Despite Lina’s joking words about keys—and the guards—there were no exterior locks, only an interior bolt. Maybe that was why all the guards were armed. Or maybe that shadow walking on a limestone perimeter pathway was a gardener with a really odd-shaped hoe.
A banana clip was hard to disguise.
Lina followed Hunter’s glance. “He’s just one of the compound’s night guards.”
The tone of her voice told him that the sight was as ordinary to her as the crushed limestone walkways stitching the Reyes Balam compound together.
Banana clips, Hunter thought to himself. The new must-have accessory for the narcos and the rich who hide from them.
The guard must have found Lina and Hunter equally ordinary. He didn’t glance their way.
All the banana clips in the world won’t help unless he’s a lot more alert than he looks, Hunter thought.
He knew firsthand just how boring the job of being a night guard could be.
Until it wasn’t.
Lina ignored the grand front entrance and went through the kitchen entrance instead. The scents of peppers both hot and mild permeated the air, along with roasted pork and corn, coffee, and the dark breath of unsweetened chocolate. Other spices clung to the room, telling Hunter that while dinner might be socially uncomfortable with the Reyes Balam family, it wouldn’t be boring to the palate.
A tiny woman was sitting at a small, very solid mahogany table, sipping from a demitasse. The china was antique, both proud and subtly faded, as though it had come to the Yucatan via Spain centuries ago. The contents of the demitasse were all New World—thick, unsweetened chocolate laced with very hot peppers.
The drink of the gods, Hunter thought. In the old days, I’ll bet a woman wouldn’t have been allowed to get any closer to it than preparing it for a man.
“Abuelita,” Lina said, hurrying across the tile floor. “I thought you would be in the library.”
Abuelita held out a hand. She was thin as only the very old can be. Her ligaments and tendons had been forged in a jungle village, where women ground corn daily between heavy stones and carried water to the fields.
“Rosalina,” she said in a voice like wind through reeds. “Finally you are here.”
“I couldn’t miss your birthday.” Gracefully Lina kneeled to be closer to eye level with the old woman. “How many is it now?”
“I am as old as the Long Count,” Abuelita said, her laugh a whisper. “I will see the final Turning of the Wheel and the changing of the gods. It is enough.”
Lina bent and gave Abuelita a gentle hug, putting smooth skin against the weathered teak of the other woman. Abuelita’s hair was white, like her clothes, which had a simple country style that was belied by the intricate white embroidery that glowed against the pale cotton. It was the sheer absence of the vivid colors that most native Maya wore that made Abuelita almost regal, her clothes and hair a white flame burning against rich skin and eyes blacker than any night.
Looking at those eyes, Hunter understood that Abuelita was indeed different. She lived in the jaguar’s world, where human concerns were like the buzzing of flies. Once she would have been called a wise woman, a bruja, a priestess. Now she was labeled senile.
“Abuelita, permit me to introduce Señor Hunter Johnston,” Lina said, speaking in Spanish. “Hunter, this is Señora Kuh Chel Balam.”
“I’m honored, Lady Chel,” Hunter said, tilting his head in acknowledgment of her age and regal presence.
Abuelita’s eyes sharpened at the formal title “lady,” which was a more exact translation from the Mayan than “señora.” She gestured for Hunter to come closer. When he did, she stared at him with an intensity that would be called rude in other circumstances. But this was Kuh—Owl of Omen—watching him.
Lina’s subtly pleading glance at Hunter asked him to make allowances for Abuelita’s age. His fingers brushed Lina’s briefly, silently reassuring her that he wasn’t offended.
“You were born in the wrong time, warrior,” Owl of Omen said in a liquid Yucatec dialect. “The Turning Wheel will crush you.”
Hunter looked to Lina for a translation. The slight motion of her head was negative. Whatever the old woman had said, he would have to wait until he and Lina were alone for a translation.
Then Owl of Omen blinked and Abuelita was back. She took a final sip of her fiery chocolate. The fingers that set the demitasse in its delicate saucer had the visible tremor of age.
“Rosalina, it is time for us to go to the library,” Abuelita said in Spanish, holding out her left hand.
A gold band set with small rubies gleamed on her ring finger. The ring, like the china, had been passed down through the generations. The thick white embroidery on her clothes was as Maya as her heritage, but the glyphs were impossible for Hunter to make out for lack of contrast.
As Lina came to her feet, she looked at Hunter with sad eyes and said, “Follow us.”
It was a plea, not a demand.
“Of course,” he said quietly.
He watched while Lina helped Abuelita to her feet—not that she really needed it. For all her appearance of frailty, she was as tough and almost as supple as the flat leather sandals she wore. Lina’s help was a gesture of respect, not a necessity.
When Abuelita was standing, the top of her head barely came up to the bottom of Hunter’s rib cage. Yet she had a presence that had nothing to do with height. It was in her eyes, her bearing. She might have been born in a jungle hut, but she was born of a royal line.
Silently Hunter followed great-grandmother and great-granddaughter out of the kitchen and into the main part of the house. The furniture was antique, weighty, with richly woven brocade upholstery. Heavy, gilt-framed paintings of European ancestors were scattered throughout. The Balam side of the family was barely represented—a vase on a side table, the figurine of a Maya noble in a corner display, an ancient ceramic flute in a mahogany niche. If a rug interrupted the handmade tiles of the floor, it was ancient, Persian. Three suits of armor in varying styles—all of them dented in battle—stood at attention in the wide hallway, gleaming beneath crystal chandeliers.
The Spanish had married into royal Maya lines, but almost all of the furnishings had come on ships. The household was like Mexico itself, an uneven and sometimes uneasy blend of Old World and New.
Two heavily carved mahogany doors led to the wing where the library was located, the part of the house where Carlos lived. Although the glyphs on the wood were ancient, the doors looked newer than the rest of the house. Hunter wondered if Abuelita had commissioned the doors from native carvers.
Lina knocked lightly before she pushed open the library doors. Immediately she was swept up in Celia’s conversation, giving Hunter an opportunity to study the room and its occupants.
The room claimed him. The overwhelming impression was blue on blue, the world viewed in every shade and tint and tone of blue—turquoise, royal, midnight, teal, cobalt, peacock, sapphire, lapis—the whole creating a sense of blue that had no name. Only gradually did he realize that the radiance of blues covered just two of the four walls. The furnishings were modern, with leather-upholstered chairs and low bookshelves of wood stained black as sharkskin. The occasional rugs looked modern, though they held Maya glyphs in shades that echoed the tiled walls. The unique fragrance of burning copal hung in the air.
Celia was dressed richly, with exquisite attention to detail—crimson silk dress, makeup flawless, nails and lipstick to match, hair expensively casual around her face, stiletto heels over four inches high—but she wore it all naturally, without thought, like her skin. Her jewelry was more aristocratic than nouveau riche. Around her throat was a heavy antique necklace of gold and emeralds in a baroque design, with bracelet, brooch, and earrings to match. They glowed against the rich color of her skin.