Indeed, the heady energy, it was suffocating. Reina didn’t pretend to rejoice. She didn’t react to the static lifting her arm hairs or the way the last sliver of iridio in her heart shuddered in sick expectation. This was a reward she didn’t want, for the lives it had cost.
“There will be no more deaths tonight,” Reina said, curling one hand and stretching the other holding the blade. Her muscles cramped and creaked. Her skin itched from an abundance of gashes. She was a sluggish creature, the last of her iridio enfeebling her. Yet she welcomed every ache and discomfort. Compared to what she’d allowed Celeste and Maior to go through, she deserved it.
Do?a Ursulina’s smug satisfaction amalgamated with doubt, then turned into disdain. “Oh? On what authority?”
Reina crossed the bridge to Maior. She grabbed her by the wrist roughly, to shake some sense into her. And it worked. Maior sucked in a big draft of air, snapping out of the trance.
“What are you doing?” Do?a Ursulina hissed.
“Reina, help,” Maior said in a voice that made Reina’s insides weak.
Maior grabbed her by the sides, as if Reina were her pillar and Reina squeezed her back. She took in a sniff of her hair, the earthy musk reminding her of all those moments in Gegania, when Maior had been safe and Reina had believed she deserved betterment for her life. There was no time for the embrace, and the fury at her disobedience only built in Do?a Ursulina’s eyes, but Reina allowed it for herself. Even if she didn’t say the words, it was her form of goodbye.
“Go to Eva,” Reina whispered close to Maior’s ear.
The human shuddered, but the time for objections had long passed.
“Oh, no, you won’t,” Do?a Ursulina snarled. “You will bring her to me.” She raised a hand like a talon, and the seven tinieblas guarding the corpses behind her awoke from their stupor. Intention gleamed in their black eyes. They laughed, a hundred superimposed voices, then stampeded toward Reina.
Reina grabbed her blade in a white-knuckled two-handed grip, her heart thrumming to a frenzied beat, bracing herself against all seven shadows. But the tinieblas rerouted before they even touched the bridge. They turned on each other and on Do?a Ursulina, disobeying her command.
No—obeying Eva.
Apprehension quaked through Reina as she glanced to the sanctum’s entryway and saw Eva standing much like the statues of Ches and Rahmagut, with her arm outstretched, her fingers curved liked talons and her eyes flooded in inky black.
Do?a Ursulina had no choice but to banish the tinieblas herself.
Either way, it bought enough time for Maior to reach Eva and the semblance of safety.
Maior called for Reina to follow, which Reina ignored.
“The invocation has begun. Rahmagut’s power is flooding this tomb. Finish the job you were tasked to do,” Do?a Ursulina said icily, her brows raised and the lines of her mouth in a deep bend. “Did you forget our conditions?”
“No.”
“You will die without your ore.” When Reina gave no answer, Do?a Ursulina went on. “Maybe you think you will find the iridio to refill today or tomorrow. But it will run out eventually. You need iridio, and you need the ?guilas; therefore you need me.”
The witch took one leisurely step after another toward the bridge, leaving the imprint of blood on the flagstones. Reina’s mouth tasted of copper and exhaustion, but she was going to hold on. She needed to, for however long it took for Eva to escort Maior out of the tomb, to safety.
“You have been using me since the moment I came to ?guila Manor,” Reina said, shaking her head. “You don’t care if I live or die. I’m just another nobody in your eyes.”
Do?a Ursulina rose an index finger between them, her other hand armed with the knife. “Yes, you came to me as a useless nobody, but I trained you to be something more. I saved your life!”
She marched up to the bridge, and Reina lifted her blade higher, her breaths coming in shallow. Do?a Ursulina stopped halfway with a confused frown, meeting resistance. She cupped a palm to press against the empty air, revealing the rippling golden light of a litio barrier with Eva’s signature written all over it. Do?a Ursulina pushed, but the protection was impervious to her. With this distraction, Eva had bought them a sliver longer of time.
“You didn’t need to spell my heart like you spelled Maior to turn us into your puppets!” The moment under the Páramo rain when Do?a Ursulina had wrenched the ore from her chest blazed through Reina’s memories. She had experienced that same loss of free will—the impotence of an unresponsive body under that woman’s command. “You invited me to cross the Páramo even though you knew the risks of me coming to you by myself.”
“Please—”
“But yes, I suppose I can’t blame that one on you. That was on me, for not trusting my father’s hatred for you.”
Darkness shrouded Do?a Ursulina’s gaze.
“He never wanted anything to do with you, and I should have followed his lead. But I was foolish in coming to you and thinking I deserved to have a family—” Reina’s voice shattered as the urge to cry returned. She pointed a finger at her grandmother, howling, “You saved my life, but it was always conditional! You always planned to keep me as a tool and not as the person I am.”
“I am doing this for Juan Vicente—for the family we used to be—to have everything we were denied. I only saved you because you are my granddaughter. Do you really think I would bother with a pitiful little duskling otherwise?”
“I may be your granddaughter, but I am nothing like you. I never would have done any of this if I knew the truth—”
“But you were perfectly fine doing it when you believed it was only a trickle of blood,” Do?a Ursulina said, the derision blurring the edges of her words into laughter. “You were perfectly fine kidnapping the women and imprisoning them in Enrique’s dungeons.”
“I did it because I thought your approval was worth it!” Reina didn’t care if her cheeks were streaked with tears. She didn’t care if her transplant threatened to drill her chest open. “I thought everyone else was wrong about you—I thought they were just afraid of the geomancia you craft from iridio.” She waved a hand at the corpses growing cold over the dais. “But for you there’s no line.” She was Do?a Ursulina’s descendant. She was nozariel. But she was not wicked, and she was not going to stand for this any longer.
“And you think there’s a line for the ?guilas?” Do?a Ursulina’s voice thundered across the chamber and bounced off the smooth ceiling. “Do you really value the life of their beloved brat so much you would rather defy me and die with your pitiful, deficient heart? I told you Rahmagut could solve this for you!”
“Celeste didn’t deserve this—”
“And you believe she deserved everything else she had? The manor, the gold, the fame of her name? Where do you think that iridio came from?”
“The mine—”
“The mine?” This time her laughter came unrestrained. No—her cackles. “Feleva got all she did because she slaughtered nine women in this same blood-damned tomb forty-two years ago!”