The stranger’s lips trembled as he said, “Rahmagut’s damas: wives in title but prisoners in reality. He took them with him to his Void when Ches banished him. But they conspired against him. They knew he was amassing a will to return to this world, so they took his power, one part each.”
Reina’s mouth twisted into a sneer as she circled Don Enrique to stand by the wall. She hated the scene, but the curiosity gnawed at her from the inside out.
“What’s recorded in written lore about how they came to reincarnate is contradictory. All I know is that their souls are trapped in a cycle, being reborn over and over again until the offering of their blood returns the power they stole, and until Rahmagut has enough of it to break from Ches’s seal.”
“What does that mean?” Don Enrique said.
The man sobbed harder. “It means—if one is killed, their soul will reincarnate into another newborn. Rahmagut’s constellation will connect and become visible on the night a new reincarnation is born. There will always be nine damas reincarnated and alive.”
Do?a Ursulina grabbed the man by the cheeks, her long-nailed fingers squeezing. “Tell the caudillo how he is invoked.”
The man cried and she squeezed harder.
“You must give their blood when his claw rends the fabric separating this world from the Void. How can you be willing to do that?”
“Silence,” Don Enrique commanded. “It is not your place to question us.”
The chained man sobbed.
“The nine damas are out there, at this very moment,” Do?a Ursulina concluded.
“So she will be returned to us?” Don Enrique inquired from his witch. “If we unveil their identities and offer Rahmagut some of their blood?”
Reina’s heart drummed so hard it ached. The air hummed in anticipation.
“Yes, and much more,” Do?a Ursulina said.
Reina looked up. Her grandmother’s smile reminded her of a similar scene, once when Reina had stood at the entrance of this laboratory, starved and begging for food after the help refused to feed her. When Do?a Ursulina’s salvation had been an arepa with spoiled meat.
“Did you not hear what I said?” the chained man howled, the last gamble of his courage. “Every time the Void god is invoked, you return him some of his power, and the seal Ches placed on him weakens. He was invoked forty-one years ago. Your witch knows it. Do you really mean to weaken the seal even more?”
The edges of Do?a Ursulina’s lips curled in a sneer. “Whatever shall we do about him, Don Enrique? He knows too much.”
“Have all the pieces been answered? Are you certain of how to proceed?”
Do?a Ursulina’s smile widened in a gesture Reina fully understood. So did Don Enrique. He shot Reina a sideways glance, finally acknowledging her, to which she offered a nod. He wasn’t seeking her approval—this she knew—but this was her admittance of her complicity.
“I will need help collecting them,” Do?a Ursulina said with her eyes gliding to Reina, her satisfaction feline.
Months ago, Reina had stood in this underground lab pledging her allegiance to her grandmother. Many times, she had descended to learn a new facet of the ?guilas’ arcane life. She had grown. And their agreement had been clear: She was going to become someone in this life, in exchange for serving Do?a Ursulina and helping her cement the legacy Reina was set to inherit. This still held truth, even if there was darkness in the path ahead.
Thus, Do?a Ursulina’s suggestion was a challenge. Reina saw it and rose to it. “I will do it,” she offered. “I will bring them to you.”
“It is done, then,” Don Enrique said.
His dead-blood eyes lingered on her a second longer before he reached for the sobbing man and opened a line of bursting red along his neck. It splattered the floor, the walls, his clothes and theirs. Then Don Enrique threw the man to the flagstones. The problem of a witness was easily solved.
The whispers of Reina’s heart blared as she tried to care for the wasted life but couldn’t. Instead, the hope Do?a Ursulina offered them intoxicated her. She had come here seeking a cure for the guilt and sadness, and her grandmother had delivered. Reina’s fingers shuddered as ignited blood pumped through her extremities. This was the key to returning them that happiness, to undoing her mistake. There was a way. And in that moment, Reina knew she was willing to seize it—to open the proverbial door to death all the way.
Something like rancor scorched Celeste’s gaze as Reina and Javier loaded their traveling supplies on a rudimentary carriage. The reason for the trip wasn’t a secret to Celeste. Reina could tell she disapproved, from the way Celeste stormed out of rooms with doors slamming behind her, from the sneers twisting her lips whenever Do?a Ursulina and Don Enrique were seen striding through ?guila Manor in conspiring debate. Celeste loathed the new objective keeping everyone in the manor busy—or at least the help who didn’t quit after, in his grief, Don Enrique welcomed Rahmagut into the household.
Despite her bone-deep disapproval, Celeste never said a word to stop them. Her glower merely hollowed as Reina approached her in the yard. “I’m crossing the mountains with Javier. We think we found the first girl,” Reina said, squeezing her biceps with crossed arms. She grew cold.
Celeste’s quiet scorn was her reply.
“Would you like to come?” Reina invited her, like when there were errands to run in Sadul Fuerte or like with a tiniebla hunt.
“I would never,” Celeste growled before whirling indoors.
With a sour taste in her mouth, Reina joined Javier in silence as their driver took them up the switchback roads out of the Páramo.
“The brat gets to weasel out of this, but I can’t?” Javier said.
Reina ignored him, focusing on the drizzle-coated landscape.
He scoffed. “Laurel dies, and I’m reduced to the work of a gofer. Brilliant.”
“Keep her name out of your mouth,” Reina said automatically.
“Make me.”
They rode with thinly veiled animosity for two days and nights, begrudgingly united by the command of their masters. A quarter-crescent moon lit the sky when the carriage finished its descent down the other side of the mountain, to wide-open fields dotted by rain trees shrouding snoozing cattle. Reina understood the dry heat, having grown up in the Llanos.
Their destination was the hacienda of a landowner under the protection of another caudillo, who, according to Don Enrique, would have no reason to suspect treachery from his Páramo neighbor.
The stable horses stirred at the sound of Reina and Javier scuttling from shadow to shadow in the home’s open corridors. She feigned ignorance as Javier shot her a questioning frown. The animals didn’t sense them because they lacked stealth. Rather, they perceived the imbalance in the air from the mere presence of Reina’s iridio heart.
The doors of the hacienda were unlocked. They crossed the tiled floors silently, the halls empty as its inhabitants and their help were tucked away in their beds, and reached a room decorated in plush cream upholstery. There the landlord’s middle daughter slept.
She woke up in alarm as Reina clamped her mouth shut with a gloved hand. The girl squirmed and fought. Javier waved his hands to cast a sleeping galio incantation, one that drowned the senses and shrouded the mind with darkness.