Beautiful Sacrifice

placed in her hands started to slip away. Automatically her fingers clenched, holding on to the supple leather.
    “You can blame your own stubbornness for that,” her cousin said. “You refused to honor the obligations of your own blood.”
    “What are you talking about? You could have just called me. You didn’t have to shoot someone!”
    Hunter’s hand touched Lina’s back soothingly, telling her that she wasn’t alone, he was with her, watching for the instant he could grab her and run beyond the reach of her cousin.
    “I tried.” Carlos sighed. “I used honey upon honey, artifact upon artifact, lure upon lure, but still you did not come to me. My men would have driven you to a waiting plane. You would have been home within hours. You would have learned from me, prepared for this as I have for years. But no, you ignored me. Now there is no more time.”
    Lina stared at Carlos. His eyes were as dark as Abuelita’s, deeper than night. And like the night, without limits.
    He touched the loosely wrapped package in her hands. “Open it. Learn. Understand.”
    Grateful to have an excuse to look away from her cousin’s eyes, she lifted a flap of leather and carefully unrolled it. On the inside was suede, black as the space between the stars. When she unwrapped the soft, resilient leather, she was holding a long, wedge-shaped piece of mahogany. Two of its edges were lighter in color, a pale cinnamon red instead of the dark garnet gleam of the finished wood.
    On the side she couldn’t see, her fingertips traced zigzag lines carved deeply into the wood. As she turned it over, she knew she held the piece of wood that had been missing from the fascinating artifact sent to her by Mexico City’s Museum of Anthropology.
    Lina was holding the fragment of wood that had been floating between the gods and men. The markings that had been removed from the whole were a representation of a codex, accordion folded in the Maya style, partially open to hint at the revelations inside.
    “This is the crucial part of the instruction glyphs on the box holding Kawa’il’s god bundle,” Carlos said, his voice vibrant with memory and awe. “Before I could prevent it, Philip discovered the box in the temple. He needed money, I needed something to appease the federal government.”
    She waited, full lips flattened, not wanting to hear any more and not able to stop listening.
    “I kept the contents and sent the rest to the government for study. I didn’t think you would be able to resist it when I prevailed upon the museum director to send it to you. Surely you would see its message, surely you would know that it had come from Tulum. You would be drawn here, to Kawa’il’s wisdom. But you had lived too long among the ghosts. You no longer recognized Kawa’il even when you held his covenant in your hands.”
    “You broke the wood,” Lina said, hardly able to believe it. “Deliberately. Broke it.”
    “Of course. It was a lure, nothing more. Beyond that key message, the box wasn’t significant. The god bundle inside had already been removed to be kept safe in Kawa’il’s own temple.”
    “Site nine,” she murmured, seeing again the rainbow glyphs, the serpent without beginning or end. Carlos had merged Kawa’il and Kukulcán in his mind, or perhaps the builders of the temple had.
    Carlos nodded and watched her with veiled eagerness, as though expecting something more.
    “Everything that you did for the Museum of the Maya and the museums in Mexico, all the explorations on Reyes Balam land that you paid for,” she said, “none of it was for the love of knowledge and history. It was all for you.”
    “For me?” Carlos shook his head. “No, I am nothing. Kawa’il is all. I planted seeds and watered them with money. Today, before midnight, Kawa’il will come for the harvest. And you, my cousin, you are the key to all.”
    Lina stared at her him. “You’re—”
    “Let him explain,” Hunter cut in softly, not wanting her to tell Carlos how crazy he was.
    There hadn’t been any bloodletting yet. Hunter really wanted to keep it that way.
    Lina started to protest Hunter’s soft order, but didn’t. The fear she had been trying to ignore had slid clammy fingers over her flesh. She finally understood just how fragile the skin of normality was right now.
    If it split, there would be violence.
    Almost desperately she looked at Celia. Her mother was staring at Carlos, her expression confused, almost stunned. It was