Chapter XXVI
XXVI
Alba
Alba slept. Even as daylight thickened and scratched her eyes, she slept. When she woke in the late afternoon, her mouth so dry it tasted sticky and foul, she sat up.
Bartolomé was there, murmuring to himself. He sat in a chair beneath the window, his legs crossed, his fingers moving over the beads of his rosary. He looked as if he were in a trance.
He was covered in blood.
Each rhythmic movement of his foot, keeping the time of the prayer, dripped dark liquid onto the floor. His hair was slick with it, plastered to his skull; his eyes, when they lifted to meet hers, were heavy with blood-wet lashes. Profane in their paleness against the blood.
The meat was ripped away from the side of his face, exposing the pink bone of his jaw as if he had been mauled by a dog.
He stopped mid-rosary and lifted his right hand. A thick black clot rolled down the side of his palm and fell to his lap with a wet, sickening splat.
“In nomine Patris, et Filii…”
He made the sign of the cross over her. A shudder built in her and extinguished itself with a powerful shake of the shoulders.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
There was no blood on him. Not a drop of red besmirched his clothes, his hair, his shoes.
She could not trust her own eyes. She could not trust her own body. She was trapped, she would die like this, there was no hope—
“Thirsty,” she croaked.
She drank. She ate food that had been brought for her into the sitting room.
She brushed and plaited her hair as she did first thing in the morning, as if she were alone preparing for the day.
She was far from alone. Bartolomé hovered, ever watchful, his hands twitching by his sides, as if they were ready to fly up and make the sign of the cross at the slightest provocation.
The decor of her sitting room and bedroom had been much changed over the course of her sleep-filled day.
Her room’s sole crucifix had gone missing at some point over the course of her stay in Casa Calavera.
It had been replaced—and multiplied. She recognized one silver-embossed cross from one of the parlors, another from the chapel.
Candles had appeared, and incense, and at Bartolomé’s side was a bottle of water.
Something under her skin flinched at it.
Holy water, no doubt.
In the midst of the crucifixes and incense, Alba sank to her knees when Bartolomé invited her to join him in prayer.
Novena melted into novena. Hail Marys bound themselves into chains. It reminded her of making flower garlands as a child: They were pretty things, yes, but gave at the slightest yank.
How could words change anything?
In Elías’s workshop, she could feel the ripple of something other when he spoke. It had the timber of a current, the force of an earthquake. It felt like something was happening.
As the night deepened, her knees ached. Her spine felt stiff, her shoulders wanted to curl over and collapse in on themselves.
Bartolomé’s voice grew hoarse. He made no conversation with her. He continued to use holy water with abandon and rarely made eye contact with her as he guided her into the next mystery of the rosary.
It was as if she did have the matlazahuatl. That which moved beneath her skin was a sickness, and he was afraid to catch it.
That knowledge made her want to rear up and taunt him. To step close and threaten to breathe on him or pull his hair, to waggle her demon-infected fingers at him and his piety.
As if he had heard these thoughts, he lifted his head and took her in with an intensity that caught her off guard. She swallowed half a Hail Mary by accident.
“It will take will, you know,” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
“Nothing will change unless you want it to,” he said. “You must want to be rid of this evil. You must commit to being free of it.”
“There is nothing I want more.” The words were abrupt, bordering on harsh. She did not care. Let Bartolomé feel the harshness. He deserved it, for daring to insinuate that she might feel otherwise.
“Then pray,” he thundered.
“I am ,” she snapped.
“You lack focus, senorita,” he said, tone honed like a blade.
“I know you are weak by nature—womanhood and sangre india breed sloth. But you must overcome these. You must fight .” This struck like a slap.
His sword was drawn—whether because he was irritated by her or feared what was within, it didn’t matter.
Did he think that she wanted to be hounded by visions of blood?
To have her limbs seized and stolen, to have her very body yanked across the mountain valley as if it were a puppet?
To look at her own hands and fear that they would not obey her, even as she willed them to clasp in prayer?
She did not ask for this. She did not want this. All she had ever wanted, all she had ever lived for, was the inverse of this perverse imprisonment. To command her own life. To command her own body, to decide to whom it was given and when.
“What will you gain when you are free of this?” he said.
Silence from her. So Bartolomé supplied the answer, his voice condescending, as if he had prompted it very obviously and she had failed the test: “Eternal life.”
But in the silence, Alba’s mind had wandered far. It had found a path and raced down it, faster than a runaway horse, and suddenly, she found herself in the shadowy workshop with Elías, palm to palm, hearts thundering, their very breath suspended in silvery anticipation.
Desire was glass shattering on a stone floor. It rang aching and clear, sharp enough to draw blood.
That, again. That .
The demon wanted Elías dead because Elías had acted to help her. He had thwarted the demon, first by accident, and then with dogged purpose.
For that, the demon had commandeered her flesh and seized a knife. It had nearly succeeded in achieving its goal.
It would try again.
She would not let it.
She had come to Mina San Gabriel to prevent her parents from breaking off her engagement to Carlos.
For more than that: for the freedom to govern her own body.
To not be forced to bear a stranger’s children.
To live in a house without fear of the person she shared it with.
To walk where she willed and simply be .
Instead, she had lost it all.
Or she would, unless she fought. On that point, at least, Padre Bartolomé was right.
Her limbs were hers to command. She would walk only when and where she wanted to. Her hands were hers . They would rise to her will and her will alone.
She folded them before her.
She closed her eyes. Set her jaw. Latin rolled determined from her tongue, and though it made something in her swill with sickness, though she knew the foul-smelling sweat of fever slicking her palms and underarms was because of it, she would not stop.
Padre Bartolomé’s voice droned on. His presence alone was not the panacea she longed for.
What good was a priest if he could not cure her with a snap of his fingers?
She shoved her annoyance aside. When he began describing the Luminous Mysteries upon which they would be meditating for the next round of the rosary, she meditated on something else entirely.
Palm to palm. The faint aromas of sweat and woodsmoke, of leather and paper, of his skin.
She ran her fingers over the beads, settling on the small silver medal that bound the rosary together.
She no longer lacked focus.
The glint of a golden earring in the gloom. The brush of his hair against her cheekbone. The taste of his mouth and the fire left by his hands.
She could feel a smile draw at her lips, wilder and more full of hope than anything the demon could conjure across her face with its grasping fingertips.
She began.
“In nomine Patris, et Filii…”