“Don’t call me that,” she shot over her shoulder. “Strangers address me as Magdalena. Vaqueros may call me se?orita, or better yet, say nothing to me at all. Understood?”
She heard a sharp intake of breath through the nose. Her barb struck him. Good. He deserved it. She wished she could turn around and pierce him with a thousand more, with every hurtful thing she had to say. To make this insultingly carefree man feel a fraction of what she felt.
“Madre Santa,” he drawled, dry and mocking. “Casimiro should have warned me that you became such a brat.”
Nena whirled to face him.
He touched the brim of his hat in an exaggerated gesture. “Se?orita,” he added belatedly.
She adjusted the jug haughtily and met his eyes. They faced each other down like duelers, pistols drawn and cocked and gleaming.
An unfamiliar feeling lifted its head in her chest: a rough, feral desire to brawl. A sudden need to fight him and win, to leave him defeated in the dust like he deserved.
“And what kind of treatment did you expect? You left me.” She had never said the words aloud. Unleashing their weight rushed to her head like a goblet of wine—it left her breathless, heated, burning. It left her wanting more. She had never raised her voice at a man like this before, but now that she had begun, she found she could not stop. “You should be grateful I’m even speaking to you now. It won’t happen again, trust me.”
She expected him to fire back in kind. Instead, his shoulders slackened. He dropped his gaze.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You think sorry is sufficient?” It wasn’t. It changed nothing. It was a thin coat of paint over a rotting, broken house.
“I couldn’t come back,” he said.
“I woke up one morning and my best friend was gone without a trace,” she snapped. “Without a word. For nine years.”
His hands rose to his face as she was speaking; now his fingertips pressed against his temples. “Nena, I . . .”
She cut him off. “Don’t call me Nena.”
He kept speaking, voice gravelly with emotion: “You died that night.”
Nena’s retort died on her lips. She expected another half-hearted sorry. This tripped her and sent her sprawling in the dust.
“I couldn’t come back,” Néstor said. He gestured to his chest with both hands, every motion woven with earnestness, as his voice wavered close to cracking. He shut his eyes, as if bracing himself against something painful. “I couldn’t face it.”
He spoke with such conviction that she could not help but pause for a moment. She only held pieces of that night in her cupped palms; the more she squinted at them, the more they slipped through her fingers like water. Abuela told her she suffered from susto, but that did not explain the scar on her neck.
But it was not an excuse.
“Basta,” she snapped. Her skin prickled with irritation, with the heat; beneath the neckline of her dress, her scar felt as if it had been stung by nettles. “You’re full of shit. I’m not dead, am I?”
His eyes flew open. “Would I lie about something like this?” he said, as breathlessly as if she had struck him.
“I don’t know. I don’t know you anymore,” she said. “Because you left.”
He opened his mouth to reply, then stilled, head cocked as if he were listening to some faraway sound.
“Did you hear that?”
If Néstor’s whistle had summoned other vaqueros, they should have replied in kind. Their footsteps would have been determined and noisy. But there was nothing to hear. The eerie silence that thickened the air since they discovered the carcass had not lifted; if anything, it thickened like heat the longer they were in the presence of the bull carcass, threatening to smother her.
Yet she could not rid herself of the sensation that something drew near. Something that lifted her heartbeat in fear as she realized how dark it had grown as they argued. She was acutely aware that they had no torch to light the path; she was seized by a fierce desire for one.
A metallic click brought Nena’s heart to her throat. Néstor had turned and stepped close to her, his left arm outstretched as if ready to defend her. In his right he held a pistol.
“Is it Rinches?” Nena whispered, inching closer to his back. She rubbed her scar to ease the irritation. “Yanquis?”
His stance was tense as he searched the twilight, scanning the grasses on either side of them and the river behind them. “I . . . I don’t know.”
Then, she felt it: a humming, like that of insects, like the whir of chicharras’ wings. But it did not touch her ears. She felt it on her skin, on her arms and cheeks, on the soft flesh of her neck as it rose through the grass. It felt like the smell of rotting meat, acrid and repulsive and wrong.
Néstor lifted the pistol. Nena gripped the water jug, ready to throw it away and flee.
Though neither of them moved, a footstep broke the silence.
12
N?STOR
N?STOR TOOK A slow step back, his grip on the gun tightening. A feeling crawled over his skin, soft as the legs of roaches: something was watching them. Something was crouching low, ready to spring.
He clicked the safety off.
Nena was just behind him, so close he could feel her breath on his neck, low and quick as a hunted rabbit’s. His own pulse thrummed in his ears. Humming tightened the air. Twilight seemed to slip into full night between one heartbeat and the next; darkness fell around them in a cloying, intimate embrace.
“Jesucristo!”
He jumped, keeping his finger loose on the trigger. He lowered the gun immediately. That was Casimiro’s voice. His whistle had successfully summoned other vaqueros.
The humming that closed in around him and Nena lowered to a soft buzz, then faded altogether. The darkness seemed to draw back, retreating into the river grasses.
The spell broke. It was twilight again, the air around them so light and normal that Néstor wondered if he had imagined the darkness. If he had imagined everything.
He inhaled deeply to steady himself and slipped his gun back into its holster.
“What the hell happened here?” another voice chimed in, crying out in surprise.
Nena brushed past him as she stepped forward toward the voices, readjusting the jug on her hip. He followed close behind.
Both Casimiro and Beto had answered his whistle and were next to the desiccated bull. Casimiro was crouched near the carcass’s throat, shaking his head in bewilderment as he examined it.
“Beto,” Nena called. The vaquero looked up at his name, his eyes skipping from Nena over her shoulder to Néstor and back again.
Beto knew. Beto always saw right through him.
Their second day on the road, Beto had begun without ceremony.
“So . . . this Magdalena. You have history,” he said. They were saddling their horses and Casimiro’s as camp broke around them, the morning still new and pale.
Néstor kept his eyes on adjusting Luna’s girth. “What makes you say that?”
“I’ve heard you say Nena in your sleep,” Beto said.
Néstor’s heart dropped. His hand slipped; he nearly lost grip of the girth. He cleared his throat. “Could be anyone.”
He made the mistake of glancing over his shoulder. Beto had the eerie, colored eyes some Anglos had; even in the gray of new dawn, they were so blue they were almost translucent. Néstor shoved his hat low over his own eyes to avoid them.
“What?” he challenged.
“Remember when we were driving out near Presidio de San Vicente?” Beto began, his slow drawl innocent. “Three years ago, working for ?lvarez.”
Néstor pulled the left stirrup down over Luna’s adjusted girth. He made a noncommittal sound in reply.
He did.
They were in Coahuila, making camp in the mountains north of the river, when he thought he saw something move in the darkness of the chaparral. A shadow rising from four legs to two, standing as tall as a man in the darkness.
Then it vanished as soon as it appeared.