Chapter 1 #4
As she reached the landing, Esme saw flickering light coming from the passages ahead, and saw someone had lit the old wooden torches that had been there strictly for show.
The storage room lay just a few yards away in an unlit hall, but Esme couldn’t resist following the torchlights to see why they had been lit.
Had Beaumont staged some sort of surprise for everyone?
Why would he put it on the sublevel and then tell everyone to stay on the first floor?
Something is going on that he didn’t tell anyone about tonight.
The air grew chilly as she stopped in front of a passage she didn’t recognize; dimly she recalled there had been a solid wall of stone blocks there.
Cautiously she retreated, and took out her second phone to snap a quick picture.
As she did she saw a shimmer appear in the air, as if the stone floor had grown as hot as a road in midsummer.
She took a snap of that distortion, and then checked the pic to see if the camera had captured it.
Although she was tempted to go closer, instead she retreated, making her way from the newly lit passage to the dark hall containing the storage room.
The door creaked as Esme opened it, making her wince, but once inside the little room she closed the door and switched on her phone light.
The room had been emptied of cleaning supplies, and nothing new had been stored inside, but the portrait of the warrior remained intact on the back wall.
A new layer of dust covered the faded brushstrokes, but otherwise the portrait remained unaltered.
He looked even more attractive than she remembered, large, muscular and intensely masculine.
Those big dark eyes appeared filled with such longing her throat tightened in response.
“Hey, mi vida,” she whispered, walking up to him as she took a tissue from her pocket and used it to carefully whisk away the dust covering the painting.
“You remember me, right? I’m Esmerina, Carmen’s granddaughter.
I used to come and make puppy eyes at you when I was a little girl. You’re just as handsome as ever.”
Talking to a painting as if it were alive definitely qualified as crazy, and yet something about him seemed terribly familiar to her now.
Esme couldn’t shake the sense that she knew this man, which was impossible, of course—or maybe it was the style of the painting.
She’d done a portrait very much like it of a friend in college; perhaps remembering the warrior.
Whoever had painted his likeness on the wall in the twelfth century was dust along with him.
The only reason it had survived this long was because the room was small and probably only rarely used.
“Plenty has happened since the last time I saw you,” Esme told him as she snapped several pics of the portrait.
“I grew up and went to college, and now I’m a journalist. My poor abuela got cancer, but I was with her until she went to heaven to be with my abuelo, mama and papi.
I’m not married and I don’t have a boyfriend.
So, you want to tell me what you’ve been doing all these years? Because I never forgot you, mi vida.”
Admitting to herself that she had fallen in love with a painting she had only seen as a child was ridiculous, but also true.
She loved the dream of this big man, and how it seemed to her that he could say so much without uttering a word.
His eyes told her that he ached, just as she did, as if he could see her through the portrait and wanted to reach out and touch her.
Perhaps he looked like that because he’d been just as lonely in his time as she was in hers.
Even with her large family she had no one she could really talk to about the things that troubled her; maybe he’d had the same problem.
Then there was just her physical reaction to him, purely as a woman to a man.
She could imagine him drawing her into his arms, and giving her the most wonderful kiss of her life, and then…
None of that would happen because he’s just a painting.
Esme suspected he had set an impossible ideal for her that she had never been able to attain in real life.
She’d dated in college, and a few times since her grandmother had passed away; her aunts still tried to fix her up with the sons of their friends.
Despite that, no guy had ever once touched her heart like the warrior did.
If he had been a real man, then he had died in the twelfth century.
Her crush on him could never come to anything.
“Maybe I should try that dating app,” she murmured, sighing as she reached out to touch the wall just beside the portrait.
“My college friend Rosa from San Jose is dating a really cute physics professor she met through that one.” As soon as her fingers brushed the cold stone she experienced a tiny jolt, as if she’d been shocked by something.
“Now you give me static, mi vida. Don’t do that.
Just tell me, how am I ever going to find a man as handsome as you? ”
Esme took a few more pics, and then walked out of the room, carefully closing the door before she started back toward the lit passage.
“I’ll check out that app as soon as I get home, Abuela,” she promised Carmen, who was probably shaking her finger at her from heaven.
“It’s not like I can go and see a matchmaker like you did so papi could meet mama.
No Chicano boy would want a girlfriend like me.
I’d have more luck with our homeboy warrior. ”
For some reason, that made her giggle at herself, and she brought up her hand to stifle the sound as she blindly turned the next corner, which turned out to be the entrance to the torchlit passage.
The air at the other end of the hall still shimmered, but Esme decided to head upstairs, as security was probably looking for her.
She lifted her phone to tuck it into her blouse, and saw a big gold spider in place of her badge on her lapel.
She shrieked and tried to swat it off her jacket, but the arachnid jumped onto her sleeve.
It then reared up and flashed enormous blood-red fangs, as if it meant to bite her.
Esme screamed her head off as she careened into the nearest wall, bouncing against it and her arm. A metallic crunching sound came from the spider, which looked flattened but still held onto her as she pulled back to look at it.
“Ayuda!” She shook her arm, and even swiped her phone at the spider several times as she staggered toward the stairs.
Only when she looked up she was headed in the wrong direction, with the shimmer coming at her just as the spider puffed up and bared its fangs again.
That made her scream and run through the shimmer and into another wall, where she hit her arm and her face, and tasted blood in her mouth.
“I’m bleeding?” Esme swiped at her throbbing lip and stared at the blood on her palm before she peered at the spider, which looked squashed again but still hung onto her sleeve. “You see what you made me do, you horrible thing?”
The arachnid puffed up again, making her want to tear off her clothes and fling them away. This time she had enough sense to use her phone to scrape off the golden bug before it bit her. She then ran as fast as she could to the big figure of a man hurrying out of the shadows toward her.
“Don’t go over there,” she begged as she cowered behind him, clutching his sleeves and pressing her cheek against his broad, hard back.
The scent of aromatic wood filled her head, and comforted her a little.
She knew on some level that she was speaking in Spanish, not English, but she couldn’t think clearly with all the terror still gripping her.
“I think that badge they made me wear turned into a huge spider that wouldn’t let go of me.
It’s as big as my fist, I swear to you.”
The man turned and swung her up into his arms before he ran with her back into the shadows.