SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

“Carlos.” The man startles at his mother’s voice. “Do you still want to marry Silvia?”

He nods silently, clutching my sister close to him. The two of them are still shaking, trembling together like a pair of rabbits.

“But there’s no baby!” protests Ma’am Margarita. “What’s the use of a marriage—”

Ma’am Loretta slaps her across the face. The sound echoes across the room, followed by shocked silence.

Tears begin to leak from my sister’s dull eyes. Silvia wanted this baby more than anything, I realize. She wanted it because it was his, because she loves him. And because he loves her. And Ma’am Loretta knows that.

Ma’am Loretta snaps her fingers and looks straight at me. “Tin, come here.” I detach myself from the wall, ignoring the American ma’ams. “Make sure you retrieve the arrhae tomorrow, as planned. We must have it for a proper Calderone wedding.”

“Yes, Ma’am Loretta,” I murmur, bobbing my head and excusing myself from the room.

As the matriarch’s daughters begin to scream at each other, I slip into Ma’am Margarita’s room for just a moment. Glancing over my shoulder, I steal one of her Valiums from the bottle atop her nightstand, hiding it in my blouse pocket. A dark, ugly rage burns in my heart. If things are to go as I’ve planned, I’ll need all the sleep I can get tonight.

“I’m sorry,” I tell the dead god, as soon as it appears in my dreams that night. “I want to make this right.” I glance down. “Between us, and for my sister.”

The dead god sighs, the whistle of wind through bone. I’m sorry, too. It was unfair of me to blame you completely. The manananggal tricked you. There was no way you could have known.

“It was still my fault,” I mumble. “It’s my fault her baby’s dead.”

Smooth, paint-tipped fingers touch my face. Do not say that, the dead god tells me sternly. You did not call the manananggal on purpose. The fault lies not with you, but with it. Besides, there’s a reason your ancestors made a pact with me. Neither of us alone can protect your family, but together we have a fighting chance.

I grip the dead god’s wrist. “I know. That’s why I want to make a pact with you and receive your boon.” I breathe in the dead god’s scent, sampaguitas and rot and ash. It is not so different from the scent that once lingered on Ma’am Loretta’s altar of saints. “I want a new child. For my sister.”

The dead god stills. If I do that, the child will be mine, it says finally. She will bear my mark and be your heir. And once the mark is passed, I cannot choose another heir, until the death of the next designated.

“I know.”

The dead god’s voice sounds almost gentle. If you pledge Silvia’s daughter to me, your own children will never fly free through the night air. They will never feel the dread and thrill of the transformation, nor see the sacred groves of your mother’s line.

I think of my sister, screaming and bleeding on the bathroom floor, tearing her hair out and battering her hands on the burning tile. Sir Carlos’s determination to marry her even without the child, the fierce, protective way he cradled her on the couch, days after the accident, the gentleness of his fingers as he stroked her hair. Her radiant face, only weeks before, as the dressmaker measured her for her wedding gown. They would surely be able to love such a child as one marked by the dead god. Who could provide better for a daughter like that? Like me?

“My sister wishes for a child,” I say quietly. “I will pledge myself to you, if you give her a daughter to replace the one she lost. You may mark her, but she must be healthy. And you must bless their household, too.”

This I can do. The dead god presses a cold, stinging kiss to my forehead, and begins to shrink, paint flecks and sampaguita wreaths dropping to the ground around our feet. Soon it is a tiny black chick, small enough to fit in my hand. As I scoop it up in my palms and bring it to my face, it whispers to me, We will look after them together. I promise.

I blink tears away. “Thank you po ,” I whisper back.

The black chick pecks at my lips, and I open my mouth to swallow the dead god whole.

With the weight of a god in my stomach and a pouch of a cremated saint’s ashes in my purse, the latter scavenged from the ruins of the Calderone house, I chase the hum in my head through dreamland.

It won’t be long now, says the dead god. My right arm burns with power. We fly together toward Capiz, a single, many-winged shadow passing over the water. I can smell my brother’s curse already.

“The kapre is your brother?” I ask it. “Is he also a god?”

It laughs in reply, the black ruff of feathers around our neck rippling in sea breeze. Aren’t we all.

The dead god is with me always now, as I am with it. The night is our passage, and dreams a current to human reality. Soon, we reach the end of the sea and the verdant shores of the central isles south of Manila. The hum in my head is so intense that my teeth hurt. We’re close.

Together, the dead god and I land our body in a forest of banana trees, the leaves muttering overhead in the wind. A figure unfolds from a nearby trunk, limbed like a man, but over eight feet tall, and the color of pitch. When he sees us, however, he merely watches us, pointing a long finger toward a clump of trees to the left.

We bow to the kapre , and trek in the direction he indicated, our bones rattling with each step. The dead god whispers, Makikiraan po , as we pass through, and I see the kapre incline his head before vanishing back into the trees.

Too soon, we find what we’ve been looking for.

“Let me do this myself,” I tell the dead god.

It obliges, pulling back and leaving me with full control over our shared body.

I sift through my purse for the bag of ash, and step up to the manananggal’s severed waist and legs, which stand on their own, concealed in the shadows of the banana grove, like a small tree growing in the shade of its elders. But I know these legs, the right one twisted and roped in scars.

Popping the corner of the plastic bag open, I drizzle the ash carefully over the manananggal’s lower half, coating the raw meat and exposed bone in white, powdered saints. Once the bag is empty, I step back, and we hide in the trees, waiting.

The sun is a sliver of orange, just cresting the horizon, when the rest of the manananggal returns. Its leathery wings flog the air, as it maneuvers itself down toward its standing lower half, its long black hair flapping around it.

But the moment its torso touches the ash, the manananggal screams and tumbles to the ground, its legs crumbling to dust around it. As the manananggal gapes and drags its hands through the remains of its ruined legs, the dead god and I step forward as one.

I wave my right hand, and the dead god’s feathers and beak recede, to reveal my face.

“Tin?” gasps Rodante. “What are you doing—”

“How dare you.” I flick my right hand, and black feathers slice down through his arms. Power hums in me, intoxicating, dreadful. He screams again. “How dare you use me to hurt my family. How dare you touch my sister. How dare you use me at all!”

“Tin, stop!” he begs, crawling toward me. “I didn’t know she was your sister. Please, Tin, I love you!”

I slash through his wings, until the dead god pulls our body away, saying, Enough .

The dead god may be old, but it is wrong this time. It will never be enough.