22

22

RODOLFO STARED INTO THEfire. His hands were clasped behind his back, and he worked a golden signet ring on his left hand with the right, lost in thought.

I sat, my needlework limp in my hands. There was no more use in pretending I had been counting stitches, that my attention was occupied by anything but awareness of Andrés’s presence passing through the gates of the courtyard. The moment he did, the weight of the darkness shifted. It twitched, first here, then there, as if shaking off an irritating fly, and refocused on the only two people left in the house.

It coiled around us, darkness thickening with each passing moment. A chill crept under the closed door and drew near, slinking across the floor with the sinuous determination of a centipede. Closer, closer, snaking around my ankles.

Beatriz, Beatriz . . .

My heart stopped.

“Come, querida,” Rodolfo said sharply. “I’m tired.”

I stowed my needlework with trembling hands. “Yes, you must be exhausted.”

He grunted in agreement and held out his arm to me. I rose and took it, biting the inside of my cheek as he set a firm kiss on my hairline.

I wanted to throw him off. To run—but where? I had nowhere to go.

I followed him out of the parlor and into the dark hall.

Paloma had left it illuminated by candelabras. I told her she must do so, but also to depart the house as soon as she could and leave the washing up in the kitchen for the morning. I was glad she had, though the opening and closing of the front door had extinguished a few of the candles.

Or had it?

The light from the candles barely penetrated the black stretching before us. At the end of it was the staircase to our bedchamber, but also the doorway to the north wing.

Rodolfo walked confidently down the hall, taking me with him. The cold parted around him like water, catching me in its wake. It watched me gasping for breath from every corner, from the rafters, from within the walls.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

Shewas here.

Beatriz . . .

“I think you did very well tonight,” Rodolfo said.

Beatriz, Beatriz . . .

The closer we grew to the north wing, the more the barriers I put up against it threatened to split like the skin of overripe fruit. I could not keep that voice from slipping under my skin like a knife.

“Oh?” I said, hoping my voice sounded light rather than strained. I should have kept my eyes straight ahead, or better yet, fixed them on my feet, but I swept the darkness before me. As if seeing could help me defend myself. I was raw and vulnerable, a lamb before slaughter.

And the house knew it.

“Yes. I think Doña Encarnación and Doña María José were rightly impressed with your hosting,” he continued. “I do think, however, that . . . some things need to change around here.”

Beatriz, Beatriz . . .

We drew near to the staircase. As we took the first step, my eyes drifted to the doorway leading to the north wing.

There, in the hall, a body lay facedown on the floor, clothed in ripped, moth-eaten rags. It was pale, streaked with blackened blood from a wound in its back. I shouldn’t have been able to see it in the darkness of the hall, but there it was, clear as day.

Someone had been killed.

I jumped, colliding with Rodolfo, who reached out for the banister to balance himself.

“What?”

“Do you see that?”

“See what?”

I looked to his face—the creases of concern deepened with shadow—and back to the hall.

The hall was empty.

“Oh, a mouse.” My voice came out so high it nearly cracked. Rodolfo’s expression deepened to a frown. “I’m jumpy because it’s so cold in here, querido,” I babbled as he led me up the stairs. “It’s quite drafty, isn’t it?”

“I don’t think so.” He reached to his collar to loosen it. “If anything, it’s too warm. Keeping a fire like that in that small parlor on a night as mild as this was too much. You must speak to Ana Luisa about that.”

I nearly tripped over the next stair, stunned. Ana Luisa is dead, I wanted to shout. I told you. I wanted to seize him by the arm. I wanted to scream at him, to shame him. How could he not remember? How could he not care?

But the cold paralyzed me. It clawed at me as Rodolfo and I ascended, as if it wanted to draw me down, down, down . . .

As we reached the top of the stairs, I glanced over my shoulder.

The body lay at the foot of the stairs. It had moved. It was moving. It lifted one arm—half bone, half rotting flesh—and seized the first pillar of the banister. It hauled itself up a step and raised its head to grin at me.

It was a skull; like its arm, shreds of flesh clung to it, and matted hair stuck to its crown with blackened blood. Lidless, empty eye sockets locked on me.

Then I blinked, and it vanished.

Cold sweat slicked the small of my back. Rodolfo was saying something about the decoration of the upstairs as he led me into the room that I had made a study, and then into the bedroom. I wasn’t listening. I was stunned, my heart hammering violently against my ribs, my eyes peeled wide.

I was going to die in this house.

I was going to shatter into a thousand pieces in the dark, crushed by the cold, by the agonizing malice of the watching, the knowing. I would die.

“Don’t you think?” Rodolfo was saying as he closed the door to the bedchamber behind us.

None of the candles were lit. I ignored him and seized the first box of matches I could find. I was aware of him watching me as I lit them on the table of my vanity; slowly, that awareness drew me back into myself. I could see the tremble in my hand, the frightened hunch of my shoulders. I could feel the concern in his posture.

Concern was dangerous. He was dangerous.

“So many candles, right before bed.” There was a light laugh in his voice.

“I . . . I was so lonely without you, you see,” I sputtered. I did not turn to face him but straightened. In the mirror, the light of the candles was reflected and expanded; beyond the line of my shoulder, Rodolfo was a dark silhouette, moving closer, closer, closer—

He took my arm.

I whirled to face him. He lifted my hand to his face and kissed the soft skin on the inside of my wrist.

An ancient instinct lifted in the back of my skull and sent a ripple of panic through my body.

I was prey. I was trapped.

“I was lonely too.” His voice was low, a rumble in his chest as he took me by the waist and pressed me to his body.

I needed to run.

I pushed against his chest. He did not release me but instead buried his face in my hair, kissing it, and moving to my neck.

I needed to throw him off, to wrench away. But I was nowhere near as strong as him—his hold on my body was like iron, and his shoulders curled around me in easy dominance.

“Querido, not tonight,” I breathed. My voice was strangled. He kept kissing my neck anyway. I imagined him growing fangs, long needlelike fangs, too many for his mouth, and flesh-colored claws, and—“Rodolfo. No.”

He loosened slightly, gazing down at me. If the intent of him was to look amorously at me, the candlelight shattered the effect: shadows emphasized the depth of his eye sockets, making them seem too deep, almost hollow—

I pushed him away.

He frowned, tightening his hold on my wrist. No. He could not become angry. He could turn on me in moments, he could—

“It is my time of the month,” I sputtered, forcing a smile to stretch my lips wide over the lie. My blood had come two weeks ago. Early, to my displeasure. Mamá once said the same used to happen to her in times of distress; if my experiences of the last weeks did not amount to distress, then I didn’t know what to call them. “It is quite uncomfortable, you know.”

Please. Please.I don’t know where I sent the prayer, but it was received. Rodolfo’s face realigned in a swift fall; he placed a soft kiss on my forehead and released me. “Of course.”

Of course he did not question. Men do not trouble themselves with women’s bodies, save when they can be of use to serve or to sate them.

I did not relax.

Not as I prepared my toilet and loosened my still-damp hair from its knot, not as I fussed over my undergarments in the small chamber adjoining our room in a half-hearted attempt to maintain my lie. Not as I returned to the room and saw he had extinguished all the candles and already lay down in bed.

It was too dark. This was not a natural dark. It was too thick. It curled too intimately over the bed. I needed copal. I stepped toward my vanity; the floorboards creaked under my bare feet. I could not—

“Leave it,” Rodolfo murmured, half asleep. “I can’t sleep with light.”

I froze. Should I try to light the copal, or would that irritate him? It was the only thing I had, the one piece of safety.

“Come to bed,” he said.

My feet were like lead as I trod across the floorboards and slipped into bed. I lay stiffly on my back, neither moving toward him nor away.

He drifted off immediately. The rise and fall of his chest was rhythmic, slow. So incongruous with the drumming of my pulse in my ears as I stared up at the wooden rafters.

Somewhere between one blink and the next, I tripped into uneasy dreaming.

The air thickened with smoke. I was in my house in the capital, my father’s house. Red light leaped and danced around me, wild as a tempest, tearing at the dark plumes. The house was on fire; I knew with the perfect, terrible certainty of dreaming that Papá and Mamá were deep in the house. They were in danger.

I called for them, but smoke choked me, swallowing my screams, slinking tight around my throat like a clawed hand. I stumbled forward, but my legs were too heavy. My head was too heavy. The floor came up to meet me and I was pinned to the floorboards, flames licking through their cracks from beneath, smoke clouding my vision. I had to get to my parents. I had to. But I could not move.

Somewhere in the house, a door slammed.

I wrenched myself awake. In this house, in San Isidro, I sucked in lungfuls of air crisp and free of smoke. But that air crackled. It was alive, alive with the fey energy of kindling about to catch.

Another door slammed. Closer, this time.

My heart echoed the act against my ribs.

There was no one in the house. No one but myself and Rodolfo, who turned in his sleep, murmuring something unintelligible.

Slam.

I was going to die in this house. The knowing swept through me, heavy with grief, cold and oracular as the whispered words of a saint.

San Isidro was my tomb.

But not tonight.

I threw the blankets off my legs. The room was black as the Devil’s shadow. I could not see my hands before me as I pawed desperately for matches. Two strikes; light spat into being. My reflection peered back at me as I held flame to wick.

Yellow flesh peeled away from my face, dry as parchment. Like the corpse at the foot of the stairs, it stretched too thin, revealing the hollows of my eyes and a line of too many teeth stretching back to my ear.

I shut my eyes. It was a vision, like the night of the failed exorcism; it could not hurt me.

Or could it?

Ana Luisa was dead, her heart stopped by fright. Andrés was snatched from the air and flung against the wall of the green parlor. In the capilla, the blood on his face did not vanish. Injury inflicted by the house did not vanish like the visions as dawn streaked the skies above San Isidro’s roof. Death would not dissipate like a nightmare.

I stood and stepped toward the doorway. Reached for the handle, hands shaking. I did not care if Rodolfo woke.

If I stayed, this house would kill me.

I opened the door and fled.

Darkness clawed at me; cold hands yanked my hair, pawed my nightdress. Drumming erupted beneath my bare feet, thundering through the floor and following me to the head of the stairs. Unseen hands planted on my shoulders. Cold as ice. Hard as death.

With a powerful shove, they pushed me down the stairs.

The world spun; the candle went flying. Was this how I died? I flung out my arms to slow myself, but cold hands forced me down, down toward the flagstones with steely determination. Poor Doña Beatriz, fell down the stairs. Shattered her skull. Spilled her brains everywhere. Poor Doña Beatriz, such a tragic accident . . .

Not tonight.

Anger caught light in my ribs. I curled myself into a ball as if I had been thrown by a horse: knees to chest, elbows tucked in, hands curled over my ears.

I caught the flagstones forearms first, then rolled. Cold air stung my grazed elbows as I sprang to my feet and stumbled to the door.

Beatriz, Beatriz . . .

I wrenched the door, almost pulling my arm out of its socket. It did not move. Yet it was not locked. I could see it was not locked, but it would not open.

Cold enveloped me like a wet cloak, covering my nose, my mouth, smothering me. I clung to the door handle. I could not breathe. I gasped and felt nothing; my lungs burned, my eyes strained against the dark. The darkness would strangle me. Unless I fought, I would drown.

Not like this, I thought.

I gathered all the strength I had and slammed a balled fist against the wood of the door in frustration. Soft, pale sparks haloed my darkening vision. I needed air. My chest was caving in, collapsing from the weight of the darkness. I struck the door again. Harder. Anger sparked in me like kindling, catching and blazing with a hunger that lit me anew. She was holding me here. She was trying to kill me.

I would not let her.

“Not tonight, you bitch,” I forced out.

I reached for the handle and yanked.

The door opened. I stumbled backward with its weight, catching myself as air rushed into my lungs. A shock of cold, wet wind struck my face. Sheets of rain slaked the courtyard, the sound of it striking the earth like shattering glass.

A gust of wind tolled the bell of the capilla once. It echoed through the courtyard, a hollow, lonesome knell.

I sprinted toward it.