Delia fell silent for a moment upon hearing that baritone voice say something that made her heart pound.
And just as Delia felt the breath on her neck turn into something more intimate…
THUD!
The sound of a book falling from the table.
Delia jolted awake.
Her eyes darted around.
Chair.
Steel table.
White spotlight.
Laptop screen dead from inactivity.
Hassan’s Jar standing motionless before her.
She realized she was in the Everette Museum research room.
Delia blinked several times.
Breathed in.
One, two, three.
Her hands gripped the table’s edge to confirm this was real, that the surface she touched was cold steel, not warm sand.
Steel.
Cold.
Real!
She fell asleep?!
In the research room?!
In front of the jar Alexander had warned her about…
Delia stood up too quickly and nearly bumped into her own table.
In the darkest corner of the room, where no spotlight reached, a pair of blood-red eyes observed.
Alexander had been here for twenty minutes.
Entering through a route that did not involve the door, a privilege he did not need to explain to anyone.
Alexander saw everything…
Delia’s chair shifting closer to the jar without her noticing.
Delia’s hand touching that dark blue gemstone.
Delia’s eyelids descending in a way Alexander recognized not as ordinary drowsiness but as something far more specific and far more unsettling.
Alexander could have broken the spell right then.
One movement, one short incantation, and Hassan’s influence beginning to root itself in Delia’s consciousness would have been cleanly severed.
But Alexander did not move.
Because there was something he needed to observe very carefully during those twenty minutes, not just Delia’s changing expressions in her sleep, not just how her body responded to the magic working on her.
But how the ruby on his own chest reacted.
Glowing.
Very faintly, nearly invisible, but Alexander felt it, a warm pulse that did not come from himself.
Like something resonating through the blood contract connecting him and Delia, transmitting part of what Delia felt in that dream directly into his own veins.
And that was what made Alexander stay silent.
Not because he did not care.
But because the information he received from that resonance made him rethink something he had kept tightly sealed since the first night he read the text on Hassan’s Jar.
Something he had not told Delia.
Something that, if Delia knew, she might not have so easily kept her distance from that jar.
Delia, now awake and standing with a face half-confused and half-panicked, did not realize anyone was in that corner.
Alexander observed her from the shadows.
The ruby on his chest still pulsed faintly.
Warm.
With a frequency that was not his.
His lips moved without sound.
In a language he had not used in hundreds of years because no one understood it and no one needed to, until that full moon night, until a girl with accidental blood entered the wrong coffin and changed everything.
“You must not meet him, Delia…” “Not yet…” “Not before I know why this resonance feels like what I once read in records that should have no relevance to us…” Alexander’s whispers sounded like gusts of wind.
Before him, Delia tidied her hair with slightly trembling hands, closed her laptop, and grabbed her bag with steps faster than usual.
Leaving the room without looking back.
Alexander waited until her footsteps faded down the hallway.
Then his gaze shifted to Hassan’s Jar, standing motionless under the spotlight.
The dark blue gemstone reflected the light calmly.
But Alexander knew in a way only a creature old enough to learn the difference between empty silence and waiting silence, that nothing was calm inside that jar.
“Hassan,” he said softly, in the same language used by the Nabataean text.
His tone was not a threat.
Not a warning.
More like two parties acknowledging each other’s existence.
“We need to talk.” Hassan’s Jar did not move.
Of course not!
It was an antique jar with an intact red wax seal, standing on a steel table under a museum spotlight that knew nothing of the conversation beginning in its room.
But Alexander waited.
Because a creature nearly a thousand years old had learned that silence was not always absence.
Silence could be the most honest form of communication, more honest than words, clearer than movement.
And the silence filling this research room after Alexander spoke that name was not empty silence.
It was silence that listened.
Alexander pulled out the chair Delia had been sitting in.
Turned it.
Sat before the jar in the manner of someone preparing for a long conversation, back straight, elbows on knees, unblinking red eyes fixed on the dark blue gemstone at the jar’s shoulder.
“I know you can hear me,” he said, this time in a more modern language.
“The physical seal holds your body.
But no seal has ever fully contained a Jinn’s consciousness, as long as a human touches your jar from that close.” The dark blue gemstone glowed.
Very faintly.
Very briefly.
But enough.
Alexander nodded slowly.
“Good.
We don’t need to pretend.” What followed was not an ordinary conversation.
No sound came from the jar.
No mouth moved, no words formed audibly.
But Alexander received it through a channel that did not involve ears, closer to how the ruby on his chest resonated with the blood contract connecting him to Delia, but different.
Older.
Wider.
And what Alexander received in the following three minutes made him sit even straighter than his already very straight posture.
Hassan was not a name chosen by humans to identify the jar’s contents.
Hassan was his own name, the one he carried from an era when the desert now having names and borders on maps still had neither.
A name given by his mother, an elderly Jinniah whose power had long faded into the desert wind, leaving behind nothing except the name of her only child.
Hassan was a Jinn who grew up between two worlds, powerful enough to be feared, different enough to be rejected.
Among his own kind, his charm power was considered too uncontrollable, too unpredictable.
Among humans, he was the story parents used to frighten children who ventured too close to the desert at night.
And between them both, Hassan lived in a way that had no equivalent in any language.
Loneliness was not enough of a word, solitude too poetic, and emptiness too dramatic.
He simply…
waited.
Without knowing with certainty what he was waiting for.
Until those noble daughters came, one by one, from various kingdoms, across various centuries.
Drawn by his power, enchanted by what they imagined about him, and falling under his influence without resistance.
Hassan let them all go.
Not because he could not keep them.
But because what he found in every encounter was always the same, they did not choose him.
They chose the idea of him.
They chose adventure, magic, and power they could borrow by being near him.
They chose everything except the actual figure standing before them.
And Hassan, for all his power that made ancient kings tremble and experienced shamans choose to lock themselves indoors when the desert wind moved in certain ways, did not know how to make someone choose him genuinely.
So he stopped trying.
And let himself be sealed.
Because a dark jar with a tight seal did not feel much different from how he had lived for centuries.
He had always been alone inside something he could not leave even when the door was open.
Alexander was silent for a long while after receiving all of that.
Outside the room, the museum was growing quiet.
The world continued moving, knowing nothing.
“How long have you been inside that jar?” Alexander finally asked.
The answer he received was not a number.
More like…
very long.
Long enough to stop counting.
Alexander nodded.
He understood that concept better than he wanted to admit.
“The girl earlier,” Alexander said.
His tone shifted, more careful.
“You used your charm power on her.”