IN OUR ABSENCE, MENDOZA had joined Paloma waiting for us in the courtyard, and together, all four of us stepped inside the quiet, watchful house with the caution of lost travelers seeking shelter in a cave. Would its predatory occupant return? When?
I cast a glance at the north wing, and a chill snaked down my spine. María Catalina was there. Someone had bricked her body into the wall and hidden the evidence.
An earthquake, or water, I can’t remember which, Rodolfo had said. I will have Mendoza look into repairs.
“Se?or Mendoza,” I said, fighting to keep my voice casual as our group continued to the green parlor. “Did my husband ask you to do any repairs on the house before he left? Mend any . . . water damage?”
Mendoza cleared his throat. “No, do?a. He didn’t.”
His voice trailed off when he saw the door to the green parlor on the floor, and the circle on the floor of the empty room beyond. He let out a low whistle. “Do I want to know, Padre?”
“Probably not,” Paloma piped up from Mendoza’s side. “I certainly didn’t ask.”
Andrés swept into the room, each of his movements sharp with anxiety. He paced around the circle twice as I picked up a broom and began sweeping the final remnants of shattered glass and broken candles out of his way; Mendoza shook his head, then he and Paloma began work on the door.
“Palomita,” Andrés said. I looked up, surprised by the tenseness of his voice. “Could you please stop speaking castellano? It would help my memory if . . .” He left the sentence unfinished.
Mendoza shot Paloma a questioning look. Paloma answered with an obliging shrug, and seamlessly slipped into their grandmother’s tongue as she and Mendoza positioned the door on its hinges.
I flitted in and out of the room, slowly moving pieces of furniture, forbidding Andrés from helping me as I dragged in a heavy rolled rug. By then, Paloma and Mendoza had left. Andrés stood at the edge of the circle, fingertips at his temples, eyes closed. Shoulders tight.
He began to pray. First in Latin, then not. When the words María Catalina slipped between one portion of Andrés’s prayer, an unpleasant hum built in the back of my skull and spiked into pain. I winced, closed my eyes, and placed my hands over my ears as he continued.
I was glad I did.
A shriek split the room, white and bleeding with fury, stretching breathlessly, impossibly long, raking over me like talons. I cried out. My eyes snapped open; I half expected to see the window shutters splintering and shattering from the sheer rage that was flooding the room.
Andrés had not moved. Fingertips pressed to temples. Shoulders wound with tension. I could see his lips move through continued prayer, though I could not hear him over the noise.
The shriek cut off.
The room was still. It was the emptiness of a tomb, airless, its belly filled with the absence of life rather than the presence of silence.
Andrés released a long breath and rolled his shoulders back. No power hummed from the circle at his feet. No buzzing filled the back of my skull.
He looked over his shoulder at me. Despite the exhaustion in his posture, the stubble on his jaw, a fey sort of victory burned in his shadowed face. “I did it.” He took a deep, shaky breath. “She’s confined to the house again.”
Behind him, a pair of red lights winked from the corner of the room, then vanished.
Terror shot through me, lodging itself in my throat.
Yes, Andrés had succeeded. He had muscled the darkness back into the house and closed the circle.
I did not feel the same victory. The danger was contained, yes, but the fact remained that Ana Luisa was dead. We knew that the body of María Catalina was in the wall and that her spectral rage fed the activity of the darkness. But we did not know who put her body there.
Nor why.
Rodolfo returned in the morning.
The closing of the circle was but a slap of plaster on a crack in a swollen dam. Water surged behind it, ready to burst forth; the crack grew wider and wider with each passing hour.
And we still stood directly in the path it would flood.
20
ANDRéS TOLD ME THAT while 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.