“What will happen to the house now?” she said instead.
El lobo shrugged. “Nuala will remain in it, of that we can be sure. A spirit such as she is difficult to exorcise. It won’t matter who inherits the property now that the woman you called the Recluse is dead.”
“The Recluse,” Bettina repeated. “We left her by the pool.”
“Yes…” el lobo said, drawing the word out.
“We can’t just leave her there. She needs to be buried.”
“If we’re lucky,” her wolf muttered, “the carrion birds will have done our work for us.”
But he got a shovel from one of the sheds behind the house and led her back into la epoca del mito all the same.
Nothing had changed by the pool where an bradán slept. The hazel trees still leaned over the water. The low stone wall, haphazardly built of fieldstone and found rocks, still held its clutter of offerings. Antlers, posies of flowers, beaded bracelets and necklaces. The little bone and wood carvings that reminded her of her milagros. It was peaceful, a place that bespoke quiet wisdom and eased the spirit.
Or at least it would without the addition of the corpse.
Bettina sat by the pool, frustrated that she couldn’t help her wolf with the task of burying the Recluse. He dug only a shallow grave some distance away and carried the body over to it, quickly filling in the grave once more. When he was done, all that remained was a long mound of dirt that made Bettina unhappy to look upon. She was unhappy the woman was dead, unhappy with all the Recluse had done, the lives she had ruined. And for what? To end up dead and buried unceremoniously, all her dreams turned to smoke and ash.
They walked back to the pool and sat on a clear space on the low stone wall. She gave him a small smile, then looked back into the pool, her gaze drawn to the salmon floating there, sleeping. It was all she could do to not reach in and stroke the shimmering scales. She couldn’t have said why she felt the urge to touch it.
“It’s still asleep,” she said.
“What were you expecting?”
“Remember the first night we met?” she said. “You told me that if it woke, I would be changed forever.”
“I remember.”
“So that’s why I thought it would be awake,” Bettina told him.
Her wolf smiled. “Are you so different now?”
Bettina nodded.
Her wolf rolled a cigarette and offered it to her. When she shook her head, he lit it and leaned back, blowing a stream of smoke up into the boughs of the hazels. When he was finished, he ground the butt out in the dirt and put it in his pocket. Bettina asked him to bring over her backpack, to take out the small pouch in which she kept her milagros and asked him to look through them. He spread them on his hand, moving them about with a finger.
“That one,” she said, pointing to a heart. “El corazón. There should be more than one.”
“I can only find two.”
“We only need two.”
She had him put the rest away, then take out a spool wound round with a thin leather thong. Under her direction, he cut two lengths and threaded a heart-shaped milagro onto each one. When he was done she had him tie one around her neck. The milagro threaded onto it rested in the hollow of her throat. He held the other in his hand and looked at her.
“Do you want me to wear this?” he asked.
She studied him, trying to read what he was thinking, what he was feeling in that wolf’s heart of his.
“Only if you want to,” she said. “Consider it a promise. If you can wait for me, if you have the patience…”
“So you will return.”
“We will be together,” she promised him. “It’s just… I need to understand these wings that flutter in my chest. I need to find Papa, to speak to him of our blood… of hawks. And then los cadejos…”
Her wolf nodded. “You are indebted to them now. I won’t say that was ill-done, but…”
“You will think it.”
He shrugged.
“So you will go now,” he said.
“Soon. But first, I...”
Shyness overcame her courage for a moment. He gave her a quizzical look.
“That blanket you packed in my suitcase,” she said. “Do you think you could take it out and lay it here on the grass? My… my hands are still tender, but perhaps you will let me hold you in other ways…”
A great stillness fell between them. Then her wolf smiled and lifted the thong to his neck, tying it in place so that his milagro hung just in the hollow of his own throat. He shook out the blanket and stood there on it, waiting until she rose from the stones by the pool to join him.
“Mi lobo,” she murmured as he lowered her to the blanket.
Then his lips were on hers and there was no more need for words.
8. Los cadejos
Endings are beginnings in disguise.
1
The ice storm lasted until the end of the week, driving the city completely to its knees. By the middle of the following week, basic services had been restored throughout most of the city, but there were still hundreds of homes in outlying regions without power and the cleanup of downed branches and utility poles, while progressing, seemed to operate at a snail’s pace. There was simply so much damage and the onslaught of a new cold front didn’t make anyone’s job easier. The temperature dropped steadily through the weekend and by Monday they were gripped in a deep freeze as vicious as the one that had plagued the city in December.
Ellie immersed herself in the Angel Outreach program as soon as the Creek sisters let her off at her apartment. She went upstairs only long enough to have a shower and change before heading over to Angel’s Grasso Street office to see if she could be of any use. She found the place in chaos and was soon working long days and nights, catching up on sleep when she could, which, as often as not, was on a cot in the back of the office.
The deep cold made her sojourn in some otherworldly desert all the easier to put on a backburner. The truth was she needed something like this—the cold and the hard work—to ground her after all she’d been through. She didn’t want time to think. Not about Donal or monsters, mysterious otherworldly deserts, or this magic she was supposed to have inside her that had gotten her mixed up in all that craziness in the first place. Thinking could come later. Right now she only wanted to be busy, to fill every waking moment with work so that when she did catch some sleep, it was deep and dreamless.
With Tommy recuperating up on the rez and so much work for the volunteers to do, she usually found herself taking the van out on her own. Angel didn’t like it; she always wanted her people paired and she especially didn’t want women out alone in the vans, but everyone was overworked and there was simply too much that needed to get done for them to be able to follow protocol.
For her part, Ellie wasn’t nervous being out on her own, but she couldn’t explain why to Angel without sounding like an idiot. “You see,” she would have had to say, “after facing down some huge tree monster in Nevernever-land, it’s kind of hard to get worked up about anything the streets could throw at me right now.”