The voice grew clearer. “Papi, it’s dark. I’m scared. Come find me.” It was perfect. The tremor in her lip, the way she swallowed the last vowel. A grown man could not have mimicked it. But the Devil doesn’t need to mimic. He just reaches into your mind and pulls out the thing you love most .

I ran. I don’t remember the rocks or the roots or the dark. I just remember the sound behind me—not footsteps, but the skittering of something that didn’t need to walk, something that slid between the cracks in the world. I burst out of the trailhead just as the moon broke over the valley. The chapel of San Miguel had crumbled completely behind me, as if it had been falling for a hundred years and only now hit the ground.

Lucia’s voice. Small, scared, coming from just around the next bend. “Papi?”

Don Celestino gave me a small leather pouch of ruda and iron filings. “Her passenger is just a fragment,” he said. “A stray piece of shadow she picked up like a burr. But to remove it, you need to cut it at the source. You need to walk the Ruta, find the place where her shadow broke off, and retrieve it before the Three Knocks.”

I walked faster.

I didn’t turn. I didn’t call out. I just closed my fingers around the black thread and pulled.