XXXIII

Elías

Padre Bartolomé stood between them and their escape, and the demon delighted in this. A tingling rush skittered over Elías’s skin; pleasure and anger grappled with each other in his throat.

Priestflesh.

Elías lifted his lip in a snarl, his hackles raised, as if he were a cur facing a foe in a dark alley.

“Get on the horse, Elías!” Alba cried. Her voice came from far away, farther than he expected—while the priest and Elías faced each other, she had already begun to bypass the men by leading her mare across the rocky, steep slope of the side of the road. “Run!”

But Bartolomé was directly between him and the saddle. Him and freedom.

Elías feinted left, then skid on loose gravel; he ducked around the streak of a knife in the moonlight. Then he leaped back, arms held wide to avoid a cut.

Bartolomé’s sweat was acrid; the heave of his breath was not panicked but measured.

Memories flashed like sparks in the corners of his awareness: Carlos gushing about Bartolomé’s military career to Romero at the incorporadero; Alba’s father commenting several times on the unpriestlike number of weapons Bartolomé traveled with.

Elías had killed a man while drunk in a back alley. It was a sin of rage and impulse. The give of fleshy throat beneath his thumbs left him screaming in his sleep, caught in the shackle of night terrors, for years.

Bartolomé had made killing his career.

Elías’s heart flung itself to his throat as Bartolomé seized him by the shirt and brought the knife close to his throat.

Priestflesh .

The demon’s presence shot through his face, stinging like saltwater through his nostrils. His eyes rolled back and saw black.

Judging from Bartolomé’s strangled cry and the way he thrust Elías back in a shuddering, disgusted gesture, Bartolomé saw something different. Perhaps those black pits devoured his own eyes. Perhaps his skin had peeled away. Perhaps—

A flash of awareness: His hands were on the priest’s neck. This had happened while his mind was distracted, wholly without his own accord. He discovered that he was pressing his thumbs into the soft valley of a throat, forcing Bartolomé down onto his knees—

Priestflesh .

Distantly, as if through a haze of far too much drink, Elías felt his jaw drop wide. He felt cold air on his teeth and tongue, he felt the pulse of delight as Bartolomé’s eyes bulged from his face with fear, with the lack of air, with his death—

A spray of ice, burning ice, shot his face like a thousand needles. He dropped his prey with a howl, staggering back and pawing at his eyes.

With one hand, Bartolomé brandished a bottle of holy water. With his other, he clutched his throat—his breathing pulled dry and hoarse. He swayed on his feet.

“Elías! The horse!” Alba cried.

Now was the time to run.

Priestflesh .

Elías forced the demon down, down, then, as his vision cleared from the assault of holy water, he lurched toward his horse.

Priestflesh . Need—not his own, but a foreign, gut-deep lust—yanked him sideways. He staggered like a drunk. He fought to move forward past it; the demon fought to keep him back, close to Bartolomé.

I move with quicksilver…It is the road to me.

The mercury in his blood would kill him one day. Let it. So long as this demon did not drag him down toward death first.

“Obey me,” he snarled thickly. The sensation of something foreign wrenching him back and forth weakened.

“Elías!” Alba shrieked. Her voice seemed as if it were coming from the wrong direction, from far away. Had she dismounted? “Behind you!”

He turned.

The demon bled sheer white delight: Bartolomé was upon them. Bartolomé and his knife—

Bartolomé ducked once, then twice—a solid thunk cut off his cursing. Alba had thrown a rock through the dark with admirable accuracy. A strangled cry of pain; Alba found her target again.

“Get on the horse!” Alba cried.

Elías turned to the horse. Mercury forced the demon back, far enough back that he was in command of his legs, his hands, and he reached for the saddle—

Bartolomé straightened. Raised his right hand, the one which held the knife, and made the sign of the cross.

“In nomine Patris, et Filii,” he bellowed, the blade flashing up and down, side to side as it moved with the holy gestures.

Elías could not stop the demon from jerking his body sideways at the sound of the prayer.

His vision and hearing were dimmed as if he were underwater, fighting to see through the gloom.

Bartolomé swung the knife upward, its arc the perfect curvature of a wave rising from deep waters. “Et Spiritus Sancti.”

A metallic glint; the whine of wind on a blade. A panicked cry, not his own. From far away: the crack of bone.

It was not from far away.

It was from here. At him; in him.

Bartolomé’s knife sank into his chest, up to the hilt. The priest’s hand slid away as he staggered back, arms raised, ready to defend himself. He thought to defend himself from the wrong threat, though—he ducked belatedly as a volley of angry stones struck him.

Elías’s pulse thrummed in his ears. His chest felt tight, as if it were cramping.

The hilt was right over his heart.

How interesting.

Just as interesting: The demon had shrunk away somewhere and fallen silent.

“Leave him,” Elías said to Alba. “Let’s get out of here.”

He turned to his horse, reaching for the reins.

He staggered. Blood throbbed in his ears.

The ground rose like a wave. It struck him in the face.

Waves of laughter rose in concert around him, brassy and dissonant and reeking of brimstone. He swatted them away. His arm hurt to move.

No breath in his lungs; he was coughing. Someone was pushing him. Lances of white pain spider-webbed his body.

Elías’s ribs lifted, muscles tearing, ligaments crying out in protest, as Bartolomé wrenched the knife out of his chest—a sodden, slick sound, like the butchering of a hog—then, with a feral cry, brought it down again.

Compression. Popping. Searing white across his vision.

Blood splattered across Bartolomé’s face, slick on his cheekbones. Wetting his eyebrows. He yanked the knife out and lifted it—

A dark figure appeared behind Bartolomé, its own weapon lifted high.

Alba brought the stone down hard against Bartolomé’s temple. She shoved him aside and collapsed on her knees next to Elías, ignoring the howling of the priest.

Her fingertips danced over Elías’s breast. Her breathing rasped, shallow and panicked; her cheeks were slick with silver. With mercury. The world was mercury, wet and silky, slipping through his fingers.

“Elías,” she was saying. Over and over, like a prayer. “Don’t leave me. Don’t leave.”

All you ever do is leave.

“I’m staying.” His breath tasted wet. He grabbed her hands; his shook.

He pulled in air. It sounded wheezing and weak.

He could feel it whistling in places it shouldn’t whistle, and he simply could not get enough.

His mouth was full of mercury. He coughed around it.

Too thick. Too heavy. He couldn’t catch his breath.

Her hands were warm.

“I’m staying with you,” he said.