Chapter 39
Minerva
“We’ve gotten to the Viceroy and Cirilo and his wife.” One of the other Valbuenistas is shouting over the fray, talking to Arnulfo. “You’re going to want to see this. It’s…it’s fucked up.”
He’s white as a sheet. He looks like he’s seen a ghost.
Some of the gunfire has ceased. There’s so much screaming. My ears are ringing. Arnulfo keeps the rag pressed to my chest.
The gunfire picks up again. I see Leoncio limping toward the door, clutching a blood-soaked leg.
“I need to get her to the medics,” Arnulfo shouts another insurgent.
“We should all get out of here,” the second insurgent says, and he’s looking up now, his eyes bulging out of his head.
Past Arnulfo’s silhouette darkness roils like thunderclouds. Chispa spurts like blood, gleaming lurid against the black.
Arnulfo keeps his head down and slings his arms under my armpits.
“Help me,” he snaps at the other.
The second insurgent snaps to attention. He shudders, as if shaking off a draft. “Yeah, let’s…” His eyes fall on me. A wash of pity rearranges his features. “Oh, boss…”
“I said help me.”
I think I’ve passed out. That must be why I feel as if I’m floating above the two of them, Arnulfo and the other insurgent, as they shout at others to cover them as they carry me to the back door that leads to the terrace.
I am an ungainly load; I swing back and forth as if carried by drunks, but something about it feels soothing.
A crack; Arnulfo ducks, hissing like a wet cat. My chin lolls to the side as the other insurgent ducks, looking around wildly for the source of the shot.
Then he goes down with a cry.
He’s still alive, but he’s clutching his leg and screaming. “Get out of here!”
Arnulfo drags me into the back garden; other Valbuenistas flood out of the ballroom around us. Everything bleeds like ink in water, billowing softly around me. Someone helps lift me into Arnulfo’s arms. They cover him as he stumbles forward. His breath is coming in sharp gasps.
“Medics, medics,” he cries to the insurgents around him. Shots fly around us.
We disperse when we hit the jungle. Some men whistle messages to one another as torches begin to bob through the night behind us. Loyalist guards stationed at the far edges of the grounds are fighting their way back toward the house.
Arnulfo stumbles. He trips. We fall.
I watch myself tumble out of his arms as if from above.
No—I am above.
“Whoa,” I cry, hands flying to my chest.
But my body doesn’t move. It remains where it fell from Arnulfo’s arms, curled in a fetal position in the dark foliage of the jungle. My body looks as if she is asleep, with one arm tucked under my face.
Arnulfo forces himself up onto hands and knees and lunges toward my body.
“Mini?” he cries. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
My chest is wet with blood. I think of the clean hole in the boy’s forehead. His scarred knuckles.
I am apart.
“No, no, no, this can’t happen, this isn’t fair.”
“Ygnacio!” I cry, and there he is: a lanky boy dressed in old-fashioned clothing, racing toward me from the house.
He’s fully corporeal. Did he devour the dying men like his kin?
He seizes me by the shoulders and shakes me. Me—or what is now me.
Somewhere between the ballroom and here, on the jungle floor, a chasm has opened between body and me that makes my stomach drop in horror.
“You need to be buried now,” Ygnacio cries. His eyes are slick and black and panicked. “Properly! Or you’re going to be stuck here forever.”
He points at Arnulfo, who looks up at us, his face white beneath streaks of blood and tears.
“We have to get him to bury you now.”
“Mini?” Arnulfo whipsers, faint at first. Then his voice grows stronger. “Mini? Are you there?”
I sink to my knees next to him.
“I’m here.” But I’m not, not really. I slipped, and I fell, and I’m thousands of years from him, so far away that he stares right through me. I put my hand on his chest.
It passes through.
He shivers.
“I can hear you.” His voice hitches; his chest rises on sharp, staccato breaths. Tears cut through dried blood and mud down his cheeks. “Don’t go. I’m so sorry. Don’t—”
“Shut up and listen.” Ygnacio cuts him off. His words bleed frenetic energy. “This place is cursed,” he explains, “so you need to bury her according to the old ways or she’ll be stuck for eternity. Start digging. I’ll tell you how.”
“He needs to run,” I say, and rise.
I am a piece that has fallen off the playing board. But Arnulfo will get to the end.
Arnulfo wipes his nose on his sleeve. His breathing pulls ragged; one sob gets caught in the next.
“If he stays, he’ll die,” I say. And none of this will have been worth anything. “Stand up.”
Arnulfo staggers to his feet. Torches bob in the night, coming from all directions.
“Go,” I tell him. “Find the others.”
“No,” Ygnacio says to me. “You can’t stay here. It’s torment.”
I put a hand on Arnulfo’s cheek, and my chest cleaves in two. I long for the warmth of his skin. The wet of his tears. His eyelashes—always the world’s envy, so dark and thick—flutter closed.
“I will avenge you,” he whispers in a breaking voice.
“Win,” I say. “And when you do, come back here and burn the house to the ground.”
Machetes swing and thud as they break through undergrowth; shouting and gunfire pass back and forth.
Arnulfo drops to one knee before my body. He places a kiss on my hair.
“I promise,” he says. “I promise.”
He runs.
I watch Arnulfo run and join the insurgents, then they keep retreating down the mountain. I rise through the trees, the crown of my head brushing the canopy as I crane my neck to look. They have reached a system of pulleys and levers—is that how they could come and go so quickly? Fascinating.
“Minerva.”
I am again right by my body’s side. I should feel dizzy; I feel a gentle swipe of vertigo, like a cat pawing a leaf. It subsides.
Ygnacio stands before me, as clear as day. As clear as if he has had his fill of chispa. As if he is alive.
“What now?” he says.
I cast a look past him, at the torches weaving among the trees, at the inevitable march of the Viceroy’s men toward the escaping insurgents.
They would set their pulleys aflame. Wouldn’t they?
The thought sparks anger deep inside me.
And then at once, I unleash: I am darkness, I am pulsing outward, larger, stronger, and when I look down at myself, I discover with unbridled glee that I have claws.
I grin. My teeth feel too big for my mouth, too long, and the thought of their transformation into fangs fills me with bright, trembling delight.
“I have a few ideas,” I say.