Before my life changed forever.
I hoped.
“And then what?”
My question hung there between us, pushed us apart. At least I thought it did. But I heard her roll over, felt her hand on my arm.
“We could figure it out,” she said, her voice low, deep. “Together.”
I liked the sound of that.
The echo of her words reverberated inside of me, waking Emilia’s story, but only for a brief flash. All of them—they settled.
They waited.
Because soon, this would all be over.
They came in the middle of the night.
I saw only the muted glowing of their eyes, first a single pair of them, then another, until the section of the wall I was next to was surrounded by them, dim yellow spots and nothing more. They made no other sounds. Just watched me, countless pairs of eyes so still in the night. I hoped they were guardians, not the terrible creatures that had tormented the children of La Reina Nueva.
They did not move, did not come in for the kill, so I relaxed, but only a little. Was I unworthy? Uninteresting?
I thought of waking Emilia, of trying to find the others, but I worried that any movement at all would set them off. But they never made their presence known otherwise. I watched them for a while, and then they began to wink out, to fade into nothing, until we were by ourselves again, and I drifted off to sleep.
I dreamed of nothing.
The howling woke me up.
The terrible, mournful sound ripped me back into consciousness. I was upright a moment later, and my eyes took a little while to adjust in the fading starlight. Dawn was coming soon.
Emilia still slept. Somehow, during the night, one of us had moved closer to the other. Maybe we both did. I rose as quietly as I could, not wanting to alarm Emilia. My stomach ached again, but the pain was different this time. Not a cramp. Something deeper. I had not been eating much on this journey, and perhaps my body was telling me so. I stood there in the silence, my hand on my belly, willing the pain away.
Another howl ripped through the early-morning darkness.
I walked toward the wall, stood next to it, gripped the cold stone in my hand.
Crickets chirped. Silence filled the space between their calls.
I waited. I opened myself up to the darkness that grew before dawn, to the desert, and it responded.
Rustling.
Thumping on the ground.
They were coming.
I rushed back to Emilia, threw myself down onto the sleeping roll, began to dig through my pack for la pala, wishing that I’d thought to bring a weapon, and—
But it was Pablo. He climbed over the rubble, breathless. “Xochitl,” he said, huffing.
“What is it?” I whispered harshly. Emilia stirred beside me.
“They’ve come back.”
“Who is ‘they’?” grumbled Emilia, rubbing at her eyes.
He didn’t answer at first. He bent over so that his hands were on his knees. “We’re surrounded,” he choked out.
Emilia sat up. “Surrounded? By what?”
“They’re all around the camp,” he explained, still hunched over, his curls bouncing when he looked back up at us. “The guardians.”
The eyes. They hadn’t been part of un sueño. They had surrounded me.
“They’re asking for you,” he said. He straightened up, put his hands behind his head, still huffing. “I don’t know what they want.”
We left our belongings behind and followed Pablo, climbing over a ruined section of the wall, and a thick, nervous sweat ran from my underarms. Just into the next clearing, I saw the others. Rosalinda raised a finger to her lips, waved with the other hand, and we slowly approached them.
“I’ve never seen guardians like this,” she whispered to me. “Big. Dark fur. Casi como gatos, pero … no.”
“Ours were ositos,” Felipe said, his voice even lower than that of his mother. “I think I like them better than these.”
I twisted around and around, trying to see what they were staring at. “I don’t see them,” I said.
“You don’t need to,” said Rosalinda.
“But I—”
“Listen.”
I didn’t hear it at first. It was so low, so present, that it nearly faded into the background. But as we all remained unmoving, it filled my ears: a humming, rumbling and deep, that seemed to come from every direction. It varied in pitch every so often, a slow, horrific growl.
We really were surrounded.
I tensed up, and it was there again: Emilia’s hand in mine. I pulled her to my side.
I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And waited.
Until one of them finally revealed themselves.
They came from the south, and they made no sound as each of their black paws gripped the soil. One step, then two, then the creature sauntered into the clearing, teeth bared, and in the newborn light of the morning, I saw that some of those teeth were stained red. Blood. It was probably blood.
But whose? Whose life had been taken?
They towered there, the monstrous bestia with black fur sleek and shiny in the early-morning light that reached up beyond the horizon in the east, and they stepped closer and closer, and I dared not move. I knew then that the slightest mistake could end in my death. So I kept my eyes locked on them, on their yellowed pupils, on the massive jaws that hung open.
They strode right up to me, and Solís help me, I was shaking, trembling right there in that spot, and they sniffed me, then glared, brows angling toward each other.
I heard something trickling into the dirt next to me, and slowly, achingly, my gaze dropped to a puddle on the ground. Felipe’s leg shivered in terror.
Do you know why we are here?
The voice was a rumble, neither masculine nor feminine, but something in between, something like you, Solís.
And it sounded in my head.
I focused on those yellow eyes. “You are the guardians of La Reina Nueva.”
“Who are you talking to?” Emilia asked, but I raised a hand for her to be quiet.
We are, cuentista.
“You protect this place.”
We do, they said. We also protected La Reina many years
