She wants to leave, Cuervito, she said. We must let her.
I wanted to flinch away from the softness of her voice. I found my beloved cousin’s brusqueness fortifying. I longed for her sharp edges, a blunt retort. To receive her sympathy made me fear she saw too much. It made me fear she saw even more clearly than I how powerfully I wanted Beatriz to stay.
But would I want to stay, if I were Beatriz? So many Solórzanos had died in this house over the years. Some violently, some not. Their voices would always live in its walls, as would the memories of the hundreds of people of my family who had served them. Such houses were what they were. I could not remove those voices any more than I could remove the foundation of the house. Some people could live in such houses utterly unaware of the company they held. For others, the walls were halfway to sentience, as difficult to live with as an overly intrusive relative.
But there was one force I needed to release. One body left to bring to the graveyard once its spirit had passed.
I could only hope it would be enough to convince Beatriz to stay.
Evil twitched in the shadows of the house, unnaturally inky black. It slipped through the halls, following me as I stepped into the green parlor. I left the door open, inviting it to follow, as I walked toward the center of the room. I began to move furniture and rolled the green rug away, my movements even and deliberate as I took a piece of charcoal from my pocket and set it to stone. I drew the first line of an exorcism glyph.
The door slammed behind me.
My heart skipped a step, then steadied as I flexed my hands. Scars were forming beneath the bandages wound around my knuckles, sustained from the burns of lightning.
I was not the same man who had faced the darkness before.
I continued sketching the correct glyphs under the watchful gaze of the darkness, my hand steady even as the hair rose on the back of my neck. Newfound power did not mean I was not still prey. I could smell my own natural fear rising, its tang metallic and sweet.
She was here.
Of course she was here. I would not grant her the satisfaction of seeing me afraid of her. I inhaled deeply, turned the page of the pamphlet, and continued working for long, silent minutes until the circle was closed.
Then I rose, stepped into the center of the circle, and faced the shadows.
“Buenos días, do?a,” I said.
A soft hiss. A rattlesnake’s hiss, but deeper in timbre. A predator’s hiss.
“Enough,” I said, voice ringing with chastisement. “It is time.”
My arms loose at my sides, I turned my palms out to the shadows.
That simple act was all it took. Like an arroyo glutted by a flash flood, I was flush with dark power. The darkest parts of myself were no longer bound, no longer confined to the box. It no longer weighed heavy in my chest, chained with shame and self-loathing and fear of what awaited me after death. It spread over my limbs with the weightlessness of dew, a steady comfort. I wore it with the ease of my own shadow, even when I turned to my grandmother’s gifts. Even when I celebrated Mass and led the people of San Isidro in prayer.
The darkness howled, building around me with the electricity of a storm.
You must find your own way, Titi always said.
If I continued walking the path I knew was right, one day, I would find my own balance. My way. My calling.
I reached into the darkness and took the spirit of Do?a María Catalina in my fist. It flung its weight away from me, battling for release with sheer force of will as Titi’s incantations unspooled from my lips.
“Enough,” I repeated in castellano.
I yanked down with all my strength.
A sound like a cord snapping split the darkness. The house’s stormy rebellion died.
The spirit of Do?a María Catalina stepped into the parlor, as real as she had been when I saw her in this room years ago. She shimmered like a mirage as I drew her into the circle. She was as delicate and sugar-spun as when I first saw her in the plaza de armas of Apan years ago, dressed in gray, her corn silk hair haughtily upswept. The enmity she felt for me in life, that she directed at me through the house, was perfectly etched on her features as she crossed her arms over her chest.
Hate like hers was a cancer. It was time to excise it from my home, once and for all.
“I think you know what I’m here to do,” I said.
Her mouth twisted into an elegant scowl.
I hope you burn, she spat. Burn, burn, burn.
The thrum of her voice struck my ears like drumming. Like the pulse of unholy fire that lit my dreams.
They burn people like you.
How long those words had wounded me.
I gave Do?a Catalina my most beatific smile. Yes, I still feared discovery, by Padre Vicente or someone worse. Yes, I feared the hereafter. I was a sinner. I was a witch. I had sinned and would sin again, like all men. But whatever my decisions meant for life after death was between me and the Lord. All I could do was serve the home and people I loved using every gift I was born with.
I squared off with the apparition of Do?a Catalina.
It was long past time for her to face the Lord herself. She and I both knew it; an expression of resignation shadowed her features as I lifted my voice with incantations, as my power wound itself thickly around her. In a moment, I would sever her from the house for eternity. If she feared what waited for her on the other side, she gave no indication of it.
“There is only One who decides who burns and who does not,” I said.
With a sound like the ripping of paper, the apparition of Do?a Catalina turned to ash. It hovered on the air, then drifted slowly down through the silence to the charcoal glyphs on the floor. There, they curled in on themselves like burning paper, shrinking and melting away.
I made the sign of the cross.
“Let His will be done,” I said.
33
BEATRIZ
THOUGH THE SUN SHONE bright in an azure sky, I wore a thick wool shawl over my shoulders as Andrés escorted me to the house. He had succeeded in healing it several days ago; it was safe enough that Paloma had salvaged some of my clothing from the wreckage of the fire. The dining room was damaged, for it was beneath my study, she said, but otherwise the majority of the house remained unscathed. My belongings were not so lucky. Smoke had damaged much of what had not burned, but I didn’t care.
The next morning, I was leaving. I was taking Mamá up on her invitation and going to Cuernavaca for a long, long time. Perhaps forever.
Part of me was wary—was Cuernavaca truly the solution to my longing for a home? I had thought as much of San Isidro.
Perhaps it wouldn’t be.
But I knew that returning to Mamá was.
Birdsong lilted overhead as we entered the courtyard and walked toward the house. Swallows swooped toward the pockmarked tiles of the roof; nests had emerged in the hollows beneath tiles.