Chapter XXX #2
A flex—that was how Elías would think of the change later. It was as if the air in the chapel bent around the demon’s will and rippled outward, bringing waves of heat. Nausea churned through Elías’s head; it was the heat of being close to a fire, but too close, and it increased with each wave.
“Just you wait.” The demon’s voice cut through the heat, through Bartolomé’s droning, like a knife. “I’ll tear the flesh from your bones. I’ll peel the veins from your face. I’ll stay in this wretched place, too close to her , if it means I can suck your liver dry.”
Her .
Elías saw ripples across mercury. He felt an echo of the terror that had flooded him in a dark shrine in the mountain.
Bartolomé continued reading, making crosses over the demon. Distantly, Elías registered the sound of retching to his left, where Carlos was kneeling.
Another cry. Alba was in there, in that heat, in that cage.
She had not chosen this. She never wished for this. It was not her fault that she had been left to die in the mine as an infant. She was innocent. It was not her fault that returning to this place had somehow, it seemed, reawakened what lay inside her like a parasite.
He rose. His hands were fists at his sides.
Alba is her own. She is her own. She is her own.
It rolled and unspooled in his mind, humming like an incantation.
“Come, my darling,” the demon purred, its voice vibrating through the heat.
“You could take me in. Let me lend silver to your tongue.” A flash of red through teeth.
“You and me. Think of the power. We could conquer this foul land with bullet and blood.” The demon spat at Bartolomé.
The glob flew through the air and struck him square on the cheek; surprise cut off his voice and let the demon’s fill the chapel: “I anoint you with it,” the demon added, mocking, and spat again.
A blood clot hit his face. Bartolomé swiped it away, but the streak of blood remained.
“In the beginning was the Word!” Bartolomé bellowed.
“Priest of death, priest of pestilence,” the demon spat back, its voice reverberating through the chapel. The air rippled with it. “Priest of filth and rape.”
Bartolomé struck the demon across the face with the Bible.
Alba cried out.
“Stop!” The word broke on a sob. That was her voice. That was her . “Please, stop!”
Bartolomé’s eyes burned fey and wild, as if the cry only stoked his fire. He struck her again.
“Enough!” Elías cried. He lurched forward; someone caught his arm.
Carlos. White, sweating, looking as if he was going to be sick again. He shook, his eyes wide.
“He said to stay back,” he said hoarsely.
“I cast thee out, thou unclean spirit!” Bartolomé roared, raising his right hand like a prophet.
The demon went limp.
The heat in the room vanished. Sweat went clammy on Elías’s back, on his arms.
Carlos relaxed. “Thank God,” he whispered, and babbled it over and over again, clinging to Elías’s arm to support himself rather than to restrain. “She will be delivered.”
Indeed, it appeared so: Bartolomé stood over Alba in the chair, hand outstretched like Moses commanding seas to part, the Bible he had struck her with clutched in his other hand.
Alba’s head hung before her. Hair in her face. Her limbs impotent and slack.
Bartolomé was breathing hard, the rasp of his panting filling the chapel. After a moment, he lowered his hand.
But the hairs on Elías’s neck still stood on end. Something still crackled in the room: the promise of lightning, or distant thunder.
“In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Bartolomé said, more softly this time. He made another sign of the cross over Alba. “Depart and vanish from this creature of God.”
Alba lifted her head.
A gasp slipped from Elías’s lips.
For it was not Alba—it was the demon, its lack of eyes devouring everything in the room. The ropes that had bound Alba went slack, and in a single, swift motion, they rearranged as if at the demon’s command.
Into a noose.
“Stop talking,” the demon rasped, “or she dies.”
The rope tightened. Its end lifted.
Elías thrust Carlos off his arm.
“For it is He who commands thee,” Bartolomé thundered. “He who ordered thee cast down from the heights of Heaven—”
Alba let out a strangled cry. Her body lifted from the chair; though her face was still the demon’s, she was clawing at her throat.
This was not enough. It was clear from the first time Elías recited the Fatiha and the Lord’s Prayer that religion helped, it did, it had some power against the monster within Alba, but it was not enough .
Another thundering voice joined with Bartolomé’s; it overpowered it, it filled his head.
It was his own.
I move with quicksilver.
Years in Almadén drew his life’s string taut, awaiting the sharp shears of the Fates.
The bowels of the mine were filled with fumes of evaporating mercury.
The punishment was not the work but the poison he breathed, the poison he drank, the poison he touched, the poison he still touched every day in the incorporadero, running his fingers through mud-thick slurry.
Quicksilver had always been his psychopomp, omnipresent as a loyal dog, watching and waiting for the moment to bring him into the land of the dead.
Now, it would be his weapon.
It is the road to me.
It was a direct path, a conduit, to the power of the gleaming shrine in the mountain. To the horror within that even the demon seemed to fear.
Incantations from El Libro de San Cipriano flowed from him like a spring with the stones cleared away: clear, fluid, without effort, without him even trying to remember them. His skin burned, his lungs burned—all of him burned with a searing, metallic heat, white and untouchable.
Alba lowered.
Elías surged forward, shoving Bartolomé out of the way. Shouting behind him; no one could touch him. He was wholly focused on Alba, on the demon that flickered in and out of her body, on its foul hands clutching the rope.
He seized the rope around Alba’s throat and rent it. It snapped in two. Alba fell into the chair, neck and limbs limp. Red marks blistered her throat.
A shadow rose behind her like a plume of smoke. It coalesced, darkened; a skull formed out of the smoke.
It grinned at Elías.
“Stronger than I thought,” the demon rumbled.
Wisps of smoke reached out and stroked his cheek.
Elías shuddered, bile scorching the back of his throat.
“Would you like to play? Come, let’s bargain.
Borrow some of my power. All it takes is a drop of blood and a promise from those pretty lips, and we can both get what we want.
You blast that foul priest and his pathetic lackey off the face of the earth.
Blacken this mine. Blacken them all. Destroy everything and run away with your woman. Isn’t that what you want?”
Elías’s heart pounded. It was eerily silent, as if the chapel, the others, everything, had faded away. Even Alba felt distant, though she was slumped in the chair before him.
The demon was weak. It needed him.
And he would not play nice.
“I want you gone,” Elías growled, and he thrust his hands into the smoke.
Smoke turned to bone beneath his hands, a skull beneath his fingers. It burned his skin, but he seized it harder, he held it even as its jaw worked and snapped, as a tongue shot through teeth and reached for him.
Foul breath washed over him; still water, rotten mine. Gnashing teeth.
“Leave this woman,” he commanded. A swell of a wave beneath his feet, crashing and rushing through his poisoned veins. “Begone and stay gone.”
He flung the skull as hard as he could through the smoke.
It struck the floor and shattered.
The ground bucked.
“Earthquake!” Carlos cried, and suddenly, Elías was in the chapel, flung to his knees before Alba. His jaw caught her knee; his teeth clashed together. He cursed.
The world stilled.
His heart beat. He breathed. He lifted his head.
“Alba?” he said. Put a hand on her knee. She slumped over one arm of the chair.
He forced himself to his feet, though his legs trembled, and gently lifted her so that she sat upright. Her head lolled onto her chest.
Was she breathing?
His fingers found the soft skin of her wrist, seeking her pulse. For a long moment, too long, too fucking long , nothing happened.
Then: a beat.
Relief flooded him. Her chest rose and fell. She lived. She would be all right.
He wanted to gather her into his arms and cradle her to his chest, to sweep her away from this torment.
He couldn’t, not before Bartolomé and Carlos, whom he became aware of again as their footsteps approached. He wanted to shove them away from Alba, to protect her from them. His ribs could crack from the ache of it.
“What on earth…?” Carlos whispered hoarsely.
Elías shot him a sharp look, but Carlos was not looking at him.
He and Bartolomé were looking at the floor around Elías and Alba. At the black marks that scored the ground around the chair.
At Elías’s hands, which he had quickly lifted off Alba at the others’ approach.
His fingertips were blackened, as if he had run them through soot. A soft smoke rose from them.
What had he done?