He was not so cold anymore. Either he was used to it, or he could no longer feel at all. That was a possibility. That was most likely best. Even if this were not hell, what they had forced him to do would surely send him to hell when he did die.
If he did.
“It is incentive to live forever, is it not? Knowing what awaits you for these terrible crimes,” Diego said with the smile of a wolf.
The friar had shown him what horrors this life held for him: he brought Ricardo a cross made of pressed gold. He kept it wrapped in silk, did not touch it himself. When Ricardo touched it, his skin burned. He could never touch a holy cross again. Holy water burned him the same. He could never go into a church. His baptism had been burned away from him. The Mother Church was poison to him now. God had rejected him.
But I do not reject God, Ricardo thought helplessly.
There were rewards. Juan kept calling them rewards. Mortal weapons could not kill him. Stabs and slashes with a sword, arquebus shot, falls, cracked bones, nothing would kill him. Only beheading, only a shaft of wood driven through the heart. Only the sun. He was immortal.
“You call this reward?” Ricardo had shouted. “To be forever shut out of God’s heavenly kingdom?” Then he realized the truth: This was no tragedy for Juan, because the friar did not believe in God or heaven.
“Did you ever believe?” Ricardo whispered at him. “Before you became this thing, did you believe?”
Juan smiled. “Perhaps it is not that I didn’t believe, but that I chose to join the other side of this war between heaven and hell.”
Which was somehow even more awful.
Ricardo stood at the church wall one night. The moon waxed again, past new. Half a month, he’d been here. He didn’t know what to do next—what he could do. They held him captive. He belonged with them now, because where else could he go?
They told him that the blood should taste sweet on his tongue, and it did. He still hated it.
Perhaps he looked for rescue. When he did not report to the governor, wouldn’t a party come for him? A troop of soldiers would come to learn what had happened, and Ricardo would intercept them, tell them the truth, and he would help them raze the church to the ground, destroy Juan and his caballeros.
And then they would destroy him, stake his heart, drag him into the sunlight for being one of them. So perhaps Ricardo wouldn’t help them, but would hide.
Did he love existence more than life, then? More than heaven?
A jingling of bridles sounded behind him. Ricardo did not have to look; he sensed the four men approaching with the horses.
“Brother Ricardo, it’s good you’ve finally come into the air. It’s not good to be cooped up all the time.”
“I’m not your brother,” he said. His voice scratched, weak and out of practice. He had taken breathing for granted and had had to relearn how to speak.
Diego laughed. “We’re all you have, now. You’ll understand soon enough.”
“He has lots of time to learn,” said Octavio, one of the four demons who had once been men, who followed Juan. Rafael and Esteban were the others.
Diego said, “Ride with us. We hunt tonight, and you’ll learn at our side.” It was a command, not a request.
He followed, because what else could he do? Except perhaps stand in the open when the sun rose and let it burn him. But suicide was a sin. Even now, he believed it. He would show that he did not forsake God. He would ask for forgiveness every moment of his existence.
Diego seemed to be Fray Juan’s lieutenant; he had been the first of them turned to this demon life, years ago now. That was why he looked no older than he had when they returned from Coronado’s expedition.
He explained what they did here. “Each of us is as strong as a dozen men. But there are still those who know how to kill us. Those who would recognize certain signs and hunt us down.”
“Who?” Ricardo asked. “What signs?”
“Secret members of the Inquisition for one. And what signs? Why, bodies. Too many bodies, all drained of blood!” They all laughed.
“New Spain is the perfect place for us. There are thousands of peasants dying by the score in mines, on campaigns, of disease. Out here on the borders, no one is even looking much. If a whole village dies, we say a plague struck. We take all the blood we need, and no one notices.”
At the mention of blood, Ricardo’s mouth watered. A hunger woke in him, like a creature writhing in his belly. Each time Diego said the word, his vision clouded. He shook himself to remain focused on the hills before them.
“I know how it is with you,” Diego said. “We all went through this.”
“Though the rest of us were perhaps not so holy to start with.” Again they laughed, like young men riding to a night of revelry. That was what they looked like, what anyone who saw them would think. Not that anyone would see them out here. That was the point, to feed on as much blood as they wished without notice. A land of riches. Diego had not lied.
“It’s eating away inside me,” Ricardo said under his breath.
“The blood will still that,” said Rafael. “The blood will keep you sane.”
“Ironic,” Ricardo said. “That you must become a monster to keep from going mad.”
“Ha. I never thought of it like that,” Diego said.
He is already mad, Ricardo thought.
They rode for hours. They could not go far—half the night, he thought. Then they must go back, to take shelter before dawn. He could feel the night slipping away in his bones. It was the same part of him that now called out for blood.
Rafael said, “The villages nearby know of us. They go to the hills to hide, but we find them. Look toward the hills, take the air into your lungs. You can sense them, can’t you?”
The air smelled of dust, heat, sunlight that had baked into the land during the day and now rose into the chill of night, lost in the darkness. The breeze spoke of emptiness, of a vast plain where nothing larger than coyotes lived. When he turned toward the hills, though, he smelled something else. The warmth had a different flavor to it: life.
When they brought him the child, he had known what was there before he saw it. He could feel its life in the currents of the air; sense its heartbeat sending out ripples, like a stone tossed into a body of still water. A live person made a different mark on the world than one of these demons.
“Our kind are drawn to them, like iron to a lodestone,” Diego said. “We cannot live without taking in the human blood we have lost. We are the wolves to their sheep.”
“And now you hunt. Like wolves,” said Ricardo.
“Yes. It’s good sport.”
“It’s a thousand childhood nightmares come to life.”
“More than that, even. Come on!”
He spurred his horse. Kicking dirt behind them, the other four followed.
It was just as Diego said: a hunt. The leader sent two of the caballeros to ascend the hill from a different direction. They flushed the villagers from their hiding places, where they lived in caves and lean-tos. Like animals, Ricardo could not help but think. Easier to hunt them, then, when one did not think of them as human. It was like facing the native tribes with Coronado all over again. The imbalance in strength between the two parties was laughable.