There was no photo or name to honor a relative killed along the highway. The only writing was crudely drawn glyphs painted on snakeskin or inked onto paper and tacked into place.
It was silent except for the random swish of traffic.
No one pulled off farther down the road. No one even paused. The intermittent parade of ancient cars and trucks was splashed with the shine of rich people’s vehicles and the duller gleam of rentals.
Insects crawled among the shrine’s offerings. Wind stirred restlessly, carrying the scent of old blood, old flesh.
“Roadkill?” Lina asked, wrinkling her nose.
“Smells like it, but I don’t see any. Would the locals get upset if I looked more closely at the shrine?”
“As long as you don’t deface anything, it should be okay.”
Hunter went to the shrine and sat on his heels. Very carefully he lifted a mound of flowery offerings. Dull eyes stared back at him. The smell of carrion became overpowering.
“What is it?” Lina asked.
“Monkey head. Maybe a cat. Hard to tell at this point.”
Her breath came in hard, coated with the odor of death. “Blood offering.”
“Looks like it.” Gently Hunter replaced the flowers and tried to ignore the memories of a basement where human blood had flowed red and dried black. The gun he had stuffed into the back of his jeans felt better than it had since Rodrigo had sold it to him. “You recognize any of the glyphs?”
Carefully she leaned down, breathing through her mouth in an effort to minimize the smell. “They’re very rough.”
He grunted.
“Blood. Power.” She stood suddenly. The smell was making her stomach twist. “This shrine calls the powerful old gods, but most of all, the gods of knowledge and death. Kukulcán and Kawa’il.
“I was afraid of that. You think the others along the road are the same?”
“Not all of them. At least one had a picture nailed at the center of the cross, and the arms were shorter. That usually means a Christian commemoration of a dead friend or a family member.”
“But most shrines were like this?” he asked grimly.
“Yes. Kawa’il. Death.”
Hunter straightened swiftly. “Want me to drive?”
“No. I’m okay. Just…” She shrugged.
“Yeah, me, too. Wonder what Mercurio de la Poole thinks of this?”
“I’ll be sure to ask.”
Lina and Hunter got back in the Bronco and drove through a green tunnel of jungle punctuated by flaring shrines.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DO THIS?” LINA ASKED Hunter after a silence lasting many miles.
“What?”
“Be here right now,” she said bluntly. “You’re used to dealing with people who are driven by money—kidnap, extortion, outright theft, that sort of thing. Jase is used to drug cartels and poor, ambitious civilians who want to find work by crossing illegally into the U.S.”
Hunter saw a flash of color against jungle. Another shrine or altar or whatever the hell was going on.
“Whoever left that blood sacrifice,” Lina said, “is different. He or she is owned by gods and a way of life you don’t understand. What you think of as good or evil doesn’t matter right here, right now.”
“And you do understand?”
“I not only know the sources of Maya religion, I feel it. I was a child in isolated villages. I understand that spirits own the night, jaguars walk with kings, and humans live on the thinnest thread of approval from capricious gods.”
“You’re a believer?” Hunter asked.
She laughed, but it wasn’t a sound of humor. “No. But I’ve felt believers. They’re different. What repels us elevates them, brings them closer to the beating heart of divinity, the very breath of the gods infusing everything. We hear wind in the jungle or the cry of birds; believers hear gods, and they act on what they hear.”
Hunter was silent, watching her, seeing both past and future in her striking profile. “So the blood and shrines aren’t new to you?”
“No. But the intensity and amount of both is new.” She tucked a piece of her unraveling hairdo behind her ear. Before she lifted her hand, the wind pouring through the open windows undid her work. “In Houston, I believed the messianic fervor around 2012 was a fad, a diversion for people who had too much money and too little life. But here…”
Hunter watched Lina’s teeth sink into her lower lip and wished they were back in bed, where needs were clear and the celebration of life was direct.
“The altar we stopped at wasn’t the product of some easy New Age belief,” Lina said after a moment. “The altar was real blood, real flesh, real death. The giving of blood and the pain that came with it, the first and oldest sacrifice.”
“So you’re saying that the blood and flowers are a recognition of the turning of the Great Wheel, baktun, the end of the Long Count, of Maya time.”
“To us, perhaps. To a believer it would be the beginning of a new world,” she said. She slowed for an old pickup truck hauling a rickety crate of frazzled chickens in back. She went around the truck with a smooth surge of speed. “If there really is a resurgence of native Maya belief around here, then any calculations you make based on New World power and drugs and money won’t be valid. Someone you expect to do one thing will do something entirely different. The past won’t be a predictor of the present.”
“Gods change. Human nature doesn’t.” Hunter’s hand stroked her tensed right arm in a slow, lingering caress. “I’m staying with you, Lina. Tomorrow night we’ll celebrate the Maya baktun together with champagne or blood, whatever gets it done. Then we’ll see who walks and who rides in the brave new Maya world.”
She flicked a glance at Hunter. His face was as hard as anything she’d ever seen carved in stone.
And as compelling.
A THIN, HIGH HAZE HAD COVERED THE SKY WHILE THE SUN came closer to dropping into the jungle. The air was unusually dry for what was technically the end of the rainy season. Not desert dry, but not ocean-and-jungle humid either.
The Museo de Antropología de Tulum was located on the northern edge of Pueblo Tulum. It was as much a compound as a pure museum. Several modest residences were situated across a courtyard garden from the museum itself. The area was walled, with ancient stelae rising among the flowers. The museum’s reception area had been designed like the anteroom to an ancient temple. Framed photos of local Maya ruins competed with colorful rubbings taken from a temple wall describing Jaguar Claw’s victory over an ancient priest-king.
A black-haired woman dressed in a long skirt and a colorful native blouse stopped tapping on an old computer when the front door opened. With the ingrained training of a woman in Mexico, she passed over Lina and asked Hunter in soft Spanish how she could help him.
“Tell Mercurio that Lina Reyes Balam is here to see him,” Lina said, stepping into a shaft of light from a high, vertical window.
The woman’s eyes widened and she stood up with what could have been a subtle bow.
“But of course. Immediately.” She hurried out through a side door.
Hunter waited until she was out of earshot. “Not royalty, huh? She didn’t bow to me.”
Lina rolled her dark eyes, but before she could think of a comeback, a handsome man rushed out of a shadowed hallway and engulfed her in a hug.
“Lina, querida, you should have told me you were coming,” Mercurio said.
His voice was as deep as his hair was black. Eyes almost as dark as his hair watched Lina with something that could only be called possessiveness. Like Lina, he was a mixture of Maya and European, an inch taller than she was and a lot stronger.