The rage of the three cousins still hung in the air, like the bitter tang of smoke. But this, they did together. This—their love for Bay, their understanding that La Pradera’s power was the only match for the curse of their blood—made them more sisters than cousins.
Above them, the well-suited men and gown-wearing women danced, drunk on champagne and lavender liqueur. But down here, with the sunken garden’s walls rising up around them, the slopes covered in green, this was their world. The floor was thick with every flower the Nomeolvides women grew. Low garden lamps gave the ground enough light to show its color. Cypress trees cast their silhouettes against the walls. Blossoming branches patterned the walkways in flowered shadows.
The cousins streamed toward the stone staircases.
“Are you coming?” Calla asked.
“Soon,” Estrella said. “I’ll be right there.”
Dalia and Azalea paused before the first step.
“Azalea,” Dalia said.
But Azalea rushed up the stairs in front of her, ignoring her.
“Just give her time,” Estrella heard Gloria whisper. “She’ll come around.”
Estrella stayed. She stood before the pond, the water still enough to mirror the moon.
The air here smelled like wild sage and blue shale. Soft waves of meadow cordgrass and pink muhly grass, things that sprouted wild in the wet ground, grew in the willows’ shade. The feathery stalks looked like clouds of fairy floss when dry, and pink rock candy when they got wet.
Estrella crouched near the water. Her dress fluffed up behind her. Flower beds fringed the banks. The ends of willow fronds floated on the water.
Forty feet down to the bottom. The lowest point of the sunken garden.
Estrella shut her eyes and asked La Pradera not to break her and her cousins apart. They could last through a hundred fights about who’d borrowed whose yellow shoes, but they could not fight like this, cold and silent and mistrusting.
She asked these gardens why they had given her family Fel, a boy so kindhearted that he carried guilt none of them could name but all of them could see on his frame like a weight. She asked what La Pradera wanted her and her family to do with him. She asked it to let him out from under his own nightmares, to save him from being a boy who did not sleep.
She asked it to help him get back all he did not remember.
Estrella traced her fingers along her necklace. The one thread of romance her mother allowed was the story of its colors. The tumbled-stone beads, as round as pearls and as big as shell peas, were the colors of a rare bird from the Atacama Desert. Bronze and lilac. Cobalt and violet. Their feathers were bright bursts on the silver land. It was proof of Estrella’s own blood, worn on her neck.
Estrella had loved it like it itself was a desert bird, bright and flickering.
She grabbed the necklace, all she had of her father’s family, half her blood. And she pulled until the strands snapped.
The beads, the blue and green and bronze, flew and scattered. They broke the surface of the pond like raindrops.
Trails of light slid through the pond. They grew brighter and dimmer as they moved into shallower and then deeper water. When they stayed still for a second, they were points of light. When they moved, they were comet trails. They skittered and broke through the surface. One spun away from the water like a firefly. One flew, mirroring the path of the one in the pond.
Another splashed up and joined the one in the air. Still another stayed underwater, lighting up the pond and the willow streamers.
Some stayed. Some flew out and clustered on the meadow cordgrass and muhly grass, lighting up the pink fluff. They looked like fireflies or tiny stars.
“Estrella?”
She thought the voice was an echo of his voice from earlier, the gardens throwing it back at her.
But she turned, and he stood there, the pond casting bands of bowing light over him.
“Fel?” she asked.
He stepped out from the willow’s shadow.
Later, she would tell herself he’d kissed her first. She would remember that. He’d started this. Maybe she wrapped her fingers around the back of his neck and pulled him toward her, but he’d still started this.
She kissed him hard enough to realize it wasn’t just the air but Fel that tasted like wild sage and smelled like blue shale. The insistence and faltering of kissing him had its own rhythm. It was the alternation of which of them wanted it more and which of them thought they should stop. They passed the two back and forth so one of them was always pulling away while the other drew closer.
The feeling that she should stop collected in her.
If she thought she could ever love him, she shouldn’t let his mouth near hers. If there was anything in her that wanted him, she shouldn’t learn the pattern of his breathing when he kissed her.
If she wanted his body not to vanish, she could not put her hands on him.
This was the heart of being a Nomeolvides girl. The more she loved a boy, the more reasons there were not to touch him.
The price of knowing he would be there for her to touch was her not touching him.
She knew this, even as he set his hands on the waist of her dress, slid his tongue between her lips, even as she dug her fingers into his hair. And with the moon veiling the clouds, with the garden lanterns and the little stars her necklace had turned to as their only light, it was almost as though, for those few seconds, La Pradera could not see them.
But around them, the ground was whispering, the grass and flower beds giving up strange things Estrella could not name.
TWENTY-SIX
Indigo milk caps. As they grew from the grass, they took root in Fel’s memory.
He knew them. They spread through the garden valley in fairy rings big enough that, even with the sweep of Estrella’s skirt, they could both fit inside. The mushrooms stood pale and bright against the dark earth and grass.
Estrella breathed in, and he could hear the wonder in that breath, like she’d never seen mushrooms that color. On land her own family made beautiful, she must have thought there was nothing to find, no unfamiliar magic.
She knelt down, and the back of her skirt trailed across a fairy ring. The garden lamps slipped gold light into the folds of fabric.
“What are these?” she asked.
“Mushrooms,” he said, letting a laugh into his words. What did she think they were?
She hesitated to touch them, hovering her fingers a little above the caps. “They’re blue.”
He crouched near her. The mushroom caps were pale purple, but he lifted the margin to show the dark gills underneath, a storm blue tinged with violet.
He remembered finding these with his brother, how the wonder of it never dulled. Each morning he forgot the deep blue, and each night he found it again.
But it wasn’t just the thought of his brother spinning back toward him.
His family.