“Time for what?” She tried to push the sheets away, but he pressed her back and sat on the edge of the bed with a sigh.
“Perhaps it is over,” he said. “Perhaps there will be no change.”
“What change?”
Instead of answering he stretched out beside her and tucked her head into the curve of his arm. “Rest now, mi gatita.”
Cat realized that she was exhausted, not only by the vigorous sex but also by emotions she couldn’t quite comprehend. A minute ago Andrés had been dominant, guiding and controlling their lovemaking with her full cooperation. But now he was something else entirely: tender, solicitous, and melancholy in a way that made her want to take him in her arms and tell him everything was going to be all right.
“You won’t go?” she asked sleepily.
He kissed her forehead and brushed his fingers over her eyelids. “Sleep.”
The caballos charged into the village, nostrils flared and teeth bared like the fangs of the jaguar ready to slaughter its prey. Their riders were gods of destruction and malice, helmets and weapons flashing as they trampled the villagers who came to meet them.
Itzel stood at the door of her house, mouth open to cry out. No sound would come. Men she had known all her life collapsed into the dust, great gaping wounds spilling blood bright as forest flowers. Women screamed and fled, some falling under the horses’ hooves, others dragged by their hair to be violated and cast aside. Children wept. And yet the conquerors slew on, laughing and merciless.
Filled with despair, she turned to the one who stood behind her. She begged Andrés to stop those with whom he had once ridden, to save the village from their murderous rampage.
But Andrés didn’t move. He stared, his skin the color of bleached bone, his eyes no longer the hue of clear water but swallowed up in obsidian black. He had become like some forgotten stone idol, unable or unwilling to interfere in the fates of men. Only when one of the conquistadores, his hair golden as the sun, drove his huge mount toward the house and reached for Itzel did Andrés act. He pushed her behind him and looked up at the man on the horse. He spoke words in the enemy tongue. Hair-of-the-Sun laughed again, spun his beast about and rode away, his followers behind him.
Itzel staggered from the doorway, her eyes glazed with horror. She knelt beside the lifeless body of her brother and stroked the matted hair from the terrible gash across his forehead. There were a few others left alive; they, like her, wandered from one body to the next, searching for those they had loved.
Much time passed before Itzel turned back to the house. Andrés still waited there, empty as one whose heart had been given in sacrifice to the gods.
She had loved him. She had made the others see that he was not like those he had abandoned. But she had been wrong. He was no different.
“Itzel,” he whispered, his voice a broken husk. But she felt no pity. She came to stand before him, fists clenched at her sides.
“You have betrayed us,” she said.
“No. I…”
“You did not stop them. For this…” She closed her eyes. “For this you must pay.”
For the first time in many suns she drew upon the powers her grandmother and mother had passed to her, powers bestowed by the earth and the sky. “You will suffer as you have watched the people suffer,” she said. “Your kind are bound to the great beasts you call caballos. Now you shall run as such a beast for all the days of your life, walking as a man only at night. But you shall not die. You shall have no relief until one of my blood forgives you for your cowardice this day.”
Andrés heard her, but he did not believe. She saw that in his eyes. But a few minutes of daylight remained; he grew taut, the curse beginning to work its way through his body.
Itzel turned her back on him and walked away, ignoring the wordless cries of agony and terror as Andrés lost his ability to speak with a human voice. The last she heard of him was the drumming of his hooves as he fled into the forest.
Cat shot up in the bed, her heart hammering and her breath locked in her throat. It took several moments before she recognized the room around her.
Andrés stood by the window, his shoulder propped against the wall as he gazed outside. Tension had turned the muscle of torso and buttock and thigh to sculpted stone. He still looked exactly the same as he had in that other, ancient world. Not even his name was different.
He had begged her forgiveness. She had given it, unthinking, never questioning why he had asked. From the very beginning he’d tried to seduce her while revealing as little about himself as he could get away with. Suddenly she had a reason for his behavior.