Julian #3
“Isi—” I stop dead in my tracks.
He’s sitting on the stairs by the chapel’s entrance as the sun illuminates his dark hair.
The hourglass with the black sand is in his hand, specks softly trickling down from the top half to the bottom one.
His head is tipped back, eyes locked on the sand as if he can see each stone separately. He looks lost in thought.
What is so important about this object? There’s a story behind it, I can tell.
“You never said who gifted you the hourglass. Just that it was a dear friend,” I say once I’m a few feet away and he still hasn’t noticed me.
His eyes lift from the pretty thing, reflections flicking in them as they take me in. He stands slowly and stretches, cracking his bones.
“How long have you been sitting here?” I venture to ask, raising an eyebrow as he tries and fails to smooth out a fold from his pants.
“I came here after the video call.” He cocks his head, considering that. “I was waiting for you, though it seems I might have lost track of time.” He strokes his stomach, then carefully ghosts over his injured side. “I must feed soon.”
He was waiting for me… A sweet tingling starts at the base of my spine, quickly growing into a pulsating ball inside my stomach. Did he spend the entire day out here? Just sitting and waiting to hear from me?
His eyes narrow, flooded with something dark and dangerous. “What is it, Julian? Why are you looking at me like that?”
Like what, I want to ask but don’t dare to, already mesmerized by the deliberate shift in his attention, in the way I become the center of it while everything else is forgotten.
“I… We cracked the code. We’ll have a location soon, and we believe it might be their hub. They run the whole thing from there, if we go by the files that Ria’s father kept in that hidden folder.”
“Impressive. I confess, part of me expected you’d try to sabotage the investigation, but you have been so pivotal to it.”
I blush a little as air struggles to make it to my lungs, my inhales coming in too quickly. “I said that you wouldn’t be able to do this without me, didn’t I? I wasn’t joking.”
He smiles, a slow and intentional lift of his lips that makes the sun pale in comparison. “Perhaps you make a far better consort than prisoner.”
I roll my eyes. “Fuck you.”
He arches an eyebrow, an impish glow swimming in his eyes. “If you insist. It flatters me that you crave me again already.”
Oh my god. He’s so full of it! It’s so infuriating!
I stomp my foot and huff. “Technically, you were the one who came onto me. Twice, if I may add.”
His smile is heart-stopping. “Join me?” he says, hand indicating the chapel.
He’s hedging, how typical. But I let it slide anyway, curious what’s special about this falling-apart building and why it hasn’t been renovated.
The inside is musky and damp, painted red and yellow as light filters in through the stained-glass windows. The left side of the pews is missing entirely, replaced by a cave-in and dark, muddy water.
“What is this place?” I say, glancing over the rim of the hole. It looks deep, and it seems to narrow the further down it goes. It kind of reminds me of that well in El Paso.
“A place of worship, as you can see,” Isidoro says, sitting on the crumbling altar. He places the hourglass down and stretches his arms behind him, sprawling fingers across the gray stone as he puts his weight on his lean limbs.
The sunrays, fractured by the colorful glass, encase him as he looks up at the painted dome, his translucent skin absorbing the light until its hue shifts to what it might have been were he human.
I remain by the water, not daring to impose on such a heavenly creature.
“The hourglass was a gift from an old friend. Handmade and very precious. She died here, right where you’re standing, on the day your father took the crown.
We were inside this chapel playing while my parents tended to guests, unaware what was about to take place.
There was an explosion and the floor under us gave.
The pews pinned us down, breaking apart as the water dragged us deeper.
The supporting beam”—he points at the space above my head, where a column and woodwork is missing—“broke, piercing my friend right through the heart. I couldn’t help her.
I couldn’t see anything, not up nor down, only mud and pieces of wood and stone as I got trapped under the debris.
Suffocation came shortly after the panic of losing her took me.
She was Samuel’s sister, and if not for him, I would still be at the bottom of that hole.
I just wish he would’ve come a minute sooner, so maybe she’d still be alive. ”
What do you say to this? What can you say? Vampires can’t drown, but that doesn’t mean we don’t feel the pain of it. Endlessly, every excruciating second stretching without a way to make it end.
My mind flashes back to the well in El Paso, to Isidoro threading that muddy water, arms flailing, legs kicking, mouth screaming without a voice.
My heart squeezes in pain as I look back at him in the present.
He looks untouchable. A fragile but deadly thing that I can’t reach.
A lonely man with no one to comfort him.
So open, so vulnerable. I doubt he shows that side to anyone because it could kill him.
Anyone but me.
My throat constricts, too tight to bring enough oxygen to my madly pumping heart. Why is he telling me this? Why does he trust me not to use it against him? And why does it hurt hearing it?
“I’m sorry,” I mutter, my heart bleeding from an invisible wound.
He chuckles. “Why do you apologize, Julian? This is all in the past, long before you were even born. None of it was your fault.”
That may be so, but I had no idea he carried something like this when I dragged him down that well in the desert.
“It felt like the right thing to say.” I avert my eyes, flooded by this uncontrollable need to touch him. To rake my hand through his hair, to stroke his cheek, to gather him in my arms, to make sure he doesn’t have to face such a thing alone ever again.
He hops down, and a heartbeat later, he’s next to me, his gaze all-seeing and threatening to expose my turbulent thoughts. “There is no right nor wrong. It’s a concept created to serve those who know how to take advantage of it.”