Her eyes sprang open.
The ceiling was gone. The front wall was gone. The late-afternoon sun streamed in, illuminating the dancing molecules of dust.
Aaron was in human form again, sprawled on top of her.
“Aaron. Come on.” In a panic to get away, she shook him. “We have to get out of here.”
He didn’t move.
“It’s dangerous. We have to get out of here.” She shook him again.
Still he didn’t move.
Again something dripped beside her ear.
She pushed her glasses up on her nose. She turned her head and looked.
Blood pooled on the floor, and as she watched, another dark red drop splashed into the puddle.
Then she knew. She knew. She knew.
“No.” Grasping Aaron’s shoulders, she rolled him off of her, onto his back, onto the rocks. “No. Aaron. No.”
Beneath the smears of blood, his tanned, proud, Indian face was pale as parchment. His eyes were half closed. His head lolled on his neck.
She pressed her fingers to his neck over his carotid artery, trying to find a pulse.
Nothing.
She picked up his wrist.
No pulse.
Putting her head onto his chest, she listened for his heart.
No sound at all.
“Not you. Not you. Please, I never meant for you to become one of my . . . I’m sorry.” She stroked his hair back from his face. “God, don’t let this be true.”
Desperate and determined, she dragged him into the one place where rocks had not landed—in the spot where she had lain, where he had protected her. She cleared his air passage, then began CPR, compressing his chest, blowing in his mouth, compressing his chest, blowing in his mouth. . . .
Panting from the effort of slamming her fist to his chest, she kept doing the CPR long past the time she knew the truth.
He smelled like Aaron. He looked like Aaron.
But the flavor of his blood touched her lips, and she knew this wasn’t Aaron.
Aaron was gone.
This couldn’t be true. It could not be true.
She collapsed onto the floor beside him. She put her forehead onto his chest. And tried, oh God, tried to hold off the emptiness she knew would claw itself up from inside her, expand, take her over and leave her with . . . nothing. Because Aaron was gone. Gone.
The last thing she’d done was fight with Aaron, yell at Aaron, reject Aaron for what he was. She had told him to go away, and now the man she loved was dead.
They had traveled across the world, chasing a prophecy she had cheerfully assumed she would find. But instead she had failed miserably, and the man she loved was dead.
She would have to go back to New York, tell Aaron’s friends the truth, that Aaron had flung himself on her to protect her, and for that brave deed, the man she loved was dead.
Lifting her head, she looked into his face, stroked his hair off his forehead, kissed his lips. “Please,” she whispered. “Don’t leave me.”
The cave creaked ominously.
But she wasn’t afraid. She was mad. “You stupid gods. You are so proud of your stupid Sacred Cave. You think this is about you.” She stood and lifted her fists toward the blue sky where the rock ceiling had once been. “A sacrifice? You wanted a sacrifice? Well, you can’t have him!”
The cave groaned again, the sound coming from the back where the floor sloped down into the hole that funneled deep into the earth.
“No. I will have his body, at least.” Grabbing Aaron under his arms, she strained with all her might. He moved a few inches, the rubble from the collapse rolling under his prostrate body. With another heave, she turned him, dragged him around the boulders, through the place where the entrance had been, and out onto the path.
There she placed him in the warmth and let the sunshine bathe his proud, high cheekbones, narrow nose, and broad, stubborn chin. Even battered as he was, he was handsome. He had been strong and brave, with hair so black it shone with blue light. He had been an Indian warrior, knowing full well the Sacred Cave and all its cruelties, yet returning to do what had to be done for the Chosen Ones, and for her.
Kneeling next to him, she gathered him into her arms and held him. Just held him, and pretended he was still with her. The old grief at her mother’s death, and the new grief at her father’s, came at her in a wave. Her anger at her father built on that; if he had told her the truth, she wouldn’t have been caught unprepared. She wouldn’t have been naïve.
At the same time . . . her father had always known what predators stalked them, and everything he’d done—the way he’d raised her, the cool discouragement with which he had greeted her eager interest in her mother’s studies, even hiding the stela from her—it had all been to protect her. In the end, he had returned to find out the truth about his wife’s cruel demise, and for that, he paid with his life.
And he had told her to . . . run.
She heard the sigh of her father’s voice.
Run.
“No. I won’t. Daddy, I won’t. I can’t leave him.” Something clear splashed onto Aaron’s still face. Another something. Another. She put her hand to her face and found it wet with tears. “Oh, God. What have I done?” She wiped Aaron’s face with the edge of her jacket, then pulled his still body close and rocked him in her arms. “What have I done?”
Chapter 35
Rosamund didn’t know how long she sat there, but the sun had started to set behind the mountains when the older lady they’d met in Sacre Barbare came hiking up the path. Men with stretchers followed her. The woman knelt beside Rosamund, put her hand on her shoulder. “Do you remember me?”
“Of course. You’re Dr. Servais.” Why wouldn’t Rosamund remember? They’d met only a few hours ago.
“Good. You are still sane and in possession of your faculties.” Dr. Servais put her hand on Aaron’s forehead, and sighed. “You can let go of him now. We’ll take care of him.”
Rosamund nodded and with agonizing slowness released Aaron to their care. Her arms ached from his weight, her knees hurt from sitting with her legs crossed, but she didn’t cry for herself. The tears that trickled down her cheeks were for the loss of the man who held her heart.
As the men placed his body on the stretcher, the doctor returned to kneel beside Rosamund. “You’re smeared with blood. Are you injured?”
“No. Not at all.” Rosamund never took her gaze away from Aaron’s body. “He was by the door. He was leaving. Then the cave cracked. Stones started to rain down. And he ran at me. He knocked me down. He covered me with his body.” The men with the stretchers stopped and stared at her, and she realized her voice had grown louder and more shrill. She stopped. She took hard breaths, trying to get herself under control. More quietly, she said, “Aaron sacrificed himself for me.”
“Did he?” Dr. Servais looked at Aaron, too. “When the time comes for a man’s life and actions to be weighed, a sacrifice like that is a very great thing.”
“The cave doesn’t deserve him.” Rosamund didn’t deserve him.
“I promise you. The cave does not always win.”
Rosamund didn’t understand what Dr. Servais meant, or why she wore that expression of resolve. Rosamund didn’t care, either. Instead, she viewed the wreckage where the cave had been. Huge boulders were strewn down the side of the mountain. The damned thing had been obliterated—except for the hole that stared like a black eye of hell. “Promise me you’ll send someone back up here to roll one of these boulders over the entrance to the cave. Then it can’t ruin anyone else’s life. At least I would have that comfort.”
“It can’t be blocked.” Dr. Servais stood. “This area has been an outlet for the Sacred Cave since the world was young. Soon someone else will walk a path through the mountains outside our village and once more find the cave exactly as it was, with the fire pit for sacrifices, the writings on the walls, and the entrance to the land of the dead.”
“What do you mean?” Ro
samund tried to stand, but one leg collapsed beneath her. “The cave comes back? It heals itself?”
“It’s the Sacred Cave.” Dr. Servais seemed to think that explained everything. Putting her hand under Rosamund’s arm, she said, “Come. Let me see you walk and know that you’re really not hurt.”
With her help, Rosamund did stand, and she did walk, and when the men carried Aaron’s body down the mountain, she followed and mourned like his widow.
They took him into the tap house, and there at the door, Dr. Servais turned to face Rosamund. “Why don’t you go home?”
“But . . . I want to sit with him. . . .”
“No. It’s your destiny to find the prophecy.”
“The prophecy? How do you know about the . . . ?” Rosamund took a step back.
The Chosen. The Others.
Aaron’s words echoed in her mind, and now she believed.
So who was this woman?
Dr. Servais spoke slowly, quietly. “I, too, have visited the Sacred Cave. I, too, barely escaped with my life. I know what’s in there, and I know you didn’t find your prophecy. I also know you won’t find it sitting beside a dead man. Go home, I tell you. Go home.” Something about Dr. Servais’s compelling green eyes made Rosamund remember her father’s text message.
Run.
So she did. She walked through the village, looking from side to side, behind and in front. The houses, so oddly quaint, looked sinister now, and the empty streets reminded her of a medieval plague village. She moved slowly at first, then more and more quickly, finally fleeing toward the car.
No one was chasing her, but all the while, she could hear her father’s voice.
Run.
She got into the driver’s seat. She sat and looked at the controls. She had never driven in her life, but she’d seen Aaron start the car. So step by step, she went through the process. The engine turned over. She put it in gear. And she ran away from Sacre Barbare, leaving her love behind.
Rosamund walked into the Arthur W. Nelson Fine Arts Library and past the desk where Jessica worked.
As soon as Jessica saw her, she started chatting as fast as she could. “Rosamund, where have you been? It’s been over a week!”
Rosamund waved a limp hand.
Jessica kept talking. “I asked about you, and Mr. Perez from the board of directors said you were on leave, but you left your stuff out on the table and that guy was with you when you walked out, and I knew that wasn’t like you. . . .”
Rosamund went through the ritual of identification without saying a word.
Jessica didn’t notice. “Rosamund? Are you all right? You look different.”
Rosamund stared at her. “I know. Glamorous, huh?” She kept walking.
“Glamorous? Sure. Glamorous. A little, um, tired, though.”
Jessica’s voice faded as Rosamund took the elevator, and let herself into the basement of the library. She trudged down the long, shadowy rows of books toward the back and into the nook where her father had worked, where she worked. . . . She was so glad to get here at last. All the way home, she had dreamed of her little corner of the library, longed to be in the familiar sanctuary. To be safe.
She had done what her father had urged her to do.
She had run.
With a sigh, she flipped on the light.
Nothing had changed. The rows of dusty books were the same. The desk chair with the torn seat and the wobbly wheel was the same. She uncovered the library table and found it stacked with more books, notebooks, and her mother’s pre-Columbian stela.
Yet everything was different. Because she was different.
For one thing, she was wanted for the murder of Louis Fournier. Her picture had been everywhere in Europe, but on her trip home, no one had even noticed her. Even the ticket agent in the Paris airport had taken one look at her passport, then at her tearstained face, and he couldn’t wait to get her on the plane and out of there.
Thank God for men who were afraid of weeping women.
She dropped her backpack and sagged into the chair. Leaning her elbows on the table, she gave up the effort to hold herself together, and wept.
She wanted to go back to her ordinary life, to her research in the library, to being the kind of woman no man cared about. She wanted to be the kind of woman who didn’t notice men, especially men with dark hair, tanned skin, and a long, silent stride. She wanted to stop expecting Aaron to appear, jacket slung over his shoulder, voice deep and sure, to kiss her. She wanted to have succeeded in doing the one thing he had asked her to do—find the prophecy.
He never had a chance to tell her why the Chosen Ones required it, but knowing what she knew about myth and legend, she suspected the need for the prophecy was urgent. Someone else would die if she didn’t find it.
So instead of sitting here missing Aaron, dropping tears on her mother’s untranslated stone tablet and feeling sorry for herself, she needed once more to become the language and prophecy expert who could somehow, somewhere, solve this terrible mystery of the prophecy. Then she would give the prophecy to the Chosen Ones as reparation for Aaron’s death, and maybe she would be worthy of the sacrifice he’d made of himself for her.
She opened her eyes. She reached for a tissue. She blew her nose and wiped her cheeks and as she did, she found herself staring at the pre-Columbian stone tablet. With sudden, desperate energy she blotted the tears off the stela, pulled out the mink brush and whisked it clean.
As Aaron had said, that first day when he’d come in here, the language chiseled into the stone was logosyllabic, an Epi-Olmec script that to the untrained eye looked similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics. While Rosamund was not proficient, because of her mother she had always had more than a passing interest.
Her hand paused, the brush held immobile above the symbol that caught her eye.
Otoch. The Mayan word for . . .
House.
Not just one word. Two words.
Otoch. Sak. The Mayan words for . . .
House. White.
She straightened.
White house.
She and Aaron had been looking for a black female slave who was a prophetess and lived in a white house.
In Spanish, white house was casa blanca.
In Mayan, white house was otoch sak.
Rosamund calmed herself. While searching for the prophecy, she had already jumped to conclusions once, and with disastrous results. She had dragged Aaron to Casablanca, to Paris, to the French Alps, and to his death. So this time she would be careful. She would be sure. She needed more than two words to get excited. She needed a word like—
The Mayan symbol for “slave” jumped out at her.
Slave. Yes. That was one of the words.
Female. Was the Mayan symbol for “female” on this stone?
Feverishly she looked for the symbols that made up the word.
Female slave.
There it was. There they were, both symbols, together.
And there was more.
Slave of dark skin.
Probably not a black woman, for this stone tablet predated the import of African slaves into the New World.
Who could she be?
For a half hour, Rosamund tried, tried to translate using her mother’s notes and her own notes, but her skills weren’t quite good enough. She couldn’t find the thread that told the slave’s story.
Then she remembered Bala’s Stone. With a murmur of disgust at her own foolishness, she opened the travel pack at her waist, pulled out the impossibly large diamond, and placed it on the stela. Once again, before her eyes, the words took shape, and she read the text.
A woman of a rival tribe had been taken in war from her people. She who had once been great now worked the fields, the sun in its anger burning her, turning her skin dark, until one day in a delirium of fever, she spoke a prophecy. Her master brought her to the priests in the white stone house of the sun god, and here her words are recorded for all time.
The
prophecy had been right before Rosamund’s eyes the whole time.
Without taking her gaze away from the stela, Rosamund groped on the table, found a notebook. With Bala’s Stone in one hand and a pen in the other, she started copying every word.
In the distance, she heard the library door open and close once. Twice.
But she paid no attention.
Chapter 36