But tonight she had only herself. And part of her realized that she might have to go through with something that could haunt her forever, if only to buy some more time for her and William.
She worked open the packet and carefully palmed it. She’d have one chance to get it into his glass. She didn’t want to think about what might happen if it didn’t work.
Be strong, Ellen. For William. For Ray. For yourself.
She opened the door, forced herself to smile, and went to pour their drinks.
“Bottoms up,” she said and raised her glass.
They both sat on the bed, Ellen with her legs pulled up beneath her, El Varón next to her, leaning in so close she could smell the sweat under his heavy cologne and the alcohol on his breath. He clinked his glass against hers. “I did not think you liked to drink, Ellen.” His glass was poised in midair. “Do you need to drink to be with me tonight?”
She shook her head. “I just want to celebrate.” She rubbed her hand through his hair. “Come on. I just want to have some fun.” She clinked her glass against his again. “Down the hatch.”
He seemed hesitant, as if he detected something. She felt her face would crack and all would be given away. But he raised his glass, tilted his head back, and she did the same. Down it went.
He coughed. His face wrinkled. “What is that?”
She wrinkled her face. “Oh my God. Yuck.” She was getting good at this acting thing. Hopefully good enough.
El Varón looked at the bottom of his glass. Held it up to his eye. “There is something wrong.”
“You’re telling me. That was horrible.”
He looked at her, then the glass, then back at her. Something had changed. Even though his smile didn’t change, something in his eyes went cold. “Stand up,” he said. “Take off your robe.”
She stammered. “Hey now, where I come from a lady likes a little niceness before she takes her clothes off.”
The room seemed to drop in temperature and she shivered, suddenly cold under the flimsy fabric. El Varón was silent. His eyes were drilling deep inside hers, probing for artifice. They were exactly like she remembered Crawford’s—almost insectile in their lack of human emotion. “You are to be the container,” he said in a flat voice. “The Old Ones brought you here to carry my seed.”
She pulled back. “Don’t you dare talk to me like that.” This was going bad fast. Too fast. Panic rose in her throat like a knot.
He stood, and as he did he seemed to grow taller. “You could have borne this gift of mine with love. But you’re just like all of them. Every one before you. A whore. A filthy fucking cunt.”
She drew back. There was no way to get past him, especially now that he was angry. When her eyes moved to the dresser and the gold-plated handgun atop it his hand cracked against the side of her face. She tasted blood and her vision went red.
“Fuck you,” she whispered.
He slapped her again. This time her head snapped so hard she fell onto the bed and nearly lost consciousness. His hands gripped her gown. Ripped it. Then tore it again, straight down the side, and yanked it from her. She kicked but his hands caught her ankles and twisted them until she screamed.
This can’t be happening. It can’t.
And then he backed away. Stared at her as she huddled on the bed against the wall. And he began chanting in that ugly language. Like the language of feral dogs in an animal shelter howling before the lethal needle, or hyenas circling their crippled prey. Or things much older and uglier. And she tried to cry out but the words wouldn’t come. Because what she was seeing couldn’t be happening.
His entire body was changing as he pulled off his jacket, then his shirt, his clothes rippling on his limbs and torso. She couldn’t avert her eyes though she wanted to close them. Had she been drugged somehow, too? Because El Varón was shifting, changing, warping as he chanted and removed his clothes. His arms lengthening, thinning, the nails on his hands extending like claws.
His face was a blur of hair, teeth, and pointed ears.
He will hurt you because he is a nagual and not a man.
Now she began to understand Costanza’s warning.
—
She finally stopped trying to kick and hit with her fists. It was useless. He was too strong. Her consciousness was retreating somewhere deep, closing off, shutting down, because otherwise she might slip into a madness that would never set her free. He was on top of her, smothering her, and when her voice trailed off into a silent wail she was enfolded within thick, rough, leathery wings.
—
Mantu had avoided telling him the truth until Ray threatened to beat it out of him. As they pulled up to the tiny clinic, he finally spilled it.
“It was hours after things started. Sabina said you were going to be okay—and you seemed okay. But you weren’t conscious. It was like you were in a deep sleep.”
“Did I go outside?”
Mantu shook his head. “You didn’t move the whole time. I went out for some air. That house was full of bad energy. The shit was thick, and it was bugging me out. I needed to shake it off.” He looked away. “When I came back in, Sabina was watching you. Just watching you like it was funny. And…I’m sorry, man. It’s hard for me to even say it. You…had bitten your fucking finger off.”
Ray felt sick. “What?”
Mantu’s face turned gray. “I ran outside and threw up. She thought that was funny, too.” He opened the door. “You had thrown it in the fire. Your finger.”
Ray opened up the passenger door and vomited in the dirt. Then he was quiet for a long time, resting his head against the dashboard. “My ring. My wedding band.”
Mantu shook his head. “Let’s get you fixed up, man.”
—
Ray insisted on driving from the clinic, but Mantu laughed. “You’re still on drugs, man. No way. You sleep that shit off.” They’d done the best they could with the stump, which ended in a jagged mess of tissue and bone right above the proximal phalanx. An accident with a hatchet, he’d told them, but the doctor had looked at him funny before going to work. Not that it mattered. Nor did the diminutive doctor ask questions when he told them they hadn’t brought the severed finger. Guatemalan doctors were used to ugly violence, and even uglier lies—some of them remembered the civil war all too well—so they knocked him out, filed the remaining bone smooth, stitched the wound, and cleaned him up. When he woke up they gave him three different bottles of pills and a tube of antibiotic cream and told him to come back in a couple days. He would need to go to Guatemala City for reconstructive surgery, the doctor told him. Or, if he could afford it, fly back to the States.
I could probably get pretty good care in a federal prison, Ray had thought. Right before they slipped me the lethal injection.
The pain kept him from sleeping, so he lay in the back as Mantu drove. He couldn’t stop staring at his throbbing bandaged hand and the empty space where his finger had been. And wondering how something so completely insane could have happened. “Something’s wrong with Ellen,” he said, breaking the silence. “She’s in danger. I had a vision. Some of what I saw was crazy hallucinations. But that part was real—as real as you and I talking right now.”
The van rocketed ahead, bouncing along the rutted road. “You were saying her name over and over. Your eyes were wide open. It was creepy. It really seemed like you were looking right at her.”
“I was. She was sitting in a chair in front of a huge statue of that Grim Reaper woman. The skeleton lady—like the little statue Sabina had.”
“Santa Muerte,” Mantu whispered.
“With flowers around her. White flowers. And a bunch of men were leaving gifts for her. It was like I was watching it on TV while it happened. She was crying. Crying like she had given up everything.” He closed his eyes and felt tears roll down his cheeks. Thank God Lily’s horrible poison was out of his system. He could close his eyes now without being drawn back into that dark, psychedelic hell. “Who is Santa Muerte any
way?”
“She’s old, man. She goes way back, Micah told me, all the way back—older than the Aztecs and the Maya, maybe even the Olmecs. Saint Death, the Bony Lady, the Skinny Girl—she has all sorts of names. It was an underground thing, but then people started worshipping her in public again. It just exploded. She’s bigger than the Catholic saints, now. In Mexico she’s more popular than the Virgin of Guadalupe. I shit you not. And her cult is spreading like crazy. I saw candles with her picture on them in a Mexican grocery store in D.C., back when I took a vacation from Blackwater. She’s gone viral.”
“What’s the appeal?”
Mantu downshifted as the van struggled up a steep hill. “Lots of things. For one, she’s not a goody-goody like all the other saints. She does what she’s asked without judging. That’s why the narcos love her. You go to a Mexican prison and half the guys in there have her tattooed on their skin. But most of the guards do, too. The cops pray to her to protect them from dying and the gangsters do the same. She’s an equal opportunity saint. She doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor, in jail, a drug addict or a judge—doesn’t make any difference to her as long as you keep your end of the promise. And I guess that makes sense, because death doesn’t care who you are or what you do, either.”
He had a point.
“Her cult had to stay underground because the church would have wiped it out like they wiped out every other indigenous religion. Nobody wanted the conquistadors catching them worshipping anything other than a crucifix or the proper saints because they had a tendency to cut off your head or burn you alive. But Micah said she goes back before the first civilizations in the Americas. And now that her cult has come aboveground—I guess that’s a pun, huh?—she’s popping up everywhere.”
Rain started hammering against the windshield. Mantu turned on the wipers. “Great. Hard enough to see as it is.”
Ray cradled his wounded hand against his chest. He already wanted another pain pill. “So maybe this El Varón has a thing for Saint Death. But I don’t understand why he’d have Ellen take part in it.”
“I don’t know,” Mantu said. “And neither can you. Stop thinking about it. You’re torturing yourself.”
Ray sat up. Popped another pain pill and chased it with warm water from a plastic bottle. “There was more to it, but it’s all a blur now.” Something monstrous, in fact, but he couldn’t see it anymore and didn’t feel like telling Mantu. “I saw Micah, too.”
Mantu stayed quiet.
“He told me I was going to see Lily again.”
The rain slammed harder against the top of the van. It sounded like they were inside a huge drum.
“And he said something big was coming. I can’t remember his exact words, but he said something big was going to happen that had been in the works since the world began. That the whole world was involved.” He leaned between the seats. “Do you have any idea what that means?”
“I don’t know,” Mantu said, but Ray suspected he was lying. “Why don’t you try to get some sleep?”
The pain pill was already kicking in. “Yeah. Okay. But wake me up in an hour. I want to drive.”
“Okay, brother. I’ll wake you up.”
—
Ellen snapped back.
He was on top of her, but something was changing. She opened her eyes. He was flipping from the bat-headed, winged thing back to his ordinary, naked self and then back again. It seemed to cause him intense pain, as his face was twisted into a rictus. It was horrifying to watch—like two blurry movies randomly spliced together, one of a man racked with pain and another of a half-human, winged horror.
The bat face stared at her with its black eyes, then it was just El Varón again. Drool leaked from his mouth. “You fucking whore!” he hissed. His eyes were rolling around in their sockets, his speech slurred. “I’m going to kill you, bitch!” His hands morphed into claws and he dug them into her neck. She felt them cut into her skin.
Ellen drove her fist into his jaw. It snapped his head back with a satisfying crack. She pummeled him, not stopping when her fists struck revolting leathery skin instead of human flesh. She kicked, her foot tangling in a wing. It was like beating on a slippery phantom, but she kept at it. El Varón sputtered and cursed, but the constant shifting kept him from fighting back.
Die, you monster piece of shit.
She shoved him off and he fell to the floor, twitching, foam bubbling from his lips. The drugs had worked after all, she supposed. He seemed back to being fully human now. All too human, his white Chiclet teeth stained with pinkish spittle, his eyes open but blank. Maybe it had been enough to kill him. She could only hope.
There was the razor in the bathroom, of course. That would do the trick rather quickly. But even now, after everything, the thought of slicing his neck open…No. She couldn’t do it.
She grabbed the pistol from his dresser. Now she understood why there was a diamond-studded bat on the stock. She looked for a safety, clicked it off. She picked up El Varón’s jacket from the floor and heard the telltale jangling of his keys. Perfect. She fished them out. Her underwear was ripped, so she grabbed the torn white robe, draped it across herself the best she could, and cautiously opened the door. There was no one in the hall, so she hurried to the door to her room. She knocked, and heard the maid muttering in Spanish. When the door opened, she held the pistol out.
Costanza stared at her.
“Costanza.” She lowered the gun. “I’m so sorry.”
Costanza waved her in and closed the door. William ran up to her and hugged her. “Mom, Mom, I was so worried about you.” He looked up. “Your neck is bleeding. Did he hurt you?”
She wiped at her neck. Her fingers were slick with blood. “No. It’s not bad. I hurt him something bad, though.”
Costanza made the sign of the cross. “Where is he?”
“He’s knocked out. Unconscious.” She squeezed William tightly, clutching her torn gown with one hand and holding the key ring in the other. “William, turn around for a sec. I need to get dressed. We’re getting out of here.”
William turned and covered his eyes. Costanza frowned. “You can’t go downstairs. There are wicked things going on.” She nodded toward William. “Things he shouldn’t see. And there are two guards there now. By the front door.”
“We have to,” Ellen said. “You said that’s the only way out. I have his keys.”
Costanza shook her head. “No, no. There is another way. Through his room.”
Ellen pulled on a pair of jeans. “I don’t think so.”
“There is. But we have to hurry.”
William was shaking. Ellen threw on a T-shirt and her shoes and turned him around. “Let’s go.”
—
When they were all back in El Varón’s room Ellen shut the door and locked it. William stared at the unconscious naked man splayed out and asked, “Did you kill him?”
“I don’t think so. But if he dies, it’s his own fault.”
“Madre de Dios,” Costanza whispered. She walked wide around him. “The bathroom. That’s the way.”
Ellen and William followed her. “There’s no way out of there,” she said. “There aren’t even any windows.”
Costanza pointed to the bathtub. “Open the closet, William,” she said. He opened the closet. “Feel around for a switch.”
William ran his hand along the inside of the door. “I found it. I think.” He flicked the switch and a loud click came from beneath the bathtub.
“Help me,” Costanza said. She stuck her tiny fingers under a crack where the bathtub met the floor. Ellen squatted next to her. William joined them.
“Pull up,” Costanza said, and they did.
The bathtub rose up from the floor. Beneath it was a rough rectangular opening. And a ladder.
“Oh, Costanza,” Ellen said. She kissed the woman’s forehead.
“Every capo has a way out,” she said. “Because eventually they all need to run. Even him.”
William
’s eyes were wide. He peeked down into the darkness. “I wish we didn’t have to go down there.”
“We do,” Ellen said. “Costanza, do you know where this goes?”
Costanza shook her head. “To his tunnels downstairs. Then probably into the caves. But I have never been.” She glanced back into the bedroom. “Go. Now.”
“You’re coming with us,” Ellen said.
Costanza shook her head. “No.”
“You have to. Won’t he kill you if he finds out you helped us?”
“He won’t find out. Go now. Hurry.”
Ellen stepped onto the ladder. “Thank you,” she said.
Costanza waved her on and pushed William. “Go as far as you can. Don’t stop. God willing, you will find a way out.”
William’s face had gone ashen. He followed his mother down into the darkness, and when Costanza pushed the bathtub back into place it echoed like the lid of a tomb.
The tunnel was lit by tiny bulbs. It was concrete and round, like the inside of a drainage pipe. Ellen had to stoop, pointing the gun out in front of her and holding William’s stiff hand. He was shaking uncontrollably. “It’s okay,” she said. “This is good. We did it.”
He shook his head. “It isn’t okay. I’m scared, Mom.”
“We’ll be okay. No one will touch us. Come on.”
“He’s a monster, isn’t he?” he asked. “A real monster.”
She nodded. “Yes. I never would have believed it, but he is. But he’s human, too. And he’s going to have a serious headache when he wakes up. If he wakes up.”
“Mom—look.”
A brick wall. And a door. Ellen held her ear against it. No sound from inside. Please, God, let it be unlocked.
The knob turned. She opened it slowly. The room was dark, but as her eyes adjusted just enough light from the tunnel allowed her to see. And then the smell hit her.
“Oh, God, Jesus, no,” she said. “Oh, no.” She gagged and covered her mouth.
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