The Temptation of Demetrio Vigil (37 page)

Because my ankles were restrained, I could not walk.
I barely was able to maintain my balance standing upright. I tried
a few pathetic hops, with the aim of getting myself to the door and
trying to saw the bindings off my wrists with the help of the
doorknob or the edge of the lopsided dresser - but all I managed to
do was fall, with a loud whump, to the floor. It was filthy, with
dead cockroaches on it, and, to my horror, a few live ones, too. I
screamed.

I heard footsteps coming - or, I should say, I felt
them. I braced myself, dreading whatever was going to come next. I
heard the door open, and I heard a person breathing, and moving
slowly, looking for me. From where they stood, they would not have
been able to see me because of the position of the bed.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” called
Logan’s voice, in sinister imitation of a child’s game.

“I fell,” I said.

“Peek a boo,” he said next, as I saw his head round
the edge of the bed, smiling horribly, “I see...”

But the rest of whatever he was going to say was cut
off now, as he was tackled by a moving blur that came flying across
the room from the doorway. I couldn’t turn my head to get a better
look, as I was facedown on the floor, and was working hard just to
keep my face up and out of the track of a cockroach. I heard
fighting now, rough motions and cursing, and solid thumps of fist
on flesh. It horrified me to listen to it, and I tried to escape by
remembering the beach in Miami, and the vacation I’d had with my
mother, so long ago. It was only a week, maybe, at the most, and
yet felt like years.

Soon, I felt hands on my back, and a familiar
tingling rush of electricity, the good kind. I smelled sunlight on
warm, dry earth.

“Demetrio!” I cried, trying to turn my head to see
him, hoping I wasn’t being tricked by my own mind.

“Shh, mamita, stay quiet.”

He sawed at the bindings until they popped, and a
wave of blood flowed from my arms to my fingertips in a painful but
refreshing tingle. He repeated this process with my ankles, then
lifted me, as though I weighed nothing, onto his shoulder.

“Thank God you’re here,” I breathed into his
neck.

“Shh, not now. Talk later.”

He sprinted from the room, and down a hall, and out
the front door, carrying me across a fallow, frozen field, and
leaving me in the bottom of a dry irrigation ditch.

“Stay down. Don’t move. Don’t scream. Nothing. I’m
going back for Kelsey. Wait here.”

“He said he was going to kill her,” I told him,
remembering now.

Demetrio flew to me, and put his
face, deadly serious, directly in front of mine. “I told you to be
quiet. I need your cooperation. Now. Life or death, Maria. You feel
me?”

I did as he said, my heart thundering in my chest.
It was an overcast, rainy day, and I had no coat. I was shivering
head to toe, and wanted to peek up and get a sense of where I was,
but I knew better than to defy his command right now. Right now, he
knew more than I did. I had to accept it.

Demetrio returned a few minutes later, with Kelsey
on his shoulder. She did not look well. In fact, she was pale,
bloody, and unconscious as he set her down next to me with a grave
look upon his face.

“What’s wrong with her?” I cried, hysterically,
trying to locate the wound. I found it. Her neck had been cut. Her
eyes were dull, half-closed.

“No!” I screamed.

“Maria, be quiet,” he blurted,
furious with me. “If you love her, if you care about her, be
quiet.
Now
.”

I held my knees to my chest, and began to rock back
and forth, having never been so horrified by a thing in all my
life. This couldn’t be happening. I’d gotten her into this, and now
she was dead.

Demetrio stood over her, his arms outstretched, and
turned his face skyward, the rain pelting him. He chanted something
I couldn’t understand, and spun slowly in place. As he did so, dark
clouds gathered above him, moving in from every direction, churning
in the sky the way they did during a tornado. Lightning began to
strike nearby. First, it hit a tree twenty yards off. Then, a rock
five yards off. I shrieked from the noise, and placed my hands over
my ears, horrified, terrified, and then, as I watched, lightning
struck Demetrio, and held him, and he did not collapse or burn. He
absorbed it. For several seconds this went on, and his whole body
glowed with power. When the bolt retreated back to the sky, he
retained a blue electric glow to his skin.

“Omigod, omigod, omigod,” I repeated over and
over.

Demetrio knelt next to Kelsey’s corpse now, and he
moved his hands along her body, much as he’d done with Buddy and me
the first day we met, except that this time, the electricity fell
from his fingers and palms like a tiny rain, onto her skin. In each
place that a drop fell, it was absorbed in a bull’s-eye pattern,
sinking in, and pinkening the white ghostly skin as it went. As his
hands floated over her neck, his face grew pained, and sweat
sprouted on his face. He looked sick, entranced, lost to me. His
eyes rolled back in his head, and the whites showed. I was
terrified, panicked, but amazed - because her neck wound, a deep
and hideous fatal gash, closed up beneath his hands, and her skin
went from dead to alive.

Kelsey’s unmoving chest suddenly burst to life, and
she gasped and sputtered, and turned onto her side and spit up,
bits of coagulated blood coming from her mouth. Demetrio,
meanwhile, fell to the ground at her side, spent, but alive,
breathing hard, and weak.

Kelsey finished spitting, and sat up, completely
confused.

“Where am I?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I told her as I threw myself at her,
and embraced her. “Alive. You’re alive.”

She seemed to be trying to remember something, and
her hands came up to her neck, the fingertips feeling along the
place where the cut had been.

“He sliced me open,” she said. “I felt it, my own
blood, it was so warm, it felt like someone had poured hot tea down
the front of my dress.”

She looked at the dress now, and saw it covered in
blood. She felt the neck harder, and her eyes searched mine for an
answer.

Speechless, I pointed at Demetrio.

Kelsey watched as he slowly recovered, and pulled
himself to sitting, tired and dazed.

“He said you wouldn’t care enough to come for me,”
she told him.

“Who said that?”

“Your brother,” I told him. “He’s out to destroy
you, Demetrio. You have to believe it.”

“He was wrong,” said Demetrio. “He usually is. Of
course I’d come for you, Kelsey.”

“Is he still here?” she asked, her voice
quaking.

“I haven’t seen him,” said Demetrio. “He killed you.
That means he’s probably been taken from this dimension already.
Revenants who have been given a second shot at redemption, as we
both have, cannot kill a human being, no matter what. If we do,
we’re sent away, to The Very Bad Place, for all eternity.”

I could tell as Demetrio said it that, even after
having seen Hilario’s handiwork, he was devastated to think of his
brother’s soul condemned for all time. He had love in his heart,
perhaps too much of it.

“He deserves it,” I told him.

“He’s still my
brother
,” said Demetrio. “And we
need to get out of here before someone see us. Ready to
go?”

We said we were ready, and crouched with him. Kelsey
seemed to be perfectly whole and strong, as we followed Demetrio up
and over the bank. I stepped on a sticker, and the ice hurt my
feet.

“Ow,” I complained.

“Here,” said Demetrio, picking me up. He offered to
carry Kelsey, too, but she was tougher than I was, and soldiered on
in her bare feet. She moved more slowly than Demetrio would have
liked, I could tell he was impatient.

That’s when we heard the sound of a motor, and
looked back toward the trailer to see a hooded figure on an
all-terrain vehicle, speeding toward us, bearing down fast.

“Run!” cried Kelsey.

But it was no use. The four-wheeled motorcycle was
upon us in no time, in front of us, blocking our path. The hooded
figure removed his hood, and revealed himself to be Logan, atop a
machine weighed down with all manner of weaponry, including, to my
horror, a large crossbow and arrow.

“I knew I didn’t like that dude,” said Demetrio.

Kelsey put her hand to her neck, and seemed to
remember something. “It was him,” she said, horrified.

“What?” I asked, as Logan removed himself from the
machine, and unsheathed the enormously intimidating hunting knife
his father had bought for him when he made the junior Olympic
skeet-shooting team.

“Hello, Maria, sweetheart,” he
said to me. “And look who you’re with.”

“He’s the one who killed me,” screamed Kelsey. “It
was him!”

“Good memory,” said Logan, licking the blade of his
knife as he looked Kelsey up and down. “You struggled nice and
hard, too. Good times, good times.”

“Behind me, girls,” said Demetrio, grabbing Kelsey
and tossing her behind himself, and reaching for me.

Logan swooped down now, however, faster than
Demetrio, and grabbed me first, pulling me close to him and placing
the blade hard against my neck. I felt it cut me, just a little,
and the pain was unbearable.

“Don’t do it, man,” said Demetrio.

“Don’t you have some ghostly superpowers to stop me,
Demetrio?” asked Logan, jovially. “Or are you too good too kill,
now that you’ve chosen the path of redemption?”

“I don’t think it has to come to
that. Kelsey’s alive, no one has to know what happened here, just
let Maria go.”

“Can’t you bring her back if I off her?” asked
Logan. “I’d get off on that a little.”

“Let her go, man. She didn’t do nothing to you.”

“Oh, but that’s where you’re
wrong. Maria and me, we have a long history. She has lied to me,
betrayed me, done so many things to me - even some things I liked,
a lot.” He said this last part lasciviously.

“Do something!” screamed Kelsey.

“I’m not going to ask again,” said Demetrio to
Logan, as his eyes slipped over to the other weapons on the ATV.
“Let her go.”

Logan responded by pushing the knife deeper into my
flesh, and I screamed. That’s when Demetrio, moving at, indeed,
superhuman speed, in a split second leapt out, removed the crossbow
from the ATV, miraculously appeared at the far end of the field
from us, where he aimed the weapon and quickly launched the arrow
from that great distance, deep into Logan’s heart. I remembered
Yazzie’s story now, about the Arrow Boy. Then, as quickly as he’d
moved away, Demetrio was back next to us, catching me as I fell
from Logan’s now useless arms.

In an instant, Logan was dead, and fallen with a
thud to the ground next to me with a look of complete surprise upon
his face. Having been pierced directly in the heart, he’d died
instantly, and there was very little blood.

“Omigod, omigod!” I screamed, astonished and
frightened, all of it having happened so fast. “You killed
him!”

“He would have killed you,” said Demetrio, holding
me gently. “I couldn’t let him do that.”

Demetrio released me now, and stood there in the
rain with a terrible look of remorse and confusion upon his face,
trembling as though he could not believe what he’d done. He dropped
the crossbow in the mud, shaken. Afraid. He looked at me.

“I’m sorry, Maria.”

“What? Why? You saved me!” I ran to hug him, but my
arms went right through him.

“I’m sorry. I, I have to go now.” In a daze, he
looked down at his body as it began to twinkle in blue and gold
lights, even though it was still daylight out. His voice crackled
and began to sound faraway. He took the book and pen from his
pocket, and held them as he stooped to pick up the crossbow. “The
rules. I can’t kill a human. The Maker is pretty clear about that.
I’m sorry. I love you.”

“Why didn’t you just let him kill me, and rescue me
like you did Kelsey?” I cried, pawing crazily at the air where he
was. “Why does it have to be like this?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It was the only way.”

“Don’t leave me,” I sobbed as he began to erupt in
sparkles of light.

“Maria,” he said, fighting to stay
with me, watching his own body fade away. “I still believe you are
my Kindred Primary. Tell the maker. It might help.”

“No!” I cried, trying to hold on to him, but the
warmth was fading. I grabbed at nothing but air. He had saved
Kelsey, but we were unable to save him.

“Goodbye,” he said, as he faded, in a great glimmer
of lights, and whatever was left of his body and clothes suddenly
turned to dust before our eyes, except for the little book of deeds
and the fancy quill pen, which fell to the ground at my feet, with
a dark and horrible sound. He’d left it, and taken the crossbow
with him.

I fell to my knees, sobbing uncontrollably. Kelsey
stood staring at Logan’s corpse, stunned motionless. I screamed and
wailed. Finally, I grabbed the book, and turned it over in my
hands, trying to understand. I flipped through it, amazed that even
as raindrops fell upon the pages, they stayed dry.

I read through the words. Each page was a list of
names, numbered starting with 1 at the very start; and where there
were no names, just descriptions, like “black and white dog,” or
“red-haired child,” with dates, and the deed he had done. They
appeared to have been written in a code of some kind, initials,
with short descriptions of the situation. An example might have
been: Rudy, Kelsey cat, RTL, auto. Or Jason Stein, male 37, SR,
bridge jumper. I read through page after page, and tried to
understand what the code had stood for. I flipped until I found my
own name, with Buddy’s, and read the entries.