Reid cut her off with a raised hand. “They are not your family.”
“Fine,” she said. “Your family. They sent you somewhere where there was a chance you could just vanish. They send their failures here hoping they’ll stay out of the way, but you know what I think? I think they’re hoping we’ll just disappear. We won’t be their problem anymore. Why else would they have started sending everyone they didn’t want here? They knew. They were willing to risk you and Marjorie’s father and everyone else. They’ve been doing it for generations.”
Pain started at the edges of Reid’s face, gathering until it shut his eyes.
Fel hated this man, for hitting Estrella hard enough that her blood found Fel in the ground. For living off money made from the blood of men who had no other choice.
But for this second he saw him enough to recognize the understanding in Reid, his realizing how much his family counted him lost. He could hate him, and still see it.
Bay wouldn’t let Fel kill Reid. Fel knew that, the rage dulling in his hands. But at least he had this, Reid’s fear. If Bay would not let Fel use his hands against Reid, he could still use this, his fear, to keep him away from Estrella and her family.
“They want to get rid of you, Reid,” Bay said. “One way or another.”
Reid opened his eyes. “What happened here?”
Bay gave a short, pained whisper of a laugh. “Your family killed people. A lot of them. They died here. Almost a century and a half ago.”
Fel saw neither shock nor recognition in Reid’s face. Reid didn’t know about the rock fall in the quarry. But he was also so unsurprised by the possibility that the Briars had blood and death on their souls, that Fel wondered how many others like him there were, how many quarries, how many lies spread so far and for so long they became true.
“Stay,” Bay said. “Stay if you’re ready to tell this story with me. If you’re ready to take responsibility for what this family has done.”
Bay’s stare was so sure, so unbroken, that Fel understood the warning in her voice. This was her signal to Reid that if he stayed and lied about this, the land would have its vengeance on him the same as it had those vanished Briars.
For as long as it took for a cloud to pass over the moon, Fel thought he caught some sign of will and certainty on Reid’s face. There was the possibility that he might become different than what his family had made him. And with that possibility came hope drifting off Bay, that this minute would make Reid into someone else. He might become someone who told the truth, who counted it as currency. He might turn into someone who made room for Bay in the world of his family, more brother than enemy.
But then the light came back, and Fel saw nothing but Reid’s wish to brush all this off him. Bay noticed, her eyes shutting as those hopes fell from her hands. Her disappointment was so full and deep he could feel it. It made him want Dalia’s hands on Bay as badly as he wanted Estrella’s on him. Dalia, the girl who could pull Bay out of all these jagged, broken pieces without them cutting her. Estrella, the girl who called Fel back from the places where he got lost.
The Nomeolvides girls saved them as much as they destroyed them.
But to Reid, they were just witches. It was written in the way Estrella had drawn Fel out of the ground, in the tree of so many colors, in the way these women spoke a language that shifted and turned too often for anyone else to learn it.
Reid would run from this place. He would get as far away from all the death here as he could.
“You know now,” Bay said. “So there’s no pretending you don’t.”
Fel turned back to Estrella. But she was gone, and all three of them in the courtyard were left watching the space where she’d been.
THIRTY-FIVE
The truth ran over Estrella’s skin, sharp as winter rain.
It hadn’t been her family.
They had not brought this curse to La Pradera. They had thought their lovers had been disappearing long before they came here, back when they were las hijas del aire.
But it was the land.
Estrella and her cousins had given the land what they thought it wanted. Necklaces and bottles of perfume. Paper flowers and sugar hearts.
A carved wooden horse, painted blue, that called back the boy it once belonged to.
Estrella ran through the dark, her hands finding Dalia’s shoulders.
“Has a woman ever disappeared?” she asked.
“What?” Dalia asked.
Now Estrella looked to her other three cousins. “Has a woman our family loved ever vanished?”
Gloria shook her head, hesitating. “I don’t know.”
“We never heard about it,” Azalea said. “Do you really think they’d tell us?”
Estrella’s understanding fell scattered and bright as the sparks off a bonfire.
“It’s men,” she said. “It’s only men.”
“What are you talking about?” Gloria asked.
“The land,” Estrella said. “It doesn’t take women. It takes men because it’s men who died here. The miners. Our family helped hide their deaths, so the ground’s been taking the men we love ever since.”
“You’re wrong,” Calla said.
Estrella looked at her.
“This has nothing to do with La Pradera,” Calla said. “The disappearing…” The words dissolved in the air. Even Calla couldn’t say the raw truth of it, the disappearing of their loves, the vanishing of anyone they cared for too much. “It was happening to our family before we ever came here.”
“Was it?” Estrella asked. She looked around at all her cousins. “Does anyone know that for sure? Do we even have stories about it that far back?”
They opened their mouths, considering speaking but then staying quiet.
“We accepted this as the way it’s always been,” Estrella said. “We thought we brought this curse here with us. But do we know that?”
She felt their four sets of eyes settle on her, listening but not yet understanding.
“We helped cover this up,” Estrella said. “So it took something from us. It wanted us to answer for what we’d done. And it wanted our attention.”
“It?” Calla asked.
Estrella looked down at her feet. “The ground. This place.”
“But we didn’t know about what happened,” Azalea said. “Not until tonight.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Estrella said. “We turned a graveyard into gardens.”
Comprehension spread over Calla’s face. “So it wouldn’t let us leave.”
Calla’s words threw a new spray of embers across Estrella’s thoughts.
La Pradera held them, made them sick if they tried to run, because it would not let them walk away from the truth they had veiled in so many flowers and leaves.
“That means it’s not us,” Azalea said, her face so soft and hopeful she looked younger than Calla. “We didn’t kill them.”
They traded glances, the language of having lived together so long they could speak to one another with their eyes.