Don Feliciano filled the doorway, a candle held high in one hand, throwing his mustache and the lines of his face into sharp relief. Past him was Do?a Mercedes in white, hovering like a ghost, and the shadow of Nena’s brother, Félix, yanking a shirt over his head as he rushed into la sala.
For a moment, Don Feliciano peered into the dark, then his eyes fell to his feet, where Néstor and Nena were crumbled.
“Magdalena?” Néstor had never heard him speak so softly.
“Madre de Dios.” Do?a Mercedes was at his shoulder at the sound of their daughter’s name. Her voice pitched high with surprise, with panic at the sight of Nena’s prone form on the threshold.
She shoved Don Feliciano aside. Néstor stumbled back. He had never seen them act with so little composure; their fear threw oil on the fire of his.
A commotion of arms, of the candle being set down and others lit to fill the room with light. Nena was brought into the house and laid gently on the floor, Do?a Mercedes kneeling at her side, repeating the Hail Mary with feverish urgency as she examined Nena’s wound. Don Feliciano stood as if struck dumb; Félix kept lighting more candles.
They seemed to have forgotten Néstor was even there. He pushed himself up on aching legs and leaned against the doorway for support. As the son of a vaquero, he had never stepped foot inside la casa mayor. He would not now, not even as Félix brought the candles to Nena’s side.
Her eyes were still closed. In the candlelight, her face was waxy. Still. Her lips were dark, almost blue.
Her wound glimmered red and raw. Blood streaked her chest and stained her dress. Red gleamed wet on the chain of her golden scapular.
Do?a Mercedes leaned over her, ear pressed to her chest, still murmuring prayers.
Any moment now, Nena would open her eyes. She would look around, be surprised that she was home, be ashamed that she and Néstor had been caught. There would be punishment, yes. Don Feliciano would surely come after him with a switch, and Do?a Mercedes would scold Nena for her impropriety. They would lick their wounds and then, they would reunite beneath the anacahuita trees, another misadventure behind them.
But not this.
Not Don Feliciano standing dumb, the candle still in his fist, his face slack even as wax dripped onto the back of his hand. Not Félix growing increasingly agitated at Do?a Mercedes’s litanies.
“Is she breathing?” Félix asked. When Do?a Mercedes did not respond, he reached out and held his fingertips over Nena’s lips; then jerked his hand back as if he had been burned. “Mamá, say something.”
Do?a Mercedes did not lift her head. “My daughter is dead!”
Her wail was the wind on a cold winter night, pinning Néstor to the spot. He could not breathe. He was not a body leaning against the doorway anymore. He was a spirit looking down at Nena, at her blue lips, her blood-slicked scapular, her colorless face. He wanted her to rise, to move. He wanted to shake her until she cried out for him to stop.
But she was as still as a statue of a saint in a chapel. Still. Still.
This was his fault.
It had been his idea to look for silver tonight. His hand that drew them toward danger.
“Boy!” Don Feliciano’s roar rose above Do?a Mercedes’s weeping.
Néstor jerked away from the doorframe, his exhausted body alight with fear. Don Feliciano’s face had transformed, rage making it grotesque in the candlelight. Don Feliciano beat any boy who misbehaved on the rancho, Néstor included. Néstor knew that the patrón’s anger was a blunt weapon, a thing to flinch away from. The full force of Don Feliciano faced him now: he pointed at Néstor with one powerful, trembling hand. In a moment, he would bear down on Néstor with all the rage of a charging bull. “Boy.”
Fear seized him and drove cold spurs into his side. He launched away from the doorframe, away from the flickering candlelight and the weeping, away from Nena, into the night.
He fled.
Away from la casa mayor, past all the jacales of the workers, past his own home. To the fence surrounding the rancho and through it. Arms pumping, legs flying, barely breathing, tears streaming from his eyes from the sheer force of his speed. From the burgeoning, dark guilt that built like a summer storm in his chest—swift and violent, all of a sudden too heavy for his body. Still he tore through the chaparral, thorns slashing his arms, stinging his cheeks, until its weight was too much. He fell forward on hands and knees, arms shaking, heaving, certain—for a fleeting second—that he would vomit, but no. It was weeping. It burst from him with the crack of a whip, then it was a torrent.
Nena.
Thoughts shattered and drifted through the storm.
This was his fault. The beast. The stench of carrion; the way it curled over Nena. The blood on its fangs and chin—Nena’s blood. Nena’s weight against him, limp and lifeless.
Nena.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
DAWN. N?STOR LIFTED his head; a shard of pain drove through his skull. He winced. Every movement ached. Every limb was stiff.
He lifted his head.
He was in the chaparral. Clothes wrinkled, throat dry.
All he could see was Nena on the floor of la casa mayor, surrounded by flickering candles, wan and still. Blood gleaming raw in candlelight.
It was his fault.
Don Feliciano pointing at him, bellowing with rage.
He could not go back.
He rose on trembling limbs. The sun was still low on the horizon, and behind him.
He walked.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
HE WALKED. WEST, for days. When he reached the river, north.
He never turned back.
NINE YEARS LATER
3
N?STOR
Febrero 1846
LAREDO, ESTADO DE TAMAULIPAS
THESE DREAMS ALWAYS ended the same. Whatever had unspooled over the course of Néstor’s sleep would tighten. Refocus. When the disorientation steadied, he was watching the sheep.
He lay on his back beneath the shade of the oaks, listening to crickets, the warmth of the siesta steeping the scene with softness. With the heavy, quiet certainty of dreaming, he knew he was not alone. He knew she was there.
If he was lucky, the warmth would keep his awareness dulled, and he would spend the rest of the night beneath the tree, until the horses’ whinnies or the voices of other vaqueros roused him.
But if his awareness lifted, if he thought of who was with him, who lay next to him? If he focused his attention on that weight against his shoulder and how real it felt—or worse, if he tried to turn his head to look at her? That thought alone could wake him.
On worse nights, it poisoned the dream.
Tonight, as he looked up at the branches of the tree, tracing their splay against the blinding summer sky, awareness sent a ragged bolt of yearning through him.
She was there.
She was with him, as real as she had been in life. He wanted to see her. He wanted to see her face more than he wanted water on a hot afternoon, more than he wanted rest after weeks in the saddle.
He turned his head.
Before he saw her, the dream shifted. His movement drenched the dream with night, steering its course away from trees and sheep and crickets to a spring deep in the chaparral. To eerie, unnatural light glinting off the surface of the dark water and a shadowy form rising from four legs to two. To a voice screaming his name.
Néstor!
He sat up sharply, heart pounding the tender flesh of his throat, his eyes peeled open, his hands clutching thin sheets. Sheets. The texture of cotton against his clammy palms; the uneven firmness of a mattress. Air that tasted not of bare night but of being beneath a roof, of sleep and breathing caught within walls.
He pulled himself back from the terror of dreaming, hand over hand, winding the rope back to himself.
It was a dream. It was always a dream, when he heard that voice.
Néstor!
The coolness of morning wicked sweat away from his shoulders and brow. He shuddered.