Chapter XXV #2
Carolina stood and began to pace as she spoke. “My grandmother said coming here was like walking into a crypt: no trees, no beasts, no life, only stone and ghosts in the shadows of the mountains. But then the Izquierdos opened the mountain. And they found what was within.”
The air around them grew chill.
“My grandmother swore it was something that was as foreign to this place as the peninsulares. It was said that it first arrived with the ships generations ago, with peninsulares and their iron, with their priests, and like a disease, laid waste to all that it found here.”
“A haunting?” Elías asked.
“Ha,” Carolina scoffed. “ Worse . Long ago, in my grandmother’s time, there were rumors that a brujo had bound it to stone to keep it deep in the mountain, watched over by a powerful force, but it endured. It was something that lived , and kept living, deep in the mountain, for decades.”
Alba’s voice echoed through mine tunnels, rising all around him.
I’m coming. I’ll find you.
“Victoriano and I knew each other, but not well. I think I was the only woman of el pueblo he knew at that time, for he came to me with the baby.”
Gooseflesh raced over Elías’s arms, raising hair in their wake.
“I lived in my mother’s house then,” Carolina said. “I immediately stepped outside and shut the door behind me so that she would not see a peninsular with a newborn, a baby so weak it could scarcely draw breath, much less cry. But even in the baby’s weakened state, I could see it.”
It’s crying, can’t you hear it?
Elías clutched his satchel to his chest, food forgotten.
“It—that evil, that thing—was inside the baby. Victoriano said that someone had left her in the mine,” Carolina went on.
“I knew that. In fact, I knew who had done it, who had been cornered by Young Izquierdo and grew rounder and more miserable in the months since. Who had given birth—to a stillborn, everyone would be told—and fled Mina San Gabriel before dawn broke. She was not my friend, but I had known her all our lives. I knew why she acted as she had. But she had also acted in panic. If she wanted the baby dead, she should have done it herself. Instead, she created a monster. A monster that Victoriano found and brought to me.” Carolina shuddered.
“Suddenly, I found myself standing before it and the rest of San Gabriel. When I told Victoriano to put the baby back where he found it, he looked at me in horror. He did not listen.” She shook her head.
“Years later, he told me the truth of what he had done. That night, the Izquierdos had been hosting a merchant from the city. A man who had mentioned, while deep in his cups, how desperately his wife wanted a child. Victoriano gave the baby to the merchant, and it—that evil, that demon , the priests would call it—was spirited away to Zacatecas.”
Waves rose around him, sheer and thick, tilting the decks, sweeping him overboard.
“At first, I was angry with him, but then I saw that in his ignorance, he had acted in the interest of el pueblo. The evil was gone. It was no longer our problem. Until she arrived.”
“She.” It was thick on Elías’s tongue.
All he saw was long black hair, unbound, as lustrous in the moonlight as mercury.
Carolina stopped pacing and turned on him, silhouetted from behind by the hearth. For a moment, there was no sound but the fire crackling.
“Victoriano had the chance to destroy that thing , and he failed,” she said, forceful as a priest warning against the fiery pits of Hell. “And I lacked the courage to tell him how. But you can fix this. You can end this . ”
“And how,” he managed, mouth drier than sand, “would I do such a thing?”
“Kill the host in open air, on a windy peak,” Carolina said without hesitation.
“Underground is useless. It was chained there before and it escaped. It will escape again. Such things cannot be killed by man, but on a peak, the wind will carry it away, and we will be free of it. You ,” she said, jabbing a finger at him, “you alone have this chance. Or it will be the doom of us all.”
Elías’s mouth parted; for a long moment, nothing emerged.
“You want me to kill Alba,” he said, hoarse, barely above a whisper.
“I want you to correct your father’s mistake,” Carolina said.
Elías stood sharply, the feet of the chair scraping harshly against the floor. He had been sent here by Abuelo Arcadio to fix his father’s mistakes. He would be dragged down to Hell and burn with his father’s mistakes bound around his ankles.
Fuck his father’s mistakes.
“You,” he began, voice a low warning, marking Carolina with his own accusing finger, “have sorely misjudged me, senora.”
“I told you he was too soft.”
María Victoriana’s interjection seemed to surprise Carolina as much as it surprised him; the girl had been so still while absorbing the details of her mother’s story that he had forgotten she was there.
“Now he’s going to run and tell her, and it’ll be all your fault for not believing me,” she continued, folding her arms across her chest. “No one listens to me.”
“I would deny everything,” Carolina spat at Elías, a dare, a challenge.
“You have all but ordered the death of an innocent woman,” Elías said. “That will not go unpunished.”
“Punishment? Ha!” Carolina’s laugh was caustic. “You know nothing of punishment. You know nothing of how we have suffered. All you peninsulares want is your silver, your women, and you will take them by force, and take—”
“I am not like that,” Elías snarled, leaning over the table toward her.
“Then why does your greed smell the same?” Carolina snapped, mirroring his posture so that her sneer filled his vision. “I’ve heard the stories. You’re a convict. A murderer. Taking lives is nothing new to you. So do it again, for the greater good.”
Hatred seized his heart in a white-hot vise. How dare she.
“He should use the damn book,” María Victoriana cut in.
Elías and Carolina whirled toward her.
“I told you. He’s in love with her,” María Victoriana said. “You’re not going to convince him to kill her. And we’re not going to kill her because that’s a death sentence,” she said flatly. “So what do we do? Watch as the demon has its fill, waiting and wondering when it will be our turn?”
She looked up at Elías. “I watched you use sorcery this afternoon…” She trailed off, her voice pinched, her face losing some of its color, even in the warm glow of the fire.
“You’re mad . You’re going to get yourself killed, or worse.
But if you know who to ask, you might be able to banish the demon and keep Alba.
That’s what she wants, you know. It’s why she’s being so rash. ”
Elías, as a rule, did not blush. He did not .
“Did I not forbid you from going near that woman?” Carolina thundered. “That is enough .”
“There’s a goddess who lives in the mountain,” María Victoriana carried on, her words building like a rushing stream, as if she were worried her mother would pounce and steal her very voice if she did not speak quickly enough.
“That force Mamá talked about, that watched over the thing when it was bound in the mountain? We call her Death. I mean, we think that’s what she is—she was here before Bisabuela was brought here, or so Bisabuela said.
The shrine is for her. Maybe she will listen. And help.”
“Padre Bartolomé ordered the shrine to be destroyed,” Elías said. His mind fought to catch up to his words, racing a pace and a half behind the conversation. A goddess. A demon. Reality and unreality swirled in a thick fog as Carolina clicked her tongue dismissively.
“As if we would allow that,” she scoffed. “We moved it before they could touch it.”
Her tone struck him like a blow. Carolina’s stubbornness, her strength, the way she spoke…all of it reminded him powerfully of his own mother.
Perhaps that was why, alone in this desolate land, Victoriano had found Carolina and stayed with her. But Elías would never know for certain, because he could never ask Victoriano, because Victoriano was dead.
A well of something that tasted salty and soft and viciously sad surged in his breast.
He crushed it down.
“I will not kill anyone,” he said, voice shaking. “The demon must be banished, but I will do it without harming Alba.” He took a deep breath, not believing what he was about to say until the words came from his lips. “Will you take me to the new shrine?”