The Dark-Hunters (798 page)

Even without it, though, he looked lethal and powerful. Mesmerizing, and absolutely lickable.

Things she didn’t want Enrique to know she thought about. Ever. She slid the pad out of his hand and closed the cover.

With a devilish grin that said he knew more than he should, Enrique took it in stride. “By the way, did you hear about Dr. Drake?”

“Which Dr. Drake?” There were four of them on campus, and two of them in the geology department where she and Enrique lived most of the time.

“The one you went on your dig with last summer down in Mexico. It’s in your e-mail. I forwarded you the notice earlier. He dropped dead on a plane a few days ago.”

She gasped in shock at his lack of tact.
Dang, boy, didn’t your mother teach better? You don’t just firebomb someone with tragic news.…

A little warning would have been nice.

The Drake he referred to was Fernando Drake from the sociology and anthropology department at Millsaps College in Mississippi. She’d been friends with him since they’d met in Reed Hall as sophomores at the University of Georgia—Fernando had been kind enough to kill the bug in her dorm room that had been terrorizing her for days.

Something he’d done with flair as he heard her screaming for a shoe to kill the beast. Flame-red Doc Martens boot in hand, he’d rushed through her open door, and killed it on the floor by her roommate’s bed. Even more heroic, he’d taken its remains and given it a burial at sea in the boys’ bathroom.

No one could ever accuse Fernando of being anything less than the best of gentlemen.

And since they were barely thirty, Fernando was way too young to just fall over from anything. She’d never even known him to have a cold or a headache. “What?”

“Yeah. Freaky thing, too. They said there wasn’t a mark on his body anywhere, but that when they did the autopsy, his heart was missing. How weird is that, huh? It’s like something out of
Fringe,
you know?”

The room spun as old tales whispered through her head. She literally felt as if she were free-falling. Reaching out, she touched the table to center herself before she fell off her stool. “You’re joking.”

“Why would I joke about something so grisly? I’m not that big a jerk.” He frowned. “You okay, Doc? You look a little sick.”

She was a lot sick as her mind went to a place she definitely didn’t want it to go. Raven mockers were said to eat the heart out of their victims and to leave no external trace whatsoever. The only way to see their work was to open the victim’s chest and find the heart gone.

Unable to breathe through her constricted throat, she opened her e-mail so that she could read the article about Fernando’s death herself. But it did nothing to calm her. If anything, it made it all the worse.

Enrique was right. Fernando had been flying home when the flight attendant had tried to wake him so that he could put his seat upright for landing. She’d discovered him dead and had assumed it a heart attack. Yet during that flight someone, or something, had removed his heart with surgical precision while not leaving a single mark on the body anywhere.

Not something one came across every day. Not unless one was completely insane or a medicine woman or man guarding the hearts and souls of the dying.

Yeah, right.

I don’t believe in raven mockers.
At least that was what her head kept saying. Too bad the rest of her consciousness wasn’t listening.

Over and over, she heard her grandmother’s stories and saw the twisted figure from her dreams that had flown out her window.

Stop it!
This was the twenty-first century, not the first. She was sitting in a state-of-the-art lab facility at the University of Alabama—not some wattle-and-daub hut in a North Georgia field.

She forced herself to look around the room. She wasn’t surrounded by cave paintings and questionable herbs that doubled as hallucinogens. She was here with the gas and ion chromatographs, an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer, electron microprobe, isotope ratio mass spectrometer, her electron microscope …

Her world consisted of things such as Betsy guns, single- and three-component geophones, StrataVisor seismic acquisition systems, and CHIRP subbottom profilers. She was a scientist, not a medicine woman doling out concoctions made from things she grew in her garden.

She refused to believe in any of this. There was a logical explanation for what had killed Fernando. There had to be. “What do you think happened to him?” she asked Enrique.

Like her, he was a scientist who didn’t buy into mumbo-jumbo.

“El chupacabra.”

Well, so much for that theory. She rolled her eyes at him. “Really? A goat sucker? Last I checked, they only drank blood, and that from animals. I’ve never heard of one taking a human heart.”

“Yeah, but you don’t know, right?” His accent changed from regular American to a thicker Spanish that only came out whenever he was excited or angry. “
Abuela,
she used to tell me stories of
el peuchen
where she grew up.”

And here she’d foolishly thought she was up to date on the scary legends. Leave it to Enrique to find one she’d never heard of before. “
El peuchen?
”

“
Si.
It’s a gigantic flying snake, right? Or sometimes it can change its shape to other things, but it’s mostly a feathered snake that hunts at night. And it’s a cousin or something to
el chupacabra. Abuela
used to tell me how it would come out and suck their blood or eat their hearts. In the morning, they’d find the hapless victims in fields or near streams. Her mother was the village
machi
and, to protect the village, she would drum it out whenever it started feeding. So I’m thinking
el peuchen
must have hitched a ride on the plane and got him.”

“Then why did you say
chupacabra?
”

“’Cause no one outside of Chile or Argentina has ever heard of
el peuchen.
It’s not exactly big up here, you know? Besides, I’ve never heard of one of them coming this far north.
Chupacabra,
on the other hand…”

As much as she hated to admit it, he had a point. Still … “You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“I know you want me to say no, Doc. I do. But …
Abuela
knew things. She saw things. Things no one could explain, no matter how much science you want to put on it. She said they were visions given to her by the Holy Mother back in the day. When I was a boy, she told me I could see them, too. But I didn’t want to see them and so I didn’t. Just because we study science, it doesn’t mean there aren’t things that defy us. For everything we know, there is much more we don’t. Things no one can find out with an empirical test.” He jerked his chin at her computer screen. “And that is something we definitely don’t know.”

He was right about that.

Not wanting to admit it, she went back to unwrapping what felt like a giant round rock.

Enrique helped her until they uncovered …

A giant round rock.

His scowl deepened along with hers as she pulled the plastic back to reveal a hand-chiseled wheel the likes of which she hadn’t seen since they left the dig months ago.

“What is that?” he asked.

She ran her fingers over the intricate carvings as she studied the giant red stone that had to be thousands of years old, judging by its worn condition. “It appears to be a Mayan calendar, but the glyphs aren’t exactly Mayan.” More than that, there was writing on it, too. Not glyphs, but something that appeared to be an ancient Greek script.

Okay … someone had to be screwing with her. They had to be. One of her friends must have made this up as a joke.

Because she’d never seen anything like this. No one had anything ancient Greek with Native American. There was no way for it to exist.

But what if it was real?

It can’t be.
Those two cultures had never intermingled. Ever.

Frowning, she dug through the peanuts until she located a note near the bottom. Prepared to have it say “April Fool’s,” she quickly skimmed it.

Teri,

We found this seal in the center of our site under an ornate headstone unlike anything I’ve ever encountered. I have never seen glyphs like this. The other script looks Greek to me—yeah, I know, go ahead and laugh—which shouldn’t be possible. I’ve sent a photo of the writing to Dr. Soteria Parthenopaeus in New Orleans to see if she can read it and I’ve asked her if she has any idea how anything European could be on a Preclassic stone in the Yucatán. My initial test results say the stone is 14,000 years old. Not a typo. Believe me, I know it’s impossible, but I’ve checked and rechecked a thousand times. It can’t be right, so I’m sending this to the best geologist I know for corroboration. Or for you to tell me it’s time to update my equipment and better ventilate the shafts we’ve been working in. I’ve included several soil samples for you, too. Please call me as soon as you get this.

Fernando

Chills spread over her arms as she stared at his name on the paper and a million memories assaulted her. Even now, she could see him sitting outside the pyramid last summer as the sun set behind him. Grimy and sweaty with his hair matted and sticking up all over his head, he’d been happy and excited even though they’d been excavating for ten hours straight in the worst sort of heat. Flashing her that boyish grin of his, he’d popped open a lukewarm beer and handed it to her.
“Después del trabajo—cerveza!”

Tears welled in her eyes. That had been the worst-tasting beer she’d ever drank, but his company had made it seem perfect. Fernando had always been a good friend to her and she would miss him terribly.

Why did he have to die? He was too young. He’d had too many plans.

She clenched her teeth, forcing her tears down as she focused on what Fernando would want her to do. Work always came first. It was why he didn’t have a wife or even a girlfriend.

Focus, Teri.…
By the date and time on the package, he’d sent it to her the same day he’d boarded the plane to come home. No doubt it’d been too heavy for him to pack or carry, what with all the airline restrictions nowadays.

Not to mention, the stone was huge.

In more ways than one. If this really was fourteen thousand years old, and if that was Greek writing on it, it would entirely rewrite the historical record and change everything they thought they knew about the ancient world. Both here in the Americas and in Europe.

Fourteen thousand years predated any known script-writing system. Come to think of it, it might even predate ancient Greece.…

She frowned at the thought. When was Greece founded? She had no idea. That wasn’t her area of expertise. She’d never been all that fond of traditional history. That had been Fernando’s scope of knowledge, and while she’d picked up a great deal of information on her digs with him, most of it was Mesoamerican and not European.

But even with her limitations, she knew this was epic to the extreme. One of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time …

There is no such thing as a coincidence. The universe and spirits are always sending us omens and signs. You must learn to see and read them. Only then will you be able to control your destiny.

Her grandmother’s words haunted her.

But what was this a sign of?

“Do you believe the world’s going to end in two weeks?” Enrique asked, dragging her thoughts back to where she was.

“What?”

He jerked his chin toward the calendar in her hands. “You know, the Mayan thing? Isn’t the world supposed to end any day now?”

At least that added a small twinge of humor to her sadness. She’d listened to Fernando rant and rave against that all summer long. It’d been his sore spot the way she couldn’t stand how some people left their shopping buggies in the middle of the aisle so that no one could get past them. Rudeness always set her off.

“No, sweetie. There’s absolutely nothing in the Mayan culture or writings to suggest the world will end this year. Like the Cherokee and other natives, they have a cyclical calendar system, and the fourth cycle ends on the twenty-first, but they never once wrote anything about it being apocalyptic.”

Fernando would be so proud to know that she’d actually been listening to his tirades. That thought caused pain to lacerate her heart as she finished Fernando’s diatribe in honor of him. “That was a distortion made back in the days when we could only read about thirty percent of the Mayan glyphs … if that much. Then back in the nineties when everyone was terrified of Y2K, some scholars repeated the old misconception and cashed in on it. So don’t start giving away your personal effects. You’ll be needing them on the twenty-second and whatever you do, don’t forget to buy something for your mother and
abuela
for Christmas. They’d be very upset at you.”

He let out a sound of supreme aggravation. “So the date’s not important to the Mayans at all?”

“Yes and no. They’d think of it the same way we throw parties on December thirty-first and why we partied like it was 1999. It’s the end of an era for them, and the beginning of a new one. But other than tossing down a few drinks, or taking a few heads as the Mayans were prone to do, it’s no cause for alarm.”

“Unless you’re one of the heads they have their eyes on.”

She laughed. “Exactly.”

Enrique sighed like he was disappointed that time would carry on. “Well, damn. I better pay my light bill when I get home. I was hoping I could let it slide.”

Before she could comment, a new voice interrupted them. “I wouldn’t rush home if I were you. The world may yet come to a bad ending.”

Kateri sucked her breath in sharply at the thickly accented male voice that intruded on their conversation. Neither Spanish nor Indian, his accent was more a soft blending of the two. One that made the deep rich timbre sound exotic.

Frowning, she looked past her assistant to find what had to be one of the sexiest men she’d ever seen in the flesh. He’d paused just inside the doorway so that he could watch them. Though she doubted he was much over average height, if that, he had an aura so powerful that it seemed to fill the entire room. It was the raw intensity of someone used to being worshiped and feared … most likely at the same time.