“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 Do?a 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.