom door.
“Last night,” he said. “Sometime after midnight. She came to my room with a knife and attacked me.”
The lift of Bartolomé’s brows cut creases in his forehead.
Elías sped through the details, remembering mid-breath to omit anything to do with El Libro de San Cipriano .
“She knew things,” Elías said. “Things that I have never told anyone .”
Bartolomé raised a finger to his lips before returning to writing. Elías lowered his voice; his throat felt rough, as if he had spent the whole day shouting.
“She spoke in a different language, Padre.”
Bartolomé looked up, startled.
“Before Victoriano came here, he was a merchant who sold goods to the North African presidios,” Elías said.
“He met my mother there, and I was born in Ceuta. After we moved to Sevilla, she still spoke Arabic to me. But our dialect is very specific, Padre,” he added, searching for a way to emphasize how wrong it had felt to hear it from Alba’s lips.
“It is as different from other dialects as galego is from castellano. She… taunted me with it.”
“Elías…” Bartolomé trailed off and turned his body so that he was staring at the door to Alba’s bedroom. No sound came from the room except, faintly, the deep breathing of sleep. “These are classic signs of possession by a powerful force.”
A cackle of chickens came from the courtyard outside; distantly, Elías heard the echo of voices and the clang of pots from the direction of the outdoor kitchen.
Something about the sounds—so quotidian, so blissfully unaware of the gravity of the conversation taking place in this shadowed room—shattered his chest like glass.
He was so far from anything he knew. He was alone in a room with a stranger, someone who had the power to either harm or heal the one person he cared about on this whole godforsaken continent, and he was powerless.
He had come to the Indies for silver. A means to an end. Zacatecas was a door through which he would pass to another life.
And this was what had happened.
Despair was a wave, but it did not drown him. He was still aware of the scratch of Bartolomé’s pen, of Alba’s calm breathing, of the chickens, the fucking chickens, clucking and fussing over their feed outside without a care in the world.
“You said she came to you in the night,” Bartolomé said, pen scratching as he spoke. “Had she done that before?”
Elías’s back stiffened. There was no sacred oath of the confessional to defend what he said. One misstep, and what thin ground he had beneath him would crumble and fall away, taking him with it.
“No, Padre,” he said, channeling every bit of earnestness he had in him. “I swear on my mother’s grave. Never .”
The pen scratched on. “You said she attacked you? She is a small woman.”
“With a knife,” Elías said. “With strength that caught me off guard.”
“What manner of knife? One for opening letters, or…?”
“It looked like it was for butchering hogs,” Elías said flatly. “I have it in my room still, if you want to see.”
The pen stopped.
“Right,” Bartolomé said. If possible, he had grown paler.
“A butchering knife. Uncommon strength.” He set his pen down and rubbed his temples.
“So Senorita Díaz, or rather, an unknown, malevolent force animating her”—here he lowered his voice—“tried to kill you. You said her strength surprised you. Do you think she is actually capable of doing so?”
“I fought for my life.” Elías’s heel was tapping again. “It was a close thing. It made me fear…Padre, is there any evidence of who killed Romero?”
A moment of silence passed as Bartolomé considered this.
“Poor Carlos,” he murmured at last, leaning back in his chair. He set his hands palm to palm, index fingers resting against his lips, and stared into space. “This does not bode well.”
A sound from Alba’s room made them both jump; it was only Alba turning in bed, sighing in her sleep.
If Elías listened closely enough, he wagered he could hear the priest’s heart racing as fast as his own was.
“Romero did not try to make himself well-liked,” Bartolomé said, “as you know.” He tapped his fingers against his lips.
“He worked here before Heraclio bought the mine. Carlos said he was much hated by the workers both before and after the purchase. My working hypothesis…is revenge,” he said after a pause.
“Someone wished to remove a person who had treated them ill.”
“So there is no proof implicating Alba,” Elías said.
“Only fear,” Bartolomé said. “ My fear, frankly. And that is not an easy thing to inspire. Sometimes, when I look at her…”
Elías straightened. “Do you see it?”
Bartolomé looked up at him suddenly, his lips pale, they were pressed together so hard.
“Do you see it?” he hissed.
“The—” Instead of searching for the right words, Elías gestured at his own eyes.
“Yes. That ,” Bartolomé gasped. A shudder took his shoulders; his eyes fluttered shut as he crossed himself. “My God.” Then, sharply, he asked: “Why you?”
“What?”
Bartolomé had stopped writing, but this was the most pointed question yet. The first that made Elías realize that perhaps he had been the subject of an interrogation this entire time.
A swish of seasickness; the tilt of the deck on steep waves.
“Why you?” Bartolomé repeated. “I am a priest. A logical adversary. But you…you are involved .” He scanned Elías from head to toe.
If his gaze caught on Elías’s fingers, perhaps all he saw was soot and ink, and not whatever lingered, still warm, beneath his skin.
“Why not confide in someone close to her, like her mother or father? Or Carlos?”
Elías had reflexive answers: Carlos was a self-centered brat; Alba’s parents were no better.
He had stupid answers: the rich crackle of potential between him and Alba; the way a simple brush of hands in a ballroom in Zacatecas had lifted the world out of his grasp and shattered it like a glass of Champagne on the floor.
Instead, he said: “Perhaps it was easier to confide in a stranger.” He gestured at the priest. “Isn’t that the way of things, sometimes?”
This answer seemed to soften Bartolomé.
“Indeed,” he said. Then, with a sigh, as if it wearied him to ask, but he had come across the question at the bottom of a mental list and could not proceed without it: “Did you ever come into contact with the occult in the East? Did you ever attempt to communicate with spirits of any kind in pursuit of arcane knowledge?”
“No, Padre.” Not in the East, no. “I was aware of a man—a fellow prisoner, that is—in Almadén. People said he was possessed. But I did not know him.”
Bartolomé thumbed his chin. “I worry that your studies might have created an openness in you. Demonic forces find the thinnest cracks in our defenses, even those as slender as the eye of a needle. They will force their way in by any means necessary. It is possible that this being…sensed something in you,” he finished, “and drew Alba to you.”
Perhaps.
Or perhaps Alba had simply found herself surrounded by idiots and had decided that Elías was a slightly more compassionate idiot than her narcissist in-laws-to-be and parents.
He bit his tongue.
Bartolomé pushed himself to standing, weariness settling around him like a cloak.
“I must pray about this. It would be best if you stayed out of sight,” he said. There was a shade of apology in his voice. “I suspect that the news of Senorita Díaz’s illness will make members of our party agitated. For her sake, we must not risk trouble.”
“I understand, Padre,” Elías said.
“I will deliver news of the ‘plague,’?” Bartolomé said. He reached for his belt and unwound the rosary that he kept hooked there. He held it out to Elías. “Keep this with you.”
The beads and crucifix were wooden and rustic. There was no gold, no mother-of-pearl, no scent of roses or expensive wood. It was the rosary of a simple man. Perhaps of a trustworthy one.
He took it.
“There is holy water in the bottle on the table,” Bartolomé said. “And prayers in your heart. May I?” he added, holding out a hand toward the crown of Elías’s head to bless him.
Any other day, Elías would flinch away. Give a dry no, thank you and move on.
Though the incantations of San Cipriano still burned under the calloused pads of his fingertips, he inclined his head toward Bartolomé and closed his eyes with unfeigned gratitude when the priest rested his hand on his hair. Latin washed over him, soft as a magic charm.
Perhaps that was what it was, in the end: a magic charm. The Lord’s Prayer, this blessing—was it any different from an incantation from El Libro de San Cipriano ?
“I will return as soon as I can,” Bartolomé said and walked to the door.
Elías wrapped the rosary around his left hand.
“Vaya con Dios,” he said, and for once, he meant it.
Bartolomé paused, hand on the door.
“You did well, to come to me,” he said. “You might have saved her life.”
Elías’s mouth was dry from speaking, from exhaustion, from thirst.
“I hope so,” he said, and his voice cracked.
It was not until Bartolomé had shut the door behind him and voices lifted in the hall that Elías set his head in his hands—which shook hard, harder than they ever had before—and wept.