Beautiful Sacrifice

bloody stingray spine and an even bloodier piece of knotted twine. Hunter remembered Abuelita’s words.
    Carlos is in the temple now, consecrating himself so that he will be favored to make Lina holy.
    Hunter hoped Carlos’s hand had slipped and he’d cut off his own dick.
    “Okay, he’s consecrated now, but he doesn’t finish the ceremony here,” Hunter said, talking aloud because he was tired of hearing nothing but candle flames. “He must have another holy place.”
    An image of Cenote de Balam shimmered in Hunter’s mind, the huge mound of flowers, the natives weaving through the jungle like snakes, watching Lina.
    Watching their beautiful sacrifice.
    But the vehicles are still here. There must be a trail.
    Hunter walked back out into the jungle quickly, limping now, not caring. The clock in his head beat harder and faster than any pain.
    Recklessly he swept the flashlight around the clearing, looking for any sign of where everyone had gone. The new cuts in the surrounding jungle leaped out. Someone had hacked an opening.
    A trail.
    Ignoring the blood seeping down his leg, he ran.
    Lina will be at the cenote.
    Alive.
    She has to be.

C HAPTER T WENTY-FOUR
     
    D RESSED ONLY IN A WRAPPED SKIRT OF RED COTTON HELD in place by an obsidian pin, Lina should have felt exposed, even humiliated as she followed Carlos across the freshly swept limestone pavers leading to the cenote. She was too busy calculating her best chance for an escape to worry about being half nude. In any case, breasts weren’t a Maya fetish; they were simply a means of feeding babies.
    As she walked between lines of men to the waiting altar, none of them leered at her. If anything, there was respect in their attitude. She was their gateway to the creation of the next Maya world. Her head was high and her hair was unbound, lifting and falling in the unpredictable wind.
    She wished her hair was shorter than her little finger.Hair was too easy to grab, to use as a binding, to imprison her as surely as the lines of short, muscular men standing close to her.
    She had to escape.
    Somehow.
    I waited all my life for Hunter. I’ll be damned if I lose my future to my nutcase cousin and his equally crazy followers.
    Without moving her head, Lina looked for a chance to run. No matter how many slow steps she took, escape seemed farther away.
    As she walked out of the jungle toward the cenote, a feeling of dreamlike unreality condensed around her, a combination of torchlight, ancient costumes, the dry wind making the jungle bow, and lightning clawing the night with thin, incandescent fingers. There was a surreal beauty to seeing Cenote de Balam as it had been dreamed by her ancestors, the edge thick with worshippers, the water a portal to another world, silently waiting for the beginning of a new age.
    Her naked feet barely noticed the flat, cleanly swept limestone pavers that led to the edge of the cenote. When the wind paused, there was no sound. The silence was as dreamlike as the cenote, darkly shimmering, waiting. Then the wind blew again. The cenote became a vast open mouth breathing in and in and in, drawing reality with it. When the cenote finally exhaled, all would be a dream.
    A nightmare.
    The four Bacabs walked to a mound near the edge of the cenote. They surrounded it, then bent and lifted as one. What had looked like a pile of flowers when Lina had seen it from the other side of the cenote turned out to be a cape made of vines and flower petals.
    From the edge of the crowd, conch horns blew, soundinga long, low note. The four Bacabs moved like dancers to the brink of the cenote and flung the petal-thick cape into the waiting water.
    The cenote sucked the offering down.
    The conch horns went silent.
    Where the cape had been, a long, waist-high Chacmool altar made of deeply carved limestone blocks stood gleaming in the torchlight. Sturdy legs carved to resemble serpents supported the altar. Torchlight made the painted legs twist and writhe like snakes. Copal smoke lifted on the returning wind, seeping from a huge censer that stood at each end of the Chacmool.
    Both censers had the same design as the one Lina had seen in Hunter’s photos. She had never seen the altar before, which likely meant that it had been concealed in the jungle and brought piece by piece to the cenote for this ceremony.
    I’d feel flattered by all the preparations, but it’s nothing personal. Just blood.
    Mine.
    The four Bacabs, dressed in white and black and yellow