Chapter 4 Blood and Bargains
Blood and Bargains
The world outside vanished the moment Nanay Rosita’s hand closed around Lina’s arm and pulled her over the threshold.
The door swung shut behind her not with a click, but with a soft, final thud, like a stone being placed over the mouth of a tomb.
It sealed off the familiar chorus of the barangay, replacing it with a silence that pressed against Lina’s eardrums. The air inside was a physical presence, dense with the smells of things dried and things burned: sage, crushed ginger root, and something else, something deeper and metallic that reminded her of the taste in her mouth after Ramon had split her lip. It was the scent of old blood.
Her eyes struggled to adjust. The hut’s single room was lit by a constellation of mismatched candles, their flames guttering in some unfelt draft, throwing shadows that writhed on the wooden walls like living things.
The walls themselves were a chaotic scripture, covered in symbols drawn in charcoal and some kind of red clay - spirals that coiled into eyes, jagged lines that looked like lightning trapped in wood, and patterns that seemed to shift and rearrange themselves if she looked at them for too long.
From the low ceiling hung bundles of withered herbs and what looked like bird skulls tied with red thread, swaying gently in the candlelight.
Nanay Rosita released her arm, but the sensation of her grip - dry, strong, proprietary - lingered on Lina’s skin.
The old woman moved toward the center of the room with a slow, deliberate shuffle, her small, hunched frame seeming to absorb the light rather than reflect it.
She settled herself on a low stool before a table carved from a single, dark slab of wood.
“Sit, anak,” Rosita said. The word, a term of endearment, sounded alien in this space.
But her voice… it was the voice from the market, only amplified in the confines of the hut.
A low, raspy whisper formed the words, but beneath it, another layer resonated, a guttural hum that seemed to vibrate up from the floorboards and into the base of Lina’s skull.
It was a voice that had lived more than one life.
Lina’s legs felt disconnected from her body, but they obeyed. She sank onto a stool opposite the mangkukulam, her knees bumping against the rough edge of the table. Her hands found each other in her lap, fingers twisting together so tightly her knuckles ached.
Rosita paid her no mind for a long moment.
Instead, her attention was fixed on the objects she began to arrange on the tabletop.
She drew them from a worn leather pouch, placing each one down with the reverence of a priestess handling sacred relics.
There were a dozen of them. A piece of coral, bleached white but for a dark stain that filled its porous surface like dried ink.
A shard of what looked like human bone, yellowed and polished smooth by countless hands.
A single, curved tooth, its root wrapped in tarnished silver wire.
A river stone, worn into the shape of a sleeping bird.
Each object was unique, yet they shared a common feature: in the cracks and crevices of each, a dark, crusted residue clung stubbornly.
Lina found she could not look away from those stains. She knew, with a certainty that bypassed thought and settled deep in her gut, that it was blood.
“They are like you,” Nanay Rosita said, her strange, doubled voice pulling Lina’s gaze up from the macabre collection.
The old woman’s eyes were black pits in her wrinkled face, reflecting the candlelight as two tiny, dancing flames.
“All of the women who held these. They came to this hut, or one just like it, with the same ache in their bones. The same marks on their skin.”
As Rosita spoke, her gnarled fingers caressed the polished bone shard. “This one belonged to a woman from the time of the Spanish. Her husband was a guardia civil. He liked to show her how strong he was. He broke her fingers, one by one, when his supper was not to his liking.”
Lina’s breath caught in her throat. She felt a phantom ache in her own hands, remembering the sting of the bleach, the raw scrapes on her knuckles from scrubbing the bathroom floor into a state of sterile submission. She curled her fingers into fists.
Rosita’s hand moved to the river stone. “And this… her husband was a fisherman, a good man to the village. But when the drink took him, he would call her a whore. He would tell her she was worthless, that no other man would have her, and he would hold her head under the water in the washing basin until the world went black for her. Just to remind her who gave her air to breathe.”
A tremor started in Lina’s jaw. She thought of Ramon’s voice over the phone, the poison of his suspicion, his accusations that stripped her bare and left her flayed. She unconsciously brought a hand to her own throat, her pulse hammering against her fingertips.
“They came here because the world offered them only two choices,” Rosita continued, her voice dropping, the guttural undertone growing more pronounced. “Suffer in silence, or die. The Sisterhood… we offered them a third.”
The Sisterhood. The words hung in the air, weighted with the history of the objects on the table.
Lina looked at the talismans, and this time she saw not just bone and stone, but faces.
The faces of women she had never met, their stories separated by centuries but united by the same pattern of violence.
The hut was no longer just a cramped, smoky room; it was a sanctuary, a confessional, an armory.
She had walked in here believing her pain was a private, shameful secret.
Now, she understood it was a legacy. She was not the first. The thought brought no comfort, only a vast, cold clarity, and a terror so profound it felt like coming home.
Lina stared at the artifacts, each one a testament to a choice made in desperation. The air in the hut felt thin, as if she were breathing in a history too vast for her lungs. “A third choice?” she whispered, the words barely audible.
Nanay Rosita nodded slowly, her gaze distant, as if she were looking back through a long, dark tunnel of years.
“Our power was not given by any god,” she said, her layered voice weaving a story into the shadows.
“It was taken. Stolen from the heart of this archipelago, from a hunger as old as the tides.”
She began the tale not as a lesson, but as a litany.
In the time of conquest, when strange men raised wooden symbols over our islands, a woman lived whose name we have been forbidden to remember.
The village chief claimed her as wife - his teeth flashed white as daylight when he smiled, but his fists fell like river stones when they closed.
He hung pearls around her throat where tomorrow his fingers would press; he clasped gold at her wrists where tomorrow the bruises would bloom.
Until one night, crawling from their bed with blood in her mouth, she understood she would not survive another dawn.
She dragged herself to where all boundaries blurred - where forest met village, where water met land, where darkness consumed the horizon.
She opened her torn lips and called into that void.
And from that void, something called back.
Rosita’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Not a god. Not a devil. Something older. Something that dwells in the spaces between justice and vengeance.” Her half-closed eyes seemed to look inward at ancient memories.
“It hungers for the fury of wronged women. It thirsts for blood shed by cruel hands. And that first desperate wife? She cut open her palm and spoke into the darkness: ‘Take what flows from me now, and in return, become my weapon.’”
Not a god. Not a devil. The words landed in the quiet of the room with the weight of a corpse. Lina flinched, a cold dread washing through her that had nothing to do with Ramon and everything to do with the infernal thing Rosita was describing.
“The demon is bound by the pact,” the old woman went on, her tone becoming pragmatic, the voice of a teacher explaining an immutable law of physics.
“It comes to answer one summons. It comes to pass judgment and to collect one life. The life of a man who has forfeited his soul through the torment of his wife. Then it must return to the depths after one full season.” She paused, her dark eyes opening fully and pinning Lina to her stool.
“The price is high, anak. Not just in blood, but in the weight your soul must carry. You do not simply ask for a man’s death.
You become the vessel for that request. His end becomes a part of you, forever. ”
Lina’s mind reeled. It was an abomination, a sin so profound she could not grasp its edges. Yet, a venomous tendril of hope unfurled in her chest. An ending. A final, absolute ending. The revulsion warred with a desperate, shameful longing.
As if sensing her conflict, Nanay Rosita reached into the folds of her faded blouse and drew out a thong of woven black cord.
Hanging from it was her own talisman. It was not like the others on the table.
This was a piece of driftwood, blackened as if by fire, with strange, spidery symbols carved into its surface, deeper and more intricate than the charcoal drawings on the walls.
It seemed to suck the candlelight into itself.