You can hear a miracle a long way after dark, even when you are dying.
Daniel Lupe Soria curled in the blackness and listened to the slow but urgent movement of a far-off miracle slowly drawing closer. It was miles off, days off, maybe, but it was so quiet out here that there was nothing to interfere with his listening. He was so thoroughly a Saint that all of his body still responded to the call. His lips were already forming a prayer for whoever this pilgrim might be. He was halfway through a prayer to make himself more pure of mind and body before he remembered that he would not be performing this miracle. Daniel would not be anywhere near Bicho Raro when this pilgrim arrived. He didn’t know what the pilgrim would find when she or he reached Bicho Raro. He didn’t know if Beatriz would perform the miracle despite her misgivings, or if Michael might return to the position of Saint after nearly a decade away from it.
He didn’t even know if it was still night.
His eyes were closed, but it didn’t matter. It would look the same if he opened them.
Everything was darkness.
It had been nothing but darkness for many hours. After he had left the message for Marisita, he had begun to put distance between himself and the words, in case she or his cousins were tempted to find him. All the while, his vision had been narrowing, those black curtains closing on either side. He could not help blinking again and again, as if he would clear his eyes. But the darkness came on relentlessly. The creature that he had sensed before was still following him, too, although Daniel had not caught a glimpse of it. Now he could not shake the idea that the creature itself was taking his vision.
A few hours after Daniel left the message behind, his fortune had run out. By that time, his vision was gray and gritty, and so was his mouth. His limbs were heavy. When he found a barbed wire fence blocking his forward progress, he wasted uncountable minutes walking alongside it, hoping for a gate to pass through. But this was wild country and there was no need of gates, so the only way was through. This would not have been such an ordeal if he had been able to see, but with only starved light coming from the fast-setting sun and with only starved light coming to him through his eyes, it felt to him as if every inch of the wire was thorned. The spacing between the strands refused to make sense. His pack with its water and food in it snagged on one of the thorns as he tried to tug through, and when he retreated to ease the tension on it, the bag fell from his shoulders. It seemed impossible for it to have gone far, but his hands could not find it in the murk. His blind spider eyes brushed up against only grass, and more wire, and posts, and then again grass, and more wire, and posts. Knowing that he could be within inches of it without finding it made his search even more agonizing than it might have been.
It was gone.
Daniel did not have enough sight left to find a new source of water, so he instead felt his way to a large bush. He moved beneath it as slowly as he could to be sure he was not displacing an unseen snake, and then he curled there. It was not much, but it would be some shelter from the sun when it came out next. It would at least keep him from dehydrating as quickly, and after he died, it would take longer for the birds and foxes to find him.
Now that he was no longer trying to move, he had enough energy left to be surprised that this was how the darkness would kill him. It seemed mundane and inappropriate for a Saint to die from lack of water rather than from an epic battle for his soul. Daniel had expected that the Soria darkness would be virulent and hellish, not ordinary and wasting. As he lay in the dry scrub, he began to doubt that he had been a good Saint after all. Perhaps, he thought, he had been doing a disservice to the pilgrims. Perhaps another Soria could have freed them from their darkness faster or better. Perhaps he had been just a man playing at God.
“Forgive me,” he prayed, and his heart felt a little lighter.
As the stars had come out that night, he had turned on the radio, waiting—hoping—for Marisita’s voice to come out.
“Forgive yourself,” he told the air.
But Marisita had not forgiven herself and so she had not come onto the radio to tell her story. He’d had to settle for Diablo Diablo, which was still a comfort. He laughed and winced as Joaquin read one of Daniel’s old journal entries about his time as a hell-raiser, and he sang and sighed as Joaquin played some of his favorite songs. Around the time that Jennie was realizing she could speak using lyrics, Daniel had cast his eyes up to the sky and realized the stars had vanished for him.
The radio fell into dull static as Joaquin and Beatriz stopped transmitting.
The creature clucked. Daniel was now entirely in darkness. He curled more tightly around himself and hooked his finger into the divot in his skin where the hailstone had marked him a sinner.
When things are dark, we cannot stop our minds from running wild, and so it was with Daniel. He could not prevent his thoughts from galloping to a future where Joaquin was the one to find his body. And then his mind advanced even further to when Antonia and Francisco and Rosa and Michael would be forced to see another Soria who had fallen prey to his own darkness. Daniel was no fool: He knew he was loved, and he knew how love can become a blunt and relentless weapon at death. They didn’t deserve this pain a generation later. And Marisita! Hadn’t she suffered enough? She was already doubled up with guilt, and she would easily take the blame for his death, even though it was all on Daniel.
And of course Beatriz. She would be made the Saint; he knew it was true—Michael would never be persuaded to take on that role again. She would do it, and she would not complain, but it would be a prison for her.
The idea of his family’s suffering tormented him, drowning out the dryness in his mouth and the blackness in front of his eyes. Instead of praying for himself, his cracked lips formed words for them instead. “Mother—”
But it was not a mother who answered.
Pebbles skittered against pebbles, and the smell of crushed sage came to Daniel. Something large was moving toward him. He heard the cluck of that creature again, and then a flap—he guessed correctly that whatever it was had wings. It was flapping farther from him, driven away by whatever approached. But not too far away.
He heard breathing. Creaking.
Daniel sat up then, but he was too dizzy to defend himself, even if he had been able to see. Something clasped his throat. Rough hair strayed across his cheek. Breath panted across his face. Daniel imagined a horse-haired monster, a devil’s plaything finally come to finish him.
Another hand clasped over his jaw. Daniel gasped.
Water poured over his lips and into his ears. He was so shocked that he coughed on it at first. It trickled over his cracked lips and down his throat and onto his chest and it felt so good to be wet after being so dry that he could not believe he was not dreaming it, except no dream can feel as good as a drink of water when you are dying of thirst.
His relief melted, though, as he revived enough to worry that he had been found by a Soria.
“Who are you?” he asked.
Damp fingers pressed his useless eyes and smeared water and grease on his chapped lips and poured more water into his mouth. Three different voices muttered in three different languages. He could have never guessed who had come in answer to his prayer, and he may not have been able to guess it even if he had been able to see, because it was a form of miracle of the kind that even a Soria did not normally experience. The spirits of the wild men of Colorado—Felipe Soria, who had killed the sheriff for his femurs; Beatriz’s financier, who had hung himself with his own beard; and the German, who was a fox as of the time of his death—had come to him.
Who knew why they came to him then and not before or after. Perhaps they were atoning for the sins of their lives. Perhaps Daniel’s prayer was fervent enough to call them from wherever spirits lingered. Perhaps they were just passing through on their way to another traveler in distress and stopped to aid Daniel along the way. For whatever reason, they let him drink until he was full.
The financier found Daniel’s canteen and the German filled it and Felipe Soria put it in blind Daniel’s hand.
“Zwei Tage Wasser,” the German said.
“Two days of water,” translated the financier, who had once spent a year in Frankfurt chasing success.
Felipe Soria leaned close.
“Fight, my cousin,” he whispered in Daniel’s ear. “Quien quiere celeste, que le cueste.” No one had to translate this for Daniel: He who wants heaven must pay. He pressed his thumb into Daniel’s other shoulder, and Daniel cried out. When Felipe removed his hand, he had left a divot that matched the one the hailstorm had left him with.
Then they were gone, and Daniel was left alone, in the dark, but alive, for now.