20

20

ANDRÉS TOLD ME THATwhile Paloma and Mendoza were fixing the door in the green parlor, Mendoza had invited her to stay with him and his daughter. His eldest daughter had married away to Hacienda Alcantarilla in the spring, and there was ample room in their home for Paloma to stay as long as she needed. When they left, it was to move her belongings across the village to Mendoza’s house.

Which meant that without Paloma present, spending another night in the safety of the capilla’s rooms was no longer appropriate.

I would have to sleep alone.

Heavy rain opened over the valley midafternoon and continued with silent flashes of lightning. As the gloomy skies darkened further still at twilight, Andrés arranged censers in a particular pattern around my bedchamber, especially near the door and window, and lit them. The darkness followed his movements closely, drawing back with a soft hiss when he began to murmur a prayer. He lifted his chin, squared off with the darkness, and closed the prayer with a territorial stamp of the heel.

The darkness shrank away.

He turned back to me, victory glinting in his face as it had earlier. He was recovering from his injury. Perhaps I would be safe tonight after all.

“Have you heard any voices since this morning?” he asked.

Tightness gathered in my throat, thinking of the red eyes appearing behind him in the green parlor, of Andrés’s intensity when he told me to cast out the voice.

I shook my head.

He must have watched all of this cross my face, for he said, “I fear for you. Your dream . . . it is evidence that your guard was down, left open to that. It is dangerous.”

I did not have to ask why. “How dangerous?” I breathed instead. If I were in danger of losing my mind, what could I do?

You’ll die here like the rest of us.

Andrés worried his bottom lip, an echo of Paloma’s expression when she weighed how much to tell me. How much of the truth I could stomach as I faced the inevitability of night. And with that inevitability, the threat of fear so profound it could drive me to madness.

“My grandmother once brought me to a house that she determined was making its inhabitants irritable. It brought the marriage of the couple who lived there to the edge of ruin. They loathed each other by the time she arrived. These forces have the power to pry your mind open and enter it. Shift what you see, how you feel. Shift your reality. I am afraid . . . I am afraid to leave you alone.” He rubbed a hand over his face, his palm scraping over the shadow of stubble. “Do you want me to stay?”

The meaning underscoring his tone was clear: he asked because he wanted to stay. Something in the determined placement of his feet, or the way his attention curled around me, calm, sentry-like, and watchful, made it clear that he had no intention of leaving me alone.

My God, there was nothing more I wanted. “Yes,” I breathed. But . . .

The room around me was bathed in flickering candlelight. The boudoir, my vanity, the plush bed that was so absurdly different from Andrés’s hard cot. The very air was imbued with an intimacy that spending the night next to each other in the green parlor did not have. Nor even Andrés’s austere rooms after the disastrous exorcism. We had fled there in desperation and collapsed defeated.

This felt intentional.

He met my eyes. Though his face was carefully impassive, there was something there that told me he saw what I saw. He, too, felt how close to a cliff’s edge our sudden, desperate friendship danced.

He still chose to stay.

I took some linens out of the dresser and placed them in his arms, then changed out of sight on the far side of the dresser. When I finished, I found him sitting on my vanity’s stool, which he had taken and positioned next to the door. The blankets and pillow I had supplied lay in a neat pile, ignored. Didn’t he intend to use them?

I glanced up at him: a rosary in hand, his attention fixed straight ahead, deliberately diverted away from me.

Perhaps not yet.

I sat on the edge of my bed, then loosened my hair from its knot and braided it. I, too, kept my attention shyly averted from the other person in the room. If I thought I felt his gaze dance over to me, linger, then dart away, I ignored it out of propriety.

Instead, I let the quiet of the room sink into my tired, aching bones. I imagined myself plaiting copal smoke into my hair, weaving in Andrés’s protective powers, the sound of his low voice beginning the rosary. When I curled beneath the blankets, I was asleep within minutes.

For a time, I slept dreamless and deep. Then, red eyes appeared in the dark; I dreamed of being pushed from a high place, and falling, falling, falling . . .

I woke with a start, heart pounding. Sunlight poured over the bed from the window. A chorus of birds sang outside, lilting up from somewhere in the garden. Everything had a crystal, clean sheen, as if I had blinked water from my eyes and were seeing clearly for the first time.

“Buenos días,” a low, musical voice said.

I looked to the doorway.

Andrés was gone.

The woman with the corn silk hair sat where he had been, her chin resting in her palm as she watched me. A golden necklace glinted coyly beneath her lace collar.

María Catalina.

Dread washed over me. Had she been sitting there, watching me sleep, the whole night? Her skin gleamed like candle wax in the light; then she grinned, and whatever color her eyes had been before, now they turned red. In an instant, her skin transformed, dried and desiccated into leather, and her teeth grew long and needle sharp.

She sprang toward me, arms outstretched—

I woke with a strangled cry. Truly woke this time. My heart hammered as I sucked breath in, in, in, my ribs straining from the effort.

Dawn paled the sky outside the windows. It was morning. Andrés was still at his post, his long legs stretched before him, his head leaning against the door. His chest rose and fell rhythmically.

The rosary had slipped from his fingers to the floor, the crucifix facedown on the floorboards.

The candles had burned down. The copal was not thick enough.

I rose with trembling hands and lit the censers and the candles. Yes, it was nearly dawn, another night was nearly over. But that did not mean I was safe.

When is nightfall? When is day?

I shook my head to clear it, and quietly scooped up Andrés’s rosary. I kissed the crucifix, a reflexive apology for letting it touch the floor. I kept it curled in my palm as I put my back to the wall opposite Andrés.

He woke as I slid to the floor, drawing my knees to my chest.

“You all right?” Though his voice was rough with sleep, he was instantly alert, scanning the room for danger.

Did you not sleep well last night? Perhaps you dreamed it. I used to have terrible nightmares as a child.Juana’s voice twined through my head. Juana, who refused to believe me when I said someone was buried in the wall. Did she not know the grave in the capilla was empty?

All I could see was a golden necklace around a skeleton’s broken neck, glinting through clouds of dust and crumbling bricks.

I shook my head, pressing my back firmly against the wall as he approached and sat next to me.

I offered him the rosary. His knees were also drawn up to his chest, his shoulder so close to mine they touched when he took the beads.

The touch of hands can be an innocent thing. Andrés seizing my hand in the dark: that was the touch of human connection burned pure, a bastion against fear.

Then there was this.

The brush of Andrés’s fingertips against my palm sparked a flush of intimacy, a rush of heat deep in my chest.

It was a sin, and I knew it, and suddenly I realized that I didn’t care.

For if sin was all I had standing between myself and the darkness, I would take it.

---

*   *   *THE SERVANTS LINED UP to greet Rodolfo, just as they had when I first arrived. I lingered in the doorway of the house’s courtyard, feeling oddly detached as I watched. The sky was cloudless, blazing lapis, the air crisp and fresh after the night’s hard rain. It was a perfect imitation of the first day I had set foot on San Isidro’s soil, the day I had unknowingly handed my soul over to the house and its demons. I half expected to see myself step from the carriage, a cloud of silks shadowed by a wide-brimmed hat, placing my delicate city shoes on the cursed earth.

You don’t belong here.

I leaped away from the doorframe.

No one was in the courtyard. I did not have to turn to know that. Paloma was with the others in a row next to José Mendoza; Andrés was in the capilla, avoiding sunlight while his head healed.

Cast it out, Andrés said.

But because I did, because I left my mind open for spirits to pry open, I knew who that voice belonged to.

I heard his wife died of typhus. I heard she was kidnapped by insurgents.

What had truly happened to her? I fought the urge to turn around and stare at the house, fought to keep away the image of Rodolfo’s name in blood dripping from the stucco. Who would bury a body that way?

The hairs on the back of my neck lifted as a cool breeze brushed over my shoulders, coming from the direction of the house.

If I died in this house, would I, too, be bricked into a wall?

If I were killed in this house, would I, too, linger in an unholy way, and watch the perverted fairy tale repeat itself as the gleaming prince brought a new wife home? Watch her emerge from the carriage, all shining silks and a face open with trust, only to be brought to my waiting jaws like a sacrifice?

A girlish giggle lilted behind me, toward me, carried by the breeze over my shoulder and into the courtyard before me.

You’ll die here.

Curling my hands into fists, I banished the voice from my thoughts as forcefully as if I were slamming a door shut: with both arms, all my heart, and all my anger.

I whirled on the house and met its gaze head-on.

If I died in San Isidro, so be it. Perhaps Paloma’s bleak, oracular words had a power that bound me to this land. To this house. Perhaps one day I would stop fighting the voices and give myself over to madness at last.

But it would not be today.

I was the daughter of a general, and I was not done fighting yet.

“Behave yourself,” I snapped, the words loaded with a threat.

The house did not reply.

I turned my back on it and walked down the easy slope of the path. Rodolfo stepped from the carriage and began to greet the villagers.

His hair was bright bronze in the sunlight, gleaming like a cathedral retablo. He was perfect. Of course he was. He was Rodolfo, and he was full of promise and light.

RODOLFO RODOLFO RODOLFO RODOL—

Or was he?

His face was smooth and calm; if he noticed Ana Luisa’s absence, he gave no sign of it. But how could he not, when she had lived and worked on this hacienda all of her life? All of his life?

He and his treat their dogs better than us.

Did they mean so little to him?

“Querida!” he cried, and strode toward me, arms outstretched. I took his hands and offered my cheek to kiss, keeping my face still and angelic to hide the revulsion that bubbled beneath my skin at the brush of his beard, at his dry lips.

“Welcome home.” I smiled my brightest as I looked up at him, blinking and shielding my eyes from the midmorning sun. “How was the road?”

“It felt longer than ever,” he said, taking me by the shoulders.

“As was the wait for you,” I said. “Were you able to deliver my letters to my mother?”

His smile faded.

“I’m sorry,” he said, putting a hand on my cheek. My spine stiffened, but I focused on the disappointment I felt to keep myself from flinching away from his touch. It was not hard. It pulled me down, its weight like wet wool. “She would not see me,” Rodolfo added. “I sent the letters through a messenger instead, and though I sent him back daily for a reply, none came.”

Mamá would not listen to my pleas to come to San Isidro. And what if she had? San Isidro was in no state for her to arrive.

Not yet.

“Don’t worry,” Rodolfo said softly. His voice crawled under my skin. “She will come around. Perhaps all she needs is time.”

I nodded, then lifted my eyes to meet his. He was searching my face, looking for something; a slight crease formed between his brows.

“You’re not wearing your hat,” he said, his voice pitched strangely.

I wasn’t. Nor had I been for days at a time, not in the garden, not as I slept on the terrace in full sunlight in the afternoons, desperate for rest and respite. I had barely spent any time in my bedchamber out of fear, and that was the only place where I had a mirror in the house. Without Rodolfo around to remind me, I had completely neglected my complexion.

And I knew what happened when I did. When I was careless. I fought to keep my face still, though panic rose like acid in my throat.

You’re one of us, now, Paloma said.

Rodolfo had not even noticed Ana Luisa’s death.

If he had it in him to kill his first wife, who was criollo pale, waxy as a doll, then what of me? What if he saw me as just as expendable as the villagers? As the maids?

I could not believe I had let myself slip. What would Mamá say?

I waved one hand, a delicate dismissal of his concern. “Oh, how my mother would harangue me for how careless I have been while preparing the gardens.” If my mother had any idea what was truly going on at Hacienda San Isidro, she might say many things. If she began with I told you I was right, you married a monster, I would not blame her in the least. “Come inside. I’ll get it and show you where I put the furniture.”

The house hummed at Rodolfo’s return. It shifted around me like a colt ready to bolt; if Rodolfo felt it at all, his face remained infuriatingly impassive.

After my brief tour of all the things I had accomplished in his absence—an underwhelming litany, if I were to be frank, since my primary concern had been staying alive—Rodolfo met with José Mendoza. To my relief, he spent most of the day with the foreman, breaking only to have lunch with me on the terrace. I made sure to wear my thickest hat, as if that could change anything now, and listened as he glowed about how well the pulque was selling. How the economy was beginning to settle at last. I weighed this, thinking of how my father said that at the end of the war, the insurgents didn’t even have guns and fought with stones. No one had money coming out of the war, yet somehow, my husband did.

I started when Rodolfo mentioned something about the hacendados of Haciendas Ocotepec and Ometusco coming for dinner. “What did you say, querido?”

“Didn’t you see my last letter?”

I pasted a smile on my face. I had not read it. The news that he was returning was enough to occupy my mind in the wake of the failed exorcism and Ana Luisa’s death.

“Ah yes,” I said. “It had slipped my mind in the excitement of your return. I look forward to welcoming them into our home.”

I did not, not in the least. After lunch, Rodolfo rejoined José Mendoza; the minute he was out of sight of the house, I ripped off my hat and rolled my dress’s sleeves up to my elbows. “Paloma!”

---

*   *   *PALOMA AND I WORKED in hurried silence, each of us doing the jobs of two people as we prepared an elaborate meal for eight. Rodolfo insisted that if a priest was on the property, it was appropriate that he join us for dinner as well as Juana, the two hacendados, and their wives. My mouth soured at the idea of Doña María José seeing me quite darker than I had been when she first met me, but I shoved this to the back of my mind.

“How is Padre Andrés?” I asked Paloma in a spare moment where I stoked the fire, relishing its warmth on my face. The winds had risen, and though the afternoon was as bright as the morning, the air had a bite of chill of the oncoming winter.

She made a noncommittal noise as she chopped onions. “His head still aches.”

“Did you say to him—”

“Yes, I told him you said he shouldn’t feel he has to come.” Paloma shrugged. My skin felt like it was too tight at the thought of him and Rodolfo facing each other across the dinner table. Would Rodolfo realize what I was trying to do with the house? Would he peel away my thinly affected adoration of him and see how the priest had as powerful a hold over me as he did the villagers?

For it was true: somewhere between sleeping and waking, suspended in pale, quiet dawns, Andrés had slipped into my heart.

Perhaps it was that the thick walls my mother claimed I had built around myself in the wake of Papá’s death were nothing to a witch. Perhaps it was how he was strength to lean on, safety in a storm. Perhaps it was that, despite all he was capable of—rising into the air like an angel riding a cloud of darkness, bringing peace to a room with a prayer and his raspy voice—he, too, admitted he was afraid. He, too, seized my hand in the dark. Needed my shoulder against his until dawn.

“He refused to listen. I was able to make him sleep more, though. That’s victory enough for one day.”

She returned to chopping. I sighed, staring at the fire.

“Has he always been like this?” I asked.

“Hmm?”

“Stubborn as a donkey.”

This startled a bright peal of laughter from Paloma. It took me by surprise. In my mind she was a serious woman, burdened with too many sorrows from a young age. Perhaps she was. But that did not mean she was without humor, nor without a laugh that rang like church bells on a feast day.

“Doña, you don’t know the half of it,” she said, her own smile a sharp echo of Andrés’s. “Titi used to smack him upside the head for trying to play the hero when simply doing what was expected of him was enough. He wanted to be an insurgent, but she would have none of it.” She wiped a trickle of sweat from her brow with the back of one hand. “She knew he was a boy made of gunpowder. That letting him play with fire would be his end.”

“He said it was his mother’s wish for him to become a priest,” I said, brushing soot from my skirts as I rose.

“It was Titi’s too. She knew it was best,” Paloma said with a nod. “I thought she was crazy, sending someone like him into a horde of priests. But she was right. It straightened him out. It gave him peace. And it gives him the perfect role to play while serving the pueblo like Titi did. He purifies houses our way after giving final rites to the dying. He deals with troubles the other priests can’t see, or won’t.” She grew quiet. A long moment passed as she stared at the chopped onions. She sniffed; hastily brushed at her tearing eyes with her forearm. “But he doesn’t go looking for trouble, not anymore. Not unless people bring trouble to him.”

Though it was clear her cousin was several years older than her, I suddenly understood that Andrés was a younger brother to Paloma in all but name. And that if he were hurt any more on San Isidro’s property, more than he already had been, Paloma would never forgive me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was afraid.”

Paloma shrugged. Apology accepted, in her own brusque way. “He would have come poking around here anyway, banishment or no. It was only a matter of time. It’s our pueblo who suffer most because of it, after all.”

She was right. Her mother had died because of the darkness. She and the other villagers lived in fear because of it. But why had Andrés been banished?

I opened my mouth to ask, but Paloma interrupted me. “Now get out of here,” she said crisply. “I’ll do the rest. The patrón won’t want his wife smelling like onion and smoke when the other hacendados arrive.”

I obeyed and went straight to my bedchamber. There were more people in the house than there had been in all my weeks here; people Paloma had summoned from the village dusted and arranged furniture. They steered clear of the green parlor—whether by instinct or instruction, I did not know.

My bedchamber was still in shambles from the night before: a sea of candles and censers greeted me. The last thing I wanted to do was clear them away, but I inhaled deeply and set to work.

I washed in cold water, letting it shock me into wakefulness. I didn’t want to wash my hair—there was not enough time for it to properly dry—but Paloma was right about the smell of smoke. I dried it as best I could, and let it hang down my back as I dressed in silk and pearl earrings for the first time since Rodolfo left.

Afternoon sun streamed in through the window, reflecting off the mirror and filling the room with light. I sat before my vanity and studied my reflection for the first time in days. It was as I feared: the sun had deepened my face. In the capital, I had kept my complexion as fair as I could through hats and avoiding sunlight. I was never as pale as Tía Fernanda’s daughters, nor as Mamá, for even the palest parts of me had a sallow cast. Now, the high points of my face had deepened to light brown, bronzed by sunlight in a way that made my hair look even blacker.

You’re nearly as lovely as Doña María Catalina, though quite darker.

My mouth twisted. So I was.

I reached for my powder.