Bewere the Night

With the sun now up, the desert rapidly heated from pleasantly cool to sweltering. Ines and Miguel both took turns carrying the small children, to give their mothers a rest. Why were they crossing now, in the brutal conditions of summer? Couldn’t they wait for milder weather? She bit back the desire to yell at the mothers for stupidity. She didn’t know their reasons. And it would upset the kids, who out of all those here were completely blameless. Not that innocence would save them, if immigration agents caught their families; they would be deported back to Mexico, with or without their parents.

Ines gritted her teeth and kept walking.

When the noon halt came, people sank down wherever they stood, trembling and drenched with sweat. El Rojo wandered among them, cursing and kicking, until everyone was as hidden as they could get. Even in this desolation, they couldn’t assume they would remain unnoticed; the so-called Minutemen rode through here on their self-appointed patrols, and some of them were far too ready to shoot.

Miguel joined Ines in her clump of creosote. The bushes didn’t offer much in the way of shelter, not with the sun directly overhead, but it was all they had. The older man offered her beef jerky; Ines gave him chips in exchange, wishing she had brought more. They made her thirsty, but it was necessary to replace the salt lost through sweat, and she could tell that few of the migrants had known to bring their own. She hoped they found a cache of water left by one of the humanitarian groups; some people hadn’t brought enough.

Murmurs rose here and there as people made brief conversation, then gave it up out of exhaustion. One curt order, though, made Ines stiffen: El Rojo, speaking to the mother whose daughter had fussed the most. “Come with me.”

Miguel’s hand clamped down on Ines’ arm before she could move. “Don’t.”

“I can’t let him—” Ines growled, trying to rise. El Rojo was leading the young woman to the far side of a cluster of ocotillo.

“Yes, you can,” Miguel hissed. “Look.” He jerked his chin; Ines, following, saw Pipo watching her. He wants what you’d expect, Miguel had said—what El Rojo was about to take from that woman. Something else to offer, the coyote in the cantina had said. For all she knew, this was part of the woman’s bargain with El Rojo. Which didn’t make it right, didn’t make it okay—

You aren’t here to rescue them, Ines. Not like that. Don’t forget your purpose.

She sagged back down, defeated, and tried to sleep. It wasn’t the heat and relentless sun that kept her awake, though, but the muffled sounds from nearby.

They rested through the hottest part of the day, then rose to walk some more. Now it was clear that, however hard the night and morning had been, that was only the beginning of their trials; stiff muscles protested, and weariness made everyone clumsy. One of the young men stumbled on his way down a slope, nearly falling, putting Ines’ heart in her mouth; if he twisted an ankle, he was dead. Nowould carry him, not all the way to the reservation. He regained his balance, unharmed, and they went on.

Until the sun set and the desert air cooled, and Ines, stupid with exhaustion, began to wonder if all this risk and effort was going to come to nothing whatsoever, except an embarrassed trek back to Phoenix, and a passport in her mailbox with no stamp marking her return to the United States. It isn’t nothing, she thought, you know about El Rojo now, and can tell—

“Hide,” the coyote snarled.

The migrants didn’t move fast enough. They’d been stumbling along, one foot in front of the other, like zombies, and now they stared at him; Pipo and the others began shoving people to the ground as distant headlights sliced through the thickening dusk.

Ines remained standing, staring, until Pipo knocked her down, almost into the spines of an ocotillo. Two lights, moving independently: all-terrain motorcycles, not a Jeep. Border Patrol, not vigilantes, and following their trail from the fence.

A low, quiet laugh from El Rojo raised all the hairs along her arms and neck. “Come on, boys.”

Making only a little more noise than the desert wind, he and his three fellows loped off toward the approaching motorcycles.

Ines shoved a hand into her pocket, pulling out the rubber-banded tin. When she rose to a crouch, Miguel whispered, “What are you doing?” He wasn’t close enough to grab her.

Keeping those agents alive. “Stay here,” she hissed back, and ran before he could protest.

She kept low, taking advantage of the scant cover. Already she’d lost sight of El Rojo and the others, but that wouldn’t matter for long. She just needed to get far enough away from the migrants… .

Good enough. Ines dropped to one knee, stripped out of her clothes, and pulled the rubber band off the tin.

The pungent smell of the teopatli inside rose into the dry air. Its scent brought memories swarming around her like ghosts: her first visit to Cuauhtemoc, at the age of fifteen, re-united after seven years with the family she had lost. Her mother sending her out into the desert, with teopatli for her skin and pulque to drink and a maguey thorn to pierce her tongue, as her ancestors had done for generations before.

Careful despite her haste, Ines dipped her fingers in the paste, and began to dab it onto her body. Legs, back, arm, face, rings and clusters of spots, and even before she was done she could feel the ololiuqui seeds ground into the paste taking effect. Her vision swam, going both blurry and sharp, and smells assaulted her nose. Then everything came together with a bone-wrenching snap, and leaving tin and clothes behind, Ines ran once more.

The coyotes weren’t hard to follow now. They feared no predators, out here in the desert; Border Patrol, vigilantes, ranchers, all were just different kinds of prey. They ran together for a time, then fanned out, and Ines went after the nearest, knowing she would have to be fast.

He was on his way up a steep rise, aiming for a cliff from which he could leap. Ines caught him halfway, slamming his wiry to the ground, her jaws seeking and then finding his skull, teeth punching through into his brain. The coyote died without a sound, as in the distance, the barking calls of his brothers pierced the night air.

The motorcycles growled lower at the sound, but they were still approaching much too fast. Ines ran again, the teopatli giving her strength she’d lacked before. She was made for the stalking ambush, not the chase, but the lives of those two agents depended on her speed. The second coyote died with his throat crushed. The noise dropped sharply; one of the engines had stopped. She caught the third coyote on his way toward the motorcycles, and this one saw her coming; he twisted away from her leap, yipping in surprise, before going down beneath her much greater weight.

Even as the hot blood burst into her mouth, she heard a scream from the direction of the engines—a human scream.

Cold blue light flooded the narrow valley where the migrants had walked. One of the motorcycles had fallen on its side; the rider lay moaning and bleeding. His partner had a shotgun out, and was pointing it in every direction, unsure where the next attack would come from. If Ines wasn’t careful, he would shoot her instead.

Now it was time for the stalk. She circled the area slowly, paws touching down with silent care, nose alive to every scent on the wind. She thought the third coyote had been Pipo—couldn’t be sure—but the last was El Rojo. He was the smart one, the subtle one, the sorcerer who had given them all coyote shape, the better to hunt the humans who came to hunt them.

He knew she was out here. Ines realized that when she found his trail looping upon itself, confusing his scent. He’d heard Pipo die, of course—but maybe he’d known since before then. He’s watching you for something, Miguel had said. Maybe El Rojo recognized a fellow sorcerer when he saw one.

On an ordinary night, she wouldn’t have been stupid enough to approach the overhang. But the strength the teopatli gave her was no substitute for sleep; Ines’ human mind was sluggish, ceding too much control to the beast.

A weight crashed into her back. Pain bloomed hot along her nerves as the coyote’s jaws closed on her neck. Acting on instinct, Ines collapsed and rolled, dislodging El Rojo. When she regained her feet, she saw at last the creature she had come all this way to hunt.

His coat was different than the others’, more uniform in color along the head and back. In sunlight, it would be reddish brown. El Rojo, the red one, whose jaws now dripped red with her blood. Who had murdered Javier, and Consuela, and David, ranchers and vigilantes, and probably some migrants, too. Coyote attacks, the official reports