Beautiful Sacrifice

arms were shorter. That usually means a Christian commemoration of a dead friend or a family member.”
    “But most shrines were like this?” he asked grimly.
    “Yes. Kawa’il. Death.”
    Hunter straightened swiftly. “Want me to drive?”
    “No. I’m okay. Just…” She shrugged.
    “Yeah, me, too. Wonder what Mercurio de la Poole thinks of this?”
    “I’ll be sure to ask.”
    Lina and Hunter got back in the Bronco and drove through a green tunnel of jungle punctuated by flaring shrines.

C HAPTER F IFTEEN
     
    A RE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO DO THIS ?” L INA ASKED Hunter after a silence lasting many miles.
    “What?”
    “Be here right now,” she said bluntly. “You’re used to dealing with people who are driven by money—kidnap, extortion, outright theft, that sort of thing. Jase is used to drug cartels and poor, ambitious civilians who want to find work by crossing illegally into the U.S.”
    Hunter saw a flash of color against jungle. Another shrine or altar or whatever the hell was going on.
    “Whoever left that blood sacrifice,” Lina said, “is different. He or she is owned by gods and a way of life you don’t understand. What you think of as good or evil doesn’t matter right here, right now.”
    “And you do understand?”
    “I not only know the sources of Maya religion, I feel it. I was a child in isolated villages. I understand that spirits own the night, jaguars walk with kings, and humans live on the thinnest thread of approval from capricious gods.”
    “You’re a believer?” Hunter asked.
    She laughed, but it wasn’t a sound of humor. “No. But I’ve felt believers. They’re different. What repels us elevates them, brings them closer to the beating heart of divinity, the very breath of the gods infusing everything. We hear wind in the jungle or the cry of birds; believers hear gods, and they act on what they hear.”
    Hunter was silent, watching her, seeing both past and future in her striking profile. “So the blood and shrines aren’t new to you?”
    “No. But the intensity and amount of both is new.” She tucked a piece of her unraveling hairdo behind her ear. Before she lifted her hand, the wind pouring through the open windows undid her work. “In Houston, I believed the messianic fervor around 2012 was a fad, a diversion for people who had too much money and too little life. But here…”
    Hunter watched Lina’s teeth sink into her lower lip and wished they were back in bed, where needs were clear and the celebration of life was direct.
    “The altar we stopped at wasn’t the product of some easy New Age belief,” Lina said after a moment. “The altar was real blood, real flesh, real death. The giving of blood and the pain that came with it, the first and oldest sacrifice.”
    “So you’re saying that the blood and flowers are a recognition of the turning of the Great Wheel, baktun, the end of the Long Count, of Maya time.”
    “To us, perhaps. To a believer it would be the beginning of a new world,” she said. She slowed for an old pickup truck hauling a rickety crate of frazzled chickens in back. She went around the truck with a smooth surge of speed. “If there really is a resurgence of native Maya belief around here, then any calculations you make based on New World power and drugs and money won’t be valid. Someone you expect to do one thing will do something entirely different. The past won’t be a predictor of the present.”
    “Gods change. Human nature doesn’t.” Hunter’s hand stroked her tensed right arm in a slow, lingering caress. “I’m staying with you, Lina. Tomorrow night we’ll celebrate the Maya baktun together with champagne or blood, whatever gets it done. Then we’ll see who walks and who rides in the brave new Maya world.”
    She flicked a glance at Hunter. His face was as hard as anything she’d ever seen carved in stone.
    And as compelling.
     
     
    A THIN, HIGH HAZE HAD COVERED THE SKY WHILE THE SUN came closer to dropping into the jungle. The air was unusually dry for what was technically the end of the rainy season. Not desert dry, but not ocean-and-jungle humid either.
    The Museo de Antropología de Tulum was located on the northern edge of Pueblo Tulum. It was as much a compound as a pure museum. Several modest residences were situated across a courtyard garden from the museum itself. The area was walled, with ancient stelae rising among the flowers. The museum’s reception area had been designed like theanteroom