There was no other word for it than awesome. She didn’t have an expert’s ability to decipher the ancient symbols, but she recognized the glyphs that represented the passage of time, and dates, and the vaster measurements by which the Maya had calculated the march of eons. They had been obsessed with time, those ancient ones—time far before their first civilization, and time to come long after they had vanished.
She stroked the light down the surface of the wall to the more conventional relief carved under the rows of glyphs. It showed a man—a lord—in full-feathered Maya regalia. But though everything else in the scene was perfectly depicted, there was something wrong with the man’s figure. It seemed to be cleanly cut off halfway through the body. He was shown walking purposefully, in profile, directly into a wall. And the wall bisected his body, as if half of him had melted into it. She’d never seen anything like that before, not in any book or exhibit or in Tikal itself.
She moved cautiously forward again; her toe brushed something that rattled and rolled under her foot. Instinctively she aimed the flashlight down, expecting rubble, though the floor here was clean of it.
Instead, she found bones.
Human bones.
Mac had never been the flighty sort. She didn’t jump back or scream. That kind of stereotypical female behavior had been left out of the mold that had shaped her sturdy, too-rangy body.
So she only looked. That the bones had been here for some time was evident by their condition. There was not a scrap of flesh left on any of them, and only traces of rotted fabric that must once have been clothing.
She followed the loose trail of leg bones to where the torso had collapsed close to the wall. Somehow the rib cage, vertebrae, clavicles, and skull had fallen in almost a straight line. Or perhaps someone had laid them out there.
Morbid curiosity brought her closer. The bones were large; masculine, she guessed. Someone who’d been tall, well built. She winced at the grinning skull. Why did people refer to them as grinning, when there was nothing funny about the end of a once-vital life?
She gripped her pendant again, comforted by its inexplicable heat. Who were you? A guide like that boy who led me here? A tourist who made a fatal mistake in the jungle?
She knew there were things that could kill, even so close to a tourist center. Jaguars were too shy, and there were few predators, but nature could set traps for the unwary. And diseases. And violence, for Guatemala was not yet an easy nation.
Mac found herself rapidly losing her enthusiasm for the adventure. Wasn’t she here to mourn the death of someone who’d died in a place just like this? Whose bones might be lying, untended, where no one would ever find them—
Her thoughts dwindled to incoherence as the beam of her flashlight came to rest at the base of the skull. Something lay among the vertebrae—something slightly darker, more regular. Familiar. A stone chip, drilled through the top, the remains of a rotted leather cord twisted through it.
Mac dropped into a crouch and leaned closer, careful not to disturb the bones.
And she knew. She knew before she saw the chip close up, before she dared to touch it and lift it to her eyes.
She knew exactly how it would match her own pendant, how it would be the other half of a whole once broken in two. When she pressed the irregular edge of the chip against that of her own, it fit like a hand in a glove.
“Oh, God,” she said hoarsely. “It can’t be. The world doesn’t work this way.”
No. Life didn’t do things like this—make it so easy, so convenient, giving you a guide to lead you right to where he’d died, so close to Tikal, in a place a hundred others would have seen before you. This could not be Liam O’Shea.
But she knew it was. She knew with a certainty beyond reason.
“Liam,” she said, tasting the name. This was all that remained of that handsome, arrogant, alive young man she’d seen in the photo.