Wild Beauty

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  She grabbed his shoulder. She dug her fingers in so hard she could feel the heat of his skin through his shirt, and she wrenched him to make him turn around.

  He did turn around, fast and hard.

  He backhanded her, like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to hit her or just flick her away.

  She was close enough, and he’d let his hand fly fast enough that the impact landed hard. Open hand, his knuckles hitting her mouth.

  Her lip split open, and the taste of her blood spread over her tongue.

  Estrella stumbled, getting her balance back. Blood stung her lip.

  “Nobody’s killed anyone except you and your family,” Reid said.

  Estrella’s heartbeat throbbed in her cut lip.

  “You’re the reason Bay’s gone, aren’t you?” Reid said.

  Estrella spit out the blood in her mouth, the salt so strong on her tongue it was almost sweet. It struck the ground, and the shape of it looked like a trail of red starflowers. They shone on the grass.

  She set the side of her thumb against her lip, blotting away the blood.

  This was one thing she could use. They hadn’t lost Bay, not yet. But Estrella could still frighten Reid with the stories and whispers about the Nomeolvides girls, their hearts as wild as they were dangerous.

  “Not just me,” Estrella said. “All of us.”

  She took a step forward, narrowing the gap between her and Reid.

  In that moment, she was not just Estrella.

  She was Calla, blushing too much to speak as she watched Bay’s careful hands shape yew wood with a rasp and hand plane.

  She was Azalea, embroidering Bay’s initials into the hems of her pillowcases.

  She was Gloria, stealing old tintype photos from Briar scrapbooks no one ever looked at, trying to work out which distant relatives Bay looked most like.

  She was Dalia, her heart lit by the understanding that Bay was not just the one they all loved but also herself.

  Estrella took another step, and Reid drew back, preserving the distance.

  “That’s what you think, isn’t it?” Estrella asked, letting the sound of taunting slip into her voice. If she apologized for her own heart then she would make it tame, and small. But like this, it was wild, and limitless.

  She could see him trying to twist his horror into rage, but Estrella could still find it, that fear.

  Estrella was herself, a girl who had loved Bay even while Bay never considered her more than a charming little sister. She was a girl grateful for falling in love like that, because it taught her how. Because when she finally let go of this woman who did not love her back, it was to let her love Dalia. Because falling in love with a girl who feared nothing in this world had left her ready to love a boy whose heart had been broken before she ever touched him.

  She was all of them, screaming for Bay to speed faster down the highway in Marjorie’s wine-red four-door. She was the five of them holding their arms out of the windows, their hands riding the night air. She was all of them hushing one another’s laughs and running through the dark as the engine cooled and creaked.

  She was each of them, born with the possibility of flowers in their hands, but never feeling like living things themselves until they ran across La Pradera with Bay Briar. They were night-blooming girls, the grass damp under their bare feet and the stars above them as thick as spilled sugar.

  “Who knows?” Estrella asked. “Maybe if you’re lucky we’ll all love you next.”

  She shoved him, palms against his shoulders. And with more fear than rage he threw the back of his hand across her face again. He struck her like she was a stinging insect to swat away.

  The impact shook through her cheek and her forehead. The force opened the cut on her lip wider.

  She lifted her chin, showing him the blood on her face, proof that she’d rattled him. Proof that even Briars could not ignore girls with flowers and death in their fingertips.

  “What do you think they’re thinking?” Reid asked. “The moment right before they’re gone.”

  Blood dripped onto her tongue.

  “Do you think they still love you?” Reid asked.

  The dry feeling climbed back to Estrella’s throat. She could not shove Reid’s words away just because Bay was still alive. Fel was gone. The loss of him belonged to Estrella.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it,” Reid said.

  The air carried the sour, bitter smell of her family’s tears, a scent like salt and lemon rind in hot water. The faint stirring of every flower she and her family had ever given to La Pradera rushed back, the sound of their petals rising up like the flutter of a million wings.

  For a hundred years, her family had put their hands in this ground, and it wanted to hold on to them so much it would never let them go.

  Now voices drifted from the sunken garden, so faint Estrella could not make out the words. It was too many voices for her to count, braiding together and then unraveling, weaving into a solid veil of sound and then fraying back into innumerable voices.

  Lost lovers.

  Men killed and then disregarded.

  They were flooding her until there was no room left for her own thoughts. Her tongue was the flame blue of an iris petal. Her skin was the rust silk of dahlias, and her hair and her eyes were handfuls of storm-damp ground. Her heart was a handful of raw buds, red as pomegranate seeds and slicked with rain.

  What happened to the miners? She wanted to ask. But calling them the miners felt like disrespect. Not naming them was a betrayal to their lives and deaths.

  She only knew the name of one.

  “What happened to Fel?” she asked.

  “You know what happened,” Reid said. “You killed him.”

  “No, I didn’t,” she said.

  “Was it fun?” Reid asked. “Making him disappear?”

  “I never wanted that,” she said, her voice splintering.

  “Did you ever think of his family?” Reid asked. “Or did you not even ask if he had one?”

  The ground looked like it was waving under her, billowing like a quilt.

  She wanted to root herself here. She was close enough to reach out for her ocean of blue petals. She wanted to vanish into that sea of color, for it to swallow her, drink her. It was a wish that spun and grew until it had its own gravity, so heavy it dragged her to her hands and knees.

  Reid’s shadow fell over her.

  “You killed him,” he said.

  Estrella kept her head down, so all she could see was the shimmer of blue petals. “I cared about him.”

  Even with nothing in her vision but ground, she wondered if these words were a lie. Maybe her brutal heart’s version of love was hate, and she didn’t even realize.

  Her cousins were life and enchantment. But she was all malice and knives.

  “I loved him.” The cracks in her voice deepened. It was more confession than defense.

  Her heart was poison. It was a close tangle of thorns. Even when it held love, that love came sharp, and she didn’t know how to offer it to anyone except with the edges out.

  The Briars had killed Fel and all those men. And her family had killed men who came too close.

  A wish flickered in her heart to become part of the ground. Fel was gone, and there was nowhere to mourn him. But he had once died in this ground, and now so could she.

  It was the closest she could ever be to finding him again.

  Her fingers sank into the bed of blue petals, and then into the soft ground. Blood fell from her lip, and the red dyed a forget-me-not petal.

  The center of her flooded with every wish for things to be different.

  For the treaties that had drawn new borders not to have been signed, so her family would not have lost their land and found they had nowhere to go but this graveyard. For them to never have been declared las hijas del aire or witches.

  For La Pradera not to hold on to them so tight it drove the will out of them.

  For the
air to spin until it gave Fel back, his body and breath reappearing the way they had disappeared.

  She wanted all this so much that when her hands sank further into the sand and met resistance, she could imagine what they were finding. Maybe they were meeting young, thin roots, or the closed fingers of unbloomed irises. But she could pretend they were not these things.

  She could pretend they were hands.

  THIRTY-TWO

  He let himself fall into that ocean of lost voices. He was himself, and he was all these men.

  They were boys who waited in the trees’ shadows. Men who had kissed Nomeolvides women in the curves of hedges and under the ceiling of leaf-covered arbors.

  And they were men and boys whose hearts were stained with blood and rust.

  They were all woven from secrets they took with them into the ground.

  But Estrella was drawing him back. This girl who had kept the carved wooden horses like they were her pets, and then buried one so deep it had called him to the surface.

  Estrella. This girl who, in her blue dress against the green hills and the brick of the Briars’ house, had looked like a small sky. A girl catching light in the folds of her skirt.

  The girl whose hands had found him in the garden valley that had once been a quarry.

  She had brought him back to life.

  Now her blood, searing through the ground, reached him. Her voice burrowed down to where he drifted in the dark. Her hands found his, their fingers meeting in the sand. His brushed hers, and hers felt like cords of daylight.

  Her heart felt strong and desperate enough to pull him back. Her mourning for everything her family had lost went down as deep as he had fallen.

  The other voices whispered to him to follow her. Theirs was a story that needed to be told, and the land wanted it spoken as much as they did. They were the immigrants, the underaged, the ones left off role sheets. And they had been caught here, in the ages they had been when they died, freed neither by being found and given burials, nor by their families hearing what had become of them, nor by the truth ever being told.

  None of those things had happened, so they had all carried it for more than a hundred years.

  The ground shifted. Not a storm this time. The slow crawl of a wave, like blue petals spreading.

  He did not realize he still had fingers, or a body. But he was rising up from that deep place. He had been drifting down toward his brother and all those other voices the ground had taken. But now he stopped, and gave into the feeling of his body floating toward the surface. He’d been a river stone, and now he was turning to foam on a sea.

  The feeling of his own lungs came sudden and hard. It felt not like coming up from underwater, but like taking back the breath he’d had before. Earth fell from his lips. It drew back from his neck. It streamed away from his body like water. It ran off him as though he was a like magnet, and the dirt was filaments skittering away. Those currents of ground knew they did not belong on him anymore.

  Her hands touched his forehead, and he realized he was skin and muscle again. She was brushing earth off his eyes as he coughed it out of his throat. She was sliding a palm under his neck and saying his name.

  “Breathe,” she said, and her own breath at the end of the word sounded like a whisper. “Breathe,” she said again, and this time he felt the outline of the word on his temple, her mouth on his skin.

  She slid her hand under his back. At her touch, his body sparked to life, first his skin and muscle, then the worn-down places around his heart. His chest trembled with trying to get his breath back.

  The moon needled his eyes. A drop of rain, hot and sudden, struck his cheek, and he blinked.

  Under that sudden light, he understood. He took with him what he’d learned in the dark, both things known and questions to ask. He brought it all to the surface.

  THIRTY-THREE

  The ground shifted and swirled. At first, she thought the ocean of blue petals was turning to water. Then she thought it was answering her wish to become part of it. It would break her into flowers, and make her part of the earth.

  The blue and violet buckled, the flashes of forget-me-not petals and borraja rippling like a pond.

  She thought she was imagining him, a boy from the earth. Petals and leaves and dirt still half covered him when she made out his shape. Black hair. Skin the soft brown of bare tree branches in winter. His eyelashes like dark stars.

  He seemed like a thing she had imagined. She’d spun the black of his hair out of the night sky. She’d made up the brown of his skin from the brown of her own, and her cousins’. He’d been an illusion of La Pradera, a boy crafted out of her understanding that this was a place nightmares bloomed as easily as flowers.

  The ground lied to her, the way the Briars had lied about the ground with the help of her hands and so many others.

  Then petals and dirt blew aside, like the wind was drawing back sheer layers of a skirt. It pulled away from this boy as fast as if it had its own current. With the thinning of the blue and brown, the colors of him were close and true, his hair and skin and the pale violet of his mouth.

  The breath came back into him, each inhale a gasp, each breath out sounding like coughing. She held him, put her mouth against his skin and told him to breathe.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, holding him close enough that she was speaking the words against his skin. “I’m sorry.” Her own guilt, her wish for him to believe her, put cracks in the words. “I didn’t know.”

  He hadn’t opened his eyes. But his fingers caught in her hair, and with his whispered “I know,” she understood that he recognized her by her touch and her voice.

  Even with his skin damp from the ground, flecked with petals she’d made, he still smelled like blue mushrooms and wild grass, like the pond with its scent that made her dream of both stone and light.

  Heat prickled her eyes. The life in him was water and warmth to everything dying in her. The hope in her, a deadheaded rosebush, woke and put out new green. It pushed out buds and shuddered into full color.

  Estrella blinked, and a tear’s heat and salt fell from her eyelashes. It struck the earth, and in its place a starflower broke through. It unfurled five soft-pointed pink petals. Its center held filaments of white pollen as fine as still-flaked snow.

  The single flower spread into a vine, and then branched into a dozen more. Buds and leaves grew so fast the ground looked like it was bursting into blue and pink flames.

  In the middle of that spreading ocean of petals, new color broke the blue and violet. Green rose up through the ground, growing into a tiny sapling. Its thin trunk wore few leaves. But it snaked into boughs and branches, and opened into flashes of color. It grew tall, and took on a willow’s wide spread.

  Tiny flowers fluttered over the branches, like wings landing. But instead of cream or soft pink, they were turquoise and teal. They were gold and green and lilac.

  The colors of beads she had given to the pond, along with her wish that this boy would find everything he had lost.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  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.