It was here, as I suspected. My inheritance. My birthright.

I fumbled in the dark for flint and a candle. When the flame’s pale light illuminated the room, I turned to the beds against the wall.

Ana Luisa must have gone through Titi’s belongings after her death and found it. How else could I explain the bastardized markings in charcoal that lined the doorway of the main house’s kitchen? How else could I explain the instinct that drew me to my knees beside Ana Luisa’s cold bed, to a small wooden box beneath its head? When I was last here, the morning Paloma found my poor aunt dead from terror, I was too ill from the blow to my head to think clearly; nausea deadened my senses to the dizzying pull that now drew my hands to the box. I set it on my knees and lifted its lid.

There it was. The pamphlet my father’s sister had left me.

Smudges I did not recognize darkened some of its pages. A thrum of grief beat through my heart. When the house went rotten, when the poison of Doña María Catalina’s anger began to spread, Ana Luisa had been afraid. She sought help from this. She should have come to me. Why didn’t she?

Pride, perhaps.

I thought of the day Paloma first told me of the problems with the house, the day she spoke to me outside of the church in Apan.

Doña Juana is hiding something. Mamá too. Something terrible.

How many times had Paloma told me Ana Luisa loathed the patrón’s first wife? If Juana had meant to rid the hacienda of Doña Catalina, would she have sought Ana Luisa’s help as an accomplice?

Would my aunt have given it?

Then perhaps . . . perhaps it was guilt that prevented her from seeking my help when the house turned on her with its cold, strangling fingers. Perhaps she knew that if I returned to San Isidro, Titi’s gifts or my own darker ones would reveal the truth eventually.

“May God forgive you, Tía,” I murmured.

Then I set to work.

I flipped through the pamphlet. Though I had not laid hands on it in nearly a decade, my fingertips traveled well-worn roads through its pages, guided by memory as I searched for the most powerful exorcism contained within. The one Titi tapped with her index finger and of which she said, Not yet, you are not strong enough for this one.

As I searched, I saw the gunpowder eyes of my father’s sister peering up at me through the glyphs. The terror I felt when I first beheld their dark spark. I saw disgust carving my father’s face, heard his voice echo behind me as if he stood just feet from me in the dark of Ana Luisa’s house. They burn people like you.

Burn, burn, burn. Perhaps that was what awaited me in death.

But in life, I would fight. I would fight to save the soul of San Isidro and the woman trapped inside its malicious walls because that was what was right. I knew it like a brand on my flesh as my fingertip found the glyphs I sought. It felt so right it had to be sinful.

The dark box in my chest trembled as I scanned the page. I felt its anticipation like the taste of pure cane sugar on my tongue.

Stand down, I told it. I had chosen to turn to this part of myself, but I would still keep my hands tight on the reins. I knew precisely the rituals and incantations to combine with these glyphs, and I would adhere to them with the utmost care. There was no room for error. No time to second-guess myself.

I looked up to the window over Ana Luisa’s bed. Full darkness had fallen.

It was time.

The air hissed with anticipation as I shut the door to Ana Luisa’s house behind me, pamphlet tucked under my arm. A storm hung over the mountains, teasing the tension in the valley with the crack of boulder on boulder. I could taste in the air that the valley would have no respite tonight; the wind had other designs, and carried the clouds away from us, sloping southeast toward the distant sea.

I gave a soft call into the dark; the night settled over my shoulders like a cloak. Invisible to the eyes of men, I slipped soundlessly through the gates of the courtyard.

My heart thrummed against my ribs; the darkness within me strained to leap forth, now that it knew I would call on it. I had to keep it in control. Beatriz’s safety depended on my success. I would enter, find where she was. Exorcise the house and stay with her until dawn broke and we proved her innocence. It was simple. All I had to do was act according to my plan.

The caudillo’s two men were stationed at the front door of the house, the closest to the capilla. One slept, the other stood watch. Though they had not lit their post with torches, the wakeful guard looked out into the night, alert to my silent approach, perhaps aware, as beasts were, of the presence of a predator.

Yes, I was here.

I slipped up the steps, around the man, behind him. A moment was all I needed to recite in his ear the prayer my grandmother used to sedate patients. He slumped against me. As he fell to the ground to the right of the door, I seized his gun, catching it so it would not clatter to the flagstones. I set it down at his side, then repeated the act on his sleeping compatriot just to be safe. I did not envy the throbbing in their heads that would plague them when they woke with the sun high in the sky.

It was time to enter the house.

I tried the handle of the door. It was locked, of course, but I had learned to bend locks to my will before I lost my first tooth.

Open, I bid it.

The house bucked; it threw me back a few steps, but I caught myself. I came back to the door. I touched the handle again, then snatched my hand back with a strangled cry—it was like ice, so cold it burned my palm.

I placed my stinging palm against the door and leaned into the cedar.

“Yes, it’s me,” I hissed through gritted teeth. “Yes, you hate me. I don’t care. Obey.” This time, I lifted the lid of the box inside me a crack, just wide enough for a sliver of darkness to accompany my whispered incantation.

Then I seized the handle, ignoring the cold that jammed my joints stiff. I braced, preparing to force the door open.

Somewhere from the copse of trees beyond the village, the hooting of an owl caught my ear.

I paused. Tilted my head to the side, listening. It was calling to me. Once, twice, pause—a third call. That was a warning.

I released the door handle and took the steps in a single bound. Once my feet were on earth, I centered myself and swept my awareness around the perimeter of the house. All my senses were alight, sharpened by the darkness awakening within me, by the taste of fear on the night.

Something was deeply wrong. My skin crawled with it.

Acting on instinct, I left the front entrance of the house, crossing the garden to its southern wing. First striding quickly, then running, I beat through the weeds and emerged near the chicken coops at the back of the kitchen. My heart pounded in my throat as I pulled around the corner and skid to a stop, and the long terrace that lined the back side of the house came into view.

A ladder was set against the side of the house, but that was not what stopped me dead in my tracks.

It was another taste, heavy as metal on my tongue. Smoke.

A dark figure perched on the roof. A plume of black smoke billowed near it, barely visible against the dark sky. My eye fell to the window of the study above the drawing room: it was illuminated from within by flickering hellfire, its lurid glow an affront to the night.

Juana may kill her first.

I fell back a step, my mind utterly blank, my limbs turned to lead by shock.

Juana had set the house aflame. Within minutes, Beatriz could be dead, either by smoke or flame or any other violent means Juana had.

My heartbeat hammered in my ears. My hand trembled as it reached for the pamphlet, then froze. I did not have time to search for the right glyphs, to plan and draw and chant. Unless I acted, and acted now . . .

I had to get to Beatriz. Through the kitchen, up the stairs . . . and if the room were already alight, what then? Titi could pass through flame if she willed it; once she had taken a child from a burning house and emerged unscathed, though she was barefoot and bareheaded. I had no idea if I was capable of the same. Beatriz certainly was not. I had to fight on two fronts, strike two foes at once: extinguish the fire and get her out.

I had to be fast.

I dropped the pamphlet and backed up several steps, lifting my face and arms to the heavens, seeking, seeking, seeking as Titi did when the valley was parched.

The black clouds were slung low on the far side of the mountains, their bellies heavy with rain.

You, I called. Heed me.

The clouds did not turn their steely heads. The wind that ushered them, steady as a shepherd, swept me away like a fly from its hide.

I was not strong enough. I was a man divided, weak, uncertain. Not as strong as Titi. I did not have her conviction, nor her command over the skies. The wind had no master; it bore allegiance to no power. Any other night, I would have accepted this. I would have recognized how I was not strong enough. Any other night, I would have retreated. Sought other solutions. Taken the path that was safer.

But Beatriz was in that house.

Her words rang in my head. Is there anything that doesn’t require words? Something where you act on instinct, or you could improvise . . .

Even though she saw the darkest parts of me, she looked at me with kindness. I had failed, I was damned, and still she looked at me as if I were someone worth having faith in.

I could not let her die. I would not let a Solórzano harm another person I loved.

I reached inside myself to the box. Darkness seeped from its lid like smoke; it was already straining at its lock. Without bracing myself, without questioning, without another thought, I did what I swore I would never do.

I flung it open.

Darkness surged through me like a flash flood. It swept through me and over me, deafening power coalescing into a dark storm in my chest, one that crackled, one that was alive. It quaked with the rumble of a thousand galloping hooves, with the strength of a long-sleeping volcano brought to the brink with fire and thunder and the Devil’s brimstone.

I released it on the clouds.

“I am the witch of this valley!” I roared. “Heed me!”

Thunder rumbled. I was my fury, my anger, soaring through my chest and the crown of my head dizzyingly high, cracking as lightning across the low, leaden bellies of the clouds. Lightning struck once, twice, brilliant green.

I bound the clouds with all my strength and yanked them toward San Isidro. They resisted, but I dug in my heels and pulled harder.

Come, I commanded. Come.

The clouds released rumbles of thunder, but I kept pulling until, groaning, they shifted course. They breached the mountains, then spilled down into the valley toward San Isidro.

I sucked in a breath. Suddenly, I was no longer in the vast black of the skies, but in myself. My feet on the ground, outside the back of the kitchen. Sweat cut tracks down my hairline, down my spine. My very skin vibrated with dark power; I was stuck with a thousand needles over every inch of me, I was outside of my body and within it in the same breath. I was alive.

The clouds opened; sheets of steely rain struck San Isidro. Rain poured over my hair and face. My bones ached with it. My ally was here to fight the fire.

Now it was time to get Beatriz.

I seized the pamphlet from where I had dropped it on the earth and crossed the garden in three steps. I threw myself into the kitchen and flung the wet pamphlet on the table. I had no censer, no copal. No plan as I strode to the door, shaking and savage with power.

Iwas the storm. Witch’s lightning crackled over my knuckles; though it scorched my skin, I felt no pain as I placed my hand on the locked door.

Open.

It flew off its hinges, landing with a sharp crack on the flagstones.

The darkness beyond turned to me. It seethed with anger; its hackles raised when it realized who—or rather, what—stood in its belly.

“Yes, it’s me,” I said, a feral grin pulling my lips taut. I shifted my weight, and with a flush of will, seized the darkness itself and held it in a stranglehold. “Now stay out of my way.”