Surrounding the statues and Do?a Ursulina were seven squirming women gagged and pinned to the ground by gnarling roots shooting out from the earth circling the dais. The roots radiated in the signature blue of Do?a Ursulina’s geomancia. Finally, seven amalgamated tinieblas stood like jailers behind the women, frozen on standby. Do?a Ursulina’s puppets.
Reina bared her teeth in a sneer, even if it didn’t surprise her to see what Do?a Ursulina was capable of. Controlling tinieblas was but a natural progression to all the lines she’d crossed with void magic.
Reina entered the sanctum just as Javier threw a thrashing Celeste on the ground beside one of the pinned damas. Reina watched, with her breath held, as he climbed on top of Celeste to hold her down, on all fours like a feline, overcoming her strength in a way Reina never imagined possible for him. He was shirtless, his body oozing with a black smoke that wormed in and out of him.
Do?a Ursulina heard Reina’s footsteps and turned to the entryway, the sight opening up her face with delight. “There you are. I was beginning to wonder if you were going to make it in time.” She was dressed in a tight-fitting jacket and trousers, all midnight black save for the puffy white collar around her neck. Her sable hair was tightly wrapped in a braided bun. She was a condor in human form, long fingernails resembling talons. “You came with the girl from Apartaderos, I hope?” she asked with a minuscule tilt of her head.
“Reina!” Celeste screamed, her eyes dilating in what could easily be confused for betrayal. But Reina knew her, and distantly, she could see the relief in that look.
“Did you really have to slay my tinieblas out there? I was having them guard the sanctum, in case the Liberator decided to meddle.”
They assumed she was here for the invocation.
An acrid anger sprouted in Reina’s belly. It made her want to retch at their feet. “Where’s Don Enrique?”
Do?a Ursulina raised a flippant hand. “On the mainland. Let’s just say I managed to convince him that an unwanted valco’s a lot more conspicuous than a condor.”
The black bird she had seen on the boat ride to the island. Do?a Ursulina had awaited them all along.
“He trusts you to get what he wants?”
“He may. But we are only doing this for ourselves.”
Reina swallowed the bitter fact, letting it pile on the list of things her grandmother had planned. All moves in her elaborate scheme.
Reina approached under the guise of her allyship, her heart fracturing with every one of Celeste’s pleads and cries.
“Well? Bring the girl already so I can begin this!” Do?a Ursulina barked as she approached the dama to her left with a small ornate dagger. “The god and master of the Void is waiting.”
The chamber breathed in anticipation. Reina could feel it in the quivering iridio solution of her transplant heart, like someone or something was indeed listening.
Reina waited for the moment when Do?a Ursulina knelt by the first crying dama before leaping on Javier. She threw the entirety of her weight into tackling him away from Celeste, who followed her cue, reading her mind and rising.
Javier snarled, his voice warped and wrong as his shoulder left a streak of blood on the stone. He gathered himself up, retrieving his sword, but Reina was quicker, yanking Celeste by the arm and leading the escape out of the sanctum.
Behind them, Do?a Ursulina exclaimed in annoyance just as her knife sliced a line of bursting red on the first dama.
Reina dared not look back. She dared not give herself the luxury of worrying for the other women, for every part of her knew that if she ever hesitated in her objective, in saving Celeste and Maior, she was going to end up with no one alive.
Dusty, stale air rushed her lungs as she pushed herself farther, every stride searing her legs. Celeste squeezed her hand in return. And when Reina looked back to meet her gaze, soaring at the possibility of getting away, she saw Javier in focused pursuit. His eyes were inundated with black, his grin wicked in a way it had never been before. Reina’s instincts screamed at her, like a chill grabbing her by the neck and yanking her spine. It stirred a fear she had long learned how to ignore—an irrational reaction that had no place awakening from the mere sight of him. Her fear for tinieblas.
He sprinted in mad pursuit with his sword in hand, unlocking and utilizing every ounce of muscle in his body. A focused, perverse hunter. He caught up to them just as they neared the other end of the tunnel where Maior awaited.
Reina withdrew the golden blade as he passed them. But he kept going, stopping in front of them and blocking their exit. Reina and Celeste had no choice but to stop as well, side by side, Reina’s chest imploding at all the awful possibilities as this man stood between her and Maior.
“Javier, you monster!” Celeste said between splutters for breath. To Reina she said, “You see that, right? He looks like a tiniebla.”
So that was where her fear came from. His face was wrong because Javier was wrong.
“Who knows what he did to himself,” Celeste spat, giving him her back as she arched her hands to summon her iridio scythe. “Unfortunately for him, if there’s one thing we know how to do, it’s to banish tinieblas.”
Javier never uttered a word in reply. Still smiling, he flashed toward her, obliterating the distance between them. He drove the tip of his sword through her lower back, shoving it all the way through in a burst of red like the hibiscuses around the Liberator’s manse.
In that fragment of a second, the world froze. Javier’s ear-to-ear smile; Celeste’s gaping mouth; the sharp scent of iron erupting from her core. Reina took it all in with a half-formed gasp, her hands reaching for thin air, coming a second too late to stop Javier.
She was trapped in a dream—in a terrible nightmare. It couldn’t be real…
“I’m tired of you running,” he said in that warped voice. “Your blood will spill with the other ones’ tonight.” Then he yanked the length of the sword out, and the burst of blood—of Celeste’s life—made it a reality.
Celeste fell to the floor with a muted exhale, her scythe disintegrating in her hand. Reina flew to her.
“You bastard!” she bellowed as she cradled Celeste’s trembling form in her arms, both their hands fumbling against gushing red to keep the bleeding contained.
Javier’s wicked chuckles were his only regard. “Thank you for bringing them here,” he said, turning to Maior, who was frozen in shock. “Now let us take them to the sanctum to complete the offering.”
Reina’s heart fissured and opened like the gaping hole in Celeste’s core, torn at the two equally terrible options before her:
She could toss aside Celeste—and her life—and rush to Maior’s rescue.
Or she could idly watch as Javier carved a hole through Maior’s belly, spilling her blood for his god.
In the end, Reina’s hesitation made the choice for her.
Javier swiveled for Maior with his red-stained sword in a determined two-handed grip. A thrust, and it would be over—
“STOP!” said a fourth voice, feminine and determined. “I command it!”
And like a puppet listening to its master, Javier stopped.
40
Hand to Hand
Javier’s face screwed in agonized concentration—in a fight with himself—but he was an immobile, catatonic object.