by Ramy Vance
The Brazilian woman, her white hair floating around her like it had caught a breeze. (There was no breeze.) She faced down Aimee, who stood twenty feet away, both hands up as if she was being mugged. (She wasn’t being mugged.)
It was worse than being mugged.
Between them stood El Lobizon, head lowered, hackles up. He stalked toward her with the slow assurance of a predator whose prey was already caught.
None of them had seen me, and none would unless I announced myself. I could watch the whole scene like a play and then slip back the way I had come.
Then, an irritating thought: What would Katrina Darling do?
Where had that come from? Was I becoming religious in my mortality? Why was Katrina Darling whose actions I wanted to emulate?
Then, the response: Because you admire her.
Not just the way she dressed or her hair or her boyfriend. I admired her bravery, her guts, even her GoneGodDamn quips at the worst moments in English class.
I surveyed Aimee, the woman, the wolf, the frozen river running beside them, and after a time, a wild, unlikely thought came to me.
Katrina Darling would come up with a plan.
I stepped up to the sidewalk, lifted a mittened hand and pointed at El Lobizon. “Hey, you son of a bitch! (That would offend a dog, too, right?) Get away from my friend.”
That should have done it.
El Lobizon spun, his black pupils locking onto me. The Brazilian woman turned. Aimee’s eyes lighted on me.
And then, the last thing I wanted to hear: the old woman let a careening laugh. It was the kind of noise a person with nothing to lose might make, and I realized I was in way, way over my head.
Chapter 9
“Ela é sua presa!” the old woman shouted, her bare hand rising toward me, one finger emerging from the folds of her dress to point at the center of my chest.
El Lobizon half-lowered before he sprang toward me, his claws raking divots in the sidewalk as he began his hunt.
So I did what any encantado would do.
I let out a shriek and turned, running down the sidewalk as fast as my heeled boots would take me. I’m sure, with my hands swinging and my slip-sliding on the ice, I looked ridiculous.
And later, when Aimee asked me about it, I would say I meant to look ridiculous. But I hadn’t—I was actually running for my life in the best (most absurd) way I knew how when running down an icy sidewalk.
But I did have a plan.
I only needed to take El Lobizon far enough from Aimee that she wouldn’t get hurt. But I wasn’t sure if I could run very far before he caught up to me.
I glanced over my shoulder; El Lobizon wasn’t fifty feet away, and he would close the space between us in just a few seconds.
I stopped hard beside the river, turning toward it. As I did, floodlights illuminated behind me, sending the frozen river and the far bank into relief. What the hell was that? But I didn’t have time to consider it; I would be dead in a moment.
I ran down the side of the bank and squeezed my eyes shut as I leapt in. Magic poured out of me, sliding over my body in a warm, enfolding wave. When my feet hit the ice, they sank right through and I slipped into the fantastically cold water beneath.
I opened my eyes for an excruciating second beneath the water—just as a massive form crashed through the ice beside me. El Lobizon, plowing into the canal like a missile.
A moment later, my body had reverted to its truest form. It’s natural form. The encantado form.
I was in my element.
↔
GoneGodDamn was it cold. But I could handle it for about a minute, which was long enough.
Even as a creature of the Brazilian rainforest, the encantado’s natural form was highly resistant to heat or cold. Like dolphins, our lower bodies had an extra layer of adipose tissue and a slick skin that would encase it.
Which El Lobizon didn’t have. His great, black coat of fur absorbed the cold water like a paper towel as he clawed ineffectually under the surface, those red eyes glaring like they could burn holes in me.
But he couldn’t draw himself any closer to me, where with a little flip of my tail, I could have easily maneuvered myself well out of his reach.
“Hunt this!” I said—except in my encantado form, it was really more like a series of dolphin squeaks —and angled my tail to thrust a strong current of water toward him.
A second later, the current pushed him back, and I saw the bubbles rise from his mouth as he growled. Already his pawing had slowed as his fur dragged him down, the cold seeping into his massive muscles.
Another minute and he would freeze under here, and that would be the end of El Lobizon.
I had just begun swimming toward the hole in the ice when a second, smaller form burst through next to the creature.
A human. Black-haired, tall and muscular.
Justin Truly, that idiot, had jumped into the freezing canal to save me.
↔
As soon as he’d entered the water, I could tell Justin regretted his choice. He took one brave look around before he spotted El Lobizon, and then me. I saw him blink once, and he began an air-breathing mammal’s familiar, desperate scramble toward the surface.
But he wouldn’t make it; he was wearing jeans and a sweater. And Justin had jumped in right next to the creature, who was still trying to get to me—his prey. The creature paddled like a dog, one terrific paw knocking Justin in the process, who sailed toward the darkness at the bottom of the river.
“No!” I screamed, and with a single flip of my tail, I pelted through the water toward him.
The cold was already affecting my ability to swim, but I burned magic as I raced toward Justin, and the familiar warmth of it sailing over my body gave me just enough energy to veer past El Lobizon and reach Justin.
I took hold of his sweater in my rapidly freezing arms and, with the most exhausting tail-flip of my long life, brought us both toward the massive hole El Lobizon had created when he’d leapt into the river.
We surfaced together, and I had just enough energy to get us halfway onto the icy surface. Justin had fallen unconscious—whether from the blow from the creature’s paw or from shock, I couldn’t tell.
I gasped as the night air touched my human half. I didn’t have long before I would freeze to death. I kept hold of Justin’s sweater, trying to pull the two of us out onto the surface, but I didn’t have the strength.
I gave a final flick of my tail, but I was too weak—I had exhausted everything.
“Encantado!” came a familiar voice. Ahead of me, the old woman had picked her way to the edge of the water, and was sliding across the ice toward us. I didn’t know what her intentions were, but none of that mattered to me right now.
I only wanted to get out of the water. Needed to get out.
She dropped to her knees, crawl-sliding toward my outreached, shaking arm.
When her hand grabbed mine, I hardly felt it. My other arm was still around Justin, and she pulled us the rest of the way out of the water and onto the ice with amazing strength.
I lay there on my back, unable and unwilling to move anything except my eyes. Above us, the night sky, and in my periphery, the old Brazilian woman knelt beside us. Staring at me.
Why? Why did she want me dead so badly?
“Watch out,” I tried to say to Justin, but it came out as a faint exhale. I was going into shock, I realized, as the moon and stars faded in my vision.
The last thing I heard before the darkness took me were the faint sounds of knocking. El Lobizon under the ice, still struggling, still seeking his prey.
Chapter 10
I woke to a woman’s soft humming, a candle’s light and warmth. It issued around me like a blanket, and I realized I was feeling heat from a vent.
Ah, modern living was a remarkable thing. Humans sometimes voiced a little fondness for it, but they couldn’t appreciate it like a once-immortal Other could.
Wait, where was I? The memories return
ed to me with a start: El Lobizon, the river, rescuing Justin from the water, the old woman sliding across the ice. And at the end, her face over me, blocking the moon.
My hand went to the amulet at my neck, found it still there. I rubbed it as my eyes traveled around the space. I was in a kitchen. Or, more accurately, on a chair with a blanket wrapped around me. I peeked inside the blanket and discovered Katrina Darling's naked body—my body. At some point in my semi-unconscious (or maybe completely unconscious) delirium, I had shifted back to her. My hair was wet, and when I wiggled my fingers and toes, I found them functional, but I couldn’t get up.
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.”
&n
bsp; “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.