She came closer.
“I knew you would.”
Closer.
“I’m still searching, mi amor, I promise.”
Her fingers grazed his face.
And then her skin went pale, slowly at first, and blood trickled out from one nostril, and she still wore the same smile as it all sloughed off her, and Eliazar was screaming, and she was dead, the smell wafting through the air. I coughed hard and spat into the dirt, and Eliazar was shaking his head.
“No, I can save you!” he said. “I left our home to find a cure!”
She was ghastly, skin clinging to bone, but her voice was still soothing. “I am gone, Eliazar,” she said, and tears prickled my eyes. “You have to let me go.”
“But it isn’t fair!” he cried out. “I don’t know how to live without you, Gracia.”
He pushed himself up from the ground, stood directly in front of her rotting face. “It makes me feel close to you to do this,” he explained. “If I’m suffering, it means you’re still here.”
In an instant, she was normal again. “But love is not suffering,” she said, and she reached out and touched his face, ran her fingers through his beard. “I know you want me back. I know you want to see me again. But this is no way to honor me.”
“Please come back,” Eliazar croaked, his cheeks damp with tears.
“You know I can’t. Deep down … you’ve known the whole time.”
“But I don’t know how to do this,” he weeped. “I don’t know how to do any of this without you.”
“You already have been.”
She stepped back. “I am gone, Eliazar.”
His shoulders drooped.
“I know,” he said. “You died.”
Gracia smiled at her love.
She faded, became a thin dust of ash, and then she was gone.
Silence returned.
The dead watched us.
And the four of them stared directly at me.
I was all that was left.
But there were no shadows. No pesadillas. No sounds. Nothing.
“Is it over?” said Felipe, and there was the smallest hint of hope in that voice, the tiniest spark of potential.
Emilia moved closer to me, and I was surprised when I felt her hand brush against mine, felt her fingers interlock with my own, and I didn’t care that anyone could see us.
She understood me, didn’t she?
It was still silent.
“Mami, what’s happening?” Felipe asked. “Why is it so quiet?”
“Maybe they are sparing Xochitl,” said Rosalinda.
“She is a cuentista, after all,” said Eliazar. He brushed the tears off his face.
I let go of Emilia’s hand. “We should leave, then,” I said. “If this place has nothing for me, then we shouldn’t stick around.”
I walked forward, heading north, and then—
I couldn’t.
I stilled, and it was as if the very will to move had been ripped from me. I tried to turn around, but I couldn’t. “Emilia,” I said, and the terror went up my throat, came spilling out. “I can’t move. Something’s happening.”
She moved quietly around my rigid body, floated right in my eyesight, her brows furrowed. “What do you mean?”
I could move my eyes. Only my eyes.
Nothing else.
And so I saw them coming.
They advanced from the north, as if they were going to join the dead behind us, and panic pressed my lungs, made it hard to breathe.
“What do I do? Am I—?”
“Mami, who are they?”
No. No.
I knew them.
Lani. Omar. Ofelia. Soledad. Lázaro.
They all woke up inside me.
“When will you tell them?” Lani said as she approached. She sneered at me. “Or will you continue to let them think you are one of the chosen ones?”
“Are you judging us now?” Omar asked, and he circled me as the others stepped back. “Do you think you’re better than us because you know what we’ve done?”
“No!” I cried out.
But was that true?
“You defied Solís,” said Ofelia. “How are you any better than us? How are you not worse?”
Soledad laughed as she came upon me. “You knew what I had done, and yet you still thought of yourself as superior. You thought you were pure.”
And then there was Emilia. Something was wrong: there were those cold eyes of hers, the ones that were so uninterested, so uncaring. They were not part of whom I had come to know. It was the old version of her, the one I had despised.
“You’ve been keeping our stories,” she said. She smiled, pure malice and spite and hatred.
They began to rot, slowly at first, their skin turning dark, then bubbling up, then falling off, and I held back a scream as I watched them fall apart. Their bodies crumbled, revealed who had been standing behind them.
Rosalinda. Felipe. Eliazar.
“Is it true?” said Felipe. “Did you really keep them?”
“How many?” asked Rosalinda. “How many?”
And then Eliazar was there, his mouth downturned, and more so than anyone else’s, his expression broke my heart. “I know you did not have time to complete the ritual, but … were you going to keep mine, too?”
“I had to,” I said, but it lacked all confidence. “I had to keep the stories. I would have forgotten what Lito … what he…”
They didn’t know anything about Lito. Or Julio. Or Empalme. None of that mattered to them.
I remembered that afternoon in the center of mi aldea. How they all turned their backs on me once they’d discovered what I had done.
It was happening again, wasn’t it?
“Why?” asked Felipe. “Why would you do that?”
I knew the answer. But I was still stuck in that spot, unable to move, unable to escape their gazes.
“Tell the truth, Xochitl. Say it aloud.”
Emilia. She touched me. Once she made contact, I nearly collapsed, free from the terrible force that had bound me. The others took a step away from me, as though I were something to be feared.
The dead remained, watching.
I sucked in a deep breath and choked, and then it all came out. All of it. I told them of that first story, the one Lito had given me, of what I found in Soledad, of the promise of Simone. And then I paused—Emilia nodded, urging me on—and I told
