Jessica Andersen - Dawnkeepers

Lucius had e-mailed Ambrose once or twice about his end-time theories, but the old coot had stonewalled him, and their one in-person meeting had been more of a midconference snarl in passing from Ledbetter than an actual meeting. Lucius hadn’t even known Ledbetter had a daughter until Sasha had phoned the glyph lab looking for Anna. Yet it was Sasha’s voice he heard at the back of his head as he hacked his way along the thin trail, and her picture, which he’d downloaded from the Web page of the high-end restaurant where she worked, that he held in the forefront of his mind. She was pretty enough—okay, gorgeous—but it wasn’t her looks that he’d focused most on. There had been something about her eyes, something about their shape and intensity. That something had sent a chill down his spine and kicked some serious heat into his bloodstream, driving him onward.

He wasn’t expecting that she’d be at the temple, was actually hoping he didn’t find her there, because if he did, odds were he’d be looking at her remains. But if luck—or fate—was with him, then he’d find a clue to where she and Ambrose had disappeared to.

The background hum of the rain forest—bugs or something, he didn’t know what—rose as the sunlight went from afternoon slant to predusk dimness. He knew he should make camp, but something pushed him to keep going—a lighter patch up ahead, maybe, or perhaps simply the certainty that he was close, so close to his destination.

And then he was there. One second he was hacking at clinging green fronds, and the next his machete broke clear. Expecting his rote-mechanical swing to meet resistance, he stumbled forward when it hit only air, and wound up in a small clearing that was barely the size of his apartment kitchen.

A gap in the canopy let through a shaft of light from the setting sun, and the beam shone bloodred on a carved stone doorway leading into the side of a hill. Only it wasn’t a hill, he realized after a second. It was an unrestored ruin, a pyramid that had succumbed to a thousand years of zero maintenance and been reclaimed by the land. Vegetation had covered all the stone with leaves and clinging vines, with the exception of the doorway, which gleamed almost new-looking in the fading light. It was a stone arch, with the cornice and lintelwork that the Maya stoneworkers had put into regular use by the height of the empire. They might not’ve had the wheel or known how to work metal, but they’d been pretty damn untouchable when it came to rock.

This wasn’t just Mayan, though. There was an elongated elegance to it, one that reminded him of another pyramid-building culture on the other side of the world, one that had faltered into despotism after the Nightkeepers left and the sun god Aten held sway.

A faint shimmy started in Lucius’s gut and worked its way out from there. High above him parrots called to one another and loose-limbed monkeys played tag in the gathering dusk. Down at ground level, though, there was strange stillness, and a hum that touched the air. Rubbing his scarred palm, which ached from all the machete work, he took a step toward the doorway, almost expecting it to disappear, for him to wake up and find himself in his crummy apartment, in the middle of his lame-

ass, going-backward life.

But it didn’t. He was really there, and so was the doorway.

“Here goes nothing,” he said, scrabbling in his knapsack for his flashlight. Clicking it on, he took a couple more steps, passed beneath the lintel—

And nearly fell straight into nothing when the floor dropped out beneath him.

He saw the pitfall in time—barely—and stopped at the edge, where interlocking stones formed a tunnel that descended at an acute slant, ending somewhere deep in the earth, beyond the reach of his flashlight beam. Adrenaline spiked and he stepped back a pace, but the stone didn’t give way beneath him. The trap had already been sprung.

From the scrapes in the dirt, it hadn’t been triggered all that long ago, either. Rain had wiped the tracks within the first ten feet or so of the entrance, but beneath his own footprints he could see another set. Damned if they didn’t look like the same kind of boot treads too, only smaller, as though the person who’d been there before him was a woman, or maybe a teen. Wearing trekking boots of the sort favored by fieldworkers.

His stomach did a nosedive as he shone his light downward once again. “Sasha? Are you down there?”

There was no answer. Not that he should’ve expected there to be. She was a chef, not a field archaeologist, which suggested the boot prints weren’t hers. Besides, like it or not, whoever had gone down, they’d done it before the rains, which meant a couple of months at least.

Lucius felt a beat of grief for whoever it’d been, along with relief that he had a good reason not to go down there. Clamping the flashlight in his teeth, he edged around the pitfall, not letting out his breath until he was safe on the other side and there was no sign of a second booby trap. Not yet, anyway, he thought. But the presence of the first trap was oddly encouraging: It suggested there was—

or had been—something in the ruin worth guarding.

“So onward we go,” he said, talking to himself because it was too damn quiet inside the low tunnel that narrowed beyond the pit trap. Using the flashlight to check his footing, he worked his way deeper into what he suspected wasn’t the ruins of a temple that’d been built up from the ground, but rather one that’d been dug into the earth itself. The tunnel sloped slightly downward as he walked, and the air was damp and chill.

Once again he saw evidence of someone else having been there ahead of him fairly recently. Two someones, in fact: A man’s wide-footed tread was marked over with a woman’s print. Oddly, though, the woman’s print didn’t match the tread Lucius had seen near the booby trap. If he figured the prints he was following now belonged to Ambrose and Sasha Ledbetter, then who had made the first set?

And why weren’t there tracks leading back out? That in itself seemed pretty damn ominous.

“Doesn’t matter,” he told himself. “Keep going.” So he did just that, heading deeper into the Nightkeeper temple. Because that was where he had to be.

The walls of the tunnel were uncarved, but the stone-work was meticulous, and the vibe . . . well, the vibe deep in his gut told him he’d found what he was looking for. He just needed some sort of proof to bring back to Desiree. And Anna.

At the thought of Anna, a complicated mix of guilt and resentment bloomed in his chest. For a second his old crush on Anna surfaced, making him feel like total shit for doing what he was doing, the way he was doing it. Then the hum rose up once again, blunting the fear and the grief and the guilt, making him numb to everything except the footprints that led him on, and the tunnel closing in around him.

Then, without warning, the shaft dead-ended at a pile of rubble. But it wasn’t just any rubble he saw in the yellow light of his flashlight beam. The debris had been cleared and stacked into a shrine of sorts, and a crude teepee had been formed of lashed-together sticks. And atop it sat a human head.

Lucius reeled back, gagging at the sight and the sudden stench of rot and death. But even his response to finding the skull felt muted, as though the hum in his bones were overriding his natural instincts.

Leaning closer, he inspected the thing. Strips of skin and flesh were still adhered in places, though creatures and time had done some serious damage. Still, though, he could see that the skull had once sported long gray hair; some of it was still caught back in a leather-laced ponytail.

He’d found Ledbetter, or part of him, anyway. But where was the rest of him, and who had placed his head so elaborately? Why?