The 52nd (The 52nd Saga Book 1)

Copyright

the 52nd
© copyright 2015 by Dela. All rights reserved.
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Dedication

For Titina, for showing me the beauty in dream-chasing.

Lucas

Preface

December 24, 2012

Fear gets you killed. It waxes over your instincts and paralyzes your decision-making abilities, making you inefficient and useless, leaving you for dead. In my earthly eternity, I never feared anything, never needed to—except for
now.

I didn’t know how I could love my only fear, and I resented her for it. But over time, something inside me changed, and I came to the humble acceptance that my death was finally going to be for one stubborn woman. From the day we met, this sweet gem stole my heart and played with it—unknowingly, torturously, and without a flinch. It was a constant stream of electric pulses. Sounds lovely, I know. She was the best mistake I ever
made.

I was a Watcher. We watched dead creatures abduct humans so they could be sacrificed in the Underworld by their god, no questions asked. My sister, her husband, my parents, and my good friend Tita were Watchers too. We were once a legend, a ghost story told to children at night by mothers of the Promised Land. But life moved on, and our unwritten stories were forgotten—
we
were forgotten. I hated this never-ending job, until it led me to
Zara.

Zara was perfect in so many ways. There was fire in her—and me too, when I was near her. She saw the good in my arrogant, royal, still-beating heart. She made me want to be better. I hadn’t felt such passion since the sixteenth century, but it scared me, and fear gets you
killed.

I didn’t think too much about that when I decided to save her. I was such an
idiot.

Now I live with my consequences. And she’s just across the way, lying in my spare room, really upset with me.
She
is upset with
me
.

Again, I was an
idiot.

Tonight I will stop being an idiot and go comfort her. After all, that’s what she wants. She only wants me. I’m ready to try now. Ready for fear to control me in new ways. And if I die, so be
it.

I slip my shirt off and throw it on my bedroom floor, picturing how I’ve wanted her entirely the past few months, to devour her tiny, perfect body. I can practically taste her. I slide my sneakers off, chuck them by the bed, and walk to the French doors leading to the balcony. Her almond scent drifts in the night’s salty breeze. I breathe in desirously, anxiously, ready.

I step outside into the humidity and hop over the gap between balconies. My heart pounds. Yes, immortals feel impulses. I stop between the swaying curtain sheers and look at her nervously through the midnight blackness.

Then, as her heartbeat plummets, I crack a hungry smile and advance.

CHAPTER ONE

January 1, 2012
The Council

It was 12:01 a.m., one minute into the new year, when I walked through the dark jungle in silence with my family. As the world celebrated, I imagined the rowdiness of kissing strangers. It made me smile briefly, before the thoughts of death returned.

Soon we were crouched behind the last layer of thick brush, staring ahead through the clearing. Ocean air dewed our faces as we waited for security to pass. The stone dwellings settled on this flat patch of land were once my home. Now they were surrounded by rope, each fragile building “preserved” as it slowly crumbled piece by piece. It bothered me, but my attention was on the vast structure on the cliff above, my head filled with more pressing matters.

The castle, with the small temple at its peak, was our greatest monument. Fog loomed around it tonight, dimming its brightness beneath the rising moon. It wasn’t normal for Tulum to get fog at this hour, but it rolled in during every Council like clockwork.

After the short security man cleared our view, weaving in and out of the unusual mist, we resumed our trek across the moonlit clearing to the castle. We hopped over the rope barrier and started up the rotting stone steps. I had climbed them many times as a youth—it was tiring then, but my legs moved effortlessly
now.

When they reached the top, my father, Ajaw Ecatzin, and my mother, whose name long ago was X’Vaal, turned to watch below. My sister, Cizin, or “Gabriella” as she was called in this modern world, walked alongside her husband, Hunahpu, or “Dylan.” She sat against a wall and hiked her knees up, and Dylan stood beside her with his arms crossed. I walked past them to the center of the
room.

Tonight marked the beginning of the fifty-second year, the last of the Mayan calendar round. I recalled it as the year of bloodshed long ago for kings and priests—I would never forget the blackened blood poured over their cloaks or the way it dried in their hair, making birds’ nests of crusted strands. The year of blood, lots of blood. I would never forget because today, it still was. Only I was a part of it now, with the dead. I let out a huff of air—still just as pissed as I was on day one of my immortality—and leaned my back against the
wall.

The way the world used to work, there was separation between the three realms: the heavens, where the Celestial gods lived; the humans on Earth; and the Underworld, where the dead and Xibalban gods lived. The Celestials monitored each other as well as those on Earth. They provided the rain for crops, and they were very generous to the humans for thousands of years. The gods of Xibalba cared only about themselves, and at one point in time, they confused the humans into sacrificing their own people to them. The Celestials did nothing because this deception did no harm to any realm, and so killing other humans to honor the gods became tradition.

When I was twenty-three, a human, Hernan Cortez, overthrew our land and all that went with it, including the bloody tradition. While under attack from the Spaniards, the natives also came under attack from the Underworld. The Xibalbans were upset that their payments of pulsing hearts had stopped, so they sent deceased kings back to Earth to retrieve human sacrifices. The humans couldn’t withstand the onslaught from two realms at once, so the Celestials intervened. An agreement was formed: the Underworld would only be allowed to receive sacrifices every fifty-two years, and then only fifty-two victims.

Tonight would be the ninth Council I’d endured since my transformation 485 years ago. It was the only time the selected group of Celestial gods would gather to discuss the arrangement that kept the human race safe. As Watchers, this was our only chance to see whom the Underworld would choose for sacrifice. It was our job to move to each sacrifice’s hometown and witness the abduction, then move on to the next victim’s location.

“Mulac, the light,” Father asked, calling me by my given
name.

Father had lived a short mortal life; he was only thirty-nine when he turned immortal. He was nearly six feet tall and had a head of black hair that marked him as descended from generations of royal Aztecs. His blue eyes, however, were a fluke. No one in our gene pool carried frosty eyes. When he was younger, his prince-brothers each fought tirelessly to be the favored son. But no matter how hard they tried, my father’s strange handsomeness made him the natural favorite, and his parents adorned his headdresses with precious metals and
jewels.

The fog thickened, forming a cloud around the base of the stairs, as Father examined the ground below. The Council would be here soon. Obediently, I rolled up the sleeves of my flannel shirt, lit the pillar candle I had carried with me on our journey, and set it on the damp floor in the far
corner.

The orange flame provided a soft light for our small space, creating a dim flicker on Gabriella’s petrified face, a look I had gotten used to on these nights. She slouched against the stone wall as she noticed my gaze and then looked away to the leather bracelets on my wrist, some braided, some wrapped multiple times. I had Father’s blue eyes, and they didn’t express the sort of worry that sprawled across my sister’s face—not with the unnerving anticipation that fueled
me.

“Gabriella, calm down,” I
said.

Her bronze hands played with the hem of her shirt as dark hair cascaded down her shoulders. Thick eyebrows furrowed over her brown eyes; she was doubtful yet again of her competence at the burdensome task of watching. It was simple, really. We get in, we watch, we disappear. That was it, but the task always proved more difficult than originally planned.

Our immortality was a gift from the Celestials, and there were rules to it. She would never let them suspect she felt fear or sadness, but Gabriella couldn’t control her emotions well, and I worried for her. Most Celestials saw emotion as weakness; I saw it as humanity. I liked to think my sister and I were somewhat human, even though we had never been such a thing. Father was the only one of my family who could truly claim he was once. This year was another round of sacrifices
we
had to endure.
We
had to watch the executioners abduct the year’s chosen—young or old, women or men, even children, whatever they preferred—while the Celestials simply showed up for the Council and left promptly once the sacrifices’ names were revealed.

As much as I despised them and this awful arrangement, a part of me felt the Celestials were partially right about emotions. Gabriella’s mourning fermented so sourly in her soul that it weakened her. It always shadowed her personality for the five years following a round. I hated
it.

“Honestly, Lucas, I don’t know if I can do this any longer,” Gabriella said, anxiously pulling at her loose cashmere sweater as she watched Dylan pacing back and
forth.

I didn’t answer her. At this point, I didn’t know what more I could say to comfort her. I left Gabriella to join my parents at the entrance.

“Mi amor,”
Mother said, stretching her arm out to me. She was short and beautiful, with black, shoulder-length hair. Its shiny sleekness was pinned up, leaving short strays to fall straight down alongside her cocoa
eyes.

Mother was a Mayan goddess, raised on Earth by her father, Chac, for a human term of twenty years. He was a god too, of course. Other gods feared him because he was one of those who had created Earth—and, I imagined, because with his brow constantly furrowed, he always looked hard on the outside. But Mother promised he was irrefutably the most softhearted god she knew. Mother told me stories about how kind he was to her and to the humans she played with as a girl. I believed her because they had the same beautiful smile. I saw it every time they smiled at each other in our Councils. She hugged me briefly, her smile a soft echo of its usual blaze, then wrapped her arms around herself, hands tucked under the sleeves of her jade sweater.

“
Estoy bien, Mama,
” I answered, moving underneath the arched entrance. She
nodded.

I leaned a shoulder against the deteriorating stone and stared up at the stars toward Ahau, my deceased godfather. He once was the shaman priest to my father and mother, the king and queen. I remembered him as I gazed into the galaxy, rolling my small
citla
between my fingers. It was a gift from Ahau, a tiny star carved from the wood of a ceiba tree, and the only small token left from my past. There was an Aztec tradition of giving your newborn child a token of the trade they would perform as adults. I was a prince and supposed to grow up to be a warrior; I never knew what gift I could possess that would have anything to do with a star. Besides, giving a citla to a
royal
was unheard of and frowned upon. All I knew was that it had deeper meaning, so Ahau had said. Ahau had known things I didn’t, but even he did not know why he had been led to give me a citla. He called it a “prompting.”

Ahau began teaching me astrology when I was young. We studied the meaning of the heavenly bodies’ movement and the future it foretold. All that time, I wondered about the citla. When I turned twenty-three, my last mortal year, we knew. It wasn’t the citla itself, it was what the star symbolized: perfection.

It didn’t mean that I was perfect—no, I was mischievous in my mortal life, far from perfect. The citla meant that I was connected to something grander, perhaps something without flaw. It aroused questions that were not answered before Ahau passed on. But I never stopped searching.

At the dawn of the eighteenth century, it began to make sense. My friend Tita, a witch and fellow Watcher, prophesied about a girl in the unknown future, chosen as the fifty-second sacrifice. She went on about stars aligning, times changing, and loves being born, a vision of a beautiful time—a perfect time. The citla instantly meant more to me than my dreadful calling as a Watcher. I felt in my bones I was to know this
girl.

After Tita, a member of the Council, Tez, came to me during the dry years—the years without sacrifices—claiming he’d had a vision of a sacrificial girl who would change the world. I’d shared the secret prophecy with no one, of course, especially not with any members of the Council. But I had no way to lie to
Tez.

At first I worried Tez would give this information to the Council, but he did not. He wanted out of the Council, like I wanted out of being a Watcher. The other Celestials came together only once, on that fifty-second year, to hear the names. Then they disappeared until the next. And though Tez would leave with them, and I wouldn’t see him for more than half a century, I trusted him to keep it secret because his foreseeing power showed him everything in this
world.

At each Council, Tez got a short glimpse into the lives of the chosen moments before their abductions, like a rapid fanning of pictures: where they lived, their friends, their schools, their loved ones. It gave him guilt. Then he saw the kidnappings—always a chase, never a fight: the executioners were too quick and too clean to make a scene. But it wasn’t the chases that crushed Tez; it was the victims’ horrified faces when they saw
what
was taking them. He didn’t want to see them any
longer.

I thought Tez was lucky because his vision was veiled in the Underworld; he couldn’t see the tortures its gods performed on their victims. We both saw this agreement for the bloody mess it was, from beginning to end. And we both wanted out. The job was absurd, babysitting the sacrifices to the Underworld; it should have stopped five hundred years ago, when Cortez ended everything
else.

Tez had promised to let me know when things began to unfold. Since then, I’d showed up to each Council anxious. It would be here that he would forewarn me of the girl, for I had no idea who she was or when she would come. But because this fifty-second year also meant the end of the Long Count, I believed this would be the year the tale would come to pass, a time I’d secretly awaited for over five hundred
years.

Gabriella watched me with glazed eyes. I knew she envied my faith that things could get better. She hated being a Watcher as much as I did. None of us liked seeing innocent people abducted, knowing what gruesome fate lay before them. Tita was the only other Watcher who had faith that this prophecy could change the entire game, but she wasn’t here now. The Celestials wouldn’t allow it.
Witches are untrustworthy,
they
said.

Gabriella turned to her husband, who paced feverishly near the wall. He was a Hero Twin of Mayan legend,
Hero
because he and his brother were the only two gods ever to have gone to the Underworld and returned alive. He looked about twenty-five in human years, just two years older than I, but it was always hard to tell the age of a god. He was handsome, a tall brute with emerald eyes that drew humans toward him easily, and quite adept at deceit. His quick paces and whispering lips matched the psychotic tangle of his golden hair, snarled into angled chunks. Once the number of people offered for sacrifice reached the hundreds, he’d stopped bothering to comb his hair for the Council. On these nights, deaths from the past consumed him entirely.

“Honey, stop pacing like a madman, and settle down next to me,” Gabriella pleaded.

Dylan didn’t answer. His fingers twitched, and he rapidly mumbled numbers under his breath as if solving a mathematical equation. Gabriella sighed, unsurprised by his rejection. We all knew Dylan wasn’t trying to solve a math problem; he was counting sacrifices from the past, and that was what bothered Gabriella most. Just as I had given up on her, she had given up trying to change the mad-scientist act Dylan put on before the Celestials arrived.

As Gabriella moved to join us, a bright spark from the crumbling back wall illuminated the tiny room. She stepped back toward us, watching as the floating light burst into rays and was gone more quickly than it came. In its place stood the Mayan goddess of sin, X’Tabay.

The fresh ocean air evaporated as X’Tabay’s scent overtook our small space. No matter how many years had passed, the implications of her filthy incense had not been forgotten. Father’s nostrils flared; we still could smell the stench of her last victim’s
blood.