But instead of pink and white, this one had a dozen different colors. Blues and greens, golds and violets. Light purple petals climbed one branch, and blue-green flowers covered another bough. Green ones he thought were leaves cleared into blossoms. Blooms of pale gold petals trailed along the inner branches.
It was the remembered things he had told her, covered in all her wild color.
There was more to him now, more of his blood. He could reach his hand to Estrella’s face, the moon brightening the edges of her hair.
With his thumb, he cleared a wet trail from her cheek. It led his eyes to her lips.
Her lip was bleeding. A gash cut across the pink red of her mouth. Blood was drying into the cracks of her lips.
Not like she’d bitten herself.
Like someone had hit her.
He felt a shadow moving closer.
Fel sat up. His chest tightened at the sudden shift, but the stirring of the ground underneath him kept him moving.
Reid stood near them, looking as startled to see Fel above the ground as he had to see him disappear into it.
Reid. This man whose family had killed and then covered everything over. This man who thought women like Estrella could be lent like candlesticks or cuff links, and struck like they were frozen ground.
Fel could see the tension shocking through Reid’s hands. He looked ready, and afraid. Not of Estrella, with blood drying on her lip. Or Fel, with dirt and petals clinging to his skin, darkening the shirt he’d been wearing when Adán took him into the ground.
Reid was staring at that tree, that beautiful, unknowable tree with all its colors. It was no trick or performance. No pond of blue petals. It was not magic for him to put on display. It was stunning and terrifying as a statue of a saint.
It was damning Reid. Fel could see guilt moving across his face as the tree loomed and cast its shadow.
Reid’s gaze struck them both but settled on Estrella.
“Your whole family,” he said. “Do you know how close you were to getting killed for being witches before you came here?”
Estrella held on to Fel tighter, as though he needed guarding more than she did.
“We should’ve let them,” Reid said.
Estrella gave against the threat, Reid’s unspoken promise that if the town turned on the Nomeolvides women, if they hated and feared them, Reid would let them drive her family from this land, cast them out, murder them.
With herself, Estrella was reckless and unafraid, but she was as careful with her family as if they were glass.
Fel’s body still felt like handfuls of ground. He had to brace against the earth underneath him to get back the feeling that he was on this side of it.
But he would kill this man. Even if he still felt himself crumbling like earth, he would kill him.
Estrella’s family had been his when he had no family. This was his fight, too.
He pulled himself to standing. His steps felt unsteady, things he had to think about. He had to force his body into them, like he’d been startled awake from sleepwalking.
Estrella grabbed his arm, and he couldn’t tell if she was trying to stop him or help him stand.
With each step, he felt more rooted in his own body, and he closed more space between him and Reid. There was current in his hands, half rage, half the untethered feeling of coming back to life.
Fel would kill this man. For his brother. For the other men. For the women who had become his family.
Steps struck the courtyard flagstones.
“Reid.” Bay’s voice rang out through the gardens.
Reid’s stare flew and found her.
Bay stopped, catching her breath. In the distance, Estrella’s cousins crossed La Pradera, the wind streaming their hair and skirts.
Reid studied Bay like he was watching her through a rain-blurred window. There was no flash of satin or fair hair, nothing pale or bright against the dark sky. In the place of blues and yellows there were browns and grays.
But he recognized her, her voice if not her clothes and her hair, cut and dyed. She put a haunted look into him, as though the voices that lived in the ground had gotten their fingers around his throat.
The sight of her deepened his fear. It shocked him into stillness.
“Reid,” Bay said, moving closer. “Did you ever think about why they sent you here?”
The shadow and silver of clouds moved over Reid’s face.
“This is the land of Briar disappointments,” Bay said.
“I know that,” Reid said, his voice unsteady. “Everyone knows that.”
“Did you know we’ve disappeared, too?”
“What?” Reid looked down at his own body as though it might be vanishing.
“A long time ago.” Bay unfolded papers from her back pocket, sheets that looked like copied newsprint. “More than a hundred years ago.”
Fel tensed, waiting for her to tell the rest, not sure he wanted to hear the story of his own death and Adán’s told like it was far history.
“The Briars who lived here went missing and nobody ever found them,” Bay said.
Fel turned to Estrella. What? He’d meant to say it, not mouth it, but no sound came.
Estrella shook her head.
“Nobody knew what happened to them,” Bay said. “People around here thought they’d skipped the country. That’s one of a dozen theories the papers ran. But they just disappeared. I’m talking about their tea and their fountain pens left out on their desks and everything. They just disappeared, Reid.”
“That’s not true,” he said, the sureness folding back into his voice. “You can’t believe every story you hear. None of it’s true. You’re here, aren’t you?”
Bay glanced at Fel and Estrella, as though these were things that should not be said in front of them.
“Look.” Bay handed Reid the papers.
Reid’s eyes moved over the print.
The only sign of him understanding was the pull of muscle between his jaw and his neck.
“It’s not them,” Bay said, looking first to Estrella and then to Reid. “It’s the land.”
“What are you talking about?” Reid asked.
“Something happened here,” Bay said. “And the land’s been taking people ever since. The stories, they all turned it into something about the women here, but it happened before they ever got here. The land took the men who lived here. Our family. Your family.”
Fel watched Estrella, her lips parting as though she was breathing in Bay’s words. He felt it, how neither of them expected Reid to believe Bay. To Reid, the Nomeolvides women were witches, an explanation so simple and clean he felt no need to adorn it.
But Bay, appearing with the wonder and terror of an angel, frightened him into believing.
“You know I’m right,” Bay said. “You can tell me you don’t, but you feel it.” Bay looked toward Estrella. “The same way they feel everything in their family, you feel this. I can see it in you.”
Reid handed the papers back. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I want you to know that our own family…”