Beautiful Sacrifice

Hunter said, latching the door behind them.
    Despite Lina’s joking words about keys—and the guards—there were no exterior locks, only an interior bolt. Maybe that was why all the guards were armed. Or maybe that shadow walking on a limestone perimeter pathway was a gardener with a really odd-shaped hoe.
    A banana clip was hard to disguise.
    Lina followed Hunter’s glance. “He’s just one of the compound’s night guards.”
    The tone of her voice told him that the sight was as ordinary to her as the crushed limestone walkways stitching the Reyes Balam compound together.
    Banana clips, Hunter thought to himself. The new must-have accessory for the narcos and the rich who hide from them.
    The guard must have found Lina and Hunter equally ordinary. He didn’t glance their way.
    All the banana clips in the world won’t help unless he’s a lot more alert than he looks, Hunter thought.
    He knew firsthand just how boring the job of being a night guard could be.
    Until it wasn’t.
    Lina ignored the grand front entrance and went through the kitchen entrance instead. The scents of peppers both hot and mild permeated the air, along with roasted pork and corn, coffee, and the dark breath of unsweetened chocolate. Other spices clung to the room, telling Hunter that while dinner might be socially uncomfortable with the Reyes Balam family, it wouldn’t be boring to the palate.
    A tiny woman was sitting at a small, very solid mahogany table, sipping from a demitasse. The china was antique, both proud and subtly faded, as though it had come to the Yucatan via Spain centuries ago. The contents of the demitasse were all New World—thick, unsweetened chocolate laced with very hot peppers.
    The drink of the gods, Hunter thought. In the old days, I’ll bet a woman wouldn’t have been allowed to get any closer to it than preparing it for a man.
    “Abuelita,” Lina said, hurrying across the tile floor. “I thought you would be in the library.”
    Abuelita held out a hand. She was thin as only the very old can be. Her ligaments and tendons had been forged in a jungle village, where women ground corn daily between heavy stones and carried water to the fields.
    “Rosalina,” she said in a voice like wind through reeds. “Finally you are here.”
    “I couldn’t miss your birthday.” Gracefully Lina kneeled to be closer to eye level with the old woman. “How many is it now?”
    “I am as old as the Long Count,” Abuelita said, her laugh a whisper. “I will see the final Turning of the Wheel and the changing of the gods. It is enough.”
    Lina bent and gave Abuelita a gentle hug, putting smooth skin against the weathered teak of the other woman. Abuelita’s hair was white, like her clothes, which had a simple country style that was belied by the intricate white embroidery that glowed against the pale cotton. It was the sheer absence of the vivid colors that most native Maya wore that made Abuelita almost regal, her clothes and hair a white flame burning against rich skin and eyes blacker than any night.
    Looking at those eyes, Hunter understood that Abuelita was indeed different. She lived in the jaguar’s world, wherehuman concerns were like the buzzing of flies. Once she would have been called a wise woman, a bruja, a priestess. Now she was labeled senile.
    “Abuelita, permit me to introduce Señor Hunter Johnston,” Lina said, speaking in Spanish. “Hunter, this is Señora Kuh Chel Balam.”
    “I’m honored, Lady Chel,” Hunter said, tilting his head in acknowledgment of her age and regal presence.
    Abuelita’s eyes sharpened at the formal title “lady,” which was a more exact translation from the Mayan than “señora.” She gestured for Hunter to come closer. When he did, she stared at him with an intensity that would be called rude in other circumstances. But this was Kuh—Owl of Omen—watching him.
    Lina’s subtly pleading glance at Hunter asked him to make allowances for Abuelita’s age. His fingers brushed Lina’s briefly, silently reassuring her that he wasn’t offended.
    “You were born in the wrong time, warrior,” Owl of Omen said in a liquid Yucatec dialect. “The Turning Wheel will crush you.”
    Hunter looked to Lina for a translation. The slight motion of her head was negative. Whatever the old woman had said, he would have to wait until he and Lina were alone for a translation.
    Then Owl of Omen blinked and Abuelita was back. She took a final sip of her fiery chocolate. The