I clutched the pouch of ruda. I kept walking.
The path narrowed until my shoulders scraped the rock on both sides. The wind began to whistle, not like air through a canyon, but like a voice trying to remember a melody. That’s when I saw the stakes. Hundreds of them. Wooden posts driven into the fissures of the rock, each one wrapped in a faded ribbon—red, blue, yellow. Some had scraps of cloth, others had photographs, rain-bleached and curling. Each stake was a soul. Each ribbon was a promise the Devil had collected. La Ruta del Diablo
It leaned close. I felt its breath on my neck—cold, then hot, then cold again. And it whispered, not in Lucia’s voice anymore, but in its own. A voice like splintering wood. I clutched the pouch of ruda
That’s when the knocking started.