She felt warm breath from human lips as he leaned down to speak into her ear. “It is me, Hun-Kamé,” he said.
She snapped her eyes open and looked up at him, and he looked down at her, slowly taking her left hand between his. The shadows grumbled and sighed around them; a couple of them spat on the floor. She could see the outlines of the room again and the wastebasket with the burning hair.
“We are famished!” they said. “We are hungry!”
“Oh, she nearly forgot herself,” wailed another.
“Quiet, you degenerate fiends, and attend me,” Hun-Kamé said, his voice cutting through their muttering like a blade. “Your eyes, on the ground, don’t you dare raise them again.”
The shadows hissed, and their blue-green glow grew narrow until they had no eyes. Blind they stood before both of them.
“Now, tell me what I need to know.”
The shadows spoke to one another in animated whispers, bowing their heads, as if conferring among themselves. Their tongues lolled out and in of their mouths. The matter decided, they spoke again.
“Head to Xtabay’s abode,” a shadow said. Perhaps the same one that had caught her eye before, perhaps another. Casiopea could not tell them apart.
“Where does she reside?”
“Nearby, see here,” the shadow said and a spark of fire, from the burning hair, lifted itself into the air and traced a line, a shape.
“My thanks,” Hun-Kamé said and tossed the last bits of hair to the shadows, which fell onto one another to devour them. And as they fell, blending, becoming one, the cold from the room ebbed, the darkness changed, and they were standing in the middle of a normal room, a tendril of smoke rising from the wastebasket, the bustling city again outside their window.
“I told you not to look at them,” Hun-Kamé said, letting go of her hand. He sounded grim, and she felt silly for the whole episode. First she’d wept, then she’d lost hold of him. And she’d been so scared, like a girl.
“I know,” she muttered.
The hair he’d tossed on the floor and the burnt hair in the wastebasket had vanished, but a sulfuric stench lingered in the room. He opened the windows to allow light and air in, and Casiopea was grateful for this gesture because the air inside was charged and stale.
Casiopea breathed in slowly. She felt supremely tired, her legs threatening to buckle beneath her. Her hand throbbed and she rubbed it, bending down at the same time, as if a heavy stone had been deposited on her shoulders. She straightened herself quickly enough, but he had noticed.
“I apologize thoroughly. This was taxing for you,” he said, and now he didn’t seem grim, just sober and measured.
“I…I’m not even sure…what were those things?” she asked.
“Ghosts.”
“I didn’t imagine ghosts were like that.”
Not that she had pictured ghosts as people wearing sheets, with two holes cut out for their eyes, or as wispy, floating apparitions. She hadn’t thought they’d be as frightening as they’d been. Nor that they might try to eat her.
“Certain ghosts. There are others, like those who haunt the roads and devour children, for one,” Hun-Kamé said with a shrug. “You should rest.”
“I’m not sure I want to nap,” she said, suddenly afraid of all the creatures that lurk in the dark and the shadows that might invade the room if she drew the curtains.
“And I assure you, you should. I do not say this idly. When I cast magic, I draw from your strength.”
She stared at him. “Like…”
“I feed off you. You know this.”
“Not like this, not—”
“Every minute of every hour, and when I use my magic, even more. Come, lie down,” he said, clasping her hand and drawing her toward the bed, then gesturing for her to sit.
Casiopea sat at the head of it, clutching a decorative pillow between her hands. She had wanted to see Mexico City, and when she did she had not expected she would be frightened by ghosts. Nor did she think she’d spend her first evening there asleep because a god had used her hair and her energy to conjure said ghosts. She’d imagined a nebulous sort of fun. But there was little fun to be had; even Carnival had not been enjoyed, merely observed from afar.
“It’s not right,” she said, frowning and toying with the pillow’s tassels. “It isn’t fair. I’m food for them or…or for you.”
