The Bloodgate Warrior (2 page)

Cradled between three massive volcanoes, Lake Atitlán claimed to be the most beautiful—and possibly the deepest—lake in the world. I couldn’t bear to look at it.

Water closing over my head. Cold. So cold. Blood on the water.

Shuddering at the memory, I shielded my eyes and scanned the house again. Rows of coffee fields curved up the side of the volcano. Birds sang in the trees, but I didn’t hear the annoying call of the quetzal that kept me up all night. With the huge bushes and towering trees in all directions, I could almost picture what Eden had been like. I’d never known such an incredible, lush green before coming to Guatemala.

“Are you sure this is it?”

“Of course I’m sure.” He smiled at me fondly. “The house is still deeded to Carla Guzmán Gonzales, your grandmother and my great aunt.”

Nana had set my feet on this adventure by giving me the journal.

No, drowning started this little nightmare.

“It’s probably not livable,” Natalie warned me. But she couldn’t hide the quiver of excitement. “No electricity. I bet you have to use an outhouse.”

“No one has lived here for at least thirty years, but we keep an eye on things,” José said. “The workers are here nearly every day in the fields, and I come once a month to check the house. With some work, it would be a beautiful
palacio
.”

Staring at the house where my grandmother had been born, I couldn’t deny a stirring deep in my heart. I imagined the veranda cleared of debris, the trees hacked back to manageable growth so I could sit out here, drinking coffee as the sun rose over the lake. “Do the coffee fields belong to the house?”

“Yes, but you would not have any worry in that regard. The fields have been managed by the Guzmáns for as long as I can remember. They do a very good job, and the money has protected the land and the home all these years.”

“I had no idea Nana owned a coffee plantation.”

So much of my family history had been a mystery until Nana passed the journal to me. Then I’d learned way more than I’d ever imagined. Why had she waited so long to tell me? Because she didn’t believe it herself? Or maybe after my mother’s death, she’d been afraid that maybe the journal’s claims were all too real. Thank God Natalie was with me to keep my feet grounded and help me differentiate between reality and what could only be fantasy.

We poked around inside the house a bit but once I heard something rustling in the pile of leaves that had blown inside, we quickly left. Natalie was right—the house wasn’t exactly livable. Not without a lot of work. As I set up the details of the cleanup with José, she stared down at the lake. I could almost hear her thoughts, because she was no doubt thinking the same thing.

A vacation house in Guatemala was exactly what I needed, even though I hadn’t known this place existed until a few weeks ago.

“How long have I been bugging you to take a vacation?” Natalie turned to me, grinning, but the concern in her eyes cut me to the quick. “You need this, Cass.”

I nodded and some of the shadows eased from her eyes. “It just seems like a fairy tale.”

“You deserve a fairy tale.” She tried to laugh, but we both knew how close I’d come to dying. She’d been the one to give me mouth-to-mouth until the paramedics arrived. We’d always been as close as sisters, but now I owed her my life, too. “Besides, whoever heard of a timeshare salesperson who never actually goes on vacation herself?”

Grateful that she returned to our long-standing banter instead of driving me to tears, I gave her a friendly shove. “The top salespeople never go on vacation, silly. We’re too busy making money selling
other
people their dream vacations.”

“Well, you’ve never sold a view like this.” She swept her hand toward the glistening lake and the hazy volcanoes in the distance. “This is pretty dreamy, Cass.”

I could only nod in agreement.

“Hey, you never finished your story, José. Why does the quetzal have a red breast?”

Thanks to Nana, I knew this part of the legend.

“Believing the horse Alvarado rode to be a part of a terrible man-beast, Técun Úman beheaded the creature. Unharmed, Alvarado took the opportunity to stab the great warrior in the heart with his spear. As Técun lay dying, his quetzal flew down to lie weeping on his breast until he drew his last breath. Ever since, the quetzal’s breast has been stained with Técun’s blood as a reminder.”

“A reminder of what? The Spaniards’ cruelty?”

José turned to me with a peculiar look on his face, careful and reverent. Of course. He’d heard Nana’s legends too. “That someday, he will return.”

Uneasy, I jerked my gaze back to the lake. I didn’t know if I could ever see so much water and not remember. The sound of crashing metal on metal. Thick smoke on the air, the stench of gasoline. The screams. Our small pontoon had been broadsided by a party boat, more of a yacht than Lake Taneycomo could really support.

Bone-chilling cold water had closed over my head while fireworks exploded behind my eyes. Blood on the water.
My
blood. I had died in that cold darkness.

I thought near-death experiences were supposed to be tunnels of light and a blessed feeling of peace, but I’d seen an obsidian pyramid. A man had pulled me out of the water and lifted me to the sun blazing at the top. I remembered the feel of his big hands on my back, the heat of his body bringing my cold, dead limbs back to life, his mouth on mine as he gave me his breath. Long blue-green feathers had hung in my face along with his hair, as shiny and black as the pyramid.

Most of all, I remembered him whispering in my ear.
“You’re well named, Cassandra, for you can bring light to my people. Help me return. Only you can bring me through the gate.”

Even now, that distinctive growling voice made my bones want to dissolve my body into a pile of goo.
Help me return.

* * *

Sitting in the courtyard beside a tinkling fountain at our hotel,
Palacio de Doña Leonor
, I could well imagine what my grandmother’s house would look like with a little care. The soft adobe walls gleamed with all the colors of the setting sun. Simple yet elegant furnishings paired with dark wood trim and authentic antiques provided a warm welcome.

I sipped my wine, waiting on Natalie to look up from the ancient book she held on her lap. With utmost care she turned the delicate pages, her eyes wider by the moment. At my instruction, she’d started at the back of the book with my brand-new entries, although I had her skip the more embarrassing ones about how sultry my dreams had been.

Now she was getting to the really good part. I could tell because she was turning the pages faster and faster, her mouth moving slightly as she scanned the words. The older entries were difficult to read, both because of the language and the faded ink, although they weren’t originals. Someone had painstakingly copied them and newer pages had been inserted to translate the original entries into English.

“This can’t possibly be real,” she finally said. Her gaze darted up to my face but leaped back to the page so she could keep reading. “If it were real, it’d be in Mayan hieroglyphs or something. Right?” She unfolded a stiff page and saw the pictures, dots and bars. “Oh, wow.”

“The family legend passed down from mother to daughter is that Luisa did at first write what happened in her native language. Her daughter, Leonor, translated it into Spanish and wrote it in her diary. Nana made the notes in English after she came to America.”

Natalie opened her mouth to continue arguing, so I leaped ahead with what I’d learned. “I thought the same thing. There’s no way for us to know what those old pages really say. So I took it to a friend who’s teaching at Drury. She put me in touch with another professor who was extremely anxious to keep the diary for further study. He dated the paper and ink to at least early 1800s, if not older. The originals probably disintegrated a long time ago in the jungle. I wouldn’t leave it with him but he did admit that at first glance, the translation was accurate.”

Natalie looked up at the picture hanging on the wall at the main entrance of the hotel. “So that woman is like your great-great-great-something-grandmother?”

Leonor de Alvarado y Xiotenega Tecubalsi, daughter of Pedro de Alvarado and a Tlaxacalan princess, the first
mestiza
born in Guatemala after the Spanish Conquest.

“Something like that.”

“And the…curse. It’s exactly what José told us about the legend today.”

“He knows the tale, too, and assures me not just my family believes that Técun Úman is supposed to come back. The people just don’t know how.”

“You know I love you…”

Nodding, I held my hand up to pause her rational explanations, because I’d already told them to myself. “But none of this makes sense. I know that. How do you explain what happened to me during the accident? I didn’t know any of this before that, yet I saw…” My voice broke as my throat grew tight and painful. I didn’t want to remember.

Natalie closed her hand over mine. “I know. It would be so much easier to explain as a hallucination brought on by head trauma if you’d learned about this book before the accident.”

But I didn’t. I didn’t even know Nana was from Guatemala until I’d started asking questions.

Yet I hadn’t dared asked the most important question. Was this what drove my mother crazy? Had she started seeing weird things, haunted by constant dreams? Had some strange otherworldly bird been screeching outside her window until she committed suicide to escape?

“That’s why I have to know,” I whispered. “I have to find out the truth. Being here will help.” I stared out over the rolling hills toward Lake Atitlán and felt an unfamiliar ache in my chest. Was it merely the beautiful scenery, or an odd sense of coming home? “This is where it all began.”

Chapter Two

August 2012, Cassandra Gonzales.

Maybe I wouldn’t feel so guilty about the dreams if they weren’t so…

Raw. Uncomfortable. Even violent sometimes.

He scares me with his intensity, and yet I love every minute of it. Don’t get me wrong, my dream lover can be incredibly tender. The way he cups my face in his big, powerful hands and strokes my cheek with his thumbs makes me melt, but he’s relentless too. He won’t let me pretend or hide or lie about what it is that I’ve come to expect—and want—from him.

God, it makes my face hot with shame just writing this down. Yet I’m squirming in my chair, too, and hurrying so I can slip between the luxurious hotel sheets and get to him as quickly as possible. Even though once I’m there, in his arms, I’ll fight. I always do.

It’s like this weird challenge I unknowingly instigated. I’ve never hit a man I’m having sex with. I’ve never scratched and bit, yelled and cursed. I’m angry at him for exposing me like this, stripping away all the niceties and modern veneer to reveal the helpless, quivering ball of need I become.

It’s all a dream, I know that, but he’s seen a side of me that no one else has. Not even Natalie. What would she think to see me screaming and fighting and running from a man one moment, only to eagerly take him into my body as deep and hard as he’ll go the next?

He accepts all my struggles effortlessly, enjoying the fight so he can force me to surrender. He wants me whimpering, begging, pleading, held down and helpless before he slides into me. It doesn’t matter what I do, how I struggle—he’ll always be able to defeat me.

I’m an idiot, right? Why play these sick games in my sleep? It’s not like I’d ever want to surrender to my lover like this in real life. It’s just a dream that I can’t control. A secret fantasy that makes me blush. That’s all.

God help me if this dream lover actually shows up in the flesh.

I want to find him. I want to believe that his legend lives on for a reason. But I honestly don’t know what I’d do if I succeed.

Yet like an idiot, I hope I fall asleep quickly tonight.

* * *

His hands clamped on my upper arms, hauling me up out of the water to him.
The dream again.

I fought to wake up. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want him to—

I flailed and managed to land a glancing blow to his head, but he chuckled deep in his chest, more like purring than any sound a human would make.

“I’m happy to see you too, Cassie.”

I jerked and twisted against his grip with all my strength, but he didn’t slacken his hold. He didn’t even try to restrain or evade my blows. Each time he pulled me through the dream, I fought. I tried to fly free of him, but I couldn’t escape. We both knew it, and the ease in which he held me to his chest only infuriated me more. I dug my nails into his shoulders like claws, ripping my way down his meaty biceps.

His breath hissed out, his eyes slitting dangerously, but he didn’t try to stop me.

“Don’t call me that. I hate it. It makes me sound like a little girl.”

The growing darkness in his eyes eased a bit. “Your mother used to call you that.”

I shuddered, instinctively ducking my head and curling my body tighter into a ball. “Get out of my mind!”

His lips brushed my temple. “Forgive me, lady, but that is impossible.”

Tenderness from a massive warrior who could crush me with his smallest finger. That easily, he made me melt against him. He had to have felt the tension leaking out of my body, but he didn’t make any move to further his advantage.

Disgusted at myself for letting him win so quickly, I turned to questions. Analytics and reason, not insanity, because I had to be insane to think any of this was real.

“Tell me your name.”

He laughed softly. “You heard a rousing tale about me this afternoon when you toured your grandmother’s property.”

I shook my head, but that only made my lips brush his chest…and the rougher scar tissue over his heart. Supposedly where Alvarado’s spear had pierced his chest and killed him. “If you’re really Técun Úman, the Guatemalan national hero, then how can we understand each other? He died in 1524!”

“Magic.”

Of course. I forced out a derisive snort. “I don’t believe in magic.”