“But you have questions,” el lobo said, smiling.
He began to walk across the lawn to where the woods began. Bettina couldn’t help but return the smile. She fell in step beside him, neither of them touched by the sleet, their footing steady in that in-between place.
“Claro,” she said when they reached the first trees. Of course. There were always questions.
El lobo nodded. “You asked what was wanted from you. They,” he nodded to where the other wolves had been, “want nothing. Their concern is with the sculptor.”
“They,” Bettina thought. He says “they.” Why not “we?”
“Do you mean Ellie?” she asked.
Again he nodded. “If that is her name.”
“But you’ve been out here long before she arrived.”
“There is another in that house with whom they have unfinished business.”
Once more it was “they.” But he didn’t have to identify Nuala by name for Bettina to know who he meant.
“What business?” she asked.
He shrugged. “That is between them. My interest is with you.”
Bettina schooled her features to show nothing of how he’d made her blood quicken. She considered all of Nuala’s warnings. Was this the moment when he would try to drag her off into the woods? She would have a surprise for him, if he tried. She was stronger than she looked, and not afraid to use that strength. But perhaps he’d come with gentler courting in mind.
“Do you have a name?” she asked, pretending a calm she didn’t feel.
“You may call me Scathmadra.”
Not, “My name is Scathmadra.” Only that she could call him by it, this apodo of his, and he would answer, but it would have no hold over him as would his true name. And what sort of a nickname was Scathmadra? A felsos name. A Gentry’s name.
“Bueno,” Bettina said. “And what is it you want from me?”
“Your help.”
Bettina studied him for a moment, surprised. Was this who had called her up out of the desert, this wolf of a spirit who wouldn’t even share with her his true name?
“And yet you are the enemy,” she said.
His eyebrows rose in a question.
“I have been warned against you.”
“Who … ?” he began, then nodded. “Of course. The housekeeper. What did she say about us?”
Now he included himself with the others, Bettina noted.
“Only that you mean me no good. ¿Y bien?”
“I cannot speak for the others,” he told her, “but for myself… you could be putting yourself in danger if you agree to help me.”
“Danger from whom?”
“The others.”
Bettina smiled humorlessly. “And yet you are one of them.”
“No,” he corrected. “I am part of them, but no more one of them than you are one of your father’s peyoteros.”
“What do you know of my father?”
“That we share a kinship, no matter how distant.”
He spoke the truth. Bettina couldn’t explain it any more than she could this unfamiliar attraction she felt towards him. It wasn’t that he was so handsome. She had met handsome men before.
“No one in my family has ever been to Ireland,” she said.
“Are you sure?”
She had to shake her head.
“I’ve never been there either,” he said.
“But…”
“And neither have the wolves. They were born and bred here, but they are no more native to the land than are those who sired them. And if anything, their hunger for the land is stronger than that of their parents. All they’ve ever had to claim for their own are the cities—and those they have to share with mankind. Outside of the cities, others hold sway. Your people.”
“My…?”
Bettina didn’t try to hide her confusion.
“Peyoteros, like your uncles.”
He meant shaman, she realized, rather than the peyote men in particular.
“And other, older spirits,” he went on. “Like your father.”
“My father was a man.”
“Was he?”
Bettina didn’t have to close her eyes to picture the hawks, soaring above the desert.
“Not all of your uncles needed a ceremony to change their shape,” el lobo went on. “And your father never did.”
Bettina had always suspected as much. It explained the claim the desert had on him. Why her mama was so patient with his absences. You didn’t tame a wild creature; you only shared his company.
“How do you know him?” she asked.
“I didn’t know him. I only know of him. I…”
He hesitated.
“Bueno,” Bettina told him. “If you want my help, then you must be honest with me.”
He waited a heartbeat longer, then nodded in agreement.
“Few in this present day and age ask for truth as payment,” he said.
“I didn’t say it was payment.”
He smiled, rakish again for a brief moment. “No, but it will be. You will see.”
“¿Y bien? I see only a wolf in man’s skin who loves the sound of his own voice too much—especially when he talks in riddles. It may amuse you, but it annoys me.”
“I apologize.”
Bettina refused to let him win her over so easily.
“Tell me this truth of yours.”
“Did your father or grandmother—”
How do you know my abuela as well? she wanted to ask, but she made herself listen to him, to hold her questions and let him finish.
“—ever speak to you of shadow people?”
Bettina regarded him for a long moment, remembering a conversation she’d had with Abuela on one of their desert rambles. “You must be careful,” she’d said, “of all the parts of yourself that you discard. It might make you feel good and strong, denying hatred and anger and whatever other base emotions you manage to set aside, but remember this: they can take on a life of their own. And the stronger, the more potent your brujería, the stronger this shadow self will be. Better to hold these things inside, to accept that you can feel such things the same as any other does, rather than deny them. Hold them fast, bind them in some hidden place inside you where they can harm no one but you can still guard them. Freed, there is the chance that they will become an enemy, one strong enough that few can easily dispel.”
“She called them sombritas” she said. “Las pequeñas sombras—little shadows.”
El lobo nodded. “As good a name for them as any.” He fell silent, gaze turned inward to some distant memory, Bettina thought, before blinking back to the present. “I was a sombrita” he told her. “I was all the discarded pieces of the one who leads these displaced Gentry, a tattered and fraying bundle of hope and kindness and whatever else he wouldn’t keep in that black heart of his.”
“But sombritas have no real substance,” Bettina said, interrupting despite herself. “They are little more than uncertain ghosts or … or …”
“An aisling,” he said, his voice gone soft. “A dream.”
“I suppose…”
“And they can take on substance,” he went on. “Surely your grandmother told you that as well?”
Bettina nodded. “She said they could be dangerous.”
El lobo gave her a feral grin. “She spoke truly. I am dangerous.”
Bettina swallowed thickly, but managed to stay her ground.
“So you are his shadow?” she asked. “The one who leads the pack.”
“Indeed.”
“What is his name?”
“We don’t have names,” el lobo told her, “except for those you give us. We have no need for names amongst ourselves, no more than a true wolf has need for a name. We know who we are.”
So he hadn’t been keeping his name from her, she thought. She refused to consider why this should please her.
“¿Y bien?” she said. “How does this explain your kinship—” To me, she almost s
aid. “—to my father?”
“While what you call sombritas have no substance of their own, they can acquire substance.”
“I know this.”
El lobo nodded.
Bettina felt uneasy now. What he said was true, but Abuela had told her that the way the shadow people gained substance was by acquiring the bodies of the recently dead.
She frowned at him. “What is it that you’re saying?”
“I harmed no one,” he assured her. “But I found one dying, a spirit of this land. Before he passed on, I asked him for his body and he gave it to me.”
“His body … ?”
“The shell he would leave behind. I made this of it.” El lobo touched his chest. “This shape I wear.”
“From this you claim kinship?” she said. What he suggested seemed preposterous.
He nodded. “We are blood kin through this body. Distant, it is true, but still kin. And an felsos can claim kinship to my spirit. So I have a foot in each of their worlds, the same way we stand in between time and timelessness in this place.” He hesitated a moment, then added, “I spoke the truth when I said that helping me could be dangerous for you. I have no idea how much control the pack leader has over me. It is possible he can influence me, make me do things I would not do of my own free will.”
Bettina shook her head. “¿Cómo? Why would I help you in the first place?”
“Because the Gentry mean to kill the native spirits of this place and if you won’t accept kinship to me, you can’t deny it to them. Would you have your kin die, when you might have been able to prevent their deaths?”
But Bettina was still shaking her head. Abuela had warned her more than once, don’t get involved in the affairs of the spiritworld. Only trouble and sorrow came when one chose sides in any struggle involving the inhabitants of la época del mito. One had only to see how it had turned out for her abuela to know the truth of that. Except, how could she not choose sides? And even if she did nothing … wasn’t the simple act of standing aside and refusing to be involved no different from choosing a side?
“No lo sé,” she said.
And she didn’t know. It was all so confusing. She knew too little, but she knew too much as well. And then there was the messenger to consider, this handsome lobo with his sweet tongue and impossible origin. That a sombrita could acquire its own body, its own independent life, in such a manner, was true. But this kinship he spoke of? She wished Papa or her grandmother were here to advise her, but they had both disappeared into the desert many years ago, the one on a hawk’s wings, the other by walking into a thunderstorm.
“It is difficult to kill a spirit,” she said finally.
“Tell that to the one who owned this body before me.”
“The Gentry killed him?”
El lobo shook his head. “The changing world killed him. He didn’t retreat quickly enough and died when the concrete was poured, when he could no longer breathe clean air and his waterways were poisoned.”
“Yet his body serves you well enough.”
“Aw felsos aren’t troubled by a proximity to man and his cities and I have that of the Gentry in me.”
Bettina nodded. She had heard of such spirits. They grew up from the underbelly of a city where mean-spiritedness was the fashion, unkindness the rule. Cities weren’t evil, by and of themselves, but there was something about their darkest corners, their most hidden byways, that nourished such bitter fruit. Like called to like, which explained ethnic neighborhoods as much as it did creatures such as these wolfish Gentry.
“What was their plan?” she asked her companion.
“I don’t know the details, but it has something to do with an artifact.”
An immense stillness settled inside Bettina. Claro. That explained what she had felt when Ellie brought out that ancient wooden mask in the studio earlier today. She hadn’t sensed evil about it so much as power, an enormous potential. And shadows clung to that power, a pattern of darkness discoloring the wood, like a sudden foul odor on a clean clear spring morning in the desert when you stumbled upon some dead rotting thing lying amidst the wildflowers. A poisoned coyote. A discarded tangle of rattlesnakes, killed for their rattles.
What she’d sensed had been the touch of the Gentry, unrecognized until this moment.
“You know something,” el lobo said. “I can see it on your face.”
She knew next to nothing, but more than he, apparently. The Gentry meant to use Ellie and the mask. They were both potent, but unfocused. Brought together as they had been, what might be created?
“I don’t know enough,” she told him.
“But…”
Shaking his head, he let his voice trail off. Neither spoke for a long moment. Bettina watched the freezing rain as it continued to fall, coating the trees and lawn around Kellygnow with thickening layers of ice.
“Will you help them?” el lobo asked finally. “If not for my sake, then at least for theirs? Will you help your kin?”
“I must think on this,” she said.
He nodded. “I see.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t.”
“And didn’t say you would.”
Bettina sighed. “Consider what you’ve been telling me—how it must sound.”
“Are you truly so distrustful of dogs?” he asked.
Dogs, wolves, coyotes …
“Why shouldn’t I be?” she responded.
He shrugged. “Because I can hear them singing in you.”
Before she could reply, he stepped away, deeper into la época del mito and she was alone in the place between the worlds, still untouched by the freezing rain that fell so constant around her. Listening to the tree boughs crack and tumble down in the woods around her, she was no longer so enchanted by the weather. El lobo had helped bring about her change of mood, with his dire warnings and parting words.
That was three times in one day, she thought. The dream. The figurines that Adelita had sent. And now this. Los cadejos. Lost for so many years.
“I don’t hear them singing,” she said softly, but no one was there to hear. “I don’t hear them at all anymore.”
Not since Abuela went away.
She would have had a hard time returning to the house, but she stayed in that half-world, the place between, until she was by the kitchen door again. There she stepped fully out of la época del mito and immediately the slick ice underfoot had her grabbing for the doorknob before her legs went out from under her and she took a spill. She managed to get back inside without mishap, removing her boots, hanging her coat on a peg by the door. Her hair was still wet from when she’d first gone out and she made an attempt to dry it with a dish towel before going to the bathroom to find one more substantial.
Returning to her room, her gaze came to rest on the little figurines that Adelita had sent her. She fingered the rosary still in the pocket of her vest and remembered that she’d wanted to call Mama this evening. It was too late now. She would do it in the morning. For now she had questions that only one person in Kellygnow might be able to answer.
She walked down a long hall until she reached the door of Nuala’s room. Since there was still light coming out from under the door, she went ahead and knocked on its wooden panels. If Nuala was surprised to see her, it didn’t show in her features. Bettina came straight to the point, asking Nuala if she knew what “Scathmadra” meant.
Nuala offered her a humorless smile. “Is that the name he gave you? Oh, he’s a sly wolf, that one. ‘Scath’ means ‘shadow,’ but it can also mean ‘shelter’ or ‘bashfulness.’“ She gave Bettina a look that was at once thoughtful and mocking. “So,” she went on. “Has this innocent wild thing managed to set your heart at ease with his honeyed tongue and gentle naming?”
Bettina refused to be baited.
“And madra?” she asked.
“Dog.”
Bettina mulled that over. Shadow-dog. Or shadow of the dog?
“I have no advice for you tonight,” Nua
la added. “I see no point, when you won’t listen to it anyway.”
Bettina shrugged. “You’d be surprised,” she said.
“I hope so.”
Bettina wanted to ask more, about the enmity between Nuala and the wolves, what it was that had set them against each other, but she managed to still her curiosity.
“Good night, Nuala,” was all she said. “I hope you sleep well.”
Nuala gave a tired nod. “Dreamless would be a gift.”
“I could make you a tea.”
She watched the older woman hesitate, but then give another nod.
“Thank you,” Nuala said. “That would be kind of you.”
9
Hunter was in a wretched mood by the time he finally reached Miki’s street. He carried a bag of cleaning supplies that he’d bought at a hardware store along the way, and it only seemed to make it harder to maintain his equilibrium on the icy streets. Between the weather, which showed no sign of letting up, and the bad temper of just about everybody that was out in it, there wasn’t any respite. The only good thing was that his side didn’t hurt as much anymore. There were still twinges when he moved too suddenly, or stretched in the wrong way, but otherwise he was almost back to normal. Enough so that he felt up to the unpleasant task of cleaning Miki’s apartment. He wasn’t sure that he’d actually be able to make the place habitable again, or if Miki’d want to live there even if he could, but he wanted to at least give it a shot.
As he got closer to the apartment, he kept an eye out for those tall, dark-haired Gentry, but there was no sign of them. There was no sign of anyone, except for a small figure farther down the block, shoulders hunched against the weather, chin against his or her chest. Other than that, the street was deserted—all the sane people were inside, dry and warm. Hunter decided he was going to give this other lost soul a cheerful hello when they came abreast, a small thumbing of the nose against the general malaise that had gripped the city, but when they both reached Miki’s steps, he realized who it was out on the wet streets with him tonight and his temper flared.
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