She was scared, but she was also intrigued by the stranger. Gathering her courage, she took a few tentative steps down the corridor. The ghost raised his hand, and she saw there was something hanging from his fingers. He said something, but it sounded like gibberish.

“I don’t understand. Do you need help?” her father repeated. He could barely stand upright.

The stranger observed him, his head cocked to one side.

“Do-you-need-help?” he mimicked, as if he were playing a game.

Lucia’s father swore and tried to shut the door, but the ghost blocked it. The sound of his fist slamming into the wood startled Lucia. Time seemed to freeze for a moment as her father focused on the thing in the ghost’s hand. Lucia squinted; it looked like a necklace.

Then the spectre retreated, returning to the fog from which it had emerged. Lucia’s father could finally close the door.

When he turned around, she saw that he was trembling.

-27-

-27-

Teresa was studying the light in her room. Not the way it fell on a specific object or reflected off a surface, but the light itself. In the past few hours, she had come to understand its true nature: it was a pulsating force that filled the air, changed color, spread over walls and objects, lapping at their edges, then receding. Darkness was nothing but black light, a rippling of waves, a tide.

There was darkness inside her now.

She hadn’t slept. She’d spent the night thinking, clutching at her memories with an urgency that was new to her.

“May twentieth, 1958,” she said to herself.

The day it had all begun. Her first day on earth. Had she known then what she knew now, would she still have smiled as she came into the world? It was a story her mother had told her over and over again. Teresa hadn’t wailed in the midwife’s arms; she had merely opened her eyes and smiled, a toothless grin in a tiny, wrinkled face. It was probably nothing more than a reflex, a reaction to the entirely novel sensation of air on her skin.

But Teresa’s mother liked to think that her daughter had been blessed at birth with innate joy. She had named her Teresa thinking that the name meant “treasure.” What it actually meant was “huntress,” though Teresa had never told her that—and in the end, Teresa had become a huntress of a kind.

Oh Mother, if you could see me today . . .

Laying down her weapons, she had taken refuge in her den that night, nursing wounds that would never really heal. They were deeper than anyone could imagine.