XXXVI

Alba

Three months later

Zacatecas bloomed in the wake of the matlazahuatl. Lives had been lost to the plague, but that only served to burnish the existing lives brighter. Was it not a miracle, to have survived? Was life not precious? Must it not be celebrated?

“What better way to celebrate this miracle than a wedding?” Mamá cried, laying first one necklace, then another, over Alba’s throat.

And what a miracle it was. After hours of battle with the demon that the sorcerer had unleashed on Alba, after hissing and spitting blood, after Alba levitated off the ground in a fit of the demon’s rage, it was gone. Exorcised.

And was it not all thanks to Padre Bartolomé?

Alba was returned to her parents and Carlos, penitent and quiet.

She was exhausted and ill, but it wasn’t anything that rest and steaming bowls of caldo could not fix.

The Inquisitors, exhausted but triumphant, softened their punishment of the people of Mina San Gabriel for their idolatrous shrine.

Work at the mine stopped for almost an entire week as every man, woman, and child said confession and carried out their penance.

And it rained. In the middle of the dry season, cleansing rain broke from the clouds and swept through the high mountain valley.

How symbolic. How beautiful it all was. How clear the air was, shimmering like crystal lain on a dinner table, the day the Díaz family’s belongings were packed onto the backs of mules and the family itself into a carriage for a muddy descent from the mountains.

Zacatecas welcomed them with sunlight glistening on puddles. With the gleaming pink spires of the cathedral and a pristine, azure sky spotted with faraway white tufts of clouds.

“I think the second. Or the first?” Mamá wondered.

Alba’s wedding dress lay folded and complete in a chest at the foot of her bed; now it was up to Mamá to decide which jewels to adorn Alba with for the ceremony that Saturday. The second necklace lingered longer, its silver and pearls cold against her burning skin.

“Mija, you are so warm.” Mamá set both necklaces aside and put the back of her other hand to Alba’s cheek, then her forehead.

Alba dropped her gaze. “I am fine.”

Satisfied with this answer, Mamá stepped away to cluck over the necklaces and solicit the opinion of one of the maids.

Alba lifted her eyes. She turned and reached for the hand mirror on the vanity to her left.

Her nails—left to grow too long—scratched against the silk on which it lay. She curled her fingers around the handle and lifted it, as if to examine the powder in her coiffure or the fashionable dark beauty mark that Mamá’s maid had painted on her cheek.

She gazed at her reflection, appearing to all as a bride transfixed by her own beauty.

But they could not see what gazed back at her: dark pits, writhing blackness, boring out of a skull. A beauty mark, lurid against bone, affixed to one pale cheek.

Together, Alba and the demon grinned.

—

Organ music rose and filled the cathedral up to the rafters, reaching as if it could touch the very heavens.

It swam around Alba in a fetid cloud, choking her as the high lace neck of her dress did.

She walked slowly toward the altar. Each of her steps was weighed down by pounds of pure silver thread and jewels.

She was pure silver. She was the fruit of the mine: born there, left to die there, born again.

The pews were thick with the lords of Zacatecas, dripping with silver and gemstones, powder from their hair and the coy, sickly sweet notes of their perfume melting together with the incense. A gag tugged, insistent, at the back of her mouth.

She swallowed it. She must press on. Toward the altar.

Toward the groom and his golden hair and the bronze priest who stood before the altar.

Other priests flanked them, fleshy white hands folded piously before them, eyes half-lidded as their Latin song joined the incense and the perfume and the reek of hundreds of bodies.

The reek of blood coursing beneath skin in time with her footsteps.

Click. Click. Click.

The soles of her shoes struck tiled floor. They would have echoed, if not for the heaviness of her skirts dragging behind her and muffling the sound.

She had requested the presence of all the priests who had been present at her exorcism.

To Carlos, she had explained that it made her feel safe.

To Mamá and anyone else who asked, she batted her eyelashes and said, voice soft, that if it were not for them, only the Lord knew what could have become of her.

Having them there was an expression of gratitude for all they had done.

Alba stared them down, all of them, as she walked toward the altar. Her strides became firmer. Determined. She unclenched her hands; they floated to her sides and slowly balled into fists.

Carlos’s weight shifted forward to his toes.

A muscle in his jaw flexed. His eyes flicked over Alba’s head at the first pew where her parents sat, then narrowed.

The gesture was almost imperceptible—only the faintest wrinkle of skin at his cheek and temple hinted that he was no longer the happy bridegroom awaiting her at the end of the aisle.

His body had tensed. He was prey, ready to spring.

Perhaps that might save him. She did not care. It was no longer her business what he did.

She refocused on Bartolomé. His shoulders had stiffened, but his face did not shift. Not for the first time, she was struck by how his irises were like shallow water, transparent and untrustworthy. Pale as the flash of a knife in the moonlight before it was plunged into Elías’s breast.

That was the last thing she thought before pain snaked through the backs of her hands, cramping and stiffening her fingers. Claws burst forth through the beds of her nails, carrying bright blood from beneath the skin to the surface.

She crouched and fastened her focus on Bartolomé.

“For Elías,” she whispered. “For me .”

A feral flush of pleasure filled her body from belly to the crown of her head.

Priestflesh .

Darkness curled at the corners of her vision. With a soft sigh, Alba the woman, Alba the soul, Alba, who had battled and bathed and borne this body all her life, released her hold on its reins.

—

Claws found throats and bellies under vestments.

Pins from hair found eyes and cheeks and howling tongues.

Screams were glass, shattering and filling her head with echoes that shivered down the insides of her skull.

Awareness of the rush of bodies behind her, the panic, the flight.

The panic, especially—it melted on the tongue like piloncillo, a textured, dark sweetness.

She craved more. She craved salt, she craved warmth.

She found it and lapped at it like a kitten, sinking her teeth into meat, relishing its rip as if she were a starving cur—

A hand on her arm. Firm, commanding.

It yanked at her.

She coughed, choking on hot liquid. She spat and pulled back as two hands wrenched her around.

“ Enough .” The command reverberated through her bones, rattling her as if the hands on her arms had shaken her bodily.

Smoke thinned. Color winked through the haze: gold, white. The pink walls of the cathedral, sharpening slowly. A glint of gold. Red, so much red—

Gold.

It was an earring.

Alba blinked. Her lashes were heavy with blood.

The hands that gripped her arms seemed to pour heat into her like liquid. Clarifying heat, metallic and good and bright on the tongue.

“Alba. Alba . Can you hear me?”

She was hallucinating. She was in the mine. Cold, moist, airless. The flicker of candlelight, the glint of an earring. The lilting melody leading her out of the dark.

If it was a dream, a trick that the demon plied her with, she accepted it. It was too sweet not to. Not when she had been starved of that voice for weeks, grasping at it only in dreams and memories thick with grief.

“Elías,” she said. Her voice was hoarse. It felt ripped. It cracked, weakened not by screaming but by a blooming, impossible hope. “Are you here?”

Elías looked down at her—at how she dripped with blood and the spoils of her savagery—and he grinned.