“I’ll tell you if you tell me where to find Eve and the old witch.”
A flash of anguish crossed his face. He obviously knew exactly who I meant.
I could also tell that he was debating the issue.
Common sense won.
“I’m not really sure, but they often go to Chichén Itzá, where they have a house near the ruins.”
For some reason I trusted his answer. There probably was no way for him to know exactly where they were, so even though his answer was a guess, it was worth a shot. Besides, he knew that I could always find him again if he misled me.
“I put eye drops in your drink. If you go to the hospital immediately, you might live, though the eye drops certainly can kill you, particularly with alcohol. Your heart isn’t the strongest anyway—there’s a chemical in the eye drops that can lower your blood pressure dramatically. And cause severe diarrhea.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t want to kill you, I just want you to know that I can. At any place, at any time. So, remember that. I’m letting you off this time, but if I ever hear the hint of another threat against me, you will not get a second chance. There are ways to kill a man that are a lot quicker than eye drops. And even more painful.”
I turned toward the biggest of the two thugs. “You guys have a choice,” I told them. “You can try to take me down and fail, and by the time the fight is over, he will be dead. Or you can take him to the nearest ER and maybe save his life.”
I knew they probably had guns, so I watched them carefully as I slowly backed out of the restaurant.
As I’d expected, they didn’t move.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The only information I had was that their house was near Chichén Itzá, so I just decided to search for it myself. I flew back to Mérida and employed a driver who said he had a cousin who knew everyone who lived near the ruins. I wasn’t convinced but decided to take my chances.
The cousin spoke fluent English, which was good in his business as a guide. I rented a four-wheel-drive SUV so that after he showed me where to go, I could stay as long as I wanted.
An hour later, I was bouncing along some dirt rut of a road following the guide in his old pickup truck. I barely remembered all the roads we traversed, but he claimed to know where the Milanic house was, so I drove right behind him.
At first we traversed some thick, moist deciduous and semi-evergreen seasonal forests, but near the ruins they began to thin, replaced by a large cleared area cluttered with the Chichén Itzá ruins. We crossed the main road to the ruins, which was paved, and I wondered why we hadn’t taken it. Probably to take a longer way, which might result in more money.
The Temple of Kukulkan was dominant here, reaching toward the sky in the middle of the largest plaza.
The driver stopped across from the plaza where a row of houses, some small, some larger, lined the paved road. Some had thatched roofs, but a couple were fairly elegant, reminding me of the ones I’d passed near Ismalda’s house in Mérida. The guide pulled in front of the most elegant one. I walked to his car, paid him with a generous tip, even though he had probably taken the long route, then watched him drive away while I approached the house.
I knocked on the door. No one answered, so I walked across the street to the ruins.
The area was very familiar to me, having visited them many times in my dreams, as well as on the excursion from the cruise ship. As I faced north, the Temple of Kukulkan was in front of me. To the left was the Great Ball Court and to the right was the Court of a Thousand Columns, a place I had seen in at least one previous dream. It was where the Council met at the height of Chichén Itzá’s power. Other renovated Mayan buildings filled the area.
I couldn’t see the Sacred Cenote, since the path to it was on the far side of the temple, but I knew it was there. Its presence haunted me.
Hundreds of tourists were on the plaza. I wandered to the steps and stared up at them, imagining what they would have looked like when they were new. No one was allowed to climb them now without special government permission, but I could remember being at the top in the distant past.
Or was I?
I stared up at the top of the temple. The stairs and top chamber were no longer pale limestone but shone with color. The background color for the temple was a variation of light brown, but the top chamber was primarily red. Standing near the top was a woman.
She looked like Eve.
Now the plaza was essentially empty of tourists, and the fence barrier to the temple was gone. I felt as though I had flown back in time.
I started to climb.
I was still in very good shape, but the steps were high and very narrow. I had to turn my feet sideways to keep from sliding down. But slowly I climbed.
Panting, I reached the top and stepped onto a red-painted floor. There was a strange room at the top, with a stone table in the middle of it but no other furniture. Murals covered the walls: feathered serpents, kings with feathered headdresses, priests holding hearts up in the air, their sacrificial victims bleeding out on tables in front of them.
Scenes flashed through my mind. I saw a priest holding up a heart after removing it from the person lying on the table. Another priest held a head by its hair, having sliced through the victim’s neck.
I shivered, unable to take my eyes off the misty tableau in front of me.
“You see the past, don’t you?” said a voice behind me. I turned to find Eve standing there, beautiful in a white Mayan gown that drifted down to her feet. The soft, hot wind whispered through the folds in her gown, revealing glimpses of her breasts and her ankles.
“So, you’re still talking to me?” I said. “What happened to your vow to never talk to me again? I know you’ve already broken it, but what changed?”
“I was wrong. I didn’t think you’d remember, but I can see you do. Somehow I knew you’d find me here.”
“Remember what?”
“All our past lives when we were in love. Now our lives are replaying, both the good and the bad. Now you love me again.” She paused. “And I love you.”
She stepped forward, put her arms around my neck, and kissed me.
I’d been kissed before, but nothing like this. A golden light entered my brain, filled with her soul, her dreams, her past and future. And as our hearts joined, I knew that Eve was my Ichika in all those previous lives and Carolyn was Raxka.
I could see the times we’d had together, the times we’d shared love in the same bed through the centuries, the children we’d had together and raised. Scenes flashed through my mind, and I knew that I wanted her, mentally and physically. We were meant to be together.
And I also knew who would try to prevent our union.
Carolyn. And Eve’s mother.
But I also knew her mother had never tried to kill me herself: she’d ordered others to do so. She had tried to prevent our love, and our children, because she had helped choose the atanzahab who had picked another woman for me. And that woman, my intended wife, was the one killing me throughout the ages. Not Eve’s mother, no matter how much she hated me.
We clung together at the top of the temple for a long time, our bodies seeking the togetherness that we needed.
“Your mother will try to stop us.”
“She’s an evil woman,” Eve said. “She’s been that way in every life I remember. The family is more important than my happiness.”
“How many do you remember?”
“Most of them, I think. I do get the details of many of them mixed up, but I could probably list most of our lives together.”
“Why do we alway
s end up meeting each other in subsequent lives?”
“It is a Mayan belief that a person doesn’t accomplish what he or she is meant to in his or her life, then that person is reborn to try again. Since we have never lived our lives together, then both of us keep being reborn to love again. Since we have a lot of lives to make up for, we will be reborn to love again in many more.”
“Eme too?”
“Not always. Sometimes she does manage to grow up without being killed and move on to her own life, in which case we don’t have her again for a while. But if she is killed, we have her as our child in our next lives.”
“So what happens in this one now?”
“That’s up to you. I’m willing to try again.”
“Why isn’t Eme my child in this life?”
“I don’t know, but sometimes the next lives get mixed up a little. Everything isn’t programmed. I had a husband in a marriage my mother arranged. And we had Eme. But he beat me, so I was able to get a divorce, against my mother’s wishes. She only cares about Eme and plans to teach her how to run the corporation.”
“Corporation?” I said.
“My family has run an awful slave corporation for centuries. Anthony Simone did run it, but my mother runs it now.”
“Your mother?”
“Yes, and although Eme has never exhibited the necessary traits to run my mother’s evil empire, my mother is convinced that Eme will change as she ages. There is no one else, unless she gives control to me, which she will never do.”
I shook my head slowly. “Is this all real? Are my dreams real? Where am I? Am I in the twenty-first century or in Mayan time?”
“No, this is real. It is happening now. You have to understand that all of time occurs at once. We just perceive it as linear, moving always forward. But it is much more complicated than that—we’re just not able to see before or after this moment unless we train ourselves to. Your dreams have opened the past for you so that you can stretch your mind throughout many years of history. You and I stood here five hundred years ago, and we kissed. That is what you’re experiencing right now, as well as the kiss in the present. Both are happening at once.”
I stared out over the courtyard of the ruins. “Why do you let her sell those abducted slaves?”
Eve’s face twisted into an expression of pain, her eyes reflecting a mixture of anger and sorrow. I put my arm around her, and she put her head on my shoulder as she cried.
“I’ve tried to stop it, but the roots go so deep. The company uses the Darknet to sell them, hiding them from legitimate governmental agencies and hawking them to evil men all over the world. The last time I tried, my mother ordered me locked up for three weeks, then we went on the cruise. She would have left me locked up instead of bringing me along, except for Eme, who insisted I be allowed to come. My mother has given up on me. That’s why she expects Eme to take over the company eventually.”
I pulled her even closer.
The sun was fading now, dropping behind the western trees. In the Yucatán summer, the air was still muggy, though high on the temple steps the evening breeze kept us comfortable.
Soon lights snapped on, one by one, filling the courtyard with a soft glow, mainly lights from the floodlights surrounding the plaza, but there was also faint light from the houses across the highway.
I didn’t want to leave her, but I knew that we couldn’t spend the night together, not here, not now. That would have to wait. Another day, another time. She felt the same way, because suddenly she squeezed closer to me.
“If they know you’re here, they’ll send me away,” she said. “I essentially just met you. I couldn’t stand to lose you again.”
“They have to know I’m here,” I said.
She started crying again, and I pulled her even closer. “What can I do?” she asked.
“You can leave with me. I have money. We can go somewhere, hide from them.”
“They’re all over the world. How can we hide?”
Ismalda popped into my mind. She knew people everywhere, and I knew she could probably put us somewhere out of sight.
“There are ways,” I said, but I knew she didn’t believe me.
“What about Eme?” she asked.
“If we can’t figure out a way to take her with us now, then we can come back for her.”
We sat there until the moon replaced the sun in the sky. But I knew no one would ever replace Eve if she and I became separated again.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Eve returned to the elegant house across the road, while I rented a motel room nearby.
I hardly slept that night. But when I did, the dreams came again, haunting me.
Raxka had followed me through the years, the centuries, hunting me with a knife, stabbing me in the back, the chest, once even using an old Spanish pistol to blow a hole in my heart.
I woke up every hour, sweat dripping off me, though I turned the overhead fan on high and the air conditioner as cool as it could go. Drifting in and out of my nightmares, I slept only because of my memories of Eve.
When I awoke in the depth of night, a figure lurked in the shadows of the room.
“It is time for you to die,” a voice said. A voice that I now recognized, a voice from a mouth in a body that had cuddled next to me in the night not long ago.
Exploding out from behind the curtains, knocking them back from the window a bit so that a gleam of light came through the glass from the plaza outside, the figure dashed toward me, a knife in her right hand. I spun off the bed, landing on my feet.
The knife slashed downward, but with the blade exposed by a glint of light, my left hand intercepted her arm. She was stronger than I anticipated, but not strong enough. I squeezed her wrist and the knife tumbled to the floor.
But she was prepared. Her left hand appeared, holding a smaller knife, one that she jabbed into my right shoulder, missing my lung only because I was able to twist out of the way of a direct blow.
A spasm of agony ran down my right arm, but I hid it from my mind and grabbed her around the throat from behind with my left arm, thinking I had overcome her attack.
I was wrong. She still had the small knife in her left hand and brought it down into the muscle in my left upper thigh. The agony in my right arm was replaced by a flash of agony in my leg, and I stumbled.
“Why have you been trying to kill me in all our lives?” I asked, gasping in pain.
“So you have figured it out.” Somehow, don’t ask me how, I could hear Carolyn smiling.
“I know the who, not the why,” I replied.
“You betrayed me,” she said. “Why should you live?”
“I chose the one I loved. How is that betraying you?”
“Our families picked the atanzahab and he arranged for us to marry, not you and that piece of Cocom dung. Our marriage was to strengthen the bond between our two families.”
“That was hundreds of years ago!” I exclaimed. “How does that relate to today?”
“The destinies of our lives were determined long ago the first time we met and our two families set up our marriage. From there, the gods created our future. Just because you wanted something different didn’t change the pathways of our lives. Ichika, Eve in this life, wasn’t to be yours. I was, and that can’t be changed, no matter how many lifetimes we live. You are not supposed to have Eve. The only way to correct the wrong in each lifetime is for me to kill you.”
“How did you know it was me, Scott Remington, in this time—that I was one you had sought in each life?”
“I don’t know. I can always tell the moment I see you, so the first
night at dinner I recognized you. And I always know where you are once I encounter you, so I can always find you after that.”
“What happens if I kill you?” I asked.
“I will get you,” she replied. “I always do.”
Then she was gone, leaving the door open behind her. I gathered that she didn’t realize how vulnerable I was at this moment, with two knife wounds, losing quite a bit of blood. She could’ve continued to attack me now, and probably won, even with my size advantage.
I hobbled after her, my leg allowing her to gain distance from me. She headed across the road toward the Temple of Kukulkan, its dark structure wavering in the flickering lights of the plaza. I felt as if I was back five hundred years.
But instead of climbing the outside stairs she ran to the right of them, where there was no longer a metal door under the stairs, just an open doorway that appeared to lead to the depths under the temple. I followed her inside.
There was a faint light from scattered bulbs—or were they lanterns?—hanging on the wall. The walls were moldy, and the stone floor was wet with shallow puddles of water.
A small, foyer-like room greeted me and led to a dark rise of steps, extending upward until disappearing in the depths of the faint lighting.
She started to climb.
Each of the narrow steps was hell, sending stabs of agony into my left thigh. I slipped and stumbled on the wet steps, fell and hit my head on the sharp top edge of a stone step, sending my orientation on a trip through the darkness. Instead of trying to walk on the steps, I bent over and half crawled up. Even that was difficult.
Above me I could see her arrive at the top, then join a figure in a white gown. A priest?
I regained my footing and climbed on, stumbling as I went. In this region of the steps, the light was almost non-existent, and I could barely see where to put my feet, but I had no choice.
Time stopped moving, and I felt as though I had stopped too. But about three-quarters of the way up, I saw the priest grab her and hold a knife to her neck.
The Hauntings of Scott Remington Page 17
