Heat flushed Néstor’s face as she moved closer to him. He hissed as she touched his elbow, encouraging him to bend his arm over his stomach. This time, when she touched him, his vision was crisp, his mind sharpened by pain as she moved around him to tie the sling over his right shoulder.
He should feel sheepish by how easy it was for her to seduce him, how even in a moment like that she could drug him into compliance with nothing but her hands and her voice. He should even feel frightened by it. Never had a woman shown she had so much power over him with so little effort.
He wasn’t frightened.
Instead, specters of what she could do to him if she were acting in earnest danced through his mind; wicked, perfect mirages that flickered just out of reach . . . and there they would remain. It made him want to groan in agony.
Her fingertips brushed over his back and upper left arm. His flesh throbbed tenderly in response to her touch as she examined something he couldn’t see.
“Do you have alcohol?” she murmured.
“For the pain?” he said. What he wouldn’t give for a tub of aguardiente to drown the events of the day.
She hesitated. “Yes,” she said.
He told her where in the saddlebags to find the flask he had filled alongside Casimiro that morning. They mimed clinking the flasks like glasses, taking a solemn sip each before they turned to saddle their horses for battle. He shut his eyes. When visions of cavalry stallions impaled on Yanqui bayonets were all he saw, he forced them open and watched the shadows Nena cast as she crossed the room and came back.
A fresh pain, this time searing and stinging hot, ripped over his arm. Nena had dampened a rag torn from her dress with aguardiente and dabbed it on his bleeding cuts.
“?Jesucristo, Nena!” he swore.
“No infections on my watch,” she said. “Here,” she then added, somewhat apologetically, as she passed him the flask.
He hissed as she moved onto the next cut, then took a sip of the aguardiente, savoring its harsh bite. Growing up under Abuela’s wing meant he knew alcohol could help stave off infection in the immediate future. He should have made the connection sooner. But shit, it hurt.
“I don’t have . . . I have nothing,” Nena continued. “No herbs, nothing. All of my things are back at the camp.” Her voice wavered as she moved and sat before him, brow creased, jaw set. “You’re going to be fine.”
She said this firmly, as if to convince herself of this fact.
“I’ve never been better,” he said.
She searched his face, narrow eyed and suspicious. There was something in the way she looked at him that made him feel as if she were really looking at him, the way Abuela did when she was assessing someone’s aura. It was a look that felt loving. A look that he wanted to keep so badly that it hurt with a sweet, tender ache.
“Really,” he said softly. “I won’t lie, it fucking hurts. But I’m fine.”
She must have learned enough from that and her long look, for she made a small, satisfied noise. She straightened. “I should check to see if we still have horses,” she said darkly.
Luna. Flashes of the desiccated bull snaked around the corners of Néstor’s vision. What if she were hurt?
“I’m coming,” he said.
“Absolutely not,” Nena snapped. “Stay put.” Her tone and the flash of pain that snaked over his left shoulder as he bent his weight forward stilled him. “You want to be useful? See if you can put your shirt on and reload your guns one-handed. Carefully,” she added firmly. She stepped toward the doorway, and, casting the gory body of the Rinche that was still splayed near the doorway a disgusted look, retrieved the machete she had beheaded the vampire with.
“You be careful too,” he said.
On his deathbed, he would remember this image: Nena’s long plaits gleaming in the firelight and shifting over the back of her sweat-stained white shirt—his shirt, and his trousers—as she turned to shoot him a look over her shoulder. Though he feared the claws of the darkness beyond the jacal, there was a boldness in her stance and in her firm grip on the machete. She would protect him. She was just as capable of watching his back as he was hers.
There was no woman on earth like this one.
She stepped into the darkness of the patio.
He listened to her footsteps until they hit gravel, then grass. He listened as he did what she ordered, grabbing his shirt and slowly slipping his good arm into it.
He would much rather she help him put it back on the way she had taken it off. For a fleeting second, an exceptionally stupid part of his brain wondered if he should have said that out loud to her.
Jesucristo, was he an idiot. Either the effect she had on him had not yet fully ebbed or the pain in his shoulder had fully robbed him of sense. He grunted as he pulled the shirt over his arm in the sling and clumsily undid buttons to let his left hand free.
On the contrary, the pain was keeping him remarkably sober. Nena’s words from before the vampire appeared wound through his head like a loud drunk unsteady on his feet.
Don Feliciano Serrano would sooner shoot a man than allow a vaquero to woo his daughter.
Boy, Don Feliciano shouted as he had pointed at him. He was never anything but chamaco or you to the patrón. As if his existence were not notable enough to warrant a name. To Don Feliciano, he was no more important than the dogs on the rancho.
To hell with Don Feliciano. There were greater threats to Néstor’s happiness and his dream of standing on the patio of his own home with Nena than the patrón.
Such as vampires, for example. The fact that he was down an arm and bleeding energy like a butchered steer. The fact that he needed to reload his pistols.
He stood, swayed, and lowered himself to the floor by the back wall of the jacal where his bullets were. He grimaced, fingers shaking as he reloaded. He couldn’t help but think that Nena and Luna were out there in the dark. He couldn’t protect them until at least this gun was loaded. The second was missing. Had he dropped it? Why were his fingers so damn sweaty and slipping over the bullets? Why hadn’t Nena returned yet?
“You good out there?” he called.
A muffled all good carried around the corner of the jacal. It did not soothe his fear, not for a minute, not until she was in the doorway. Her shirt was damp with rain; now that she was back and the buzzing worry cleared from his head, he heard the tentative, first sounds of rain on the roof of the jacal.
“They’re shaken, but unharmed. And still there,” she said, with a half-hearted, breathy laugh, as if she could not believe this fact. “I would be halfway back to Los Ojuelos if I were them. Here.”
She lay his second pistol at his side. He nodded his thanks, too focused on reloading the first to speak.
Something in her other hand caught the firelight. Before he could ask what it was, she was back in the doorway, crouching as she uncorked a small bottle. She poured a thin line of what looked like sand across the threshold.
It was the salt from his saddlebag.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“You remember Abuela’s stories,” she said, corking the salt and slipping the bottle into her pocket. She gave a defeated shrug. Exhaustion drew at the corners of her mouth. “Anything to help.”
“Speaking of,” Néstor said. He turned the loaded gun around so the handle faced Nena and handed it to her.
She took it hesitantly. Held it as if she were weighing its utility against the threats they faced. “I don’t know how to shoot this.”
“Then I’ll teach you tomorrow,” he said. “So you can defend yourself after I’ve taught you how to cheat at cards,” he added. But his voice was a hollow imitation of what it had been that afternoon. Neither of them laughed.
Nena put the pistol in the holster at her hip and turned to the hearth.