The Bloodgate Guardian (11 page)

Her heart ached for this man who’d suffered so much guilt, as well as his brother who’d been willing to do anything for love. “Even though she betrayed him, he still went after her, and you went after him. How can that be wrong?”

Ruin flinched, the turmoil of that day swelling within him once more. Perhaps his story would help her see the error in opening the Gate to save her father.

“Butterfly Star’s father, the king of the K’iche, promised her to a Kaqchikel prince to further cement their alliance against us. With her help, they laid a trap for Wrack, and she died in the fight. He begged me to send him through to Xibalba so he could help her through the Place of Fright, so I opened the Gate for him. Before he could find her, the Lords of Death captured and sacrificed him. As his twin, I felt his death. Of course, I went after him.”

“If he was already dead, what did you hope to gain?”

“Death is only the beginning of a new journey. I fetched him back to this journey. I had the power. I had the knowledge. But I did not know that he would be changed so much by the betrayal. I thought he would welcome my rescue. Instead…”

His chest was tight, his breath short and loud. It had taken his greatest magic to blow a spark of life back into his brother’s body. Returning through the Gate had been his first death. He’d awoken on the lakeshore stiff, sore, and thirsty for revenge, but once revived, his brother had waded back into the lake calling his woman’s name. When he’d found no portal back to Xibalba, he’d turned on his brother. He’d sworn to never rest until Ruin had paid the price of her death a thousand times over.

He forced his voice to ring with vehemence. “I allowed my heart to interfere with my duty. It will not happen again.”

Jaid stared at him solemnly. He feared she would attempt to comfort him, but she finally turned aside to explore the city.

At first, he simply watched her. Her steps were hesitant, her eyes large, her face damp with sweat. Yet she pushed onward, refusing to let her fear dictate her. As the sun climbed in the sky and moved in its downward swing toward the lake in the west, her manner eased. The stiffness in her shoulders disappeared and her eyes glittered with excitement.

“The colors are still bright and beautiful. I’ve never seen panels so well preserved.”

He ran his hand over the stone. “The layers of rock protected it from damp and exposure.”

“Does it bother you to walk through the plaza and remember what it was once like to live here? I can’t imagine how that must feel.”

He shrugged. “For the most part, it feels like a dream of a dream, only a vague memory. I’m not the same priest who stood at the top of the temple each morning to bid the sun good day, and each night, safe journey through Xibalba.”

“I’m ready to see your temple.” Her voice was quiet, but the fear had left her.

She’d faced her fear and overcome it. No small feat. Her courage only served to draw him closer. The man he’d once been yearned to pull her into his arms and feel her courageous heart beat against his while he whispered praise and sweet words in her ear. Words he’d never allowed himself to say to any woman.

His magic swirled inside him, a painful swipe of claws that reminded him of his purpose.

He led the way to the Pyramid of Dawn, mirroring Volcano San Pedro. Twin pyramids across the plaza represented the other two stones of the three-stoned hearth and completed the triad. She started to climb the stairs to the top but paused when he didn’t join her. Instead, he entered an unimposing structure which sat at the base of the mighty pyramid.

Inside, the walls were painted with the story of creation, very similar to the story the K’iche had recorded in the
Popol Vuh
, only with his people’s interpretation and memories. Patiently, he waited while she looked about the room.

Her mouth moved slightly, her brow furrowed as she translated the glyphs on the walls. “These are easy and straightforward glyphs, fairly typical of most ruins. This isn’t what my father found.”

His mouth quirked. “Do you think my most sacred knowledge would be so readily available?”

He stepped over to the inner wall where a large map of the region had been engraved into the stone. He touched the three carved volcanoes in quick sequence, and the rock cracked.

“A secret door,” she breathed, her eyes gleaming with excitement. “Now I’m really starting to feel like Indiana Jones.”

“Did you bring a light? The tunnel’s dark.” She shook her head, so Ruin held his hand out. “I know the way. Take my hand and I’ll lead you through.”

“We’re going…” She paled and her eyes dilated. Agitated, she gripped the leather bag, her fingers aimlessly playing with the strap and the catch. “I don’t think I can do that. Not in the dark, with all those heavy rocks pressing down on my head.”

She shuddered and took an involuntary step backward.

“Shhh.” He stepped closer and took her hand. “It’s only a few feet and then we’ll be in the open chamber beneath the pyramid. It was made with a hole at the top to allow the sun to come through, and the last time I was inside, your father had left supplies inside to light the chamber. Trust me. This tunnel has been safe and sound for hundreds of years. It survived an earthquake and the eruption of the nearest volcano. Nothing’s going to make it collapse today.”

Swallowing, she took his hand, her fingers squeezing hard. With halting steps, she followed him. Her panting breath echoed in the small room, worsening at the door to the tunnel. “Distract me. Please. I want to see your temple, but I’m afraid.”

She stepped closer to him, her face pale. Her free hand settled on his other arm. Heat from her palm seeped into him, surprising him with a sudden uncurling of desire. Her scent filled his nose, laden with the pheromones of burgeoning attraction.

Very slowly, she laid her cheek against his chest. The feel of her against him stirred longings he’d believed dead a very long time ago. She was so small against him, courageous and afraid, brilliant and yet so curiously naïve, arrogant in her ignorance. The complex twisting tightened his stomach. He could not afford any sentiments for this woman. He had one goal only: protect the Gate. She knew too much.

Truthfully, he should have already killed her.

The wary priest in him insisted this softness was merely a ploy to gain his trust and admiration. A betrayal. But he didn’t believe such fearful courage could be pretended. In this time, in her country, such weakness would not be readily displayed.

Without letting himself think too much, he picked her up and strode into the tunnel. She burrowed deeper into his arms, hiding her face against him. Her arms came up around his neck, her fingers gliding through his hair, torture and heaven at once. All too soon—and not soon enough—he reached the inner temple.

Reluctantly, he set her back on her feet. Her hands remained on his shoulders and she turned her face up to his. Her dark eyes gleamed, her lips soft with emotion that he didn’t dare consider. Would her mouth taste as rich and decadent as promised by her cacao eyes and hair?

He turned away, ruthlessly crushing that softness threatening his duty once more.

Her father had set up large lamps and a generator in the corner. He flipped the machine on, glad to have some activity to occupy his hands before he did the unthinkable.

Light bloomed, and she gasped. “Oh, Ruin, I had no idea. It’s so beautiful!” She rushed to the wall and stroked her fingers over the pictures and carvings. “Yes, these are familiar, yet so strange and complex. Did you write them?”

“As I wrote the codex.”

She glanced back at him. The warm glow of admiration in her eyes burned him. The women of his time had never been able to look at him without fear, yet this modern woman—who shouldn’t have believed a single word of his explanations—looked upon him with enough heat to crack the ancient foundations of his temple. “How can you bear to destroy it?”

“Originally I made thirteen copies.” He sighed. For all his determination to be as immovable as stone, he’d found it impossible to wipe all evidence of his sacred knowledge from this earth. “Only one remains.”

“Thirteen, one for each level of heaven?”

“Yes.” He watched her move around the room, waiting for her to notice the floor. “I gave a copy to each of the great cities of the age.”

“What did they use them for? If it was forbidden to use them, why make copies and give them to the other cities?”

“The magic itself wasn’t forbidden, merely its misuse. I often used the portal to communicate with our allies and even our enemies. It also enabled us to contact our ancestors and the gods, if the appropriate sacrifice was offered. When Great Feathered Serpent blessed me with this knowledge, I swore to never use the Gate for personal gain, yet I misused the Gate to bring my brother back to life.”

“I thought you used obsidian mirrors and various herbals to induce visions…” His words must have finally dawned on her, for she whirled, eyes wide and sparkling with interest. “You communicated directly with the other cities through the portal?”

He nodded. “We could travel from city to city without ever stepping from this room. The high priests often communicated in secret to unify ourselves before warfare. We still warred, yes, but the Gates gave us the chance to arrange treaties in privacy.”

“How?” She whispered. “How did you do it?”

“I’ll show you.”

“Look at the floor,” Ruin said.

Jaid dropped her gaze to the tiles. Her eyes couldn’t make sense of the colorful mosaic. The swirling pattern of spirals and glyphs, carvings and lines made her so dizzy that her vision blurred. The room swam.

“This is the first level of protection. We deliberately designed the pattern to make you uncomfortable, so your eyes will seek out something solid, anything but the fluid, blurring floor.”

A headache already threatened between her eyes, so she closed them.

“Step toward my voice,” he whispered.

It only took three steps to reach him. He settled his palm in the small of her back and turned her around, adjusting her until she stood in a certain spot.

“Just like the wall panel, the floor contains a map. As with any map, you must know the key to understand how to read it.”

She hadn’t seen any sort of map in the floor. The patterns were too overwhelming. Even with her eyes closed, she could sense the moving design, as though waves rocked the room back and forth.

“Open your eyes and see the map.”

Bracing against a sick lurch in her stomach, she opened her eyes. The room remained solid and the pattern in the floor became visible. Blue waters spread from her feet, with the triangle of three volcanoes, so she stood on Lake Atitlan. Various glyphs were arranged in a large circle about her. It looked like a calendar round, only instead of the kin glyphs, they were cities. She’d definitely seen this before; she could recite the known city names from memory.

Padding silently like the jaguar, he edged around her so he could see her face. “Each location glyph corresponds to a portal. Straight ahead, you should recognize the sign for Chich’en Itza.”

“And the number four beneath it.”

She didn’t understand the small quirk to the corner of his mouth. “This is where your father stood when he snapped the photographs he sent to you, right? This is how you decided the translation of city to number.”

Even in perfect sequence and carefully numbered by her father, the photographs had lost the intricacy in the floor. Standing here in the middle of it, she could almost feel the location ring revolving about her.

“We couldn’t translate all of the city names, but we figured out the key using the numbers. The only one Dad was really interested in was First Five Sky.”

“Everything you’ve just told me is wrong.”

Shock splintered through her, followed by frustration. “What do you mean? I can see it.”

“Of course you do. That’s why it’s a good secret, yes?”

She pivoted on the blue waters. “Are you saying this is encrypted again?”

“What number do you see for Lake Atitlan?”

A black shell winked beside her right boot. “Zero.”

“Knowing that my city was named Mouth of Creation, does it make sense to see a zero by Heart of Lake?”

She frowned. Images flipped through her brain like a massive database of glyphs, settling on Cosmic Hearth, the three-stoned hearth of Orion’s Belt. “Three is the sacred number of creation.”

“Also four, the cardinal directions; nine, the levels of Xibalba; thirteen—”

“The levels of heaven,” she whispered. She’d never seen zero applied to any sacred location.

“Did you read the entire codex?”

“Of course not. It might take the rest of my life to fully translate every single panel. Dad had me concentrate on the rounds.” Her stomach felt rather queasy, but she couldn’t blame it on the swirling floor. Even after she closed her eyes, the map remained emblazoned on her retinas. “I warned him that Zuyua meant twisted speech and riddles. Some parts that I’d translated seemed…”

“Wrong?”

She hated that word. Her thoughts whirled as badly as the floor had earlier, a roulette wheel, and she was the tiny, insignificant pea tossed blindly by chance.

“Do you remember this passage in the codex:
He who wishes to see heaven stands, one foot on the Jaguar Throne Stone and the other on the First Sorcerer’s Seat
.”

Of course she’d read that passage. While poetic, she’d assumed it was merely narrative.

“We used several secret codes in the codex to keep the magic secure. One is the positional key in the map. If you don’t stand in the appropriate location on the map—which varies by city—safeguards kick in. As the Gatekeeper, my curse compels me immediately to the source of the tampering. I knew you were reading the codex long before your father ever attempted the ritual, because I felt you like an itch in the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet. I simply could do nothing about it, because you were too far away.”

She leveled her gaze on him, searching his hard, proud face. “And now?”

“And now,” he whispered raggedly, “my palms still itch with the need to kill you, at war with my need to touch you.”

Shivering, she felt her skin tingling with the memory of his palms gliding over her skin. So he felt the attraction, too. Had he felt the need to kill her even then? Yet he’d done nothing but soothe away her fear. To distract them both, she returned to the passage he’d quoted. “The First Sorcerer could only be Itzamna, who placed the third hearth stone in the sky.” Holding his gaze, she slid one foot to Volcano San Pedro, the largest volcano on the shore of Lake Atitlan, and her other foot back to the smaller volcano further south, the Jaguar Throne. Very deliberately, she dropped her gaze to the map.

The glyph of Chich’en Itza now had the bars and dots of seven by it. “How do you open the portal to First Five Sky?”

“That’s a whole other secret.” His voice cracked with strain, drawing her gaze back up to his hardened face. His eyes glittered like chips of frozen sunlight. “Any tampering with a Gate without the proper precautions results in access only to Xibalba, which should never have allowed the Lords of Death access to this world. Your father managed to fully unlock the Gate.”

Her fingertips ached with cold. “The last thing we wanted to do was open the Gate to Xibalba.”

“I know what you wanted, but the Gate to First Five Sky is more secure than all the others. Because you hadn’t yet translated the entire codex, you didn’t understand that there are degrees of access. The Gates can be used for communication, passage through, or passage back to our world. The latter, unfortunately, allowed the Death Lords to escape.”

She flinched. “Dad has been fascinated with the supposed Return at the end of this age. He would have tried to open the Gate for them to come through. He’s always had a vision of the Great Feathered Serpent…” Her bad knee gave out and she sat down hard on her backside. “Did you lock it back?”

“Absolutely.”

“So how are we going to put the demons back?”

For the first time, the all-powerful priest looked shaken. “I don’t know.”

Chilled, she started shaking, her head buzzing. What had they done? Who would suffer because of their curiosity? How many would die? “You said earlier that Blood Gatherer had escaped. Which others?”

“Seven Death, second Lord of Xibalba, and Bloody Teeth. They’ll be looking for a priest to sacrifice for them, spreading disease and death everywhere they walk, gaining strength with every passing moment. Soon, they’ll try for another Gate.”

“Why?”

“There are seven more Death Lords to release. If they—” His jaws clenched tight. Eyes narrowed, he turned away.

He doesn’t trust me.

Could she blame him? How could he believe that she wouldn’t take every bit of knowledge he’d given her and misuse it again? She didn’t need him to finish his thought. “If the Death Lords command the Gates, they’ll destroy our world, and then use those Gates to destroy everything else. The Maya who planned to Return will either be locked away or killed.”

“First, they must gain a human priest.”

“You.”

“They killed me because I refused to help them.”

“Who can they get in our world?”

Staring at her, he didn’t say anything, his mouth flat and hard.

Black spots floated into her vision. Her voice squeaked. “Me?”

“I should kill you quickly and gently, if only to prevent you from falling into their hands. I worry, also, for your father in Xibalba. They will recognize the taste of magic in him, and they’ll feel the Gate. They know that three of their kind already passed through. They’ll torture him until he tells them every bit of magic he possesses.”

Her heart pounded too hard, pumping adrenaline through her body. She couldn’t sit here and do nothing. She leaped to her feet and resumed pacing, limping on the bad knee. “What can he do there? Is the equivalent of the Gate rounds in their world, too?”

“The portal is there, but there’s no key or rounds to sequence in order to open the Gate.”

Tears burned her eyes and her hands trembled so badly she finally shoved them into her pockets. “We have to help him.”

Ruin stared back at her, the implacable warrior priest. How could she expect him to go back on his word again? She had to devise a way to use his duty to convince him. “If they gain his knowledge, couldn’t they eventually break through the locks? We have to get him out!”

Alarms blared in the distance. They both rushed for the exit. Jaid didn’t even care about the tunnel this time. She gripped his hand and ran beside him, her right hand flung up just in case the stone had slid back in the wall. When they emerged, she suddenly realized how many hours had passed. Evening cloaked the ancient stone in shadows, and the sun had made a glorious fiery descent.

At the main compound, armed guards hurried like soldier ants protecting the nest. Smoke billowed from the rear of the building.

“The codex!” She ran into the building, ignoring the soldiers. The concierge lay across the front desk, blood pooling on the gorgeous carpet. The key-pad door hung off its hinges. Blackened, the heavy vault door still smoldered. The safe beneath the podium was torn open.

Sick, Jaid stared numbly at the empty safe. “What are we going to do now? Who took it?”

Ruin sniffed the air, his eyes glowing. He prowled about the room, sleek muscles flexing and flowing like the big cat. “Wrack.”

“Could he be the human priest for the Death Lords?”

“No.” He shook his head, black hair falling about his shoulders. “He hates them too much to ever submit fully to their control. He could, however, bargain with them.” A look of death flashed across his face. “Especially if he has the White Dagger.”

The White Dagger was mentioned in the
Popol Vuh
. The Xibalban Lords had sent the owl messengers with the knife to cut out Blood Moon’s heart before she could deliver the hero twins.

Understanding dawned. She didn’t think more horror could churn in her stomach. “The knife of sacrifice.”

“If he gets the knife, and he possesses the codex explaining how to open the Gate, then he’ll go into Xibalba himself.”

“Why would he risk letting all the Death Lords out again? That doesn’t make sense.”

Ruin stared at her, his eyes flickering with darkening shadows. “He won’t care about anything but getting to Butterfly Star.”

Two guards rushed into the room with semi-automatic weapons. “Dr. Merritt, please come with us.”

She recognized the man who’d stood guard at her hut and escorted her last night. “What’s going on?”

The other soldier wore an official-looking military uniform. “Dr. Reyes has ordered us to place you under arrest.”

Jaid forced bravado to her voice despite her trembling. “A priceless codex has been stolen, and you put
me
under arrest?”

Dr. Reyes was seated in the elaborate lobby of the main compound. Gaze narrowed on Ruin, he indicated the chair beside him. “Who’s this?”

She froze. Dr. Reyes had originally hinted at the legend of the twins. He was sure to recognize the jaguar-priest.

“I’m Balam,” Ruin said calmly. He’d taken up a defensive position behind her. “I met Dr. Merritt in Santiago Atitlan this morning.”

However, Dr. Reyes didn’t appear alarmed or stunned by her companion’s choice of name. He leaned forward, his eyes sharp and intent. “So you admit you were both there.”

“Of course,” Jaid replied. “I took a driver to town and did some shopping. I bought a textile that should be in my room. While I was there, I met Balam, who impressed me with his knowledge of the area’s folklore. He agreed to accompany me back here, and the guards allowed him inside as my guest.”

“And where have you been since ten o’clock this morning, when the guards acknowledge your return?”

“We’ve been in the ruin.”

“The whole time?”

“Yes.” Jaid sharpened her voice. “What’s going on? Why the sudden show of force? I thought I was a guest here.” She glanced around the room suspiciously. “Where’s Madelyn?”

“After we received the news, she was questioned first. She was quite distraught by the images and retired to her office to rest.”

“What news? What are you talking about?”

Silent, Dr. Reyes picked up a television remote. The large flat-screen on the wall flipped on. At first, she couldn’t make sense of it. Someone spoke in Spanish, narrating an event, while images of death filled the screen. People lay broken and twisted everywhere. Blood coated the walls, the floor, even the ceilings. Men, women, even children, it didn’t matter.

Ruin dropped his hand on her shoulder, his grip firm and strong, else she likely would have thrown up. The violence and death were worse than anything she’d ever seen before. A few survivors stumbled on screen, moaning, blood staining their hands and clothes as though they’d tried to help loved ones. A close-up shot revealed horrible sores on the woman’s face, leaking pus.

Jaid’s stomach churned. “Where is this?”

Without answering, Dr. Reyes paused the show. A distinctive white church filled the screen, the six-columned grand entry now draped with bodies and stained with death.

She gasped. “The church in Santiago Atitlan!”

Nodding, he played the show and translated the Spanish for her. “Authorities believe some bizarre ritual was performed here in the church. The most bodies were found here. The small hole in the center of the church that the locals call ‘the navel of the world’ was desecrated, thrown open and fouled with blood, as well as the altar. Specifically, hearts were ripped out of the victims’ chests. They were sacrificed.”