by Ramy Vance
Every part of me felt exhausted, just barely above hypothermic. All I wanted to do was sleep.
But that humming continued through the dark doorway, and it kept me awake. Beside me, a square table and four chairs, a row of cabinets, and above, a single fluorescent bulb diffused by a floral glass cover.
The voice neared, and I recognized it as an old village song from Brazil. Centuries old, a favorite among women as they went about the house, cooking or maybe sweeping.
“Hello?” I called.
“Ah, feiticeira,” came a voice. “Enchantress,” she had called me. A slippered foot stepped into the room. “You’re awake.”
My gaze flitted from the feet straight up the length of her body, and I squinted my eyes shut when I saw that face.
It was her. White-haired, those dark, haunted eyes. She stared at me with folded-arm triumph.
“Você convocou a criatura,” I said.
She offered a single nod. "I summon him," she said in English. Her voice creaked like a book's spine being tested for the first time in decades.
"Why?"
She slipped back into Portuguese. “I hear your kind is marvelous at recognizing faces. Do you remember me, encantado?”
I studied her face. Just as when I’d seen her the first time, something about her eyes struck me as familiar, but I felt certain I hadn’t met her before—not in my mortal or immortal life. I had left Brazil back when the gods left, and I hadn’t returned since.
“I …”
“You don’t. I seem familiar, but in a way you can’t place.” She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “Then how about this?”
She shuffled forward in that old dress, lowered with great care and effort so our faces were level, and reached out her hands toward my face. “Oh, lover,” she crooned. “You’re a bird. A gift.”
My throat caught. It couldn’t be.
“Federico,” I breathed. And as I said it, I smelled him. That particular scent, what had drawn me to him from the beginning: cinnamon spice and an earthy musk.
It had been seventy years.
I stared into her eyes—his eyes, green and flecked with gold. He wielded that gaze like a soldier his sword, and it only took one walk along the river, us meeting eyes that one time, to hew me through and through.
Federico of the long walks by the water. Federico of the green eyes and blue-black hair.
I had loved him with my entire body. Every fiber, every nerve, my thoughts coagulating into him.
The twinge of a smile caught on her face—his smile—and disappeared as quickly. “There we are. Now you remember.”
“You’re …”
“Inez. His daughter.”
↔
DAUGHTER, I thought, my eyes on the silver strands of her hair floating under the light. A word that implied youth, vitality. Of course, all humans were someone’s daughter, from the start to the end. Even white-haired and near that end.
“I knew it was you.” Inez pressed my hair from my eyes. “I knew it was you in that other form, with the red hair. Just as surely as I knew it was you in this one.”
She was referring to my old appearance, and now to Katrina Darling’s.
“What happened to Feddy?”
“My father? Oh, he’s dead. Decades ago of lung cancer, while his hair was still a little black. But you might say he died long before that.”
My last memory of Federico: the half-full pack of cigarettes sailing out his shirt pocket as he ran. He had rolled them himself, took great pride in every part of their creation. The rolling, the padding of the tobacco, the licking and of course, the smoking.
“I didn’t know he had a family,” I whispered.
Her top lip lifted, yellowed teeth baring in a snarl. “You wouldn’t, would you? Two daughters, a wife who adored him so completely she died of heartbreak when he disappeared. That was how it happened: one night, just gone from the house. By the time he returned a year later, we were in ruin.”
Federico. Always impulsive.
He had told me he burned for me. He would give up his job on the coffee plantation, what put the calluses on his hands, what had brought him back and forth along the river each day. This was after I’d taken on the illusion of the young woman with the auburn hair and the delicate frame.
From the moment he had seen me that way, he’d wanted to wrap himself around me at every moment. Of course, he had only come to the river at night. Always at night, where we walked, talked about leaving the village for a secluded life. Together, the two of us.
No mention of family. Of daughters.
And one night, after months, we had done just that. He had a bag when he arrived at the river, he grabbed my hand, and we’d left together. Left the village and made a life together deep in the Brazilian forest for a year.
1943. That shining, gilded time. The world was at war, but we were in love.
“I didn’t know,” I said again. Inez was lifting something from the folds of her dress now, and a familiar curved edge came into view. Bone-white, as long as my forearm. “Inez, please. Where’s Justin?”
“Justin? Ah, the black-haired boy. You like them black-haired.” Inez palmed El Lobizon’s claw in both hands. “He was your next victim. Wasn’t he, encantado?”
"I just want to know if he’s all right."
"You will show him what you are before I drive this through your deceitful heart," she said. "And if you refuse, I will make you show him. You remember the creature’s magic."
I shuddered, my eyes on the glinting tip of the claw in the kitchen light. I wanted to run, but as young as I was and as old as she was, I didn't think I could even stand. My body was just too tired.
She rose to her full height, the claw disappearing into the folds of her dress before she vanished through the doorway.
I tried to stand anyway, but my limbs felt like sandbags. I could barely move at all. "Help!" I called, my strangled voice echoing in the small kitchen.
Half a minute later, she returned leading a wet-haired Justin into the room, still dazed and shivering. He held a blanket tight around him.
“Here,” Inez said in English. “Your love.”
↔
I MADE to rise from the chair, but Inez stepped forward with a strange affect of concern. “No move. Weak.”
Justin came forward, hands out, and mine rose to his. He felt so cold as he slumped into the chair next to me. “Are you okay?” His words were slurred from the shock—and likely hypothermia.
“I’m all right.” My eyes flicked past him to Inez, whose hands were folded together before her. I needed to play along. “Where are we?”
“Inez saw us in the river,” Justin said. “She and Aimee helped get us here in Inez’s car. She doesn't speak much English.”
“Where’s Aimee?” I asked.
“She return home,” Inez said. “I take care."
“But you didn’t take care of us.” I pulled the blanket tighter around me, surveying the room for weapons. The counters were strangely empty, bare. Still, there were two of us and only one of Inez, which meant she couldn’t overpower us. Probably. “You should have called the police. Taken us to the hospital.”
“So sorry—I am not familiar,” Inez explained. “I am from small village in Brazil.”
“It’s fine, Inez,” Justin said, taking a slow, laborious blink. “We’re both OK.”
“We need to go home now.” I tried to stand from the chair. My muscles were on fire, and needles pricked the bottoms of my bare feet.
Inez stepped forward, the deadly tip of El Lobizon’s claw emerging in her hand and all pretense gone. “Não até você mostrar a ele o que você é.”
"Saia do meu caminho," I shot back. I swallowed, turned to Justin. “Help me up."
“What is she talking about, Kat?” Justin asked, his eyes on me. “And since when do you speak Spanish?"
"It's Portuguese." I grabbed his arm. "Let's go."
“Show!" Inez bellowed in English, lifting the
tip of the claw to my cheek. “Mostre-lhe, enganador," she murmured. "Show him.”
I froze, afraid to move for fear of the tip piercing me. I couldn't take my eyes off the deadly claw. “You have to understand about your father," I whispered in Portuguese. "Let me tell you the truth.”
“You stole him. You destroyed my mother,” Inez breathed, her chin dimpling with feeling. Her hand shook. “Do you know what it’s like to grow up an orphan, you vile bitch?”
“I loved him."
“You’re too afraid to show this one the truth, I see. At least he will know what you are before you die."
The next moment happened quickly: with a single motion, she jerked the claw down the side of my face, and my illusion fell away from me like a chocolate coating. A billow of smoke rose into the kitchen, so much I was surprised the smoke alarm didn’t go off.
I slipped into the blanket, slid onto the floor. From above, I saw Justin’s wide eyes on me as I became the very creature that had driven Federico away seventy years ago.
"Vile bitch," Inez's voice rang through my mind. And then Federico's voice, still so clear after all those decades: "A monster!"
Monster.
In 1943, and in the hundreds of years I lived before the gods' departure, there weren't Others and monsters. The two were one and the same, and in South America, the encantado was as feared as she was repulsive.
Without thinking, I opened my mouth to call out to Justin, but I had already lost my voice. All that came out were a series of incomprehensible squeaks, and the two humans clapped their hands to their ears.
Justin's eyes had gone wide as coins. And Inez dropped to her knees, the claw clasped in both hands and raising high, higher, as high as her arms could go so that when she plunged it into me, the claw would become a dagger. An instrument of death.
If I were Katrina Darling, I would find a way out. To survive. Or at the very least, I’d face this with defiance.
But I wasn't her, and I never would be. So I did the only thing I had left to me to do.
I closed my eyes against the violence, the promise of impossible pain and a quick death. And where, every night in seventy years I'd seen Federico's face, for once I did not.
I saw someone else's face. As a last look, I thought, this isn't a bad way to go.
CHAPTER 11
I didn’t die.
A thud sounded on the kitchen tile, followed by a chilling scream from Inez. When I opened my eyes, she and Justin were struggling on the floor in the strangest, half-obscene thing I’d ever seen.
He’d lost or thrown off his blanket, and his naked body gleamed under the light as he tried to pin Inez down, El Lobizon’s claw still clutched in her hand. She yelled, “Stop! Eu esperei tanto tempo. Stop—stop!”
But of course Justin didn’t understand her, and he yelled in English, “Just drop the claw, lady.”
And I couldn’t say anything that either of them would understand, so I stared with one unobscured eye as the two of them fought. For a woman her age, Inez was putting up a stunning defense against a college athlete.
An athlete who had, of course, nearly just died of hypothermia.
At one point, she managed to angle the claw against his forearm, dragging a red line down his skin. He grunted, but it had no other effect on him, because of course, Justin didn’t possess magic.
He just was who he was. A human being who was trying to protect me.
And the thought hit me like a hammer: Justin knew I wasn’t Katrina. He had seen me transform into my true form—the encantado form—and had still decided to save me. He was devoting every bit of his strength to that act.
No man had ever done that.
So I needed to help him. I knew from my time in the cafe bathroom that I wouldn’t be able to resume my illusion for at least ten or fifteen minutes, but the floor was slick enough that I could swipe my tail at Inez.
The two of them weren’t far from me. After she cut Justin with the claw, he’d backed off a little, and she was moving to sit up.
“Not on my watch,” I squeaked, and when her eyes flicked to me, my massive tail swept around and walloped her right in the face. It was the equivalent of getting hit with a really wet towel—not a serious damage-dealer, but enough of a shock to stun a woman in her eighties.
She dropped halfway back, and Justin managed to grab her hand and squeeze the claw out of her grip. He sent it clattering across the floor, and she tried to roll over to reach for it, but by that point he had her fully pinned.
“Fera!” She struggled against him. Her dark eyes lit on me with almost feral intensity. “Você deve destruir a besta. Isso destruiu minha família.”
“You must destroy the beast,” she had said. “It destroyed my family.”
“I don’t know what you’re saying,” Justin said, “but it’s over. You’re not going to get her.”
I blinked, stared at him. He meant me. I was a her—not a beast. Not a monster.
I had a gender.
And because I couldn’t say or do anything else on that kitchen floor until my magic returned, I wept.
↔
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, I sat on one of the kitchen chairs, huddled in a blanket. Across from me sat Inez, who had been reduced to staring, her hands bound with curtain ties to the chair Justin had sat her on.
Justin stood between us, his own blanket wrapped around his lower half like a Greek statue who’d just stepped out of the shower. Somehow, bedraggled and exhausted as he was, he had never looked more attractive.
“So,” he said to me, “who are you?”
I swallowed, pushed my curly red hair over my shoulder. I hadn’t resumed my Katrina illusion; this time I’d gone back to my original appearance, the one everyone else knew me as. “Isabella Ramirez,” I whispered. "I'm an Other. A student here at McGill."
He studied my face. “You do look kind of familiar.”
“I live two doors down from Katrina.”
He made gun-fingers at me, like we weren’t in the apartment of a woman who’d just tried to kill me. Evidently he’d been through a lot of stressful situations with Kat. “That’s it.”
But he didn’t smile.
“Você vai queimar,” came the hissed words.
My gaze flicked down to Inez, whose bloodshot eyes narrowed on me. She hadn't spoken in English since the tussle. “All the hells are gone,” I murmured.
“What did she say?” Justin asked.
“She said I would burn.”
“Whatever replace Hell will have you.” Her voice sounded flinty, defiant. Any elegance her hair might have possessed had disappeared during the struggle, and it now lay tangled and half-matted around her face.
For the first time, I allowed myself to stare at her. At the smoker’s lines threaded around her lips, and at the grooves between her eyebrows. She bore nothing of happiness on her face—no laugh lines, no crow’s feet.
“How long did you say you’ve waited to find me?” I said in Portuguese.
“Seventy years,” she spat. “Since I was a girl.”
“Seventy years,” I whispered. “You spent your whole life seeking revenge for your father. Why didn't you come for me before I left Brazil?”
"I could never find you.” Her eyes glazed as she remembered. "Not until the curse—until I was taught to summon the creature."
El Lobizon.
"And you followed me here to Canada. How did you know I was here?"
"The creature led me. It scented you on my father's shirt, and when you used your magic ..."
She meant when I'd used my magic on arrival in Montreal, I realized. That had occurred over a year ago. She'd traveled all the way from Brazil to Canada, and only now had she found me. Now that I’d used my magic a second time, to transform into Katrina Darling.
My eyes widened. "After all those decades, it scented my magic on his clothing?"
She didn’t answer, but her thin lips came together hard.
"Inez, were you ever married?
Did you have children?"
She didn't respond to this, either, but her eyes blazed with ire. It isn't just me she hates, I realized. It's the life she's lived.
I stood from the chair, crossed to where Inez sat. I knelt in front of her so that she had to look down on me. “I’m sure your father was many wonderful things, Inez, but here’s the truth: he wasn’t the man you believed him to be.”
“Enganador,” she breathed, jerking against her restraints like she would bite me.
I straightened, and behind me I heard Justin step forward. “What did she say?”
I raised one staying hand. “She called me a deceiver.” Then I spoke in Portuguese. “Inez, your father was a man who abandoned his family for an illusion, and when he discovered the truth of that illusion—of me—he abandoned me, too. He called me a monster, and left me.”
“So he saw you for what you are.”
“For my part,” I continued, “I didn’t know you existed. And I can’t say whether I would have let him be even if I had. I only knew I loved him unconditionally, unendingly.”
She didn’t speak, but tears rose in her eyes. Of rage? Of sorrow? I didn’t know.
“I know you hate me too much to believe anything I tell you,” I said. “But I see your suffering all over your face. A life lived for revenge isn’t a life at all.”
Inez screwed up her mouth and spat. It landed on my cheek, and I jerked back, one hand rising to my face. She stared at me with shaking anger, the kind of anger that ceases to be about anything except what exists inside.
It wasn’t even me she hated anymore. It was just hate.
Under the blanket, one of my hands went to my neck, searching out my amulet. But it wasn’t there.
“All right, that’s enough,” Justin said, stepping forward.
I rose, wiping Inez’s spit from my cheek. “Where’s my amulet?” I stepped around the kitchen table, scanning the floor.