The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (75)

He didn’t want to hurt her the way an alcoholic didn’t want another drink.

She said nothing, though. Bolívar held her close, desperate. And for the first time she realized, she liked seeing him scared.

While he slept soundly, she kissed both his eyelids, and crept out of their cabin. Moved swiftly down, down, down into the hold of the ship where they kept the elephants and lions and wild beasts. The Londo?o exotics and oddities. For a moment, she wondered if that was what she was to him. If that was what he couldn’t help but be drawn to and that was why, when he wasn’t at her side, he forgot about her.

Orquídea pushed the door aside, readying her wicked tongue to lie. But Lucho wasn’t there, by some miracle. In the years to come, she wondered where he had gone and why he had chosen that specific day to abandon a post he had guarded so faithfully before. Some things were never meant to be answered.

When she opened the ship’s cargo compartment, the Living Star slowly turned in her direction.

“Are you ready to make a deal?” he asked, weary but amused.

“I am. But I have a condition.”

“What?” he snapped.

“Show me your real face.”





24

THE GARDEN OF PLAGUE AND MIRACLES




No one knew exactly what was wrong with Tatinelly and Michael Sullivan. After she’d fainted in the circus museum, they’d rushed to drive her back. Marimar had kept her discovery between herself and Rey and would do so until her cousin was well. While Tatinelly had a high fever and was dehydrated, her husband had worsened. One thing was certain, the Montoyas had to cancel their flight.

Mike’s sickness, which had begun with the symptoms of a common cold, had progressed to something even doctors couldn’t explain. His skin had become so translucent, you could see the inner workings of him. Like his body was an aquarium for his bloody, swollen organs.

The first doctor who had been brave enough to enter the now-quarantined Buenasuerte house, was Lola Rocafuerte, a surgeon who owed the dead Wilhelm Buenasuerte a favor and decided to pay it by coming to diagnose the foreigners locked in the guest room.

She took their temperature, their blood to run tests, but she was positive she had never seen anything like this. And so, one by one, medical professionals arrived to the house in cohorts to try and determine the cause of the ailment.

One doctor, round and with a face like a mole who had never seen sunlight, protested that it was a plague from God. Normally, they all would have laughed, or disregarded him as being out of his mind, but then pustules began growing in pockets across Mike Sullivan’s body. Upon closer inspection, they were pods. After the biopsy of one, they discovered the very early stages of grasshopper eggs.

Tatinelly, on the other hand, displayed all the textbook symptoms of typhoid fever. But when her bloodwork came back, along with her husband’s, the only abnormality displayed was high blood pressure on Mike’s part.

The doctors all agreed to send the blood and egg samples to the CDC, and a week after that, they received the same results. There was nothing wrong with them, except Mike had become a human incubator for a biblical plague and Tatinelly’s body was an oven.

The inhabitants of the Buenasuerte house, who had so far been immune, did everything they could to keep Tati and Mike comfortable. From teas to cold baths. Still, the only thing that would truly help Mike’s emotional and physical pain was being sedated with high levels of morphine.

Marimar was in the rear courtyard with Rhiannon and Rey, hoping for some time away from doctors and prying eyes. A few of the medical professionals, unable to cure the Sullivans, had taken to try and analyze the three cousins with the flowers growing out of their skin, particularly Rhiannon, whose rose had turned the color of ash since the day her mother fainted. Although the surrounding neighbors did climb ladders and peek their heads up on the other side of the cement walls to ask how they were doing.

To which Rey would answer, “Just enjoying the biblical plague! How are you?”

No one really tried to talk to them after that.

“We have to do something,” Marimar said while Ana Cruz and Jefita were getting takeout. Days of worrying had drained them all. Marimar and Rey were cleared by Doctor Rocafuerte to return home, but neither of them could imagine leaving their family behind. “If it’s not a scientific ailment, then it’s a magical one.”

“We do what we came here to do,” Rey said. “Figure out Orquídea’s shady fucking past. Let’s start with the eight-pointed star.”

“Theory one,” Marimar said, “Bolívar Londo?o is actually immortal and my father. Which, gross.”

“In my comic book,” Rhiannon said, pulling out dead leaves in the rose bushes. “The superhero married his dad’s former girlfriend without knowing it.”

Marimar blinked in surprise. “You let her read that?”

Rey gestured at the glass screen separating them from the medical freak show happening in the house. “We’ve been a little busy, Mari.”

“Fine.”

“Theory two,” Rey said, in a hurry to bypass the conversation. “Bolívar survived the fire, had another son, and somehow that son met your mom?”

“Too Dickensian. It could explain why Orquídea didn’t want me to know my father. And why she forbade my mom from chasing after him. Either way, he won’t survive this. I will kill him myself.”