Chapter 16
Ygnacio
It always takes a few days to settle into my limbs.
To once again find the rhythm of walking, of running, after years of living in the nooks and crannies of the house.
This cannot be done in la Casa de las Gardenias, no—during the day, I lay aside my body and flit out of the house as a spirit, into the garden and beyond, where the humid embrace of the jungle awaits.
There, I take my body back: forearms, wiry as they were when I gripped pickaxes and laid stones, the eyes of the overseers crawling over my bent spine.
Shoulders, not quite as broad as they might have grown had I lived to full manhood.
Legs that connect me to the earth and the soles of the feet that root me there, firm and grounded.
I walk forward. The cries of brilliant birds wash over me. I lose myself in the chitter of faraway monkeys and the hum of insects. The air is clammy with mist, and my body is cold—I feel cold, for the first time in so many years.
So I run.
And it is as if I become a god.
Roots cannot trip me, not when I am flying like this.
Not when chispa burns in my breast and floods my veins with life.
The hammering of my steps is the drumbeats of priests long dead; the rhythm brings me as close to worship as I can ever come, ruined and wretched as I am.
I fly. Vines sting my arms and face and I do not care. Nothing can stand in my way.
Until I feel it.
A tug, twining around my ribs. A hand curled around my spine—gently at first, then tightening into a fist.
It yanks me to a stop like someone seizing me by the collar of my shirt. I halt, chest heaving, body still itching to be free, to fight its weight and fly. I curl my hands into fists and bring down one foot, hard. But it is an impotent frustration; it cannot become a step forward.
This is as far as we can come, my body and I.
An arc surrounds la Casa de las Gardenias. I have tested its reach and its strength and find the same thing, year after year, no matter how much chispa I have consumed, no matter how fresh and strong I am—even today, when I am hot from feeding and newly reborn, it is as solid as a stone wall.
I spit at the barrier.
My spittle falls in a curving arc. It strikes the humid earth two steps beyond where I stand.
Two steps beyond where I can reach.
This is my torment. My curse.
I once tried to force my way through. Imagine—I could run away from the house, descend the mountain, and return to the valley of my birth. I could finally see what had become of the Capital. I could breathe fresher air, see new sights, be free. Take back what I had been robbed of.
I was newer then. I nursed fanciful hopes. I had not yet learned what was possible in my chispa-flushed state.
I only knew that it felt like being alive.
Jaw gritted, I tightened all my muscles and thrust forward, headfirst—
And I woke in the dust of the fourth floor of the house.
Disembodied. Broken. Sapped of the chispa that had given me the strength to step into the body I once knew.
I only realized how much time had passed when the del Valles I knew from many years of watching the house returned taller, grayer, and with children in tow.
I had slept for decades to regain my strength.
I step back from the barrier. The fist curled around my spine eases. Within seconds, it feels as if I imagined the sensation altogether.
I let my frustration drain away like rain off the roof of the house.
This time, I will not risk it.
Not when I have such opportunity. Not when there are this many occupants in la Casa de las Gardenias, so many opportunities to curl my fingers into nightmares.
I must conserve my strength. Spend it where it matters.
After all, I am not the only spirit in the house who hungers for this simile of freedom that chispa provides. If I am to unleash my monstrous kin, I must not only conserve my strength, but become stronger still.
And so I shed my body and return to la Casa de las Gardenias. I curl into the corners of the ceiling.
The sun sets. Darkness spills through the house, slow and inevitable as blood.
The hunt for chispa requires cunning. Exposed throats and veins are beyond my reach; I can no more strangle a living thing than I can leave the grounds of this cursed house.
I must find a mind to infiltrate and direct.
In this limited, desperate kingdom, I am the petty god of nightmares. I am subtle suggestion woven into the tendrils of sleep, so soft and so natural that when the sleeper wakes, they cannot distinguish my touch from their own thoughts. They step into my will and wear it as their own.
The ones who seek ropes from the carriage house to pull taut.
The ones who seek the creatures and plants of the jungle floor, the brightest and the most poisonously lurid.
They are the ones who creep into the kitchen when the household slumbers around them, slipping the sharpest knives out of the butchery drawers.
This is the only one of my experiments that led to victory. And so I undertake it once again.
Chispa, once hot and fresh, is consumed, and then spent, and then it dies. Twilight closes around me and my kin, and once again, we slumber.
But never for long.
In la Casa de las Gardenias, death is restive.
I descend. I trail over blond curls spread across plush pillows. Gray hair. Dark hair. I sift through silky strands into silkier dreams and test their strength as a spider tests an ambitious length of web. I want threads close to snapping. I want to taste desperation as famished as my own.
There are few heads of short hair in the house. I swirl over one, the only one that rests in a del Valle suite. His skull would shatter like sugar candy beneath my will; already, cracks reach across it like hungry forks of lightning from the first time I wove my will into his dreams.
I pull back. A tool, no matter how pliant, no matter how easily it slips into my grip, is no use to me if it is broken. Or, worse, if their acts are discovered and they are cast out.
I let the del Valles slumber. Their peace will be short-lived.
I turn to the servants’ quarters, where a single waking mind flutters against the darkness.
There, in a cot against one windowless wall, lies the girl who once slept on the third floor. The one who arrived with Octaviana and the crone Encarnación. The one who hears too much. Who sees too much, with those chispa-bright eyes.
She has poked and prodded at the corners of the house. She has lifted her head and looked over her shoulder, seeking me in the dark, when others wouldn’t.
It is not long before she will see more than she should.
The girl curls onto her side. She is weeping. She balls sheets into her fist and forces it against her mouth, trying to stifle the sound.
It is then that I see it: she wears a bracelet made of thread on one wrist. Thread tied with seven knots.
This is why it has been easier to accidentally catch her attention: she senses what lives in the walls of la Casa de las Gardenias.
She continues to cry. Her sobs grow shallower; she shifts again, and wipes tears from her jaw.
Focusing on the seven knots banishes any twinge of pity I feel.
Now that I have gorged on chispa, I am so much stronger than before. No amulets can stand between me and my prey, not anymore. I can still crawl into her mind.
My kin are restless in their confinement. I can taste their hunger in the air like I can taste the saltpeter anticipation of a lightning strike. It’s alive, more alive than any other creature in this cursed house.
The last time they were freed, they swept through the house like a plague, ravenous, devouring the chispa of all they encountered.
When the del Valles in the Capital sent messengers to see why they had not heard from the del Valles on the mountain in weeks, all they found were husks. It was a plague, they said.
A weapon to which I hold the trigger. All I need is to be strong enough to pull it.
I brace myself. I build energy in myself as I once did to burst through the barriers surrounding la Casa de las Gardenias.
And when the moment is right, when the sleeping thoughts that swirl beneath my fingertips like a pulse pause and take a breath, I plunge in.