After about thirty seconds of abuse, Hunter shoved Philip back into the entrance far enough for all of them to come in. Then Hunter shut the door and waited for the old man to run out of breath. From the look of his face— sweaty and pale—it wouldn’t be long. When Lina started to walk closer to her father, Hunter held her back.
“Let him run down,” he said.
And he revised his opinion of Philip from eccentric to borderline nuts.
“Anything he’s saying make sense to you?” Hunter asked Lina when Philip paused for a breath.
“He thinks we stole an artifact from him.”
“I got that. But what?”
Lina bit her lip and shook her head. “That’s where it falls apart. He says we stole the Kawa’il codex.”
Philip erupted again at her words and grabbed her shoulders, shaking her hard. “You traitorous bitch, you think I don’t see through your lying—”
The flat of Hunter’s palm landed on Philip’s cheek. The blow wasn’t hard, but it was shocking. With another swift movement Hunter knocked Philip’s hands away from Lina. Then he got right into her father’s face.
“Settle down before I put you down,” Hunter said flatly.
Philip stared at him. “You—you—”
“You hearing me?” Hunter asked.
For a moment Philip’s eyes went vacant. Then he nodded and sat heavily on an old couch.
“It’s gone,” Philip said hoarsely. “Everything is gone.”
“What’s gone?” Hunter asked.
“Ask her. She—”
“—was with me every moment she wasn’t with her family,” Hunter cut in.
Philip looked at him, baffled, almost childlike. “But it’s gone.”
“We got that,” Hunter said calmly. “When did you miss it?”
“As soon I knew you had been to the temple, I came back here to check it.”
“What—” began Lina.
Hunter’s hand closed over her arm.
She looked at her father and understood he was only relating to Hunter right now. She bit her lip and looked away, tears stinging at the back of her eyes. Nothing new, really. Philip had ignored her all of her life.
“You came back here, checked, and it was gone,” Hunter said.
Philip nodded.
“Show us where you kept it,” Hunter said. His voice was like his eyes, patient. Relentless.
Her father tried to get up, wobbled, and started to go down. Hunter put him back on his feet with an easy strength Lina found as startling as the slap had been. The contrast between Hunter and her father rocked her. Even after she had begun to understand her father’s emotional limitations, she still had thought of him as physically strong, indomitable, ageless.
He wasn’t.
With Hunter’s encouragement, Philip pulled himself together enough to lead the way back to his study. Hunter noticed the heavy lock on the study door and knew without asking that no one went in without Philip being present. Certainly not the maids. The place was dusty, messy, piled with papers and artifacts in haphazard heaps.
Lina’s breath came in hard and stayed. The artifacts so carelessly stacked everywhere were extraordinary. The jade jaguar pendant she had found and he had kept was on a bookshelf, on top of a tilting pile of scholarly archaeology bulletins. Automatically she looked at every artifact in sight, searching.
Hunter watched her.
After a moment she shook her head. “Not at first glance. Excellent, wonderful, fascinating—but not what we’re looking for.”
Hunter nodded and centered his attention on Philip, who was still fumbling with the dial of an old-fashioned safe. Vault, really. It was at least seven feet high and five wide. Unlike the rest of the room, the lock looked well cared for, oiled, clean. Bookcases flanked the vault door on either side from floor to ceiling.
Just when Hunter thought he’d have to try his hand at drilling out the safe’s locking mechanism, Philip managed to get the combination right. When the door swung open, Hunter was glad that he hadn’t had to wear out steel drill bits and himself on the safe. It was at least four inches thick, way beyond what would be necessary to protect against burglary or fire.
Cool, dry air wafted out of the safe, reminding Hunter of the temple.
“No burning candles,” Lina said, telling him that she was thinking the same thing he was.
Not surprisingly, Philip ignored his daughter. Whatever emotion had driven his outburst had been spent. Now he was a leaky balloon, deflating a breath at a time.
She gave him a worried glance but made no move to intervene as he pointed a shaky finger at a small, climate-controlled glass museum box at the back of the vault.
“There. It was there. Now it’s gone,” Philip said.
Hunter walked forward to look at the box. He could have checked for fingerprints, but he didn’t have the right equipment—or temperament—right now.
A glance had told Lina that more than an empty climate-controlled box filled the vault. The walls were a mosaic of shelves and niches and cases. Boxes had been stacked waist-high, leaving very little floor space to move around. She realized that, unbelievably, the reason the jade pendant and other superb artifacts had been left in the study was that Philip had run out of room in the vault.
She turned and went to her father, who was leaning against the vault door. His hand hung limply on the handle. His expression was glazed.
“What was in the box?” Lina asked bluntly.
He shook his head as if her words were cold water instead of breath. “I…” His voice died. He swallowed. “A codex. Kawa’il’s, I believe.”
“How long have you had it?”
He looked confused, irritated. “Years, but what does it matter now? It’s gone!”
“Years,” she said, her expression a fluid mix of disbelief, anger, and disappointment. “You hid it for years.”
“I had to study it,” Philip said. “Without me, it’s just drawings on paper. I found it! Once I’ve finished translating it, I’ll publish and take my place with the foremost names in archaeology. But it’s hard, so hard…”
“What is?” Hunter asked.
“Translation, of course,” Philip snapped. “The glyphs are very intricate, very idiosyncratic, hard to understand. Almost cryptic.”
“You never were very good at translation,” Lina said, her voice neutral. “Yet you never asked me to help. Even Mercurio noticed it.”
“You were on
“What are you talking about?” Lina asked.
“You. Your mother.”
“Philip, I was eight years old when you and Celia separated. What on earth makes you believe I was on anyone’s side?”
“You’re a woman. Selfish. Like her. Just when you were finally old enough to become useful to me, you were mooning after Mercurio. Nobody cares what I want. But I outsmarted all of you.” Philip grinned without humor, more of a grimace. “I found the codex.”
“A work whose meaning you could barely decipher, much less truly appreciate,” Lina said. “So you hid it for years and picked away at something that was as far beyond your reach as the back side of the moon.”
“I made progress,” Philip said defensively. “Glyphs aren’t as impossible as people like you make them out to be. They just require more intelligence than most people have. Especially these glyphs. History as allegory, just like the
Hunter looked at Lina.
“I understand,” she said to Philip. “This codex wasn’t a linear compilation of names and events. The glyphs required nuanced interpretation rather than measurement in situ. Shades of possibility and meaning, like
