The Demigod's Legacy Page 6

  He was in the dense, verdant jungle near Tenochtitlan, returning to the chinampa plot the calpulli, or community, had assigned to him and his wife to cultivate staples like corn and peppers. Rain had pounded the countryside that afternoon, and the flowers had opened wide. He couldn’t resist the blooms. Practical as the people of the farming class were, they still liked to have pretty things to decorate their mud huts and their clothes.

  He’d chosen to live a simpler life, more like his father’s people than that of a goddess’s son who could have been revered as a king. He’d never wanted that kind of attention. He’d wanted to experience mortal things, having not fully prepared for the mortal pain that came with them when they were gone.

  Meat was hard come by, and what little the men acquired went into bellies of people in higher classes. They’d feast, and the farmers would settle for their meatless tamales.

  On his way back from the hunt, he’d carried a couple of ducks and the flowers he’d gathered. He’d tucked the flowers into his bag for his wife, and had hurried ahead of the rest of the men, but she wasn’t there to meet him near the lake as she usually was.

  No one had met them at all, not even any of the dogs that always escaped back from their homes in the capital. The village had been quiet. There were no women outside grinding corn or working their looms. No children out playing.

  No Eztli.

  His mother appeared out of thin air at his side before the others caught up. Silently, she’d extended an arm, holding him back.

  “Yaotl.”

  He’d asked why she was there. She never visited Tenochtitlan or anywhere near it. The place wasn’t her home, and she couldn’t abide that it was Tito’s, either.

  “There was sickness,” she’d said.

  “I wasn’t gone so long.”

  Barely a day.

  He’d set down his pack and turned in a slow circle. He didn’t like the quiet. His calpulli was a loud place, and he’d always loved coming home to the noises after time away. His son was loud like him, but Tito couldn’t hear Eztli.

  “Why can’t I hear him?” he asked.

  “He’s sick. They’re all sick. There was nothing I could do. Healing is not one of my gifts.”

  Tito had dropped his bag and started toward his home, but his mother grabbed his arm and pulled him back.

  “No. Wait.”

  “Wait for what? If they’re sick—”

  “There is nothing you can do but watch and wait. To feel useless and incompetent. This isn’t about your pity. This is about their sickness, and you should go, like all the rest I’ve sent away.”

  “What do you mean the rest?”

  “The healthy, so it doesn’t spread. They didn’t want to leave either, but I made them. If they didn’t leave, there wouldn’t be anyone left.”

  Tito had thrown her hand off his arm and ran to the dwelling. The smell of sickness and death hung heavily in the air, and they lay limp—his child and his wife, sweating. Barely breathing. Emaciated.

  Not dead yet, but close.

  “Yaotl.”

  His mother had pulled him back again. She took both his hands, squeezed them, and looked into his eyes. “Just go. There is nothing you can do. They won’t know you’re there praying for their recovery. They won’t hear you wail. They won’t see your grief. Just go, and let the old women tend to them.”

  He could feel them at his back, the “old women” like his mother. Rarely seen goddesses, because women weren’t supposed to be seen like the men. Their history went unrecorded. No one made temples for them.

  Ma’s sisters. Cousins. Friends.

  They were detached from the circumstances. Impassive outsiders who’d do the work that needed to be done without anyone outside of the calpulli ever knowing—without any of the survivors ever knowing who’d been there.

  He wouldn’t turn to look. He didn’t want to meet their too-knowing gazes. Didn’t want to see their judgment of his weaknesses. His lack of assertiveness.

  “Why is he dying?” he’d whispered. “Why isn’t he one who got to walk away? My son should have walked away.”

  Ma had shaken her head and pulled her cape tight at her neck. “He wasn’t meant to.”

  And whatever that meant, he hadn’t known, and he couldn’t have asked, because she’d lulled him to sleep there and he woke up in the jungle, hundreds of miles away. Too far to do anything. He would need days to get back, and she’d known that.

  Their bodies had already been disposed of when by the time he got back, tipped into the water still breathing so that they’d be taken into the peaceful realm of Tlalocan and not just a empty, dreary void.

  His son and wife’s last breaths had been in Lake Texcoco.

  Tito blinked, again and again, trying to force his mind back to the present. Cool, soft hands pressed against his cheeks, and someone kept repeating in a soft voice, “Don’t move. You’re back. Don’t move.”

  Belle.

  The dining room came into focus around him. Belle stood in front of him, pushing soothing energy through him. Sean leaned against the doorframe between the dining room and living room, looking on with concern. December stood nearby, gripping the serving bowl Tito had been carrying. Her face was pale, green eyes round, and mouth open in awe.

  There were others in the room—Cougars and other weirdoes. He could sense their proximity, but he didn’t turn to see who they were.

  Didn’t matter.

  Belle pulled her hands away. “You all right?”

  “Yeah. I’m all right. Thanks.” He gave her the thumbs-up she’d probably grown to expect from him and then cleared his throat and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  Six hundred years.

  He’d done all he could to repress the memories, and they’d never resurfaced so vividly before. He’d felt like he’d been there in the calpulli again. He’d felt the heat of the sun on his face, the smell of impending death, the way his gut had lurched with his realization of hopelessness—he’d felt it all as if it’d been the first time.

  “People like you have a way of living in the past,” came his mother’s voice in his mind.

  He turned and found her in the kitchen doorway in her granny get-up, clutching her big purse in front of her.

  “Get out of your head.”

  He couldn’t respond in the manner in which she was speaking to him, so he just nodded, and pivoted back to the room. People always expected a wisecrack or a joke from him, so he dug deep for anything that could make them laugh, and maybe him, too.

  “So, uh. What happened while I was on vacation just then? Did anyone go by my house to water my plants or check the mail?”

  Belle tossed a cloth napkin at him and, sighing, retreated to the kitchen. “Jeez.”

  The tension in the room seemed to deflate just a bit—enough for him to take a deep breath again.

  “Does anyone want tomato for the tacos?” he asked. “I think I left them in the kitchen.”

  “Tito, what just happened?” December asked.

  Tito flicked a little lint off his black T-shirt, perhaps a bit too aggressively. “Whaddaya mean?”

  Get out of your head. Get out of your head.

  “You just, like, went catatonic or something, and nobody thought it was a big deal except me.”

  “I want tomato,” Cruz said.

  December closed her eyes and let out a ragged exhalation. “You don’t like tomatoes.”

  “I like them on the bottom. The meat makes them gooshy. They’re okay then.”

  “I’ll get the tomatoes,” Sean said, and he didn’t waste a second going to fetch them.

  “Are you sick?” December asked Tito.

  He gave his head a slow shake. “No. At least not in the way you’re thinking.”

  “So you weren’t, like, having some kind of seizure or something?”

  “No.”

  He didn’t know a good way to explain in mixed company that his problem was supernatural and not medical, so he
just shrugged. “If I needed medical intervention, I tend to give folks a specific signal. I start waving a little Mexican flag and singing like Chalino Sánchez.”

  “Who’s that?” Cruz asked. Her little nose was scrunched as if she smelled something rotten, and hadn’t just heard an unfamiliar name.

  She was cute, the best he could tell. He would know for sure if he’d take a good look at her.

  He wasn’t ready.

  He took a deep breath and turned his palms over. “Best Norteño singer ever, some folks say.”

  “What’s Norteño?”

  “Oh, boy,” Hannah muttered from somewhere behind him. “Don’t get him started. He’ll want to show you his truck’s sound system, and whenever he turns on the bass and hits play on one of those old cassettes, some of my house’s basement windows crack.”

  “They’re due to be replaced, anyway.” Sean slid the bowl of diced tomatoes onto the table. “And I think some of those cracks came from when you were…” His lips twitched. “Living down there.”

  Hannah narrowed her eyes at him.

  Someone tittered, possibly Belle.

  Ninety percent of the people in the house would have caught the joke. Technically, Hannah had been Sean’s abductee for a little while. She’d kept making threats to castrate and/or kill him, and he didn’t doubt that she’d follow through. He’d kept her in his basement until she’d accepted her lot in life—that she was a Cougar’s mate, and that she was stuck with Captain Shameless, whether she wanted to be or not.

  Turned out in the end, though, that she did want to be.

  December’s wide-eyed look of confusion had given way to one of squinting annoyance—an expression he’d never seen her wear until that day. She was fun and bubbly, and always had a smile. Or at least, that was how she’d been when he’d last been in her company. He was under no pretenses that her current mood was one of his making, but he didn’t know what he was supposed to do. He’d wanted to leave her alone, but since there was a child in the picture, he didn’t really have a choice but to take the verbal beating he was certain was coming.

  Shit.

  He dragged a hand through his hair yet again, and turned to Cruz. He missed having hair. The crew cut just didn’t do enough to satisfy his fidgeting.

  “So…tomato under the meat. What about lettuce?”

  “Nah.”

  “Good girl. Don’t go ruining a perfectly good taco by putting salad on it. Cheese?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good choice. Hot sauce?”

  “What kind?”

  Ma snickered triumphantly behind him. She padded over, peeling open her giant purse as she moved, then set it atop the table in front of Cruz. “Any of those.”

  Sean peered over her shoulder. “You’ve been holding out on me. I asked you if you had any of that Devil Sauce left, and you told me no.”

  “I didn’t at the time.”

  “Oh, so a bottle just magically appeared in your purse in the matter of a day?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ugh.”

  Cruz rooted through the seemingly bottomless bag with her tongue peeking out of the corner of her mouth and her brow furrowed.

  He couldn’t help but watch her, then. Her intensity was enthralling. She looked mostly like her mother, only a little darker, and tinier. Cruz had the sort of frame that hinted that she’d always be tiny, even as an adult, like Ma.

  Women from Tenochtitlan rarely got much taller than four-ten. Tito had only grown as tall as he had because his father had been a freakishly sized five-ten.

  Tito had no doubt that Cruz was his, even if he couldn’t tell using magic the way Ma did. He could see himself in her goofy smile as she held up bottles.

  He could hear himself in her unfettered belly laughs. She was a beautiful child, and that made his incompetence feel all the worse.

  Cruz found a half-used bottle of ghost pepper sauce and held it up triumphantly.

  “No,” December said.

  “She’ll be all right, Dee,” Sean said.

  “No one would be all right after eating that.”

  He shrugged. “Doesn’t bother me.”

  “You’re over thirty and have an asbestos stomach lining. She’s five.”

  “If it’s not hot enough to taste, why put any on at all?”

  “Your opinion doesn’t count. Your sense of self-preservation has always been lower than average.”

  “Higher since meeting Hannah.”

  “I feel sorry for Hannah.”

  “How about just put a couple of drops on one along with a heap of sour cream and go from there?” Belle asked.

  December sighed. “Fine. I can’t believe a treasure chest of hot sauce is distracting me, but it’s been like that all afternoon, right? Every time I ask a serious question, something’ll happen to keep me from getting an answer.”

  “Tito’s going to give you the answers you seek,” Ma said. She patted the top of Cruz’s head and pulled out the chair beside her. “Right after dinner.”

  He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose again.

  He kept them closed through all the rustling and footsteps. Folks were making tacos and taking their seats. They were settling into the usual easy flow of conversation that always happened on the ranch. Even Cruz chimed in on occasion. She didn’t even know the folks, but she had opinions, and of course they treated them as valid because that was what people who weren’t assholes tended to do.

  Eztli had been treated the same way by the men in the calpulli. Tito had thought he was supposed to have been special, too, but he hadn’t lived.

  “I want to ride a horse, Mommy.”

  At Cruz’s statement, Tito opened his eyes and found December staring across the table at him.

  Probably thinks I’m a loser.

  She cut her gaze rightward to Cruz. “I don’t think Belle was inviting you to ride, only saying that you could ride a horse, in theory.”

  “Oh, she can if she wants to,” Belle said, rubbing her chin. “Maybe. I don’t think she’ll spook the horses too much.”

  “They’re not used to children?”

  Belle cringed, and her cheek twitched when she smiled. “Um … The horses are usually just fine with kids.”

  The kids weren’t the problem, their energy was. The horses had a problem with certain types of energy. Mason couldn’t go anywhere near them, and they weren’t huge fans of a certain goddess, either.

  “How about we try and see?” Ma said. “Slow, gentle pony, perhaps?”

  “Yeah, we’ve got a few of those. One in particular tends to be a little more … ” Belle shrugged. “Oblivious.”

  “Oblivious is a good thing as far as horses go?” December asked, her voice tinged with the kind of panic mothers who weren’t goddesses seemed to default to.

  Belle nodded slowly. “In some situations, yes.”

  “Others, though?” December pinned her narrowed gaze right on Tito. “Not so much.”

  He clamped his teeth together and pulled his face into something he hoped resembled a smile. His natural instinct, groomed over the course of the past two hundred or so years, was to exit stage left during situations that made him uncomfortable. That was how most gods and demigods survived as long as they did—isolation. Being apart from everyone was a lonely venture at times, but often, it was also the safest one for him and everyone else, too.

  He couldn’t run, though, not with a room full of people looking on and expecting him to do the right thing, and not with a child sitting at the table who didn’t know who he was but would likely remember how he’d reacted on that day.

  Ain’t this some shit?

  “So … ” Hannah said, shattering the uncomfortable silence that had been hanging in the air. “Are you still working at the bar, December?”

  “Yeah, for the time being. When Cruz starts school, though, I’m going to look for something else. I want steadier hours, and not having to service a bunch of people who obviously
despise me just for living and breathing would be nice, too.”

  “Yeah, I know what that’s like.” Belle stuffed some lettuce into a couple of taco shells and then reached for the meat spoon. “I used to wait tables at the diner in town until I took over most of the ranch management duties for Mom last year. I think most of the customers there were regulars, though. They all knew me, and that probably made my job a lot easier than yours.”

  “I need to finish school. I keep wanting to transfer to a four-year place. For years, I’ve been grabbing all the registration paperwork every summer and intending to finally enroll somewhere local, and then the deadlines creep up and some disastrous thing happens. Last year, my car died. The year before that, I had an insurance gap and ended up paying a scad of money out of pocket because Cruz needed an E.R. visit, and—”

  “Why was she at the E.R.?” Tito interrupted, and he stared at December’s mouth because he was certain he wouldn’t be able to hear whatever she said in response. His pulse was pounding in his head, and the echo of his heartbeat muffled all else.

  She stared at him, unanswering. She wasn’t annoyed, as far as he could tell, but perhaps curious given the way she furrowed her brow.

  Don’t tell me she was sick enough for a hospital, Dee.

  When December didn’t seem forthcoming with an answer, he looked at Ma, who just shook her head.

  “Well?” he said to someone—anyone—who’d answer.

  “Broke muh leghs,” Cruz said through a mouth full of taco. “Bof um ’em.”

  December sighed and put her head down on the table. “She didn’t break her legs,” she said dejectedly. “I just thought she did. I was at a cookout. I turned around for one minute to get a drink out of the cooler. In three seconds, she decided to follow some knuckleheaded kid onto the diving board, and she jumped into an empty pool.”

  “Jeez,” Hannah said in an undertone.

  “Spare me the lecture. I know I should have been watching her more closely.”

  Tito put up his hands. He hadn’t planned on lecturing her, nor did he think he had the right to. He was too fucking relieved that the problem had just been trauma and not infection. That might have been a story he wouldn’t have been able to handle.