The Bloodgate Guardian (8 page)

Pretending as though she hadn’t just knocked a shapeshifting jaguar priest out cold in her hut, Jaid calmly walked down the path to the guard. “I’m going back to the compound to speak with Dr. Gerard. Would you escort me? I’m not comfortable walking about in the night after the intruder.”

The guard ground his cigarette into the gravel and nodded. “Of course, Dr. Merritt.”

“What’s your name?”

“Knightley.”

“What’s an American…” she glanced at the automatic weapon slung over his shoulder, “…soldier doing here in Guatemala?”

Knightley laughed. “Well, ma’am, I’m not exactly an American or a soldier.”

“You’re not Guatemalan either.”

“True.”

They reached the compound without him volunteering any further information. Was that his orders, or just his personality? “Did you know my father?”

“Yes, ma’am, I did. I’m sorry for your loss.”

He’s not dead
, she retorted silently, but forced a polite smile and nod. “If you’re not Guatemalan and you’re not an American soldier, who do you work for?”

He stared at her several long moments before shrugging casually. “Venus Star. Same as you. I’ll be at my post. When you come back out, wave me over if you want an escort back to your hut.”

Don’t trust anybody,
her father had screamed.
Especially don’t give it to Venus Star.

The guard strode away, his low, gravelly voice carrying in the night. “Watch yourself, Dr. Merritt. The locals have been whispering about an immortal priest who can shift into a jaguar. They say he’s been prowling around the compound ever since your father opened up his cursed city again. If you see the bastard, let me know and I’ll shoot him. I always wanted a nice black pelt to throw before the fireplace.”

Yeah, I’ll do that. Not.

Since she was alone this time, she paid more attention to the décor of the compound. The place really did resemble a hotel instead of a research facility. Plastered walls lined the empty hallways, and Mexican tiles rang beneath her boots even though she tried to walk softly. Artwork and rustic furniture had been attractively arranged in the front lobby. A man in a smart black suit sat at the desk, and she immediately began rehearsing excuses and entreaties in order to talk her way past.

When he saw her approach, he smiled and stood, sliding his card through the scanner. He even opened the door for her. “Good evening, Dr. Merritt. If you need anything, please let me know. If any doors have a touchpad, simply press your thumb to it. If you can’t access something you want, pick up any phone and call the front desk. I’ll arrange security clearance immediately.”

The compound had state-of-the-art security inside, but a bunch of mercenaries couldn’t stop a man on foot or a jaguar? She walked down the hallway, noting the nameplates beside each door. She’d already seen her father’s office. Sam’s was across the hall, lights off. She tried to peek through the slitted blinds but couldn’t make out anything but a computer monitor. Dr. Madelyn St. James’s office was beside Sam’s, and it too was dark and closed.

The door beside her father’s stopped her cold.
Dr. Jaid Merritt.
Had the office always been here, or had they merely thrown her name up at the last minute once they knew she was coming? Hesitantly, she tried the doorknob. It was locked, so she placed her thumb on the keypad and the door clicked open. She pushed it open wider and flipped on the light.

Continuing the same luxurious hotel comfort theme, she found a nice cherry desk and tall cabinet. Two upholstered chairs faced the desk. A flatscreen monitor stood in the corner with several cables open and waiting for her laptop. Otherwise, the top of the desk was bare. She pulled open the top drawer of the filing cabinet and noted it was empty except for a few fresh manila folders.

Shrugging off the weird sense of expectation, she walked down the hallway, passing Dr. Reyes’s office and several unclaimed spaces. At the end of the hallway, a massive steel door waited. It had been open when she’d first arrived. In fact, she hadn’t noticed anyone using card readers or security of any sort. Had Sam sent them all away and prepped everyone to unlock the doors to make her feel welcome?

Or had he done it to make sure she brought them the codex?

Weary, she rubbed her temples, trying to dispel the growing headache throbbing through her skull. She’d known Sam all her life. Surely her father hadn’t meant to include his best friend in his warning. But Sam hadn’t known about the codex or her father’s attempt to re-enact the ritual.

With a growing uneasiness she couldn’t shake, she held her thumb to the keypad and the lock snicked. The door slid aside easily despite its four-inch thickness. The large room reminded her of a lecture hall, only more intimate, with vibrant red chairs at each oval ring of desks and jungle green carpet runners. The same impeccable taste extended to the artwork decorating the walls. It nearly made her forget there were no windows and the only exit was through a vault-quality steel door.

On the table at the front of the room, Sam Gerard stood with his back to her. The codex was laid out on the table.

A fierce possessive urge drove her to run down the aisle. She wanted to yank the fragile book away and snarl like a jackal protecting a hunk of meat.

Tracing the glyphs with his bare fingertips, he didn’t even notice her tapping foot or her fierce glare. Oils from human hands would stain the fragile plaster coating on the pages and mar the delicate inks the Maya had used. “You should wear gloves to handle it.”

At her voice, his gaze jerked up and he stepped away. He managed to look sheepish instead of guilty. “Sorry, you’re right. I’m just stunned at its condition. Nobody’s ever seen an authentic, intact codex that’s so pristine. It looks like it was painted yesterday, not a thousand years ago. How could Charlie bear to let such a treasure out of his sight?”

Jaid pulled on a pair of latex gloves. “He wanted the translation more than he wanted to hold the book.”

Leaning back down, Sam pointed to the page but didn’t touch it. The opposite page was heavily colored with a complex story panel. “What does this section say?”

“I don’t know—I haven’t translated this page yet.” Her father had been adamant that she translate the rounds first. The angry red of the volcano seemed to glow like a furnace, shooting rock and flames into the sky. Tumbled pyramids crushed people, falling stone by stone into the shimmering blue lake. The whole panel was dominated by a priest pointing to what was likely a warning on the opposite page, his face grim. Black spots dotted his arms and upper body.

Exactly like the man she’d seen transform from a jaguar. This priest even wore a jaguar pelt about his shoulders.

She dragged her attention to the glyphs. Wiping her thoughts clean, she let the whole page come alive in her mind. It was as though the original strokes were quickly drawn in her mind’s eye, each bold, black stroke of ink a permanent entry into her memory. Few knew she had a photographic memory, although Geoffrey had probably suspected the truth. She only ever had to translate a glyph once, and she could quickly re-draw a glyph even without a reference, because she never forgot the symbols.

She let out a long breath. This was too much of a coincidence. The warning written here was almost word for word what the jaguar man had said.

“What?”

“It says that the Mouth of Creation will be destroyed by the gods’ wrath if the Gate is ever misused.”

“Chi’Ch’ul,” Sam whispered, his voice reverent. “They predicted their own destruction. I wonder who misused the Gate that caused the volcanoes to erupt.”

The priest who’d recounted part of this warning to her not even an hour ago.
She spoke rather sharper than she intended. “Volcanoes erupt all the time. This is merely an explanation the Maya developed to help explain why bad things sometimes happened to people who couldn’t understand geological plates shifting beneath the earth’s crust.”

Unbothered by her reaction, Sam touched the glyph of a dancing skeleton. “Is that all it says?”

She thought his fingers trembled, but when he caught her look, he quickly pulled his hand back and shoved it into his pocket.
“The Place of Fright will swallow them. The White Road will rise up beneath their feet. Yet they will travail a very long time…”
She frowned, her brow creasing. While she could easily remember an entire dictionary of glyphs, the Maya numbering system was an entirely different beast. “This is actually a large Maya number.”

“Charlie thinks in Maya numbers.” Sam carefully unfolded the next panel. This one was row upon row of glyphs, mostly faces, figures, and place names, the ones she’d spent the most time on at her father’s insistence. “How on earth do you make sense of these?”

“That’s the challenge. Some of them have different meanings, depending on what they’re grouped with. This symbol by itself might mean
kin
, day. But combine it with this,” she pointed to
Ah-Kin
, “and it becomes Lord of the Sun, another name for either Itzamna or Kukulkan, the Great Feathered Serpent god.”

“So is this the pantheon?”

“Not exactly. These are place names, many of which did include the patron god of the city. Dad and I believe these correspond to the larger round on the altar and in the temple floor.”

“What are they for?”

“We’re not sure.” She weighed alternatives. Her father had warned her against Venus Star, and so had the jaguar priest. Sam had brought them onto the dig, but how could she
not
trust him? He’d practically raised her, while her real father had abandoned her. No one knew her better than Sam.

According to the man in her hut, her father was trapped in Xibalba and another man who looked remarkably like an ancient Maya warrior was killing people very close to her. She needed help, and Sam was her best shot, no matter what her father had warned. “I believe this is a location element of the magic. Turn the dial to the city name and open the Gate there. If you pass through this Gate, you end up in the specified city.”

“This is Chich’en Itza,” Sam said excitedly, his blue eyes gleaming with boyish charm.

Although he looked nothing like Geoffrey, he possessed that same easy manner. It would be easy to convince herself that the warmth glowing in Sam’s eyes could be more than fatherly affection. But Geoffrey was gone, Sam was her father’s best friend, and she was alone, again, as always. She had to swallow to ease the ache in her throat.

“So the Sacred Cenote is a Gate, right?”

She nodded. “That’s what we’re guessing. Although many cities are listed that we can’t identify. Many others have no cenote or body of water known at the location. Most of the cities didn’t even co-exist at the same time. El Mirador was abandoned hundreds of years before Tikal or Chich’en Itza, yet all three cities are listed in the codex. None of the glyphs in this column even look familiar. If they’re Gates, where do these go? We have no idea.”

“Now Charlie’s gone,” Sam whispered. “Do you really think he went through a Gate?”

“I don’t know.” She blinked back tears. If the man in her hut was right, Dr. Charles Merritt was worse than dead. “This isn’t something we can blindly experiment with. I still can’t believe he tried to perform the ritual before I finished the translation.”

Sam straightened, his eyes flashing with determination. “You work on the translation tomorrow. As soon as I get back, I’ll take you to the ruin and we’ll put the pieces together.”

“I was attacked on the way to my hut.”

Sam whirled around, his eyes flashing with fury. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.”
This time.
The thought made her stomach drop to a location near her knees and her palms sweat. “It was the same man who killed Geoffrey, and there was a jaguar too. Two intruders, Sam, that shouldn’t be anywhere near this compound if it’s as secure as you say.”

“Make sure a guard escorts you back and forth. I’ll ask Thorne to keep a close watch on you tomorrow.”

The thought of having a stranger tag along with her while she suffered the biggest panic attack of her life didn’t sound appealing at all, but she’d definitely take a muscled goon with a gun on the walk back to her cabana in the dark. “How many guards patrol the fences? Do you have any cameras? Surely they would have caught something.”

“We have the main building and the entry points to the compound highly secure, but we’re remote enough and relatively unknown that we thought this would be secure enough. Ask anyone in Santiago Atitlan what’s up here, and they’ll say tourists. That’s exactly what we want. We don’t want any other research group poking around.”

“Could one of Dad’s competitors have hired him to shut this dig down?”

Sam blew out a big breath and jammed his hat back on his head. “Hell if I know. Venus Star hired some of the best private security around. With Charlie gone, your friend dead, and now the same man around here…I don’t like it, Jaid.” He lowered his voice, glancing about as though he feared someone might overhear him. “Quite frankly, they’d love to steal Charlie’s research right out from beneath him. He’s been obsessed and paranoid lately, and rightly so. Stay close, keep your eyes open, and whatever happens, don’t let anyone near the codex until I’m back tomorrow.”

So far, Sam’s advice made perfect sense, and his worry and doubts confirmed her father’s suspicions. Some of the tangled knots eased in her stomach. “Where are you putting it?”

Reverently, he folded the fragile pages back together and together they set it in a waterproof storage container. Bending down, he pressed his thumb to a control panel on the front of the lectern, and a safe popped open. “Only you, Charlie, and I have access to this safe, and only Madelyn and Efraín have access to enter this room. It should be safe enough here.”

Absently rubbing her knee, she watched him lay the precious book inside and lock the safe. Too bad she couldn’t climb in there and hide from all this craziness. Jaguars who became men. A Maya killer following her from Texas to Guatemala. A priceless codex detailing Gates to other worlds.