Chapter 13
Ygnacio
I feel. I feel.
I am round and full and heavy as a cloud about to burst. I have not felt this delicious in decades. I can feel limbs coalescing as I crawl to the back of my lair, in the hollow, empty skull of the house. In the darkness, I collapse in on myself, quivering beneath the delicious sense of weight.
I slumber.
Heaviness pins me to the floorboards; I wake with a start, for I can feel the floorboards beneath my body. Their hardness. Their grooves. They creak as I shift and lift myself.
Hands. I see hands on the floor.
Flex, I think.
They do. Tendons pop against skin. White scars line fingers and thumb, familiar scars that return every time.
Knees press into the floorboards. I rock back on my heels; vertigo swoops through my head like a bird diving off the face of the mountain.
Goose bumps rise over my skin. I relish the ripple of muscle and flesh, the taste of chill that runs down my back.
I am present. I am here.
I always have been, since the walls of la Casa de las Gardenias were raised, since mortar was spread and stones were laid in the foundation of this cursed house.
I have watched the del Valles from the moment they set foot on the earth of this mountain.
It has been my punishment to keep watching them, for years, for decades, for centuries, as all that is good in this land is trampled and dies, as the rains come and go, as time bleeds through the halls of this house like a slaughtered pig.
I shift my weight. Lift one foot and place it firmly on the floor. I test it, then lift my weight onto the other foot.
I rise. A hot curl of chispa unfurls in my chest, a golden roar of life.
From a different corner of the house, I feel the attention of the others lift. They catch a whiff of me, of what I have accomplished, and shake off their slumber at once.
My kin in damnation. I know they ache for the taste of life, as I once did. Beasts of hunger and lust, they rumble, restless. I imagine their dark, fanged mouths dripping with saliva.
“Are you hungry?” I whisper. My voice. It cracks like a boy’s; I wet my lips and raise it. “Do you wish to feed?” My eyes sting with a sudden wetness, hot enough to make me blink, for a man’s voice, almost, falls on my ears. Fossilized since the rockfall, unchanging, human. My own.
Yes, they hum. They whimper and cry; they are a thousand voices in one, my kin, and they are famished. Yesssss.
“It won’t be long,” I say. Not for them, and not for me, either. “Not long at all.”