Beautiful Sacrifice

Houston’s usual humidity was making a comeback from the earlier dry air. The sky had turned to steel, but it didn’t feel like rain was coming. Traffic was its usual relentless self. Lina was relieved to get inside the museum building again.
    Inside her office, she stared at the photographs until they seemed to shimmer, breathe smoke, drip blood. Sitting next to her, close enough to rub thighs beneath her office worktable, Hunter was using her computer to search databases she really hoped didn’t leave any cookies on the hard drive. Auction houses weren’t on the academically approved list, much less some of the sleazy “archaeological specialties” sites he’d visited.
    Apparently, some people really got into Maya bloodletting rituals. Or what they thought of as Maya rituals.
    While Hunter worked he exchanged texts with his friend Jase. From the set of Hunter’s mouth, none of the news was good.
    Lina knew how he felt. Even in the Reyes Balam private databases, none of the artifacts she’d seen were like those in the photos. Artifacts similar in form and function? Yes. Identical in substance and detail? No.
    Hunter stretched and yawned. Not boredom. Fatigue. The darkness beneath his eyes told of missed sleep and too much adrenaline.
    “Why don’t you go home and nap?” Lina asked. “Yawning is catching.”
    “You saying I’m boring you?”
    “I’m saying you’re tired. How much sleep did you get last night?”
    “A few hours.” It was the time of year he acutely remembered Suzanne’s death. Sleep was hard.
    “Git,” Lina said in her best way-east Texas drawl.
    Hunter hesitated.
    She knew he was thinking about Omar’s and the men who had spread silence like darkness behind them.
    “I’m in a museum that is guarded all day, every day,” she pointed out. “Go home and sleep. I’ve got a lot more work to do on these photos before I’m ready to talk about them. When I leave, I’ll have the guard walk me out to my car. My apartment is very secure.” Because my family is paranoid. “I assume I’ll see you tomorrow.”
    “I can’t leave the photos here.”
    “I have an excellent memory and lots of notes.” She didn’tmention the quick sketches she’d made. She just scooped up Hunter’s photos, stacked them neatly, and handed them over. “Go.”
    Reluctantly, Hunter went. Lina was right. He couldn’t do all-nighters the way he once had.
    “Call me if anything breaks loose,” he said.
    She waved her hand in a shooing motion. She was already at work, making cryptic notes. A thick book of glyphs stood open at her elbow.
    Silently Hunter let himself out of the office.

C HAPTER E IGHT
     
    H UNTER GROANED, TWISTING IN THE COILS OF A NIGHTMARE .
    Suzanne, trapped in a beat-up truck, hammering against the window with her little palms flat and red, her eyes so wide that they’re more white than brown. The truck is parked on a frozen lake, so cold that Hunter feels his skin split and bleed.
    Icy blue fog claws its way around the truck tires while something laughs like breaking bones.
    No, not bones. The ice is breaking, the blue fog rising in fingers shaped like a shaman’s smoke dreams. Ancient glyphs smiling death.
    He runs and gets nowhere, heart slamming, open mouth screaming “NOOOOOO,” and his cries are more glyphs, more death.
    More bones breaking, ice smoking into blue nothing.
    The back end of the rusty Ford slips away first, shards of blue teeth chewingup the truck bed. Suzanne with her father’s eyes staring at Hunter, beating on the window with small fists, smears of blood. She is sideways now and the icy teeth and glyph, blue fire and red death, chewing, chewing.
    Sweat glazes Hunter’s body, his heart beating like his daughter’s fists, his body frozen in blue ice and fire.
    The car slips deeper into the hungry blue while Hunter, frozen in a glyph, watches helplessly, screaming, Suzanne dying—
    The phone trilled at Hunter, dragging him from the nightmare. For long moments he didn’t know where he was, who he was, how he was alive. A last ripple of thunder came through the apartment walls. A storm, not ice breaking, not him screaming, his body slicked with sweat.
    Goddamn. Goddamn.
    He hadn’t had a dream that bad since Suzanne had died in a single-car rollover accident with her mother and drunken father. No ice, no water, except in his nightmares.
    The phone stopped ringing, then started up again. Hunter grabbed it.
    “Yeah?” he asked hoarsely, looking at his