by Meg Cowley
Robbed of his shield, Gonzalez whirled to face me, dousing the fire jaguar in a gush of water that hissed and crackled. His other hand was already raised, but he dove to shield himself with his arm and a hasty magical barrier as I attacked with all my might, punching him with a magic filled fist.
My first punch missed, but my second connected as the water monkey clambered onto Gonzalez’s back. Magic coursed through it, glittering and sparkling as if it was both water and electricity at once. It paralysed Gonzalez for a moment before he blasted us both away with a force that slashed the monkey into ribbons of trailing water that spiralled into the bay, and tumbled me into a wall.
Something crunched as I hit, and the breath was crushed out of my lungs as I crumpled. Winded on the floor, with stars dancing in front of my eyes, Gonzalez disregarded me, and twisted his hands into claws, holding magic that scooped Juan from the dock to swing him in mid-air. Juan cried out in surprise and struggled, but it was as if the air itself bound him, and no matter what he did, he could not free himself, nor seem to call forth his own magic to aid him.
“I will suffer this no longer,” Gonzalez spat, with fury etched into his face, and he began to draw forth another magic; a deeper, older one.
As he called to Kukulkan’s Skull, the low thrum of its resonant magic grew until it hummed, deep and vibrant and strong… and I could feel it, singing to my blood, whispering words I could not understand as it sung of life and death. My heart fluttered in my chest at its caress upon my senses and I gulped in deep breaths, not willing to succumb to its calls to sink into slumber, for I knew I would not awaken if I did.
Juan moaned — the sound of resistance — as the magic encircled him, and I blinked furiously, trying to clear my head of Kukulkan’s magic, and the impact that had stunned me, but I did not move. I did not want to draw its magic to me, because I was painfully aware I was far too weak to withstand it.
In a moment, I had clarity as I finally managed to catch my breath, push aside the crushing pain in my torso, and, just for a second, shut out Kukulkan’s whispers of sleep and death. The sky seemed to grow more clouded and darker with each insidious whisper, and Gonzalez’s smile grew as his eyes narrowed in malevolent pleasure. But something was wrong — for him. I could see Gonzalez straining with all his might to hold onto his own power trapping Juan, and to harness Kukulkan’s. In that instant, I perceived his weakness. He had Juan defenceless. He had me rendered immobile, or so he thought. And he had left himself unguarded.
Suddenly, my pain did not matter and I found the resolve to banish Kukulkan’s rising magic. Without a twitch, I made a copy of myself prone on the floor whilst my real self rose to my feet, shrouded once more under my cloak of invisibility and misperception.
Juan’s cry stabbed through me again and I gaped as I beheld him. In the sickly, stormy light, he had turned a shade of pale white so uncharacteristic of his warm, tanned skin. And I knew then that I had to rush, or my friend would die. He looked, quite literally, as if the life was being leached out of him.
I had no doubt Kukulkan’s magic was to blame, stealing the life from his body exactly as Juan had warned me it could. I had no doubt I would be next. I had wanted Juan to take the final shot as his justice and his vengeance, but he was in no fit state, and never would be again unless I took this slim chance. I had no idea if I could reverse Kukulkan’s magic, but I pushed the thought aside.
I strained my body, calling forth every ounce of magic I could, and feeling so thankful we were so close to the replenishing magic of the ley lines. In a single strike, I felled Gonzalez with a magically charged blow to the back of the neck, and he crumpled at my feet. With a snap, Kukulkan’s magic vanished, but there was no time to savour it.
Juan dropped like a stone, straight into the harbour, smashing into the water with an almighty crash. I sprinted after him, diving off the side of the yacht and into the balmy waters with a deep breath. Straight down, I shot like an arrow until I grasped him. Pale and sickly and not breathing — he looked dead. I would have been terrified to admit it, had there been a moment to think. I dragged him to me and propelled us to the surface with magic to aid our buoyancy, and a gentle nudge for the water to push us upwards.
My head broke the surface and I gulped in air, struggling to tread water under Juan’s dead weight.
“Wake up, Juan!” I said desperately, slapping his face as hard as I dared, but he did not flinch or respond. I dragged him to the side, but the dock was too high above us to reach.
“Damn it!” I cursed.
A shadow fell over us and I instinctively shirked back, blinking up at the figure silhouetted above us.
“Juan?” a female’s voice said. I blinked the brightness away to see a tanned woman with frizzy dark hair leaning over the edge of the dock with her mouth agape.
“Help!” I said. “Felicia?”
“Yes, come!” She threw herself on her belly, shouted for help, and stretched a hand to reach us. I grabbed hold, still clinging to Juan, and trying not to let myself sink with relief.
Help soon arrived and strong hands hauled the pair of us out of the water and onto the docks with a wet slap. Immediately, I sprung to my feet to check Juan. Felicia already tended to him and was on the phone, by the sounds of it, to the emergency services. Armed police were flooding the site and I whirled around… but Gonzalez was gone.
My heart hammered as a rush of adrenaline spiked. I sprinted to the yacht and onto the deck. There was the smallest speck of blood where he had fallen and nothing more.
My shoulders slumped. I didn’t need to turn around. I didn’t need to search for him. I didn’t need to send out magical tendrils, feeling him through the air. I already knew. He had escaped.
I suppressed my anger at that somehow, despite all the pain and hurt he had caused, he had escaped scot-free, and felt for the skull. Some small relief. It was still below decks, and its power rumbled, but it was dormant once more.
Juan was coming around on the dock. I watched Felicia help sit him upright, stroking his back and offering him a bottle of water. Her brows were wrinkled with concern, and they talked. Of what, I could not hear. Juan gestured to the boat, the docks. I presumed he was telling her what had happened. Her mouth grew thinner and thinner as it set in a line, and by the time I joined them, her eyes were as hard as stone.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Señorita Stark.” Felicia held out her hand to shake mine. “I’m sorry we didn’t arrive sooner. It seems we are too late to apprehend Señor Gonzalez.”
“Call me Zoe.” I shook her hand. “All the artefacts will be below deck. You can still prove he’s guilty though, right? He has all the missing goods on his own private vessel. We have evidence to link him to the car that—”
“It’s alright, Zoe.” Felicia smiled grimly. “Juan told me. We have everything we need. I can’t believe it could happen… Not Gonzalez.” She shrugged and shook her head with disbelief. “But here it is. It looks like we were all wrong about him.”
“What about us?”
“What about you?”
“Are they going to take us into custody?” I knew my diplomatic passport could get me some way out of bother, but I didn’t fancy spending any time sorting this mess out from behind bars.
“You’re kidding, right? I need all hands on deck now. Literally!” Felicia flashed a set of straight, white teeth as she chuckled. “We have to re-catalogue all these items and get them back into our system.”
I flicked a glance to Juan, and he gave me a faint grin, a shadow of his normal charm. “Felicia is Magicai,” he murmured. “She knows all about the skull.”
Felicia threw a dark glance at the boat. “I can feel it, too. Arrangements will be made. That will not be kept with the rest of the relics.”
“I have an idea,” Juan said. “If the Kukulkan Skull is to remain in the light, it will draw people like Gonzalez again and again. One day, it may be used for great evil, no matter how well we try to protect it. There
was a reason it was hidden. Perhaps, it should stay so. Perhaps, this is one discovery the world should not know of.”
Felicia chewed her lip and fidgeted. “You may be right. But where?”
Juan stirred. “I have an idea of a place no one would ever think to look. Inaccessible.”
“Where?” I blurted out. Where could he possibly hide it that it could never be found again?
“In its home.” Juan’s lips curled up. “Under El Castillo itself, in the depths of the cenote recently discovered under the pyramid. Where better for Kukulkan’s Skull than the well of his power?”
“It cannot be reached.” Felicia frowned.
“Not by any man… but with magic, I know we can do it. The cenote connects to others at the site. There will be a way in.”
“It will be extremely dangerous.”
“It will be worth it,” countered Juan. “Zoe, will you do it with me? We’ll return it. Together?”
“Are you sure, there, it cannot be touched, ever again?” I asked. I banished thoughts of dark, water-filled caverns, and the dream of the altar of bones.
“Yes.” I could see the iron determination in his face and hear the steel in his voice. “We will take it there physically. That will be a barrier enough for most. Upon it, we’ll lay wards of concealment. No whisper of its power will escape that place. No one will be able to see it should they somehow chance upon it. It will never have existed.”
A shiver crept down my spine as he mirrored Gonzalez’s words of me. “What of the records? Surely, now it is known, its disappearance would be noted?” I looked to Felicia. As Juan’s superior, she had the decision.
“It will be wiped from the records. Any documents, any mention of it — gone. Only we three and Gonzalez shall know it existed. I will perform memory altering charms where required. And only the three of us shall know where it is laid to rest.”
“What if he comes after us to find it?” I knew how these people operated. With a prize like this, they would stop at nothing.
Felicia hesitated to answer. “I’m not sure,” she admitted. “That’s a bridge I’ll cross if and when it appears. For now, our priority is to make sure it’s safe.”
I nodded. I’d half expected her to suggest memory charms on each other… but memory charms could be broken. Perhaps it was safer to live with the knowledge of what we protected. A cold finger trailed up my spine. Yet another target on my back, it would seem, after this. Ricardo Gonzalez was a name I would have to watch out for.
~
After a thorough check over, Juan was discharged by the paramedics in fine health. Luckily for him, it seemed the effects of Kukulkan’s powers were reversed, and the spell stopped in time before it claimed his whole life force.
I could feel the energy humming from him as he replenished himself from the ley lines, sucking it in greedily to replace what Kukulkan had taken. Felicia had given him the once over too and said she thought he would suffer no lasting ill effects.
We – the three of us – didn’t let the artefacts out of our sight after that, riding with them in a truck all the way to Felicia’s headquarters.
~
By the time we arrived, Juan and I had mostly dried out from our dunking in the sea and helped Felicia organise the crates. We did not need to open them to find Kukulkan’s Skull. It called to us so loudly. It was so close, and its power waxed.
With a skilled charm, Felicia modified the memory of everyone who had seen it, save for us, and made it disappear in an instant. “Come,” she said in a low voice, and we slipped away. Back to the van where the crate reappeared in the rear. And back out of the complex.
It was pitch black as we left Cancun and struck into the heart of the peninsula again. We didn’t speak, each lost to our own thoughts as Felicia drove us as fast as the van could go down the mostly deserted highway.
We did not pull into Chichén Itzá, but drove past the entrance. A minute later, Felicia pulled off the highway into a rural airstrip just north of the site.
“Just through those trees is the Cenote Sagrado,” Juan pointed across the road, south. “That links to the cenote under the temple of Kukulkan.” At the god’s name, a whisper of magic emanated from the skull. The darkness seemed to shroud us, to push closer.
We shared a glance.
“Perhaps, it is best we leave that name unsaid from here on,” Felicia suggested tensely. “It seems to have power, and we do not want… its… power to awaken. Not here, not now. Not ever.”
We nodded, not that she would be able to see it in the darkness, and unboxed the skull in the back of the wagon, cracking open the case like an egg, and collapsing the sides down. In the middle, packed carefully, was the skull. Even in the darkness, it gleamed a pearly white as though it were its own light source. I swore as I looked from the corner of my eye, sparks and swirls of magic followed the path of the carvings upon it, but when I blinked and flicked my gaze to it, nothing. Nothing but smooth, white bone, glowing in the dark.
We held hands, stood before it, and called the magic forth. Spells of binding and slumber. Charms of concealment and hiding. Magic of diversion and misdirection. We made the skull a shroud of total invisibility — that all others but ourselves would perceive — undetectable, and unbreakable, which would keep its magic contained and its presence hidden, hopefully forever more.
We were still to go one step further to protect it. I eyed the scuba diving gear Felicia had somehow procured with more than an edge of nerves. Dark spaces, wholly submerged, underground. It was unnatural, to say the least. Juan squeezed my hand. I didn’t like to trust other people, and as much as I liked him, the knot in my stomach did not unclench at his reassurance.
We set out. The skull hovered before us, suspended weightlessly in the air, and moved with us as if we pushed it. It was an eerie sight. It seemed to belong here in the jungle.
The night wildlife was deafening, but as we passed, a hush fell over the rainforest as if the creatures recognised, and feared, the power of the skull. It didn’t help my nerves. We reached the edge of the Cenote Sagrada and I gulped. This cenote was huge. Far wider and deeper than the one I had dived into with Juan and the children at Alejandro’s… It seemed like a lifetime ago, strangely. So much had passed in the few days since. The cenote’s white limestone walls illuminated in the passing moonlight. The water below us was inky black and impenetrable.
Felicia helped me into the wetsuit, which clung to me like a second skin, thick and oppressive, and then donned her own. Juan slipped into his with expert ease. The air tank strapped to my buoyancy jacket felt like a lead rucksack, I felt I’d sink into the ground as Felicia clipped weights onto me. How was I supposed to swim with all this weight? I tried to keep my breathing even. I wasn’t even underwater! Chill out, Zoe, I told myself.
Here, under the stars with Kukulkan’s skull before us humming with power and blazing with light the closer we got to Chichén Itzá, I couldn’t help but feel like we had stepped through time into legend itself. For a wild moment, I wondered if we stepped into the water, would we be pulled out or be claimed by the Mayan underworld forever.
Juan cleared his throat and it broke the spell upon me. I turned to face him, forcing my breathing to remain even. “Are you ready?” he asked me in a low voice that betrayed nothing of his own feelings.
“No,” I said honestly and grinned, albeit shakily, to try to conceal the worst of my nerves. He returned it, his teeth gleaming in the moonlight.
“Chica, we can do this. This is the easy part.”
I had been in worse situations, I tried to remind myself, for the little good it did. “Let’s do this now before I change my mind.”
“You know how to scuba?”
“Yes.” It had been a while, but I’d done my diving certification a few years back to explore some sunken ruins on the trail of another relic. I had hated diving then, even in the bright sun and the clear waters of the Aegean Sea. I would hate it even more now, in the cold black waters
here, I was sure.
Felicia levitated us to a jutting ledge just above the water’s surface. Kukulkan’s skull floated away from us over the water as if it wanted to go back to its home. A whisper to my bracelet showed us the path. A golden, sparkling thread dove into the cenote, disappearing quickly into the dark depths and away to the south, towards Chichén Itzá.
“Do not separate for any reason.” Felicia’s voice was brittle with her own nerves. She cast a magical tether over us that would keep us close and always aware of each other. I could feel Juan tug on it as he moved. “And… be careful. There may be old magic here. Keep your mind sharp and your magic at a moment’s call… and do not be led astray.”
I knew she did not mean by misdirection in the darkness. An altar of bones and Juan’s skeletal face taunted me from the shadows of my deepest fears. The skull held old magic: dark and powerful. As we neared its home, and as we neared the time it could be wielded with maximum deadly effect, I knew it would be a force to be reckoned with.
Chapter Nine
The skull sank with us. Its huge, smooth, white bulk rippled the water, and it glowed with its ethereal, pulsing light until it was submerged. It appeared as a wavering, grimacing, horrific sight under the water, as if a giant beast were about to leap out and snatch us to a watery death.
As we dived into the black depths of the cenote, consumed by its utter absence of light, my chest tightened with barely controlled panic. Single-mindedly, I focused on breathing in and out, with the strange hissing of the scuba equipment as my not-very-calming music, and swam after Juan, my attention locked on his fins before me.
Felicia kept the tether tight, and I kept the magical thread burning bright into the distance before us whilst Juan surrounded us with a small sphere of light that felt simultaneously like a confining cage, a safe bubble, and an unwanted beacon. I’d forgotten to ask what may lurk in the depths other than us. I hoped nothing, and pushed thoughts of teeth and claws and burning night-lit eyes from my mind as best I could.