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.
The glyph panel, though, was different.
The nine rows of text—for the nine layers of the underworld, Xibalba—looked like normal Mayan hieroglyphs . . . except that in every pictograph that should have contained a human or animal figure, there was a bat-demon instead, a camazotz, with sharply pointed ears, tricornered mouth, pushed-in nose, long fangs and talons, and strangely tattered wings.
The locals believed the ancients had built the temple to appease the camazotz, and that she risked awakening more of the creatures by excavating the sacred site. But although Cooter, her crazy-brilliant Mayanist mentor, had harped on the value of trusting the natives to know more about their homes than any visitor—however well educated—could, logic said that the legends of the camazotz had come from the temple itself, and maybe costumes worn by the members of the bat cult that had probably worshiped there. Not the other way around.
"Chicken and egg," she murmured, trailing her fingers along the writing.
The wonky glyphs meant that she couldn't read the text. Instead, she would have to farm it out to an expert, which was why the photographs, tracings, and other records were a top priority.
So get back to work. But the same gut instinct that had prompted her to turn down the safe-bet Tikal project and disappear into the jungle, and that had eventually led her to the cave, now rooted her in place.
A chill prickled across her skin, an almost electric crackle that was how her gut feelings sometimes hit her. She was missing something. But what?
Frowning, she stared at the panel, touched the carved surface. The silence in the echoing chamber amplified the small sounds of her breathing, making the air seem to throb with the quiet.
Her fingertips scraped along the carved stone, from ridge to dip, from one bat-faced demon to the next, the next, and—to something else.
She froze, her pulse going zero-to-sixty as the shape jumped out at her.
There was a bird among the bats.
And it wasn't just any bird. It was the bird.
The parrot's head sat atop three stacked circles and wore a flaring headdress of curling feathers in a glyph that was achingly, acutely familiar. Yet the parrot's head didn't correspond to any pictograph in the historical record. She knew that for a fact . . . because she had been searching for it ever since her thirteenth birthday.
"Holy. Shit." She touched the small silver pendant she wore around her neck. She had found the glyph!
All the restless, edgy energy that had plagued her since she'd first set foot inside the cave—hell, in the forest itself—suddenly concentrated itself in her chest. A hot, hard buzz seared through her system, saying: Do it.
But do what?
Swallowing hard, she touched the parrot's-head pictogram, stroking a finger along the feathered headdress and down the curved beak. It was really there, really real. It was—