Chapter XXXII
XXXII
Elías
Elías lay on his back on the cold floor.
Floor was, perhaps, a generous term; it was hard-packed dirt, and it had the chill of the earth in winter.
It seeped up through his bones and into his throbbing skull.
His hands were bound before him and his feet at the ankles, but he could roll onto his side and press his throbbing cheek to the dirt.
A shift of liquid in his nose; it was bleeding. That he could tell without looking.
After everything he had done—communicating with an unholy, terrifying power that some called goddess , performing occult rituals, challenging a demon—he could not loosen rope around his wrists.
His hands had tingled from bloodlessness; now, they had settled into a dull throb.
He doubted he would be able to feel them at all soon.
All he had wanted was to come, get rich, and leave. And here he was. All because he was too soft to let a woman suffer.
His greed had failed him. Was that not the true downfall of a Monterrubio? To be presented with riches—and all the security and freedom that entailed—and choose a woman instead?
Would he die for that choice?
A gentle thump of metal against wood at the door. He squinted through the gloom; a shadow appeared at the side of the door, then yawned wider as the door opened with a pained creak.
Long black hair falling into a pale, thin face; a white nightdress, wrists red with blood…and a knife clutched in one hand.
Alarm struck him like a flash flood. If he hadn’t been prone on the ground, he might have jumped back with a cry.
But when she slipped inside and shut the door, it was her commanding her movements.
He swore it was true. It was not the jerky, agitated steps of the demon that brought her across the room and to his side.
She fell to her knees smoothly. Her face was her own.
Her voice, when she began to exclaim at his state, was her own.
The blood on her was fresh.
Dread pooled anew in his belly.
“How did you get here?” he asked.
“There has to be something sharper than this in here,” Alba muttered, working with the knife at the knots in the rope that bound his wrists.
Her face lacked color; her cheeks looked drawn and exhausted.
She had grown thinner in the weeks since he first saw her in Zacatecas, and never had it been more apparent than now: Her cheekbones were too sharp, the bones of her chest pressing against her skin as if they were determined to emerge.
It was as if the demon’s skeleton and Alba’s flesh were fusing, becoming inseparable, but no, that could not be. He would separate them. He would.
“Ha!” With a cry of victory, Alba yanked on the rope binding his wrists. Blood rushed to his digits with stiffening pins and needles; he grimaced as he shook his hands out.
She immediately set to work on his ankles. Her fingertips, too, were splattered with darkening blood.
His stomach turned.
“How did you escape?” he asked.
“Acapulco,” Alba said, ignoring the question. “Someone is getting horses for us. If we rush, we can make the fleet, can’t we?”
“We need supplies,” he said, heart picking up speed. They weren’t getting out of this, were they? It couldn’t be real. She couldn’t actually be here, dressed in nothing but a bloodied nightgown, talking about fleeing tonight. This had to be a dream.
Let it not be a nightmare.
Alba rose sharply and whirled, looking about the room.
“There has to be something sharp in here—” Her gaze caught on a shelf.
When she sprang for it, the movement set his stiffening muscles crying to life—that was a predator’s movement, and it was unlike her.
He set to working the rope at his ankles himself.
He could not be bound if the demon seized her.
It would be a death sentence.
If only they had time. Privacy. What he was able to accomplish in the chapel had brought her so close to freedom he could taste it. In a perfect scenario, they would leave this place without the demon. Flee everything. Be truly free.
This was not a perfect scenario. But it might just work.
“Yes, perfect,” Alba hissed. She turned on him, a hoof pick in one hand, a fey light in her eye.
The movement was too quick; Elías fought the urge to fling himself back from her. Who was guiding her body now? Whose idea was it to flee?
He searched her face, but there was no sign of the skull.
Could he trust her?
He had to. He was laid out before her, vulnerable, as unable to defend himself as she had been when he bound her with ropes the other night.
Until he was unbound, he had to trust that she was in command of her body.
And that no fresh blood would thicken the patchy coating already on her raw, rope-bitten wrists.
His pulse quickened as she raised the hoof pick; his imagination supplying vivid, gruesome images of how the tool could be lifted up high overhead and brought down toward the soft flesh of his eyes—
Though his heart remained at the well of this throat, thrumming like a panicked rabbit’s, all she did with the hoof pick was work at the knot. She pried rope loose. They were almost free, almost—
The door creaked a second time.
His heart stopped when Carlos stepped into the room.
No. No, it was not fair, Elías was almost on his feet. He could fight, he could—
Carlos did not look surprised to see Alba in here, working at freeing Elías’s bindings. He held a burlap bag that was lumpy with items. A thick sarape was thrown over one arm.
His stance, on second glance, did not read attack , no…
Carlos had helped Alba? There was no other explanation: Carlos watched, waiting, as Alba unwound the rope from Elías’s ankles with a pleased, victorious sound and helped him to his feet.
“There are two horses saddled in the stable aisle,” Carlos said, his voice low. “Supplies in bags on their saddles. Here.” He tossed the bag he held to Elías; when he caught it, it was heavier than he anticipated and hit his chest with a metallic sound.
Silver.
“Give my name at Casa Alfonso in Acapulco. They’ll charge the room to my account,” Carlos said, putting a pair of women’s boots on the ground and handing the sarape to Alba, who immediately dropped her thin rebozo and yanked the thicker wool over her head.
She reached for the boots and thrust her feet into them, barely stooping to tie them.
“I’ll do my best to direct everyone here to search in the capital. ”
Alba and Elías followed Carlos. Elías’s feet could barely feel the ground beneath them—they were sharp with blood rushing back into them but also weightless with disbelief.
He caught the bridle Carlos tossed him and quickly put it on the larger of the two horses. Carlos helped Alba mount the smaller horse—a bay mare, one Elías did not recognize, perhaps one of her family’s horses.
“Hurry,” she hissed at Elías.
Carlos had turned to leave; Elías caught him by the elbow. “Why are you helping?”
Carlos shrugged his hand off roughly.
“I don’t think I like you,” he said, tone acrid, “but I don’t want to watch you die.”
First María Victoriana, then Carlos. Why did people keep saying that to him?
“Now get the hell out of here,” Carlos said as Elías mounted. A shadow of grief crossed his face as he lifted a hand in farewell to Alba.
“Vaya con Dios,” he said.
He turned away rather than watch them leave.
—
Heels to hide; a snap of leather reins. The clatter of shod hooves on stone. They were off like phantoms in the night.
Elías barely remembered the way they came into Mina San Gabriel, but there was only one way out, and his horse seemed to know it well enough.
Once out of sight of the valley, he brought them to a trot, listening for any sign that they were being followed.
The moon was high and cast long, gray shadows; the ground and the mountains around them seemed doused in molten silver.
They had supplies, money, horses, a destination. It was his to ruin.
He would not . He was not going to fuck up this one chance they had.
Not when the mirage of Alba in the azoguería lingered in the back of his mind, thickening like mist: the shine of sunlight on her cheeks, the luster in her dark eyes as she wondered about Constantinople.
How she had practically trembled with longing at the thought of a new world. A new chance.
They could have it all. All they had to do was run.
A gasp from behind him. A panicked, strangled sound.
He wrenched around in his saddle, tightening the reins to slow his horse. “Alba?”
His gut soured at the sight. She was a marionette drenched in moonlight, at the mercy of a mad puppeteer.
Her arms were not her own but twisted at wrong angles.
Her head jerked to one side, then to the other, then back, her throat white and exposed to him.
Her horse had stalled but trembled as if it was preparing to bolt.
Alba’s jaw opened wide, wider than it should, dropping down until her face seemed to be nothing but maw and a red tongue.
“Not now ,” Elías snapped.
Not if he had anything to do with it.
He dismounted and, keeping his horse’s reins in one hand, lunged toward the mare.
If he did not seize her bridle now, she would be gone, and they would be lost. The mare tossed her head up.
Gravel crunched beneath her hooves as she backed away from Elías, her nostrils flaring, her ears flat to her skull.
“ Shh ,” he hushed. It was pointless to try to communicate calm through body language; he felt no calm, the mare felt no calm. There was no lying about it either way. “Be still.”
One step closer. One last reach, and Elías grasped the reins.
The demon flung Alba’s body from the saddle.
She struck the ground. Instead of collapsing there in a heap of limbs, she skidded toward the edge of the road as if dragged by a great force.