Chapter Twenty-Six
Several days later …
If it is deemed necessary, the lead archaeologist and her fieldwork crew will return at a future time to carry out more investigations and excavations.
Until then, INAH will be focusing its efforts on exploring other sites that the Mexican government views as not only beneficial for broadening knowledge about the ancient Maya civilization, but also lucrative on the archaeo-tourism front.
—Written by Quint Parker, a freelance writer and photojournalist, who spends way too much time sweating in the Mexican jungle amidst the Maya ruins when he’s not running from man-eating mosquitoes.
She pulled her thoughts away from last night’s amorous entanglement and returned to Quint’s article.
In just a few thousand words, Mr. Big-time Photojournalist had summed up their time at the dig site, wrapping their accomplishments in a nice, professional bow.
He’d glossed over their frustrations while including just enough details about their field work without mentioning a peep about the shock and horror they’d experienced at the end.
The bat-house was not somewhere she wanted to revisit anytime soon.
KuTu had used the whistle of death to close the wall, making Quint stay far away just to be safe.
Then they’d nailed together some wood to cover the hole in the floor leading down to the sacrificial chamber.
To try to keep future trespassers out of the ruin, they’d piled stones to the ceiling in the entrance and redirected some living vines so that they would grow down over the front of the structure again.
As for the rest of the site, they’d buttoned it up as best they could, burying the skulls that had been piled in front of the wall, and removing any means to get inside the site. Now all they could do was wait to see if someone tried to go over the wall.
She settled into one of the two lounge chairs on her back deck and stared out over the dark Caribbean toward the reddish-orange horizon.
The sun was going to pop up in the east within a half hour and start its trek across the sky.
The waves below were painted with mauve and deep yellow as they tumbled onto the pale sand.
It was good to be back home enjoying beach sunrises, cool ocean breezes, and a soft, cushy bed under a steady ceiling fan. A cold drink in the evening with a hot demon at her side was the cherry on the top.
The screen door opened and Quint stepped out, carrying two glasses of iced coffee.
Yum!
Dressed only in his swim trunks, which were still clearly damp from a pre-dawn dip in the warm water, he was offering an abundance of bare skin for her to admire.
Quint paused to stare at the sunrise for a moment before handing her a glass and settling onto the lounger next to her. “So beautiful,” he said, taking a drink of coffee.
She agreed. “I love how the waves turn pink just before the sun comes up.”
He looked her way, his gaze traveling slowly south down over her white crocheted swimsuit coverup before returning topside. “I wasn’t talking about the sunrise.”
“You’re such a smooth operator, Prince Charming.” She took a sip of the cold, creamy liquid, tasting the Maya chocolate Quint liked to stir in for a bit of complex flavor. “So delicious.” She made a point of slowly licking her upper lip as he watched. “And I wasn’t talking about the coffee.”
In the soft morning light, his sexy beard stubble and dark eyelashes had her libido waking up, bright eyed and bushy tailed. But it was that devilish smile of his that pulled the rug out from under her heart every damned time.
“You’re sitting too far away from me, sweetheart,” he said. “I need to touch some bare skin to fully enjoy the sunrise with my morning coffee.” He wiggled his eyebrows at her. “Or you could just take everything off, come over here, and let me get handsy.”
“How will me naked make the sunrise better?”
He scoffed. “Who gives a damned about the sun? It just keeps coming up day after day.”
She thumbed behind her. “You’re forgetting that Dad will see us through the kitchen window.”
“No, he won’t. He said he needed to work out some kinks after all the hard work he did over the last few days and took Rover for a walk down to the bakery at the end of the road. He’s bringing us back some scones and bunuelos.”
She blinked in surprise. “He really took my javelina on a walk?”
Angélica had picked up Rover from Teodoro’s place in Coba on the trip home from Site 5 yesterday, intending to start sharing custody of the javelina with Teodoro and María now that she had an outdoor area fenced and prepped just for her not-a-dog pet.
Teodoro had been working on leash-training Rover before they’d started work at Site 5, and now the javelina would squeal and spin when shown the leash.
“You mean our javelina,” Quint corrected. “You may have found baby Rover in the jungle, but if you’ll remember, I was his part-time babysitter from early on, sharing my tent with the little guy, teaching him to fetch your pink bra for me so I could snuggle with it on lonely nights.”
She laughed. “You did not train Rover to do that.”
“Let’s just say I encouraged his fetching behavior with multiple rewards of María’s homemade tortillas.”
Now that Angélica could believe. “I’m shocked that Dad is finally getting over his ‘the javelina is not a pet’ mindset. It’s almost as surprising as Mom somehow changing places with Fernel.”
Quint swallowed a gulp of his coffee. “At least we don’t have to worry about your mom seeing everything anymore.”
“Yeah, but I’m still struggling to wrap my mind around what happened.” She smiled out at the pale pink hues now filling the horizon. “But I’m happy as hell to have her back in my life—I mean ‘him’ in my life.” She shook her head. “This is going to be hard to get used to.”
“What is? The fact that your mother is somehow alive again, or that she is in the host body of a forty-ish male who we now know had shit-tons of money probably earned from selling looted treasures on the antiquities black market?”
“It’s surreal, all of it.” Angélica rubbed her finger down the cold sweat on the outside of her glass.
“And I still don’t understand where the real Dr. Fernel went, even though KuTu explained his theory about Camazotz stealing Dr. Fernel’s life force and leaving a vortex-like vacuum at the moment that somehow sucked in Mom’s ghost.”
“It’s a good thing Marianne had floated after you that night and joined us inside the bat-house.” He raised an eyebrow. “Or did you somehow conjure your mom in the thick of it all?”
“I have no idea, and neither does she, but the whole thing is just …” She shook her head.
“It’s nuts, I agree,” Quint finished. “But so was the wild ride we had at the last dig site, especially down in that claustrophobic, piss-filled snake den.” He shuddered. “I can still smell that place if I think about it.”
He had a good point. “I guess as long as you’re in the picture, Parker, we can expect a blurring between reality and Maya mythology.”
“What do you mean as long as I’m in the picture?” He swirled the ice in his glass, the cubes clinking almost musically. “Am I leaving the picture at some point?”
“Well.” She paused to take another sip, building up the courage to talk to him about a worry that had been festering in her thoughts over the last week while they’d closed down the dig site and field camp. “I told you that I loved you before you fell through the floor.”
“No, you said, ‘I think I’m in love with you,’ which implies uncertainty.”
She glared at him. “Fine, but you didn’t get back to me since then with any declaration about your feelings at all, so that leaves me to wonder about you in the long term.”
He set his glass on the floor next to the lounge chair. “You know, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that.”
She scoffed. “You’ve been meaning to talk to me about that?” She’d taken a step out onto a ledge in the bat-house ruin, only to be left high and dry for days, fretting she’d overplayed her hand.
“Well, more like ask you something.”
Ask her what?!
Oh, crap. Was he going to ask her to marry him? Her pulse picked up speed as her thoughts began to spin. No, it was too soon for marriage talk, wasn’t it? What was she going to say if he did ask her? Sure, she loved him, but … But what? Shouldn’t they take more time to make certain that …
“Why did you lie to me?” he asked.
His question had a definite ice-water-over-the-head effect. She frowned, a bit deflated that the subject was her lying, not them tying the knot, which was something she should probably analyze later when she was alone.
“We already discussed this,” she said flatly.
“No, we discussed that you had lied and I’d found out, for which you apologized, and that was nice. But we did not cover the ‘why’ part in full.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I wanted to work at the site more than go on our vacation because Dr. Fernel was gung-ho to get there first, and I didn’t want him to discover something before I could prove another of Mom’s theories.”
And now she understood Dr. Fernel’s impatience when it came to being allowed onto the site.
He was determined to live forever, and he thought he had all of the magical tools needed to make the wheel of time grind to a halt only for him.
Unfortunately, the same eagerness that drove him to try to buy his way to the site ended up bungling the reincarnation ritual, and now he was gone … maybe forever.
Or maybe not.
KuTu had no answers for Angélica on that issue.
But it was clear that the timing for the ritual had been wrong due to the not-quite-full moon.
Plus, there’d been another monkey wrench that neither Dr. Fernel nor KuTu had anticipated—Quint.
Or rather, as KuTu had said, a demon from Xibalba with his guardians in tow.