Maybe this is too personal, too raw, to talk about with someone I don’t like or trust, but I’ve never been good at keeping my thoughts to myself, and the words bubble up before I can stop them. “The first one I met was an animagus. He killed my mother.”

“That’s . . . how old were you?”

“Six or seven, maybe.”

“How did you get away?”

“I killed him right back.”

He jerks in his seat, and water sloshes over the side of the bucket. He says, “You killed an animagus.”

“Yes.”

“When you were a little girl.”

“Yes.”

“How?”

I’ve told this only to Hector and Rosario. Why am I telling Iván? “I’m not sure how. I dream about it. Sometimes in the dream, I kill him by pushing him into the fireplace. He falls and hits his head on the mantel. But most of the time, I stab him with a skinning knife. That’s how I think it must have happened. The stabbing, I mean. Because that’s the memory that makes me . . . I can still smell his blood.”

Gently Iván asks, “Was it during a battle too?”

“No. He was looking for something. Something of my father’s, I think.”

A partial truth. Filtered through the sieve of life and retrospection, my memories tell me the animagus was looking for a Godstone. Like the one hidden in my drawer in the bunk room.

“And before you ask . . .” I hold up a hand to forestall the question forming on his lips. “No, I don’t know who my father is, and no, I’ve never met him, and no, I don’t care to.”

Iván’s lips quirk. “Fair enough. But you’ve met some Inviernos since then that you didn’t hate?”

“Not at first. The next one I met made me her slave and beat me on the regular. Several other Inviernos came to the village I lived in. Sometimes animagi. My next master always needed money; he often sold my blood to them so they could work their magic. I was a good bleeder, he always said.”

“That’s disgusting.”

“Yes.”

He holds up his vest; water drips back into the bucket. “Almost clean.”

“Iván, don’t move.”

“What?”

I grab a clean rag from the shelf. “Your lip is dripping blood. Be still, or you’ll have to launder your shirt too.”

I hold the rag beneath the spigot just enough to dampen it, then gently press it against his mouth.

“Is it as swollen as it feels?” Iván mumbles into the rag.

“You look like a puffer fish.”

His grin becomes a wince before it can truly bloom on his face. “It really hurts to smile,” he says.

“I’ll do you a favor and be perfectly dull. Actually, you should stop talking entirely and let me keep up the pressure, or this will never stop bleeding. Beto got you good.”

“I got him better.”

“Yes. Now shut up.”

“Distract me.”

“Huh?”

“Tell me a story to keep me from talking. Like, how you got that white streak in your hair.”