Beautiful Sacrifice

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

WHEN WATER BAT PARKED CARLOS’S LAND ROVER NEAR the Temple Four site, Carlos seemed to come out of the trance he had been in. Lina had been watching her cousin warily, waiting for him to break out in tongues or froth at the mouth, or both. He had done neither, simply sat silently, swaying with the rough road, his black eyes searching the dark, dry night.

Lightning arced and branched and sheeted in awesome display around the Rover, followed by the hollow applause of thunder. Yet no rain came down to bless the thirsty land.

Two Shark opened Lina’s door and pulled her out. As he bent down, his knife flashed in the gleam of the headlights. The duct tape hobbling her ankles came apart. She held her wrists out in front of her, expecting to be freed. She wasn’t.

The headlights went dark.

With a grunt Two Shark sheathed his knife. Water Bat and the other men who had come with Carlos had already vanished, nothing but shadows among the handful of torches suddenly flaring in the jungle.

Carlos appeared at her side. The mark she had left across his cheek looked black in the weak light. He’d done nothing to clean his face.

“Follow me,” Carlos said.

“My hands—” she began.

“If you fall, Two Shark will carry you.”

The thought of Two Shark touching her made Lina shudder. She turned away from the silent guard and followed Carlos. She had been dreading taking the path in the dark with her hands bound, but more torches were lit as soon as his guards told people that Carlos was on the way.

Within minutes they had arrived at temple grounds that were alive with the movement of flames. They danced to the music of the wind that was whispering and calling through the night, bending trees as easily as it did fire. Another line of torches went beyond the temple, in the direction of Cenote de Balam. Mixed with copal smoke from the torches, Lina smelled bruised leaves and sap from recently chopped branches.

They’ve cut a new trail to the cenote since Hunter and I left, she thought. There was no sign of it earlier.

For every torch there was a Maya standing solid as stone, reflected fire licking over each face. She didn’t see warmth, or welcome, or even curiosity. She saw only the expectation of a jaguar that had finally seen its prey.

But not in Carlos. His eyes were alive with something else, more fierce and less human than his followers. His expression could have been a god’s confidence or a devil’s satisfaction, or both together, burning like flames in the wind. His fingers touched the wound on his face. Like the night, it was dry, waiting.

As he walked into the temple, Lina slowed and tried to slide away among the shadows and wind, into the bottomless darkness of the jungle. Two men appeared to block her, a wall of flesh short enough for her to see over but too strong for her to break through. Each man grabbed her by an arm. Without a word, they pulled her in the direction of the temple, making it clear that she could go with them willingly or she could be dragged like a donkey.

Lina looked longingly at the scarred steel machetes each man wore. They were stained and scented with the blood of the plants they recently had hacked through. Her palm itched for the feel of a machete handle.

Not yet, she told herself fiercely, fighting the fear that made her want to panic. Wait for them to get careless. They aren’t warriors or guards. They’re simple farmers. They expect nothing but obedience from a woman.

Wait.

Just wait.

And don’t think about Hunter.

But he was there, always, part of her heartbeat, part of her fear, part of her hope.

Promising herself a panic attack when she could afford one, Lina walked at the same speed as the men beside her, wanting to appear willing or cowed, anything so that they wouldn’t watch her so closely. The men walked slowly, more slowly than Carlos, who soon disappeared into the open mouth of the temple.

By the time Lina reached the short hallway inside the temple, Carlos was out of sight. The candles that lined the narrow passage were the color of fresh, pale cream, and smelled like vanilla and cinnamon. The thought of Abuelita making each one of them with loving hands for this night sickened Lina.

She could understand the madness of her cousin wanting to be priest-king; she couldn’t understand the madness of her great-grandmother wanting to worship him.

The inner temple room was both cool and ablaze with clumps of blue candles, every shade of blue from light to dark.

Carlos was naked.

It was the last thing Lina had expected. It was too much. Throat straining around screams she refused to voice, she closed her eyes and tried not to break down completely. As she fought for self-control, she heard rustling sounds, footsteps leaving, returning, echoing her wild heartbeat.

You can’t get away if your eyes are closed, she told herself. Stop acting like a child. You’ve seen a naked man before.

An image of Hunter suddenly consumed her mind—male, hard, reaching for her as she reached for him and they joined bodies in a lush tangle of pleasure. Hot. Alive. Everything she had ever wanted.

I love you, Hunter. I never let myself know, never told you how I felt. I was afraid it was too soon.

But it was too late, and that was something else I didn’t know.

Lina set her teeth and opened her eyes. Somehow she would free herself, find Hunter, and tell him.

Then the memory of him falling bonelessly to the floor flashed through her mind like icy lightning.

No!

He’s alive. I’d know if he were dead.

Wouldn’t I?

Don’t think about it, she told herself fiercely. Think about getting away from Carlos. It’s the only thing you can do right now that matters.

Hunter ran like blood through Lina’s body, her bones, strengthening her. She forced herself into the moment, the crazed modern man in the ancient temple, and her own eyes alert for any opportunity to escape.

Carlos was now wrapped in a long loincloth of fine, midnight-blue cotton. On his head he wore the cured skin and skull of a jaguar. The cat’s eyes were gleaming obsidian, eerily alive. The rest of the jaguar’s spotted skin swirled down Carlos’s back, the back paws nudging against his legs, the front paws clasped around his shoulders in a horrifying embrace. Beneath the long, curving claws, two necklaces held a jade pectoral representing an openmouthed jaguar surrounded by lightning.

The jade was spectacular, fully twice the size of the one Lina had found. One of the heavy necklaces was made of carved, thumb-size obsidian beads. The other was of jade. Both felt as ancient as the temple to her.

One of the men stepped forward, using his fingers to paint Carlos in all the colors of ritual—black, red, yellow, white. When he was finished, another man stepped forward with a headdress of feathers that rippled like blue-green lightning. Their jobs complete, both men left the room. Carlos opened the small bag he had been given. His movement and the candlelight made the feathers of his headdress, the paintings overhead, and the jaguar skin writhe with terrifying life.

Stubbornly Lina refused the awful allure of the scales and the endless serpents, the supple cat skin mocking life.

“Who do you think you’re fooling?” she asked Carlos in English, afraid if she spoke the native Mayan dialect she would be sucked deeper into the nightmare. “You hear the echoes in your own head, not the voices of the gods.”

Carlos ignored her. Slowly Two Shark approached him. Like everyone in the room except Lina, he had switched to ancient Maya dress—loincloth and bare feet, paint and decorations topped by feathers. Their drapes were of cotton rather than jaguar fur, their costumes less noble than their leader’s. As the men moved, jade and obsidian objects sewed onto their clothes caught light. The cloth Two Shark wore was the color of Kan, the east, the yellow blaze of sunrise. He held a small, carved box in his hands.

Water Bat was dressed as Chak, the red of the south, the color of fresh blood. His burden was the sacred jade Chacmool that had been among the stolen artifacts that had brought Hunter to Lina. Silently Water Bat kneeled in front of Carlos.

No Tomorrows wore the black of sunset, Boox. Another man wore white, Sak, the north.

The four pillars, the Bacabs, Lina realized, separating heaven and hell.

In the ancient belief, when the Bacabs fell, Xibalba would rise to the gods and everything in between would be cleansed, destroyed, a storm of change that would make room for the next creation, the next age.

The Age of Kings, which Carlos believed he would lead.

Grimly Lina looked around the temple. Its shadows were empty, no man-size limestone altar lurking nearby.

He won’t be killing anyone here. So why are they posed like costumed actors waiting for the director to appear?

As though Carlos had heard her silent question, he spoke to her in soft English. For all his men responded, it might as well have been the wind rustling.

“I regret that I didn’t have time to make you understand,” he said. “But know this, it is not only your blood, your pain, that Kawa’il needs today. I will bleed, too, an act of reverence to strengthen me for what comes.”

“Really? Last time I checked, you weren’t the one dying.”

“Silence, or I will tie knotted twine in a loop through your tongue and yank on it each time you speak.”

Put that way, silence had definite appeal. She shut up.

Carlos went back to preparing himself to turn the key that would open the lock on the Age of Kings. As he did, he continued to instruct her in English.

“The twine I hold in my right hand is from a wild cotton tree growing near my natal village, gathered as our people have for over six thousand years. I wound the twine myself and knotted it twenty times, following the instructions in the Codex of Kawa’il. On one end of the twine is the barb from a stingray I hunted and killed myself with a stone knife.”

Lina found herself unable to look away from the ancient ritual Carlos was reenacting. The stingray barb was almost as long as his hand and nearly as thick as his little finger. At either side of it were curved spines that had only one purpose—to dig into flesh and not let go.

Carlos set the box on the floor, moved his loincloth aside with his left hand, and pinched a deep fold of foreskin between his thumb and forefinger. He plunged the barb through the hypersensitive skin, stopping only at the first knot.

Lina didn’t know whether he gasped or she did. She did know that it couldn’t have been the first time Carlos had performed this agonizing rite. His hands were too steady, too sure. Blood welled and began to drip down his penis. Bile crawled up her throat. She swallowed hard. Twice.

“With each knot pulled through, I draw closer to Kawa’il,” Carlos said. “When the whole cord is dipped in my life, Kawa’il speaks to me.”

Twenty knots embedded beneath and then pulled through his foreskin, Lina thought, feeling a bit dizzy. That would bring enough pain to hear voices in your head and make you believe in an alternate reality rooted in blood, flowering in agony.

Carlos tugged the twine and more blood flowed as the first knot pulled through the slit in his skin. The cord turned crimson in the candlelight. Blood trickled into the jade Chacmool held by the kneeling Bacab.

Lina forced herself to breathe. From the corner of her eyes, she watched the men dressed as the Bacabs. Three of them were absorbed in the ritual.

No Tomorrows watched only her.

The metallic scent of fresh blood curled through the small room like copal smoke.

Knots kept crawling into the slit and emerging drenched in red.

“Earth lies flat on a field of four colors, black and white and red and yellow. Each of the field’s corners is held up by a man who is becoming a tree, roots plunging down, drinking earth’s blood, flowering in the heavens…the four pillars of creation…hot wind blowing…stars glowing…Xibalba in black pulses reaching for the stars…my breath is his breath, hot, hotter, too hot…agony…Kawa’il…is all…”

Carlos’s words wound through the room with the smoke, and the smoke became a serpent whose blood rippled in feathers the color of rainbows, jaws opening and opening more, until the room was swallowed and the last knot was red and Carlos was ecstatic, held within the pulsing center of agony.

For a long time there was silence but for Carlos’s ragged breathing. Then, at a nod from him, Chak stood and placed the blood offering in front of the pile of red petals at the south corner of the room.

“Now,” Carlos said, his voice transformed by pain and something else, something others called madness and he called transcendent communication. “I am cleansed, renewed, blessed. Kawa’il has spoken. I am ready for the most beautiful of sacrifices.” His voice boomed. “Come. The end of the world awaits us at the Cenote de Balam.”

PAIN SPIKING OUT FROM BEHIND HUNTER’S LEFT EAR DROVE him from the black embrace of unconsciousness.

Lina.

Danger.

Hunter tried to sit up. Pain stabbed and he discovered that his hands were taped behind his back, his ankles were taped together, and his feet were bare.

Boots.

Knife.

He rubbed his face against the floor to clear blood from his right eye. The pain was breathtaking. He forced himself to breathe anyway. Then he listened.

From beyond a closed door came the voices of two men. They were on guard and they were bored. One of them talked about robbing and raping Cecilia. The other told him that El Maya would have his balls and the balls of every one of his male relatives. Better that they just wait and do what they had been told to do. Soon the wheel would turn, El Maya would come back to the house, and his men would be rewarded for their service.

Hunter smiled unpleasantly. Doubt that they know their boss expects the world and everything in it—except himself—to be destroyed. Or if they know, they don’t worship at that altar.

The subject of conversation in the hallway changed to which of the housemaids had the best ass.

Carefully Hunter looked around as much as he could. Shadows. Rug. Wooden floor. Vine-choked windows outlined by landscaping lights. He was on the second floor and it was night. The weight of the gun at the small of his back was gone. He was tied, defenseless.

Lina.

What is Carlos doing?

Hunter pushed away his fear for Lina. He couldn’t help her until he helped himself. From the corner of his eye he saw his boots about four feet away.

Did they find the knife?

Ignoring the pulsing pain in his head, he inched closer to his boots. He saw the shadow of the black-leather-wrapped knife and grinned despite the surly throb of his skull. He managed to swing his feet over the boots and drag them closer to his bound wrists. Slowly he struggled to get the knife out and position it so that he could saw away at the duct tape coating his wrists. By the time his wrists were free, his shoulders were burning, he was sweating, and the clock counting down in his head was screaming at him.

Hurry.

Lina.

Hurry!

He pushed aside the pain streaking through his head and attacked the tape binding his ankles. Moments later the silver material gave way. He shoved his feet into his boots and stood.

The dark lure of unconsciousness spiraled around him. He breathed through his clenched teeth until the dizziness passed.

Outside in the hallway, the guards were talking about the Mexican lottery. Both wanted to win it. Neither really expected to. One kicked idly at the wall as he talked. The hollow thud of his boot told Hunter that this was likely one of the banana-clip-carrying elephants brought in from stomping the perimeter to more stationary duty.

Hope the clumsy bastards still have their weapons. I’ll need them.

Untrained people who carried weapons had a touching certainty of their personal invincibility. Hunter had learned long ago that a trained body was a weapon that couldn’t be taken away or used against him.

Sheathing the knife because it would only get in the way, he eased carefully toward the door. Like all of the doors he had seen so far on the estate, it locked only from the inside, which explained the guards outside.

Listening to the voices, placing the position of each man in his mind, Hunter flung open the door. He took out the guard on the left with a backhanded fist to the throat. The second guard barely had time to put his idly kicking foot on the ground before Hunter’s boot sank into his gut. A second kick knocked the man out.

Someone jumped Hunter from behind. At first he thought he’d missed his mark on the first guard. Then he realized that there had been a third man who had been doing his job rather than jawing with his buddies. Hunter slammed an elbow backward. The third man grunted and let go just enough for Hunter to turn and face him. The guard’s chin was tucked to protect his neck.

But the rest of him was up for grabs.

Fingers hooked, Hunter’s left hand went for the man’s eyes and his right for the man’s crotch. The guard saved his balls but couldn’t evade the fingers digging into his right eye socket. Desperately he threw his head back and grabbed Hunter’s left wrist. With his other hand, the guard pulled a knife and stabbed. As the blade cut through cloth and skin on the inside of Hunter’s leg, Hunter’s right fist smashed into the man’s now-unprotected neck.

Retching, coughing, fighting to drag breath through a ruined windpipe, the guard joined his groaning buddies on the floor. A few swift kicks put them out of their vocal misery. Gutter fighting at its dirty and brutal worst, but it got the job done in reasonable silence.

Hunter felt blood running down his leg. He widened the slash in his pants, saw that the blood wasn’t pulsing and the wound wasn’t to the bone, and set about disarming the guards. AK-47s weren’t his weapon of choice, but they had a way of evening odds in a crowd. He checked one weapon quickly, found it good to go, and slung it across his back. He tucked an extra banana clip in his belt. He left the rest of the weapons behind. The guards wouldn’t be using them any time soon, if ever.

Lightning sheeted through the night, overwhelming the darkness. Thunder rumbled, but no rain hit the windows.

Hunter used the prolonged thunder to cover his footsteps. He didn’t find any other guards on the second floor, or the first. In the kitchen Abuelita sat at her table sipping pepper-laced cocoa from china as fragile as a breath. Philip and Celia were duct-taped to separate table legs. Even if they had worked together, they wouldn’t have been able to jerk the solid mahogany table anywhere useful.

But they weren’t working together.

Philip was ranting about treachery and his career and the codex. Tears and mascara ran down Celia’s cheeks. She was screaming at him to shut up, his daughter was in danger.

“I never wanted a damned brat!” Philip yelled back.

“Then you should have kept your cock in your pants! I was an innocent!”

“You were the biggest whore since Lilith!”

Obviously it wasn’t the first time they’d had this discussion. They flung insults and accusations with the ease and timing of actors in the fourth year of a Broadway play.

“Where is Carlos?” Hunter demanded, cutting across the old argument.

“I don’t know,” Celia said. “His men kept Philip and me out of the way until Carlos had gone.” Then she wailed, “He took Lina with him!”

Hunter had already figured that out.

Sheet lightning blazed through the night. The blackness that followed was absolute, all electricity gone. The house creaked and groaned and trembled under a blast of wind and thunder.

A wooden match flared, followed by the biting smell of sulfur. Abuelita lit the first of four candles that were set at cardinal points around her table.

“It is too late for words.” Abuelita said in Spanish. Her voice was as dry and thin as the flame touching each candlewick in turn. “The gods are with Carlos. He will be reborn as the ruler of the Age of Kings.”

Philip turned his invective on Abuelita.

She blew out the match and drank her cocoa as though she was alone. Her eyes gleamed with reflected fire.

Hunter would get the truth from Abuelita somehow, but he would try sweet reason first.

“Lina told me your name means Wise Owl,” Hunter said.

Abuelita’s black eyes focused on him. She nodded.

“You know where Carlos has taken Lina,” Hunter said.

“It cannot be stopped.”

“Then there is no harm in telling me, is there?”

She laughed.

He stared. With her dark, glittering eyes lit from beneath by candles, she didn’t quite look human.

“Carlos lived among you ghost men,” Abuelita said, “but only enough to earn the wealth to buy the old secrets that had been stolen from his people. He listened to me. I told him who he was and who he could become. After the wheel turns, a new generation of kings will come from his loins.”

“He’s sterile!” Celia screamed.

“The wheel has not yet turned,” Abuelita said calmly. “Carlos is in the temple now, consecrating himself so that he will be favored to make Lina holy.”

Lightning flashed again, this time so close that the feeling of electricity playing through the air made Hunter’s skin ripple.

“Where’s a flashlight?” Hunter asked Celia.

“In a bracket by the back door.”

He bent, slashed the knife blade through Celia’s wrist restraints, and handed her the weapon.

“You can free Philip or cut his throat, your choice,” Hunter said, not caring which she decided on.

Celia closed her trembling hands over the handle of the knife.

Hunter ran to the back door, grabbed the bulky, waterproof flashlight, and headed for the Bronco. Lightning blasted across the sky. For an instant everything looked frozen. Then thunder rode on the back of a wind that felt desert-dry. Blinded, half deaf, Hunter put the AK-47 in the passenger seat and climbed into the Bronco by touch more than sight. He fumbled several times before he jammed the key in place.

The Bronco started, died, started again. Hunter hit the lights and accelerator at the same instant. Wheels churned through crushed limestone, sending white gravel spitting out from beneath the tires. Following the map in his mind, he raced down the main estate road, then made a series of turns that ended in a small track. The Bronco lurched, bounced, banged, and scraped, but held to the track.

Hunter’s leg burned and his head was on fire. He set his teeth and took the punishment, wishing only that he could be faster. He didn’t know what personal witching hour Carlos had chosen, but Hunter didn’t want to be late for the ceremony. Not with Lina the central attraction. He kept hearing Abuelita’s words ringing in his head, louder than pain, more urgent.

Carlos is in the temple now, consecrating himself so that he will be favored to make Lina holy.

Make holy.

Sacrifice.

The knowledge was like fingers beneath Hunter’s ribs, in his guts, digging, twisting. He drove faster than even a fool would think safe, but it still seemed like a month before he saw a Land Rover and several trucks blocking the narrow track.

The vehicles were empty. Just beyond them was the trail to site nine, the Temple of Kawa’il. He killed the lights, half expecting shots to explode around him. Opening the door, he went out low.

No shouts. No shots. Nothing but trees thrashing beneath the wind like drunken dancers.

Guess everyone is in the temple, getting ready for the main event.

The blood sticking Hunter’s pants to his thigh pulled free in a slash of pain. Blood ran down his leg to his boot.

It’s a long way from my heart, Hunter told himself.

He turned on the bulky flashlight, slid the AK-47 over his shoulder again, and headed for the concealed trail to the temple. Except it wasn’t concealed anymore. Sap bled and recently cut branches gleamed like bones in the flashlight. The pain banging in his head was his heartbeat, routine, barely noticed. It wasn’t the first crack on his skull he’d taken. He knew he had at least a mild concussion, but he saw mostly one of everything, so he wasn’t worried.

His head was a long way from his heart, too.

In every pause of the wind Hunter expected to hear voices—shouts or incantations or screams—anything but the silence that filled the usually noisy jungle.

This has to be the right place, he told himself. Those vehicles didn’t just fall out of the sky.

Before the jungle gave way to the small clearing, he turned off the light. He knew he should wait for his eyes to adjust, but there wasn’t time. He slipped the AK-47 off his shoulder, readied it, held the darkened flashlight along the barrel, and continued down the path.

He smelled the torches before he saw them. They burned on either side of the temple doorway. He froze, listening, listening.

Not one human sound.

The image of Lina lying bloody on the temple floor was a knife in Hunter’s guts. He shoved the thought away. It couldn’t help him, but it could bring him to his knees.

A shadow in the darkness, he hurried over the open ground. Every uneven step made the pain in his head flash lightning. If anyone noticed his approach, no one cared. That should have been good news.

It wasn’t.

With growing fear, he went into the temple entrance. Candle flames bent as he rushed by. There was no sound but his footsteps, nothing but the mixed scents of vanilla and cinnamon and blood. He hoped it was just the blood from his leg he was smelling. Candles burned in the temple room.

He was alone.

Wildly Hunter raked the room with his flashlight. No sign of Lina. No sign of Carlos. No sign that anyone had ever been there.

Then he found the Chacmool in front of the petals. Blood, yes, but not enough for a severed artery, a beating heart ripped from a chest. Next to the Chacmool was a bloody stingray spine and an even bloodier piece of knotted twine. Hunter remembered Abuelita’s words.

Carlos is in the temple now, consecrating himself so that he will be favored to make Lina holy.

Hunter hoped Carlos’s hand had slipped and he’d cut off his own dick.

“Okay, he’s consecrated now, but he doesn’t finish the ceremony here,” Hunter said, talking aloud because he was tired of hearing nothing but candle flames. “He must have another holy place.”

An image of Cenote de Balam shimmered in Hunter’s mind, the huge mound of flowers, the natives weaving through the jungle like snakes, watching Lina.

Watching their beautiful sacrifice.

But the vehicles are still here. There must be a trail.

Hunter walked back out into the jungle quickly, limping now, not caring. The clock in his head beat harder and faster than any pain.

Recklessly he swept the flashlight around the clearing, looking for any sign of where everyone had gone. The new cuts in the surrounding jungle leaped out. Someone had hacked an opening.

A trail.

Ignoring the blood seeping down his leg, he ran.

Lina will be at the cenote.

Alive.

She has to be.