On the Hunt

Chapter Nine

Neal caught Viviana before her head could hit the floor.

Panic clawed at him, but he kept his cool because he knew it was the only thing that could help her now.

He had no idea what was wrong with her, but it had something to do with his luceria. They'd found the gadget, her promise was fulfilled, and the luceria came off. Just like it was supposed to.

Viviana, however, was not supposed to pass out.

Neal had no idea how many other nasties might be running around in here. He needed to get her out to safety. Or, even better, get her to one of the Sanguinar—their healers—so they could figure out what had gone wrong.

He fished the luceria out from her clothing and fastened it back around his neck for safekeeping. He hated wearing it again, hated thinking that his life would go back to being what it had been—filled with pain and impending death. A life without Viviana.

He had to convince her to give them more of a chance together. A few hours weren't enough for her to know what he did: that they belonged together. She hadn't been raised seeing the proof the way he had. There was no way for her to know except through faith.

He needed her to give him that faith, for just a while longer.

Neal carried her to the truck, lifting her inside. Her eyes fluttered open and her pupils were tiny dots of terrified black. "Give it back," she croaked out, her voice rough, as if she'd been screaming for hours.

He smoothed her mussed hair away from her face, hoping to comfort her. "What, sweetheart?"

Her eyes fixed on his throat and her chin began to quiver. "You can't take it away from me. It's mine. I need it." Her gaze moved up to his. "I need you."

Neal was too shocked to speak. He never imagined she'd want to stay with him, only hoped to hear those words.

Her voice was strained. "Please. I've been alone too long. I know where I belong now."

"Where's that?"

"With you. With your people. My people."

She reached up, her slim fingers curling around the luceria. It fell away from his throat and coiled around her hand as if trying to get closer.

Neal took it from her and fastened it around her throat. He didn't want to take the chance that she'd change her mind, so he sliced through his shirt, scoring a line over his heart. "My life for yours, Viviana," he vowed.

And then he held his breath. She had so much power over him. She didn't know all the details of their union, or how his life was in her hands. He didn't want guilt to factor into her promise, so he kept his mouth shut. He'd take what she wanted to give him and count himself lucky for whatever time with her he had.

"I'm staying with you, Neal. You're the only person in the world whom I can be with and not feel alone. I'm not letting that go. I'm not letting you go. I think I love you."

Neal's heart nearly burst with joy. He never thought he'd get lucky enough to have someone like Viviana in his life, tied to him by both love and duty. She may not have known her own history, but they were going to make their future together.

As he watched, the luceria shrank to fit her slender neck, deepening to a rich bronze color that suited her skin perfectly. The Bronze Lady.

"I know I love you," he told her, and then he kissed her. It was sweet and full of hope and promise, just like the rest of their lives together would be.

CRYSTAL SKULL

JESSICA ANDERSEN

Chapter One

Deep in a rain forest south of the Mexican border

"For an archaeologist who's made the discovery of her career, you don't seem all that happy," Javier said from the far side of the underground cavern, where he was systematically photographing a panel of carved hieroglyphics. Wearing jeans, scarred boots, and a UFC T-shirt, the ex-wrestler handled the high-tech camera as expertly as he wielded their portable excavator and the double-barreled shotgun that was his constant companion out in the field.

Natalie grimaced. Should've known he wasn't down here just to take pictures. Her grizzled dig coordinator—and good friend—wasn't big on being belowground. The others must've deputized him.

Settling her headlamp more firmly over her dark ponytail, which was damp at the ends from the cool condensation that slicked everything inside the ancient temple, she focused on the painted clay pots she was supposed to be examining. "I'm just tired."

Which was true. The members of her six-person team had been pulling double shifts ever since she had discovered the cave two days earlier. They were racing to catalog the artifacts before things hit meltdown territory with the locals. Which was imminent.

She had all the necessary permits, but the residents of the nearby village had stopped caring about the paperwork the moment she had peeled back the overgrown vegetation to reveal a cave entrance carved with images of winged, humanoid creatures that matched the local legends of the bloodthirsty bat-demons known as camazotz.

Add to that the approaching equinox—which was supposedly when the creatures came up from the underworld and terrorized the villagers—and the fact that a local jaguar had recently developed a taste for livestock, and she had herself a village on edge. There was real potential for a pitchfork-wielding mob to descend on the dig at any moment. They probably would've been there already, if it hadn't been for her connection to American ex-pat and local hero JT Craig.

And how much did that reminder suck?

Javier snorted. "Girl, you showed up everyone who said you were crazy for turning down a season at Tikal and bushwhacking out into the middle of nowhere instead. But you did it. You found a new freaking ruin. Tired or not, stressed or not, you should be happy-dancing from here to base camp and back again. So what gives?"

She shrugged, the motion pulling where her lightweight camp shirt stuck to her skin. "There's no such thing as a 'new ruin.' It's an oxymoron."

"You're the moron if you think I'm letting you change the subject. So give. What's wrong?"

"I'm—" Fine, she started to say, then cut herself off because she knew that wouldn't fly with Javier, especially when she wasn't fine. She was restless and stirred up, itchy and twitchy. "I just keep thinking that I'm missing something, that I'm not where I'm supposed to be."

And wasn't that the story of her life?

"We've gotten this far following your instincts. I'm not stopping now."

Which was true. Others might think she was too brave for her own good, going off into a particularly volatile section of rain forest based on her gut feelings and the devil that kept pushing her to do more, be more, but Javier and their teammates followed her without complaint.

Still, though, his tone had her glancing over to where he was fiddling with the tripod-mounted camera and attached laptop. "Why do I get the feeling there's a 'but' coming?"

"But if you're feeling off, are you sure that it's about the dig and not about—"

"Don't say it," she interrupted, scowling back at her pots.

"Somebody has to."

"Or not. I've never let my personal life interfere with the work before, and I'm not going to start with JT. Weren't you the one who told me that I've got the dig-site-boyfriend thing down to an art?"

He hadn't meant it as a compliment, either. Ever since he'd married Nikki, the team's bubbly computer guru, he'd been busting on Natalie's long string of short-term, no-harm-no-foul relationships. He had seen her ten-week relationship with the gray-eyed ex-Army Ranger as a step in the right direction.

Or not.

"This time was different. You and JT were—" He broke off when someone shouted his name from topside, the word echoing along the stone tunnel that led down to the sacred chamber.

"What?" he bellowed back, setting up a reverb that made Natalie wince.

"We could use you up here," Aaron called.

Natalie breathed a sigh of relief at the interruption. There was no point in talking about her and JT. What was done was done . . . and they were way done.

Javier scowled. "Dang it. I just finished setting up this shot. Couldn't the crisis du jour have waited a few minutes?"

They both knew he could've shot five frames in the time it had taken him to set up this one. He'd been stalling so he could push her some more on why she'd ended things with JT. What he didn't know was that it had been the other way around.

Waving him off, she said, "Go ahead. I'll take care of the pictures."

"Come topside when you're done. You should eat something." The and we're not done with this conversation was implied.

Once he was gone, she tried to clear her mind and focus on the work at hand. She took the picture he had set up, then started to focus on the next set of glyphs while the attached laptop added the image to the composite they were assembling of the entire carved panel. But instead of framing the next shot, she found herself shifting aside the camera so she could get up close and personal with the hieroglyphs that made up the huge, intricate text.

For a moment, she let herself imagine the artisan who had chiseled the words into the cave wall.

He would have known who he was, where he belonged within the hierarchy of the ancients: The scribes had been more than peasants but less than royalty, falling roughly equal with ball players and engineers. On some level she envied that—not the stratification, but the identity.

He had probably been a priest, given the religious overtones of the cave. He would have worked in there, hour after hour, painstakingly carving each symbol of a language that had allowed its users to embellish at will, turning words into art.

So beautiful, she thought, trailing her fingers along the carved panel.

It was also an enigma. Everything else in the room belonged to the good guys: The altar on the opposite wall was a carved chac-mool that honored the rain god; the winged serpent motifs on the walls represented the creator god, Kulkulkan; the carved and painted rainbows up near the ceiling were a reference to the goddess Ixchel; and the ball-game scenes painted on the clay pots she had been examining paid homage to the sun god, Kinich Ahau. All sky gods, positive influences.