12

12

BACK UP.” ANDRÉS’S VOICEpitched with fear; his hand tightened on mine as he fell back a step. “Slowly.”

A rush of shadows swept from behind us. The keys at my waist rang like wind chimes; the candle’s flame bent forward. I wanted him to let go of my hand so I could cup it around my flame. It licked upward, fighting as desperately as if it were being suffocated. As if the air in the hall were too close for it to be able to breathe.

Then it went out.

A low no escaped Andrés’s mouth as darkness fell over us.

“Back to the parlor,” he said. “I face back; you face forward.”

We moved as one, our backs against each other, facing the darkness. We had no copal. No weapons to defend ourselves. Nothing to shield us from whatever it was that seethed inside the house, whatever it was that pursued us like the weakened prey we were.

There was no candlelight. Only Andrés’s hand crushing mine. It was not enough. Not when the house was all around us. There was no running from it; there was only running deeper into its bowels, and the cold pulling at my legs like mud as we fought toward the parlor where we had left the copal.

I relied on memory to carry me to the fork in the hall, past the staircase, too terrified to reach out to the walls and feel my way forward, for what if they crumbled beneath my touch and revealed new horrors? It was becoming difficult to lift my feet, difficult to breathe, as if something heavy were pushing on my chest. The cold, the dark, was heavy, so heavy . . .

A girlish laugh lilted toward us from the direction of the collapsed wall, faint and wavering, as if carried on a breeze from far away.

Juana, the laughter called, birdlike and thin. Juana.

“Go, go.” Andrés picked up speed, forcing me forward into the dark. His hold on my hand was so firm I could barely feel my fingers. My feet knew the way, and carried us into the main hall, past the dining room . . .

Juana, Juana. . .

The door of the parlor was shut, though we had left it open. I reached for the handle—it was locked. Of course. God damn this house.

Andrés collided with me, pushing me against the door. My teeth jarred against one another and I cried out as my candle fell to the floor. It cracked against the stone floor and rolled away in pieces.

“Carajo,” Andrés said. “I’m so sorry, I—”

Juana. Less faint now. It was following us, dropping in pitch, becoming less singsong, less girlish. Its ring was dissonant, setting my teeth on edge. Juana.

It drew closer.

“Can you open it?” Andrés’s breathing came in rough gasps. My heart throbbed in my throat as I fumbled with the key; finally, we fell forward into the dark room. Andrés slammed the door shut behind us with his shoulder.

The copal sputtered out. All the candles were extinguished. He released my hand. “Lock the door. I’ll light candles.”

He didn’t have to ask me twice. I did so, then followed him as he stumbled forward into the room.

There is nothing more beautiful than the sound of match against paper, the sharp spark of amber and gold, the small crackle of a wick taking flame.

My body shook uncontrollably as I lowered myself to my knees next to the first three candles. He lit ten or eleven in all, his movements sharp with fear as he scattered the thick tallow candles about the room to illuminate every corner. When he was done, he turned his attention to the three copal censers. He placed two on either side of me and the third between us and the door. Then he sat at my right side, breathing heavily, legs pulled to his chest so he could rest his chin on his knees—mirroring how I sat.

His hands trembled.

Slowly, smoke rose from the censers, filling the air with the sharp spice of copal. Andrés sat so close to me our arms brushed.

I was not alone. His presence calmed my racing heart. I was not alone.

Andrés drew a long, shaky breath. “I . . . I did not expect that.”

His attention was fixed on the door. Beads of sweat were drying on his brow.

“I told you.” The words slipped from my mouth before I could stop them.

“And I believed you.” His shoulders tensed as a shudder went down his back. “But it is one thing to believe. It is another to see.”

We sat in silence, staring at the door. Watching the copal curl toward the ceiling. Slowly, my heartbeat returned to its normal pace.

“I will stay here for the rest of the night,” Andrés said softly. “Whenever you are ready, you may leave to sleep. I will be safe.”

“You think I’m leaving this room?” The indignant pitch of my voice made him jump. “You might be safe, but may I remind you which direction I have to walk to go upstairs? Would you want to walk that way alone?”

The shadows made his frown seem deeper than it was. “I could escort you.”

“No,” I said firmly. I don’t want to be alone. “I’m staying here.”

He shifted, tightening his hold around his knees. He kept his gaze fixed on the door. He was uncomfortable about something; that much was clear.

“If this is about spending the night in a room with a woman,” I said, “I might remind you that I am married, and moreover am your host in this horrible place, and therefore I decide what is appropriate or not.”

His head snapped to me in surprise. “Cielo santo, no, doña,” he said, having the infuriating decency to look scandalized. “I beg your pardon. It is only that . . .” He let the thought trail off as he worried his lower lip, as his eyes skipped again to the door. He was weighing something, deciding whether to speak further. Whether or not to allow me to stay.

He had to let me stay. Surely he understood what it felt like to be alone in this house. Shadows curled around our small halo of light, reaching for him like tendrils of cloying mist; it was as if they deepened in his presence, grew more alive.

He let out his breath with a hoarse curse, then those long legs stretched out, and he rose to his feet. “If you wish to stay, I must ask that you not tell the other priests . . . anything,” he said sharply. “Especially Padre Vicente. Do you understand?”

“Padre Vicente?” I repeated. The demand—for it was clear from his tone it was a demand, albeit couched in polite language—caught me off guard. “I could tell him anything and he wouldn’t believe me.” I could honestly picture myself declaring the sky is blue to his overfed, red-cheeked face, only to see his eyes widen, his jowls tremble as he reached for a pen to write to my husband to control his hysterical wife.

Andrés looked down at me, somber and unamused. Then his attention flitted to the door. Whatever he had heard, it was enough to tip the scales of his silent debate. He patted his trousers pocket as if searching for something then drew out a piece of charcoal.

Rolling the charcoal between forefinger and thumb, he turned away from me and began to count his paces from the first copal censer to the one before the door. “Siete, ocho, nueve . . .” He crouched, made a mark on the floor, and straightened. He counted again. Crouched, marked, rose. His steps were measured, mathematical, as he sketched a circle of precise markings into the floor around where I sat. Then he picked up a censer and retraced his steps, pacing the circumference of the circle, his stride measured and controlled, murmuring under his breath.

It took me several moments to realize he was not speaking castellano at all. The language was silky, sinuous as the copal that curled around him in thick plumes. I had heard it many times since coming to San Isidro, spoken among the tlachiqueros and their families.

Candlelight danced on the high points of Andrés’s face like sunlight on water; incantations wove through the smoke with the lazy grace of a water snake.

He is a witch.

The thought rang in my mind clear as the toll of a church bell.

I shook my head to dismiss it. No. That was impossible. Padre Andrés was a priest.

He finished the incantation, crouched on the ground, and began drawing more geometric shapes. Finally, he set the charcoal down and retrieved a small object from somewhere in the black fabric of his habit.

A sharp pocketknife glinted wickedly in the candlelight as he flicked it open and pricked his thumb with its tip.

I gasped.

A large bead of blood bloomed beneath the knife’s point. Without missing a beat, Andrés lowered his hand to the floor and smeared the blood through one of the geometric shapes. Then he pocketed the knife and drew out a handkerchief to staunch the blood.

He lifted his eyes to mine, his expression defiant. As if he were daring me to speak the words that he knew were on the tip of my tongue.

“You’re a witch,” I breathed.

He nodded. Once, solemnly.

“But you’re a priest.”

“Yes.”

He stood, cocking his head to the side as he evaluated the markings he had made on the floor. Then his eyes flicked back to my face. If he had been waiting for an exclamation of fear or any other sort of reaction from me, he received none. I was struck dumb.

You’ve never met a priest like him before.

“What are you thinking?” he challenged.

“I find it odd that a witch would become a priest,” I said flatly.

This answer surprised a bark of laughter from him, its texture low and throaty. “Is there any vocation more natural for a man who hears devils?”

Hairs lifted on the back of my neck. I should be afraid of him. I should be. People were meant to be afraid of witches.

But a quiet as soft as dawn fell within the circle. The air felt lighter, calmer. The flames of the candles drank it greedily and danced high, reaching for and illuminating the witch’s throat as he turned his head and narrowed his eyes at the door.

“But the Inquisition . . .” I began.

“I feared it, yes. But it has left México.” Andrés made a soft, dismissive noise. Though the tension in his shoulders had not relaxed, his movements resumed their natural, languid pace as he adjusted the position of the copal censers. “I don’t know if inquisitors even sought people like me,” he said thoughtfully. “Their purpose was to destroy political rivals. Control people who stepped out of line, like mystics and heretics. They never found me.”

He picked up the charcoal and moved to another part of the circle to resume sketching. His intent, I now saw, was to make a thick band of marks around us.

Like the glyphs on the inside of the kitchen doorway.

“Is Ana Luisa a witch?”

“You’re thinking of the kitchen. No.” He never looked up from his work. The wax surrounding the wick of the candle nearest to me had liquefied, and a thick droplet of it rolled lazily down the candle’s side. There was a judgmental note on his voice, and a harsh one, as he continued. “She knows these are meant to have power. She also knows that she isn’t capable of doing it correctly. It was dangerous. She should have known better.”

“Why?” I asked.

The stroke of his charcoal slowed; paused. Perhaps he caught himself speaking too much. Perhaps he realized fear had loosened his tongue and created an intimacy between us that should not be there, that I was not to be trusted with this information, for he raised his head sharply. “You won’t tell anyone. You can’t,” he said. “Swear you won’t.”

“As if Padre Vicente would believe me,” I said dryly, but the joke fell flat between us.

“If he were to learn of this”—here Andrés made an expansive circular gesture with one long arm—“he would send me away. To Spain, to a prison, I don’t know or care. The people here need me. The war left scars. It left demons. It broke people.” Fervor hardened his voice. “They need to be listened to, they need to be heard, and there are things they can’t speak about with the other priests.”

“Because they don’t speak that language?”

“Mexicano? That matters less,” Andrés said. “Neither can I, not anymore. I lost it as a child.” To my questioning look, he added: “I memorized what my grandmother taught me. I mean that the other priests . . . they’re rich men from the capital and Guadalajara. They cannot speak the language of the people’s troubles. They can’t see what I am, and it must stay that way. Apan, San Isidro . . . this is my home. I know these people. Their wives are like my mother, their sons my brothers. I know. And I listen.”

He returned to where he had been sitting next to me, crossing his long legs. Then, there in the center of a witch’s circle, he drew a rosary from his pocket. The silver face of la Virgen winked in the candlelight as the centerpiece slid past his graceful fingers.

Truly, I had never met a priest like him before.

“I promise,” I whispered. “I swear I won’t say a word. Thank you. For this. For believing me.”

“You didn’t even need to speak for me to believe you,” he said. His attention on the door was now watchful rather than fearful as his fingers moved from bead to bead with a meditative rhythm. “Your face said it all. And then walking through the door . . . I didn’t plan to resort to this”—his slight nod at the circle around us indicated this was the dark glyphs—“but in all my years cleansing sickened homes, I have never faced anything like that.” His voice trailed off for a moment, as if caught and held captive by a memory. “How much have you been able to sleep recently?”

My laughter was dry, its sensation foreign and hoarse in my throat. Perhaps I could count the hours, no more than a handful a night since Rodolfo left . . . nine days ago? Ten? “Does the answer ‘I haven’t’ suffice?”

“Here.” He reached for one of the blankets I laid out earlier and passed it to me. “I’ll keep watch.”

My fingers sank into the thick wool. I could allow myself to fall, to give in to the silence, while someone else stood watch. The peace of being inside the circle enveloped me like mist, cool and soothing. Sleep. The idea of it was so intoxicating that I didn’t care that it meant sleeping next to a man who was not my husband, whom I had only met a few days ago.

A man who was a witch.

I bunched part of the blanket into a pillow and curled onto it like a cat settling before a warm hearth.

It was so quiet that I could hear the crackle of wicks bearing their flames, the brush of Andrés’s calloused fingertips over the beads of his rosary. His voice was a low, steady hum.

I was not alone.

Between one Hail Mary and the next, I slipped over sleep’s dark edge and fell, fell, fell . . .