The Crossings by Jack Ketchum

reason to watch our backs. Hart nodded toward the settlement.
    "You see your sister anywhere in there?"
    "Yes. In the last group, over toward the hacienda. Celine is the one in white."
    "I see her."
    I spotted her too. A pretty girl of about fifteen or sixteen in a frayed white slip and camisole. I couldn't quite make out the look on her face from this distance whether strong or frightened though I tried. I seemed to want to know what the other half of this family was made of.
    "You got anything on your mind at all about how we're gonna do this, Hart?" said Mother. "I mean, we can't just walk in and kick 'em all in the jewels, elegant though that was."
    "Thank you, Mother. I got a notion might work."
    We never did get to know what that was though because at just that moment the crowd went unexpectedly silent and we saw the doors to the hacienda open and walking through those doors — no, gliding through those doors like some Mexic witch on a broomstick was maybe the oldest woman I'd ever seen outside of a sickbed, a wild-haired grinning harridan draped in filmy white, long hanging breasts swaying back and forth beneath what she was wearing, a bleached skull crowning her head and her face painted in black streaks and circles over some dry clay-colored base. Eva . She carried a long black blade in front of her gripped in both hands. Its handle pointed toward the earth, its tip toward the sky.
    By its size she should not even have been able to lift it.
    The man behind her was painted too, a skull's face imposed over his own in stark black and white which gleamed in the flickering firelight. He was barechested and his chest and arms were massive. Around his waist he wore a belt of what appeared to be human bones. Humerus, radius, ulna. Around his neck, fangs or talons or both. I couldn't say.
    In one hand he held a heavy leather leash and at the end of it was a girl who might have been Celine's twin but for the large livid birthmark across her neck. Her dress was clean and white and looked new, a virgin's dress and she stumbled along behind him, her arms and face twitching on the razor's edge of some drug — pulque, mescal or some mix of their own devising, some powerful intoxicant.
    "Ryan," Elena said.
    "Christ on a crutch," Mother said. "Damned if it ain't. I'd never have known him."
    "I'd have known him," said Hart.
    For a moment all we heard was the crackling fires. Then the sisters began to chant. That same clicking, hissing tongue I'd heard Elena use only shrill this time. You thought of crickets dense in the still night air.
    "Their nahuatl ," she said. "Their prayer. The girl? The last time I saw her she was tied to a bed and screaming. I think her screams are over now."
    "This is what I think it is?"
    "Yes. To demonstrate obedience. To the sisters, to the old gods and the old ways. To show the buyers exactly what they are buying and what happens should they be fool enough to betray them."
    "Why this girl?"
    "I don't know. Probably she gave them trouble. Perhaps she was brave. Possibly she is not so valuable to them because of the mark."
    The other two sisters, Maria and pug-faced Lucia, fell in behind them chanting as Eva and Ryan marched the girl through the guards and buyers and up the hill which glowed at its summit and billowed tarry smoke. Even the roughnecks among the crowd looking sober now and silent. At the top he turned the girl so that she faced the crowd and unbuttoned the front of her dress and parted it and Eva handed her the long obsidian blade and shouted to the crowd.
    " For Tezcatlipoca! "
    The girl hesitated, gazing at the knife in her hands in a kind of dazed twitching horror and then Ryan stepped forward and whispered something in her ear and to this day I still cannot imagine what it possibly could have been which would make her face seem suddenly to melt into that expression of beaten-down indifference as she turned the blade toward her and held it there a moment and then plunged it into her