A terrible understanding ripped through Celia. She came to her feet so violently that she nearly upset the coffee table. The limestone head shivered, swayed, then settled among the tumbled fruit.
“Take me!” she cried. “My blood is as royal as Lina’s.”
With surprising strength, Abuelita yanked Celia back to the couch.
“Quiet, my granddaughter. Neither of us is worthy of being made holy.”
“My blood is—” Celia began.
“We are sterile,” Abuelita said, her voice dry, terrifyingly rational. “You by choice. I by age. Carlos by the will of Kawa’il. Of what worth is our blood to the gods? Only Rosalina carries the seed of future Balams. Her death is the end of the Balam line. What greater gift could possibly be given to the gods? What time could be more sacred than the end of the Long Count? Rosalina will be made holy and the gods will favor the Maya once again. Carlos will lead our people out of slavery. He will lead our world, as it should be led, in the ways of the old gods.”
“How sweet for you,” Lina said to Carlos, not bothering to hide her anger any longer. “You, the only survivor, Kawa’il’s favorite, king of the new age. No doubt you’ll be made fertile in the bargain and given twenty fertile virgins to screw.”
Carlos shook his head at her lack of understanding. “I will merely unlock the doorway to the gods. Kawa’il will be first to come through. He will sacrifice the four sacred Bacabs to Kukulcan and the sky will fall. Then the world will end. If it pleases Kawa’il and Kukulcan, I will live. If not, another Long Count of slavery to a foreign god will begin for our people, until another is born who is worthy of the attention of the gods.”
Beyond the windows, incandescent white light seared across the sky, revealing the ghostly shapes of jaguar-spotted clouds. Something rumbled in the distance, too hollow to be thunder, too empty to be anything else.
“But you don’t really expect the gods to be displeased,” Lina challenged. “Do you?”
“Like everyone else,” Carlos said, “I await the judgment of the gods.”
But his eyes said he knew what that judgment would be.
Lina bit her tongue against a scream, tasted her own blood in her mouth, swallowed it. But she couldn’t swallow the rest.
“You really are insane,” she said.
Hunter gathered himself for the explosion.
It didn’t come. Other people’s reality simply didn’t touch Carlos.
“Every day you believe in things that you can’t see, can’t touch, can’t explain,” Carlos said, trying to make Lina understand. “The power behind an electrical switch. The fragmented heart of atoms. The music your tiny machines steal from the air. The movement inside your television. You don’t understand these things, can’t create them yourself, yet you accept them. Kawa’il is simply a different kind of acceptance, a different kind of power.”
He sounded so calm, so reasonable, that Lina shivered. “You believe you’re the chosen one. The one who will save the world.”
“I have no intention of saving this world,” Carlos said. “It will be cast off like a snake’s skin. And what will be left will be shining and new, ruled over by a wise king and Kawa’il’s sacred warriors. After more than five hundred years of sleep, our people will awake. I just wish that you could see it, Rosalina.”
There was something terrifying behind his eyes, a jaguar weeping for the cornered prey.
And hungering.
Thumping and scuffling came from the hallway, along with grunts of effort. Two long-haired, unsmiling Maya pushed Philip fully into the room. His hands and mouth were efficiently bound with duct tape.
Carlos laughed, a sound like faraway thunder. “The idiot arrives, the soulless one who can’t understand the words of the gods, much less the beating heart of a living people. The codex was never yours, fool. Be grateful that Kawa’il wants only pure blood today.”
“Then let Hunter go,” Lina said immediately. “He has nothing to do with this.”
At a single gesture from Carlos, Philip was thrown facedown on the couch, all but burying Celia. Abuelita made an expression of distaste and stood up so that she wouldn’t touch Philip.
“Don’t worry,” Carlos said tenderly to Lina, his fingertips rough against her cheek. “You aren’t the first I have suckled. It will be swift and certain. You are the last and most perfect. Only you will be kissed by the sacred knife of Kawa’il.”
Lina smashed the glass into her cousin’s face. Icy water flew. Blood appeared from a long cut on Carlos’s cheek.
Hunter spun and took out the nearest man with a backhand that sent him tumbling into another man. “Run, Lina!”
One high, one low, two other guards jumped Hunter. Lina turned to help him, the broken glass held in her fist. Carlos struck from behind, sending the wicked crystal spinning away. A gun flashed in a guard’s meaty fist and the barrel slammed into Hunter’s head. He fell forward in a boneless sprawl.
Lina screamed until a guard took her from Carlos and silenced her with a broad hand across her mouth. Celia wept. Abuelita smiled.
Outside, lightning raged over the horizon and the dry wind whipped. The burned smell in the air increased.
Carlos felt the familiar heat and texture of the liquid running down his cheek and smiled with white teeth whose gums were rimmed with blood. “Kawa’il is pleased.”
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.
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.
