Beautiful Sacrifice: A Novel

Melodee turned back to Lina. “So Kali Yuga meets the Age of Aquarius or just a cosmic burp?”

Lina managed not to roll her eyes like her mother. “The ancient Maya were, as some people are today, obsessed with numerology. It was deeply integrated into the Maya culture. It’s a very human thing to create significance where realistically there is none.”

Deliberately Lina began packing up her lecture materials, signaling an end to the woman’s questions.

Melodee plowed right ahead. “But the end of the age? And then there’s the whole passing-through-the- galactic-center thingy. We can’t just ignore alignments that are so rare.”

I can, Hunter mouthed from behind Melodee.

Lina managed not to smile. “You are, of course, entitled to your beliefs.”

“But—”

“It’s very exciting to believe that you’re living at a pivot point in human history,” Lina continued, talking over the relentless Melodee. “People make a lot of money polishing that lure and it gets buckets of page views on the Internet, even though the movie didn’t sell as many tickets as its backers hoped. That, I believe, will be the only millennial Maya cataclysm.”

“The Maya will begin the Fourteenth Baktun,” Hunter added, “and the rest of us will continue counting down the shopping days until Christmas.”

“That’s so…so ordinary,” Melodee said.

“The beginning of a new baktun,” Lina said smoothly, “especially this one, which will end the Long Count and begin another, is a cause for celebration all across the Maya world.”

“But the sunspots,” Melodee said. “And the reversal of the magnetic poles and Nostradamus and—”

“None of those things concerned the Maya,” Lina said, “and they were incredible astronomers and mathematicians. They tracked the seasons, followed the path of Venus—their sacred star—and invented a very abstruse language to describe how their universe worked.”

“But the sun will cross the galactic equator and the plane of the ecliptic or something like that and the galactic alignment and everything in the Chilam Balam and…” Melodee ran out of breath and buzzwords at the same time.

“The Maya don’t need a fourth catastrophe to be complete,” Hunter said, not bothering to conceal his impatience. “The Spanish took care of it for them.”

“Very good, Mr. Johnston,” Lina answered, biting her lower lip to hide a smile. “In Maya mythology, they have already gone through three separate cataclysms, leading to the age that the fifteenth-century Maya knew, which was their present day. But much of how we perceive the Maya today is filtered through the lens of the Spanish, who weren’t interested in the Maya as a culture, but as a resource.”

“The Maya died three times before the Spanish came?” Melodee asked faintly.

“It’s a metaphor,” Hunter said, readjusting the envelope under his left arm. “A story. It took the gods four tries to get the world right. First with people made of mud, then made of wood, then monkeys. Then us.”

“Precisely,” Lina said. “And between each of the worlds, the gods erased their works and started over, finally culminating with the world the Maya lived in, with the covenant between the gods and humans. Things were as they needed to be and life was good and bad in cycles. But there was never going to be one total apocalypse at the end of the Long Count.”

“But the Chilam Balam says there will be.”

“The Maya writings you refer to were composed after the Spanish conquest. They’re a mixture of Maya and Christian beliefs, with a good dose of wishful mysticism.”

“Then why aren’t the Maya still here?” Melodee asked. “Living in their palaces and all?”

Melodee’s bizarre take on reality left Lina speechless.

Hasn’t this idiot learned anything from my classes? she asked herself silently.

“I am part Maya,” Lina finally said. “Through my mother, my lineage can be traced back at least to Tah Itza in modern Quintana Roo. The Maya are a people, not ancient architecture and a religion based on sacrifice to appease the gods.”

Melodee looked to Hunter. No support there. Then to Lina. “So there’s no grand revelation coming?”

“The only revelation is that there won’t be one,” Hunter said. “That help?”

“No,” Melodee said, turning on her high heels like a pole dancer. “It’s as boring as you are.”

With that, she strode up the aisle. The curious group of students who had overheard the exchange began to drift away to their mundane lives.

“My God, when will this craziness end?” Lina muttered. “I can’t wait for December twenty-second. I’m tired of breaking the news to wide-eyed adrenaline freaks that the earth will turn and life will go on as always.”

“People like Melodee make my head ache,” Hunter agreed. “Shall we try that coffee again?”

Lina hesitated, then smiled up into his eyes, eyes that were almost as light as her father’s but silvery blue rather than gray. Beautiful in a way her father’s would never be, because Hunter was vividly there, his attention focused only on her.

“Is your cell phone with you?” she asked wryly.

“I set it to vibrate.” A slow smile. “Cheap thrill is better than no thrill at all.”

She told herself not to laugh. It didn’t work. The idea that a man like Hunter had to get his adrenaline rush from a phone shaking against his butt was ridiculous.

“Coffee,” she agreed.

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“Giving me another chance.”

She gave him a sidelong look. “I’m addicted to coffee.”

As they walked to a local coffee shop, Hunter waited for her to ask where he had been, why he’d run out on her with a rushed apology. He was still waiting when they took their coffee to a back booth. Lina had been too busy glancing over her shoulder and looking at people who passed by to pay much attention to him.

Maybe she hadn’t noticed that he had been gone for the last two weeks.

Lina slid into the booth, then bent over and inhaled the rich scent of coffee, cinnamon, and chocolate rising from her reinforced paper cup. She closed her eyes and sighed with pleasure.

Hunter’s jeans started not to fit.

Damn, he thought. It’s been way too long if a bit of simple, sensual female appreciation makes me hard.

But there was something about her thick, dark eyelashes and full lips, the slick pink of her tongue as she caught a drop of coffee on the rim of the cup. It was sexier than watching most women undress.

“You’re very quiet,” he said.

“I told you,” she said, taking another sip, “I love coffee.”

“Can you look and lick—er, sip—at the same time?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“What I’m looking at.” She glanced up and saw him watching her mouth. Suddenly the booth felt very small, intimate. When she spoke, her voice was husky. “I can multitask.”

Hunter didn’t know Lina well enough to be thinking what he was thinking, much less to say it. He let out a silent breath and shifted on the seat.

“I have some photos,” he said.

“Please, no etchings.”

He laughed. “Nothing that cliched.”

“Bring it,” Lina said. “For this coffee I’ll look at almost anything.”

Silently Hunter took a handful of photos from the manila envelope and fanned them across the table, facing her.

Lina looked down.

The world shifted.

She squeezed her coffee cup so hard the heavy paper gave and coffee slopped over, scalding her.

Hunter whipped the photos out of the way, grabbed napkins, and began cleaning up. “You okay? Burn yourself?”