Beautiful Sacrifice: A Novel

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Lina pushed through the undergrowth, gathering new welts to match her old. Behind her, Hunter did the same. Neither of them commented on the small wounds. Both understood that the jungle was its own master and exacted its due from soft-skinned trespassers.

  In tandem, Lina and Hunter climbed down to a low outcrop of limestone that overlooked a small clearing ringed with more of the misshapen ceiba trees. The roots were unusually gnarled and twisted, more like strangler figs than ceiba. Even for vegetation powerful enough to hold overworld and underworld together, life right here was a raw struggle.

  At the center of a clearing Hunter saw a mound that had once been far taller than he was. Now it was about his height. The rubble surrounding it was at least twenty yards across. All of it had been consumed by the jungle, though the biggest limestone blocks were still fighting for their place in the sun.

  Hunter took a slow, deep breath. Perhaps smoke from clove cigarettes, perhaps a dead campfire, perhaps his instincts working in overdrive. Whatever had happened here recently wasn’t happening at this moment. He no longer felt watched with predatory interest.

  And he still didn’t like the fact that he had felt that way.

  “Any back roads from here to Tulum?” he asked.

  “None that don’t pass over estate lands. As a cat sanctuary, we’re off-limits to tourists and hikers. Besides, there’s not much here to see. No beaches. No mountains or canyons worth mentioning. No striking ruins. No village fairs. Bird-watching is average, at best. Cenote de Balam is barely known beyond the boundary of the estate itself.”

  Hunter nodded slowly. “What you’re saying is that the area is pretty much a blank spot on the map.”

  “A lot of the Yucatan is like that. Without rivers to provide food, freshwater, and relatively easy access, or any wealth to be mined once you manage to get deep into the jungle, this area has been left alone. Around Tulum there is the biggest underwater cave complex in the world, all gnawed out of limestone one drop at a time. But none of the underground passages connects with our cenotes.”

  “Somebody liked it a long time ago,” he said, looking at the rubble mound.

  “Even before the Maya came, there were people here. Some of the oldest human skeletons in the New World have been found deep in the flooded caves of Tulum. They come from a time when an ice age locked up so much water the sea level was much lower than now.”

  “What about this site right here? Has this been dug?”

  “No. There were—and are—more promising sites. But this one is my favorite. There’s something about the isolation, the feeling of time made tangible.” She half smiled. “I’ve never been able to explain it. This site simply draws me.”

  He studied the overgrown remnants of what had once been a substantial structure. Very faint paths webbed around the mound, leading to the far side.

  “So, what is this place?” Hunter asked as he looked for any sign of an entryway.

  “It’s a tomb. We think.”

  “‘We’?” Hunter asked. “Philip comes here?”

  “Not since we measured it. Ten years ago I found this site and some others by using remote sensing techniques. Spectral analysis of satellite images of the jungle pointed me in the right direction. Even overgrown sites reflect light differently from undisturbed jungle. Philip listed them in order from most promising to least and went to work.”

  “With your help?”

  Her mouth tightened. “When I insisted. And I insisted that I be here for any excavation at this site. So”—she shrugged—“he put it at the bottom of the list.”

  “And you’re still waiting.”

  “Most of the time, I don’t mind. Part of me likes knowing the mound is here, untouched.”

  A breeze came, swirled. It sounded like snakes crawling around them, a dry scrape of scales. The haze in the sky was still thin, barren of rain.

  “What do you think the rubble once was?” Hunter asked.

  “Philip says it was like the rest of the Reyes Balam sites, only much smaller, a sixteenth-century pimple on the bitter end of the Maya road.”

  “After the Spanish?” Hunter asked, measuring the rubble and the jungle with the eyes of a predator rather than a tourist or an archaeologist.

  “We’re not entirely sure, but yes. Most of our Reyes Balam sites were created by people fleeing population centers after the fall of the Maya civilization, which preceded the Spanish. Some of the sites we’ve found were active several generations before 1550, but after that, the sites grew quickly in size and number.”

  “Vanquished kings looking for new thrones.”

  Lina smiled. “I doubt that our Maya ancestor was a king. More like a favored son who saw the Spanish handwriting on the wall and put his X on the winning side. But the Balam genealogy insists he was a king. We have a family crest in Madrid to support that claim.”

  Hunter shook his head. “And you just want to be plain old Lina Taylor, Ph.D. Must really make your family crazy.”

  “They return the favor.”

  The breeze lifted again, almost secretive in its hushed presence.

  With pale eyes Hunter searched the jungle. If there were any more mounds, he couldn’t see them beneath the thick growth.

  “Mind if I walk around the edges?” he asked.

  “Go ahead. If there was anything of obvious archaeological significance, Philip would have been here, rather than scrambling around in Belize.”

  “Philip sounds like the type who couldn’t overlook any chance, however slim or distant, to get one up on a rival.”

  “You haven’t even met him, yet you already know him.”

  “You’re a good teacher.” Hunter jumped lightly down from the outcropping, then turned and held his arms up for Lina.

  She could have jumped down just fine without him, and both of them knew it. So she smiled and let him lift her. Before he put her down, he gave her the kind of kiss that made the world spin around her.

  “Your father may act like an ass,” Hunter breathed against her lips, “but he contributed sperm toward one extraordinary offspring.”

  Lina blinked against a sudden sting at the back of her eyes. “Thank you.”

  “I didn’t do a thing. You did.”

  Before she could say anything, he lowered his head just enough to sink into her mouth. She flowed against him like warmth from a fire, sinking into him in turn. Finally, slowly, he raised his head.

  “Either we stop now or we go for ticket sales and a limestone mattress,” he said hoarsely.

  “Ticket sales?”

  “The locals lurking out in the jungle.”

  “Oh.” She sighed. “I’m willing to try the limestone mattress, but not the tickets.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Figured.” He blew out a hard breath and reminded himself of all the reasons it would be really stupid to let down his guard long enough to do what his body was demanding. “C’mon, let’s take a walk around the ruins.”

  She led him to a reasonably clear thread of path and set out toward the mound.

  “Who do you think is buried here?” Hunter asked.

  “Somebody more important than the folks who built the tomb,” she said dryly. “But on the scale of Maya monuments, this is really small change. It’s isolated, unconnected to any other sites.”

  “Could have been a secret place.”

  She gave him a startled look over her shoulder. “That’s what I think. Or rather, what I feel. This is an unusual site.”

  “Why don’t you explore it?”

  “Philip has first rights on all the ruins on Reyes Balam land. It was part of the prenuptial agreement he signed. In return, he gave up any legal claim to Celia’s name or inheritance.”

  “He gets first dig rights and walks away from the sure thing—money.”

  Lina laughed oddly. “Celia married to get out of the Yucatan. Philip married to get exclusive digging rights in the Yucatan. The old Chinese curse—may your
fondest wish come true.”

  Hunter whistled softly. “Life’s a tricky bitch.”

  “Oh yeah. Even back then, Philip was drawn to hints of Kawa’il. He met Celia on a university-sponsored dig on Reyes Balam lands. When I read Moby-Dick on the way to my undergrad degree, I thought of Kawa’il. It’s Philip’s white whale, his obsession. The more it eludes him, the greater his need to pursue.”

  “I saw the movie. Didn’t end well.”

  The feeling of being watched returned. It wasn’t simply the sensation of being in a jungle that felt alive and other.

  “Are you sure we’re alone out here?” Hunter asked, switching to English.

  “As long as we aren’t testing mattresses, we’re okay,” Lina said in the same language. “The local Maya knew about this place long before anyone cared. It wasn’t disturbed then. It won’t be looted and sold on the black market now.”

  Something rustled out at the edge of the clearing, twigs whipping against what sounded like flesh. The wind blew hot, feeling too dry for the jungle.

  Hunter followed Lina around to the back of the mound and nearly ran into her when she stopped dead in the path.

  “What—” he began.

  She pointed, her finger trembling. Her voice made clear it was rage, not fear, coursing through her. “Some of the rubble has been moved.”

  Whoever had done it had been careful to disturb as little of the overgrowth as possible. It took Hunter a moment to see what Lina saw.

  “I can’t believe looters are here,” she said hoarsely.

  Hunter had drawn his gun from beneath the backpack. He held the weapon along his leg, not wanting to spook Lina unless he had to.

  “Neatest looters I ever saw,” he said.

  She closed her eyes and tried to manage the rage that had flooded her at the thought of her secret place being pillaged. After a moment she opened her eyes and saw what Hunter had.

  A casual visitor wouldn’t have noticed the subtle movement of rubble and overgrowth. There were none of the potholes and garbage and careless piles of dirt that were signatures of an illegal dig.

  The breeze shifted shadows and sunlight. Something gleaming in the disturbed area caught Hunter’s eye.

  Metal, not glass.

  He followed a very faint trail winding amid overgrown blocks of rubble. Within four steps he saw the gleam of fresh brass. He bent and picked it up with his left hand. It was slightly cooler than his skin, no warmer or colder than the ground itself. On the back of the cartridge, the head stamp read 7.62 × 39. He rolled it in his fingers and passed the open end under his nose, smelling for gunpowder but getting only the faintest trace. Probably his imagination.

  “How long since the last rain?” Hunter asked Lina as she hurried to him.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It can rain every day, but the weather’s been weird here just like it has up in Houston.”

  He wrapped his fingers around the spent cartridge. “This smells dead. It could have been fired days or weeks ago. Brass is still shiny.”

  She looked at the gun in his right hand.

  “Wrong caliber,” he said, smiling faintly.

  What he didn’t say was that he would bet good money that the spent brass had come from an AK-47.

  “But—” she began.

  “Quiet,” he breathed. He pressed her behind him into a shallow alcove in the mound of rubble. “Someone is out there.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  LINA’S PULSE HAMMERED AGAINST HER WRISTS. SHE HAD trouble keeping still while being held off balance with one side of her head pressed to the stone and the rest of her pressed against Hunter.

  He stood quietly, his pale eyes raking shadows for a target.

  Changing direction and strengthening, the wind kicked up, no longer dry. It was like jaguar breath, hot and moist. Bits of man-made and natural litter danced along the ground, covering any sounds that might have come from farther away, beyond the edge of the clearing.

  Hunter waited, knowing there weren’t enough shots in the magazine to manage a standoff. Rodrigo’s illegal gun would put out a lot of stopping power, but not at a great range, certainly not enough to be much good against the thick cover of the encroaching jungle. Concealed by wind and vegetation, a dozen men could be closing in.

  But the shadow that had alerted him was no longer there.

  The exhalation of wind faded.

  “Stay here,” Hunter said.

  He eased away from her, then made a sharp motion that no watcher could have missed.

  Nobody cared enough to shoot.

  Deliberately Hunter shrugged out of the backpack and swung it out into the open. Nobody shot at the sudden target.

  He retreated to cover, shoved the gun into the back of his pants, put the backpack on, and returned to Lina.

  “Nada,” he said.

  She nodded without looking at him. Her fingertips were digging along a faint, straight line among the stones. Now that she had called his attention to it, he could see that other fingers had been there before hers, rubbing against lichen and moss, and keeping bigger jungle plants at bay.

  Hunter’s curiosity fired. “Is it a door?”

  “Looks like.”

  She worked her fingers along the tiny seam where the limestone blocks came apart. These huge pieces of stone were squared off, unlike the more uneven, harshly weathered blocks that had fallen from higher. It looked like a wall mostly concealed by rubble.

  “Is it stuck?” he asked quietly.

  “Probably hasn’t been opened in centuries. We should get an engineering study to make sure that—”

  With only the faintest grating noise, the stone moved.

  Lina made a shocked sound and peered into the darkness. She could see just enough to tell that the door had moved aside into a prepared niche in the wall.

  “It worked,” she said, astonished.

  “Too well.”

  “What do you—oh. It’s been maintained. How odd. Philip never mentioned anything. But then, he wouldn’t,” she added with faint bitterness.

  Hunter checked over his shoulder. Nothing but jungle, no sound except the faint rub of leaf against leaf as the wind slowly twisted. Whoever or whatever was out there wasn’t interested in confrontation.

  “What is this place?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Lina replied. “It doesn’t feel like any tomb I’ve ever been in. Something is…odd.”

  He nodded. His eyes never stopped probing the surrounding jungle.

  “Look,” Lina said, her voice urgent.

  Hunter spun back to Lina’s position and glanced inside. She stood half in light, the rest of her consumed by shadows. A few feet farther into the mound was what looked like a wall, yet a faint light came from one side. It took only a few steps before a blunt, short hallway, perhaps three feet by five feet, maybe more, opened at an angle deeper in the rubble.

  Pale candles that smelled faintly of flowers burned in the darkness along one wall.

  “Someone lit these,” she said, going through the opening into the ruin.

  He stepped inside after her, pulling the gun once more. When he moved to the right, the door slid back into place behind him.

  “What the hell?” he muttered.

  “I think whoever was here is gone,” Lina said. “The candle-lined passage is empty and the flames are still. The opening of the door didn’t really affect them. Nobody has hurried by lately, disturbing the flames.”

  “Stay put. I have to check something.” He set the gun in an empty waist-level niche and took a penlight from his pocket, the same burglar’s tool he’d found in his uncle’s house in Padre. The thin beam revealed a finger-smoothed line around the rim of the door, just like on the outside. He pushed, prodded, cursed, stepped to the right—and the door opened. He stepped back across the entrance to the left and it closed again.

  “Must be some kind of counterweight system,” Hunter said, retrieving the gun and putting it at the small of his back.r />
  “As long as we can open it, I don’t care if it’s PFM.”

  “PFM?”

  “Pure flaming magic,” she said, feeling her heartbeat settle.

  He laughed softly. “As good an explanation as any.”

  “It’s cooler in here than I expected,” Lina said.

  Hunter took a breath. “And dry. More PFM?”

  “Works for me right now.”

  “Want more light?” Hunter asked.

  Her teeth flashed against her skin as she smiled. “Not yet. I like seeing it as the Maya did.”

  “Sorry I left my copal torch at home,” he said dryly, switching off his penlight. “I only have the twenty-first-century kind.”

  Smiling, she started to walk toward the end of the short, candlelit hall.

  Hunter’s hand clamped around her wrist, stopping her barely a step inside the blunt passage. Startled, she looked at his face. In the knee-high candlelight he looked hard, almost demonic. She froze, listening as he was listening.

  Nothing. Not even the faintest rustle of a lizard.

  Gently he released her. Then he switched on his penlight again.

  “I don’t—” she began.

  “Let me look at the floor before you go exploring.”

  The beam was thin as a laser, a cold slash of blue white. Unlike the floor, the walls and ceiling were finished in limestone stucco. The uncovered stone on the floor had been worn away by the passage of feet, leaving a dull streak against the surface. The streak led to the far wall, and what looked to be a dead end.

  “Dirty feet,” Hunter said. “Or sandals. If it’s safe for them, it’s safe for us.” He clicked off the beam. “Go ahead.”

  “Pit traps only happen in movies,” she muttered.

  “I saw that one, too,” he said. “Ended well.”

  Candlelight bent and straightened as they walked down the hall. At the back, there was another hall branching off at a right angle. On the far side there were stone steps leading down to a place where no candles glowed.

  Lina counted six steps before she lost them to the darkness. What she could see was polished limestone, dimmed at the center by the passage of many feet.