NENA
Octubre 1837
IT WAS OFTEN said that a strange kind of magic ran in the waters of Rancho Los Ojuelos, the kind that made the Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca go mad, the kind that made mustangs swift and the land rich. Nena knew, even as a child, that magic was a turn of phrase. A way that adults talked about bounty and blessings: with reverence, and perhaps a bit of fear, for when you had much, you never knew how much of it could be lost.
She and Néstor were thirteen that year. She knew that magic, in as many words, was not real. But as summer’s heat stretched thin and reached into fall, there was something she sensed whenever she set her palms to the soil of the herb garden behind la casa mayor or turned her face to the twilight-bruised sky. A strangeness. A ripple of unease. An understanding, though timid at first, that perhaps there was some truth to the stories of blood-hungry beasts and river ghosts that the abuelas on the rancho spun to keep children close to home after sunset. A sense that there was a reason to watch one’s back when shadows grew long.
Perhaps magic was the wrong word altogether.
For what Nena and Néstor found that night was monstrous.
◆ ◆ ◆
FOR THE SECOND time that week, Nena slipped out from under her blankets, stone floor cool beneath her bare feet. She had waited for hours, sleepless, her mind racing as she counted the heavy breaths of her younger sister and cousins. At last it was time. The moon hung full outside the bedroom’s single window, heavy as a bag of coins. By its light, she snatched an already dirty dress and slipped it over her head. It had a muddied hem; the plans she and Néstor had would make it dirtier still. He would already be waiting for her by the anacahuita trees, a shovel in hand. Ready to dig. Ready to test the last of the fireside stories that they still believed.
Of all of Néstor’s abuela’s stories, the tale of the Spanish count’s buried silver paled in comparison to that of El Cuco, cloaked and carrying a child’s severed head in the crook of his arm. When the children of the rancho settled around Abuela’s feet in a crescent of devout supplicants, they begged for La Llorona’s wails or the long talons of La Lechuza, not the tale of a well-heeled Spaniard perishing of exhaustion in the chaparral. Nena no longer feared boogeymen or ghosts snatching at her plaits when rain lashed the rancho and lightning fractured the broad, black sky. In the last year, Tejas had been ripped out of México, leaving a gaping wound in its wake. She had learned that there were real monsters to be mindful of now.
Which was why the tale of buried silver beckoned her. Its promise was a coin with two gleaming sides. The first: protection for the rancho at a time when its safety hung in the balance.
The second: a life of her choosing.
After the events of the last week, she knew she would not be at ease until she had both. Until she felt certainty about her future as firmly as cold metal in the palm of her hand.
When she pushed the bedroom door, it gave a mournful, arthritic creak. She froze, heart drumming in her ears. If Mamá woke and found her now, she would receive a sharp slap and be sent back to her room; the next morning would open with a lecture on how inappropriate it was for a young woman of her age to be sneaking into the night.
But no one stirred. Not in the girls’ bedroom, nor in any of the other rooms of la casa mayor. Holding her breath, she crept across the great room to the door. Slipped on her boots with practiced silence, then tiptoed onto
the patio.
Night slipped over her warm skin like stepping into cool water, sending a pleasant shudder over her shoulders. October days were hot, but when the sun set, autumn announced itself with a nip in the air, its smell piney and crisp with the promise of change.
Beyond the kitchen vegetable garden grew a copse of anacahuita trees. In the moonlight, their trunks gleamed silver with secrets. Néstor’s slim shadow waited for her there, leaning casually against the trunk of the largest tree. The boy who had kept step with her, as close as her own shadow, since they first met five years ago.
Nena hiked up her skirts and ran toward him.
He straightened at her approach. “There you are.”
His voice was like coming home. It loosened the unease that had curled in her chest all week.
“Sorry I’m late.” The words hitched as she caught her breath.
“I heard about the Anglos,” said Néstor softly.
She searched for his eyes in the dark. Had to tilt her chin up a bit more than usual to do so. It seemed as if every time he came back from three or four days in the chaparral with the other vaqueros, he was half a hand taller. His voice was changing too. Sometimes it was ragged like torn cloth; other times it shifted and creaked like an oak in a playful breeze. But its tone was as it always had been: a question. An invitation. A door she could either open or shut.
That was the way it was with Néstor. If she chose to barrel through the door and pour out her thoughts like a torrent, he would listen. If she kept the door shut, he would ask no further questions.
Three days ago, when Néstor was in the chaparral, bearded strangers had appeared on Rancho Los Ojuelos seeking its patrón. Vaqueros brought them to la casa mayor, the great central house of the rancho, to speak to Nena’s papá, Don Feliciano Serrano Narváez. Nena had peered around the corner that separated la casa mayor’s outdoor kitchen from the patio, where the family dined and Papá received guests. The strangers were lean men, road-hardened and parched as strips of beef left out to dry into acecina. When they removed their hats, they revealed high points of faces reddened by wind
and sun and pale, hungry eyes.
Nena’s mouth went dry when she realized they were Anglos. From the east, they said, their Spanish ripped and creased in all the wrong places. They had moved through Tejas and come farther south, seeking land. Did the patrón know of any for sale? Was he interested in selling any of his cattle?
It was like seeing El Cuco materialize before la casa mayor to ask after something as ordinary as horses for sale, one clawed hand caressing the severed head he always carried. These were the creatures of tall tales and nightmares come to life and walking in broad daylight.
Papá had kept the conversation brief, barely granting the strangers the courtesy of the shade of the patio. No, he said to all their questions. Firmly. Politely. No, and no again.
But as he watched their retreating backs, his black mustache twitched. Nena watched as he shifted his weight and clasped his hands behind his back, fidgeting with the signet ring he wore on his left hand. Apprehension circled over his shoulders like vultures. It spread to Nena. It spread to the rest of the rancho.
And so, the evening after the Anglos had appeared and left, she eavesdropped, ear pressed against her wooden bedroom door, straining to make out the irregular rise and fall of argumentative voices in la casa mayor. The women of the family had retreated from la sala as the men gathered: Papá; Nena’s elder brother, Félix; and Mamá’s own brothers, the three de León uncles who also lived on the rancho. Everyone had heard of increases in cattle theft. Of good men—rancheros, even—vanishing in the night, leaving widows and unguarded land in their wake. Stories slinked like snakes through the ranchos of las Villas del Norte, the five great towns that hugged the lazy bends of Río Bravo, rattling their warnings from house to house. Had not some of Papá’s own vaqueros come to Los Ojuelos after fleeing the bloody seizure of the rancho where they used to live, the Dos Cruces land just south of San Antonio de Béxar?
Everyone knew the appearance of a few Anglos was the harbinger of worse to come.
Worse still, Nena thought, was the manner in which everyone agreed to protect Los Ojuelos.
“It’s time for Félix to marry,” an uncle’s voice cut in. “Marriage is the surest way to an alliance with a strong hacienda.”
Félix did not reply. She yearned to know what he was thinking. She would be horrified, or filled with rage, if Mamá’s brothers talked about her future so callously.
“Exactly!” Another voice rang with agreement. “Family defends family. If I had daughters, I would give them gladly.” That would be Tío Julián, who had no children. “What of Magdalena? Surely she’s old enough now.”
At the sound of her full name, Nena’s heart dropped through her stomach.
When Félix raised his voice and pointed out that it would be six or seven years until it was appropriate for Nena to marry, the men began to argue about which rancho to marry her off to when the time came. Which
had the most sons, or the ones who showed the most promise? Which had the strongest vaqueros, the most cattle, the most land?
Names slipped through the crack of light that lined the underside of the door, twining around Nena’s ankles, ready to drag her away from Los Ojuelos and her family. Away from Néstor. She could not let that happen. She would not.
But if Papá insisted, if Papá shouted the way the tíos were shouting now . . . she would freeze like a rabbit spotted by hunters.
And what would happen then?
If she told Néstor about that night, he would listen. He was the only other speaker of their shared, silent language, the only person on the rancho who listened to more than her voice: he read her shifts in energy, her expression, the way she held her weight. She loved him fiercely for it.
Now, he sensed her unease. He reached into the dark and took her hand. “Was your mamá mad about something?”
His words touched a familiar ache, sore as a day-old bruise.
If Mamá was angry with Nena, it was going to be about Néstor.
She and Néstor had met when they were eight, when Néstor first came to Los Ojuelos with his family. Within days they were a matched set, inseparable as a pair of old boots as they fetched water, fed the chickens, and watched the sheep with the old shepherd Tío Macario in the chaparral. For years, no one noticed or cared—Nena losing herself in the pack of the rancho’s children meant she was out of Mamá’s hair as she cared for the baby, Javiera, and so Nena did as she pleased.
But lately, Néstor had grown taller. He began to work with the other vaqueros, heading into the chaparral for days at a time. As Nena outgrew dresses and inherited some of Mamá’s, the tías began to exchange whispers about her attachment to Néstor. Overnight, their time together was halved by his work, then halved again by Mamá and her obsession with propriety and honor. First, Mamá insisted that Nena was too old to be playing with the peones’ children barefoot in the courtyard; then, when her first blood came last month, Mamá forbade her outright to be seen alone with a young man. Much less the son of a vaquero.
During the day, Nena obeyed. Mamá and Papá’s love was a fragile thing. Lately, she felt that if she moved too quickly, it might snap.
She hated it. Growing older felt like holding water in cupped hands; the harder she
pressed her fingers together to keep life with Néstor the way it used to be in her grasp, the faster it slipped away. So she held Néstor’s hand tightly. With him, there was no Papá or Mamá, no work or tías casting sharp glances at how she behaved. There never had been. Tonight, the moon was high, the night cloudless; they were blissfully alone, their only company a corona of stars that winked like flint.
If they found Spanish silver, perhaps they could keep it that way forever. With that money, Papá could hire double the vaqueros he currently had. Los Ojuelos would be safe. There would be no reason to marry Nena away to a stronger rancho or hacienda, and she could live her life as she pleased. Marry whom she pleased.
But if they failed? Once Papá had decided which path was the best to ensure the safety of the rancho, there was no changing his mind. Félix was already engaged to the daughter of a powerful hacendado. Nena had no desire to think about what lay in her own future, nor did she want to talk with someone like Néstor about marrying a stranger.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Let’s go find some silver.”
In the moonlight, Néstor’s grin was like mother-of-pearl, bright and eager.
Nena knew the story from Abuela, but recently, Néstor had heard another version of the tale. It was one of his first nights in the chaparral, and the vaqueros gathered with a group of itinerant carreteros, merchants who left the distant capital and crisscrossed México with their ox carts to the ranchos north of Río Bravo. They came bearing cotton and silver and china, yes, but when vaqueros encountered them on their curving paths north to las Villas del Norte, stories were the currency of the chaparral.
Néstor had listened in reverent silence to the tales of a Spanish count who fled north with his wealth during the war against the crown, thinking he could make a new life for himself in El Norte. But he was not strong, not like the carreteros and vaqueros and the Indios who made the broad, arid wilds of the north their home. The burden of his silver was too great; unless he lightened his load, he knew he would stumble and become food for coyotes and vultures. He chose a secret place to bury his treasure, blessed it, and carried on. Legend said he died in the chaparral anyway.
That was where Abuela’s version of the story ended. But the carreteros spun the story further: if you saw a winking orb of light deep in the chaparral at night, they said, it hovered over the place where the Spaniard buried
his treasure.
When the vaqueros returned to the rancho, Néstor came rushing to meet Nena in the anacahuita grove before evening vespers, his eyes alight with a look she knew well: he had a secret, and he was dying to share it with her.
“There are lights by the springs at night,” Néstor whispered. “I’ve seen them. Casimiro didn’t believe me, but I swear I saw them before dawn.”
“Mamá once said that my abuelo told stories of Spaniards passing through Los Ojuelos, years ago,” Nena had said. “Maybe it was them.”
So tonight, they passed the smaller, wooden jacal houses of the vaqueros and other workers and slipped through the gate of the high fence around the central grounds of the rancho. Néstor carried a shovel in one hand; Nena had left a second for herself near the springs during the siesta, when no one would notice.
“I wonder if those Anglos were here because they were looking for it,” Nena mused.
“They’d better not be,” Néstor said, voice dark.
Anglos were why Néstor, his uncle Bernabé, his cousin Casimiro, and his abuela had come to Los Ojuelos five years ago: they shot the ranchero for whom Néstor’s papá worked to steal the land and the cattle. Over the course of long afternoons, while watching the sheep with Tío Macario, Néstor had told her what it was like to see his home in flames. It was as if the whole world—everything he had ever thought of as safe and permanent—were turning to ashes. How he saw his own father’s body bleeding in the corral, shot by Anglos.
How in the midst of the chaos, Bernabé packed what few things he could carry, took Abuela and the boys, and fled. How every day since then, he had felt like a burden to his uncle. An outsider in his own family. This was why he wanted his own rancho, Nena knew: to belong. To never be powerless again.
“Did they say where they were going after your papá told them no?” Néstor asked. “They didn’t mention the porción by the river, did they?”
“No,” Nena said. When the Anglos left, she fixated on Papá, trying to gauge how severe the threat they posed was based on his reaction. If the Anglos spoke among themselves as they retreated, she did not hear them. She wouldn’t have been able to understand them anyway. But why was Néstor asking after the unoccupied bit of land south of Los Ojuelos, farther along the river? “Why?”
They walked in silence for a few steps. “Because that’s the land I want to buy,” he said at last.
He had often mentioned wanting to become a ranchero, to build his own casa de sillar, but for some reason, Nena had never connected that with him no longer living on Los Ojuelos. Now that he said it aloud, it was painfully obvious. Was he planning to leave all this time?
“You’d leave me?” She felt the panicked pitch of her voice before she heard it.
“I won’t. Never.” He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. “I’ll still live on Los Ojuelos while I’m building the house. It’ll take time, lots of time,” he
said. “Then when it’s finished, you can visit every day. Maybe . . .” he added, then his words quickened, as if pausing meant what he intended to say would be swallowed by the night. “Maybe, if you wanted, you could even live there too. With me. We could get married. Or something like that.”
Hand in hand with Néstor, she felt as if each step they took led them closer to a future that she wanted, one she caught in glimpses of color and smell like a half-remembered dream: cutting rosemary and lavender in her own garden like Néstor’s abuela. Holding hands with Néstor unabashedly, with no Mamá watching her every move, her disciplining hand waiting to bend Nena to the strict ways of honorable womanhood. Life would be as simple as it was when they watched the sheep together with Tío Macario, dozing in the heat of the siesta. Life would be perfect.
Knowing that he wanted the same thing she did filled her chest with a pleasant, tingling warmth. It spread over her cheeks too, drawing gently at the corners of her mouth.
“Or something like that,” she said, squeezing his hand back.
The slope of the path curved downward now as they followed the well-worn trail to the springs. It was the same trail Nena walked every morning with her cousins to collect water and bring it to la casa mayor. Habit guided her around every rock and root.
But something felt off.
The happy warmth in her chest faded as she scoured the rocky path before them, willing her eyes to peel away shadows. As they grew closer to the springs, the distant cheeps of bats and hooting of a screech owl faded away. It was as if even the crickets fell silent in anticipation, or fear; as if the breeze caught its voice in its throat, apprehensive of the way the night thickened.
One last turn of the path, and they reached the twin springs, the eyes that gave Los Ojuelos its name. Moonlight filtered through the laurel trees that curved over the water; doused by its silvery touch, the trees’ roots plunged into the rippling water. They looked like curving, skeletal fingers gripping the edges of the pool and the stream that led south.
Her heart jumped as Néstor stopped them short. The whites of his eyes glinted with surprise as he gestured sharply with his chin before them. Look.
A wink of light reflected off the surface of the springs. Its color was not that of moonlight. It was like an orange from Reynosa—no, it was like a grapefruit, perfectly round as a full moon, heavy with a strange, warm light.
Néstor stepped forward.
Nena hesitated.
She had believed Néstor when he told her the carreteros’ version of the legend, the lights in the night that marked the place where treasure had been buried. But she had not anticipated feeling so uneasy when they found it. The world felt twisted in the way of dreaming; needles skittered up her arms and down the back of her neck.
She wanted to tell him to stop. The air hummed with the prickling tension of a gathering storm, and like facing down a storm, she felt a powerful, overwhelming need to find shelter. To hide.
But from what? Nena knew this land like she knew every inch of the square rooms of la casa mayor or the lines of her siblings’ faces. There shouldn’t have been any reason to feel this uneasy, but she did. She felt as if the darkness were watching them, as if it had a mind and a will, as if it wanted them to draw closer.
She should have told him that she was frightened—silver or no, he would have stopped then. Or would he?
Néstor released her hand and walked forward, his jaw set. If he felt the same sudden unease she did, he gave no hint of it. He gripped the shovel with determined intention.
“I think . . .” I think we should go back was what rose to her lips, but at that moment, her words were cut off by Néstor’s shovel striking the gravelly earth with a metallic sound.
The orange light vanished.
Nena let out a cry of surprise as darkness bloomed around them. Was it a trick of the night, or were the shadows lengthening?
No, it was a figure. It was a creature.
It darted forward, fast as a cougar, cutting between Néstor’s turned back and Nena. Fear flushed her limbs as she stumbled backward, as the creature reared up on hind legs. It towered over her, as tall as Papá, perhaps taller, with limbs as long as a spider’s.
She had to get away, but her limbs moved too slowly. She turned; her boot caught on a root, sending her sprawling. Her breath shattered out of her. She gasped, coughing, curling into a tight ball on the ground. Black spots pocked her vision, growing and darkening.
“Néstor!” she cried, grasping and failing to push herself up. He had to get to safety. She had to run. She could still get away, if she could only force herself upright.
A crunch of gravel by her right ear, then her left, as the creature’s feet—or were those hands?—struck the ground on either side of her head. Its hot breath washed over her face as its head swung low, thick with the odor of carrion.
A flash of teeth in the darkness.
Fear was sour in her sweat, in her breath, in the pale, wordless ringing in her ears as teeth as sharp as knives sank into her neck.
NÉSTOR
AT THE SOUND of Nena’s sharp intake of breath, Néstor straightened. She only ever made that sound when she was hurt—was she all right? Was something wrong?
When he turned to ask her what was the matter, a dark form bolted forward from the thick brush alongside the stream.
Toward Nena.
He could not see if it had four legs, or two; now it lunged high, now it dived low on all fours. All he knew was that it was a threat to Nena, that it was racing toward her, and that he had to get between her and it. He wrenched his shovel out of the ground and adjusted his grip on it, so that he held it like a machete, and when he was about to run forward, he heard his name.
“Néstor!” Nena’s cry was weak and breathless; it was followed by the sound of a body striking the earth. The dark form was upon her, holding her to the ground.
A wet sound, like the butchering of a hog, sent fear coursing through Néstor’s gut.
Nena was his home. The one thing on earth more precious to him than his own life. Whatever that creature was, it did not matter—the only thing that mattered was getting it away from her.
He ran forward, shovel held aloft. When he was upon the dark form, he raised the shovel higher and threw his weight into bringing the shovel down.
The creature whirled on him.
This was not a trick of the darkness. This was a bent-legged beast the likes of which he had never seen before: its humanlike head was a mouth full of teeth; its face was wrinkled and hairless and mottled gray, gray like the rest of its hide. There were two slits where a nose might be. He couldn’t see its eyes in the dark, but there was no doubt in his mind that it was looking at him as an aggressive hiss came from its lipless maw of teeth.
The hiss nearly froze him. It was sharper than a rattler’s, as angry as a cougar’s. A feral part of him, deep and black and curled at the back of his mind, knew that this was a predator, and he was prey.
Nena was its prey.
Nena was down and trapped beneath it. Every part of his being wanted to run, but he would not, not without her.
He raised the shovel again.
His world narrowed to a single purpose: get to Nena. Get to Nena and get away.
But first he had to draw the beast away from her. He could drive it back, or tempt and taunt it and somehow get between its fangs and Nena.
Through the dark, if he squinted, he could see Nena’s form, prone on the ground, the beast’s forelegs pinning her arms down.
If he did not act now, there might not be any Nena left to save.
He rushed forward, shovel held high, and brought it down against the back of the beast as hard as he could.
“Get back!” he roared, but his voice cracked with fear. It was thin—too thin—against the night. ...
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