His heart began to race. His breath fought to keep up; his chest was so tight it hurt. Darkness gnawed at the corners of his eyes, threatening to drown him. He could not control his breathing. He paced the camp, agitated, long after the figure vanished, eyes ripped wide in fear as they searched the night for danger.
There was nothing but chaparral clothed in night. Nothing but the black silhouette of the mountains, looming silent on the horizon. Nothing but the glimmer of the fire, though its dancing shadows set him on edge.
By the time Beto grabbed him by the arm and asked what was wrong with him, fear had begun to fray at the edges. Awareness of the other vaqueros watching him warily sank in; thorns of humiliation prickled over his skin.
“You got wasted and started crying about a girl,” Beto was saying. “You kept saying Nena, Nena. That’s what they call her, isn’t it?”
Néstor stared at the stirrup before him, scratching away an imaginary bit of dried saddle soap foam with his thumbnail. “I don’t cry.”
“You did.”
“Don’t remember it.” He shoved his hat lower, then mounted Luna.
Beto had followed in suit. “Look, I’m not going to tell you what to do,” he said. “All I’m saying is that whenever I’m having trouble with someone, I find the best approach is to be honest. To say things out loud. ?Me entiendes?”
Beto’s advice was solid. It always was. So he had tried, but he had stumbled spectacularly. The evidence of his failure was clear: the air around Nena crackled with irritation as she gestured for Beto.
“Come with me to the river, please,” Nena said to Beto. “Then escort me back to camp.”
“Of course, se?orita,” Beto said. “But wasn’t Duarte—”
“Se?or Duarte no longer has the privilege of my company,” Nena said archly.
Néstor flinched.
His strategy at broaching the gulf between him and Nena thus far had reaped little harvest. He had learned to charm women, to flirt and coax smiles from the sternest face, but would not resort to such tactics. This was not any woman. This was Nena. At a loss for how to talk to her, he tried to warm the chill she shrouded herself in as Beto might—begin with the weather, comment on the horses. Lull her defenses with quiet, quotidian conversation until they lowered.
She rebuked him.
He told himself as he held watch over her tent at night that he could accept this. Nena lived. She moved through the world with the same determined tilt to her shoulders and flint in her eyes that drew him to her when he was a boy, a moth to her blazing light. Was she not miraculously resurrected? To see her was enough. To hear her laugh again, even if it was at one of Beto’s long, meandering jokes and not his, was enough.
He could survive on the scraps from her table—had he not spent the last nine years starving? Anything she gave him now was a bounty. It would be fine.
“I respect your wishes, se?orita,” Beto said slowly, choosing his words with care, “but your brother instructed us to protect you, and given this”—here he gestured at the carcass of the bull—“there might be a cougar nearby. Or . . . worse.” He paused, as if wondering what worse could mean. “I’ll fetch the water, if you don’t mind. I think it’s best if you go back to camp.”
“I’ll say,” Casimiro said, standing. “It’s not safe out here.” He set his hands on his hips and gave the dead steer one final look before turning to Nena and Néstor. “I think Beto’s right. Shall we go back to camp, se?orita?”
Nena hesitated. Was she weighing how much she wanted him out of her sight?
“Fine,” she said at last. She shifted her weight and held the jug out to Beto, who took it with a genteel touch of the brim of his hat.
“Better safe than sorry, se?orita,” he said, and headed off to the river. As he passed Néstor, he murmured in English: “You’re welcome.”
Néstor bit his tongue. He could not see Nena’s expression, not with her back turned to him as she stepped haughtily forward to walk beside Casimiro, but he imagined she would not take kindly to being whispered about behind her back in English.
Beto’s whistle rose through the grasses, growing fainter, as they parted ways in the deepening gloom. The fires of the camp were just visible through the high grasses; by their light, Néstor saw Casimiro set a hand lightly on his holster and cast a meaningful look over his shoulder. It was a silent message, perhaps so as not to alarm Nena, but it was clear as if he had spoken it aloud. Be ready.
For what?
He told Nena the truth when he said he had seen something like that before, near Presidio de San Vicente. The same evening Beto claimed Néstor wept about Nena, he and two other vaqueros had come across an enormous longhorn bull downed in the chaparral. There were signs of a struggle: scratches on the bull’s hide from thorns, the dirt stirred to madness beneath where it lay. But there were no other tracks around it. No sign that a cougar—the only predator big enough to down a steer of that size—had attacked. Even if it had been a cougar, it made no sense for the animal to abandon its kill out in the open.
Much less to leave it so desiccated.
Néstor drew back in disgust, a sour taste slicking his mouth. He had seen hundreds of dead cattle in his life. He had even butchered many. He had never seen something like this: its eye sockets empty and blackened with flies, but that was the only normal thing about it. It looked like a sack of bones, as if it had been left out to dry for weeks. Bones protruded like sharp roots breaking through earth; Néstor could count every single one of the bull’s ribs, make out the ridges of its spine. As if it had been starved in a drought, though the entirety of the herd they were driving was healthy and hale. The levels of decay and lack of scavenging meant the kill was recent. Perhaps only a day old.
There was but one wound. Just beneath the curve of the bull’s cheek, the soft flesh of the throat had been punctured by incisors . . . if those fangs had been situated in an enormous set of jaws.
And that was it.
It made no sense.
“Híjole.” One of the vaqueros with Néstor that day was an older man they called Old Juan, a stranger whom no one had driven with before. Old Juan kept to himself throughout the drive; though he shared his tobacco, he never shared conversation or stories over the campfire. Néstor and Beto thought him strange—how could they not, when he left lines of salt around his sleeping bag and drew curious marks in the dirt around the horses? Everyone thought the man was a bit cracked, and cut him a wide berth.
Old Juan crouched near the bull’s ravaged throat, then stood and crossed himself quickly. When he spoke, it was the most words Néstor had ever heard him string together in his ragged, shout-roughened voice. “No animal did this,” he said to Néstor and the other vaqueros. “This is the work of spirits.”
The brassy, mocking laughter of the other vaqueros shattered the eerie silence that hung over the bull carcass.
But later that night, after Néstor panicked about seeing humanlike shapes in the gloom, Old Juan approached and sat next to him. The older man rolled a cigarillo in silence, the campfire carving the lines of his face deep.
“I know that look. You’ve seen them,” he said. His voice was like gravel underfoot. Néstor did not reply. Old Juan did not seem to care, for he continued without prompting. “I was born in Guadalajara, you know. Came north looking for silver, long ago. El Norte is different. Maybe you don’t see it because you’re from here—something strange lives in this land.” He stamped earth under the heel of his boot for emphasis. The glow of his cigarillo being lit was like an ember, burning brighter as he inhaled, then released a thin, blue stream of smoke. “If you live cheek to jowl with danger your whole life, you’re bound to be blind to it. But I’m telling you. There are no monsters in Guadalajara. Not like here.”