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 mamá 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.”
“¿Ybien? 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 brujena, 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 pequenas 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 said. “—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 anfelsos 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. “^Como? 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 epoca 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 se,” 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.