Page 117 of Espíritu

Yadriel drew his portaje. Gold light danced along the blade’s edge. “I’ll go first.”

“No, I’ve got it,” Julian answered, already stepping in. “He’s my—He’s Luca.”

Yadriel hesitated but nodded, falling in behind him. Maritza took the back, jaw set.

Julian curled his fingers around his St. Jude medal, thumb finding the worn edge. “Keep us safe, old man,” he muttered. Then he swung his feet onto the narrow steps and started down.

The staircase corkscrewed into the earth. Stone sweated against Julian’s shoulder as he kept one hand on the wall, the other tight on the medal. The portaje’s glow threw their shadows long and warped. Dust hung in the air like ash. With each turn, the air cooled and the pulse from below grew steadier—blue light ghosting up the shaft in thin breaths, every so often veined with a sickly green flicker.

The steps flattened. Julian stepped off into open space.

The floor leveled into a cavernous chamber carved from earth and stone, old air pressing close. Faded pictographs lined the tomb walls—jaguar, serpent, skull—stories etched into dirt that remembered.

Julian’s stomach turned. This was where he’d died.

He felt the echo of a slab against his shoulder, Yadriel’s panicked prayers, the ringing scrape of obsidian on stone, the silence that had followed—and shoved it down. Not now.

“Lights,” Maritza whispered, nudging him.

Several candles were already burning, puddles of fresh wax webbing their bases. Someone had been there. Recently.

Julian’s eyes snapped to the cenote.

The glowing pool in the center of the cavern pulsed faintly blue, veins of light rippling up the carved altar stones where jaguar heads jutted. The glyph of Bahlam. Every few breaths, that blue shivered and a thin, sickly green bled along the seams of the glow, as if something deeper were exhaling.

A swell of light rolled up from the cenote and caught Angel full on. They stood at the edge of the cenote, one hand clamped around Luca’s upper arm, the other gripping their obsidian dagger that drank the glow.

For a heartbeat, Julian thought the shadow at their throat was just the angle—then the light brightened, and something bloomed under their sternum.

Julian’s mind rejected it, then snapped to it like a magnet. Ink pooled beneath Angel’s skin right over their heart, the edges limned with a thin, sickly green that flickered whenever the cenote exhaled.

A Marca Hueca.

Angel didn’t move. Their back was rigid, shoulders locked, the dagger steady in their fist as the green bled at the edges of the mark like rot finding new veins.

Luca flinched when the blade twitched in Angel’s hand, sneakers skidding on wet stone. His free hand flew to his chest, pressing hard over his own Marca Hueca like he could hold himself in place.

“Jules,” he whimpered, voice cracking. “Please—help me.”

Julian took a step forward, fists clenched so tight his nails bit into his palms.

“Angel,” Julian said, voice steady but hoarse, “what are you doing?”

“Don’t come any closer,” Angel warned. “I mean it.”

Yadriel shifted to Julian’s left, portaje low, golden light veining the blade. “We’re not here to fight,” he said.

“You should’ve stayed outta this,” Angel said, voice shaking. “It’s not your business.”

“Luca is my business,” Julian shot back, taking another careful step.

The cenote’s blue made their face look carved. The green at the edges of their mark flared, then dimmed as they looked at Julian. For a heartbeat, they just breathed—like a kid caught somewhere they shouldn’t be.

Julian had seen that color twice tonight—the sick green threading the cracked wards, the flicker ghosting up the stairwell from the cenote—and now it licked the edges of Angel’s wound.

This wasn’t just grief curdled into bad choices. Bahlam had found the tear in them and was breathing through it. A Marca Hueca as a door. No wonder they kept orbiting this place—every pulse from the water tugged their strings. If Luca’s mark was a bruise, Angel’s was a hook.

He couldn’t pretend they weren’t dangerous—but he couldn’t pretend they were entirely themself, either.