Chapter XXXII #2
She rose too quickly. Too jerkily. Her forearms and elbows were dark with blood and gravel; her nightdress and sarape were torn by rocks.
She turned to retrace their path to Mina San Gabriel.
Elías had the reins of both horses in his hands; he could not let them drop, not when one threatened to bolt. He could not lose Alba either. Jerkily, she made her way up the road, her feet barely touching the dirt. A phantom from a nightmare, moving farther and farther out of his reach.
He was trapped. He was paralyzed. No. He would not remain paralyzed.
Mercury in his blood. Mercury in his lungs. Wherever there was mercury, there was the thrumming power of whatever deity lived in these mountains.
Darkness can only be undone by its like.
He reached for the mercury that ran in his veins. With a chant from El Libro de San Cipriano , he took both reins in his left hand and flung his right toward Alba’s turned back.
“Come back ,” he commanded.
The demon shuddered to a stop. Its whole body trembled violently, but it obeyed him. Pebbles struck against one another from the force of it being pulled toward him. Freedom was at their fingertips. He was not going to let it slip out of his grasp. This demon would not stand in his way.
Then, it whirled.
He expected the skeletal grin, the hollow pits, but his heart never did. It shrieked to a stop against his ribs and throbbed there, hysterical, as he met the demon’s gaze. As the fetid vapor of brimstone rose to his nostrils and reached into his own skull.
“Begone,” the demon growled.
Elías felt it like a blow to the chest. He stumbled a step back before righting himself. He dug his heels in and met the demon’s gaze anew.
“I am not leaving her,” he forced through gritted teeth.
The demon spat at him. A glob of something thick and dark and shining struck the ground at his feet.
“I am sick of you interfering.”
Metal on stone, like a pickaxe pulled agonizingly slow along the wall of a mine tunnel. Elías clenched his teeth; the hairs on his arms stood on end. Alba’s mare whinnied, high and sharp, and she tossed her head again, yanking at his left arm.
“You can’t have her,” he said, annunciating the words clearly and forcefully, feeling heat build in his fingertips as he poured sheer will into each syllable.
Darkness can only be undone by its like.
“Weakling. She is mine.”
She was not. And he could prove it.
He inhaled deeply, and began to sing his mother’s lullaby, the one thing that had soothed her terror in the mine.
The demon tilted Alba’s head to the side, doglike, as if the sharpness of Elías’s breathless notes disturbed it.
It was distracted. As he had planned.
Then, Elías flung out his right hand. His will reached out like an extension of that hand to seize the demon’s throat.
He yanked; the demon batted him away with a furious snarl.
But he did not relent. Once, twice, again.
Finally, he found purchase, though the demon writhed and tried to slip through his grasp, slick as raw meat, but he held on with all his strength, ignoring the squelch of flesh, ignoring the warm drip of blood.
He would not let go.
With all his might, all his will, all the power burning through the mercury in his body, he pulled .
A dark cloud of smoke slipped out of Alba’s body.
It shot across the space between them, as if released by a slingshot, and struck him full in the chest.
Sulfur and smoke. Stinging heat and clouded vision. His organs slipped and rearranged, wiggling as if of their own volition, meat shuddering and soft in all the wrong places in his gut.
He was on his knees. He was crawling forward.
Backward. There was no up, no forward, no down, where was he?
He heard his name; his shoulder struck the ground.
He was clawing at his face. It was in him , it was under his skin, writhing like a thousand snakes.
Beetles scurried over his bones, over his skin, up his nostrils, into his brain and out his eyes—
He balled his right hand into a fist. He would get to Acapulco, so help him God .
He struck the earth. Hard.
Mercury was heavy in his blood. Mercury would seize the demon and wrap it in gleaming chains. That was what he wanted; now he envisioned it happening. He crushed the smoke down; he bound it in a writhing quicksilver cage and locked it there.
Hands on his shoulders. They shook him.
“What did you do?”
Elías gasped for air. Wind struck his face like ice; his cheeks were slick with wet. Sweat or tears. Maybe blood.
Alba bent over him. She searched him for injury, checking his limbs, running warm fingertips over his skin. He shuddered. Moonlight frosted him. Shadows sank into his bones like stone.
He would deal with the consequences of what he had done later. For now, they did not have time to linger.
“Explain later,” he grunted.
“Can you get up?”
He nodded. She took his arm and helped him to his feet; groaning in pain, he found his footing. Mercifully, the horses had not fled.
Claws rent at the inside of his face.
Weakling, weakling, I will suck your marrow—
Shut up , he snarled.
He shunted the voice to the side.
He walked with Alba to her horse. His limbs were numb, barely his own, as if he were feeling them through several layers of thick, rough cloth.
Alba tossed her mare’s reins over the horse’s neck. Elías interlaced his fingers and held his hands out to Alba, then assisted her into the saddle.
He felt as if there were a thick veil between him and the world, thicker than drink, thicker than opium. He shook his head. Bit the inside of his cheek. Pain would bring clarity, wouldn’t it?
It brought metallic warmth to his tongue. That was it.
“Ready?” he said to Alba. “We need to make up lost time.”
She nodded, gathering her reins.
One step at a time. The road to Acapulco was long. Once they were out of the mountains and found a place to rest and lick their wounds, he could assess their situation and decide what to do next about the demon that he now carried in his own breast.
Alba gasped; he turned.
A horse had emerged from the side of the road, careening down the side of the mountain. A dark figure flung its leg over the horse’s side and dismounted before the horse even came to a stop, and now stood between Elías and his own horse.
Padre Bartolomé drew a long knife from beneath his clothes and shifted his stance. He was crouched, on the offensive.
“In the name of God,” he said, “you go no farther.”