Reina met her black gaze as a chill shook her from neck to toes. This was the moment she had dreamed of during those lonely days as she crossed the Llanos and the Páramo. This reunion with her grandmother. How flat and painfully disappointing it had turned out to be.
Do?a Laurel watched them. “Do you know this woman?”
“This badge belongs to me, just like it used to belong to my father, and his father before him,” Do?a Ursulina said, slowly turning it over in her hands. “I enchanted it with a powerful ward of litio protection and bismuto—enough to allow you to see the tinieblas and ward them away. I knew the journey here would have its dangers—I just didn’t expect to be… so right.” She crossed the distance to Reina and lifted her chin for a better look. “A nozariel like your mother, aren’t you?” she said, eyeing the black spots of pigmentation on the iris that made Reina’s pupils look oblong, almost like a cat’s; the caiman-like scutes over the bridge of her nose; the long, pointed tips of her ears. The marks of her nozariel breed, undiscernible from far away but never failing to earn her a scowl or a grimace from most humans. “You actually came.”
“Explain yourself, Do?a Ursulina,” Do?a Laurel commanded.
“I sent the badge to Segolita, along with this letter, to my granddaughter.”
Do?a Laurel’s mouth hung open. “As in, Juan Vicente’s daughter? He has a daughter?”
The way they said his name, with the familiarity hinting of a past Reina wasn’t privy to, reignited the agony in her chest. She chewed the insides of her cheeks, tasting her own blood, and forced the words out despite the pain. “I came to meet you.” She tried sitting up again, only to collapse with a moan. A violent spasm shook her, made her want to scream.
“She needs a doctor,” Celeste blurted out from her spot by the doorway.
“The tinieblas hungered for her heart, and they have tainted it. This is dark magic, and it will not be cured by a mere doctor, if at all,” Do?a Ursulina said.
It was a blow, renewing Reina’s fears. She let out a shuddery breath. With an angry hiss and the last of her strength, she said, “I came from Segolita—I traveled this far—to be your family. Not to die!”
And the witch who shared her blood smiled.
“Then it must be fated that you live, child, for if there is one person capable of salving a tiniebla’s rot, it will be me.”