All the Crooked Saints
Page 24
But this was not the puzzle Beatriz had to solve, because Beatriz had broken the taboo against helping the moment she suggested interviewing Marisita. So her darkness must be something else. Now, for the first time, she truly realized how difficult it was to be a pilgrim, a realization Daniel had just come to days before—a realization that all budding Saints should be led to. It was often so easy to identify the darkness from the outside. But from the inside, your darkness was indistinguishable from your other thoughts.
It could take forever to learn yourself.
Something touched Beatriz’s hands. She flinched back, but the touch pursued her and she realized it was another set of hands, gripping hers. She tried to pull back from them, but they hung on.
“Beatriz,” Pete said.
“You left,” she said.
“I did.”
He’d tried to, anyway. He had walked out to the main road and he had even convinced a trucker to pick him up so that he could hitchhike back to Oklahoma. But as he thought about leaving the desert, he realized he didn’t think he could actually survive it. He’d already broken his heart once that night, and he thought that if it happened again, it really would kill him. In fact, it was only love that had kept him dying from the first heartbreak. It has a way of plugging holes in the heart even as it punches new ones. But he knew there wasn’t enough love in the world to help him survive leaving the desert so soon after leaving Beatriz, and so he asked the trucker to let him out. The desert was so moved by this act of love for it that it cast a wind that rose the sand and dust, and this amorous breeze rolled Pete head over heels over scrub and fence and through dry riverbed, tumbling him through the night like one of its weeds, until it brought him here to Beatriz.
Once he saw her, he knew what he needed to do.
“You can’t be here,” Beatriz said. “You’ll get my darkness.”
“I know,” Pete whispered. “It’s already here.”
“What?”
Dread seeped through her, and he held her fingers more tightly.
“Don’t let go of my hands,” he said. “I can’t see anything.”
Faith is a funny thing, and Beatriz, as only a reluctant Saint, had never truly accepted it. But now Pete was relying on her to be able to cure herself so that she could cure him.
“How do you know I can do this?” she asked.
“I reckon I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know much of anything about what’s gonna happen. I don’t know what I’m going to do now that the truck’s gone. I don’t know if I’m ever going to see again. But I guess I do know this: I want to be with you.”
In her head, Beatriz heard all of the arguments she had mounted against the possibility of a relationship with him, a young man so kind and so soft, and her, the girl without feelings.
And then, of course, just like that, she had it.
“I was upset,” she told him.
“I know,” he replied.
“I was upset every time you said it,” she said.
“I know.”
“I don’t show feelings like other people.”
“I know that, too.”
She hesitated. It felt very peculiar to express this out loud, but she suspected that meant she was supposed to. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t have them. I think—I think I have a lot of them.”
Pete wrapped his arms around her. He was covered in all the dust the desert had rolled him through, but she didn’t mind.
“I know I have a lot of them,” she said.
The sun rose, and they both saw it.
Miracles and happiness are a lot like each other in many ways. It is difficult to predict what will trigger a miracle. Some people go their entire lives full of persistent darkness and never feel the need to seek out a miracle. Others find they can exist with darkness only for a single night before they go hunting for a miracle to remove it. Some need only one miracle; others might have two or three or four or five over the course of their lives. Happiness is the same way. One can never tell what will make one person happy and leave another untouched. Often even the person involved will be surprised by what makes them happy.
And it turns out that owls find both miracles and happiness irresistible.
There was plenty of happiness to be found the night the Sorias finally celebrated Antonia’s and Francisco’s birthdays the following year. Marisita and Daniel danced on the stage that Pete had built, lights twinkling over their heads and rose petals swirling under their feet. Marisita wore a blue dress she had never worn before. After having to wear a wedding dress every day for over a year, she had vowed that she would never again wear the same clothing two days in a row. That night after the dancing was done, she would sit at the kitchen table with Antonia as she had every night before, tear the seams out of the blue dress, and sew herself a new one. Daniel held her fondly as they danced, and his hands bore eight more tattoos: eight closed half-moon eyes just below his open spiders’ eyes, to remind him of what he had learned during the hours that he could not see.
Antonia and Francisco had just finished dancing, and now they exchanged gifts while Judith looked on with joy. Antonia presented Francisco with a small box. When he opened it, he discovered a shapely, night-black rose. It was not quite as perfect as the one he had been hoping to breed, but that was because she had fashioned it out of the ashes of the box truck. Francisco kissed his wife in delight, and then he retrieved a large box from the table behind him. When Antonia opened it, she discovered a black-and-white collie puppy. It was not exactly the same as the one he had owned when he met her all those years ago, but this one had a bigger smile. Antonia said, “I love dogs.”
Pete and Beatriz had yet to dance. Currently, they both sat on the blackened wire mesh platform of the radio telescope, looking down at the festivities from above. From here they could see Marisita’s family joyfully chattering near the stage (Max had remained in Texas with his anger for company), and they could also see Joaquin demonstrating the use of the turntable and speakers to one of Marisita’s younger sisters. His bag was already packed beside him; he was headed to Philadelphia that summer, but he’d promised to stay for the party. He was on his way to becoming Diablo Diablo even during the daytime, and the Sorias couldn’t have been more proud.
“I’m happy,” Beatriz told Pete. It was a sentence she wouldn’t have thought to say out loud only a few months before.
“Me, too,” Pete whistled back.
Above them and below them, owls began to cry out. They lifted from the rooftops and soared off the edge of the radio telescope, and Beatriz and Pete hurriedly descended to discover the source of the commotion. All of the Sorias watched as a pair of headlights slowly pulled up beside Eduardo Costa’s beloved stepside truck. Owls careened toward the newcomer, some of them landing on the vehicle itself. Owl talon on metal is not a fortunate combination, and the sound is equally unpleasant.
The lights turned off. It was a large farm truck with the words double d ranch painted on the side of it.
This was Darlene Purdey, the owner of the rooster Pete had repurposed the previous summer. Deprived of her prize fighter, she had shifted her focus from hosting cockfights to searching for the two young people who had taken him from her. After all this time, she had finally tracked them to Bicho Raro by means of a classified ad—the Sorias had listed Salto for sale in the newspaper, and Darlene had recognized him from his description alone.
Now she climbed out of the truck, a shotgun hooked over her elbow. She was no less bitter than she had been the night that Pete and Beatriz had burst onto her ranch. Darkness had only continued to layer on top of her existing grief until now she could barely move for it. All she did was sleep, and look for General MacArthur.
“I’m here about a rooster,” she snarled. She swept her free hand over herself, attempting to clear the chaos of owls away from her. Some of the smaller birds had settled around her feet, flapping and trilling. They barely moved when she nudged the toe of her boot at th
em.
“Lady,” Eduardo said, “you look like you need a miracle.”
Darlene snapped, “Yeah, have you got any of those lying around?”
The Sorias faced her.
“Yes,” Daniel said. “We do.”
There are quite a few crooked saints I’d like to thank for the making of this book. The team at Scholastic has been a ceaseless champion for years and continues to be, but for this novel, I must particularly point fingers at my editor, David Levithan. He could tell what I wanted this book to be long before it had become the book I wanted it to be, and worked joyfully to close the difference.
Thanks to José de Jesús Salazar Bello, for advice before I began; to Francisco X. Stork, for advice while I was writing; and also to my two sensitivity readers, for their advice after I had finished. They were all incredibly generous with their language and stories; all inconsistences and errors are entirely mine.
A tip of my hat, as ever, to Brenna Yovanoff, Sarah Batista-Pereira, and Court Stevens for hours of wordplay.
Thanks to Ed for holding my hands in the darkness.
And thanks to my old Camaro, which hurtled and lurched its failing way into a small Colorado town years ago. I was looking for a miracle, but I got a story instead, and sometimes those are the same thing.
Also by
MAGGIE STIEFVATER
The Raven Boys
The Dream Thieves
Blue Lily, Lily Blue
The Raven King
The Scorpio Races
Shiver
Linger
Forever
Sinner
Lament: The Faerie Queen’s Deception
Ballad: A Gathering of Faerie
Copyright © 2017 by Maggie Stiefvater
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
First edition, October 2017
The text type was set in Centaur MT
Cover art © 2017 by Eoin Ryan
Cover design by Chris Stengel
e-ISBN 978-0-545-93082-6
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