Carnal Sacrifice (2 page)

“Miss,” Huenu said to her in formal Quechua. “This person we travel so far to find. She is well known to you?”

Delaney struggled to come up with an Indian equivalent for stepmother, and then finally said, “She is the woman my father married after my mother died. I believe she may have been on that bus.”

Huenu’s forehead crinkled beneath his straight black bangs. “If the Hungering Ones find her—”

“I know.”

They lapsed into silence again, but left unspoken between them was the memory of the withered carcasses of small animals. On nights when the winds blew loudest, the body count was always high. It seemed they waited somehow, she and the villagers, for something to put a stop to it. In her case, she waited for definitive proof that the legends were true, that drinkers of blood actually roamed the Andes. The reasonable, scientific part of her stubbornly refused to chalk it up to anything more serious than marauding predators.

“I appreciate the time you’re taking to do this,” Delaney said. “You and the men.”

“You heal Rayn. You heal Rayn’s baby. Her father is my brother.”

For Huenu, that explained everything. In the Andes, relationships were the thread that bound together hundreds of fragile lives. They saved you from certain death. Funny how the kind of money Delaney had grown up with didn’t bind, it severed.

She breathed deeply to clear her head, but thoughts came rapid-fire now, like commuters rushing to a train. The dream she’d had of Jaden, one of a thousand variations of the same dream, haunted her. Mixed in with those shameful feelings was mortified pride. The last time she’d gone to Cusco, she’d seen a magazine cover of him at some tony LA eatery with his arm around a sultry brunette.

They pushed on till noon, descending out of the rocky arid region of the highlands and into the cloud forest—
ceja de selva
, the locals called it, “eyebrow of the jungle”. Huenu rummaged through the llama’s saddlebags for the traditional lunch of corn and wild radishes. While they ate, the sun broke through, dappling the ground at their feet. The air grew steamy and thick. A dung beetle delicately rolled a ball of fresh spoor.

Three hours later, on a crumbling one-lane road that ribboned around the mountain, Delaney heard the squawking of handheld radios. Despite her dread of what she might find, her pace quickened. She rounded the bend and saw rescue workers in varying stages of progress rappelling down the steepest part of Alta Verde, dwarfed by the panorama of trees and sky and soaring peaks. How could anyone locate that bus, let alone survivors? Two careening rubber skid marks indicated where the bus had fought, and failed, to stay on the road. Even if the bus had a GPS tracker, how could they recover either the bus or the bodies? She couldn’t see where they had landed. No broken trees or circling buzzards. On these roads, buses did sometimes go over and rescue workers never found them.

She approached a man who seemed to be in charge. Taller than the average Andean, he wore a police-issue, military-style uniform, and his hair was combed in a shiny pompadour.

In Spanish, she asked if he knew the nationality of the tour company.

He shrugged. “
Americano.
”

“When did the bus crash?”

“Two days ago.”

Two days. She felt curiously light-headed. Part of her wanted to yell at the rescue team for not having gotten here faster. She forced herself to remember that in Peru, two days
was
fast. It took time to assemble a crew, since no professional crews existed. The drive up Alta Verde took hours and made huge demands on their machinery. About five hundred feet away, a modified wrecker idled, wheezing, all rust and primer, a reminder that money and resources were almost nonexistent.

Yet frustration continued to churn as she stared out over the sloping hills, sudden drop-offs and hard blue sky. Of all the times Val had mocked her in public, shamed her in front of her friends, badmouthed her to her father, Delaney had never imagined her stepmother at the bottom of a ravine. Getting a dose of her own medicine, sure, but never this.

Then, in the distance, she spotted a jeep traveling fast. Huenu saw it too, because he muttered, “
Reporteros,
” with withering contempt.

Hugging the serpentine sides of the mountain, the jeep disappeared from view for a moment, and then reappeared much closer, followed by a plume of blue exhaust. Delaney counted only one occupant, the driver, who was clearly Peruvian. The jeep lurched to a halt in front of her, and the driver got out.

“You are Delaney Jones?” he asked her in Spanish.

She stared at him, speechless, expecting him to officially notify her of Val’s death. Instead, he walked around the front of the Jeep and opened the passenger door. When he gestured for her, she followed, dreading what she might find. Val, mangled beyond recognition, already stiff. Perhaps her body, but missing limbs or fed upon by eaters of the dead. Delaney had seen it all at one point or another. Seen it and been profoundly moved by how insubstantial life could be, spores of a dandelion that had been cast to the wind.

“
Signora,
” the driver said, moving aside so she could step around the door. Heart pounding, she forced herself to look. The passenger seat had been angled back. Lying beneath a thin cotton blanket was the outline of a body. She peeled the blanket back, steeling herself. Realization came with a gut punch.

Jaden.

“Altitude sickness,” the driver said. “He insisted we drive straight through.”

Delaney couldn’t catch her breath. The dream of last night that had dogged her every step of the way here had suddenly been made flesh. There he was, Jaden Seavers, unconscious beneath the blanket, everything she had worked so hard to forget. He’d tried to get to Peru as quickly as he could because he thought, perhaps, that his mother was injured but not dead. Where had he been when the news arrived? Everything she’d read described the poshness of his celebrity lifestyle—the cars, the yacht, the house overlooking the Pacific. Maybe he’d been performing on one of his endless tours, sweating beneath a blaze of lights, 30,000 screaming fans surging like a human ocean in front of him. Now he was here, and she knew with perfect certainty that nothing in her life would be the same again.

She jerked her head up when she realized that the driver was still speaking. “I must begin the journey home,” he said. He pulled a duffel bag and a guitar case out of the back while she stood frozen. “Will you move him to a higher elevation?”

She swallowed hard. How had this happened? How was it possible that Val was dead and Jaden was in Peru? Her mind just wouldn’t process it. Now, his life was in her hands. She would have to make difficult decisions, potentially life-threatening ones. And there were a thousand other ghosts she would be forced to contend with too. Delaney shoved those thoughts aside. Later. She could think about it all later.

“Help me move him,” she said to Huenu and the men.

Strong as he was, Huenu couldn’t throw Jaden over his shoulder. Jaden was six-two and none of the Peruvians was taller than five-six. Delaney took point by holding Jaden under the armpits and hauling him out. With the men, she staggered away from the road and toward an embankment where, possibly miles below, the tour bus lay in a pile of twisted metal.

Despite the pallor, his face was the same one she remembered, the strong jaw and prominent chin, but his dark hair had grown a little past his shoulders. She felt overwhelmed and helpless. Altitude sickness sometimes progressed far beyond headache and drunken fatigue. His brain could swell. He could suffer permanent damage, even death. She would have to move him to a lower elevation, especially since her village lay another 3,000 feet higher. But how could she participate in the rescue operation he would insist upon, and save his life at the same time?

She spotted the handful of rescue workers climbing back up their rappelling ropes. For all she knew, the rescue had been given up as hopeless.

With terrible uncertainty, she gazed down at him. The wind stirred a few strands of his hair, only a shade or two lighter than her own. In repose, his face looked both unholy and angelic. She caught the warm scent that reminded her of the rum-infused pipe tobacco her father kept in a humidor on his desk. She’d forgotten how scent could affect a person so intimately.

There was a rumbling in the distance. The men stood. Then the sound got closer, turning into a deafening roar that sent birds screeching into flight. Delaney stood too, heart pounding.

Earthquake.

The ground became a trampoline beneath her feet. One violent up-thrust sent her sprawling. She lay stunned and in pain, trying to make sense of the surreal: a fifty-foot Peruvian peppercorn tree bent nearly sideways, an evergreen, split in two, tumbling over the drop-off, a hundred tree limbs groaning, cracking, raining down leafy spears. Nature had gone on a murderous rampage.

In a strangled voice, she cried, “Help me carry him!”

Huenu grabbed Jaden under the shoulders while she and Imasu carried his legs. The llama squalled in protest. Maiqui herded it across their narrow swath of earth, maybe 200 feet wide, the overhang on one side, an abyss on the other. Where could they go? With eerie calm, Delaney thought, we’re all going to be dead—me, Jaden, Val, my mom, my dad. She could trace by memory her mother’s hands, translucent from chemotherapy, folded gracefully on her blue duvet. Her father, lurking around the stables with a forbidden cigarette. And the awful moment when Val must have realized her time was up, the breathless suspension of the bus teetering and then hurtling down the fast, roadless highway to whatever hell awaited her.

Another cataclysm knocked Delaney to her knees. Imasu pulled her up again, and their eyes met in a flash of mutual terror that the earth could no longer be trusted. Together, they headed toward the cliff, away from the drop-off, but Delaney halted. Earthquakes triggered avalanches. Already, pebbles rattled down the cliff face, harbingers of bigger rocks to come.

A twenty-foot tree branch crashed in front of her. She stifled a scream. Her legs shook. She could barely move. Summoning the last of her strength, she kept her hold on Jaden. Then above her came a sharp report, followed by the rumble of something moving fast.

“
Huayco!
” someone shouted. Landslide.

She whipped her gaze to the rock face, and her blood ran cold. Boulders the size of cars plunged over the cliff. She and the men stood paralyzed while a rock sailed past them. It slammed into a tree with a concussive blast.

She fought back a sob.

There was an awful noise, like a bomb exploding. Two boulders smashed into each other and burst apart, firing shrapnel in all directions. Delaney caught some in her leg and went dizzy with pain. The weight of carrying Jaden was crushing.

There was nowhere to go, she realized. They would die here, all of them. She imagined Huenu’s wife and children keening with grief. The American media cannibalizing themselves to get the news out first: heartthrob Jaden Seavers, dead at twenty-seven. A more ominous sound made Delaney snap her attention back to the cliff. In slow motion, the entire precipice collapsed, sending up rocks and trees. The sheer force of it blasted her off her feet. She lay stunned and helpless beside Jaden, trying to be brave, trying to accept the inevitable. She curled herself around him, as much to protect as to say good-bye. Perhaps now she could admit the hard truth, she thought, closing her eyes, bracing herself for impact. All that shame and guilt and desire, years of it.

The rumbling stopped.

The dust continued to climb and roil, yet everything appeared uncannily still. Shocked, exhausted, no one said a word. Even the llama stopped clacking.

“A miracle,” Huenu muttered. She opened her mouth to respond, but what she saw over his shoulder made the words stick in her throat. There was a fifty-foot-wide chasm where the road used to be. All the rescue workers stood gaping on the other side of it.

Chapter Three

The implications hit Delaney all at once. Jaden’s removal to Cusco was now out of the question. With a sinking feeling, she also knew the rescue attempt was over too. The workers would pack up and make the treacherous descent down to their lives and families. And what of her own village? Anguish seized her when she considered the damage an earthquake might have done. No, they had to get back right away.

But how could she do that and at the same time save Jaden? A quick ascent might kill him. And even if they could get hold of one, no standard-production helicopter could ascend eight thousand meters or find a place to land if it did.

She pressed one hand to her mouth to stifle a sob. His life was completely in her hands. She stared down at his face, the sooty lashes, the faint pink flush to his lips and cheeks. A thousand memories threatened to engulf her. But a different sadness, one far more personal, refused to let go. She knew that no amount of humanitarian work would absolve her of the sin of loving him.

Gently, Huenu put his hand on her shoulder. “We must go.”

“Yes,” she said tonelessly. Across the ravine, the old truck was already sputtering away. She saw the bewildered frightened faces of the men in back. It shocked her to realize that all of them, herself included, had nearly died. And now the actual dead lay sprawled in a tour bus somewhere far down in the valley. Delaney squeezed her eyes shut, stemming tears that surprised her. All that bad blood. It could never be scrubbed clean again.

Val had been family, same as Jaden.

Huenu and the men collected two light but sturdy branches and lay them side by side about three feet apart. Only then did she realize what they intended to fashion: a makeshift stretcher. With her pocket knife, she helped cut vines they would lash around the branches, creating a sling for Jaden. Her fingers wouldn’t stop shaking. What if they couldn’t carry him all that distance? And how would she persuade them to take the journey in stages so he didn’t throw an embolism and die? They had families too, and were understandably anxious to get home. What if there’d been casualties?

An hour later, the stretcher was finished. They sat in the shade and drank water that the llama carried in saddlebags. Delaney wiped her forehead on her sleeve, wishing that llamas were strong enough to carry people. That would have solved a lot of problems.

But when they lifted Jaden onto the stretcher, he seemed almost feverish. His dark hair lay plastered to his shoulders with sweat. Delaney took a towel out of her backpack, wetted it with water from her canteen and wiped his face.

They walked for three hours, taking turns carrying. Their progress was slow, and Delaney’s worry intensified. Twice they stopped to rest. The jungle, usually a place of joy and wonder, felt unbearably sticky. Late-afternoon sun streamed gold through the canopy and made dappled patterns on the ground. Gradually, the lushness thinned. The topography opened up into low swelling foothills carpeted in shades of green and brown. Above them, the sky was a hot electric blue, and between the knuckled spurs where the mountains parted, a snow-capped peak rose majestically, emptying itself into a watershed that reflected the sky like a mirror.

Distracted by her own thoughts, Delaney was startled when Huenu spoke. “The sun will be setting soon.”

“Yes.”

“We must make shelter for the night.”

“Yes.”

When he hesitated, Delaney braved herself for the worst.

“
Ilakllariy,
” he said.
We worry.

“About the village.”

“Carrying the American, we are slow. The others say it is better for you to stay. Wait, and we will come back.”

She bit down on her first impulse, which was to argue. Of course they wanted to go. She was lucky to have gotten this much help from them at all. Her second impulse was to scream in frustration. But this was as far as they could ascend without compromising Jaden’s health. Although for a thousand reasons she felt overwhelmed by the thought of being alone with him, she knew how pointless it was not to accept her fate.

“Imasu knows of a place to shelter,” Huenu said. “A temple of the Inca. It is close to water, and of course we will leave you all our food.”

“Thank you.”

They fell silent as they trekked closer to the temple. Imasu pulled the llama and led the way. Delaney found it strange that the Incas built anything this far up. Most temples or ruins of temples lay deep within the lowland jungle. Despite an ever greater sense of curiosity and dread, she pushed on. Slobber hung off the llama’s muzzle, but it kept pushing too. Night would be here soon. Already, the familiar clouds of sunset lay in rumpled folds across the sky, red clouds with purple underbellies. Delaney followed the men up a steep embankment and felt the backs of her thighs quiver with exertion.

When they topped the hill, she spotted the temple in the near distance and blinked to make sure she wasn’t seeing things. Sunk halfway into the side of a mountain, it was almost perfectly preserved. She had never known it existed until now.

In the tradition of Inca temples, it had been built in the shape of a pyramid, maybe one hundred meters high. The external walls were terraced on all sides like oversized stairs. Drawing closer, she could see a small portal with the symbol of an eye carved above it.

“You will be safe here,” Maiqui said. “You and the American.”

Huenu pressed a wad of leaves into her hand. Coca leaves, she realized, to help with Jaden’s altitude sickness. The Indians chewed them as a mild stimulant. “We hope to return the day after tomorrow,” he said.

He and the men carried Jaden beneath the carved eye and into the temple. Delaney stopped to ignite the Coleman she’d refilled before leaving the village, and dragged after them.

Once inside, she held up the lantern to get a better look. They were in an enormous chamber, a ceremonial chamber by the looks of it. A great stone altar sat in the center. When she ventured closer, she realized all the dark stains were most likely blood. Before the Spaniards came with their swords and their smallpox, the Incas had regularly sacrificed humans.

She set the lantern down on the altar steps and helped Huenu unpack the llama’s saddlebags. It looked at her with its soulful eyes, as though empathizing with her dilemma.

“You will need a fire,” Huenu said.

“I’ll gather thatch.” She gazed down at Jaden, thinking how many tasks awaited her. How alone they would be.

The men turned to leave, and she followed them, steeling herself not to watch them walk away. Instead, she selected sticks and a few good branches, then went back inside. Strange how no animals nested there, not even snakes. The air smelled of mold and dank—enough to support some form of vegetation, surely, but there were no vines, no moss, no weeds struggling up through cracks in the stones. The place gave her an odd feeling of…not anxiety, exactly. Restlessness. As though a strange energy emanated from that gruesome altar that both repelled and fascinated her.

She knelt beside Jaden and took inventory. He needed more water and, if he could chew them, the coca leaves. Despite his sickness, he looked remarkably healthy. Most sufferers were white and hollow-eyed, bent double with stomach pain.

Other emotions, more intimate ones, crowded. She kept herself busy so she wouldn’t dwell on them. But her pulses kept fluttering. Why had Val booked a trip to come see her? And what sort of wild celebrity lifestyle did Jaden lead in LA? She didn’t even know if he was married.

His nearness unnerved her. He was her dream of the night before, only real this time. As she dipped the hem of her shirt in water and passed it over his face, she noted with guilt, shame, and longing the swell of his chest and shoulders, the flatness of his stomach, and what lay below, prominent even in jeans. It acted on her like a hot, dark drug.

She, Delaney Jones, who the guys at school used to call the Ice Queen… Little did they know it was because no one compared, that once you’d been with certain men, you could never go back.

Delaney’s head swam. It was her dizziness from before, only worse. She staggered to her feet. She could almost hear the blood surging through her veins. What was happening to her?

She went outside to clear her head, just in time to see the last rays of sun sink behind the western peaks. Then she heard a rustling sound behind her. Turning, she saw Jaden standing ten feet away, barefoot with his shirt off.

The smile he gave her was unmistakable. “God, how I’ve missed you.”