Page 102 of The Hacienda
32
ANDRÉS
AFTER A DAY ANDnight of hovering at Beatriz’s bedside, using my grandmother’s gifts to ensure that her recovery was seamless and quick, Paloma unceremoniously ushered me out of her house.
“She can’t rest properly if you keep meddling. Go be useful elsewhere,” she said. With a meaningful tilt of her head, she gestured out the doorway at the main house of the hacienda. “You know what I mean.”
I did.
The morning was gray and misty as I walked across the courtyard to the house, my aunt Inés’s pamphlet in hand. Its pages had been damaged by rain, but its glyphs survived without a smudge. I suspected something a bit stronger than ink bound them to the page.
The house watched my approach, silent and apprehensive. Its stucco was stained with soot from the smoke, but the fire had primarily damaged the far side of the house. From the front, it was the same it had alwaysbeen: a few tiles missing from the roof, wilting bougainvillea. Flower beds weeded, then abandoned.
I could almost feel it narrowing its invisible eyes as it sized me up: like it, I looked the same as I had before the night of the fire. But a different man opened the front door and stepped into its cavernous quiet. It smelled of rain, wet wood. The aftertaste of smoke lingered heavy on the mist that seeped into the ruins of the dining room and, above it, Beatriz’s study and bedchamber.
The night of the fire, the roof had collapsed on Juana. Mendoza and I searched for her body there the next day and found it in the formal dining room, shattered and scorched. The floor of the burning room had collapsed into the room below before rain could extinguish the flames.
We buried Juana in the Solórzano plot with even less fanfare than her brother... and as far from her brother as we could manage. The caudillo Victoriano Román abandoned his investigation against Beatriz when Paloma brought forth a blood-blackened knife and dress from Juana’s rooms; her evidence was compounded by Juana’s arson and the blatantly clear attempt she had made to kill Beatriz.
I shook away the memory of finding Beatriz ringed by flames. It haunted me like my own shadow. In my brief, stolen hours of sleep since that night, I saw nothing but her silhouette against Perdition’s rage. In dreams, I could not move. I cried out to her but was voiceless. My feet were too heavy, my arms feeble and unable to move as fire devoured her, as her screams for help whipped the flames higher, still higher.
I woke drenched in cold sweat, her name knotted in my throat.
Never again would I allow her to be so threatened. I swore no more harm would come to anyone under this roof. I was there that morning to ensure that.
But would it be enough?
Paloma told me that she and Mendoza had found a stack of lettersaddressed to Beatriz among Rodolfo’s papers, that she suspected they came from Beatriz’s mother.
She wants to leave, Cuervito, she said.We must let her.
I wanted to flinch away from the softness of her voice. I found my beloved cousin’s brusqueness fortifying. I longed for her sharp edges, a blunt retort. To receive her sympathy made me fear she saw too much. It made me fear she saw even more clearly than I how powerfully I wanted Beatriz to stay.
But would I want to stay, if I were Beatriz? So many Solórzanos had died in this house over the years. Some violently, some not. Their voices would always live in its walls, as would the memories of the hundreds of people of my family who had served them. Such houses were what they were. I could not remove those voices any more than I could remove the foundation of the house. Some people could live in such houses utterly unaware of the company they held. For others, the walls were halfway to sentience, as difficult to live with as an overly intrusive relative.
But there was one force I needed to release. One body left to bring to the graveyard once its spirit had passed.
I could only hope it would be enough to convince Beatriz to stay.
Evil twitched in the shadows of the house, unnaturally inky black. It slipped through the halls, following me as I stepped into the green parlor. I left the door open, inviting it to follow, as I walked toward the center of the room. I began to move furniture and rolled the green rug away, my movements even and deliberate as I took a piece of charcoal from my pocket and set it to stone. I drew the first line of an exorcism glyph.
The door slammed behind me.
My heart skipped a step, then steadied as I flexed my hands. Scars were forming beneath the bandages wound around my knuckles, sustained from the burns of lightning.
I was not the same man who had faced the darkness before.
I continued sketching the correct glyphs under the watchful gaze of the darkness, my hand steady even as the hair rose on the back of my neck. Newfound power did not mean I was not still prey. I could smell my own natural fear rising, its tang metallic and sweet.
She was here.
Of course she was here. I would not grant her the satisfaction of seeing me afraid of her. I inhaled deeply, turned the page of the pamphlet, and continued working for long, silent minutes until the circle was closed.
Then I rose, stepped into the center of the circle, and faced the shadows.
“Buenos días, doña,” I said.
A soft hiss. A rattlesnake’s hiss, but deeper in timbre. A predator’s hiss.
