Reina forgot to breathe as the whistler regarded them with a gaping grin. Her gaze found Celeste, who said something, but Reina couldn’t hear a thing. She couldn’t hear the crickets, the wind’s howls. She couldn’t hear her own thrumming heart.
It was what whistlers did, jumbling sound to confuse those they hunted, their whistling loud when they were far and faint when they were close to their prey.
The whistler slashed a second time. In forgetting how to breathe, Reina also forgot how to move.
Celeste wrenched her out of the way. They hurled to the ground, slamming on a rock and dead brambles as the whistler shredded the air where Reina had stood.
“Reina!” Celeste’s voice snapped her back to reality. “Remember your training.”
Reina sprang to her feet. Her machete whizzed out of its scabbard to become an extension of her arm. With a machetazo she swung at the whistler’s slashing claw, severing it in a clean swipe. Celeste swung her scythe at the other arm, hacking through sinew and bone and nearly getting stuck along the way.
The whistler let out a deafening high-pitched whistle as Celeste rammed her way through the cut. Without its arm, it ran at Reina, snapping bloodied teeth for a desperate victory. But this time Reina didn’t hesitate. She swerved out of the way, her legs acting on muscle memory, and muted the whistler with a thrust right through the heart.
The smell of sweet yet rancid flesh slapped her across the face.
Reina let the body fall to the ground and yanked her machete out. She was wet with foreign blood and tendrils that smelled of corpses. A smell she knew well.
Despite the stickiness, Celeste took her in an embrace that grounded her. Reina shuddered in her arms. Celeste’s touch made her remember she was safe and not in the clutches of the tinieblas who’d left her heartless.
Together they took a deep breath that seemed to return the sounds of the mountain.
Celeste let go. She watched Reina, eyes surfing her curly braid and tawny face.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Reina said to regain whatever pride she could muster. “I could have handled it.”
“You froze.”
Reina was supposed to be the one saving Celeste. She was supposed to be the better warrior. If she wasn’t worthy to humans, and if she didn’t have a fortune to her name or a proper family, the least she could do was be self-sufficient. And not freeze.
So she offered Celeste a very reluctant “I mean—thank you.”
They turned to the fallen body. Sores and cuts oozed with black-red blood all along the whistler’s pale skin.
Reina wiped the blood from her hands on her trousers—her good pair. Thankfully none was theirs. “I struggle killing whistlers,” she confessed. “I rely too much on my hearing.”
Celeste’s eyes fell on Reina’s chest. She said, “Are you using an iridio spell? Your chest is pulsing so much.”
“You know I don’t cast iridio.” She hated to, in fact. With the ore keeping her alive, iridio was part of who she was. Casting a spell of it and depleting her own supply left her feeling like a breath was being sucked out of her lungs.
Celeste gave her a smug look that made the heat rise to Reina’s cheeks. She needed to stop staring so much.
“It’s all right, you know,” Celeste said. “I’m here for you, even if you infuriate me sometimes. The Virgin made me run into you so I could save your life because she knows I’ll be the one needing saving someday.”
“I’m not useless.” And gods don’t look out for me, Reina thought.
“I’m not saying you are.”
Still, even if she pretended, Reina didn’t miss the meaning: I’m here for you. The night wasn’t dark enough to shroud the brightness in Celeste’s eyes. She smiled, her plum lips slightly parted. A flutter awoke in Reina’s belly.
Everyone else in the manor only had critiques of her role. But the good things in her life, her machete and her sense of home, came from Celeste. Reina’s skin hummed. She could be anywhere in the world, soiling her hands facing any foe, and it wouldn’t matter as long as she was with Celeste. And she wanted to be with her. Her bones ached with the suggestion of what it would feel like, to take Celeste’s slender neck in her hand and bring her close so their lips were but a breath apart. Would Celeste object, if Reina’s lips trailed soft worship down to her collarbone?
Reina stepped closer. Without the whistler, the night was loud again in its orchestra of nocturnal sounds, yet it felt like privacy had blanketed them. A hush, and Reina’s wildly beating heart.
Celeste’s eyes widened. She wasn’t blind to the heady bubble.
Reina swallowed thickly. The daring to turn her fantasy into reality was right there, her fingertips ready, until the sound of an anxious coo dissolved the impulse. A babe’s cry; it was loud enough that it couldn’t be too far.
Reina and Celeste looked around, then their eyes met.
The cries intensified.
“The baby—” Reina said, her pulse blazing with disappointment. It had robbed her of the moment.
Celeste took off toward the sound. They climbed the rocky slope and reached an elevated clearing. There a barricade of frailejones circled a small pond. And right on the banks was a bundle of hemp blankets, stirring and spilling with the cries of the abandoned infant.
Reina ran to the baby first. But before she could fully reach to scoop him up, a shock of electrifying energy stopped her. Her hand reached again, and the energy lapped her like fire.
She hissed and stepped away. “？Qué diablos?”
Celeste stopped beside her, staring at thin air.
“Well?”
Celeste extended a hand, touching something invisible, her palm molding around the shape of a dome. “There’s a litio barrier.”
Of course, Reina thought. Celeste could perceive geomancia.
“Is this what the damas’ blessing is supposed to look like?” Celeste gave breath to the same question flooding Reina’s thoughts.
The babe’s cries became wails.
Celeste dissolved her scythe incantation and picked up the babe up in one smooth, unhesitant motion. She lifted him to her chest, the barrier never once inhibiting her.
“Why isn’t it stopping you?” Reina was suddenly reminded of her breed. Of all the things she couldn’t do as a nozariel.
The clouds parted, allowing moonlight to reveal the babe’s teary eyes and ruddy cheeks. He was distressed but unscathed. Celeste squeezed him closer, cooing and squeezing his mottled blanket, and calmed him.
“I don’t know. I just had a feeling I could do it,” she said. When she looked up at Reina, triumphant, it wasn’t her eyes or smile that earned Reina’s attention.
Speechless, Reina reached out to dislodge Celeste’s jacket and vest collar from her neck, moving her black hair aside. She wasn’t thinking about whether it was proper or not, and if Celeste objected, she never expressed it. Reina’s attention zeroed in on the marks sprinkled behind Celeste’s left ear. Dots she had marveled at and interpreted as beauty marks in the past, before acquiring the damas had sucked up all her time and mental energy. But now, as she gazed at the pattern she had observed in the other women time and time again, she knew with utmost certainty that they weren’t just moles. Reina ran her thumb along the marks, caressing the soft, unmarred skin protected from the elements by Celeste’s hair.