Beautiful Sacrifice (40 page)
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.
D
RESSED ONLY IN A WRAPPED SKIRT OF RED COTTON HELD
in place by an obsidian pin, Lina should have felt exposed, even humiliated as she followed Carlos across the freshly swept limestone pavers leading to the cenote. She was too busy calculating her best chance for an escape to worry about being half nude. In any case, breasts weren’t a Maya fetish; they were simply a means of feeding babies.
As she walked between lines of men to the waiting altar, none of them leered at her. If anything, there was respect in their attitude. She was their gateway to the creation of the next Maya world. Her head was high and her hair was unbound, lifting and falling in the unpredictable wind.
She wished her hair was shorter than her little finger. Hair was too easy to grab, to use as a binding, to imprison her as surely as the lines of short, muscular men standing close to her.
She had to escape.
Somehow.
I waited all my life for Hunter. I’ll be damned if I lose my future to my nutcase cousin and his equally crazy followers.