AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The old woman glances at the knife and her thin lips twist in scorn. “You think Santiago steel can stop me?”
Her next words slip into a strange language I don’t understand, but they scare me more than anything. It reminds me of the Latin AmericanbrujeríathatTíaAnna once told me about. How Colombia is this big mysterious country filled with black and white magic, where in some places superstition and curses have a higher power than God.
She shuts her eyes, her breath rattling, and then they’re flying open to fix tiny, black needlepoints on him. “I am not here for her,niño estupido. I am here foryou.”
Edier slashes at the air again as she steps closer. “Stay back!”
But she keeps coming.
“You thought you could justforget? Don’t you know? The past is a slave, and she is not so easily freed.”
He goes very still, and her eyelids snap shut again. That strange language is drifting over us once more.
This time, the air turns even cooler. It feels like icicles are forming on the inside of my chest. I watch in a daze as she pulls out a crumpled piece of paper from the folds of her dress and shoves it into her mouth, and then she smiles, as though she just fired a bullet right at him
“Get down!” snarls a voice.
Edier lunges for my waist, and I lose my balance, my bare knees scraping painfully on the gravel path as we hit the ground together. A second later, a gunshot rings out, stamping a perfect, red circle in the old woman’s forehead. She collapses a few meters away, her beetle-black eyes all glassy and still.
“No need to cry,Mi Cielo,” Edier whispers after a time, gently pulling me to my feet and brushing the tears from my cheeks. “You’re safe now.”
“Is she hurt?”TíoJoseph swings me around to face him, his arctic gray-blue eyes blasting me with heat, not ice, as he jams his gun into the back of his jeans. “Are you hurt, Ella?”
“She’s fine,” insists Edier.
I’m not though, and neither is he. I can see it in his face. I can feel it in my bones. This morning has changed us somehow. It’s changed everything,
TíoJoseph’s face creases into a frown as he cups my cheek.Mamásaid he’s from a place called Texas, but he doesn’t look like a cowboy. He’s more like a mountain in Utah, all sun-kissed and solid. “Sweetheart, you’re shaking.”
Am I?
I think about the piece of paper the old woman stuffed in her mouth before she died.
Why did she do that? What does it mean?
“Thalia,” I croak, remembering my sister.
“She’s safe too.”
“W-we heard guns.”
“Not anymore,” he reassures. “The uninvited don’t take long to evict from this estate.”
But his words don’t comfort me like they should. My body is aching and my head hurts. All I want to do is go inside and lie down, but Edier has other ideas—grabbing his father’s arm as we turn to leave.
“Did you hear what she said to us,Pá?”
“She spoke a load of bullshit, if that’s what you’re referring to.”
“You sure it was all bullshit?”
TíoJoseph’s expression tightens, the same wayPapá’sdoes when he doesn’t want to talk about something. “You were just a boy when fate brought you here, Edier. The only thing you left behind in Bogotá were broken bones.”
Broken bones?
Edier drops his gaze to me, and then it slides right off again like ice cream down a hot surface. “Thatbrujacursed me. I know she did.”
His father just scoffs. “You think I haven’t been cursed a thousand times in this country by shamans and charlatans shaking their feather sticks at me? Yet here I am…still alive enough to kill them.”
