Eva ran inside, driven by the need to purge her bedroom before the archbishop and his acolytes turned on her.
“Didn’t Néstor go with you?” Décima said in Eva’s pursuit.
Eva wiped her wet bangs out of her face, her hands stopping at her antlers. “Don’t you have—I don’t know—a life? Why are you keeping track of where everyone is going?”
“He took the carriage!” Décima pressed her palm to her chest and pouted in indignation. “I want to go into town because I heard a most delicious rumor about something happening today. Is that why you came in such a hurry?”
“Chisme!” Eva cried in utter exasperation, shocked at the speed of the traveling gossip, and sidestepped her cousin.
“Eva Kesaré?” Pura’s voice flowed out of the parlor, stopping Eva before she could walk away.
Eva stuck her head under the doorway. “Yes?”
Pura noted Eva’s soaked hair and the muddied hem of her dress. “Are you all right?”
Eva silently sucked in a breath. Always one to see the best in her.
“I’m fine. It’s just—things happened at the Contadors’—I wanted to come back.” She glanced behind her, fully expecting to witness Décima’s insult, but her cousin wasn’t there anymore.
Eva excused herself. In her room, she had a small coffer hidden inside a trunk of her possessions. It was concealed beneath layers of fabrics and scarves and a bodice that no longer fit her. Her heart pounded as she pulled out the coffer from underneath the mess and opened it. Stored was a flask filled with a litio solution, a titration tube, and a handkerchief embroidered with the eclipsed sun symbol of the god of the Void. Underneath the flask and the handkerchief was a small leather-bound journal where she had poured her adolescent melancholy and where she hid her enchanted paper butterflies.
Eva hesitated. Her hands were clammy and shivery. Somehow, she had to muster the courage to get rid of them.
She supposed it wouldn’t hurt to look—to open the journal and meet the wispy scarlet, goldenrod, and cerulean paper cutouts flying out of its pages. Traces of galio sparkled gold as the butterflies fluttered around their master. Eva let out a wounded, shuddery breath. How could she ever extinguish the life of her own creations? She knelt beside her trunk, her fists clenched over her knees and her eyes screwed shut, the suffocation gripping her.
Eva sucked in a loud hiss. Her cheeks scorched. She wanted to scream. Her life—this cage where everyone in Galeno was a jailer—was constantly out of her control. When Dulce had been alive and still had happiness, she had filled Eva’s head with legends about valcos. Like Feleva ?guila, who’d made the Páramo Mountains her home. They were said to be mighty and independent. Proud, with accomplishments trailing behind them, because when one was born so beautiful and capable, how could everything else not follow naturally? But not Eva. She had nothing.
If she were any less cowardly, she would leave Galeno for those mountains. She would abandon the comforts of the Serranos and forge her own path. But Eva felt shackled. Afraid.
The paper butterflies tickled her cheeks as they flew near her. It was a wretched thing—to see their whimsical possibilities and have to end them forever.
Suddenly her bedroom door swung open. Eva jumped, her knee knocking the flask all over her handkerchief, where the oily litio solution spread. A strong smell saturated the room.
“Eva Kesaré!” Do?a Antonia’s voice was a crack of thunder.
Eva scampered to her feet as her grandmother and Décima walked in.
“Oh, by the Virgin—it smells of sulfur!” Do?a Antonia said, with her thumb tracing a cross over her heart. She took in the sight of Eva, all dripping curls and muddied dress. Then her eyes doubled in size at the sight of the fluttering pieces of paper. “You’re summoning demons into this home!” her grandmother said, crossing the distance to the butterflies.
“I told you she was up to no good.” Décima smiled behind the matriarch.
“It’s not what it looks like—” Eva pleaded, but Do?a Antonia didn’t care. She swatted at the paper butterflies, which crashed against the wall, falling lifelessly onto the ground.
“No!” Eva cried, tugging on her grandmother’s arms as the big woman stomped on the paper cutouts with as much ardor as if she were squashing well-deserving cockroaches. “Please—” But the word was slapped out of her mouth by Do?a Antonia’s heavy hand. Fire erupted on Eva’s bottom lip. Black dots blurred the image of her grandmother and her smug, snitching cousin. At the sight of her crumpled creations, Eva cried.
“The archbishop warned me not to let you near that woman, and he was right! This is why Pura had a snake come into her bed: You’ve let yourself be seduced by the devil. And the lesson was not learned then. Here you are summoning creatures into our home! What is the matter with you?”
Even as the taste of iron spread within her mouth, Eva remained on her own two feet and howled back, “I would never do that!”
“There will be an inquisition on the nozariel bastard. She worships demons, and everyone in Galeno knows it. Just like they know you’ve been going into her home, spending time with her, learning from her?” The last words, her grandmother said with an inflection, making it clear this was Eva’s act of betrayal. “You will bring that sort of reputation to our family?”
“It’s not bad!” Eva pleaded, uselessly, “You can’t summon demons with litio. Litio is for protection!”
Horror rounded Do?a Antonia’s eyes. In her pause, her disappointment smothered the room. “Your mother used litio to take her own life.”
A sharp silence enveloped them. Whatever rebuttal Eva had been formulating dissolved in the blood taste of her split lip. It was true; litio was deadly if digested. The Serranos had learned this when Dulce had swallowed a whole flask.
Do?a Antonia fled the room, her disappointment filling the void where she had stood.
Something awful twisted inside Eva. “Wait, Abuela!” she called out.
Eva shoved her cousin as she passed through the doorway, giving her a taste of what Eva yearned to gift her later, once she appeased the mighty Do?a Antonia. Unhearing of Eva’s calls and always five steps ahead, Do?a Antonia entered the governor’s study and slammed the door behind her.
Eva stopped, her hand hovering over the door handle. She threw herself against the wall beside the door and ground her teeth as she listened to Do?a Antonia’s outcries.
“That girl has no morals! It’s as if she doesn’t care for what we hold dear and holy. Tell me, Mateo, tell me I’ve failed in giving her a proper education!”
The governor said something too soft for Eva to hear, and her grandmother went on, “How long will our family suffer through that man’s crime? How much longer do I have to sleep in fear that Eva Kesaré is going to invite the devil himself through our front doors? I can’t control her anymore. You know one day she will! She has the blood of that demon—she can’t contain herself. She sought out the curandera for brujería. It’s why that snake defiled Pura. Mateo, when will we be rid of her?”