“Is she going to be okay?”
“I don’t know. There’s nothing I can do about the blood she lost.”
Domingo smoothed Atl’s hair away from her face. It was starting to change, slowly morphing into a more human shape. “And now? What do we do now?” Domingo asked.
“I think you ought to let her sleep. This is so wrong. Damn, what is it with you and girls? First you get your ass beat because of Belén and now you’re hooking up with a monster?”
“She’s not a monster.”
“Vampires … they suck people’s blood, man. Come on, you know that.”
“She’s not going to hurt me.”
Quinto gave him a skeptical sigh and crossed his arms. The light in the room was harsh, drawing stark lines upon Atl’s face so that he felt he could almost see every bone underneath her skin.
“I’m off,” Quinto said.
“What? Where? You can’t leave her alone. What if she needs help in a couple of hours?” Domingo protested.
“Yeah, I need to shower and go straight to bed.”
“Quinto—”
“Look, I’m just going to pull out the old cot you slept on a few times and nap. If she needs me, come and look for me in the back, all right?”
“All right. Thanks, by the way.”
Quinto didn’t reply. He moved toward the door, but paused to give Domingo one last look. “She’s a vampire. You need to get rid of her before it’s too late.”
Domingo did not reply. He bent down to pick up Atl’s jacket, which Quinto had tossed to the floor, and placed it on top of her, also drawing up the blanket they’d wrapped her in. He guessed he ought to find her clean clothes and a clean blanket, but there wasn’t much in terms of that around the room and he was afraid of looking outside and Atl suddenly having a relapse while he was gone. She was looking better now, but there were no guarantees she wouldn’t need more medical attention.
He patted her hand and pulled up a chair, sitting by her head.
*
He supposed he was dreaming, because he was standing in the middle of the desert and there was a tortoise crawling next to him. Domingo looked at it. The sun bleached the desert white, the animal looked like it was made only of bones. He turned and saw a fire burning in the distance. Smoke billowed up, black, staining the sky, but when he approached the fire had stopped burning and there were only ashes left. A pile of ashes blanketing the desert, which was now gray.
And that’s when he saw them, under the shadow of a dead tree: three bodies. Two teenage boys. Someone had inflicted tiny cuts on their faces and bodies, then cut off their heads, and the severed heads stared at him, their eyes bulging out. The third was a pregnant woman. A shot had blown off half her head and she’d been decapitated. Her belly was a bloody mess.
He knew, in a corner of his heart, that this was a true memory and no nightmare. It was Atl’s memory.
Domingo opened his eyes and lifted his hand, glancing down at Atl. She was breathing slowly, eyes closed, and her face now was that of a normal young woman. Just a girl, asleep, but for the first time he felt apprehension, the trickle of fear upon his shoulders.
And then he heard it. Footsteps. Several people.
He whirled around to find himself face-to-face with Quinto. He wasn’t alone. The Jackal and two of his buddies were with him.
“Hey, asshole,” the Jackal said. “I came to meet your new girlfriend.”
“Fuck,” Domingo whispered.
CHAPTER
23
Atl waited for Izel to scream. She waited for her to wail. She waited for anything except the calm, restrained look on her sister’s face, as though someone had dragged an eraser across a blackboard, cleaning the slate.
“Aren’t we doing something?” Atl asked.
“I am making arrangements for the funeral,” her sister said.
“I’m not talking about the funeral. I mean something.”
Izel was standing beside the large axolotl tank, observing the white and black salamanders as they swam up and down.
“You know, people tend to focus on the neoteny of the axolotl. It reaches sexual maturity without ever undergoing metamorphosis. But its more interesting aspect, the reason why we’ve always kept a few as pets, is their healing ability. They are capable of regenerating whole limbs, even vital parts of their brains. We are able to do that too, of course. In that sense we are like cousins.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Atl said.
“We will grow anew. We have been damaged, but we will heal.”
Atl circled the axolotl tank. “Yeah, and that’s fine, but what are we doing about them? What are we doing with Godoy? What are we doing with the assholes—”
“We do nothing,” Izel said.
Atl did not speak, could not find the words, any words, for the span of a good couple of minutes. “Mother has been murdered. They delivered her head to us,” Atl said.
“I know. The elders spoke yesterday, I am the cihuātlahtoāni now. And I say there shall be no retaliation.”