Tiempo que pasa no vuelve.
She didn’t even have to say the words to seize control over it. The connection came so easily. The darkness purred with so much satisfaction it terrified her. She sucked in a breath and thrust herself back into reality.
Waiting for her was a smiling face of eyes turned putrid black.
“Hello, Eva,” said Javier in the deep, devilish voice of his tiniebla.
Eva stepped back, but he lunged, shoving her to the bed and pinning her beneath him.
“No!” she cried.
The darkness curled in and out of him, smoke smelling of rotten flesh. He watched with a grin, like she had fulfilled his deepest desire.
“I would like to thank you, Eva Kesaré,” he said. “My host—he was doing a mighty fine job keeping me restrained—”
“No!” she cried again. Her belly turned to acid at the implications.
Tiniebla Javier just watched her with that wide spoiled-to-the-core grin.
“The fool thought he could keep my influence and consciousness bottled up forever. I suppose he was good at it, until you came along,” he said, lifting her chin with one hand.
Eva gagged at the touch.
“Thank you, my dearest.”
“Stop it! Let me go!” Eva bellowed with the might of her iridio, hoping to seize some control.
The air crackled, but her resolve was too weak.
“Now it’s time to fulfill my calling.”
She tried pushing free of his bind with all her might, but to his strength, she was an ant. “No!”
“It’s time to spill the blood of the damas, to give them the reward they deserve for fleeing my master.” He took a deep inhale of pleasure, then said, “Can you feel it? The gates to His tomb have been opened. It must be fated—Don Rahmagut’s return.”
He sprang from her and landed on all fours before getting to his feet. The grace and beauty Javier carried like a banner disintegrated. This creature seized his body and turned him into something else.
“Thank you, Eva Kesaré. For this, I’m sure Don Rahmagut will shower you in rewards,” he said, sparing her one last corrupted glance. Then he sprinted out of the alcove and into the darkness of night.
Tears swelled at the corners of Eva’s eyes. She took one massive gulp of air after another, and it still didn’t feel like enough. This was her fault. His eyes, putrid and vile, were imprinted on her memory. She had been but a feather against the steel of his grip. Above her, the ceiling spun and blurred. She covered her face with her hands, and still she drowned.
A scream pierced the quiet of night.
Maior, Eva thought.
He was going to sacrifice the damas to unseal his god. There was no time for useless tears or dallying. Eva sprinted out of the room. Outside, the corridor was shrouded in shadow and silence, as it ought to be when the moon was highest.
She tried Maior’s room and found it locked. “Maior!”
She pounded on the door, loud enough to surely wake the manse. Reina’s and Celeste’s rooms were in similar silent and locked states. The lack of answer was the most terrifying part.
Eva decided to enter the rooms from their doors to the garden, where the path connected the manse to the beach. She found the door to Celeste’s dormitory kicked open, the frame splintered and battered. There was no sign of any of the women.
She stood on the steps of Celeste’s room, with its view to the serene beach where the water was an endless lagoon of black, rippling the moon’s reflection. To the left were the jungle paths. A maze to the tomb’s entrance. Eva didn’t have the luxury of cowardice any longer. She had caused this, so she had to figure out the way through, stitch the path together from the memories of her walk with Maior. She had to find Maior and Celeste. She had to warn Reina.
Mostly, she had to undo her foolishness and reel tiniebla Javier back into the darkness where he belonged.
39
The Sacrifice
Reina wasn’t unfamiliar with aches of the heart, but this pain was unlike anything she’d experienced before. Panic choked her, a desperation she couldn’t outrun or escape or breathe through. She ripped through the jungle’s overgrowth, not blindly—for the bismuto pumping through her sharpened Reina’s already heightened eyes—but like a cannonball, tearing everything in her path while the jungle fought back with its own cuts and gashes. Spiking brambles and protruding knotted roots. Vines catching her arms and a muddy soil collapsing beneath her weight, sucking her in.
Still, despite obstacles and the tears clouding her eyes, Reina endured. She was a fool, but she wasn’t going to sit idly and lose the people who mattered most. Celeste, in spite of the canyon between them, and Maior, who’d never asked for any of the things Reina had put her through.
Finally, she found the tomb’s gaping mouth. Her heart ached from a deficit of iridio, the last droplet keeping her standing. She supposed that when she died tonight, she would deserve it.
A shadow moved within the overgrowth’s darkness. A tiniebla, perhaps, so Reina unsheathed Ches’s Blade with a holler. Then her eyes adjusted, and she saw it was Maior tiptoeing around the lagoon, Do?a Laurel’s ghost hovering like an ever-present sentinel.
Reina shuddered a cry and, in her exhaustion, fell to her knees before the woman, the blade falling beside her. Maior mimicked her, saying her name in warm relief. They threw their arms around each other, and Reina squeezed like she needed the proximity to breathe.
Maior’s cheeks glistened from that mocking, relentless moonlight when they pulled away.
“Why weren’t you in your room? I was looking for you—why are you here?”
Out of all the places, Maior was at the threshold of the most dangerous one.
“Can you get up?” Maior said, eyes on Reina’s chest, keenly aware that Reina was operating on borrowed time.
Reina nodded a lie.
Maior helped Reina to her feet. “I felt her, Reina, that witch,” she said as she massaged Reina with a numbing spell of galio. Reina closed her eyes, wishing she could lean into it, grateful. “I slipped in and out—”
“Slipped in and out?” Reina picked up the fallen blade and sheathed it.
“I blacked out, for a little bit, like I used to do in ?guila Manor when she took me to see the caudillo.”
Reina surveyed the greenery surrounding them. Her ears were sharp and alert for any unwanted presence, yet she heard nothing. Then Maior’s meaning nestled in her belly like rotten food.
“I blacked out, and when I regained control of myself, I realized I was walking away from my room… like I was going to her. I—I was somewhere on the path when I came to, and I sort of recognized the way, but it was so dark. I didn’t know which way was back to the mansion, so I just kept going forward. I ended up here.” Maior dug her hands into her hair, her eyes terrified. She was scared.
As was Reina.
“So I hid behind the lagoon, where—” Her gaze shifted away from Reina, in a shame Reina didn’t understand. She settled with pointing to the other side and said, “In those bushes over there. That’s where I saw them.”
Reina could hear the shudder of Maior’s pulse. She reached for Maior’s arm, then squeezed gently in case she needed the grounding.
It got the words out of her. “I saw Javier dragging Celeste inside.”