Chapter XXVIII
XXVIII
Alba
The changing of Alba’s guard happened deep in the night. She had lost track of the hours since sunset; one seemed to bleed into the next, novena after novena. It had been long enough that her voice was hoarse, no matter how much water she drank to soothe it.
She rose from her seat on the edge of her bed when Bartolomé went to answer the knock at her door. An exchange of low male voices; retreating footsteps. The door shut. Then it locked.
Her pulse marched against the well of her throat.
She had spent hours thinking about Elías, about everything that had occurred before and during their attempted exorcism in the workshop—mostly before, if she was frank—and now he was there , mere steps beyond the doorway.
She peered into the sitting room.
Elías sat in a chair, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees, his hands clasped before him.
Bartolomé’s rosary, small glass bottle of holy water, and Bible were at his side on a small table, but he had not touched them.
He worked his hands together—the movement was part fidgeting, part purposeful.
As if he were massaging them, preparing them for work.
He stared at the wall; he was far from this room, lost in thought.
His hair was tied back, and was damp, as if it had been recently washed. There were familiar shadows beneath his eyes and a slope to his back that spoke of exhaustion.
“Did you rest?” she asked.
He looked up at her, and when he did, her heart stopped. It was not shyness at his beauty—this she felt regularly, and she had grown accustomed to the sweep of warmth through her chest, the sudden heaviness of her tongue and need for her hair to be touched, to occupy fidgeting hands.
This was not her .
Something—some one ?—seized her heart in a clawed fist and squeezed it so hard it had to be bleeding, it had to be crumbling from the anger in the grip.
She gasped; one hand flew to her chest.
Elías was on his feet. “Are you all right?”
There was something in Elías that had seized the demon’s attention, and now, Alba tasted it, too: a presence, a vibration on the air, something that was threat , and she knew if Elías drew so much as one step closer—
“Stay back.” The words came out strained. Airless. The grip on her heart was slowly relenting with deep breathing. “I’m afraid.”
Elías did not retreat, but he did not grow closer. “Of what?”
“Of how I respond to you,” she said. His cheeks darkened with color—yes, it sounded suggestive, but she did not care. Pain radiated through her chest. It was a magnet, and Elías was metal, and it wanted to yank her close to him.
“Of how it responds to you,” she clarified.
His hands were outstretched. Ready for any weapon: prayer, embrace, occult practice.
They trembled slightly.
Her mother’s voice snaked through the back of her mind. These azogueros all die an early death. And for what?
A powerful ache seized her lungs. She did not want him to die. She knew some of his secrets, but she needed to know them all. She wanted to know him. She wanted him .
But when a dull hunger woke within her chest, it was not want. It was something else’s bloodlust, its itch for revenge.
“Are you all right?” Elías repeated.
Padre Bartolomé had called her condition a holy war, illustrating a romantic tableau of a battle between good and evil as if with a painter’s brush on a chapel ceiling: darkness billowing in sulfurous clouds, fallen angels, and above it all, a bright, cleansing light, scalding away sin and evil from her mortal soul.
But Bartolomé did not live in her skin. Bartolomé, for all his talk of battling to save lost souls, did not know the feeling of true confrontation. This was a war of wills, and her body was the battlefield.
There would be no more casualties. She would make sure of it.
“I want to be close to you,” she forced out. “But it wants me to be close to you, because then it can hurt you.”
Elías, to his credit, did not retreat. His weight resettled, a shift of feet on the carpet. He was ready to spring into action.
“Do you know why?” he murmured.
She took a deliberate step back toward the doorway of the bedroom. She had not noticed that she had drawn several steps closer to Elías, into the sitting room—that was not good. Pain clawed at her breast with each step; her breathing burned her throat.
“I think”—she gasped for breath—“it sees you as a threat.”
Why would he look satisfied to be told this?
“I am a threat,” Elías said, his voice reaching a lower, menacing register.
Alba’s body shuddered against her will. It wanted to lurch out of her grasp, it wanted flesh, it wanted blood, it wanted to consume his blackened soul—
“Don’t say that!” she gasped. “At least not so loudly .”
Contrition transformed him immediately. “How can I help you?” he asked. He was already reaching for the rosary.
Alba flinched.
“Toss that to me,” she forced through gritted teeth.
He obeyed. The beads glided through the air, a strange bird. Alba marked it with her eyes, she told her hands to reach for it as it drew near—
And then watched it strike the floor before her feet. Her hands hung immobile at her sides.
Frustration burned in her throat. She wanted to stamp her feet on the carpet, to throw a tantrum as if she were a child. She was her own . Her body was her own and it would follow her will.
“Obey me,” she spat at her hands, and slowly, as if she were clawing her way through heavy, wet sand, she crouched and picked the rosary up with cautious fingers.
She brought the crucifix to her lips out of habit; it felt like frozen metal, and it burned.
She exhaled forcefully and straightened. The weight of Elías’s gaze was on her—she could almost feel him drawing calculations from each of her gestures, evaluating where her movements stopped and began, as if one could possibly pinpoint the moment where it seized control.
“Why me?” she said, feeling her voice slip high, close to a spoiled child’s whine. It wasn’t fair .
“I actually think I know the answer to that,” Elías said softly.
There was a gentle pull, somewhere under her skull, somewhere behind her ears, that she now knew was not her . The demon had become guileless. Sloppy. It did not care if she knew what it wanted or not; it pulled her recklessly toward what it wanted.
“Perhaps…you might want to sit,” he said. “It is a long story.”
The demon lifted her feet and padded them over to a chair. She dropped into it. Elías’s words unlocked famished curiosity; what he had to say, as he sat opposite her, tracing a fingertip over the cover of Bartolomé’s Bible absently, slaked her thirst.
And left her hollow.
The tale tread a familiar opening. She was found here. In the mine, to be specific. She had been left to die there.
But now, she knew by whom .
By someone nameless, a woman whom Carolina knew but had not seen in decades, who was no longer a part of this tale.
A woman who, like Alba, had been pursued and trapped—perhaps not in a dark hallway at a ball, but trapped all the same.
By Young Izquierdo, Carolina said—the man whose father had sold the mine to the Monterrubios.
Then, she left San Gabriel behind and had never returned. Carolina would not even give her name.
She was a woman who had taken her life by the reins and cut away the burdens that threatened to strangle her freedom. In a way, it was an admirable thing to do: to ruthlessly carve a new place for herself in a world that would give her nothing.
But in doing so, she had carved away Alba.
Alba felt no closure, though this was what she had searched for, and she had been right, she was right —Carolina knew.
Hollowness yawned wide and empty through her: an absence of feeling, of the grief she expected.
She would have welcomed grief, for grief meant that she had belonged to someone, and that someone had been robbed of her.
But she hadn’t belonged to anyone. She wasn’t someone’s daughter before Mamá.
She was someone’s punishment. A consequence.
A curse.
Her mind cut to blankness. It was filled with a high-pitched buzzing, as if a thousand black flies were trapped between her ears.
The demon was impatient.
It surged; agitation rippled under her skin like a living thing.
Elías spoke, but the demon within her knew that he could have spoken more.
He was hiding something. Thousands of ants crawled over her sinew, through layers of muscle.
She twitched. She scratched at her forearms, roughing the sleeve of her nightdress.
“You’re leaving something out,” she said through gritted teeth. “It won’t leave me alone.”
Swift as leaves resettling in a breeze, victory flickered across Elías’s face—then he schooled his features into stillness. “There are things I don’t want it to know.”
Alba flung herself forward with a growl that ripped at her throat and shook her ribs.
She caught herself. Feet on the ground. She would not harm Elías.
“What can I do to help?” Elías asked. He was on his feet again, alert, hands outstretched.
Words failed her; any breath for speaking transformed into a low, menacing rumble in her chest. Her teeth gritted so tightly she could hear them grind against one another. The hinge of her jaw clicked painfully.
She lifted her arm, though its weight was wooden and impossibly heavy, though it was stiff and pained her—and pointed at the holy water.
Elías snatched the bottle from the table next to him; did that shift of his weight mean he was going to come close to her?
She whirled around to the back of the chair, placing it between herself and Elías.
Good thing she did. He was stupid enough to take a step toward her.
“Don’t come near me,” she gasped. The rasp of her voice felt too deep, too other . “Please don’t.”
He looked from the holy water in his hand to her. “Shall I…throw it to you?”
“Yes,” she said. “Then back away.”