‘‘Wasn’t that—’’ Anna broke off at Red-Boar’s sharp look.
‘‘It’s not a sacrifice if it doesn’t hurt.’’
Anna wished she had something to give for the journey, but she wasn’t carrying anything appropriate. She touched the skull effigy, but let her hand drop without offering the precious yellow quartz. There was a line between sacrifice and stupidity. Still, her heart ached as he lifted the first shovelful of dirt and tossed it atop the carved jade.
Oddly, the noise made her think of Dick. What was he doing now? What did he think about the phone message she’d left saying that she wanted to take a break from the mess their marriage had become?
He hadn’t called her back, which was probably an answer in itself.
‘‘All the dead were accounted for,’’ Red-Boar said, interrupting her thoughts. ‘‘Jox checked. I was the only one who wasn’t a corpse.’’ He drove the shovel into the piled earth and heaved it into the hole, where it fell on Ledbetter’s body with a hollow, echoing sound.
‘‘Except for the winikin and the babies who got away.’’ She paused. ‘‘He didn’t tell you about them.’’
‘‘Because he doesn’t trust me. Never did.’’ Once a layer of soil covered the body, he used his booted feet to shove the bulk of the dirt back into place. ‘‘Don’t really blame him, either. Not after I beat the crap out of him and took off.’’
Anna wanted to ask about those days, and about Rabbit’s mother, but she knew those things didn’t really matter anymore. What mattered was today. The next four years. So as Red-Boar tamped the last of the dirt into place, she asked, ‘‘Do you think Jox knew about Ledbetter? ’’
‘‘No. If he’d known there was another magic user out there, he would’ve called him to the compound when the barrier reactivated.’’ Red-Boar paused. ‘‘Which, along with the scars and the fact that the boluntiku didn’t get him during the massacre, begs the question of whether he was a user at all.’’
‘‘He must’ve been,’’ she argued. ‘‘Otherwise how did the ajaw-makol find him? And why now?’’
‘‘Might not’ve had anything to do with magic. Might’ve followed the same thought process you did and figured he’d take out our best source of info on Kulkulkan and the Godkeepers before we came looking for him. Question is, what would Ledbetter have told us if we’d found him with his head attached?’’
‘‘No,’’ Anna said softly. ‘‘The real question is whether there are others like him.’’
Red-Boar met her eyes, unblinking. ‘‘Why don’t you find out?’’
Breath going thin because she didn’t want to try and fail, especially not in front of him, she hesitated a moment before she nodded. Kneeling, she pressed her palms into the soil covering Ledbetter’s body. Seeking the quartz effigy with her mind, she lightly jacked in, and then dropped her shields, opening herself to the impressions.
She got darkness. Gray static. An indistinct sense of longing.
Shaking her head, she climbed to her feet. ‘‘Nothing.’’
‘‘You need to practice more.’’
‘‘You need to step off,’’ she said with more weariness than heat. ‘‘Don’t assume I’m going to fall into line just because Strike did.’’
‘‘You have a responsibility to your bloodline.’’
‘‘I also have a responsibility to my husband and my students.’’ She glanced over at him. ‘‘Maybe that sounds small to you, but some of us are destined to do small things.’’
‘‘Not you. You would’ve made a good king.’’
She stiffened at the suggestion—and the sudden spark of intensity behind it—but said only, ‘‘Thank the gods for patrilinear inheritance, then.’’
They stared at each other for a moment in silence before Red-Boar turned away. He said a prayer for the dead in the old language, then palmed his ceremonial knife to prick his elbow, which was one of the most honored autoletting sites. He handed over the blade without a word and Anna did the same, and they let their blood drip down onto the fresh grave.
‘‘Safe journey, stranger,’’ she whispered.
When it was done, they smoothed the disturbed earth above the sinkhole, then split up to search for Ledbetter’s campsite. They could’ve searched together, might have been safer that way, but they both needed the distance. Traveling together had been bad enough. Sharing an experience like burying Ledbetter had been far worse.
Moving into the thicker growth beyond the clearing, she touched her effigy and sent out a faint questioning thread, not jacking in fully, but tapping the power and asking it to guide her to where Ledbetter had been. In theory. In practice her subconscious was blocking the hell out of her sight. And who could blame it? The last time she’d had a full-fledged vision, she’d shouted Lucius’s name in Dick’s ear.
Branches scratched her face and caught at her clothes as she pushed her way deeper into the rain forest, thorny fingers grabbing at her, begging for attention. Where have you been? the undergrowth seemed to say. Where are you going?
When she heard the words a second time and magic touched her skin, she stopped, wondering if she’d imagined it. ‘‘I can hear you,’’ she said softly. ‘‘What do you want?’’
She never in a million years expected a response.
But she got one.
The figure of a man appeared in front of her, coalescing out of the humid air. He was taller than she, but stick-thin and wrinkled, with obsidian eyes that had no whites.
Anna gasped and backpedaled, snagged her heel on a root, overbalanced, and fell on her ass. She froze there, her heart pounding as she gaped up at the figure, and pain seared the skin between her breasts where the effigy rested.
A nahwal. On earth.
Impossible.
But when she blinked and looked again, it was still there. Then it turned and disappeared into the undergrowth.
‘‘No!’’ She scrambled to her feet, pulse racing. ‘‘Come back!’’
There was movement up ahead, a flash of motion that left the foliage undisturbed. Head spinning with power and desperation and a strange sense of shifted reality, Anna followed on shaky legs, running deeper and deeper into the forest along an ancient path.
Where was—There! Power rippled along her skin and she saw another flash of motion as the nahwal passed into a low cleft in the earth. Anna followed, flying along the path and ducking through the cave without hesitation, only briefly registering the carved lintel and square walls of a temple. Two steps into the cave, she was plunged into darkness.
Four steps in, the world dropped out from beneath her and she fell, screaming. She hit hard and her head banged against rock. Pain flared and pressure snapped tight in her chest, and for a second she thought she was flying. Then she thought she was drowning. Then burning.
Then there was nothing but blackness around her, inside her. The darkness lasted for minutes, maybe hours before she felt a hand grip hers, lending solidity to the world around her, and heard a voice that called her back from the edge.
‘‘Gods help us.’’ His harsh whisper roused her, though she wasn’t capable of more than an answering moan. The world spun around her, made of blackness and pain.
‘‘Sleepy,’’ she whispered, the word coming out as little more than a puff of air. Lassitude cocooned her, warming her until even the pain seemed friendly rather than raw.
Red-Boar didn’t answer. She heard the click of him flipping open his satellite phone, heard a bitter curse. ‘‘No signal.’’ Then he was leaning over her, touching her gently, though she could barely feel it. ‘‘Come on. We’ve got to get you out of here.’’