Page 76 of Ransom
"I said let him."
I pushed back from the table. "I'll go."
I grabbed my hat off the hook and pushed out through the screen door before anybody could say anything else. The afternoon had gone yellow. Wind picked up off the mesa, and I stood on the porch a second to figure out which direction Fenix had gone. He could have run for the cottonwood by the creek, or the bunkhouse, or the south fence line where Linc usually walked him when he got like this. None of those were where Fenix went when he was actually scared. When Fenix was scared, Fenix went underground.
I cut around the side of the main house toward the root cellar.
The door was propped open with the same rock that had been holding it open the day Linc and Fenix laid Castillo out down there, which was about the time I'd given up trying to make sense of how Fenix decided what was sacred and what wasn't. The light from inside was wrong for an oil lamp, low and orange, flickering. Coyote's voice came up the steps before I made it to them.
"... salt first, in the corners. Always the corners. Mama said the corners were how they got in. You put the salt down and you say her name three times and they have to stop where the salt is, they can't cross it."
I slowed up at the top of the stairs and put one hand on the doorframe.
Fenix was sitting on the dirt floor with his back against the stone shelf where we'd laid Castillo, knees pulled up tight. Coyote was cross-legged in front of him with Nimue draped across his shoulders like she was paying attention too. There was a candle on the floor between them, a small pile of what looked like rock salt next to Coyote's knee, and a sprig of something green that I was pretty sure had come out of Sierra's herb pots without permission.
"Whose name?" Fenix said.
"Santa Marta." Coyote was quieter than I'd ever heard him. "You say Santa Marta three times and they have to listen because she's the one who minds the dead. Mama said you could call on the Virgin for most things, but for this you call on Marta. The dead are her job. They have to do what she says."
"How do you know she'll come?"
"She comes for Mama. Mama was a bruja. She left me her saint when she went."
"And the saint comes for you?"
"She comes for whoever Mama sent her to."
Whatever Coyote was doing, it was working better than the cottonwood ever did. I leaned in the doorway for a second to watch it.
"What about Ransom?" Fenix said.
I held my breath.
"What about him?"
"He has them too."
"I know."
"More than Joe."
"I know."
"How come his don't bother him?"
Coyote made a small sound that might have been a laugh. "Different kind. Joe's are loud. Ransom carries his quiet. Has since he was a kid."
I backed off the steps before either of them could turn around. The wind hit me when I cleared the side of the house. I cut across the yard toward the barn instead, fast, not looking at the porch where Winston was probably still on his phone. I didn't slow down until I had the barn door shut behind me, Galahad's stall in front of me, my hands flat on the rail.
His water was full, his hay was clean, his shoulder warm under my hand. The horse didn't need checking, and I didn't need to be checking him, but here we both were.
The bag of road salt slumped against the wall by the tack room door, half empty since February. I'd walked past it a hundred times since the thaw without seeing it.
I was being stupid. I knew I was being stupid. The kid in the cellar thought he was dead. The dead I knew about had been quiet a long time. There was no reason in the world to think they were stirring on a Wednesday afternoon because some boy had counted ghosts on Joe Dancing. The dead I didn't know about were still strangers, and I didn't owe them a damn thing.
I crouched down and scooped up a handful of salt anyway.
The first pinch went into the front corner. My ears burned the whole walk over there. The second went in the back. By the third corner, I'd stopped trying to talk myself out of it and just kept walking, because if I was going to be a damn fool about it, I might as well be a thorough damn fool about it.
