The 52nd (The 52nd Saga Book 1) (27 page)

“What?”

I breathed deeply and looked across the pond. “My blackouts haven’t been as nice as I’ve made them out to be. I see things. A lot of things. You already know that. But lately, when I’m there, instead of fearing what I see or hear, I walk toward
it.”

“You
what?”

I tightened the blanket around my legs, worried about what he thought. “At first it was uncontrollable—I couldn’t stop walking toward it . . . the screaming. But the more I go there, the more my fear of that place goes away, and I feel curious.”

He looked betrayed, and I felt
guilty.

“I can’t explain the crazy feeling, but it scares me to death. It’s that emotion, Lucas, that desire that makes me afraid. I’m afraid it would control me again for Solstice. I feel dark
inside.”

His body was against mine before I finished my sentence. He wrapped his arms around me tightly. “I promised you I would never let anything happen to you, and I won’t, even if I have to protect you from yourself.”

I drank deeply of his tropical scent and tried to control my pounding heart. “Thank
you.”

He squeezed me somewhat more tightly, his hands beginning to slide down my body, but then he backed away suddenly with an apologetic
look.

“Sorry. That was wrong of me. I shouldn’t have—” he began quickly.

“It was
just
a hug,” I said incredulously.

He shook his head. “Do not tempt me, Zara.”

“You came on to
me!”

“Aztecs one-oh-one. Because of the nature of my living being, of my very existence, I feel I have to devour everything virtuous about
you.”

“Your godlike nature, or your Aztec
nature?”

“Both!” he replied. He stood to pace in frustration. “After the transformation, every human feeling I ever carried increased exponentially, while everything I felt physically went dead. But now, for some reason, every fiber of my being is on
fire.”

My eyes followed him as he moved. “What do you
mean?”

“When my body became immortal, I could sit at the bottom of a frozen lake for over an hour and be perfectly okay. I only need to eat every other month or so, I sleep two hours at most a week, my facial hair grows out of control, and I could bleed for days but never die. My body would heal itself, and I would go on living. Absolutely no limits to my physical state, never have been, until now, with you. Something about you makes my insides crazy—a crazy you’ve no idea
of.”

“Then give me an idea.” I hoped he’d kiss me
again.

But he froze, his inner struggle growing clearer when his eyes hardened. Instead, he picked a piece of crumbling stone out of the snow and chucked it. As it slid across the frozen pond, he bent and picked up another piece, repeating the same throw. It was a good distraction.

He spoke with his back to me, throwing stone after stone. “I am anxious, jittery, and nervous.”

“You, nervous?” I didn’t mean to laugh out loud, but it came out whether I liked it or
not.

He turned to me and cocked his head. “Yes.”

My butt froze to the tartan as he sat back down and stared at me intently.

“But mostly, the hole I felt my whole life, the longing for . . . something, has now been filled, and I can’t satisfy it the way I want to. And it’s burned me like fire since the day I met
you.”

I felt brittle before his honesty, afraid to move. He chuckled—perhaps I was turning the color of my
scarf.

“Aren’t you going to say something?” he
asked.

A nerdy laugh slipped through my lips. “Come on, Lucas. Being you can’t be that
bad.”

“Zara, for five hundred years, I’ve felt nothing but emptiness. There’s nowhere I can go to find someone who shares the same life. If I could have seen then what I see now, a life damned to solitude and unhappiness, I’m not sure I would have chosen this
path.”

“Don’t say
that.”

“Why not? It’s true. And now that I’ve finally found something special, I still can’t have
her.”

I blushed and looked away, at a loss for
words.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that,” he added in a
rush.

“Yes, you did. You’re choosing not to have her.” I couldn’t believe I’d pressured him—or that I’d referred to myself in the third
person.

This time, it was the immortal who froze while I took my turn staring at him hard. “You’re just as afraid as I am, aren’t you?” I said when he lowered his head toward the blanket.

He looked up through his lashes, his voice so close but so distant in its softness. “You and I . . . it’s too dangerous.”

“More dangerous than me and the Underworld
god?”

He looked away again, to the tree line, where the sunlight was strengthening. The snow crystals seemed to have been embedded in the branches.

“My feelings for you have grown, so much that I feel as though our relationship should be forbidden. The kiss on the mountain was because I was selfish. I was used to taking what I wanted. I wasn’t thinking right that night. But I care for you more now than I did then, and us being together is too much of a risk, as I keep trying to explain. It scares me, Zara, because
they
have the power to destroy our world if you make
me
weak. And you can get seriously hurt. Don’t you see that?” He said it, finally, what Valentina had presumed all along. His voice, his own hellish destruction: he would choose not to love. And it made him a sad sight. I saw only remorse and longing in his eyes. Longing for what? For hope? For companionship? He only needed to reach out to me and I would be his, but he didn’t.

This was the truth, and it hurt, and now I was offended.

“I get it, all right? We don’t need to talk about this anymore,” I said sourly. He couldn’t know that my heart was peeled back and exposed, bleeding out as we
spoke.

Or could
he?

He couldn’t even look at me in that instant. “Fine.”

Feeling colder, I took another sip of the cinnamon cocoa, but it suddenly tasted bitter. I gave up on it and set it back down in the
snow.

“Why won’t you talk about what happened when you transformed?” I
asked.

“Because. I just won’t,” he said
curtly.

At this rate, I would know more about the Underworld than I would about Lucas. I didn’t want it this way, but I feared this was the only open direction, and I feared when I would black out next. Moments passed while I regained my courage, and then I asked carefully, “What will you do then after the portal is
closed?”

He picked at some strands of grass poking through the snow, hardly acknowledging me as he stared across the pond. I imagined that this was the type of prince he was, cold and snappish, but a part of me denied it. That part imagined him kind and respectable and desirable.

“Stay in Progresso, deal with the Celestials.” His voice was
sour.

“Will you come back to
Tahoe?”

He paused, thinking, then looked back to me. “I don’t think
so.”

I didn’t know what to do with his response except snuggle my hands under my arms, hoping it would tame the tightening in my chest. I wondered if time would ever change Lucas. He stressed over fear of the future, like I did, but I didn’t suffer from the decision to risk everything to change an old and binding tradition like he did. His pain hung before my eyes: guilt, resentment, unforgiveness, anxiety, worry . . . I didn’t want to feel it anymore, but it flowed out of him so easily and broke like a wave over me. I slumped and looked at my
feet.

“Zara, I didn’t bring you here to upset you. I brought you here to help you. Let’s not talk about me anymore,” he suggested.

“But I want to . . .” He was too preoccupied with what had been done or needed to be done to look at me straight on. I watched him remove the beanie from his head and swipe his hand through his hair. It rose nearly two inches from his forehead. “What’s your real name?” I asked. I pictured something
fierce.

He looked back up to me. “Mulac.”

It sounded nice, properly divine. “How come you chose
Lucas?”

He fiddled with the laces of his shoes. “Because he was a doctor to Saint Paul in the Bible. We all chose names that would be acceptable to the Spaniards. To prove we had converted to their beliefs.”

I imagined the Spanish friars in the sixteenth century and the methods they used for conversion, which we’d read about in school. New names to avoid the brutality turned on those who resisted. It was horrible.

“Does Xavier always come to help kidnap the sacrifices?”

“No.” He sighed, his eyes on the pale blades where his fingers played. They were delicate with the frail grass at first, but the grass snapped the moment he was distracted. I understood, suddenly, the frustration of supernatural power, breaking everything too easily. He threw the shredded grass to the ground. “The executioners are the ones always sent. We believe Xavier is involved in order to break his curse, but I suspect it’s also partial revenge for what I did to
him.”

“But why would Xavier come now and not hundreds of years earlier?”

“Because it’s the end of the Long Count calendar, and you are a virgin. The only time possible for him to break a witch’s curse. He needs pure
blood.”

Blood rushed to my face, coloring my cheeks the same cherry red as my nose. I looked down, embarrassed. “Honestly, does
that
really
matter?”

His gaze was steady as I hid under the blanket.

“It means everything. Without that purity, it would never break a curse as black as
his.”

“What did you do to him?” His complexity—his past—scared me, and I wondered if I was smart to ask such detailed questions.

Lucas hunched over his crossed knees and rested his elbows on the caps. “Xavier and Dylan come from a strong lineage of Mayan gods. They were known as the Hero Twins. Dylan was called Hunahpu, and Xavier, Xibalanque. Together they were very smart and very powerful. But unlike the other Celestial and Xibalban gods, they lived on Earth. They tricked people so potently that their victims self-destructed, destroying their own lives with things like crime, dishonesty, and infidelity.

“Gabriella was only seventeen when she met Dylan. She saw the good in Dylan. They fell in love. Next thing you know, Dylan was telling Xavier that he wanted to change. But Xavier was furious. When he found out Gabriella was the reason for Dylan’s change of heart, he tried to trick her to her own death so he could get his brother back. Nobody knew that Gabriella and I were demigods, so when Gabriella jumped off a cliff just as Xavier had coaxed her to, he presumed she was dead. Gabriela waited for him to leave so that he would believe she was dead, and then she went into hiding. By the time the Celestials approached us to be Watchers, Gabriella had been in hiding for weeks. It was obvious what we needed to do to become worthy. The Celestials didn’t like Xavier because he disturbed the peace on Earth. He couldn’t let humans be. So Dylan helped Gabriella and I plan his destruction. And it was this act that gave us our pass to immortality.”

“But . . .”

“How did we do
it?”

“He’s a god. Aren’t gods indestructible, curse and
all?”

“All gods have a spirit that is worth far more than their physical body. Spirit is what makes a god powerful and vulnerable.”

“I hate that
word.”

Lucas’s lips curved up silently. “We figured that if we could curse his soul to Xibalba, we would be rid of him. But of course we needed a
witch.”

“Tita.”

He nodded. “That summer we received word that the Incas in Machu Picchu were going to sacrifice a witch. We saved her and brought her back home to Yucatan, where we planned our attack on Xavier. His arrogance was his weakness. When we heard he was going to make an offering up north at Tajin, a Mayan woman who looked similar to Tita, we swapped Tita for his captive victim. Tita bespelled herself so that when Xavier tried to kill her, his spirit would be cursed to Xibalba and Tita’s life would be preserved. Since then, Xavier has been locked in Xibalba, trying to get
out.”

“How come I saw Xavier on the bridge if he isn’t allowed to
leave?”

“That’s just his rotten physical body. It’s been deteriorating for five hundred years. While his spirit is trapped down there, his physical body is weak here. Because they aren’t together.”

Xavier had been feeble and thin, his pale skin almost translucent. Lucas noticed my shudder.

“Don’t worry, his physical form really isn’t that powerful without it,” he
said.

“But he had power over me.” I remembered the way that Xavier’s fingers flicked and slammed my body into the bridge that
night.

“But not over us. That is why he fled when we arrived.”

“You cut it too close sometimes,” I joked nervously.

His smile played with my heart, controlling me in a very different way than Xavier had. I breathed in the icy air, hoping it would take away the hot palpitations. Lucas chuckled. He was now lying on his side, propped on an elbow like someone in a painting.

“What are you laughing at?” I
asked.

“Your heart is racing. I can hear
it.”

“Do you hear everything?”

“Pretty much.” He grinned.

Great.
“What did your dad do to become immortal?”

“You can’t just sit still for a second, can
you?”

“And you can’t just answer a simple question, can
you?”

He shook his head, chuckling under his breath. “The Aztecs believed that all gods were honored by human sacrifice. But being married to my mother, a goddess, my father knew that not all gods wanted human sacrifice. So after they met, he lived his entire life never performing that sort of ritual. After Tajin we moved to Yucatan, where he dedicated Tulum as a place where no human sacrifice would ever be made. It was extremely uncommon for an Aztec to commit to a bloodless life, but the Celestials cherished him for it and saw it as
worthy.”

“And
Tita?”

Lucas sat up, facing me, but playing with the laces of his shoes again. “Tita
had
to turn immortal. If she died, Xavier’s curse would be
lifted.”

I looked away, embracing the beauty of Lucas’s snowy fortress. I listened to the song of the birds and stared across the frozen pond. The whiteness around us was pure and calming, but my mind unwillingly turned to what lurked in Xibalba.