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Can you imagine if this were nothing but a ghost story, full of cold drafts and shadows where they oughtn’t be, clammy palms and sweaty napes? That’s too clean a tale. Too simple. And this one gets messy.
but her wedding gown and all its silver was slick with blood. Gleaming with it, profane and red as cinnabar, wet as afterbirth.
Not long ago, in a land far from here, Elías Monterrubio found a book of spells. Or perhaps it found him.
All he had to do was leave. All he had ever had to do was leave. But he hesitated. That was his inheritance, wasn’t it? A bone-deep lust for more, more, more.
Greed was less a deadly sin than family creed, as inescapable as the name he bore or the way he recognized his father’s gestures in his own hands. He swore he was different from his cousins, his uncles, his grandfather. His greed was different. It buried him in tomes and equations and experiments, for it was a lust for knowledge that drove him to seek more. It was a noble greed. But that much silver…
Ghostly fingertips grasped at his shoulders, desperate, as if trying to pull him back from a precipice. Why are you never content? All you ever do is leave.
Once the marriage deed passed from hand to hand, a stranger would own her body. Would expect to exploit it for heirs that would inherit their own silver and titles. Disgust bloomed and spread like a fungus, curling into and rotting her bones.
The rite of confession continued, and Alba plotted to sin again.
If Carlos was a candle, Alba was the shadow it cast. Always a half step behind, flickering with unease at his every move.
When people gave away secrets, they peddled in surface metals, never reaching for the deepest ore. Not unless their hand was forced. Even then, some things would always remain buried. Some things should never see the light of day. But it was a pretty thing to say.
Normally, she was happy to placate Mamá. But was Mamá ever happy to placate Alba?
Señor Carlos could go lay his golden ass in a grave and rot there, as far as Elías was concerned.
With a volley of high-pitched keening, a flock of bats soared past her. Wings and claws brushed her forearms and hair; she shuddered, her breathing coming sharp and swift.
Rabies
When you descended into the dark, you never went alone.
Gravel. It must have slipped into her shoes the previous day, worked its way through her stockings, and remained there as she slipped into bed. Her stockings must be in need of mending. How odd.
She's sleepwalking… and doesn't even realize it
Thin red scratches over the backs of her knuckles stung when touched. She must have grazed them against something—a wall, or the splinter-prone, unfinished wooden bed frame—without noticing.
Sleepwalkingggg……
A delicate foam seeped through her teeth, gathering at the drawn corners of her mouth.
Rabies…
She released a wail like a bat’s cry, high, piercing.
The night had never frightened him like this before. But he had never before experienced a night like this.
“I don’t know if I like you, but I don’t want you to die,” María Victoriana said. This surprised him enough to tear his attention from the food. The answer that tripped to his tongue: Well, how funny that she should say that, because he also did not like himself and also did not want to die. They had a great deal in common after all.
The sight of meat on her plate made her want to vomit.
Rabies causes severe spasms when trying to swallow… is this why she doesn't eat?
“Whom do you serve?” he forced out. “There were gods here, once.” Her breath was metallic. It washed over him like being submerged in fouled mine water. “When we arrived. Don’t know where they are now. Maybe we ate them. Maybe we became them.”
As a child, at twelve or thirteen, she entertained vivid fantasies of gilded strangers on horseback, riding into the courtyard of their house to spirit her away to some castle. But then she was forced to speak to men, and the fantasies dissolved like sugar in hot water, leaving a fading sweetness that quickly turned stale between teeth.
Meeting his gaze was not a sin. It should not feel like one.
She caught his kiss between her teeth and returned it stripped of chastity. And this was what sin tasted like: lips that were soft, a mouth that gave with an unutterable tenderness.
She took the water from Bartolomé and drank. Her throat felt as if it were lined with inflamed welts; the water slaked her thirst, but swallowing pained her.
It is possible that this being…sensed something in you,”
"you see too much"
Santa Alba, patron of those who suffer under the yoke of pig fiancés, hear our prayer.
Elías, who sang her out of the dark. With whom she had shared one enchanted dance that sealed their fates, molten metal pouring gleaming into their ribs and setting around their hearts. He was the one thing she had ever chosen for herself.
Forgive her, Padre, for she had sinned, and would sin again. “I will not be cured,” she said. Liquid dripped thick out of the corner of her mouth and streaked down her cheek. “But neither will I be caged.”
She was a curse on this land. An evil. People crossed themselves, spat on her, avoided her presence. She was the worst thing to ever happen to her birth mother. The worst thing to ever happen to Elías. If it be with her dying breath, then may she be the worst thing to ever happen to Padre Bartolomé Verástegui Robles.
Together, Alba and the demon grinned.
