Beautiful Sacrifice

ago. Or at least fear. But kids were stuck with the parents they had, and loved them despite everything.
    “I’ll try to behave better than he does,” Hunter said. “What time are we leaving tomorrow?”
    “Early,” she said flatly.
    “I’m going to be in your room again tonight.”
    Despite her anger and frustration with her father, she gave Hunter a slow smile. “I’m counting on it.”
    What Hunter didn’t say was that he’d be there even if he was sleeping on the floor. He didn’t trust Philip. Her father wasn’t lock-him-up crazy, but he wasn’t a poster boy for rationality, either.
    Silently they drove to the compound, parked, and walkeddown a crushed limestone path to Philip’s casita. The morning haze hadn’t thickened into afternoon rain, though thunder rumbled far away. The Casita Cenote guesthouse where Hunter was supposed to be sleeping was barely a pale shadow beyond the fairly mannerly tangle of greenery.
    Philip’s residence was a single-story, whitewashed L, with weathered storm shutters and a faded red-tile roof. Despite its occupant, Hunter liked the place a lot better than the mansion where Old World splendor reigned.
    At least, he liked it until they knocked on the door and Philip opened it, looking like a wild man. Immediately he started cursing Lina for stealing his life’s work, his only entrée back into the closed world of scholars, and the most valuable Maya artifact ever found.
    After about thirty seconds of abuse, Hunter shoved Philip back into the entrance far enough for all of them to come in. Then Hunter shut the door and waited for the old man to run out of breath. From the look of his face—sweaty and pale—it wouldn’t be long. When Lina started to walk closer to her father, Hunter held her back.
    “Let him run down,” he said.
    And he revised his opinion of Philip from eccentric to borderline nuts.
    “Anything he’s saying make sense to you?” Hunter asked Lina when Philip paused for a breath.
    “He thinks we stole an artifact from him.”
    “I got that. But what?”
    Lina bit her lip and shook her head. “That’s where it falls apart. He says we stole the Kawa’il codex.”
    Philip erupted again at her words and grabbed her shoulders, shaking her hard. “You traitorous bitch, you think I don’t see through your lying—”
    The flat of Hunter’s palm landed on Philip’s cheek. The blow wasn’t hard, but it was shocking. With another swift movement Hunter knocked Philip’s hands away from Lina. Then he got right into her father’s face.
    “Settle down before I put you down,” Hunter said flatly.
    Philip stared at him. “You—you—”
    “You hearing me?” Hunter asked.
    For a moment Philip’s eyes went vacant. Then he nodded and sat heavily on an old couch.
    “It’s gone,” Philip said hoarsely. “Everything is gone.”
    “What’s gone?” Hunter asked.
    “Ask her. She—”
    “—was with me every moment she wasn’t with her family,” Hunter cut in.
    Philip looked at him, baffled, almost childlike. “But it’s gone.”
    “We got that,” Hunter said calmly. “When did you miss it?”
    “As soon I knew you had been to the temple, I came back here to check it.”
    “What—” began Lina.
    Hunter’s hand closed over her arm.
    She looked at her father and understood he was only relating to Hunter right now. She bit her lip and looked away, tears stinging at the back of her eyes. Nothing new, really. Philip had ignored her all of her life.
    “You came back here, checked, and it was gone,” Hunter said.
    Philip nodded.
    “Show us where you kept it,” Hunter said. His voice was like his eyes, patient. Relentless.
    Her father tried to get up, wobbled, and started to go down. Hunter put him back on his feet with an easy strength Lina found as startling as the slap had been. The contrast between Hunter and her father rocked her. Even after she had begun to understand her father’s emotional limitations, she still had thought of him as physically strong, indomitable, ageless.
    He wasn’t.
    With Hunter’s encouragement, Philip pulled himself together enough to lead the way back to his study. Hunter noticed the heavy lock on the study door and knew without asking that no one went in without Philip being present. Certainly not the maids. The place was dusty, messy, piled with papers and artifacts in haphazard heaps.
    Lina’s breath came in hard and stayed. The artifacts so carelessly stacked everywhere were extraordinary.