Fernando woke with a start. His heart hammered wildly. He was damp with sweat, feverishly hot. Horribly and painfully aroused. Furiously ashamed. His hand stung, sliced open by an icon fallen from the shelf above his cot. The walls groaned, creaking. Shaking perilously under the strain of remaining upright against the stormwinds that assailed them.

In this dream of himself as a child, Fernando’s mother lifted one coffee-colored leg. She braced her foot on the edge of the vanity to paint her toes. Her dressing robe tented as she did this—a makeshift fort which no little boy could resist. He crawled under her chair, under her pitched-up skirt. She was naked

The skies grew dark well before dusk. Fell winds gusted, breathy and portentous. Hushed whispers of warning that skimmed the ear. The dense, damp air stirred like a broth. Grey-black thunderheads thickened as they rolled in above the lashing trees. Murky clouds churned slow and viscous overhead, like a cauldron of conjured night. The old

Fernando’s body creaked like the cot as he dragged himself out of it. His grandmother harried him, imploring him not to get up, telling him he needed to lie still and rest. Fernando brushed her off. He knew that if he lay here any longer in this bed he might never get out of it.

Fernando lost track of the days in his convalescence. In the gloom of the hut day and night seemed to meld together, shadow for eclipsing shadow. Eventually, Chico and the others came to visit him. Whether they had spent the intervening time mustering up the nerve to cross the witch’s threshold, or bracing themselves for

IV Fernando watched the shadows play over the clapboard walls, chinked with cracked clay, packed with moss and palm floss. In the flicker of the oil lamp, the shadows bent and twisted, undulating salacious and sinister over the racks of dried herbs, the grubby tallow candles, the rough-hewn shelves of bones and beads and carved

Fernando didn’t have long to wait. He was out smoking on the crumbling, graffitied overlook, surveying the motley sprawl of Cortez old and new, when Pedro’s crew-cab truck drew up beside him. Pablo sat in the backseat. Their looks were sober, grim. “Primo,” Pedro said. Fernando nodded to him. Crushing out his cigarette beneath his

It was one of Lalo’s guys who first alerted him to the trouble. Fernando followed him downstairs, weaving after him along the broad path he cut through the seething torrent of the crowd. Fernando went out back to find himself pitched headlong into a scene of scandalous turmoil. In addition to Lalo, Fernando saw that