Under the blinding light she could feel the darkness of the creature rising up once more, swelling like a maggot-ridden corpse. She caught the tattered wisps of the brujería born in Ellie’s mask, and holding onto them like a handful of threads, she plunged an arrow of her spirit into the morass, searching for some part of Donal that the Glasduine hadn’t already swallowed and taken into itself.
She had to navigate through the flood of the creature’s hatreds and lusts, experience the gruesome deaths of the Gentry, delve deeper and deeper until she felt she could go no further and was ready to give up. But finally, there it was.
A tiny, warm kernel of Donal’s goodness, hard-shelled like a seed, protecting itself from the awful stew in which it floated.
Bettina focused the arrow of her spirit until it was so small and sharp it could pierce the kernel and enter it. Before the darkness could rush in after her, she connected the tattered threads of the mask’s brujería to it, then sealed the opening she’d made and enclosed the whole of it, kernel and connecting threads, in a protective sheath. She waited only long enough to see that the kernel was beginning to swell, then retreated, her stamina spent.
She allowed the Glasduine to expel the arrow of her spirit. It returned to her with a shock, withered and trembling. Loosening the numbed grip of her fingers, she let the Glasduine fling her away. She hit the ground hard, went tumbling over the loose stones and dirt. Her fingers, the palms of her hand were raw, the skin burned away. There was nothing left of the rosary her mother had sent her. She could barely lift her head, but she did. She couldn’t look away.
The Glasduine had fallen to its knees. Illumination still flared from its pores, laser-thin and bright, a thousand blinding lines of white light. It was still howling, but the sound was different. Almost fearful.
Grow, Bettina told the seed she’d found in the Glasduine’s darkness. Be strong.
She said another “Hail Mary.”
She couldn’t bring her hands together—even the movement of air across the raw wounds was agony. With an effort, she managed to dampen the worst of the pain. Her gaze remained locked on the Glasduine.
The shafts of light began to swell, to join. The Glasduine’s upper torso drooped. By the time it had bowed its head, pressing its face into the dirt, all the shafts of light had joined into one tall pillar that rose up from the arch of the creature’s back. Colors swelled up from the bottom of the pillar, the familiar greens and golds of the creature’s vida en hilodela. A moment later and the light had swallowed the Glasduine whole.
Bettina and the others couldn’t look away.
Something became visible in that light. They were being given a glimpse, as though through a stained-glass window, of enormous trees, giants that dwarfed the cliffs around them. Impossible behemoths that rose and rose up into the sky.
“Forever trees,” Bettina heard her wolf whisper. “In the long ago.”
By that she knew they were looking in on the First World, the source from which the Glasduine had been drawn. She drank in the sight, leaning closer when she saw a woman walking under those trees.
Bettina wasn’t sure who the others saw—she sensed that each of them recognized her in their own way—but she saw a dusky madonna, modestly clad in blue and white robes, and knew it was Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Virgin as first seen in a vision by Juan Diego at the chief shrine of Tonantzin on Tepeyac Hill, centuries ago. Those trees were far from Cuautlalpan in Mexico, but La Novia del Desierto’s presence felt as natural in that ancient forest as it did in the Sonoran.
The woman lifted her head and looked their way. She smiled and Bettina’s heart grew glad in a way it hadn’t since her abuela had followed the clown dog into the storm. Then the vision was gone.
But the marvels continued.
The pillar of light dwindled until it pooled around the fallen body of the Glasduine. Bettina held her breath, watching the liquid light pulse. Then something moved in the center of the pool. For a moment Bettina thought it was the salmon from the pool behind Kellygnow, but then a saguaro rose up, swallowing the body of the creature as it grew.
By the time it stopped growing, it towered fifty feet into the desert sky, two tons of cactus, enormous by any standards, though dwarfed in Bettina’s mind by her brief glimpse of the incredible heights of the forever trees.
The giant stood there for a long moment, gleaming in the sunlight, gleaming with its own inner light. Then one of its arms dropped off. Another. And it fell apart as quickly as it had grown, the green waxy skin browning, rotting. In no time at all the only thing that remained were the saguaro’s ribs, the lower halves still standing tall, their upper halves drooping like the spokes of an umbrella. Caught in the middle, with ribs thrusting up from its chest, was a small body.
Donal, Bettina realized at the same time as Miki ran forward. Miki wept, trying to break off the saguaro ribs. Hunter joined her, pulled her away.
“Let me try,” he said.
He lowered her to the ground and with el lobo’s help began the grisly task of breaking the brittle ribs so that they could free Donal’s body. Miki remained where Hunter had left her, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Bettina glanced at Ellie. The sculptor’s eyes were wet with her own tears when she turned to Bettina.
“What… what happened?” she asked.
“Neither Donal nor the creature lived a good life,” Bettina said. “So the shape would not hold for them. There is an old Indios saying. If you live a good life, you come back as saguaro; you become one of the aunts and uncles. Live a bad life, and you come back as a human.” She hesitated for a moment, then added, “You chose well for your mask.”
“Yeah, like I knew what I was doing.”
Bettina shrugged. “Your heart and your hands… your brujería knew.”
Ellie slowly stood up.
“So… we won, I guess.”
Bettina nodded.
“So why do I feel like shit?”
“Because we are just people,” Aunt Nancy said, joining them. “Because the world isn’t black and white and it cuts us so deeply when those we love—those we think are good people—do bad things. It’s hard to celebrate a victory that has come about through the death of one we loved.”
Ellie gave a slow nod. “I still can’t believe Donal had it in him.”
“There was goodness, too,” Bettina said. “In the end, that’s what saved us.”
“It just seems like such a senseless waste.”
“Sí.”
“Let me see your hands,” Aunt Nancy said to Bettina.
Ellie went pale at the sight of them.
“Oh, my god,” she said. “Your hands…”
“They will heal.”
“I have a small jar of bunchberry/cattail paste in my pack,” Aunt Nancy said. “Let me get it.”
“Thank you.”
“Can’t you, you know, heal it with magic?” Ellie asked.
“I have been working on it,” Bettina told her, “but such healing never works as well on yourself. Mostly I’m concentrating on dampening the pain and retaining my hands’ mobility.”
Aunt Nancy returned and with a touch as gentle as the brush of a butterfly wing, she applied a thinned mixture of the paste to Bettina’s hands. The bunchberry immediately cooled the burns, penetrating deep under them to relieve the pain. The cattail helped to numb the worst of it.