23: Andrés

23

ANDRÉS

WHEN I WOKE, THE fire was embers; my room was silent. The slam of a door echoed through my mind. Had I dreamed it? Did the house plague my nightmares?

No. Something tugged at me. I touched bare feet to floor; from beneath it, the earth reached up into me, stirring my clouded mind into sharp wakefulness.

Someone was in the capilla.

I felt the hum of distress like someone grasping my wrist, and I followed it.

I kept thick candles lit in the capilla all night long, to let the villagers know they had a refuge at any hour.

I froze when I saw who the light fell on.

At first glance, I thought it was the apparition we called the Weeper. A woman in white with black hair falling into her face. She stumbled up the aisle, sobbing uncontrollably. Water trailed behind her, leading from the door.

But I knew the Weeper well. It was not her season, not her time. Nor her place to appear.

This was not a spirit.

Beatriz.

She reached out and clung to the side of a pew, half collapsing into it. Her knuckles were white where she clutched the pew; her whole body heaved with sharp, gasping breaths. They came too quickly, too suddenly.

I should not have left the house. It was an irrational flash of feeling—of course I could not have stayed. Rodolfo’s presence prevented it. But it was a mistake.

She looked up at the sound of my approach, her green eyes so wide I could see the whites around her irises. Ana Luisa’s face flashed in my mind. Her heart had stopped from terror, her eyelids peeled back, leaving her gazing into the void in horror for eternity.

“Beatriz. Shh,” I said, my voice low. I crossed the last few steps to her, my hands held out as if I were calming a spooked horse. “Shh.”

Her arms gave out. I sprang forward to catch her before she fell against the pew. She was soaked to the bone and shook forcefully. Her face was pale with fear. I tightened my grip on her upper arms to steady her. “Shh.”

She lifted her chin. A red graze cut across one cheekbone; her eyes were glassy with unshed tears as they tracked over me, searching me hungrily, perhaps trying to see if I were real or phantom. Then she looked around me, her chest rising and falling staccato. “It’s so quiet.” Her breath hitched. “So quiet.”

My heart tightened. How many times had I fled from the roar of the darkness as a child? How often had I been tormented by voices after sunset, and sought solace in the peace of the church?

“You’re safe here,” I said.

Her face crumpled.

The world slowed: a yearning like a tide swept through me, an unbearable need to protect the woman before me. At the same moment I drew Beatriz to me, she threw her arms around my body. One movement, perfect as dancers. One tight embrace. Her arms wound around my rib cage; her fingers dug into my back. Damp seeped from her dress onto my shirt, warmed by the heat of our bodies. I pulled her head into my chest, resting my cheek against her wet hair. She smelled of rain. She smelled of fear.

“You’re safe,” I murmured. She shook against me as she sobbed. “Shh. Breathe. You’re safe.”

I stroked her hair, my other hand pressed against her lower back. Slowly, her hitching breaths calmed; her hands relaxed. Her weeping softened and stopped altogether.

Neither of us loosened our arms. I do not know how long we stood there, twined tightly as lovers in the soft glow of the candles on the altar. Rain beat the roof of the capilla; deep in the night, an owl’s soft call echoed across the valley. She was safe. She was safe. I did not know why she had fled, but I knew this: as long as my feet felt the earth beneath me and my heart the heavens above, I would not let any harm come to her.

I felt the muscles of her back stiffen, ever so slightly, beneath my palm.

Reality fell into place around me. I should not hold her so tightly, no—I should not be holding her at all.

She loosened her arms, and I took a quick step back. Something akin to grief tightened in my throat.

Holding her felt right. The feeling swelled in me with the inevitability of rain, my certainty an ache that cut to marrow. An ache that knew no language. It was right.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said, a flat determination in her voice.

My heart stopped.

“I am not going back. I can’t.” Her voice cracked.

I cleared my throat. I had not been thinking that at all. Was that what she thought of me? That I was foolish enough to send her back to the husband from whom she had fled in the middle of the night? To that house?

No. I wanted to beg her to stay here, to slip into my arms, to dig her fingers into my back—

“I’m going to sleep on a pew,” she said. She inhaled deeply. “And you can’t stop me.”

Different thoughts tumbled through me, tangled, half articulated: her husband would wonder where she had gone. No, her husband would be angry if he woke and found her with me. The house was awake, alive, and she could not go back alone. Not until dawn broke. But she could not spend the night here.

Could she?

Hadn’t I sought refuge by doing the same, so many times in my life? Titi knew I fled my father’s house in the night because of the voices. When I grew old enough to begin learning from her, she lectured me about the powers that sought to slip under one’s skin, to seize their hosts like bats gorging themselves on a weakened bull.

You must cast them out, she would say. You are your mind’s sole master. Banish them. Tell them to mind their own business and leave you be.

Even when she walked into the most sickened of houses to purify their energy with copal and smudging of burnt herbs on the walls and hearths, houses so diseased she ordered me to stand outside with the inhabitants, the voices rippled off her like water off silver, her aura as impenetrable as a warrior’s gleaming shield. She was a prophet in a land that had been stripped of its gods: a healer of the sick, a beacon in the night. She reached into steel-dark clouds to control the storms of the rainy season, seizing lightning as her reins and bending them to her will to turn harvests into gold. She called the voices to heel and banished them.

I was not her.

I had failed, and Beatriz suffered because of it.

Perhaps I was weaker than Titi. No matter how hard I tried to walk her path, how hard I fought to be good, to do good, I failed. No matter how hard I thrust the darkest parts of myself into their box and worked only with Titi’s gifts, they endured. Worse, they had tasted freedom and hummed with life. They mocked my failure. They strained at their chains, demanded my attention. Reminded me that I was damned.

Damnation was not something Titi concerned herself with. She believed in an underworld for all, a smoky, dark peace into which all souls folded. But she had not spent years studying scripture as I had, nor praying for her sins in dark seminary cells, convinced the very soul she was born into marked her for burning. Because of what I was, I feared Judgment Day. Aside from Titi, anyone who knew what I truly was—not just her heir, as the pueblo did, but something darker—feared me. This was a pillar of my life, as fixed as the pattern of seasons.

Yet in her flight, in her own fear, Beatriz had sought the capilla. Beatriz sought me. After all she had endured in my company, all she had seen, any practical mind would associate my presence with danger, and therefore cast me out of their life as fast as they could.

But she didn’t.

Even as she folded her arms across her chest in preemptive defiance of words I could not bear to speak, she stood here, barefoot and drenched in the capilla, because she trusted me. Her nightdress was so soaked that it clung to her arms, stomach, and thighs. Against my better judgment, I let myself notice this for a moment longer than I should have.

Heat climbed up my throat.

I did not deserve the trust she placed in me.

“You’ll catch your death of a cold.” Was that my own voice? It echoed far and foreign. It was mine, though the words it spoke were those of an imbecile.

“I don’t care.” She stepped into the pew and sat on the bench, dropping her weight with the heavy determination of a child. “I’m not going back.”

I could not argue with that.

I turned to walk back to my rooms.

“Where are you going?” I caught how her voice pitched toward fear and cast a glance over my shoulder. Though her hands rested on the back of the pew in front of her, her body was tensed, as if she were ready to rise and follow. This sent an arrow of compassion through my heart, further bruising what was already too tender for her.

I could rationalize this decision away. It was easy, too easy. She was a lost soul who sought help and I gave it; thus was my vocation. I could repeat that sentence like a litany, like a prayer, a meditation of pious deceit, but it still would not change the truth. I was giving in to temptation. Every decision I made that kept me close to her, that offered the opportunity to be close enough to touch her hand or smell her hair, was a sin.

I wanted it all the same.

“You’ll need blankets,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”

I returned with an armful, some still warm from my sleep. Beatriz was shivering when I reached her; I stepped into the pew to set most down next to her, then chose the softest and draped it over her shoulders.

“Thank you,” Beatriz murmured. Her fingertips brushed mine as she tightened it around herself.

Her eyes fell from my eyes to my mouth.

A soft dizziness settled in my chest, curling around my lungs and robbing them of air. I had to get ahold of myself. I sat on the other side of the blankets, clasping my hands before me.

“What happened?” I asked, willing my voice to be steady.

“I saw things.” Her voice was hollow; a shadow of distress flickered across her bloodless face. “I tried to do as you say and cast out the voices. I tried not to listen. But I have begun to see things. I feel things, as I never have before.”

Her hands trembled, even as they clutched the blanket around her.

I knew precisely what Titi would say. Get the family out of the house. Quickly. She would wag one gnarled finger at me. Then purge it of its rot.

I had tried. I had opened that dread prison within me and released a limb of the darkness within. I held it with a pale-knuckled grip, tightened the reins of incantations around it though it yanked and champed at its bit. I was in control. I used every prayer precisely as it was meant to be used. There was not a breath that was unplanned, not a step that was not precisely timed.

And yet I had failed so profoundly that I could have been killed.

My aunt was killed.

The rot in the house was a plague. Who would it fell next? Paloma? Beatriz?

I could risk neither. I could not fail either of them again.

But how could I proceed with Rodolfo back from the capital? If he was any bit as suspicious or intolerant as Doña Catalina, I would have no luck convincing him that allowing me to draw his wife’s blood in the middle of the green parlor and speak to unseen spirits was for the good of his household.

Unless he, too, was as tormented by the house as Beatriz was.

“Does . . . does he feel it?” I asked softly.

“Rodolfo?” She made a disgusted face. Even that moment of animation was enough to make her seem alive again, and I was grateful for it. And for other reasons, too, reasons that I then suppressed with the force of slamming a chest shut. “No, he doesn’t. I don’t think he can feel anything at all.” She shifted uncomfortably, then took another blanket into her lap. A long moment passed before she spoke again. “Paloma told me he has done horrible things.”

I lowered my gaze to her hands, watching them methodically shred the end of a tassel. Paloma must have told her about Mariana. I closed my eyes and made the sign of the cross for her. I had failed her too.

“I know,” I murmured.

“Then you know he is too evil to feel it,” Beatriz said.

“I don’t believe it works that way.” Even my father had felt what dripped from his walls. Perhaps it was one of the many reasons he turned to pulque: to dull his senses, to blind himself to the shadows that slithered from the corners of his house. “A house like that . . . he should feel it.”

“Do you know what he said?” She turned to me, tightening the blanket around her shoulders. Most of her hair was still in a long plait that fell down her back, but much had worked its way loose and fell around her face. “He complained that the house was too warm. Can you imagine?”

I could not. “Perhaps he is mad.”

“Perhaps I am,” Beatriz muttered, the animation in her face dulling. Her shoulders slumped as she leaned against the back of the pew. “I have nightmares. I see things no one else can. I hear things no one else can.”

“Perhaps you are a witch, Doña Beatriz.”

Her laughter was the bright, sudden snap of castanets, its surprise echoing in the dome of the chapel. She cast a coy look at the crucifix and crossed herself. “God forbid, Padre,” she said, a little breathless as she touched her thumb to her lips.

Despite myself, a smile tugged at the corner of my mouth. God forgive us, blasphemers both.

I moved to the side, slightly away from her down the pew, and patted the pile of blankets that remained. “Rest,” I said. “I will wake you before dawn and escort you back to the house when it is tolerable.” I almost said safe, but I wondered if it ever would be.

It was as if she heard this, or saw the thoughts written across my face. “You should rest too,” she said. “Your head . . .”

“It will heal, God willing,” I said. Then, soft and determined: “I will not leave you.”

She considered this, her expression grave. This was the fifth night we had spent in each other’s company, each more unpredictable and dangerous than the last.

“Do you promise?” she asked.

When a man makes a promise, he makes it on his honor. When a witch makes a promise, they feel it in their bones. Titi believed words are power: they may lay your destiny in stone or shatter a legacy altogether. Words can damn or bless in equal measure, and are never to be used lightly.

“I promise,” I breathed.

Then I knelt on the knee rest before us, reaching out of habit to my pocket for my rosary. I met the soft cloth of my sleeping clothes. My rosary was in my room, resting on the stack of books next to my bed. No matter. I made the sign of the cross and began to pray in a low voice. I had learned visiting orphanages in Guadalajara that there was no easier lullaby than someone else’s meditative prayer. Behind me, I heard Beatriz lay herself down on the blankets, shift, and settle. Her breathing softened, then deepened.

When I was certain she was asleep, I let my voice drop to a murmur, then fell silent.

She was curled in a fetal position on the pew, one arm tucked under the blankets she used as a pillow. Dark hair tumbled over her cheek and her mouth, rising and falling with her breathing.

I brushed curls away from her face, mimicking her own gesture by tucking one gently behind her ear. I ached to leave my hand on her hair, to stroke it gently, but I drew it back. She shifted; her eyes fluttered open.

“Sleep,” I murmured. “You’re safe.”

Her eyes drifted shut. She believed me. She had seen all I was—darkness, damnation, and doubt, my failings, my fear—and still trusted me enough to fall asleep by my side.

I listened as her breathing resumed its deep, steady pattern.

“I promise,” I whispered.