XXXIV

Alba

She would always remember the exact moment Elías passed.

It was viscerally tactile in her mind, more object than vision.

It was as if she could lift it from under her hair, pull it through her scalp, and pin it, dripping, to velvet.

She could put it behind glass, like a naturalist with luminously winged dead insects.

It was his sight.

His breathing had stopped, yes, but when his eyes went from looking at her, to past her, and beyond, and then went still—that was when he was gone.

She felt as if she hovered beyond her own shoulder, an impassive spectator.

She could remember weeping, but it was as if she were watching someone else.

Hot rasping sobs, wails of disbelief, fingers curled into the wet of his shredded, bloodied shirt, stiffening in the cold—these belonged to a stranger.

Then: Two shadows rose.

The first came from her left, where she had shoved Bartolomé. His body lumbered upright with a curse and the grit of gravel, with an aura of rage shimmering over his bent shoulders like a red cloak.

The second: Before her, from Elías’s grisly, wet chest, a curl of smoke lifted like the tail of a curious cat. It reeked of sulfur. It was looking at her when it spoke.

You know what happens now , it said.

And it plunged into her throat.

—

She was in the mine. She was helpless, alone, abandoned. Cold. Weak. Ripped from warmth. From soft touch. Left to die.

But someone took her and led her forward. Upward. Elías walked before her, silhouetted by candlelight that bobbed several steps ahead of them.

He was singing her back. Back to the surface, to the light, to the air. It echoed all around her: that sad, lilting melody, rhythmic as a heartbeat, yearning like sweetness on the tongue. His hands on hers, guiding her out of the darkness.

—

It was always dark now. No one to lead her out. She could lead herself, she supposed, but why? To what end? What was waiting for her on the other side of the darkness?

Bartolomé was a constant at her bedside, praying, regaling anyone who would listen—most people at Casa Calavera, that is—with the struggle between him and the sorcerer.

How Elías, powered by the might of his many deals with Satan, had almost brained him with a sharp stone to the head.

That was why he had such an unsightly lump on the side of his skull and a black eye that turned yellow and green as it aged.

She could sneer at that. At the priest’s vanity.

But what was the point?

No one would listen to her. No one would give credence to anything she shared, anything she felt, anything she thought.

For was it not true that the sorcerer’s presence had stalled, if not almost ruined, her recovery from the evil that afflicted her?

Was it not true that he had cursed her to begin with?

That was why they took him captive—to send him to the capital for a proper trial at the hands of the Inquisitors.

And now he was dead.

It did not matter. Elías would have been condemned to death anyway, for what he had done to Alba.

The priests repeated this until it became as true as the prayers they chanted.

God bless Padre Bartolomé for saving Senorita Alba.

God bless Padre Bartolomé for his quick thinking and courage, God bless Padre Bartolomé’s readiness to face danger and rescue the innocent maiden from that practitioner of the occult.

God bless the priests. And God damn Alba Díaz de Bolanos: Once again, she was the worst thing to ever happen to someone.

She was the cause of Elías’s death. Everyone knew it.

María Victoriana flitted in and out of her room like a ghost, bringing things for the priests, her face puffy and red from crying. She would not even look at Alba.

—

Every night, she dreamed of the road. She dreamed of moonlight on the stark white bone of Elías’s face, no—it was not his face but the face of a skull, with eyes like the pits of a mine.

His act was one of selflessness, one with which no one in Casa Calavera could ever compete, be they priest or layman or even her own mother. Elías had freed her, paying with his very soul.

For the first time in her life, she had felt free .

She felt vacant and quiet. In being emptied, she had become whole.

As if she wanted to lie down immediately and fall, weightless, into deep, pure sleep. A cold gray morning of pattering rain, a breeze on her face.

What she had not dared to hope had become truth: Elías had indeed been the cure. He was the one person—the only person—who could have freed her from her torment.

He had. He did .

Now he was gone.

She was white sheets on a line, drying in pure sunlight, snapping in the wind.

—

Mamá and Papá talked of a convent in Guadalajara. Endless droning, locked in the dark, kneeling as her whole body ached.

—

Carlos sat with her, carefully watched by an endless rotation of priests. He did not hold her hand. He did not speak. Perhaps it was a quarter of an hour. Perhaps it was many hours.

He snuck furtive glances at Bartolomé whenever the priest was present. How tragic, to be so ensorcelled by someone whose whole heart was steel and ambition, with no room for soft touch. How pathetic, to be the two of them, soul-broken and quiet in the twilight.

—

The Inquisition tore Mina San Gabriel apart looking for the shrine Bartolomé was convinced still existed. For people to punish.

They could not find the shrine, but they found the latter.

And those souls were mere practice for what the Inquisitors had in store for her.