This wasn’t just Mayan, though. There was an elongated elegance to it, one that reminded him of another pyramid-building culture on the other side of the world, one that had faltered into despotism after the Nightkeepers left and the sun god Aten held sway.
A faint shimmy started in Lucius’s gut and worked its way out from there. High above him parrots called to one another and loose-limbed monkeys played tag in the gathering dusk. Down at ground level, though, there was strange stillness, and a hum that touched the air. Rubbing his scarred palm, which ached from all the machete work, he took a step toward the doorway, almost expecting it to disappear, for him to wake up and find himself in his crummy apartment, in the middle of his lame-
ass, going-backward life.
But it didn’t. He was really there, and so was the doorway.
“Here goes nothing,” he said, scrabbling in his knapsack for his flashlight. Clicking it on, he took a couple more steps, passed beneath the lintel—
And nearly fell straight into nothing when the floor dropped out beneath him.
He saw the pitfall in time—barely—and stopped at the edge, where interlocking stones formed a tunnel that descended at an acute slant, ending somewhere deep in the earth, beyond the reach of his flashlight beam. Adrenaline spiked and he stepped back a pace, but the stone didn’t give way beneath him. The trap had already been sprung.
From the scrapes in the dirt, it hadn’t been triggered all that long ago, either. Rain had wiped the tracks within the first ten feet or so of the entrance, but beneath his own footprints he could see another set. Damned if they didn’t look like the same kind of boot treads too, only smaller, as though the person who’d been there before him was a woman, or maybe a teen. Wearing trekking boots of the sort favored by fieldworkers.
His stomach did a nosedive as he shone his light downward once again. “Sasha? Are you down there?”
There was no answer. Not that he should’ve expected there to be. She was a chef, not a field archaeologist, which suggested the boot prints weren’t hers. Besides, like it or not, whoever had gone down, they’d done it before the rains, which meant a couple of months at least.
Lucius felt a beat of grief for whoever it’d been, along with relief that he had a good reason not to go down there. Clamping the flashlight in his teeth, he edged around the pitfall, not letting out his breath until he was safe on the other side and there was no sign of a second booby trap. Not yet, anyway, he thought. But the presence of the first trap was oddly encouraging: It suggested there was—
or had been—something in the ruin worth guarding.
“So onward we go,” he said, talking to himself because it was too damn quiet inside the low tunnel that narrowed beyond the pit trap. Using the flashlight to check his footing, he worked his way deeper into what he suspected wasn’t the ruins of a temple that’d been built up from the ground, but rather one that’d been dug into the earth itself. The tunnel sloped slightly downward as he walked, and the air was damp and chill.
Once again he saw evidence of someone else having been there ahead of him fairly recently. Two someones, in fact: A man’s wide-footed tread was marked over with a woman’s print. Oddly, though, the woman’s print didn’t match the tread Lucius had seen near the booby trap. If he figured the prints he was following now belonged to Ambrose and Sasha Ledbetter, then who had made the first set?
And why weren’t there tracks leading back out? That in itself seemed pretty damn ominous.
“Doesn’t matter,” he told himself. “Keep going.” So he did just that, heading deeper into the Nightkeeper temple. Because that was where he had to be.
The walls of the tunnel were uncarved, but the stone-work was meticulous, and the vibe . . . well, the vibe deep in his gut told him he’d found what he was looking for. He just needed some sort of proof to bring back to Desiree. And Anna.
At the thought of Anna, a complicated mix of guilt and resentment bloomed in his chest. For a second his old crush on Anna surfaced, making him feel like total shit for doing what he was doing, the way he was doing it. Then the hum rose up once again, blunting the fear and the grief and the guilt, making him numb to everything except the footprints that led him on, and the tunnel closing in around him.
Then, without warning, the shaft dead-ended at a pile of rubble. But it wasn’t just any rubble he saw in the yellow light of his flashlight beam. The debris had been cleared and stacked into a shrine of sorts, and a crude teepee had been formed of lashed-together sticks. And atop it sat a human head.
Lucius reeled back, gagging at the sight and the sudden stench of rot and death. But even his response to finding the skull felt muted, as though the hum in his bones were overriding his natural instincts.
Leaning closer, he inspected the thing. Strips of skin and flesh were still adhered in places, though creatures and time had done some serious damage. Still, though, he could see that the skull had once sported long gray hair; some of it was still caught back in a leather-laced ponytail.
He’d found Ledbetter, or part of him, anyway. But where was the rest of him, and who had placed his head so elaborately? Why?
He figured the shrine had probably been an effort to mimic the pyramidal piles of skulls, called tzomplanti that the Maya had built at the height of their sacrificial practices. They had piled the heads of their sacrifices one atop the next and left them on platforms or at the city limits as a warning to their enemies. This is what we’ll do to you, the tzomplanti had signaled. Be warned. But who had this warning been intended for?
“What happened to you, old man?” Lucius whispered, his voice echoing oddly. “Where’s Sasha?”
The second set of feminine footprints was there too, smudged and scuffed over the top of the bootprints, but the dust was really messed up at that point, churned up amidst rust-brown splashes he had to assume were blood. Strangely drawn by the stains he crouched down to touch one of the bloodstains with his fingers, and felt a tingle when he made contact. It was almost as though there were two of him inside: One wanted to touch the blood and the skull and see if the tingling grew stronger; the other wanted to keep looking and see if there was any evidence of where Sasha had gone from there.
Forcing his fingers away from the bloodstains, he swept his flashlight in a low arc, stopping when he came across two new sets of footprints in the dust at the edge of the cave-in. They looked like the marks from . . . men’s street shoes and a pair of high heels?
“You’re shitting me.” But even after he’d blinked a few times the marks were still there. He hadn’t seen them anywhere else in the tunnel; nor did they seem to lead beneath the piled rubble. It was as though whoever belonged to the footprints had just appeared out of thin air, then disappeared once they’d done what they’d come to do. Which was just ridiculous. There had to be another explanation.
He didn’t know what, but there had to be. So he kept looking, sending his flashlight beam arcing from one side of the tunnel to the other, hoping to hell the literal dead end wouldn’t turn out to be a metaphorical one too.
Then the flashlight beam glinted off something, there and gone so quickly he almost missed it. But when he repeated the action he got the same gleam again. More important, he got another glow farther down the tunnel, then another. There were mirrors on the walls, he realized. Rather, they were highly polished spots on the stone angled precisely so they caught the light and bounced it from one to the next and then on again.
The Egyptians had used metal mirrors to bring sunlight into their tombs and pyramids, Lucius thought as excitement kicked through his bloodstream. The ancient Maya, on the other hand, had worked by torchlight. The presence of the mirrors in the temple was another confirmation of the crossover, the connection from one continent to the next, one people to the other. But it was so much more, because for them to have bothered polishing the stone mirrors, there had to be something to see.