Beautiful Sacrifice

grabs.
    Fingers hooked, Hunter’s left hand went for the man’s eyes and his right for the man’s crotch. The guard saved his balls but couldn’t evade the fingers digging into his right eye socket. Desperately he threw his head back and grabbed Hunter’s left wrist. With his other hand, the guard pulled a knife and stabbed. As the blade cut through cloth and skin on the inside of Hunter’s leg, Hunter’s right fist smashed into the man’s now-unprotected neck.
    Retching, coughing, fighting to drag breath through a ruined windpipe, the guard joined his groaning buddies on the floor. A few swift kicks put them out of their vocal misery. Gutter fighting at its dirty and brutal worst, but it got the job done in reasonable silence.
    Hunter felt blood running down his leg. He widened the slash in his pants, saw that the blood wasn’t pulsing and the wound wasn’t to the bone, and set about disarming the guards. AK-47s weren’t his weapon of choice, but they had a way of evening odds in a crowd. He checked one weapon quickly, found it good to go, and slung it across his back. He tucked an extra banana clip in his belt. He left the rest of the weapons behind. The guards wouldn’t be using them any time soon, if ever.
    Lightning sheeted through the night, overwhelming the darkness. Thunder rumbled, but no rain hit the windows.
    Hunter used the prolonged thunder to cover his footsteps. He didn’t find any other guards on the second floor, or the first. In the kitchen Abuelita sat at her table sipping pepper-laced cocoa from china as fragile as a breath. Philip and Celia were duct-taped to separate table legs. Even if they had worked together, they wouldn’t have been able to jerk the solid mahogany table anywhere useful.
    But they weren’t working together.
    Philip was ranting about treachery and his career and the codex. Tears and mascara ran down Celia’s cheeks. She was screaming at him to shut up, his daughter was in danger.
    “I never wanted a damned brat!” Philip yelled back.
    “Then you should have kept your cock in your pants! I was an innocent!”
    “You were the biggest whore since Lilith!”
    Obviously it wasn’t the first time they’d had this discussion. They flung insults and accusations with the ease and timing of actors in the fourth year of a Broadway play.
    “Where is Carlos?” Hunter demanded, cutting across the old argument.
    “I don’t know,” Celia said. “His men kept Philip and me out of the way until Carlos had gone.” Then she wailed, “He took Lina with him!”
    Hunter had already figured that out.
    Sheet lightning blazed through the night. The blackness that followed was absolute, all electricity gone. The house creaked and groaned and trembled under a blast of wind and thunder.
    A wooden match flared, followed by the biting smell of sulfur. Abuelita lit the first of four candles that were set at cardinal points around her table.
    “It is too late for words.” Abuelita said in Spanish. Her voice was as dry and thin as the flame touching each candlewick in turn. “The gods are with Carlos. He will be reborn as the ruler of the Age of Kings.”
    Philip turned his invective on Abuelita.
    She blew out the match and drank her cocoa as though she was alone. Her eyes gleamed with reflected fire.
    Hunter would get the truth from Abuelita somehow, but he would try sweet reason first.
    “Lina told me your name means Wise Owl,” Hunter said.
    Abuelita’s black eyes focused on him. She nodded.
    “You know where Carlos has taken Lina,” Hunter said.
    “It cannot be stopped.”
    “Then there is no harm in telling me, is there?”
    She laughed.
    He stared. With her dark, glittering eyes lit from beneath by candles, she didn’t quite look human.
    “Carlos lived among you ghost men,” Abuelita said, “but only enough to earn the wealth to buy the old secrets that had been stolen from his people. He listened to me. I told him who he was and who he could become. After the wheel turns, a new generation of kings will come from his loins.”
    “He’s sterile!” Celia screamed.
    “The wheel has not yet turned,” Abuelita said calmly. “Carlos is in the temple now, consecrating himself so that he will be favored to make Lina holy.”
    Lightning flashed again, this time so close that the feeling of electricity playing through the air made Hunter’s skin ripple.
    “Where’s a flashlight?” Hunter asked Celia.
    “In a bracket by the back door.”
    He bent, slashed the