“How?”
“How much has Al told you about our mom--or who he likes to now call Dayanara?”
“He hasn’t said much.”
Sticking his thumb in his mouth, Hex gestured to his studio. “Then let’s go over there. I’m sure you’ll want a drink after I tell you this.”
We walked toward his studio, putting the fire and craziness behind us.
“My mom was always crazy. Al tries to convince me that it was my dad who made her that way, but it’s not true. I think that maybe Al’s father kept our mother’s mental episodes away from him. Once Al’s dad died, she lost it, and started practicing corazón muerto, but she didn’t have my grandma in the states to guide her on the right way to serve their gods. Instead, she spent her free time around the wrong practitioners, evil ones. My dad belonged to that group, and later they married.”
We arrived at the door. He held it open for me.
“Okay, so this curse has something to do with your mother and father?” I asked.
“Yes. My dad feared death. I mean everybody does, but he was obsessed with the possibility that no afterlife would be there for him. That it would all just end with darkness. So he searched for spells to make him immortal.”
“That’s insane. There’s nothing out there that can make you immortal.”
“Anything is possible, Elle. Anything. If enough is sacrificed.” Hex stepped over to a small black cabinet behind his biggest sculptures, opened it to reveal a few bottles of red wine, and pulled them out. “Forgive me. We’ll have to drink these from paper cups. Like I said, I usually don’t drink a lot because it’s hard for me to stop once I start.”
“Cups are fine.”
He grabbed two from the sink, filled them, and handed mine to me. “My father found one spell that involved killing many people.”
“Excuse me?” I froze right there with my cup right next to my lips. “Are you telling me that your father killed a lot of people?”
“Yes. My mom and dad did it together.” He moved my cup to my lips. “You may want to drink for the rest of the stuff I have to tell you.”
“Good idea.” I took a huge gulp.
“When Al was home, they hadn’t even found the spell yet. Not that Dad would have done it around him. Al and Dad argued all the time. Al thought he was an evil bastard. Dad just never accepted Al as his own kid. Plus, he beat him and Mom whenever Al did anything wrong. For whatever reason, Dad never touched me. Once Al got older, bigger, and way taller than Dad, the beatings stopped, but there was always this huge tension in the house whenever they argued, like if they were to go after each other, one of them wouldn’t be alive in the end.”
“You really think it was that bad?”
“Al or Dad would have killed each other if they’d had the chance. I have no doubt about that.” Hex poured some more wine in my cup, even though I wasn’t finished. “So once Al left for the navy, things changed a whole lot. Dad found a curse to make him immortal and it was all he talked about to my mom. I would sneak and put my head next to their bedroom to listen to their conversations. The spell called for several sacrifices to their gods. Donalito is kind of the head god. He is the creator of the universe where all of the other gods and goddesses live. So my dad tells my mom that Donalito demanded ten female hearts on a night of a full moon in order to gift them with immortality. So a good year after Al left my dad and mom searched the city, kidnapped ten different women, young and old. And when the full moon came, they killed them all one by one in front of me, right under the moonlight.”
“Ten?” The wine went down hard. My fingers trembled at the very thought of someone killing that many people so brutally. “They killed ten people?”
“Yes. My dad did most of it. Once he started my mom tried to stop him several times, but he locked her up in the bathroom.”
“But she helped him kidnap them?”
“Yeah.” He poured himself another glass. “But when it came down to the actual killing part she couldn’t do it. And she hated the fact that he wanted me to witness the spell so that one day I could do it for myself. She hated having me involved in anyway.”
I finished my cup. “Could you pour me another one?”
“Sure.” He did. That time he filled my cup all the way to the rim. “When they first kidnapped the women, I would sneak them food and water. Dad kept them locked in this big metal shed behind the house. We lived far out in the Redlands where our closest neighbor was several miles away and nothing but farmland could hear their screams. At the back of the shed was a crack that was big enough to fit my hand through. Every day I would spend hours sawing at that crack and trying to make it bigger so they could escape.”