Beautiful Sacrifice

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

WHAT’S GOING ON?” LINA DEMANDED THE INSTANT the casita door shut behind them.

“Abuelita and Celia are waiting in my study,” Carlos said. “We will talk there.”

“But—” Lina began.

Carlos made a sharp motion with his head. “Patience, mi prima.”

It wasn’t a request.

Irritated, silent, Lina followed Carlos along the path of crushed limestone that led to the main house. The feel of Hunter’s hand resting at the small of her back was an anchor in the storm of questions and emotions seething inside her. She didn’t even notice the estate guards standing discreetly aside for them.

Hunter did. Back at the casita, the six full-blooded Maya who had arrived with Carlos had neatly separated Philip from Lina and Hunter. Then the guards had shut the door in front of Philip’s face. Two of the men had stayed behind to make sure it stayed shut.

Maybe they didn’t like the way Philip acted, Hunter thought. Or maybe Carlos ordered them to beat the hell out of him once Lina was gone.

The men looked more than tough enough to do the job. In fact, several were bruised and scraped like they had been in a fight recently.

Even though none of the men with Carlos had made a move against him or Lina, Hunter’s instincts were up and prowling the dark edges of his mind, howling that something was very wrong. Maybe it was the fact that two of the men had slowed until they were walking behind him.

Hunter really didn’t like having strange men at his back.

And maybe it’s just that creepy guayabera Carlos is wearing, Hunter told himself.

The loose white shirt was heavily embroidered with what had at first looked like blue flowers, as many shades of blue as on his study walls. Only they weren’t flowers. They were skulls set among ragged petals.

Or is that lightning around the skulls?

There was no answer to Hunter’s silent question. Like smoke, the designs changed with every movement Carlos made, frustrating any attempt to decipher them.

“Cool shirt,” Hunter said.

Carlos ignored him.

Lina looked more closely. She was accustomed to seeing the pattern within Maya embroidery. Her full mouth flattened.

Must be skulls, Hunter decided.

Skulls or flowers, he was glad to feel the weight of a gun at the small of his back. His neck was itching like it was hosting a chigger reunion.

Wind flexed, bending the jungle beneath it. The thinly overcast sky hadn’t changed as the afternoon slid toward evening. The air smelled of lightning, a dry storm. Carlos’s shirt rippled and shifted, reminding Hunter of the drawings in the temple, where blue lightning glowed.

One of the stocky, long-haired men who had come with Carlos opened the front door of the main estate for him. Carlos swept in, trailed by Lina and Hunter, whose silver-blue eyes never rested, checking possible exits and keeping track of the full-blooded Maya around them who wore guayaberas and jeans instead of uniforms but acted more like guards than the men outside clomping around the perimeter of the family compound.

Another thick-boned, dark-skinned man waited beside the open study door. He was wearing the jeans, boots, and loose pale shirt that Carlos’s other men did. Hunter told himself not to get paranoid about it. A lot of the men in the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central America wore loose shirts and jeans.

He glanced at Lina, but if she noticed all the men, it didn’t bother her. He wished it didn’t bother him. But it did. He’d rather have had an AK-47 stashed under his shirt than a pistol.

Abuelita and Celia were waiting inside the study, sitting side by side on one of the couches, silent. A pitcher of water, ice, and lime slices waited within reach on the coffee table. Near the pitcher, fresh fruit and sparkling glasses were lined up like offerings at the feet of a life-size limestone face.

Celia was turned out like a city woman going to a fancy dinner, except for the temper that narrowed her eyes and added years to her looks. She looked even less happy to be there than Hunter was.

Abuelita’s skin gleamed like polished wood, tight across her skull, hands interlaced like tree roots on her lap. Her face was a ghost of Lina’s, plucked out of time past. The bones were the same, but the years had been pulled across them differently, skin weathered yet still alive, as enduring as the ceiba tree itself. She wore a long ivory dress with pale embroidery that shimmered mysteriously. A shawl lay loosely around her shoulders. The saffron fabric was as radiant as the sun would be tomorrow.

Two men stood in front of Carlos’s desk. Their cinnamon-brown faces were impassive, their hair long, their hands broad and strong, their bodies thick and patient. The blood of the Maya ran rich in their veins.

Outside the open window, trees swayed in a wind that was too hot for the season. Despite the wind, the room’s air smelled of copal smoke and something else, something Hunter couldn’t identify.

Abuelita’s eyes tracked from Celia to Lina. The old woman’s irises were like obsidian caught in the folds of her eyelids. With a gesture, Abuelita told Lina to come closer.

Lina smiled and took her great-grandmother’s hands in her own. The old woman’s skin was as warm as a lizard in the sun.

“You are looking well,” Lina said, swallowing her irritation at Carlos. Despite her complaints about Lina’s unmarried state, the older woman had always treated her like a princess, someone to be hugged and petted and fed special tidbits. “Your dress is very beautiful.”

Abuelita squeezed Lina’s hands and released them. “It is good you are here.”

Flanked by two men, Carlos went to stand in front of his desk. At his signal one of the men began serving iced water with slices of lime. As the man moved, Hunter noticed that he was dressed like the others, walked like he had a sore gut, and in addition to a bruise or two, he wore what looked like a bulky bandage around his ribs under the loose shirt. All of the men had hair as thick and black as night, worn pushed back over their shoulders like a mane.

Hunter assumed they were armed because it would be stupid to think otherwise.

The man offered Carlos the first glass of water, Abuelita the second. When he held a glass out to Lina, she shook her head. Much to Hunter’s disappointment, no one else was offered a drink. Broken crystal had intensely sharp edges.

“Who are these men?” Lina asked Carlos, her voice caught between impatience and unease.

“They are my people. The one with the bandaged hand is called Blood Lily,” he said in the local Mayan dialect. “No Tomorrows is in the hallway. Two Shark and Water Bat brought you here.”

If the others had names, Carlos didn’t mention them.

Hunter didn’t understand the words, for they were as Yucatec as the men. Lina translated for him, and added that she would continue to do so unless people spoke Spanish or English.

Carlos shrugged.

Celia moved restlessly, like someone who was about to stand. A sharp gesture from Carlos kept her seated. The lines on her face tightened, telling anyone who cared that she was barely tolerating her cousin’s demands.

Hunter looked behind Carlos, where the server had previously blocked the view. The dense mahogany desk was clean but for a handful of artifacts. A scepter with obsidian teeth. A censer with openmouthed skulls decorating it and faint tendrils of copal smoke oozing out like sly tongues. A Chacmool of green stone, probably jade.

A mask of seamless obsidian.

Understanding crawled over Hunter like insects, but it was too late. He was way outnumbered. All he could do was wait for a chance. Or make a chance, if it came to it.

And pray that Lina didn’t notice the artifacts behind Carlos’s body.

“Speak to Carlos only when you are spoken to,” Abuelita said to Lina. “Listen before you judge.”

“What—” Lina began.

“No. Listen.”

Lina stared at Abuelita, for the first time wondering if her mother had been right, if her great-grandmother was senile. Abuelita ignored Lina, watching Carlos, her old eyes filled with the love of a woman looking at her god.

Uneasiness condensed into ice, making Lina shiver.

Wind blew through the open window, but there was no moisture with it, no living scent of jungle and flowers. There was only a hint of ozone, distant lightning giving a burned edge to the air.

Carlos breathed deeply, smiled. “Kawa’il is sharpening his blades.”

Without looking, he reached behind him and picked up a leather-wrapped bundle. Holding it like a fragile gift, he walked to Lina. As he placed the leather in her hands, his expression was both possessive and loving.

The fact that Lina backed up until she was almost on top of Hunter told him that she was no happier with the situation than he was. He wished he could do something about it, but he hadn’t seen an opening.

Yet.

“Finally you are here with me,” Carlos said to Lina, coming closer despite her retreat. “After so many ignored invitations and other, firmer overtures.”

Drawn by the unexpected gleam of obsidian on the desk, Lina looked past Carlos. Then she went pale, shaking her head as though refusing to accept what she didn’t want to know.

But she did know it, and nothing would ever be the same.

“The parking garage,” she said to Carlos, her voice too tight. Like her hands, her body, her throat. “Those were your men.” She looked at the silent Maya men around the room. “These men.”

Hunter knew that she had figured out how deeply they were in trouble. Don’t lose it, sweetheart. You need every nerve you have.

We both do.

Yet the desire to clamp his hands around Carlos’s throat and squeeze almost overwhelmed Hunter’s control. Motionless, he fought himself. Lina needed him more than he needed to punish Carlos for Jase’s near death.

“Yes, they were in the parking garage,” Carlos said calmly. “If they had hurt you, they wouldn’t be here. They would be in Xibalba, waiting for the wheel to turn.”

“Why?” she demanded. “Why hurt Jase? He bled so—” Her voice broke. The package Carlos had placed in her hands started to slip away. Automatically her fingers clenched, holding on to the supple leather.

“You can blame your own stubbornness for that,” her cousin said. “You refused to honor the obligations of your own blood.”

“What are you talking about? You could have just called me. You didn’t have to shoot someone!”

Hunter’s hand touched Lina’s back soothingly, telling her that she wasn’t alone, he was with her, watching for the instant he could grab her and run beyond the reach of her cousin.

“I tried.” Carlos sighed. “I used honey upon honey, artifact upon artifact, lure upon lure, but still you did not come to me. My men would have driven you to a waiting plane. You would have been home within hours. You would have learned from me, prepared for this as I have for years. But no, you ignored me. Now there is no more time.”

Lina stared at Carlos. His eyes were as dark as Abuelita’s, deeper than night. And like the night, without limits.

He touched the loosely wrapped package in her hands. “Open it. Learn. Understand.”

Grateful to have an excuse to look away from her cousin’s eyes, she lifted a flap of leather and carefully unrolled it. On the inside was suede, black as the space between the stars. When she unwrapped the soft, resilient leather, she was holding a long, wedge-shaped piece of mahogany. Two of its edges were lighter in color, a pale cinnamon red instead of the dark garnet gleam of the finished wood.

On the side she couldn’t see, her fingertips traced zigzag lines carved deeply into the wood. As she turned it over, she knew she held the piece of wood that had been missing from the fascinating artifact sent to her by Mexico City’s Museum of Anthropology.

Lina was holding the fragment of wood that had been floating between the gods and men. The markings that had been removed from the whole were a representation of a codex, accordion folded in the Maya style, partially open to hint at the revelations inside.

“This is the crucial part of the instruction glyphs on the box holding Kawa’il’s god bundle,” Carlos said, his voice vibrant with memory and awe. “Before I could prevent it, Philip discovered the box in the temple. He needed money, I needed something to appease the federal government.”

She waited, full lips flattened, not wanting to hear any more and not able to stop listening.

“I kept the contents and sent the rest to the government for study. I didn’t think you would be able to resist it when I prevailed upon the museum director to send it to you. Surely you would see its message, surely you would know that it had come from Tulum. You would be drawn here, to Kawa’il’s wisdom. But you had lived too long among the ghosts. You no longer recognized Kawa’il even when you held his covenant in your hands.”

“You broke the wood,” Lina said, hardly able to believe it. “Deliberately. Broke it.”

“Of course. It was a lure, nothing more. Beyond that key message, the box wasn’t significant. The god bundle inside had already been removed to be kept safe in Kawa’il’s own temple.”

“Site nine,” she murmured, seeing again the rainbow glyphs, the serpent without beginning or end. Carlos had merged Kawa’il and Kukulcán in his mind, or perhaps the builders of the temple had.

Carlos nodded and watched her with veiled eagerness, as though expecting something more.

“Everything that you did for the Museum of the Maya and the museums in Mexico, all the explorations on Reyes Balam land that you paid for,” she said, “none of it was for the love of knowledge and history. It was all for you.”

“For me?” Carlos shook his head. “No, I am nothing. Kawa’il is all. I planted seeds and watered them with money. Today, before midnight, Kawa’il will come for the harvest. And you, my cousin, you are the key to all.”

Lina stared at her him. “You’re—”

“Let him explain,” Hunter cut in softly, not wanting her to tell Carlos how crazy he was.

There hadn’t been any bloodletting yet. Hunter really wanted to keep it that way.

Lina started to protest Hunter’s soft order, but didn’t. The fear she had been trying to ignore had slid clammy fingers over her flesh. She finally understood just how fragile the skin of normality was right now.

If it split, there would be violence.

Almost desperately she looked at Celia. Her mother was staring at Carlos, her expression confused, almost stunned. It was obvious that she knew less than Lina did about what was happening.

“I thought your reluctance to come to me,” Carlos said, “to learn, meant Kawa’il was angry with me because I didn’t have the proper tools to communicate with him through ceremony and ritual. But when I tried to send the sacred artifacts to myself in Houston, they were seized at the border. Soon after, the place of worship that I had built for Kawa’il was desecrated by ignorant American police.”

Lina wanted to scream at Carlos to shut up, that she didn’t want to know just how crazy he was.

Hunter touched her back lightly, reminding her that Carlos’s words weren’t the only reality in the room.

“I took my most holy objects and went to a new place, a place already dedicated to death,” Carlos said. “There I sought Kawa’il in blood and smoke, but the tools I used to cut, to bleed, to worship, were inferior. Yet by Kawa’il’s grace it was enough. His sacred objects came back to me. They were beautiful, powerful. I gave glad sacrifice to my generous god and came home to Quintana Roo.”

That’s one way of looking at it, Hunter thought sardonically. My view of reality is different. Snakeman twists LeRoy to steal the artifacts from ICE’s evidence warehouse, good old LeRoy loses his heart to Kawa’il, and Carlos beats feet back to Mexico. Nothing holy about it.

“But still you didn’t come to me,” Carlos said to Lina. “Still Kawa’il tested me.”

Air moved like a dry river through the open window. Without looking away from her, Carlos coughed and held out one hand. Water Bat gave him a glass of cold water with translucent green lime slices floating beneath ice. The wind swelled again, bringing the smell of lightning and the malaise of a storm that would not break.

“You’re thirsty,” Hunter said very softly in English to Lina. “Hold out your hand for a drink.”

Before he finished, she was asking for water. Apparently the same thought had occurred to her—a broken glass could be a weapon.

Two Shark brought Lina a glass of liquid. He and Water Bat withdrew, watching everyone in the room equally.

Despite the dryness in her throat, Lina’s stomach knotted at the thought of swallowing anything, even water. She sipped anyway. The liquid coolness and the fragrant kiss of lime made her feel better. When she took another small drink, Carlos began talking again.

“When my men failed to bring you to Quintana Roo, I knew that somehow I had continued to displease Kawa’il.” Carlos swallowed water, sucked on a stray piece of ice, and watched Lina with leashed anticipation, waiting for her to understand.

She fought for control by counting the tiny beads of condensation that formed on the outside of her crystal glass. The taste of lime went metallic in her mouth.

“I came here, to Tulum, to Kawa’il’s land, his people,” Carlos said when Lina stayed silent. “I studied the twenty panels of Kawa’il’s instructions.”

“The codex,” Lina said despite herself. “You have it.”

Carlos kept talking. “I realized I must have misinterpreted one of the panels. I sacrificed my blood until I knew the ecstasy within the soul of agony. Each time I used the sacred stingray spine, pulled the knotted twine, breathed the sacred copal smoke, I came closer to knowing Kawa’il. With his wisdom, his guidance, I learned until the god found me worthy.” Ice crunched between strong teeth. “Kawa’il brought you to me. Who am I to refuse the gift of Death himself?”

For Lina, reality narrowed to the jagged chunk of limestone sitting on the coffee table. The stone’s edges looked chewed, signature of having been chain-sawed off its anchor wall in some unknown ruin. The stone face with its empty eyes stared at the world serenely, eyes relaxed and easy, mouth open, with just the hint of a broad tongue touching the lower lip.

No one had taken a piece of the fruit heaped like flowers around the limestone face that ruled the coffee table.

She watched the stone, half expecting it to comment on what was happening in the room. That would be no less crazy than Carlos, calmly waiting, standing on a small rug that looked like a pool of turquoise water lapping around his feet.

Bare. His feet were bare. Strong. Clean. His toenails gleamed from a recent pedicure.

Lina swallowed laughter she was afraid to release. She knew there would be no end to it until she was as mad as her cousin.

The warmth of Hunter’s hand moved slowly on Lina’s back, pulling her away from her cousin, anchoring her in something that wasn’t crazy, wasn’t murderous.

Death or love. The choice was simple, terrifying, because she knew her life and her love were in the bloody hands of a madman.

“Rosalina,” Carlos said, his voice almost hissing, echoing the sacred snake with the human tongue. “Our people have been hiding for five hundred years. Abuelita and our ancestors are descendants of priests and kings. Instead of waging a losing war against the Europeans, or signing over their souls to the invaders, our people took their knowledge and disappeared into the jungle. We survived. And we waited.”

Without moving anything but his eyes, Hunter watched the men in the room.

They watched him in return, dark eyes alive with the patience of a jaguar.

Not good, Hunter thought. He had hoped the English ramblings of their boss would bore them, make them careless.

It hadn’t.

“The hidden people kept the covenants with the gods,” Carlos said, his voice resonant with time and certainty. “During the years, priests of Kawa’il filtered out of the jungle. They helped villages, showed the people how to bend the required worship of the European Christ so they could escape the Spaniards and still appear to have bowed to them.”

“The Vatican allowed it,” Lina said, feeling like a sapling engulfed in a deep wind, fighting to hold the very earth she was rooted to.

“The pope believed his god would overcome ours in time,” Carlos said, satisfaction in his voice. “Foolish. While we kissed the European beads in churches built on the ruins of our temples, we planted our crosses of corn and blood and kept the true gods alive.”

Her throat too dry to speak, Lina just shook her head.

“The truth of the world was written down,” Carlos said, his eyes burning. “The Codex of Kawa’il is not only a celebration of the real gods. It instructs us in the proper ceremonies to keep them alive, to keep the bargain that the gods made with their new creation so many thousands of years ago.”

Lina looked at her mother. Celia was shaking her head in silent denial while tears ran down her cheeks, leaving dark trails of mascara.

“The Chel family was first and highest among the hidden priests,” Carlos said. “Like the Balam side of my family, Chel blood is older than Palenque, as old as the first breath. We have not only the blood of priests and kings, but of the gods themselves infusing our lines with greatness. The gods will reward those of their children who have honored them.”

“Carlitos,” Celia said, her voice breaking.

He ignored her, focusing only on Lina. “Imagine the gods’ gratitude when the Great Wheel turns, the Long Count ends, and we present them with a sacrifice that honors both them and the Balam line.”

His eyes gleamed but Lina could only see black emptiness beneath their glow. Like obsidian. All that kept her from freezing into stone was the warmth of Hunter’s hand.

Am I as warm to him? Am I his anchor in Carlos’s mad storm?

Hunter’s hand caressed, reassuring both of them that there was a reality beyond madness. A reality he held on to as surely as she did. A reality they held between them.

Carlos reached beneath his shirt to a sheath of leather bleached white as bone. He drew out an ancient knife.

Obsidian.

Lina’s breath froze.

“How can you not believe?” Carlos asked Lina. “Could mere man make such as this? Never. It was the hands of our ancestors, the very gods, Kawa’il himself, that shaped this blade.”

Hunter didn’t need Lina’s sharply indrawn breath to recognize the knife as the one in the photos. The blade shimmered and seethed with an extraordinary light, as though life had somehow been trapped within.

Delicately, Carlos’s long fingers traced the lines of the knife. “Look at the proof of Kawa’il. The blade is smooth and even, flawless in comparison to other obsidian blades. Its like has never been seen before or since. Kawa’il’s sigil wasn’t carved into the blade, it was breathed there by gods, again and again, until the stone itself accepted the mark. To hold this blade is to hold black lightning, the power of Kawa’il and Kukulcán, living as one. This is the key to the end of our corrupt age.” Carlos pinned Lina with his obsidian gaze. “And you, Rosalina, you are the lock to be opened.”

A terrible understanding ripped through Celia. She came to her feet so violently that she nearly upset the coffee table. The limestone head shivered, swayed, then settled among the tumbled fruit.

“Take me!” she cried. “My blood is as royal as Lina’s.”

With surprising strength, Abuelita yanked Celia back to the couch.

“Quiet, my granddaughter. Neither of us is worthy of being made holy.”

“My blood is—” Celia began.

“We are sterile,” Abuelita said, her voice dry, terrifyingly rational. “You by choice. I by age. Carlos by the will of Kawa’il. Of what worth is our blood to the gods? Only Rosalina carries the seed of future Balams. Her death is the end of the Balam line. What greater gift could possibly be given to the gods? What time could be more sacred than the end of the Long Count? Rosalina will be made holy and the gods will favor the Maya once again. Carlos will lead our people out of slavery. He will lead our world, as it should be led, in the ways of the old gods.”

“How sweet for you,” Lina said to Carlos, not bothering to hide her anger any longer. “You, the only survivor, Kawa’il’s favorite, king of the new age. No doubt you’ll be made fertile in the bargain and given twenty fertile virgins to screw.”

Carlos shook his head at her lack of understanding. “I will merely unlock the doorway to the gods. Kawa’il will be first to come through. He will sacrifice the four sacred Bacabs to Kukulcán and the sky will fall. Then the world will end. If it pleases Kawa’il and Kukulcán, I will live. If not, another Long Count of slavery to a foreign god will begin for our people, until another is born who is worthy of the attention of the gods.”

Beyond the windows, incandescent white light seared across the sky, revealing the ghostly shapes of jaguar-spotted clouds. Something rumbled in the distance, too hollow to be thunder, too empty to be anything else.

“But you don’t really expect the gods to be displeased,” Lina challenged. “Do you?”

“Like everyone else,” Carlos said, “I await the judgment of the gods.”

But his eyes said he knew what that judgment would be.

Lina bit her tongue against a scream, tasted her own blood in her mouth, swallowed it. But she couldn’t swallow the rest.

“You really are insane,” she said.

Hunter gathered himself for the explosion.

It didn’t come. Other people’s reality simply didn’t touch Carlos.

“Every day you believe in things that you can’t see, can’t touch, can’t explain,” Carlos said, trying to make Lina understand. “The power behind an electrical switch. The fragmented heart of atoms. The music your tiny machines steal from the air. The movement inside your television. You don’t understand these things, can’t create them yourself, yet you accept them. Kawa’il is simply a different kind of acceptance, a different kind of power.”

He sounded so calm, so reasonable, that Lina shivered. “You believe you’re the chosen one. The one who will save the world.”

“I have no intention of saving this world,” Carlos said. “It will be cast off like a snake’s skin. And what will be left will be shining and new, ruled over by a wise king and Kawa’il’s sacred warriors. After more than five hundred years of sleep, our people will awake. I just wish that you could see it, Rosalina.”

There was something terrifying behind his eyes, a jaguar weeping for the cornered prey.

And hungering.

Thumping and scuffling came from the hallway, along with grunts of effort. Two long-haired, unsmiling Maya pushed Philip fully into the room. His hands and mouth were efficiently bound with duct tape.

Carlos laughed, a sound like faraway thunder. “The idiot arrives, the soulless one who can’t understand the words of the gods, much less the beating heart of a living people. The codex was never yours, fool. Be grateful that Kawa’il wants only pure blood today.”

“Then let Hunter go,” Lina said immediately. “He has nothing to do with this.”

At a single gesture from Carlos, Philip was thrown facedown on the couch, all but burying Celia. Abuelita made an expression of distaste and stood up so that she wouldn’t touch Philip.

“Don’t worry,” Carlos said tenderly to Lina, his fingertips rough against her cheek. “You aren’t the first I have suckled. It will be swift and certain. You are the last and most perfect. Only you will be kissed by the sacred knife of Kawa’il.”

Lina smashed the glass into her cousin’s face. Icy water flew. Blood appeared from a long cut on Carlos’s cheek.

Hunter spun and took out the nearest man with a backhand that sent him tumbling into another man. “Run, Lina!”

One high, one low, two other guards jumped Hunter. Lina turned to help him, the broken glass held in her fist. Carlos struck from behind, sending the wicked crystal spinning away. A gun flashed in a guard’s meaty fist and the barrel slammed into Hunter’s head. He fell forward in a boneless sprawl.

Lina screamed until a guard took her from Carlos and silenced her with a broad hand across her mouth. Celia wept. Abuelita smiled.

Outside, lightning raged over the horizon and the dry wind whipped. The burned smell in the air increased.

Carlos felt the familiar heat and texture of the liquid running down his cheek and smiled with white teeth whose gums were rimmed with blood. “Kawa’il is pleased.”