Chapter 37
Minerva
I slept in starts and snatches, my dreams cluttered with garbled conversations and frissons of color.
Senora Encarnación surveyed playing pieces in her cupped palm, peering at them over the rim of her glasses as if they were tarot cards.
Chita wrote about you, crooned the Viceroy, looking at a favored dog.
You were different from the others. Footsteps echoed behind me as I took the stairs to Senora Encarnación’s suite.
The crack of gunshots; the lilt of piano music from the ballroom.
Filomena, fallen, her livery dark with the grass’s damp.
Mamá’s amulet, Arnulfo said; he was standing in the garden of Casa Azafrán, his inside-out jacket stark and sharp against the green, and I was racing, racing, racing through the kitchen to get to the door and shut it before the others saw him, but the harder I ran, the farther away it drew, until it was so small that Arnulfo vanished from sight.
A cold brush against my cheek startled me awake.
I rose and stretched, my aching muscles protesting every move.
Ironic, that the objects that haunted my dreams for nights at a time did not visit as I slept right next to them. The three sarcophagi loomed before me. From my vantage point, sitting on the floor, surrounded by blankets, they seemed twice as tall as I was.
“It’s time?” I asked Ygnacio.
“Nearly,” he said.
I stood. In the end, all I had to do was this: tighten the amulet at my wrist and open the sarcophagi. Ygnacio would do the work of corralling his kin downstairs to the ballroom, where they would find Octaviana, the Viceroy, and his men and the other guests.
Once Ygnacio ensured they were happily gorging themselves, he and I would flee the house. He would chaperone me as far as he could, and from there?
I would go alone.
I took a deep breath to steady myself. Ygnacio’s regard traced over my face like lingering fingers of mist.
“I’m not saying goodbye to you,” I said. “I already have.”
“I haven’t.” His voice was soft as cobwebs. It faded into silence. When I stepped toward the sarcophagi, he interrupted: “Goodbye.”
Cold snaked down my forearm to my wrist. To my palm. I missed the days when he was corporeal, when I could shove him against a tree and hold a knife to his throat. It would be nice to hold someone’s hand now.
“It’s been different with you here…” He trailed off.
My throat tightened.
“Different in a good way.”
“I’ll come back,” I rasped. “And I’ll burn this place to the ground.”
I stepped forward and set my palms on the first sarcophagus lid.
“Say when,” I said firmly.
And, after a long pause, he did.
I braced my feet. I gathered the strength of my shoulders, and—with all the anger and all the broken, hot pieces in my chest—I pushed.
First the head of the sarcophagus, then the feet, then the head again. Stone groaned as the lid slid inch by inch. Even in the gloom, the darkness within the sarcophagus had a different sheen to it. It was ink. It swallowed any light.
A low, rumbling growl rose from within.
My amulet was a very slim thing, wasn’t it?
I went to the next sarcophagus and shoved its lid open. My arm and back muscles screamed in protest, but still I pushed.
For me. For Arnulfo. For Filomena. For me.
Senora Encarnación wasn’t watching. She would never know.
Perhaps, if she knew, she would think me a traitor to the del Valles and shake her fist at me.
Turncoat, she might say, but I knew this: I was not a weakling.
I would not be knocked off the board, not when I still had this move left.
The game wasn’t over until every one of my pieces was dead, Hound and Mouse alike.
And even then, the dead would have fight left in them.
I gave a final shove to the third sarcophagus lid.
Iciness, not from Ygnacio’s touch, spilled liquid down my spine, lifting every hair on my body in its wake.
I stumbled back from the sarcophagi as three clouds belched forth, billowing toward the slanted ceiling like smoke.
Sulfur stung my nostrils; gleaming snatches of teeth and claws caught my eye in the gloom.
They were looking at me. I could taste their saliva on the air; I felt their hunger rippling toward me with grasping, long-taloned hands.
The first among them spoke.
It was a long, low call, closer to the raspy growl of a puma than human speech.
“She is not for eating,” Ygnacio agreed.
“Downstairs,” I said. “Go down.”
“Follow me,” Ygnacio crooned.
With a bite of electricity on the air like a gathering storm, Ygnacio and his kin melted through the floor and were gone.
I leaned forward and peered into the sarcophagi.
The insides were carved with stylized images of suns. Seven setting suns, arching around where a head would rest.
Three skeletons, gray and desiccated, lay against the stone. Their ribs were shattered, crushed into their spines; their long legs were dislocated from pelvis and feet. They seemed human, until I saw their skulls.
Long canines extended over lower teeth, tusklike in their prominence; knobs of bony growths lined their jaws.
The first scream was faint. Then it rose. It pierced high and true through the levels of la Casa de las Gardenias.