The Hacienda(32)

His attention fell on Ana Luisa’s charcoal markings around the doorframe; his nostrils flared with a quick intake of breath as his eyes skipped over the markings.

“What were you thinking?” he breathed, softly incredulous. It seemed directed more at himself than at me. Something about his voice seemed almost angry.

“Is something wrong?” I asked, voice unsteady. A sudden shift in his energy had accompanied his discovery, and I felt as if I were standing on the deck of a ship that had turned into rough waters.

He did not answer my question. “You mentioned that the north wing was where you found . . .” He paused as if reaching for a word, only to decide the better of it. “Shall we go there next?”

“Very well.” I wet my dry lips and turned to the kitchen doorway.

The darkness yawned open, a maw. Nausea swept over me.

It had heard us.

Padre Andrés stepped forward, pausing when he noticed I had not joined him. “Do?a Beatriz?”

The walls were so close, too close. The darkness too deep. I thought of the flint in Juana’s eyes as she pushed me into the dark. How the walls spun around me from mezcal. She knew this house. She knew it was like this.

And she sent me into the dark anyway.

“I want the copal.” My voice was strained, breathless.

“Would you like to return to the green parlor?” Padre Andrés asked.

Part of me yearned for the sensation of my back safely against a wall. Part of me screamed for light. It begged to light a thousand candles, to throw anything that could be burned into the fireplace and set it aflame.

Part of me wanted to burn the whole house to the ground.

The other part of me could not bear being alone. Padre Andrés was here. He was another creature in the house, one who meant me no harm. Another soul in the dark. Another pair of eyes, to watch my back when I could not. I could not tear myself from that safety, not even to sit in a room of copal and candles, inhaling smoke until I went dizzy.

“My house, my responsibility,” I said. “Forward.”

I set my jaw and faced the darkness.

The darkness faced me, a tremor of sick joy rippling through it.

We left doors ajar behind us on purpose, to test my perception that something other than Ana Luisa was making them shut behind me. When we reached the staircase, Andrés breathed in sharply.

“The cold,” he said hoarsely, barely above a whisper. We could have shouted at the top of our lungs—there was no one to judge us, no one to hear us—but we could not bring ourselves to raise our voices. As if he, too, realized we were being watched, being listened to. I knew the house would hear him anyway.

The cold was like stepping into a current. Three paces back, it didn’t exist at all; now it was all-encompassing. It snaked up my spine, wet, slick, heavy as mud, and settled on my chest. My breathing grew shallow and pained; no matter how I tried, I could not breathe deeply enough.

A clacking noise to my right; Padre Andrés’s teeth were chattering. “What is that?” he forced out.

“A terrible draft,” I said, my own jaw stiff from the cold. The house swallowed my joke whole.

“The north wing is where you found . . . ?”

I nodded, too chilled to speak. This was different. Before, when the cold had attacked me, it was a wind, biting and dry, ready to snap me in two. This was like wading through thick water: it tore at my limbs, its heaviness seizing my thighs, grasping at my waist.

We moved into the north wing.

Naturally cold storeroom, I had written. A wild giggle rose in my throat, and I covered my mouth with a hand to silence it.

I let Padre Andrés take the lead in the narrow hall, my heart thundering against the tightness in my chest as we waded slowly through the cold. For a moment, the click of the heels of his shoes on the stone floor was all that broke the silence.

Then he stopped abruptly.

In the flickering light of the candles, I could see that bricks littered the narrow hall before us. The bricks that had collapsed when I—

Red eyes appeared over the bricks, high enough from the ground to belong to a person.

I gasped. Andrés seized my free hand.

The red winked into darkness and vanished.

Candlelight danced on the bricks, on the collapsed wall . . . and glinted off the gold necklace that was still draped around the skeleton’s broken neck.

The hair on the back of my neck lifted; a buzzing fear followed, rippling over my flesh. We were exposed. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to create a barrier between us and that, nowhere to hide.

Andrés raised his candle, then moved it down and side to side in the sign of the cross. “In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus—”

I cried out as darkness leaped from the walls, from around the skeleton, from behind us, from before us. The cold sucked shadows toward it with a ferocity that made our candles flicker and jump.

Andrés’s candle died.





12





BACK UP.” ANDRéS’S VOICE pitched with fear; his hand tightened on mine as he fell back a step. “Slowly.”

A rush of shadows swept from behind us. The keys at my waist rang like wind chimes; the candle’s flame bent forward. I wanted him to let go of my hand so I could cup it around my flame. It licked upward, fighting as desperately as if it were being suffocated. As if the air in the hall were too close for it to be able to breathe.