I Do Not Trust You

by Laura J. Burns

  “Okay,” she said. “Thanks.” She got to her feet. All that was left to do was say good-bye. It shouldn’t be so hard. She’d only known him for a matter of days.

  Ash stood up too. “It’ll be okay. I’ll be here when you get back. The pieces of Set will be here.”

  She felt a jolt of surprise. She should be thinking about the pieces. But she’d only been thinking of him.

  “I have to go.” She started toward the mausoleum’s narrow door, then turned and launched herself at Ash, hugging him tight. His arms came up, crushing her to him. “Be careful,” he said.

  “I have to go,” she repeated, mumbling into his chest. Then she pushed herself away and left.

  She didn’t let herself look back.

  CHAPTER 20

  M checked to make sure the needle on her compass was perfectly aligned with the orienting arrow. Then she aimed in the direction of the traveling arrow, chose a tree in the distance, and started toward it, silently thanking Mom and Dad for teaching her navigation skills. She wouldn’t have been able to find her way through the jungle to the jaguar temple without them.

  After three hours of hiking, she was also thankful she’d decided to buy two pairs of thick, comfy socks along with her new hiking boots and small scythe, all paid for with Ash’s money. I guess it’s the Eye’s money, actually, she thought.

  She had mostly managed to wall Ash-related thoughts into one corner of her brain. But apprehension kept slipping through. She knew wondering if she’d made the right decision was pointless. It had been more than a day since she left him. If he were going to take the pieces to the Eye, he was already gone.

  She’d made her choice. She wasn’t going to think about it anymore. Distractions were something she couldn’t afford. If she got off course by as little as fifty feet she might walk right past the temple.

  After another half hour of hacking her way through the jungle, she found it. Vegetation had begun creeping over the carved jaws that served as the temple’s entrance, enormous teeth designed to incite fear. She stopped and a shiver slithered through her.

  Her gut was telling her she was in danger. Her brain knew the mouth was a carved rock and not at all threatening. But her gut couldn’t be ignored. It believed stone teeth should be avoided. And soulful eyes should be trusted. When she’d first met Ash, she’d known to be wary, she’d—

  Stop, she ordered herself. Just because she’d successfully navigated the jungle didn’t mean she could stop paying attention to her surroundings. Ruins could be extremely dangerous. And her gut was telling her the temple should be avoided. She had to be careful.

  M straightened her shoulders and walked through the monster’s mouth un-chomped. The temperature dropped several degrees inside the stone building, and as she moved deeper, she was struck by the silence. During her hike through the jungle, insect whirs and buzzes, screeches and monkey chatter had been incessant, but no living creature had taken shelter in the temple. Even the mosquitos that had been biting her all day hadn’t followed her inside.

  She took a large flashlight from her backpack. Her fingers brushed against the feathers of the mask Ash had bought her, a silly thing to take to a jungle, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave it behind. It had been so unexpected, so sweet.

  Was he waiting? Was he— She sighed, not finishing the question. She flicked on the flashlight and studied the narrow passageway in front of her. Looked good. Nothing to climb over or squeeze around.

  She slowly walked down the passage, playing the flashlight beam along the wall carvings as she went. They all seemed to be of warriors, but many had lines carved across them, slashing through the images.

  The grooves were deep, clearly made by a sharp blade, because the cuts were smooth. M ran her fingers down three parallel grooves, her nails making a light scratching sound. They’re supposed to be claw marks, she realized. Well, she was in the Temple of the Jaguar. Did the slashes indicate warriors who had somehow angered or disappointed the god? Her fingers itched to pull out her cell and document what she was seeing, but she wasn’t here as an archeologist.

  The passageway widened, and she saw another carved mouth. This time she stepped through without hesitation—but the small circular room she’d entered was a dead end. At the far side was a raised stone altar. On top sat a cracked statue of a man with the ears and teeth of a jaguar, and beside it a bowl. The walls on either side showed paintings of the gradual transformation of a man into the great cat. The paintings only used two colors, red and black. To the Maya, red represented initiation, and black represented transformation.

  She ran her fingers along the walls, hoping to feel something her eyes had missed, some way to get deeper into the temple, but there was nothing. She studied the altar. It was unadorned, made of the same stone as the walls. The were-jaguar statue and the bowl were both ceramic.

  Could the statue hold some kind of trigger mechanism that would open a door? Or set off a booby trap? Dr. Verela was superstitious, but that didn’t mean there weren’t real dangers here. There had to be some reason the people who had come to the temple ended up dead, a reason these two artifacts had been left untouched.

  Before last week, M would never have considered a supernatural explanation. But now she wasn’t so sure. And if she had to face down an actual were-jaguar to get the last Set piece, so be it.

  She gently ran her hands over the ancient statue. There didn’t seem to be a way to move the ears or mouth, the jaguar’s feet or the man’s hands, at least not without powers she didn’t possess. Who knew, maybe Ash could make it dance a jig, but she was on her own. She tried pressing on the jaguar’s spots, but nothing happened.

  She put down the statue and picked up the bowl. There was a series of pictures painted in red. The first showed a figure cutting its tongue and letting blood drip into a bowl. The one she held?

  The next showed the figure adding a flowering plant to the bowl. Then there was a picture of the figure drinking from the bowl. The final image showed the figure curled up under the altar M stood before, complete with bowl and statue on top.

  M returned the bowl to the altar. The instructions were for a ritual of some kind. Likely an initiation. M looked inside the bowl. There was a yellowish residue, maybe powder from the decaying clay, but maybe something else. Could it have been left behind from something mixed in the bowl, remains of the plant shown?

  M thought back to the sibyl cave. The lore had said to bring an offering of mistletoe, and mistletoe had helped them get to the room with the signpost. The bowl was telling her what to do.

  In her backpack, she had the Swiss Army knife her mother had always carried. Dad had given it to her when she turned twelve. Mom had believed every woman should have one, and since then, M had used it for a million things—gutting fish, disgorging a fish hook from her dad’s cheek, pressing the reset button on her cell, getting spinach out of her teeth, making a new tent peg, killing a scorpion, cutting moleskin for a blister, sharpening a pencil, opening a can. M had never done anything as cool with it as save a life, but her mom had. She’d used the knife to perform an emergency tracheotomy once.

  The most important thing the knife did was make M think about Mom. Every time she used it, she made sure to remember something, even if it was just something from a story someone had told her about her mother.

  M took out the knife and selected the small blade. She opened her mouth. Was she really going to do this? Yeah, she was. At least the blood didn’t have to come from a penis, like in some rituals. She’d have been shit out of luck.

  With a quick motion, she nicked her tongue and leaned over the bowl, squeezing the tip of her tongue between her fingers until a few drops of blood mixed with the powder residue. She used her pinky to mix in her blood, then licked the concoction off. It burned where it touched the cut she’d made, but didn’t have much of a taste, just the usual salty tang blood had.

  I may have lost it, she thought as she crawled under the altar and curled up to mat
ch the position of the figure on the bowl.

  She closed her eyes, waiting for … something.

  Swirls of red and black appeared beneath her eyelids. Her scalp began to tingle, burning, the sensation flowing down her skin. The pain went deep, stabbing now, burrowing under her skin, blazing.

  She tried to scream, but she couldn’t pull in any air. She couldn’t even open her eyes. It was as if her eyelids had melted into her cheeks. Her arms had fused to her sides, her legs bonded together.

  Then she was falling.

  Falling.

  Falling.

  She landed with a thud. And lay there. The fire in her body extinguished. The pain was gone.

  It took her a second to realize she couldn’t feel her heart beating. Or her chest rising and falling. Was she breathing? Was she alive?

  Terror threatened to overwhelm her. She shoved it back with everything she had in her.

  I’m alive, she told herself. Of course I’m alive. I’m thinking this, so I’m alive.

  If she could just open her eyes … just see where she was …

  What would Mike do? Or Ash? Pray. But M didn’t know how. Or who she would pray to if she did.

  So what would Dad do?

  She called upon one of his favorite expressions: “Let’s review.”

  Okay, M, let’s review, she told herself. What just happened? You—intentionally—ingested the residue of what was most likely a hallucinogenic plant.

  And then? Let’s review. You felt as if your body turned molten and fused into a somewhat person-shaped lump without a pulse.

  The logical answer? You are tripping.

  What should you do? Wait it out. Because, let’s review, you don’t have a choice.

  She felt fractionally calmer. She pretended she was taking yoga breaths, in through the nose and out through the mouth, nice and slow and controlled. Maybe that’s even what was happening. It felt as if she weren’t taking in air, but it was impossible. Because she was alive.

  Although, if she couldn’t move, she wouldn’t stay alive forever. She’d starve. Was that what had happened to the people who died in this temple?

  Not a useful thought. She did some more pretend breathing. In out, in out, in out.

  After some amount of time—M wasn’t sure if it was minutes or hours—she heard a faint cracking sound. Had she been able to hear before? The cracking continued, along with a new sound. The pounding of her heart!

  She tried to open her eyes, and felt her eyelids give a little. They didn’t open, but they’d responded. She tried again, managing to open her eyes a slit, enough to turn the terrible blackness into a deep gray.

  M concentrated on her lips, trying to wrench them apart. There was a louder crack, and her mouth opened slightly. A fine grit slid inside.

  What she needed was her hands. She struggled to yank her arms away from her sides. It was as if she were encased in a hard shell. She felt something crack, then crumble, when she tried to jerk her arms free again. It was working. The knowledge gave her a blast of strength, and she wriggled and twisted and wrenched her arms until, with a crack as loud as a gunshot, her right arm burst free.

  She shook and flexed her hand until she had control over it, then brought her fingers to her face. It felt hard and smooth, like ceramic. She tapped on her cheek with her knuckles, first tentatively, then harder. The cracking sound again. She explored with her fingertips and discovered a fissure. She pried at it until shards began to come off.

  Gently, she worked her eyelids free. Opening them felt miraculous. She couldn’t see much. It seemed like she was lying on a mound of dirt. As quickly as she could, she cracked the area around her mouth until she was able to work her jaw. Opening and closing it caused more of the hard shell to fall off.

  Chipping away at the ceramic was taking forever. She wanted out. Now. She used her free arm to give herself a push, then another. She managed to get herself rocking and was soon tumbling over and over, rolling down the mound. When she hit bottom, she felt large pieces of her casing break off. She arched, and flexed, and bucked, until she was able to stand. She looked down. Chunks of ceramic painted with a complex pattern of red and black were scattered around her.

  Her breath caught as she turned. At least a dozen bodies, in varying degrees of decomposition, lay behind her. Each had been pierced by at least one jade-tipped arrow.

  M crouched down and examined the floor she’d rolled across, before stretching out on her belly, pressing down on one of the stones. Wffft! An arrow shot out of a hole in the wall to her right and flew over her head.

  If she had walked across the floor instead of rolling in her ceramic casing, she would probably be dead. Those who had died down here must not have followed the whole ritual, so the ceramic cocoon hadn’t protected them when the arrows shot out.

  What had just happened hadn’t been a hallucination. It had been real. She’d seen equally strange things—talking statues, the behavior of the Set pieces—but still couldn’t quite believe it.

  She turned away from the bodies and saw that the only way forward was a tall, narrow staircase. She began to climb. At the top was something she’d seen in Mayan ruins before—a ball court. The Maya were believed to have played a game somewhat like basketball. There was a clear space about the size of a football field with a twenty-foot-high black wall running along one side. Stone rings carved with snakes protruded from the wall at either end. The openings in the rings were positioned out to the side, rather than parallel to the floor the way a modern basketball hoop was. But the object was the same—get a ball through a hole.

  A strange phosphorescent light poured down on the court from globes, hundreds of them, arranged around a stone throne at the top of the wall. A massive golden jaguar sat there, towering protectively above everything. Maybe the globes are coated with jarosite, M thought, unable to stop trying to come up with logical explanations for a situation where logic clearly didn’t apply.

  The jaguar glyph they’d found inside the Buddha’s mouth made the golden jaguar the most logical place to start looking for the Set piece. M had brought along climbing gear, but the wall was absolutely smooth. Could the whole thing be made of polished obsidian? Mayan royalty had used that for their mirrors, tezcatl.

  How was she going to get up there? A small stone pyramid sat on either end of the court. They weren’t high enough to help her, but M walked over to the closest to see if it might be useful in some way.

  From a distance it had been invisible, but there was a pit in front of the pyramid, circled with flat stones. The stones were covered in more red-and-black paintings, this time of male warriors playing on the court. Well, some were playing. Others were almost entirely enveloped in snakes twining around their bodies.

  Peering inside, she saw that the pit was deeper than she realized, and filled with bones. Bones of the defeated warriors? But not all of the bones were human. A long skull with large, pointed canine teeth made her think the others were jaguar. So there was a connection with the were-jaguar worship. Maybe the game had something to do with picking the new king, something the jaguar was supposed to be involved in.

  M walked back across the court until she was even with the golden jaguar and the throne it guarded. Someone used to sit in that throne. There had to be a way up. If she could get a rope through one of those rings, she might be able to use it to walk her way up the wall. She snorted. “Easy-peasy.”

  She smiled, the goofy expression making her think of Ash. Instead of sending a spike of worry through her, this time she found the thought of him comforting. She wasn’t completely alone in this, even if he wasn’t with her right this second.

  Okay, rope through ring. Could she tie the rope to a piece of bone? Or maybe go back and get one of those arrows? Before she could decide, a sound split the silence she’d grown so used to.

  It came from above, a noise like the grinding of gear teeth.

  She looked up and saw the jaws of the golden jaguar jerking open inch by inch. T
hen something came hurtling down at her. A black ball. It struck her on the cheek, hard. A drop of blood trickled down her face and plopped onto the stone floor.

  A crack appeared in the spot where the blood hit, and a long, slender red snake slithered out.

  “Holy snakes,” she whispered, her hand on her cheek. It had all happened so fast that she felt a little stunned.

  The snake slithered toward her, but she stepped out of its way. Snakes under the floor. Not her biggest problem. She picked up the ball that hit her. It was made of hard rubber, and was just a bit smaller than the holes in the stone rings. Clearly it was designed for the game.

  M rolled the ball between her hands, thinking, before taking her mom’s Swiss Army knife out again. One of its features was a hook that turned the knife into a package carrier. The hook was also useful for guiding a line through a tight spot. She got to work removing the knife’s outer casing and unscrewed the tiny bolts, carefully putting them in a pocket of her backpack. Then she removed the hook, and with the help of the small blade, managed to gouge a hole in the ball and jam the end of the hook into it. Next she attached one of her climbing ropes to the hook. Now all she had to do was throw the ball through the hoop. If a Mayan warrior could do it, so could she.

  M eyed the ring, took a few running steps, and hurled the ball at it. Not even close. The ball hit the stone floor with a wham, making a new crack. Another red snake wriggled up and out, its tongue tasting the air. She threw the ball at the ring again. Missed. Wham. Crack.

  And there came another snake. It stayed nearby. So had the other two. “I really don’t need spectators,” M muttered. She took another shot. “And I win another snake!” she cried, throwing up her arms in frustration as a new snake came out of a new crack in the floor.

  She stomped off to retrieve the ball. The newest snake followed, and as she picked up the ball, twined its way up her leg. Oh, hell no. She grabbed its neck, right behind the head so it couldn’t bite her, and yanked. It tightened its coils until she gave a yelp of pain. The snake hadn’t looked big enough to be this strong. She returned to her backpack, the snake still bearing down on her calf. She took out the knife blade and cut off the head. Its body twitched and tightened its grip.