28: Beatriz

28

BEATRIZ

THEY LOCKED ME IN a storeroom while Rodolfo’s body was removed from my bedchamber. My wrists were bound with rope. I lowered myself to the floor, curled my knees to my chest, and rocked back and forth in the dark. Hunger gnawed at my belly; I had not eaten all day, nor had water since the cup Andrés offered me in the capilla. The lack of food was making me dizzy and caused my hands to tremble.

The house curled around me with all the tenderness of a rattlesnake. Its rank breath trailed over my arms, curled around my neck. Too close. Too airless.

Visions intruded in my mind. At first they pushed like hands through curtains: prying and grasping, a dozen of them or more, their rhythm unpredictable as the thunder of fists on my bedroom door. But their ability to seize me was ultimately blunted by thick fabric.

The hands grew claws. Long, flesh-colored claws. They sliced through the curtains, through the barrier between me and it, carving my defenses to ribbons. They sank into my flesh, forcing visions that were not my own into my mind:

Juana’s face loomed over me: calavera-white, her footstep soft as a puma’s, appearing out of the gloom. The burning of alcohol in my nostrils. The steady beat of rain on the roof. Blooms of smoke; the fading of Juana’s face. I felt circled by her, trapped. I knew she disliked me, even resented me, that our argument that night was heated, but this—

The glint of steel in the darkness. Once, twice. Again. Pain blooming in my throat, my breast. A sour swoop of vertigo. The sensation of falling; a sickening crack. Darkness broken only by the thunderous drumming, of rain.

I tried to push them away. These were not my memories. Their metallic tang was someone else’s fear. Cast it out, Andrés said. But the claws of the house held me too tightly, their needle tips sinking fang-like into the flesh of my throat. Cracking the fragile casing of my mind and sinking deeper, deeper, deeper . . .

Ana Luisa’s voice snapped through the gloom.

You acted too soon, Juana, she said. This wasn’t the plan.

Distantly, she came into focus over me, disgust carved into her face’s every line. She loathed me, I knew.

We cannot dig with the flooding, she said. It is impossible. Where will we hide her?

Juana materialized in the darkness. Her bronze halo of hair; a splatter of red bright on one cheek.

The north wing’s collapsed wall, she said, her tone flat and determined. I was fixing it today, she added. The mortar is still wet.

Distantly, I saw Ana Luisa nod curtly, and heard her voice; I could not make out words. I was falling, falling . . .

I struck stone. I was being dragged by two people, one hauling each of my arms, flagstones peeling away the skin of my cheek. Heavy panting; the scrape of brick on brick. Brick on brick on brick . . .

Juana, Juana. I know what you are, Juana. I know you slaughtered Rodolfo, Juana. I will rip your throat out with my teeth. Crack you like eggs. Grind your wretched bones in my jaws. Tear your flesh to shreds. Juana, Juana . . .

I rocked back and forth, sobbing silently. I was hallucinating. In the broad light of day, I was losing my mind. When the shadows grew long, when the sun set . . . I did not know if I had the strength to survive another night of the house.

Voices echoed through the gloom. Men’s voices. Real, mortal voices, with cadences that rose and fell with breathing, with echoes that began and stopped.

And Juana’s voice.

A sudden flood of light blinded me; I jerked away from it, startled. Unable to catch myself with my hands bound, I nearly lost my balance. The caudillo’s men had wrenched open the door. One seized me by my bound wrists and hauled me to my feet. If they saw my face streaked with tears, if they saw how I shook with the terror of the mad, they gave no indication that they cared. They led me down the hall, closer and closer to the chill of the north wing. My heart hammered against my ribs. My God, if they were taking me there, I should beg them to shoot me now. I could not face that cold, the glint of red in the dark . . .

They turned to the stairs.

I dug in my heels; they yanked me forward. Pain burned dully in my arms and shoulders.

“Where are you taking me?” I asked.

They did not reply. I discovered soon enough: Juana waited by the door of the study, my ring of keys in her hand. She tapped her foot impatiently.

“You know I didn’t do it.”

“That’s quite enough from you,” she said. “I will not tolerate further insult to my brother’s memory.”

She made a motion as if to wipe a tear from her eye and turned to the caudillo’s men. “She’s mad, you know,” she said in a voice so sweet I wouldn’t have recognized it as hers if I hadn’t been watching her move her lips. “Ask Padre Vicente, he knows the truth. She thinks this house is possessed.”

They couldn’t believe this act. Did they not know Juana Solórzano? She was no victim. She was rotten, as rotten as the evil that blackened this house.

“Best step away, Doña Juana,” one of the men said, a tone of concern in his voice.

Juana obliged, tucking a lock of her hair behind her ear. Her hair was dirty, yes, but her clothing so clean.

Though the door to the bedchamber was closed, I could still smell butchery. In my mind’s eye, all I could see was blood. Staining the floorboards, the walls. The sheets. My copal censer was in there, and candles—things I would need for the night ahead, but I could not brave it. I turned my face away for fear I would vomit again.

Juana was a monster. A gilded monster with my keys on her hip, looking beatifically at me as the caudillo’s men turned to leave the room.

I held her gaze until the door shut, picturing her covered in red, Rodolfo’s blood dripping down her face, splattering her clothes. I wanted to scream.

Slam.

I flinched. The tongue of the lock slid shut. A jangle of keys; the sound of footsteps descending the staircase.

I was alone.

A plate of cold tortillas was left on a table. My stomach growled. What if they were poisoned? I wouldn’t put it beyond Juana to do so. I glared at the food. Even if it weren’t, I couldn’t stomach the thought of food so near to where Rodolfo had died. Not when the smell of blood still hung in the air, drifting in from the next room.

I crossed to the far side of the study, away from the door to the bedchamber. The rug was damp beneath my bare feet. It hadn’t been earlier this morning. I was barefoot then too—I would have noticed.

I squinted up to the ceiling. Was there a leak? If there was, it was significant: the rug was soaked, the floor on this side of the room was dark and slick with . . .

I inhaled, and my nose crinkled at the strength of the smell. Alcohol. It reminded me of the night Juana and I drank mezcal, when I woke with a sour headache and knowledge that something was wrong in the house.

How long ago that seemed.

I frowned. Rodolfo had not drunk mezcal, as far as I knew—though, then again, I did not know.

And I never would.

He was gone.

It was a strange realization. It had not struck me that morning, when I found him, nor at any point during the day thus far. Judging from the color of the light coming in from the western-facing windows, it was late afternoon. Hours had passed. And still—

Rodolfo was dead.

I had cared for him, when we met. I was hungry for him and all he stood for. That hunger soured to fear and disgust in the last weeks, as I learned of his cruelty and his hypocrisy. But he was dead. As dead as my dream for a home.

Now what awaited me? Prison? An asylum? Execution, for my supposed crime? My heartbeat quickened at the thought. The vapor of the spilled alcohol was making me dizzy, but at least it masked the smell of Rodolfo’s death.

His chest lifting; his head turning. The jerk of his lips and the sharp movements of his glassy eyes . . . these were imprinted in my mind, burned there in a way more powerful than any nightmare. Andrés and the caudillo and José Mendoza staring at me, completely unable to see or hear.

Tell him the truth, that strangled voice said.

The truth was Juana killed him. Juana killed anyone who stood in her path. And she had won. With her crocodile tears and authority as an hacendado’s daughter, she had won. She told the men I was mad.

The truth was I was mad.

Andrés had come too late. The house cracked my mind open and shattered it like china before I even knew of his existence, before I knew a witch could purge the house of evil intent.

Cast it out.

I could not, not now. Perhaps I never could have. I was vulnerable and ripe, and doomed from the first night I saw red in the dark. The house knew me as prey the moment I crossed its threshold, and now, it would devour me.

Lifting my eyes, I saw my father’s map on the wall. I had pinned it above my desk weeks ago, the day Rodolfo left for the capital. I was so occupied with the north wing and the green parlor that I had not thought about this room much at all, not since the day I discovered my silks covered with blood. That was the only point at which Juana and I had spent any time together.

Apparently, it was enough to convince her I was to be gotten rid of.

My eyes stung with tears. What had I done wrong? Nothing. What could I have done right? Nothing. I married Rodolfo and presumably would bear heirs to inherit this property away from Juana. Perhaps I was not even a flesh-and-blood person to her: I was but a symbol of her brother taking away what she wanted, what she believed to be hers.

Hadn’t I longed for the same? Wasn’t that what an hacienda represented? Rodolfo’s money was liberation from Tía Fernanda’s reign of humiliation. Deliverance from desperate reliance on the fickle kindness of relatives I barely knew. I had sacrificed any hope of love in my marriage to secure my autonomy.

Juana sacrificed María Catalina. She sacrificed her brother. I had no doubt she would spill my blood, too, if she saw it beneficial to her.

I had to fight back.

I was not my mother, ready to give up when the blood was spilled and the muskets leveled. No. I was a general’s daughter.

But I was so, so tired.

My feet squished across the wet carpet as I went to the desk and kicked the chair back. I sat beneath my father’s map and rested my elbows on the desk. My arms ached, my wrists ached. My throat stung from bile, and my mouth tasted sour. I wanted to lay my head down on the desk. But even that I could not do. My hands were bound and going numb from it.

The shadows in the room were lengthening. Tears filled my eyes.

I rested my forehead on my hands, my position so similar to praying it brought the image of Andrés in the chapel last night to my mind.

How many times had I heard priests lecture about prayer from their pulpits and let the words wash over me, unbelieving? I had never trusted them. Never truly trusted the existence of God. Yet a few weeks ago, I would have said I never believed in the existence of spirits.

Or witches.

Help me, I prayed. Give me the strength to fight.

I began a rosary. I built a barrier to protect myself with words, layering them around me like an impenetrable skirt, like stones, anything to keep the house at bay. Whenever I lost track of where I was, I thought of Andrés’s voice beginning the words of the next Hail Mary. It was a trick of my mind, I knew it was, but I followed, whispering when my voice grew hoarse and cracked. When I reached the end, I began again.

For the length of another rosary, the house was silent.

The sun set, its dying light bleeding across dark storm clouds. The dark deepened, from blue to gray and finally black. A distant roll of thunder.

I heard the cold before I felt it. It scraped along the floorboards like claws, the sound vibrating in my teeth more than my ears: like metal on metal, glass on glass.

I lifted my head.

Blood rushed from it. My hands were numb and bloodless. Hunger dizzied me, sucked the strength from my legs and left them trembling.

The cold slinked around my ankles, curling up my calves.

I jumped up. The rug was clammy, squelching beneath my feet. Unbidden, I envisioned it drenched in blood, like the sheets in my bedchamber that morning.

Beatriz.A whisper, girlish and light.

Cast it out.

Darkness filled the room, crackling and snapping with potential. It was kindling ready to light.

Light. Candles were in my bedchamber, I knew that. And copal.

But I would have to enter the bedchamber.

My heart curled in on itself at the thought. I couldn’t.

Deep in the house, a door slammed.

“No,” I whispered. “No, I’m so tired.”

My voice cracked. A long moment passed. My shoulders were wound tight, taut as rope. I braced, ready for the next slamming door.

It never came.

Instead, a drumming began. First it was faint, distant, from the far side of the house. Distant enough that I thought it was another roll of thunder. But it never ended. It was a drumming on the wooden floorboards, as if a thousand heavy fingers struck in quick, violent succession. The sound marched toward the north side of the house, growing, becoming louder, so loud my bones rang with it. I could not cover my ears, could not hold out my arms to protect myself.

It drew closer, closer, then it stopped at the door of the study. There it drummed an irregular beat, growing louder, frantic, so powerful the door shuddered on its hinges.

The drumming stopped.

Sweat poured down my temples and slicked my palms.

It was there. It was there outside the door, and there was no copal to stop it. No candlelight. No Andrés.

A wink of red appeared in the dark, then vanished.

No.

It was here.

The red eyes appeared by the dark doorway to the bedchamber, then vanished.

It was coming closer. My heart beat so hard against my chest, so desperate and irregular it ached. Would it give out and leave me stiff and wide-eyed as Ana Luisa? Was this where it ended?

Hands grasped at my skirts, near the floorboards. Three or four hands, long fingered and icy; I could see nothing in the dark, but their too-soft flesh seized my ankles and yanked at me.

I shrieked and sprang away.

“Don’t touch me!” I cried.

A girlish, lilting laugh from somewhere in the rafters. She was mocking me. She was enjoying this. Anger swelled in my chest. I jerked my head up, scanning the dark desperately for something, anything to direct my furor at. The laughter now sounded from my bedchamber; I whirled to face it.

Enough.

“What do you want?” I cried.

A pair of freezing hands struck my shoulders forcefully, knocking me off my feet. Unable to throw out my arms to stop myself, my skull struck the rug with a dull thud.

Nausea heaved through me, from chest to rattled skull. I rolled over onto my side. The rug dampened my cheek; the smell of distilled alcohol overpowered me.

I coughed and, fighting the urge to retch, forced myself to my knees. I staggered upright, head spinning, breath coming in ragged gasps. Lightning illuminated the room for a moment; then darkness fell again.

“I didn’t hurt you,” I spat. “I didn’t even know you. Leave me alone.”

Something hurtled toward me through the dark. Instinct seized my chest; I ducked.

Glass shattered on the wall directly behind me, and pieces went flying. A few struck my back; they rolled across the floor. A vase? It didn’t matter what—I was barefoot and blind. Moving would rip my feet to shreds.

“So you’re angry,” I said to the dark. I picked my way carefully over to the desk, where there was a glass vase. I picked it up in both hands and faced where I had last heard that infuriating giggle.

“I am too!” I shouted, my throat ripping from the strain of my fury. I threw the vase as best I could while bound at the wrist. It shattered against the opposite wall. “I wanted things too! I wanted to be safe. I wanted a home. And I got stuck with you.”

The darkness hissed—like a cat, but with a depth to it that assured me that no mortal beast could make a noise like that. Then a growl rose: an inhuman growl that set the hair on my arms standing on end.

Red eyes appeared in the dark, blazing more brightly than I had ever seen them.

I had nowhere to run. I was backed into a corner, barefoot in a sea of shattered glass. I wondered if I could even open the door with my hands bound.

“I bet you want to avenge yourself,” I said, forcing the words to be steady, past the tremble in my voice.

The eyes drew closer; the darkness closed in on me, pressing down on my chest with a weight I only knew in nightmares. Breathing became difficult. But I did not retreat. Though my heart screamed against my rib cage, my head and shoulder throbbed, and my legs shook, I dug my heels into the damp carpet and looked the Devil in the eye.

I was not done fighting.

“Is that it? You want vengeance? Then go find it,” I spat at it. “Killing me won’t sate you.”

Another growl. A cold flush of fear swept over my skin. That was a challenge. A dare.

The darkness pressed on my chest, on my throat. I gasped for air like a fish on land.

“If you kill me,” I forced out. My voice was strangled, a snarl robbed of breath but full of venom. “I’ll be stuck here, same as you.” Air, I needed air. “And I swear on my father’s grave I will make you miserable.”

The darkness released. I gasped, lungs aching as they expanded; I fell forward onto my knees. Glass dug into my kneecaps through my skirt, but I didn’t care. I breathed, I breathed.

The darkness’s attention had lifted to the rafters. I frowned. Footsteps tracked across the roof. Mortal footsteps. Familiar footsteps. They settled overhead; clay struck clay as terra-cotta tiles were ripped from the roof and stacked on top of one another. Metal struck wood. Once, twice; the ceiling began to splinter.

Someone was breaking through the roof with a machete.

“Andrés?” I tried to call the name, but it came out a whisper. Had he come to rescue me? Was my torment at its end?

A boot kicked in through the ceiling, widening the hole cut by the machete.

Liquid poured into the room through the roof in a swift, short torrent, as if from a well bucket. Droplets splashed my dress and my face, and where they touched my lips and eyes, it burned.

That smell. It was alcohol. Pure, distilled alcohol. Like the rug. Like mezcal, but even stronger.

From overhead, the sound of a match being struck; a torch blazed to life.

Its light illuminated a woman’s face. Bronze hair, a thin-lipped visage, the shadows carving distinctive cheekbones, skull-like in their sharpness.

Juana’s mouth was set in a grim line, her gaze dispassionate as she took in my desperate appearance.

In an instant, I was back in the capital, watching Papá led away at bayonet point. Watching the remaining soldiers throw oil on the house and set it alight with torches. Smashing windows; waves of rippling heat. The acrid taste of smoke, my weeping, stinging eyes.

Fear enveloped me. I forgot all my pain. Every sinew of me was focused on that torch, on how it leaped and danced and cast wicked shadows across Juana’s face.

Oh, no. Not like this.

“No. Get me out of here,” I begged Juana. My throat was shredded; the words came out half a sob. “I’ll lie. I’ll cover for you. I’ll leave and never come back. I swear I’ll never come back.”

Something flickered in her face. Perhaps it was a trick of the light. Perhaps it was my own desperation, tricking me into thinking she would actually consider my plea.

She did not.

Without a word, Juana dropped the torch into the center of the room.