Her heart raced faster. “Did myfiancésay anything else before he left?”Like he was readying to slay their guards.
“I don’t think so. He’s kind of strange, no?”
“He’s a dead man, that’s what he is,” she grumbled through her clenched jaw.
The boys’ eyes widened.
“I warned him. Papá killed him, right?” Adrián asked.
“No.” But she was going to.
This whole ruse was a terrible idea. What was she thinking? That was the problem. She wasn’t. She’d been so caught up in trying to prove herself, in trying to keep her papá from offering her hand to someone she didn’t love, that she’d proven Papá’s point. Her selfish decisions hurt people. She’d begged Abuelo to teach her how to fight, and where was he now? She’d forced Lalo to pretend to be hers, and guards were killed because of it.
Papá’s boots clicked on the tile. Sweat ran down his forehead. “Everything and everyone are accounted for.”
Mamá and the cocheros entered the house, along with Carolina’s five older brothers, her cousins, and her uncles. They spoke above one another, their voices competing over who got to tell their story first.
“A sediento was killed near the schoolhouse this morning,” Domingo, the oldest of her uncles, said. “We had just finished burning the body when gunshots came from the gates.”
“We ran to investigate and found our men dead. Their pistols were still hot in their hands,” her brother Manuel said.
“Something dashed away from the gates of the hacienda,” another brother—Sergio—added.
“Damn thing was faster than any creature I’ve seen,” her uncle Vicente said.
“We raced after it, but couldn’t keep up, even on our swiftest horses,” her uncle Malaquías noted.
Carolina could scream. She had trusted un vampiro in her own home, allowed him to walk this earth, and look what he did.
The alarm bells sounded from the bell towers to the east, right where Lalo would have gone if he was running toward his home.
Carolina clenched her fists at her sides.
She was never going to let that beast of a boy slip away again.
“I will kill you, Lalo Montéz.”
From the journal of Friar Alejandro Ibarra
If one’s lands are overrun by vampiros, there is only one thing to be done. Find the poor creature Tecuani dragged from the Land of the Dead and destroy its heart with the tool used to beckon the god with. This tool is typically a blade of some fashion, used by the conjurer to summon the trickster god. If the original beast is slain, the vampiros it created will also fall.
“But how does one find the blade used in the first place?” I ask myself.
It must be an item that held value to the deceased when they were alive. The conjurer will use this special tool to slice into their own hand before placing their open palm on the grave of the departed. Blood is the essence of life. It summons the god as well as feeds the dead.
CHAPTER 21
Lalo
He’d been in the cellarunder la cantina for at least a few hours now. Lalo knew he needed to get home in order to keep up with the charade of his betrothal, but how could he leave all these journals and books behind? Maricela was lurking in the valley. The answers to finding more about Vidal could be here. He couldn’t leave until he discovered them.
His eyes leafed through the pages, the words on them scrawled so delicately across the parchment. People didn’t write like this anymore. They didn’t take the time to get the perfect amount of ink onto the quill and curve their letters like this author had.
Lalo was reading through a woman’s diary written some two hundred years ago. She was a terrible gossip. This person did not take care of their gardens properly because they were too busy drinking in the barn. That person was seen slipping out of a certain padre’s rooms late one night. Funny how so much hadchanged in the world yet stayed the same. Humans would always be humans. Flawed. Judgmental. No matter the century.
Lalo remembered his father grumbling about how good things had been a generation or two back, perhaps for some. For the privileged, things were never so terribly bad. They had time to sit in their reading rooms or rocking chairs and write about basic human follies while others were simply trying their best to survive.
His eyes caught on a name in the journal. Alma.
