“Trust me. There are no bats—bats aren’t crazy enough to live in the Sacred Cave—and I’m not claustrophobic.”
“All right. I believe you.” She counted down another reason. “Second—my parents were all over the Petén in Mexico and Guatemala, in cenotes and caves, and I grew up having cave safety drilled into me. I know what I’m doing.”
“That is good to know.”
“And if I’m reading you right, you avoid caves like the plague.”
He shrugged and nodded.
“So you don’t need a
man-chomping
cave. You could get hurt out of sheer ignorance of proper caving procedure.”
“The cave is safe when it wants to be.”
“You’ve never been here before and . . . oh, never mind.” She lifted another finger. “Third—I don’t believe the Sacred Cave can hurt me.”
Capturing her hand, he folded it into a fist. “Perhaps the Sacred Cave doesn’t care what you believe.”
“Perhaps not, but for some reason you believe it has a vendetta against you. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it wants to kill you. But it doesn’t want to kill me. Consider this—if the Sacred Cave wants to murder you, and I’m with you, I’m going to be hurt in the fallout.”
As her words hit home, he jerked and turned away.
She followed, knowing she had him. “So I’ll go in alone, you can sit right here outside the entrance, and if I need you, I’ll call. I promise.”
A compromise. He could compromise. “I’ll come with you into the cave, sit by the entrance, and if you need me, I can respond immediately.” She started to argue, but he put his hand over her mouth. “Take it or leave it. I wait for you inside, or I go with you to find the prophecy.”
She nodded.
He took his hand away, lightly kissed her lips; then lying on his belly, he shoved the coil of rope forward and crawled into the cave.
As soon as his head breached the cave, that familiar sense of otherworldliness surrounded him.
It was exactly as he remembered it. Light leaked in behind him, and the Sacred Cave itself glowed with a diffused light that seeped from the stone. The walls were alive with cave drawings that worshipped the magic cave, words written in languages long vanished, and here and there, the desperate scratches made by a dying soul. The ceiling near the entrance was low, but gradually sloped up and back, extending into darkness. The floor sloped down and back, into the darkness at the center of the earth, or the home of the gods, or heaven, or hell. No one knew. No one who had followed the cave down had ever returned.
The fire pit was there, too, hollowed out of the hard rock.
His father, Cripple Eagle, would have scolded him for failing to bring wood to build a fire and appease the gods.
But Aaron knew the gods would not be appeased until his own blood stained the rocks.
Rosamund followed close on his heels. He heard the intake of her breath, the soft whisper of her voice. “This is magnificent. It is . . .” She searched for the word.
“Holy,” he said.
“Yes.”
Even through his sense of incipient disaster, he had to smile at the awe and excitement she wore so easily. There was nothing of artifice in Rosamund; she saw the cave, the writings, the light that came from some mysterious source, and she worshipped the sight.
If the cave was indeed sentient, it must bask in her admiration.
She walked toward the pictures of dancing antelope drawn in ocher on the wall. “I’ve never seen anything like this. In a
National Geographic
layout, of course, but not in real life. These must have been drawn forty thousand years ago.”
“When the world was young,” he said.
The cave was quiet. Waiting.
“The art close to the entrance is the oldest. The farther we go in the cave, the newer the work.” Eyes glued to the walls, she walked along the smooth floor, heading for the back where the floor fell away into darkness.
“Rosamund.”
She stopped and looked back inquiringly.
“Watch where you place your feet.”
She glanced around, focused, and nodded. “Right.”
“Look for the prophecy.”
She swept the walls with her gaze, found what she was looking for, and knelt on the floor in front of a scrawl that extended for two lines, one on top of the other, for a six-foot length. “This is it.” Brow furrowed, she studied the symbols.
As she did, a soft tremor shook the earth. The grinding of one rock against another made him look up toward the ceiling; sunshine now shone through jagged cracks above. His heart began a slow, deep thumping. “Did you feel that?”
“Yes. I’m sure it’s fine,” she said absently.
As if her words commanded it, the earth stilled.
In a voice he kept deliberately low and casual, he asked, “Can you read the prophecy?”
“No . . .”
“Use Bala’s Stone.”
She turned her head and looked at him, and he clearly saw the misery in her eyes. “I want to be able to read it myself.”
“Because you want to
prove
it wasn’t the stone that translated the symbols in her journal?”
A steady wind sprang up from nowhere, and went nowhere, ruffling Aaron’s hair, then moving to Rosamund and brushing one lock from her shoulder.
The cave was taunting him. Mocking him.
Threatening her.
The tension in him ratcheted up another notch. “We need to leave as quickly as possible. Please. Use the stone.”
She stared again at the script, squinting, tilting her head, trying everything to force sense out of the prophecy. Just when he was ready to shout with frustration, she opened the travel pack at her waist and brought out the stone. The rock wall zigged and zagged, a natural surface that made her job difficult. She held the stone an inch above the plane where Sacmis had written her final words, and skimmed the script, right to left, then down to the next line, and right to left again.
She frowned. Shook her head. Did it again.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “If you still can’t read it, it doesn’t matter. You’ve tried your best, and it’s time to leave.”
“It’s not that. I can read it. I can comprehend it perfectly.” Rosamund stared at him with concern. “According to her writing, she knew we were coming after her. She speaks directly to us.”
“What are you talking about?” He took two steps into the cave.
Rosamund read, “ ‘Greetings, woman of books and man of mist. . . .’ ” Rosamund faltered.
“That sounds like us, all right.” Two more steps into the cave.
Rosamund kept her head turned away from him, and continued. “ ‘I foresaw the day you would come after me/Seeking knowledge.’ ”
“She saw a vision of us chasing her for her prophecy.”
“That’s what she says, but I can’t believe . . .” Rosamund took a breath. “ ‘With my last breath/I led you astray/Clues placed like bread crumbs/In a trail that leads into the trap.’ ”
Two more steps. Danger humming in his ears. “Rosamund, let’s go.”
She didn’t budge. “ ‘Who would do such a thing/ in malice aforethought?/I, Sacmis, descendant of Isis, prophetess to the great/have done this/The Others are my brothers/The Others are my sisters/The battle is joined and we have won.’ ”
The trap set two hundred and fifty years ago had been sprung. “Rosamund. Leave. Now.”
“I misread everything.” Rosamund wrung her hands. “Sacmis says she’s one of the Others, and every bit of research I’ve performed, every translation I have made, is wrong.”
“Shit happens. Especially when we’re dealing with the Others.” With all the emphasis of a man on the edge, he said, “Rosamund, we need to leave.”
Impatient and upset, she raised her voice. “If you’re afraid, Aaron, leave. I need to stay until I understand what’s happening here. How could someone who lived two hundred and fifty years ago see us coming?”
“How can a cave, a hole in the earth, be sacred? How can it demand sacrifices, deem who could live or die?”
“It can’t. It
doesn’t
!” Rosamund came to her feet, fists clenched.
At last, at long last, he lost patience. “Yes . . . it . . . does. I was born in the Sacred Cave, abandoned by a mother who left me to die as the gods wished, but my foster father stole me away, and for that insolence he paid with his leg. The cave smashed it, trapping him, so he cut off his own leg with his knife.”
Rosamund took a horrified breath.
Aaron didn’t care about her horror. Not now. Not while he remembered. “I knew the story. I was raised on the story. But when I reached adolescence, I wanted to go to the Sacred Cave, to see the place where I had been born, to beg the gods to let me live a long and full life free from fear. My father warned me the gods were never lenient. But I was young. I was confident. I thought I could interfere in the eternal battle between good and evil, and escape unscathed.” He took a harsh breath. “My father insisted on coming with me. I had to carry him most of the way. The cave—” Aaron waved a hand around. “This is the cave I saw that day. We burned new wood in the fire pit, sprinkled the logs with herbs and flowers, and I spoke to the cave, to the gods, whoever they were, telling them who I was and asking humbly for my life.”
She watched him, violet eyes wary. “What happened?”
“The Sacred Cave doesn’t give a damn about humble. It wants blood, and that day, it wanted mine. The cave creaked and groaned. My father told me to get out. But the rocks were falling all around me, and I couldn’t make it to the entrance. I didn’t see how either of us was going to survive. It was impossible to survive. But I wanted so badly to be out of that place, and then . . . I was. I didn’t know how, but I was. I waited for him to follow. That was the first time that I . . . turned . . .”
“Turned what?”
He found himself staring at the spot where he had last seen his father, at the rocks still stained with his blood and brains.
Rosamund’s insistent voice broke into his reverie. “Aaron? What happened to your father?”
“He couldn’t follow me. A rock had fallen and smashed his head.” In a rage of anguish at the memory, Aaron grasped the neck of his shirt and tore the material. “He rescued me. He raised me. He loved me. And I killed him.”
“You didn’t kill him. The cave killed him.” She realized what she’d said, and caught herself. “I mean, if the Sacred Cave could be said to kill someone, that killed him.”
“I wandered the forest for years afterward, alone, surviving the most bitter of winters, the briefest of summers. I hunted. I planted. I starved. I was looking for death, but no matter how hard I looked, I never went back to the Sacred Cave.” He looked around. “And yet . . . here I am. I should have known—I could never fight destiny.”
“But that story doesn’t make sense,” she said gently. “Why would the cave want your blood? Why wouldn’t it be satisfied with the sacrifice of your father?”
“Because of this.” Stripping his shirt off his shoulders, Aaron turned and bared his back to her. He knew what she saw—a tattoolike mark on his back that looked like two crumpled wings on either side of his spine. “I was abandoned by my mother, and when that happened, I was given this mark, and a gift.” Pulling his torn shirt back on, he faced her and told her the truth. “I am one of the Abandoned Ones.”
At last, he had shocked her into listening, into the first stages of belief.
But still she fought.
She shook her head in denial. She backed away from him. Backed away as if he were something unclean. “No. That’s a myth.”
Relentlessly, he followed, determined to make her see the truth at last. “More than that, I am one of the Chosen Ones.”
A small rock gave way beneath her foot. She stumbled and sat down hard.
“If the cave claims me, my power is part of it forever,” he said.
Still she shook her head. “That’s impossible. My father didn’t believe in stories about the Abandoned Ones.”
“Didn’t he? Didn’t he really? I think he did. I think he more than believed. I think he was married to one of the Abandoned Ones.”
“What do you mean?” She sprang onto her knees. “What are you saying?”
“You don’t know your maternal grandparents, do you?”
“My mother was an orphan. So what?” Rosamund looked up at him, her violet eyes half bewildered, half enraged, on the verge of a revelation she didn’t want to face.
“She had tattoos on her fingers. She didn’t know who her parents were. She was gifted, making leaps in the translation of ancient languages that were almost magical.” Like a sprinter in a race, Aaron crouched on the balls of his feet with his fingers touching the rocky floor. He looked into her eyes. “Her parents abandoned her as my parents abandoned me, and at that moment, she was given a gift . . . the kind of gift that could get her killed.”
“She was
not
one of the Chosen Ones.” Rosamund rose to her feet, and her eyes shone hot beneath her glasses.