Fel wished the caballucos could grow to the size of real horses. He wished they would gallop across these grounds and break through the walls of the stone house. Their brays and the buzzing of their wings would scare every Nomeolvides woman into telling the truth.
He thought he heard Estrella saying his name, but he couldn’t hear. The caballucos laughed their laughs that were half-horse and half-human. Their color was the milk from a thousand indigo mushrooms, pouring everywhere, dyeing the night air.
They were laughing at him because he had believed he had life and breath of his own.
He had believed they were things he could hold in his hands.
The sounds he had forgotten rushed at him. The crumbling and collapsing of rock. Men calling out in fear or warning. Rubble crashing down, folding them all into its wave like it was night falling.
This was why he could not remember his brother’s name, or face. It hurt too much to remember him, because he had lost him in the gray world.
“Fel.” Estrella’s hands slid onto him.
The feeling of her touch, this girl with one palm on his back and the brush of fingers on his forearm, broke him into pieces. He was made of wood and paint, a caballuco figurine, splintering.
She’d found every crack he’d shown. Like his dreams of the caballucos disappearing between floorboards, she’d slid her fingers into those open places.
He wrenched away from her. This girl had been part of the family who turned a graveyard into a garden. They had hidden and covered over the truth of his brother’s death and his own.
To anyone but his own brother, he had been nothing but an underaged miner. He was an immigrant whose name no one cared to learn. He wore his own name on his shirt because he was not worth listing on a role sheet.
Fel looked at Estrella, still in that blue dress, the sky color bright against the night. Her skirt traced a wide arc behind her. A few drowsy fireflies hovered their tiny bulbs near the glowing bracelet on her wrist.
“You lied to me,” he said.
His mouth still felt warm from hers, the night air cold against his lips.
“What?” she asked.
“You hid this,” Fel said. “All of you. You took the truth and you turned it into flowers.”
When she blinked, the indigo of the milk mushrooms showed on her eyelashes. “Fel.”
She reached out for him. Her fingers struck his forearm.
He drew back. She grabbed him, one hand landing on his upper arm, the other on his side. Her touch, the first from her he hadn’t wanted, shocked through him.
His breath pulled in on itself. In one half-second, there was less air in him than he needed.
“This is what your family does?” he asked. “You take all this blood and death and you make gardens out of it?”
“Fel,” she said. “I don’t know what…”
He held up a hand.
“No,” he said. “Stay away from me.”
His steps crushed the grass, and it let off a scent like leaves and citrus.
Estrella was a girl drawn in blue and brown and gold, and he wanted to hide his face from her.
She could have her gardens and her family and the lies she spoke as a first language.
He had been cared for and watched and taken into this family, and they had all covered over the thing that had killed him and his brother and so many others.
“I loved you,” he said.
He tried to throw it all away. Estrella spreading blue paint on his skin. The pond giving off light like it was full of stars. The caballucos screaming through the dark. Estrella and him cooking the indigo mushrooms until they turned teal.
“Fel,” Estrella said, coming toward him. Her stricken face broke through the dark. She cut through that blur of stars and memory.
Gloria set a hand on Estrella’s shoulder. “Let him go.”
It was the one thing he could still be grateful for, the oldest Nomeolvides girl stopping the girl he had loved from following him.
La Pradera turned to a beautiful, terrifying fairy tale. Trees in bloom and bushes covered in color grew from the earth. Thick stripes of flowers banded the ground. Roses and vines dripped from wooden frames. Branches drooped so heavy with blossoms they should have broken.
The gardens were a whirl of petals. The stone and brick walkways were winding paths that led nowhere but back onto themselves. The flowers stood so bright and full they looked like frightening magic, their heads nodding in the wind so they seemed like they were watching him.
He had one decision left to him. There was a little of his own life still in his hands.
Fel crossed the gardens. Water lilies sat still in the fountains. A broken champagne glass had left shards over the flagstones.
Stone steps led to the still-open French doors, strewn with flowers and lost bracelets and curls of lemon peel. Wind puffed up the curtains, airing out the smells of cologne and liquor. The traces of women’s perfume faded, giving way to the nectar and petal scent of the blossoming trees outside.
Inside, the ball had been left behind in scraps. Shoes had been cast off. Half-full glasses sat abandoned. Flowers, taken from arrangements to be tucked into hair or pinned to lapels, had been discarded. Lost beads and buttons freckled the floor and tables.
All the guests had gone. Reid had probably passed out somewhere.
Fel would wake him up.
He now understood why Reid’s touch had felt as uncomfortable as hands wrenching his wrists. Why he had shuddered away when Reid set a hand on his back.
Reid would answer for the things his family had done, and then covered over.
Fel looked for him on the first floor, then the second, stopping at the room Reid had claimed as his study.
Reid was not there, not passed out on the desk or on the leather-covered chairs.
Light from the hall showed the desk, messy with letters.
The paper looked so heavy, so woven, that Fel could not help picking up the leaves.
He sifted through them, the handwriting of rich men declaring that they wanted their own estates to have grounds like La Pradera.
One referred to how his wife would love to have a rose garden like the one here, screened in by wooden lattices.
Another mentioned the wide flowered valley, calling it a sunken garden.
A third included a last line that Reid should stay in touch when you start sending them out.
Sending them out. Like the Nomeolvides women were books. Like they were things to be possessed, given away and returned.
This was why Reid had wanted so badly to impress them, why he’d made Estrella perform in front of them.
He wanted to interest everyone watching.
Estrella had thought Reid just wanted a favor.
She had no idea he had turned her into an advertisement.
Fel backed away from the dark-polished desk.