Page 96 of The Hacienda
You must find your own way.
My home and Beatriz were in danger. How could I do anything but take up the tools I had to deliver her from evil?
Deep in my chest, that locked box of darkness hummed, trembling with expectation.
Forgive me, I begged.
Then I rose, turned, and walked briskly to the door of the capilla. For better or for worse, I had chosen my path. I could not think of what I was sacrificing to do so, nor what punishment might await me at the end of my days.
There was no time to waste.
***
I STRODE DIRECTLY TOAna Luisa and Paloma’s house in the fading light. Its windows gaped dark in the twilight, hungry and empty.The door swung open before me; as I crossed the threshold, I sensed something in the house invited me in, drawing me toward it like a moth to flame.
It was here, as I suspected. My inheritance. My birthright.
I fumbled in the dark for flint and a candle. When the flame’s pale light illuminated the room, I turned to the beds against the wall.
Ana Luisa must have gone through Titi’s belongings after her death and found it. How else could I explain the bastardized markings in charcoal that lined the doorway of the main house’s kitchen? How else could I explain the instinct that drew me to my knees beside Ana Luisa’s cold bed, to a small wooden box beneath its head? When I was last here, the morning Paloma found my poor aunt dead from terror, I was too ill from the blow to my head to think clearly; nausea deadened my senses to the dizzying pull that now drew my hands to the box. I set it on my knees and lifted its lid.
There it was. The pamphlet my father’s sister had left me.
Smudges I did not recognize darkened some of its pages. A thrum of grief beat through my heart. When the house went rotten, when the poison of Doña María Catalina’s anger began to spread, Ana Luisa had been afraid. She sought help from this. She should have come to me. Why didn’t she?
Pride, perhaps.
I thought of the day Paloma first told me of the problems with the house, the day she spoke to me outside of the church in Apan.
Doña Juana is hiding something. Mamá too. Something terrible.
How many times had Paloma told me Ana Luisa loathed the patrón’s first wife? If Juana had meant to rid the hacienda of Doña Catalina, would she have sought Ana Luisa’s help as an accomplice?
Would my aunt have given it?
Then perhaps... perhaps it was guilt that prevented her from seeking my help when the house turned on her with its cold, strangling fingers. Perhaps she knew that if I returned to San Isidro, Titi’s gifts or my own darker ones would reveal the truth eventually.
“May God forgive you, Tía,” I murmured.
Then I set to work.
I flipped through the pamphlet. Though I had not laid hands on it in nearly a decade, my fingertips traveled well-worn roads through its pages, guided by memory as I searched for the most powerful exorcism contained within. The one Titi tapped with her index finger and of which she said,Not yet, you are not strong enough for this one.
As I searched, I saw the gunpowder eyes of my father’s sister peering up at me through the glyphs. The terror I felt when I first beheld their dark spark. I saw disgust carving my father’s face, heard his voice echo behind me as if he stood just feet from me in the dark of Ana Luisa’s house.They burn people like you.
Burn, burn, burn. Perhaps that was what awaited me in death.
But in life, I would fight. I would fight to save the soul of San Isidro and the woman trapped inside its malicious walls because that was what wasright. I knew it like a brand on my flesh as my fingertip found the glyphs I sought. It felt so right it had to be sinful.
The dark box in my chest trembled as I scanned the page. I felt its anticipation like the taste of pure cane sugar on my tongue.
Stand down, I told it. I had chosen to turn to this part of myself, but I would still keep my hands tight on the reins. I knew precisely the rituals and incantations to combine with these glyphs, and I would adhere to them with the utmost care. There was no room for error. No time to second-guess myself.
I looked up to the window over Ana Luisa’s bed. Full darkness had fallen.
It was time.
The air hissed with anticipation as I shut the door to Ana Luisa’s house behind me, pamphlet tucked under my arm. A storm hung over the mountains, teasing the tension in the valley with the crack of boulder on boulder. I could taste in the air that the valley would have no respite tonight; thewind had other designs, and carried the clouds away from us, sloping southeast toward the distant sea.
