Beautiful Sacrifice

When she did, Hunter suspected he’d be hearingmore about art later. That was okay. He’d be glad to get naked and talk about whatever she wanted.
    At length.
    Depth, too.
    “This looks like an elaborate stone mask,” she said. “The crown or whatever is unusual, more like stylized sun rays or something shining from or through the mask. It reminds me of…”
    “What?” Hunter asked.
    “Come with me. I have a piece of wood I want you to look at.”
    Jase made a choking sound and looked sideways at Hunter’s lap.
    Hunter flipped him off.
    But he was grateful for the walk through the museum’s maze, because his pants fit better at the end of the stroll than at the beginning.
    Gotta get my mind off sex, Hunter told himself, watching Lina’s prim and proper body striding ahead of him. Yeah, like that’s going to happen. The lady has an outstanding ass. Perfect for my hands, perfect for my—
    Stop thinking about it.
    Quickly Lina walked toward a room that held special, temporary cases—locked, controlled for temperature and humidity. Every step of the way she told herself that she was imagining the waves of sexual heat coming off Hunter. Her outfit was a simple dark pantsuit, nothing clingy, nothing feminine, no peekaboo tease, nothing to make her feel like Hunter’s glance was caressing her hips.
    What is it about that man? He makes me feel…odd. Fizzy.
    Sexy.
    Try stupid, she advised herself. He’s the one who’s sexy, not me. And he’s the next thing to a blackmailer, remember?
    She remembered, she just didn’t care. Maybe her previously unsuspected bad-girl self was coming out to play.
    Automatically Lina punched in her code, held the door for the men to enter the room, and made sure the door locked again.
    The door opened into a room flooded with cool, blue-white light. The illumination was indirect, bounced from hidden lights, with no obvious source. Inside a transparent, humidity-controlled case, a sheet of very dark red wood rested on a stark white sheet. The wood was perhaps twenty inches long, two-thirds as wide, and appeared to be the top of a sacred box that had once held a god bundle.
    Each time Lina saw the artifact, it took her breath and set her mind on fire. There was something richly organic and alive about the wood, as if it might flow right out of the case into a Maya priest’s smoke dreams. A crack ran across the lower third of the artifact, a new break that told of a missing wedge of wood.
    Hunter looked from the dark wood to Lina’s face. The distance between this room and the bloody evil of the basement was so great he had a hard time holding it in his mind. Belatedly he realized Lina was talking.
    “Then we’ll verify the age by several kinds of analysis,” Lina said. She looked at him. “Hunter?”
    “Sorry. The contrast between this museum room and that barrio basement…” He shook his head
    She put her hand on his arm. “The job you and Jase do must be nearly impossible.”
    “One of the reasons I’m no longer with ICE,” Hunter agreed, putting his hand over hers.
    Jase looked from one to the other and felt invisible. He had always accepted Hunter’s differences—especially his intense awareness of things most other people didn’t notice—but every so often Jase was reminded all over again. Like now. He had a sense of what Lina and Hunter were talking about, yet he didn’t quite understand it.
    But they certainly did. Even Jase could feel the sexual energy between them. It made him think about going home and nibbling on his wife. All over.
    Lina cleared her throat and turned to the artifact case and the oddly radiant wood, taking refuge in professionalism. It was either that or start undressing Hunter with more than her mind.
    “After I saw your photos,” she said, “I reviewed every bit of private and published research on the Kawa’il cult. When I found nothing to explain most of your artifacts, I looked for reasons why someone might create counterfeits. Only a few people in the world care enough to go to those lengths. My father does, but he couldn’t. It’s not a matter of professional standards so much as creating those artifacts would take an act of imagination that he simply isn’t capable of.”
    She looked at Hunter, trying to see if he understood.
    He nodded. “What about Mercurio?”
    “Possible, of course. But impossible to keep secret. Take the mask in your photo,” she said. “Even today, creating that from a piece of obsidian would