Fel opened his eyes, still bracing against the moon and the prickling light of stars. He moved his hands, and the feeling came back to each of his fingers.
The world resolved into forms.
A tree grew from Estrella’s ocean of blue petals. The branches had the shape of cherry and almond trees in flower.
But instead of pink and white, this one had a dozen different colors. Blues and greens, golds and violets. Light purple petals climbed one branch, and blue-green flowers covered another bough. Green ones he thought were leaves cleared into blossoms. Blooms of pale gold petals trailed along the inner branches.
It was the remembered things he had told her, covered in all her wild color.
There was more to him now, more of his blood. He could reach his hand to Estrella’s face, the moon brightening the edges of her hair.
With his thumb, he cleared a wet trail from her cheek. It led his eyes to her lips.
Her lip was bleeding. A gash cut across the pink red of her mouth. Blood was drying into the cracks of her lips.
Not like she’d bitten herself.
Like someone had hit her.
He felt a shadow moving closer.
Fel sat up. His chest tightened at the sudden shift, but the stirring of the ground underneath him kept him moving.
Reid stood near them, looking as startled to see Fel above the ground as he had to see him disappear into it.
Reid. This man whose family had killed and then covered everything over. This man who thought women like Estrella could be lent like candlesticks or cuff links, and struck like they were frozen ground.
Fel could see the tension shocking through Reid’s hands. He looked ready, and afraid. Not of Estrella, with blood drying on her lip. Or Fel, with dirt and petals clinging to his skin, darkening the shirt he’d been wearing when Adán took him into the ground.
Reid was staring at that tree, that beautiful, unknowable tree with all its colors. It was no trick or performance. No pond of blue petals. It was not magic for him to put on display. It was stunning and terrifying as a statue of a saint.
It was damning Reid. Fel could see guilt moving across his face as the tree loomed and cast its shadow.
Reid’s gaze struck them both but settled on Estrella.
“Your whole family,” he said. “Do you know how close you were to getting killed for being witches before you came here?”
Estrella held on to Fel tighter, as though he needed guarding more than she did.
“We should’ve let them,” Reid said.
Estrella gave against the threat, Reid’s unspoken promise that if the town turned on the Nomeolvides women, if they hated and feared them, Reid would let them drive her family from this land, cast them out, murder them.
With herself, Estrella was reckless and unafraid, but she was as careful with her family as if they were glass.
Fel’s body still felt like handfuls of ground. He had to brace against the earth underneath him to get back the feeling that he was on this side of it.
But he would kill this man. Even if he still felt himself crumbling like earth, he would kill him.
Estrella’s family had been his when he had no family. This was his fight, too.
He pulled himself to standing. His steps felt unsteady, things he had to think about. He had to force his body into them, like he’d been startled awake from sleepwalking.
Estrella grabbed his arm, and he couldn’t tell if she was trying to stop him or help him stand.
With each step, he felt more rooted in his own body, and he closed more space between him and Reid. There was current in his hands, half rage, half the untethered feeling of coming back to life.
Fel would kill this man. For his brother. For the other men. For the women who had become his family.
Steps struck the courtyard flagstones.
“Reid.” Bay’s voice rang out through the gardens.
Reid’s stare flew and found her.
Bay stopped, catching her breath. In the distance, Estrella’s cousins crossed La Pradera, the wind streaming their hair and skirts.
Reid studied Bay like he was watching her through a rain-blurred window. There was no flash of satin or fair hair, nothing pale or bright against the dark sky. In the place of blues and yellows there were browns and grays.
But he recognized her, her voice if not her clothes and her hair, cut and dyed. She put a haunted look into him, as though the voices that lived in the ground had gotten their fingers around his throat.
The sight of her deepened his fear. It shocked him into stillness.
“Reid,” Bay said, moving closer. “Did you ever think about why they sent you here?”
The shadow and silver of clouds moved over Reid’s face.
“This is the land of Briar disappointments,” Bay said.
“I know that,” Reid said, his voice unsteady. “Everyone knows that.”
“Did you know we’ve disappeared, too?”
“What?” Reid looked down at his own body as though it might be vanishing.
“A long time ago.” Bay unfolded papers from her back pocket, sheets that looked like copied newsprint. “More than a hundred years ago.”
Fel tensed, waiting for her to tell the rest, not sure he wanted to hear the story of his own death and Adán’s told like it was far history.
“The Briars who lived here went missing and nobody ever found them,” Bay said.
Fel turned to Estrella. What? He’d meant to say it, not mouth it, but no sound came.
Estrella shook her head.
“Nobody knew what happened to them,” Bay said. “People around here thought they’d skipped the country. That’s one of a dozen theories the papers ran. But they just disappeared. I’m talking about their tea and their fountain pens left out on their desks and everything. They just disappeared, Reid.”
“That’s not true,” he said, the sureness folding back into his voice. “You can’t believe every story you hear. None of it’s true. You’re here, aren’t you?”
Bay glanced at Fel and Estrella, as though these were things that should not be said in front of them.
“Look.” Bay handed Reid the papers.
Reid’s eyes moved over the print.
The only sign of him understanding was the pull of muscle between his jaw and his neck.
“It’s not them,” Bay said, looking first to Estrella and then to Reid. “It’s the land.”
“What are you talking about?” Reid asked.
“Something happened here,” Bay said. “And the land’s been taking people ever since. The stories, they all turned it into something about the women here, but it happened before they ever got here. The land took the men who lived here. Our family. Your family.”
Fel watched Estrella, her lips parting as though she was breathing in Bay’s words. He felt it, how neither of them expected Reid to believe Bay. To Reid, the Nomeolvides women were witches, an explanation so simple and clean he felt no need to adorn it.
But Bay, appearing with the wonder and terror of an angel, frightened him into believing.
“You know I’m right,” Bay said. “You can tell me you don’t, but you feel it.” Bay looked toward Estrella. “The same way they feel everything in their family, you feel this. I can see it in you.”
Reid handed the papers back. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I want you to know that our own family…”
Reid cut her off with a raised hand. “They are not your family.”
“Fine,” she said. “Your family. They sent you somewhere where there was a chance you could just vanish. They send their failures here hoping they’ll stay out of the way, but you know what I think? I think they’re hoping we’ll just disappear. We won’t be their problem anymore. Why else would they have started sending everyone they didn’t want here? They knew. They were willing to risk you and Marjorie’s father and everyone else. They’ve been doing it for generations.”
Pain started at the edges of Reid’s face, gathering until it shut his eyes.
Fel hated this man, for hitting Estrella hard enough that her blood found Fel in the ground. For living off money made from the blood of men who had no other choice.
But for this second he saw him enough to recognize the understanding in Reid, his realizing how much his family counted him lost. He could hate him, and still see it.
Bay wouldn’t let Fel kill Reid. Fel knew that, the rage dulling in his hands. But at least he had this, Reid’s fear. If Bay would not let Fel use his hands against Reid, he could still use this, his fear, to keep him away from Estrella and her family.
“They want to get rid of you, Reid,” Bay said. “One way or another.”
Reid opened his eyes. “What happened here?”
Bay gave a short, pained whisper of a laugh. “Your family killed people. A lot of them. They died here. Almost a century and a half ago.”
Fel saw neither shock nor recognition in Reid’s face. Reid didn’t know about the rock fall in the quarry. But he was also so unsurprised by the possibility that the Briars had blood and death on their souls, that Fel wondered how many others like him there were, how many quarries, how many lies spread so far and for so long they became true.
“Stay,” Bay said. “Stay if you’re ready to tell this story with me. If you’re ready to take responsibility for what this family has done.”
Bay’s stare was so sure, so unbroken, that Fel understood the warning in her voice. This was her signal to Reid that if he stayed and lied about this, the land would have its vengeance on him the same as it had those vanished Briars.
For as long as it took for a cloud to pass over the moon, Fel thought he caught some sign of will and certainty on Reid’s face. There was the possibility that he might become different than what his family had made him. And with that possibility came hope drifting off Bay, that this minute would make Reid into someone else. He might become someone who told the truth, who counted it as currency. He might turn into someone who made room for Bay in the world of his family, more brother than enemy.
But then the light came back, and Fel saw nothing but Reid’s wish to brush all this off him. Bay noticed, her eyes shutting as those hopes fell from her hands. Her disappointment was so full and deep he could feel it. It made him want Dalia’s hands on Bay as badly as he wanted Estrella’s on him. Dalia, the girl who could pull Bay out of all these jagged, broken pieces without them cutting her. Estrella, the girl who called Fel back from the places where he got lost.
The Nomeolvides girls saved them as much as they destroyed them.
But to Reid, they were just witches. It was written in the way Estrella had drawn Fel out of the ground, in the tree of so many colors, in the way these women spoke a language that shifted and turned too often for anyone else to learn it.
Reid would run from this place. He would get as far away from all the death here as he could.
“You know now,” Bay said. “So there’s no pretending you don’t.”
Fel turned back to Estrella. But she was gone, and all three of them in the courtyard were left watching the space where she’d been.