Vampires of El Norte

by Isabel Cañas

Duérmete, niño, Duérmete ya, Que viene el Coco Y te comerá

He was looking directly into her eyes. It was too familiar. Too intimate. “Buenas,” he said softly. Without breaking eye contact, she shut the door in his face.

From the day he left Los Ojuelos, a part of him knew that his life was now a game of second bests. Of good-enoughs. A meager harvest grown in the long shadow of her absence.

“To you, Nena died. To her, you left. Those are two very different griefs.”

“Strangers address me as Magdalena. Vaqueros may call me señorita, or better yet, say nothing to me at all. Understood?”

He could survive on the scraps from her table—had he not spent the last nine years starving? Anything she gave him now was a bounty. It would be fine.

For a moment, his world was her dark lashes, the curve of her nose, her cheek. Loose wisps of her hair tickling his skin. Then he shut his eyes. Her lips were impossibly soft. Her skin smelled like sunshine, like her, like home.

He lingered there, just for a moment, a hair’s breadth from her lips, from her honey skin, to memorize every part of her. He pressed his lips to hers.

She wanted to hold his hand in the night, as if he were a talisman against the darkness. He was a talisman. He was rich with magic she couldn’t understand, a key to a part of herself that had been dead for a long, long time. To her, he was worth more than he knew. He wasn’t a vaquero. He was Néstor. He was hers. It was folly for either of them to pretend otherwise.

He knew exactly what he wanted. He meant to marry her. To build a house for her and make a home with her. To fall asleep smelling wildflower soap in her hair every night for the rest of his life,