Wilde Child 7

by Jenn Stark

  Another billboard flashed by, advertising a taqueria. Taqueria sounded like taco, so that seemed like a good place to start for food. I pulled off the highway and into what appeared to be suburban Mexico City, and the streets boasted ordinary things like drug stores and gas stations and, yes, taco restaurants. We stopped first at the gas station, where I told Martine to stay locked inside while I pumped gas, and to act like he was asleep. This proved to be a masterful decision, since he was once more passed out by the time I finished filling the tank.

  I didn’t have the heart to wake him when we reached what appeared to be the Mexican version of a Walmart either. But I was pretty sure I was breaking some kind of code of babysitter conduct leaving a child sleeping unattended in a car. I wrestled with indecision for a few minutes, then pulled the nails out of my hoodie, and crossed them on the driver’s seat.

  “Protect him,” I whispered.

  On the flat leather seat, the bone shards gleamed and shifted, their runic carvings seeming to glow more brightly.

  I didn’t know what that meant, but I felt better. The babysitter code of conduct had nothing on the Valkyries.

  Inside the store, I scored pajamas and underwear that were more or less the boy’s size, bath wipes and towels, and a blanket-pillow combination that might have been intended for a smaller kid but was the first thing I could find in a hurry. I realized standing in line that I looked like nothing more than a child abductor, but the sleepy-eyed old woman at the checkout didn’t appear to think anything of it.

  “Mojar la cama?” she asked, not unsympathetically. I had no idea what she said, but I bit my lip and did my best to look embarrassed. She grinned and patted my hand, then I was through.

  I trudged back to the car and unlocked it, unreasonably happy to find the boy still inside. The bones were there too, and, once again embarrassed, I thanked them as well. Tossing the clothes and supplies in the backseat, I spent an extra minute putting the blanket over Martine and easing his head onto the pillow. He looked so unreasonably small, I found myself scowling at him. Was I really going to make him spend the night in a car?

  I thought about Gamon and Mercault, and the mercenaries they’d bought to track me down. Yeah, I am, I decided. If I needed to get away, I’d rather already be in a vehicle.

  The next stop was the taqueria, and I did poke the kid awake for that. If I did the ordering, God only knew what we’d end up with.

  What we ended up with, however, was easily half the restaurant, the boy’s eyes wide with excitement as we got back on the main road, staring from the food to the blanket and towel spread over him, then back to the food. “This is dinner?”

  I eyed the twelve-pack of tacos and monster cups of soda. I wasn’t going to be winning any parenting awards soon, I knew, but these were desperate times.

  “It’s dinner.” I nodded. “We’ll push on a little bit and then find someplace to hide for the night and tomorrow, okay?” I honestly wasn’t worried so much about the night, but the next day might be tough.

  We traveled in relative silence another thirty minutes up the road, with Martine focused on his tacos and soda, while I let my hunger sharpen my focus. The last thing I needed right now was a food coma. When the boy looked up, he seemed calmer, happier, the trauma of the tent attack behind him for the moment.

  He pointed at the next sign. “We sleep.”

  I glanced at the cheery image of a sunrise over a squat adobe-shaped building, and I shook my head. “No can do. We might have people after us. You sleep however you need to, and I’ll sleep once you’re rested. Sound good?”

  He agreed moodily, but within another twenty minutes, he passed out again, and I resumed my vigil. More touristy billboards cropped up as well, although now there was a new name besides Teotihuacan: pirámide del sol. That made me straighten. Even with my poor language skills I could tell that the first word was pyramid, but it was the second that caught my attention: sol. Sol, as in solar, meant sun. And Martine had wanted us to go to the northeast, toward the sun.

  Was Gamon hiding out at an archaeological dig site?

  It made a certain kind of sense. It was outside the city, and while no doubt a magnet for tourists, most of those folks would be in and out, never to return. And I’d been to my share of sites enough to know that often what had been discovered and opened to the public was only a fraction of what was really there.

  How good would Gamon’s security be? And what was her arrangement with the owners of the site?

  I kept driving into the night, at one point pulling free my phone, which fortunately Mercault hadn’t had time to divest me of. Probably hadn’t worried too much about it, since he was planning on swissing my cheese. Asshat.

  I punched in the number while eyeing Martine. The boy was still out.

  “Madam Wilde.” Ma-Singh’s voice rang with such quiet authority that I almost laughed. I was glad to have him on my team.

  “Sorry I didn’t check in before, but I’m sure you heard what happened. Thank you for your help in getting the team in there so quickly.”

  A pause. “Yes. But only after the fact. The agents we had in place all had headsets. An order was given to rescue you at the tent of Monsieur Mercault, first with blanks, then with knives. I assumed it was you doing the ordering. They said it was a female who gave the command.”

  “That would be no.” I watched another Pyramid of the Sun sign flash by. “More likely, Armaeus pretending to be me due to the tech interference.” I wanted Ma-Singh to trust the Magician, but it wasn’t easy. Still, the man had clearly helped when help was needed. “Either way, your team performed flawlessly. Are you tracking me now?”

  “Yes,” Ma-Singh said. “Heading north, northeast out of the city. Destination?”

  “Pyramid of the Sun, it would seem. One of the ruins in this giant archaeological site called Teotihuacan.”

  “Why there?”

  “Because that’s where the kid wants me to go.” I grimaced, feeling the first tug of fatigue behind my eyes.

  “But Gamon will not be there,” Ma-Singh said, confidence ringing in his voice. “She needs a lab, medical production facilities. The ability to cart drugs in and out. This must be another stop along the way.”

  That gave me pause. “That’s fair. It’ll be somewhere past there, then. Out of the city, I’m thinking, but not so remote that vehicles in and out of the place will seem odd. Do some research and let me know likely possibilities, okay?”

  I disconnected and spent a full ten minutes arguing with myself about whether or not to throw the phone out the window. In the end, responsibility won out. Like it or not, I was the leader of the House of Swords. People were counting on me. Moreover, I wasn’t on a solo mission, but one with a child who didn’t deserve to get killed because I wanted to play Captain America and go in alone, guns blazing. Or gun blazing, anyway. I never was good at shooting with my left hand.

  We reached Teotihuacan less than an hour later, my concerns instantly put to rest about where to hide. Surrounding the ruins was a rabbit warren of streets, residences and government buildings, parking lots and shops. It was the work of fifteen minutes to find three good locations in relative shade. We’d hole up, hide out, and make our move the next evening, when Martine did his eyeball track and mapped us out of here.

  I pulled into a shaded lot just before dawn and shut off the car, looking over again at Martine. He was awake again, though yawning, and I stood guard as he prepared for sleep, returning to the car to stretch back his seat and cover him. In mere moments, he was sleeping soundly. When I was ready to bunk down as well, I cradled the sticks in my hands, careful not to grasp them too hard, and breathed another word over them, the same word I’d used before with Martine. “Protect.”

  The shade around us lengthened and twisted, and I craned around, staring. The tree that had leaned crazily over the wall was fuller now, richer, its long limbs hanging over the wall and cascading around the car. In another minute, it looked like we’d abandoned
our vehicle there sometime during the first Bush administration, never to be reclaimed.

  I chuckled, weighing the Gods’ Nails in my hands. It might have some codependency issues, but this was an artifact that meant business. “Thank you,” I muttered, hugging the bone shards close. Illusions like these I could get used to. Then I drifted off to sleep.

  A moment later, I awoke with Martine’s hand on my shoulder.

  “Sara,” he whispered urgently. “It’s time.”

  “Time for…” My eyes fluttered open, but instantly I saw the problem. We were still in the car, shaded from all eyes…but it was clearly dusk outside—dusk, not dawn.

  I sat bolt upright. “How long have you been awake?”

  “The entrance is very close here,” he said, ignoring me. A second later, I knew why. His eyes had gone milk white. “You are strong, Sara. You will save us.”

  “So you keep saying.” I blew out a long breath. “We drive or we walk?”

  “Walk—no phone, nothing with…” He paused, searching for the word. “Electric. The archaeological people can track that.”

  I lifted my brows, but I didn’t argue. We’d only be in the pyramid long enough for Martine to get his next geolocation. And the car was sweltering—it could do with a time out too.

  “All right, let’s go.”

  “Not we, Sara.” Martine’s eyes were no longer milky, but his smile was rueful. “You.”

  He reached out and took my hand, placing it on his heart. A racing staccato burst beneath my palm. “I can no longer slow its dancing,” he whispered.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The entrance to the Pyramid of the Sun of Teotihuacan was an impressive affair, seen for hundreds of yards in all directions. The building itself was enormous, standing at the end of a street referred to as the Avenue of the Dead. This information didn’t inspire confidence, but then, neither had the very sick ten-year-old boy who’d given said info to me.

  I grimaced, angling past the grand entrance to skirt the building. I was searching for a nondescript square that looked like every other square of rock in this heap of ruins, only slightly raised. That was where the voices would come from. According to the boy, I’d know it when I saw it. Not trusting myself to know anything with that level of certainty, I’d kept my hands deep in my hoodie pockets as I walked, shuffling my cards.

  After some back-and-forth discussion as Martine had grown dramatically paler, I’d left my phone with him, but not the Gods’ Nails. He seemed pretty certain I’d need something stronger than Pizza Hut on autodial, and I wanted him to have a way to call for help. I keyed in the general’s number, made the boy promise to dial it as soon as I was out of sight. I would have hated for the general to make some kind of extremely reasonable request of me that I’d have to ignore.

  Now I was back in familiar territory, however. The territory of being completely lost and alone. It felt refreshingly like coming home.

  I pulled out a series of three cards in quick succession, scrutinizing them quickly before dropping them back in the deck, then smoothed down my hoodie. I didn’t want to draw any more attention to myself than I needed to, and it was bad enough that I was going off the beaten path. Still, there were other tourists meandering along the scrubby dirt and rocks even at this late hour, scuffing their feet along the enormous stones.

  I paused in front of an informational sign, pretending to study it with great interest. Luckily, it included an English translation. The excavation had apparently not gone below the surface too deeply, with all the exciting discoveries having been made inside the pyramid itself, and even among those, the “excitement” was limited to some clutches of skeletons and a few examples of funereal pottery and jaguar statues. None of that meant anything to me.

  Ma-Singh’s hesitation in believing this site was the endgame rang loudly in my ears, and I had to admit he was right. This didn’t look like a facility capable of producing more than a tumbleweed. There were no commercial buildings near the pyramids—at least not close enough to serve as loading stations for multibillion dollar shipments of drugs—and everything seemed geared toward archaeology and tourism. Too many eyes from too many countries. It simply didn’t add up.

  Like it or not, though, this was where Martine had led me, where he insisted I must go. When I’d asked if there was another destination after this, he’d stared at me, confused, and I hadn’t pushed it. It was enough that I was here, at his direction. It would have to be enough.

  “Focus,” I muttered, scanning the barren landscape. The rocks that were visible didn’t look like escape hatches to me. They were thick pallets of stone, part of an ancient sacred road, with nary a manhole to be found. And a manhole was what I needed. The first card of the three I’d pulled was once again the Seven of Pentacles, showing a young man staring down at a series of pentacles. Those pents were in the shape of fruit on a bush, but still, he was staring down into the bushes, and by God, that was where I’d start looking.

  Only there was nothing—scarcely any bushes, and those that were clustered around were set far away from the larger rocks. I wandered over to a section that looked like a miniature excavation site—pickaxes, shovels, a light—and realized it was staged, another informational placard describing the history of the place. Crap.

  I swept the horizon with my gaze, but there was nothing. The sun was dropping lower in the sky, and all I could think of was Martine, stuck back at the car, wondering what the hell I was doing.

  “Think, think.”

  After the Seven of Pents, I’d pulled the Six of Cups and Tower. I hated pulling the Tower anytime I was stuck underground, and the Six of Cups was frankly one of my least favorite cards to pull from a tracking perspective. It could depict anything, and since its focus was children and Martine was currently languishing in my car, it wasn’t a particularly helpful draw. The cards did that to me sometimes, though, portraying my worries and concerns when I simply needed a clear-cut answer. But first things first.

  “Seven of Pents.” I scanned the space again. Shovel, pickax, lantern, slab, dust, rocks, bushes. Lather, rinse, repeat across the entire road, except for this little makeshift digger’s gallery. For a moment, I tried to consider what it would be like to dig anything under the hot Mexican sun. Especially in the heat of the day, it would redefine misery to be out here, leaning on your shovel, mopping the sweat from your brow, wondering when the hole would ever be deep enough…

  I stopped, my brain finally catching up with my eyes.

  “Idiot,” I muttered. Looking around to see if anyone was watching, I moved forward nonchalantly one step, then a second. By the third, I’d reached the shovel. I picked it up, only to realize it had fallen over from its casing—a shallow bucket set into the ground filled with sand. You couldn’t see the bucket at all from even five feet away, but it made for the perfect base.

  I pushed the shovel into the base and jumped away, bracing for impact.

  Nothing moved.

  Moving forward gingerly, I tried again. I wiggled the shovel a little in its sand pail, then leaped back a second time. Still nothing. I leaned all my weight hard on the shovel once, twice, in rapid succession, before jumping away as quickly.

  And still nothing. The wind was starting to pick up, the sun now officially setting over the western skyline. A few more brightly jacketed official-looking types could be seen at the doorways to the main buildings, and I grimaced. My window of opportunity was narrowing, but nothing was working. There were no voices here.

  I reached out and jiggled the shovel again—and no. I stepped behind the shovel onto a layer of sand, and shoved the long-handled tool down into the pail. No.

  What was it I was missing? With the shovel well and truly wedged into the pail, I leaned heavily on it and stayed that way, staring at the rocks. Was there some sort of image there I was supposed to see? Some guide to opening up secret passageways? Some—

  The sound tipped me off just in time for realization to strike, but not soon e
nough for me to back away.

  With a long, groaning shudder, sounding exactly like the haunting moan of an old man, the sand dropped away beneath me.

  I plummeted.

  As I tumbled down a solid surface rather than into a gaping maw, several things flashed into my mind with sharp clarity. The first was, I needed to be smarter. Even an idiot could have worked out faster that prolonged leaning on the shovel was exactly what had been needed, mimicking the young man on the Seven of Pents, who leaned on his pole while contentedly regarding the fruits of his labors.

  The second was, I was falling a long way into the earth, but not on any sort of usual trajectory. This entrance was a one-way chute that funneled me somewhere deep into the pyramid, but not in a straight line. Instead, I skidded over rocks worn smooth by what had to be thousands of people before me, over hundreds—perhaps even thousands of years. Who’d built this chute into the floor, and why?

  Remarkably, I had time to think about all that. It was that long a drop.

  I was working out my theory of space and time when the pace of my fall picked up rapidly, and I suddenly landed on what had to be stacked bags of cornmeal. Or poured cement, as the case may be. Either way, I hit with enough force to knock the wind out of me, so much so that I crumpled to my side, trying to make sense of the odd smell in the room. Beneath me, there was corn, wheat—some sort of grain. It smelled earthy and natural. But the other scent…

  I scrambled off the stacked bags and fished in my pocket for a penlight, flicking it on long enough to get my bearings. I was in a room empty of people, but by no means empty. On the near wall, where I was, were tumbled rows upon rows of bags of cornmeal, rice, or something that had once no doubt been soft but was now bruisingly hard. Against the other were pallets of…what had to be marijuana.

  It simply had to be. I’d never smelled anything that could quite match the stench of the plant, acrid and rich at once. I crept over and pawed at the bricks of hash, then realized that they weren’t on stationery pallets—they were on tracks, empty pallets to the left, full to the right, and a cart rail system that disappeared down an even darker corridor beyond.