My God, there was nothing more I wanted. “Yes,” I breathed. But . . .
The room around me was bathed in flickering candlelight. The boudoir, my vanity, the plush bed that was so absurdly different from Andrés’s hard cot. The very air was imbued with an intimacy that spending the night next to each other in the green parlor did not have. Nor even Andrés’s austere rooms after the disastrous exorcism. We had fled there in desperation and collapsed defeated.
This felt intentional.
He met my eyes. Though his face was carefully impassive, there was something there that told me he saw what I saw. He, too, felt how close to a cliff’s edge our sudden, desperate friendship danced.
He still chose to stay.
I took some linens out of the dresser and placed them in his arms, then changed out of sight on the far side of the dresser. When I finished, I found him sitting on my vanity’s stool, which he had taken and positioned next to the door. The blankets and pillow I had supplied lay in a neat pile, ignored. Didn’t he intend to use them?
I glanced up at him: a rosary in hand, his attention fixed straight ahead, deliberately diverted away from me.
Perhaps not yet.
I sat on the edge of my bed, then loosened my hair from its knot and braided it. I, too, kept my attention shyly averted from the other person in the room. If I thought I felt his gaze dance over to me, linger, then dart away, I ignored it out of propriety.
Instead, I let the quiet of the room sink into my tired, aching bones. I imagined myself plaiting copal smoke into my hair, weaving in Andrés’s protective powers, the sound of his low voice beginning the rosary. When I curled beneath the blankets, I was asleep within minutes.
For a time, I slept dreamless and deep. Then, red eyes appeared in the dark; I dreamed of being pushed from a high place, and falling, falling, falling . . .
I woke with a start, heart pounding. Sunlight poured over the bed from the window. A chorus of birds sang outside, lilting up from somewhere in the garden. Everything had a crystal, clean sheen, as if I had blinked water from my eyes and were seeing clearly for the first time.
“Buenos días,” a low, musical voice said.
I looked to the doorway.
Andrés was gone.
The woman with the corn silk hair sat where he had been, her chin resting in her palm as she watched me. A golden necklace glinted coyly beneath her lace collar.
María Catalina.
Dread washed over me. Had she been sitting there, watching me sleep, the whole night? Her skin gleamed like candle wax in the light; then she grinned, and whatever color her eyes had been before, now they turned red. In an instant, her skin transformed, dried and desiccated into leather, and her teeth grew long and needle sharp.
She sprang toward me, arms outstretched—
I woke with a strangled cry. Truly woke this time. My heart hammered as I sucked breath in, in, in, my ribs straining from the effort.
Dawn paled the sky outside the windows. It was morning. Andrés was still at his post, his long legs stretched before him, his head leaning against the door. His chest rose and fell rhythmically.
The rosary had slipped from his fingers to the floor, the crucifix facedown on the floorboards.
The candles had burned down. The copal was not thick enough.
I rose with trembling hands and lit the censers and the candles. Yes, it was nearly dawn, another night was nearly over. But that did not mean I was safe.
When is nightfall? When is day?
I shook my head to clear it, and quietly scooped up Andrés’s rosary. I kissed the crucifix, a reflexive apology for letting it touch the floor. I kept it curled in my palm as I put my back to the wall opposite Andrés.
He woke as I slid to the floor, drawing my knees to my chest.
“You all right?” Though his voice was rough with sleep, he was instantly alert, scanning the room for danger.
Did you not sleep well last night? Perhaps you dreamed it. I used to have terrible nightmares as a child. Juana’s voice twined through my head. Juana, who refused to believe me when I said someone was buried in the wall. Did she not know the grave in the capilla was empty?
All I could see was a golden necklace around a skeleton’s broken neck, glinting through clouds of dust and crumbling bricks.
I shook my head, pressing my back firmly against the wall as he approached and sat next to me.
I offered him the rosary. His knees were also drawn up to his chest, his shoulder so close to mine they touched when he took the beads.
The touch of hands can be an innocent thing. Andrés seizing my hand in the dark: that was the touch of human connection burned pure, a bastion against fear.
Then there was this.
The brush of Andrés’s fingertips against my palm sparked a flush of intimacy, a rush of heat deep in my chest.
It was a sin, and I knew it, and suddenly I realized that I didn’t care.
For if sin was all I had standing between myself and the darkness, I would take it.
* * *
*
THE SERVANTS LINED UP to greet Rodolfo, just as they had when I first arrived. I lingered in the doorway of the house’s courtyard, feeling oddly detached as I watched. The sky was cloudless, blazing lapis, the air crisp and fresh after the night’s hard rain. It was a perfect imitation of the first day I had set foot on San Isidro’s soil, the day I had unknowingly handed my soul over to the house and its demons. I half expected to see myself step from the carriage, a cloud of silks shadowed by a wide-brimmed hat, placing my delicate city shoes on the cursed earth.
You don’t belong here.
I leaped away from the doorframe.
No one was in the courtyard. I did not have to turn to know that. Paloma was with the others in a row next to José Mendoza; Andrés was in the capilla, avoiding sunlight while his head healed.
Cast it out, Andrés said.
But because I did, because I left my mind open for spirits to pry open, I knew who that voice belonged to.
I heard his wife died of typhus. I heard she was kidnapped by insurgents.
What had truly happened to her? I fought the urge to turn around and stare at the house, fought to keep away the image of Rodolfo’s name in blood dripping from the stucco. Who would bury a body that way?
The hairs on the back of my neck lifted as a cool breeze brushed over my shoulders, coming from the direction of the house.
If I died in this house, would I, too, be bricked into a wall?
If I were killed in this house, would I, too, linger in an unholy way, and watch the perverted fairy tale repeat itself as the gleaming prince brought a new wife home? Watch her emerge from the carriage, all shining silks and a face open with trust, only to be brought to my waiting jaws like a sacrifice?
A girlish giggle lilted behind me, toward me, carried by the breeze over my shoulder and into the courtyard before me.
You’ll die here.
Curling my hands into fists, I banished the voice from my thoughts as forcefully as if I were slamming a door shut: with both arms, all my heart, and all my anger.