Tears of the Jaguar

by Hartley, A. J.

  Chaak! called the voices echoing from the speakers behind her.

  She paused in the silence and looked down but couldn’t see where the gun had gone. She climbed again, faster now, recklessly, clambering apelike up the monumental staircase.

  She was too close now to see what was happening above her, and there was no cover from which she could watch or time her appearance. Her best weapon was surprise. She took only a half pause at the very top, stiffened her muscles, and sprang over the final step not knowing what she would find there. In the same instant, with a final cry of Chaak!, the pyramid and its macaw-stamped temple at the top turned a deep crimson.

  Adelita lay bound and gagged on the stone platform, her skin daubed with a blue paste, the Mayan color of sacrifice. The child’s eyes were wide and glassy: her abductor must have made her walk up the pyramid, only binding her legs when they reached the top. Beside her lay a clay figurine with what looked like a lock of silver-blonde hair fastened to it, and around her in a rough circle were items from the Witch’s House tomb: pouches of jewels, scepters, and ceremonial rods, an assortment of silver and gold objects studded with gems.

  Standing over the girl was Marissa Stroud, wearing a dark cape of jaguar skin and holding a long knife of flaked obsidian that sparkled like shards of glass in the red glow. On her head she wore a mask that left only her mouth uncovered, the mask itself bearing the features of the jaguar, the fangs of the upper jaw bared as if the woman’s face was emerging from the animal’s throat. Around her neck was a roughly fashioned cord onto which jewels from the hoard had been randomly threaded, and above the mask sat a twisted crown inlaid with stones that flashed darkly.

  Rubies.

  Stroud stood facing forward to the rest of the site, with the great alcoved frieze wall behind her, but she did not react to Deborah’s appearance. She was chanting to herself, whispering, “Teche a caah a uilah u yich a yumil can,” then moving from Spanish to English and back to ancient Mayan so that Deborah caught only “symmetry” and “daughter,” standing with her head tipped back and arms spread like some strange crucifix. As if to complete that image, Deborah saw that Stroud was bleeding heavily from her hands and mouth.

  A blood sacrifice.

  She thought the big woman’s eyes might be closed.

  So Deborah ran at her, leaping over the prone child and snatching at the woman’s arms just as the knife blade began its downward sweep. Stroud fell backward, momentarily stunned by the attack, but she held onto the knife, and as she swung it wildly Deborah shrank from it. The conquistadors had learned long ago what obsidian could do to human flesh.

  Chaak! roared the unseen crowd again, and the light went out.

  Chapter Eighty-Three

  The darkness lasted only a few seconds, but it was, briefly, total. Deborah sensed Stroud moving but could see nothing. She was also terrified of stepping backward off the platform. Even if she only fell down the stairs she doubted she’d survive, and in parts the drop was vertical. So she held her ground, dropping to a half crouch and spreading her arms, fingers splayed, to catch the other woman. She didn’t realize how close Stroud was till she heard the faintest rush of air and felt the scalpel-clean slice of the obsidian against her left palm and forearm.

  For a moment there was no pain at all, only shock, and she took a step backward with no clue if there would be stone or a hundred-foot fall through empty air behind her. Then her skin and the muscle beneath it began to sing with the terrible ecstasy of the gash and she clamped her other hand to the wound to gauge how deep it was. Her arm from elbow to fingers was slick with blood. She bit back the panic and moved her other hand along its length.

  No spurting. Please God, no spurting.

  There wasn’t. She clutched the wounded arm to her chest, feeling a shrill of pain, then stood up and kicked wildly into the night to ward Stroud off. Deborah’s first kick found nothing and threatened to upend her with the effort, but the second caught the other woman in the midriff, and as Deborah weaved away from where she thought the lip of the platform was, she sensed Stroud doubling up.

  Then with another choric bellow of Chaak!, the light came back, blue again, and there was Marissa Stroud, holding her stomach with one hand as the other held the shimmering stone blade in front of her. She had torn the mask from her face, and her eyes were dark with a deep, lethal-looking rage. The crown had fallen but she still wore the necklace of beads and precious stones and it swung with her movement as she whirled and straightened for another attack. Adelita, gagged and bound, lay before her, watching, her eyes wild.

  Deborah kicked at Stroud again, precisely this time, connecting with the woman’s wrist so that her arm jerked and the massive knife flew up and out of her grasp, flashing in the blue light. Stroud cried out, more with anguish than pain, and for a moment time seemed to slow as she scrabbled at the night to catch it. It scythed through the air and then fell. Stroud tore her hand back from where it had cut her, and the ceremonial knife shattered against the platform, exploding into a million sparkling shards like rain.

  “No!” she screamed, then pointed an accusatory finger at Deborah. She was wearing the ring from Edward’s grave. “You,” she spat. “I knew it would be you.”

  “We don’t have to do this, Marissa,” said Deborah, forcing herself to focus.

  “We?” the other shot back. “We don’t have to do anything. I have to do this.”

  And as she said it, she stooped and snatched up something small and silvery: a syringe with a long needle. She came up with the hypodermic clutched like a knife, her eyes locked on Deborah’s.

  “I don’t need the knife to kill the girl,” she whispered. “The ancient Maya knew all manner of ways to sacrifice children.”

  “But why?” she managed. “Why the girl?”

  “Balance.” She said it dismissively, taking a step toward Adelita. “Her grandfather was the beginning. With the girl, I end it.”

  “You can’t believe that,” said Deborah, trying to shove down the horror that it was Stroud who had killed Eustachio, and had tried to kill Hargreaves. She had to stay in the moment. She had to save the girl. She paused, feeling the heat in her wounded hand, as she circled up toward the masked woman. “How can killing Adelita help Angela?”

  That stopped her. For a moment Stroud’s mouth opened and no sound came out, but her eyes were full of alarm, while behind and below the ancient Mayan city shifted into golden light and the music and voices began again.

  “I know about Angela Powel,” said Deborah, looking for the woman’s resolve to crumble. “I know about the accident. I know she is your daughter.”

  The music continued to crash, but there was a strange sense of stillness on the pyramid. Stroud seemed stricken, whether by the memory of her daughter lying motionless in a Chicago hospital or by the surprise that Deborah knew about it, Deborah wasn’t sure. For a long moment she seemed to hang there, immobile, caught in some terrible indecision, and Deborah wondered if she was crying.

  Deborah spoke, her voice lower, gentler.

  “You know it won’t help, Marissa. How could it?”

  The woman seemed to wilt a little, and the syringe she held above her head seemed to lower fractionally.

  “How could it help?” Stroud repeated, her voice small, as if she was talking to herself. “Because it has to.”

  And she straightened, her grip on the hypodermic shifted, and she was coming again, resolute and powerful, all emotion wiped from her face save a cold and murderous determination.

  And then, quite suddenly, she wasn’t. There was a noise like a distant cough, then she faltered and stopped, all purpose slipping from her. The needle lowered, but it did so absently, and then one leg seemed to buckle and she sank to her knees at the very head of the great staircase. Only then did Deborah notice that there was a fresh pattering of blood dripping from her robe onto the stone.

  “All you people do is talk,” said Dimitri, stepping out into the light from one of the alcoves at the
east end of the frieze wall with a silenced pistol. “It’s very American. Very annoying.”

  Deborah shrank back but he wasn’t coming any closer. Slinking out of the alcove behind him was Alice, looking childlike and defeated, red, swollen eyes downcast as if too ashamed to look at her.

  “The stones aren’t what you think they are,” said Deborah.

  “I see,” he said. “And what do I think they are?”

  “You think they might be part of a military laser,” she said.

  For the second time in the last few minutes she saw the astonishment her words had produced, saw it land in his face, but she suspected it would do no more good than brandishing Angela’s name had done against Stroud. In fact, Dimitri’s eyes quickly hardened and Deborah thought she might have made a mistake.

  “I’ll decide about that,” he said.

  He was a powerful man, with a military-style crew cut and precise moustache and goatee. His eyes looked so cold and dead he could have been one of the skulls carved on the walls of Chitchen Itza. In his gaze she saw no possibility of mercy, no spark of empathy or hesitation.

  “Take the jewels from her,” he said.

  Marissa Stroud was still kneeling at Deborah’s feet, bleeding, dying for sure, but still just upright, the syringe loosely cradled in her left hand. Deborah looked to the ruby-studded crown where it had fallen then to the roughly constructed necklace that Marissa must have prepared herself, a double looped cord that had been threaded through armlets, diadems, little crowns, and other pieces of the royal regalia. Cautiously, watching Dimitri and the half-casual way he followed her movements with the overlong pistol, she stooped to Marissa Stroud and lifted the makeshift necklace over her head.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered to Marissa, sure now that the woman, who had crumpled onto the backs of her legs, her head lolling forward, was dead.

  The necklace was heavy and irregular, and it was too dark to see if the stones that matched the Malkin Tower gem were there.

  “Alice,” he said. “Bring them to me.”

  Alice seemed to shrink back toward the alcove, and Deborah thought she heard a sob, but when Dimitri spat her name again, she came forward, skulking sideways like a whipped dog.

  “Alice,” said Deborah as she came close, “you don’t have to...”

  “Shut up,” said Dimitri, the gun leveling at her face.

  Deborah thought wildly about hurling the necklace of gems and artifacts off the pyramid into the jungle, but she knew that would only delay him and get her killed.

  He’s going to kill you no matter what.

  She wanted to argue the point with herself, but she could see it in his eyes and there was no debate. She remembered Bowerdale. James. And suddenly she realized it must have been this man who pursued her into the cenote, shooting at her as if for sport.

  Alice shuffled up to her, head down, and Deborah held out the necklace. Alice took it, then looked up suddenly and snarled.

  “You dropped one, you clumsy bitch.”

  Alice dropped to a squat, picked something up off the stone, and stood up again.

  “You always thought you were so smart,” Alice said, staring at Deborah. “So much better than me. Ordering me about like you were the queen of the fucking world. Now look at you.”

  Deborah blinked, amazed, and then flinched as Alice reached back and slapped her hard across her face.

  “A cat fight,” said Dimitri, amused. “Nice.”

  Deborah tasted blood, but she didn’t let go of her wounded arm, which was throbbing. In fact, she was almost as stung by what Alice had said as by the blow. She hung her head, suddenly exhausted and defeated, and it was only then that she realized that the hypodermic that had hung limply from Marissa Stroud’s dead fingers, was gone.

  She forced herself not to look up, not to stare at Alice, not right away. When she did raise her eyes, Alice had already reached Dimitri, was handing him the cord of threaded treasures and coronets with her left hand. Her right hand was lost in shadow, but as Dimitri took a step so that the great lamps that splashed the temple with rich blue light played over the gems in his hands, that hand flashed toward his back.

  He flinched as if stung, his back arching, and then he was turning toward her and the gun was coming up.

  “What did you do, you little whore?” he demanded, his free hand reaching for the syringe that was sticking out of his back, its plunger fully depressed. “What...?”

  Alice took a step backward, but there was a look of triumph in her face that had burned off the skulking terror.

  “What the hell...?” he began again, aiming the gun at her. Then something stopped him. He seemed to stagger, as if losing his balance, and then he turned slowly and his eyes were wide. For a moment he was quite still, but then he began to sputter in words Deborah didn’t know—his own language, she guessed—and there was horror in them. He wheeled and fired the gun, two, three times, shooting blindly so that the stones of the frieze sparked and fragments of lead and stone flicked across the temple platform.

  Deborah ducked instinctively, trying to cover Adelita, but he wasn’t shooting at them. He wasn’t even clearly shooting at Alice, though there was a fair chance he would hit her. He seemed to be shooting at things only he could see, and as his panicked guttural cries grew faster, more desperate, Deborah found herself amazed by what could strike a man like him so full of terror. It was like he was fighting something he knew he couldn’t kill, emptying his pistol at people who just wouldn’t die.

  Then there was only the clicking of his empty gun. He seemed aware of this, dropped it, and reached inside his shirt, tearing it open as he started to pull another gun free. Alice seemed to anticipate it, as if she knew it was there, and she rushed him before he had it ready. It went off as she made contact, and after the silenced pistol this one seemed to boom like a canon that tore a hole in the night and shot a foot of flame out of the barrel. He brought his knee up hard, and Alice collapsed in a heap. Her attack had given him focus, and now he aimed the gun squarely at her head.

  Deborah sprang, coming at him low and fast, covering the yards between them in two strides, blindsiding him as the gun went off in a flash and a wall of sound so intense, so close, that for a moment after it there was only whiteness and silence.

  Dimitri cannoned sideways, struggled to regain his balance, and took one final step into a place where there was no stone, only air. For the briefest of moments he seemed to hover, trying to grasp what had happened, and then he was falling through the night and the darkness and the recorded chorus calling Chaak! to the stone floor a hundred feet below.

  Then there was silence.

  Deborah moved back to Adelita, not wanting to look, but Alice had moved to the lip of the platform and was gazing down to where he fell. As Deborah fought to release the child’s bonds with her good hand, she heard Alice’s voice, distant and dreamy, as if she was talking to herself, say, “I wonder what he saw.”

  “Saw?” said Deborah.

  “The hallucinations,” said Alice, not looking round. “They come from inside you, from the things that scare you. He used to have bad dreams.” She said it almost tenderly. “I wonder what he saw.”

  She remembered Nick Reese running frantically through the Kabah site muttering, “Get me out of here. I don’t belong here.”

  None of them did.

  “I’m sorry about the slap,” said Alice, still absently, gazing out over the site whose structures shifted from gold to green again as the music and voices returned. “I was just trying to...”

  “I know,” said Deborah.

  But then Adelita was sitting up and sucking in air through her mouth, and her wet eyes were wide, and Deborah was folding her into her arms and holding her tight to her chest so that all thought went away.

  “It’s OK,” she whispered. “It’s over.”

  “Whoa,” said Alice, suddenly.

  Deborah looked up and followed the other woman’s gaze, stricken with panic.


  He’s not dead. He’s coming back...

  But she was not looking down but across to the governor’s palace where, silhouetted against the moonlit sky, was the shape of a large cat. It was standing quite still, and with a breathless rush of feeling that brought tears to her eyes, Deborah realized that it was looking directly at them. For a moment that felt like eons they looked at each other, the women, the girl, and the jaguar, and Deborah felt the distinction between herself and the cat collapsing so that for a moment she seemed to be looking through its eyes, seeing her here with Alice and Adelita, feeling only the animal’s instinctive caution and isolation. And then it was over. The jaguar took two loping bounds down the other side of the palace, its coat shining blackly in the moonlight, and was gone.

  PART 6

  Chapter Eighty-Four

  The police helicopter took the site team to Merida for hospital observation, but as soon as it was clear that the CIA agents would be flying on to Chicago, Deborah insisted that they first return Adelita home.

  No one felt like arguing.

  It was a little after dawn when they reached the village of Ek Balam. Word had reached the Maya that they were coming, that they were bringing the girl with them, and the whole pueblo turned out for their arrival. Adelita had been quiet but was regaining something of her old poise, and the reception by her friends and family completed the transformation. She sprinted gleefully into her mother’s arms, and the family turned in on themselves, weeping and laughing, forgetting everyone and everything else. Deborah watched, but when she felt her eyes prickling, she turned to Nick Reese and said, “Time to go.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Adelita spotted her and ran after her, hugging her, but it was like she was tied to her parents again, enclosed in a kind of bubble, and Deborah was outside it.

  That’s OK, she told herself. Better this way.