Carpathian 23 - Dark Storm

“Thank you again.”
    Ben rubbed his temples, scowling as he turned away from her. Riley helped push the
     remains of the bats into the hole Gary had dug, waiting until Ben was out of earshot
     before she turned to Jubal.
    “All right,” she said, “he’s gone. Now tell me what Raul was chanting. And what language
     was he speaking? It’s certainly not native to this country or any tribe here in the
     Amazon.”
    Jubal slipped his gun into some kind of harness beneath his loose jacket. Riley found
     it interesting that he hadn’t put it away until Ben had left.
    “The language is an ancient one,” Jubal said. “It originated in the Carpathian Mountains,
     but there are very few who still speak or even understand it today.”
    She frowned at him. “The Carpathian Mountains? How in the world could a poorly educated
     porter from a remote village in the Amazon come to know and speak an ancient European
     language that even I’ve never heard of? Never mind. We can talk about that later.
     For now, I want to know what he was saying.”
    Jubal looked over her head at Gary.
    “ Don’t do that. Look at me, not him. I know you understand what he said,” Riley insisted.
     “That man was trying to kill my mother. And the whole time he kept saying ‘ Hän kalma, emni hän ku köd alte. Tappatak naman. Tappatak naman .’” She repeated the phrase with perfect pitch, intonation, sounding exactly like
     Raul. “I want to know what it means.”
    Jubal shook his head. “I don’t know the answer to that. I really don’t, Riley. I’m
     not as good at the language as Gary is, and I don’t want to make a mistake. I think
     I got the gist of what he was trying to say, but if I mistranslate and alarm you . . .”
    “The man came after my mother with a machete. I don’t think it’s going to be more
     alarming than that,” Riley snapped and was immediately ashamed of herself. She needed
     this man’s help. Gary, Ben and Jubal had no doubt not only saved her mother’s life,
     but probably her own as well. “I’m sorry. You helped defend my mother, and I appreciate
     that. But I’m afraid for her and I need to know what I’m dealing with.”
    Gary moved around Annabel’s hammock to stand in front of Riley. “I’m sorry this is
     happening to both of you. You must be very frightened. It sounded to me, and this
     is a loose translation, that he was chanting ‘Death to the cursed woman. Kill her.
     Kill her.’ That’s as near as I could make out.” He looked at Jubal. “Did you get the
     same thing?”
    Riley knew he’d switched his attention to Jubal in order to give her time to recover.
     She’d suspected the translation would be something threatening—but still, she felt
     as if someone had punched her in the gut and driven every bit of air from her lungs.
     She forced herself to breathe as she looked up at the night sky through the canopy,
     a film of hazy leaves. Who would target Annabel? She was an amazing, kind woman. Everyone
     she met loved her. The attack didn’t make sense at all.
    “Raul has definitely spent his entire life here in the rain forest. He truly doesn’t
     have that much contact with outsiders, none of the villagers do. How would he ever
     pick up such a nearly extinct, clearly foreign language?” Riley struggled to keep
     the challenge out of her voice.
    Without a doubt this man had saved her life, but Jubal Sanders and Gary Jansen researched plants. They both admitted they’d come to
     the Andes in search of a plant that was supposed to be extinct everywhere else and
     that the plant was native to the Carpathian Mountain range in Europe. If this language
     had originated in that same area, what were the plant and language doing in South
     America? And what a coincidence that everyone in their traveling party was experiencing
     the same hallucination all wrapped around this ancient language both men understood?
    Jubal shook his head. “I have no explanation.”
    He was lying. He looked her straight in the eye. His expression didn’t change, his
     handsome face carved with worry lines, his jaw and mouth firm, but he was lying.
    “Oh, yes, you do,” she retorted. “And you’re going to tell me what it is, right now.”
    Gary sighed. “Just tell her, Jubal. Worst case, she’ll just think we’re as crazy as
     the porter.”
    “Honestly, we don’t know for certain what’s going on, but we have our suspicions.
     We’ve seen things like this happen before in