Chapter Eighteen. Julian
EIGHTEEN
JULIAN
Julian’s stomach plummeted. Everything inside him stilled—the air, the room, his thoughts.
“What?” he croaked, his voice barely audible.
Flaca sat up straighter, blinking. “They left like an hour ago.”
“He’s with Angel?” Julian said again, the words tasting like ash. “Where did they go?”
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “They didn’t say.”
Rocky picked up her phone, squinting at the screen. “He’s at the cemetery. They’re probably looking for you. See—”
But Julian didn’t need to see it.
There was only one place in the cemetery Angel would have taken Luca—the only place in the cemetery he never wanted to go back to.
The place he, Yadriel, and Maritza hadn’t set foot in since the night Catriz died. The place with a door to Xibalba.
The old church.
Julian didn’t think—he just ran.
He shouldered through the party and hit the sidewalk at a sprint, cold air burning his throat. Headlights cut across him as a car swung to the curb—Paola’s, the passenger window rolling down.
“Get in!” Maritza yelled from behind the wheel.
Julian dove into the seat, slamming the door.
Yadriel leaned over the console, face tight. “Seat belt.”
Maritza punched the gas.
“Tracker?” Yadriel asked, already bracing a hand on the dash.
Julian shoved his cracked phone at him, blue dot pulsing. “Back of the cemetery. By the old church.”
Maritza gripped the steering wheel tighter, eyes on the road.
They flew past blocks of twinkling porch lights and to the cemetery’s front gate. A few brujx lingered by the yellow church, stacking chairs and wrapping leftovers.
Yadriel ducked his head as they rolled past. “Keep going,” he murmured. “Don’t stop.”
Maritza killed the headlights near the back gate. “Let’s go,” she said, throwing the car into park.
They piled out into the cold. Julian didn’t wait. He took off down the gravel, Yadriel and Maritza pounding after him.
The deeper they ran into the cemetery, the quieter the city got. Sirens and dogs and music faded to a tight, unnatural hush.
The old church rose from the earth like a scar.
Wild vines strangled its crumbling stone walls. The patchwork masonry was mottled and cracked, and the crooked bell tower jutted skyward like a broken tooth. A few grave candles still flickered nearby, but the building stood cloaked in shadow.
Julian staggered to a halt, panting. “God, I hate this place.”
“It hates us right back,” Maritza muttered, steps faltering at the wrought iron fence. “We haven’t been here since—”
“I know,” Julian said, voice hoarse. “I remember.”
He forced himself forward. The short iron gate hung askew on one melted hinge. The smell hit them—scorched metal and rotting herbs.
“The wards,” Yadriel said grimly.
Carved along the stone lintel of the church’s doorway were old brujx sigils—protective glyphs shaped like serpents, jaguars, and skulls.
One was split down the middle by a jagged crack.
Another pulsed faintly with dying orange light, like a coal on the verge of going out.
And along the fissures, a thinner, sickly green thread pulsed.
Maritza reached toward the carvings, then pulled her hand back. “These were reinforced with obsidian dust and sacred oil. That should’ve held.”
Yadriel touched the fractured edge with two fingers. They came away gritty and black with soot.
“Obsidian,” he said. “Angel knew what they were doing. They came prepared.”
Julian took in the doorway. Vines had been ripped aside, and the wood along the jamb was scraped and scorched. “They didn’t sneak in,” he said. “They tore their way through.”
A gust of wind blew through the graveyard, carrying with it a breath of sulfur and something older—the heavy scents of wet stone, mildew, and incense left to rot. The church had been a place of reverence once.
Now it smelled like a wound.
Yadriel pushed the door open with the edge of his shoulder. It creaked wide, revealing the main sanctuary of the old church. The three of them slipped inside, boots scuffing against the cracked stone floor.
“Stay close,” he said.
The air was thick with dust and old incense, and something more sour beneath it—the scent of rot and time. Wild vines still clawed in through broken windows, curling around exposed beams like skeletal fingers. Cracked pews stood in crooked rows. Up ahead, the main altar loomed, cloaked in shadow.
Julian’s breath caught.
The tall gold candelabras still stood there, crowding the base of Lady Death’s statue.
Most of the candles had long burned out, their wax dripping like frozen tears across the floor.
This was where it had all gone wrong. Where Yadriel had tried to release Julian’s spirit—and failed.
Where Catriz had appeared. Where everything had changed.
The flickering memory bloomed behind Julian’s eyes. The sea of candlelight, Yadriel walking toward him, the flash of the obsidian dagger. His own breath ragged as he realized he wasn’t ready to die again.
He shook the thought off like a shiver and kept moving.
They passed the altar into the sacristy. Shadows pooled along the walls where an old desk sat askew. In the corner, the trapdoor gaped half-open, hinges blackened. From below came a damp exhale of air and, beneath it, a faint pulse like distant water knocking stone.
“Down there,” Julian said. His voice had gone flat. Focused.
Yadriel drew his portaje. Gold light danced along the blade’s edge. “I’ll go first.”
“No, I’ve got it,” Julian answered, already stepping in. “He’s my—He’s Luca.”
Yadriel hesitated but nodded, falling in behind him. Maritza took the back, jaw set.
Julian curled his fingers around his St. Jude medal, thumb finding the worn edge. “Keep us safe, old man,” he muttered. Then he swung his feet onto the narrow steps and started down.
The staircase corkscrewed into the earth.
Stone sweated against Julian’s shoulder as he kept one hand on the wall, the other tight on the medal.
The portaje’s glow threw their shadows long and warped.
Dust hung in the air like ash. With each turn, the air cooled and the pulse from below grew steadier—blue light ghosting up the shaft in thin breaths, every so often veined with a sickly green flicker.
The steps flattened. Julian stepped off into open space.
The floor leveled into a cavernous chamber carved from earth and stone, old air pressing close. Faded pictographs lined the tomb walls—jaguar, serpent, skull—stories etched into dirt that remembered.
Julian’s stomach turned. This was where he’d died.
He felt the echo of a slab against his shoulder, Yadriel’s panicked prayers, the ringing scrape of obsidian on stone, the silence that had followed—and shoved it down. Not now.
“Lights,” Maritza whispered, nudging him.
Several candles were already burning, puddles of fresh wax webbing their bases. Someone had been there. Recently.
Julian’s eyes snapped to the cenote.
The glowing pool in the center of the cavern pulsed faintly blue, veins of light rippling up the carved altar stones where jaguar heads jutted. The glyph of Bahlam. Every few breaths, that blue shivered and a thin, sickly green bled along the seams of the glow, as if something deeper were exhaling.
A swell of light rolled up from the cenote and caught Angel full on. They stood at the edge of the cenote, one hand clamped around Luca’s upper arm, the other gripping their obsidian dagger that drank the glow.
For a heartbeat, Julian thought the shadow at their throat was just the angle—then the light brightened, and something bloomed under their sternum.
Julian’s mind rejected it, then snapped to it like a magnet. Ink pooled beneath Angel’s skin right over their heart, the edges limned with a thin, sickly green that flickered whenever the cenote exhaled.
A Marca Hueca.
Angel didn’t move. Their back was rigid, shoulders locked, the dagger steady in their fist as the green bled at the edges of the mark like rot finding new veins.
Luca flinched when the blade twitched in Angel’s hand, sneakers skidding on wet stone. His free hand flew to his chest, pressing hard over his own Marca Hueca like he could hold himself in place.
“Jules,” he whimpered, voice cracking. “Please—help me.”
Julian took a step forward, fists clenched so tight his nails bit into his palms.
“Angel,” Julian said, voice steady but hoarse, “what are you doing?”
“Don’t come any closer,” Angel warned. “I mean it.”
Yadriel shifted to Julian’s left, portaje low, golden light veining the blade. “We’re not here to fight,” he said.
“You should’ve stayed outta this,” Angel said, voice shaking. “It’s not your business.”
“Luca is my business,” Julian shot back, taking another careful step.
The cenote’s blue made their face look carved. The green at the edges of their mark flared, then dimmed as they looked at Julian. For a heartbeat, they just breathed—like a kid caught somewhere they shouldn’t be.
Julian had seen that color twice tonight—the sick green threading the cracked wards, the flicker ghosting up the stairwell from the cenote—and now it licked the edges of Angel’s wound.
This wasn’t just grief curdled into bad choices. Bahlam had found the tear in them and was breathing through it. A Marca Hueca as a door. No wonder they kept orbiting this place—every pulse from the water tugged their strings. If Luca’s mark was a bruise, Angel’s was a hook.
He couldn’t pretend they weren’t dangerous—but he couldn’t pretend they were entirely themself, either.
Julian ran the options fast.
Yank Luca free, Angel would jerk. The knife and the water were too close. The only thing that seemed to soften them was when they looked at him and talked. He uncurled his fists, made himself breathe—four in, two hold, six out—and kept his hands where Angel could see them.
“Angel,” he said, softer now, “what did he promise you?”
Yadriel angled his portaje down until the gold barely showed. “Talk to us,” he murmured.
Angel’s throat worked. Their grip on Luca eased a fraction. The green at their mark thinned.