The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina (94)

“Let this end,” Lázaro begged.

Bolívar’s eye blazed an unnatural blue. “You’re wrong, old friend. It’s been decades and I still don’t have what I’ve always wanted. But I will, when I see Orquídea again.”

Marimar laughed, and when she saw it drew his ire, she laughed harder. “She’s dead, you fucking corpse. You’ll never see her. Never.”

“Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong,” Bolívar said, waving a wrinkled finger in the air. He walked around the beam of moonglow with ease, like he’d never left that stage. “My Orquídea isn’t dead. She’s a survivor. She’s eternal. She’s simply in a different form, and she will be mine again.”

Marimar glanced at her cousins. Rey’s eyes moved, his form inching at a glacial pace, like they were wading against time.

“Control the girl,” Bolívar warned Lázaro. “I have spared her life as she’s your child and I owe at least one mercy after all these years.”

“Marimar,” her father said. His curtain of black hair fell over the side of his face as he turned to her. “Leave this place.”

Tears burned down her face. “How? Where?”

“Bolívar was right. My blood runs through your veins. We are celestial beings, made from the spark of the world’s dawn. No one can take that from you. Your mother knew that, remember?”

Bolívar stopped pacing.

Lázaro’s words came fast and heavy with meaning. “Remember the door.”

Bolívar raised his fist and twisted the signet ring on his index finger. “Traitorous until the very end.”

“Go, Marimar!” Lázaro yelled as he fell to his knees. She felt the temperature drop, frost creeping against the walls.

The wall of magic that froze Rey and Rhiannon was lifted. They stumbled into Marimar and she seized them. She couldn’t wait. She couldn’t look back to see her father’s fate. She held onto her cousins and stepped into the beam of moonlight. A force tried to pull her back, but she fought hard.

Marimar thought of home. Four Rivers with its great blanket of sky. Her garden. Her orchard. Her house that she’d bled for. She heard her mother’s laughter as if she was standing right beside her.

“Did you know that there’s a secret door at the bottom of the lake?” she told Marimar.

“No way,” Marimar said. “You can’t have doors in lakes.”

“Where do you think all the fish came from, silly?”

Marimar saw it now, the door. A kaleidoscope of celestial light. She stepped right through.





33

THE STARS FELL OVER FOUR RIVERS




Rey’s first thought upon opening his eyes was that he should have taken his mother up on those swimming lessons. The second one was that even if he’d learned to swim, he still couldn’t breathe under water. When he looked back, the prism of light that Marimar had created was gone. He made the mistake of being startled by a tiny silver fish and sucked in a mouthful of water. The next thing he knew was that Rhiannon, his seven-year-old cousin, was the one dragging both of them out of the slimy depths of the lake.

After belly crawling themselves onto the shore, they coughed and sputtered, and he was certain he’d swallowed a fish.

“You couldn’t have teleported us onto the shoreline with your star magic?” Rey choked. Somehow, they still had Orquídea’s fishing net and knife with them.

“I don’t know, Rey, I’ve never done that before. I was just hoping none of us combusted along the way. Let’s go. We have to warn the others. We have to warn Orquídea.”

Rhiannon raised her arm to the lake. “It’s them!”

The wind came first, clearing the sky, like someone had taken an eraser to the evening heavens. She thought of Lázaro and their matching constellation of freckles. She felt a pressure in her stomach. The lake’s surface bubbled and churned, twisting into a whirlpool, and she knew that Bolívar had followed her.

Marimar, Rey, and Rhiannon ran from the lake to the house, their path lit by incandescent dragonflies and lighting bugs. When she chanced a look back, Bolívar was trudging across the valley and pulling Lázaro along.

“Hurry!” Marimar urged. She opened her mouth to scream when a piercing cry split the valley awake.

“Bless that zombie rooster,” Rey said, as they reached the porch.

Marimar saw her laurel leaf was intact. She touched the wound at her throat again and swallowed the urge to wail along with Jameson.

The front door swung open and the Montoya clan spilled out of the house that Marimar had built. There were Juan Luis and Gastón, Ernesta and Caleb Jr., Enrique, Tía Silvia and Reina.

“What’s happened?” Enrique asked.

“They’re coming!” Rey managed. There was no time to explain. “We have to protect Orquídea.”

Marimar tried not to think of that day seven years prior, but she couldn’t help it. She knew that Enrique must have been thinking of it, too, because when their eyes met, he was crying. She’d never seen him cry, not ever, not even when he got a compound fracture when he fell down the hill after a fight with Orquídea.

One by one, the Montoyas returned with their weapons. The baseball bat and pocketknife Chris had left behind, the shovel Enrique had used to dig Penny’s grave, butcher’s knives, hammers and wrenches, and even a curling iron. The ceiba roots sprouted out of the ground like keloids on skin, the moonstone baby embedded in the trunk glowed as they gathered around Orquídea’s tree.