“Please tell me I didn’t kiss an agent of the IRS. I’d have to shoot myself. You’re who?”

“Raine. Raine Ashaway. You wrote me about the temple at Teotihuacan, and yes, the Feathered Serpent looks like a dinosaur.”

Bang!

“Oh!” She lunged for McCord and hung on as the Land Rover swerved. “What was—?”

“That was my left headlight clipping the mountainside. So do you know of any place in the Copper Canyons where such a beast might have been found?”

She was no longer seeing triple. He had wonderful lips, though she knew that already. The man was a natural-born kisser. “What’s your angle on this?”

“Aw, jeez—you’re going to hold out on me, after I risked my neck to rescue you?”

“I never said that.” But was she?

“So say it! ‘McCord, I owe you my life. If I know where to find a dinosaur, it’s yours with a bow on it.’ Or would you rather I turn around and hang you back in the tree where I found you?”

Dear Reader,

Sometimes it’s hard to say goodbye to a particularly vivid character. After An Angel in Stone, I meant to put professional bone hunter Raine Ashaway on the back burner, and move on to her younger sister Jaye. But then while prospecting for my next plot, I happened on a book on the Aztecs. I flipped to a page and there was a photo of the Temple of Quetzalcoatl, aka the Feathered Serpent. Good Lord, I thought, that carving looks like a dinosaur!

Next thing I knew, Raine had dashed off to the Copper Canyons of Mexico to check out the situation. A long, tall, wise-mouthed renegade Texan came wandering in from left field with his own agenda. I found a charming villain with a weakness for hummingbirds and…

Well, anyway, sometimes all an author can do is run at her heroine’s heels, taking dictation as fast as the adventure happens. This was that kind of story. Hope you enjoy it!

Peggy Nicholson

A Serpent in Turquoise
Peggy Nicholson

www.millsandboon.co.uk

PEGGY NICHOLSON

grew up in Texas with plans to be an astronaut, a jockey or a wild animal collector. Instead she majored in art at Brown University in Rhode Island (LARGE welded sculptures), then restored and lived aboard a 1920s wooden sailboat for ten years. She has worked as a high school art teacher, a chef to the country’s crankiest nonagenarian millionaire, a waitress in an oyster bar and a full-time author. Her interests include antique rose gardening, Korat cats, ethnic cooking, offshore sailing and—but naturally!—reading romances. She says, “The best thing about writing is that, in the midst of life’s worst pratfalls and disasters, I can always say, ‘Wow, what a story this’ll make!’” You can write to Peggy at P.O. Box 675, Newport, RI 02840.

To Ron duPrey, stars in his bow wave, attended by dolphins, reaching toward the dawn. Fair winds, my darling.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Epilogue

Prologue

Tenochtitlan, Valley of Mexico. Spring, 1520 A.D.

“T his Cortés is a man, I say, and not a god! All this foolish talk in the marketplace that he is the Quetzalcoatl—pah!” The high priest spat into the brazier’s flames. “You have only to look at his eyes, how they glow when he sees our gold! He burns for it like a boy in rut. He’s no sort of a god. He’s a soulless, hairy dog of an unbeliever, come to rob the Aztecs of all but their clouts!”

“If you say so, my lord.” Like most traders, the pochteca was a practical man. He believed in a fair weight of cacao beans, and the sheen of parrot feathers. A leather pouch clicking with turquoise or coral. He’d leave the gods and their savage requirements to the bloody priests. One had to make a living in this world before he faced the gods in the next, he knew, though he’d never dare give voice to such an opinion.

“I do say it. But though this Cortés is a man, he brings our ruin. The city will fall.”

The trader grunted in surprise. “I heard Cortés had fled, he and his men. After they murdered King Motecuhzoma. That they’d been driven from the city and were running for the east.” The pochteca had returned only this morning from a profitable venture to the western ocean. He’d barely had time to bathe himself, then hurry his laughing young wife to bed, before the summons had come from the temple. From the high priest of Quetzalcoatl himself!

“Cortés will return, with more warriors than the fire ants. We have asked the one true Feathered Serpent, the real Quetzalcoatl, and so he says. Tenochtitlan will fall. Our men will be trampled like corn stalks beneath the hooves of their terrible beasts. Our women will be driven weeping into slavery. Our children will be meat for their sacrifice.”

The pochteca swallowed a protesting laugh. One didn’t laugh at a priest and live. “The god says this?” he asked weakly. Or his old women priests putting words into the Quetzalcoatl’s mouth? Tenochtitlan was the finest, largest city in all the world, home to two hundred thousand of the bravest. Floating like a lily on its lake, the imperial capital could be approached only by guarded causeways or by canoe. To think that it could fall to a handful of rude, hairy, sweat-soaked foreigners? What nonsense.

“Already our end has begun. The strangers send a poison through the air before them. The people to the east of here breathe it and die—an illness of coughing and fever and spots on the face. The city will fall, says the Serpent. He says that if His children would survive this plague, they must return from whence they came. To Aztlan, the Place of the Herons.”

“Aztlan,” the trader repeated without inflection. Aztlan was no more than a tale to tell children. A fading dream of a homeland somewhere far to the north. Hundreds of rainy seasons ago the Aztecs had abandoned that city, but nobody remembered where it was located or why they’d fled. They’d marched south for year upon year till at last they came to an island in a lake, where they spied an eagle perched on a nopal cactus, devouring a serpent. There they’d stopped and founded Tenochtitlan, which became the navel of their empire.

But the pochteca had ventured north and west as far as a sensible man might walk in four moons of hard walking and he’d never heard a whisper of Aztlan. If such a place existed, he’d have learned of it. It would have markets same as any city, markets hungry for all the goods he traded and sold. A real city couldn’t live on air. If ever the Place of the Herons had existed, it must have crumbled to dust. Its birds had flown.

“We return to Aztlan, those of us who have the vision and foresight to know what’s coming. The courage to do what must be done. And you will lead the way.”

The pochteca found spit enough to speak. “I, my lord? I—I don’t deserve such an honor. I’m only a poor pochteca, a lowly merchant in obsidian and—”

“You will go before us, guiding an expedition that carries the temple treasure and the Feathered One himself. You will take your men and such priests and soldiers as I choose, to serve and guard the Quetzalcoatl as you travel.”

His wife. Her feet were dainty as a deer’s, softer than turkey down. And she was only beginning to swell with their first child. She’d never be strong enough to make a journey to nowhere, trudging north over mountain and desert for the gods knew how long—for years and dusty years?

Besides, the priests would never allow him to bring along a mere woman on a sacred journey. They valued only sacrifice, never human love. “Of course, my lord, if this is your wish. I’d be honored to do it. But first I’ll need to go home, pack my gear, summon my men.” If an entire people could flee, if a temple could pick up its gold and its gods and take to the road, then so could a single family. He’d take her west toward the ocean this very night. He knew a village on the coast; its people were openhanded and friendly, with gods that demanded fish and flowers, not beating hearts.

The priest smiled for the first time, a lipless turtle smile below eyes black as dried-up wells. “Ohhh, no need to go home! I’ll send the slaves for whatever you require. We have much to discuss here tonight.

“This then will be your mission. You will find Aztlan. There you will raise a temple to house the Feathered One and his treasure. You’ll prepare for the coming of His children.

“As soon as your expedition is safely on its way, I will call in the nobles and tell them my plan. Those who are wise enough to heed Quetzalcoatl’s warning will gather their people, their slaves and their goods. We will follow no more than one moon on your heels, two at the most. And, Trader? Never fear. I’ll keep your charming young wife safe, under my own hand.”

“Very good, my lord.” He felt the tears welling, warm as blood behind his lashes.

Chapter 1

State of Chihuahua, Mexico. July, present day

F ourth in line for his bimonthly haircut and shave, Anson McCord lounged on the barber’s porch, which overlooked the town of Creel, swinging hot spot of the Sierra Madres. Last approximation to civilization, north of the Copper Canyons.

Balanced on the back legs of his rickety chair, he thumbed through a year-old National Geographic. A couple of gringo mountain bikers whizzed past, nearly coming to grief as a mule and rider sauntered out of an alley and stopped halfway across the street to admire the view. McCord turned the page, glanced down at the next article. Blinked.

The photo had been taken in the midst of green jungle. A long-legged blonde sat on the skull of a dinosaur roughly the size of a Volkswagen Bug. She wore a broad-brim fedora tipped low against the tropic sun. Its shadow hid all but her knockout smile. Whoever she’d been smiling at must’ve landed on his butt.

“Hello!” McCord murmured under his breath. “Aren’t you just something?” What he was feeling—hell, how could he be jealous of the fielder of that smile, when he’d never even met the woman?—call it wistfulness, or plain old-fashioned lust.

He dragged his eyes down to the caption. Central Borneo. Raine Ashaway of the professional fossil-collecting firm Ashaway All poses with the only known specimen of an opalized T rex. Photo taken by her partner in the historic find: O.A. Kincade.

“Good for you. Glad somebody’s finding what she’s looking for.” McCord scratched his bristly jaw. Come to think of it, a dinosaur expert might even have some advice regarding his own quest. He brought his chair down with a thump and rose, to stride into the barbershop. “Felipe, tienes papel?” Might as well drop her a note, while he was waiting.

New York City. October, present day

“I couldn’t find a kayak on the Somali coast, but I did meet a Frenchman who loaned me his windsurfer,” Raine Ashaway told her younger sister, who’d picked her up at JFK airport. For the past half hour, they’d been stopped dead in traffic on the West Side Highway, not a mile from the apartment that served as the east coast base for Ashaway All, whenever any of the family hit New York City.

Time enough for Raine to tell about her scouting expedition to Ethiopia. She’d found a promising dig site in the gorge of the Blue Nile. A rich fossil stratum of the proper period, if not bones of Paralititan himself. But the war was heating up again. Bringing in a field crew was unthinkable, for the present.

Done with that topic, Jaye had insisted on hearing about Raine’s detour, after her Ethiopian venture. Now she pulled her sunglasses down her nose, the better to give her sister the fish eye. “You windsurfed out to an offshore oil rig in the Red Sea?”

“Just the last few miles. I hitched a ride on an Arab fishing dhow. Paid ’em to take me as near as they dared sail to Cade’s rig. Asked ’em to wait for me.” Raine unclipped her ripply, pale-blond hair and shook it out on her shoulders. She kicked off her sandals, then twisted her long jet-lagged body around, so she could prop her shoulders against the door of Jaye’s ancient pickup.

“You’re lucky they didn’t blast you right out of the water! After Kincade’s rig was blown up by terrorists, they’ve got to be taking a dim view of drop-ins.”

“Actually, I was more afraid of the sharks. Red Sea sharks have this reputation…”

“Since you’re here, I take it you didn’t meet any. When did Kincade’s guards spot you?”

With flat seas and a light breeze, they’d seen her coming about a mile out from the rig. Backlit by the fast-sinking sun, her rainbow-colored sail would be hard to miss, if anybody happened to glance down from the platform. Apparently somebody had. An amplified warning like the wrath of Allah himself had thundered out overhead—in Arabic, but the meaning was crystal-clear: “Back off or take the consequences.”

But she’d come too far, loved him too well, waited too long to hear his voice to give up now.

She swerved the board to run parallel with the monstrous black tower, so that the sail wouldn’t block their view of her. She’d worn a T-shirt over her bikini top, but it was soaked with salt spray and it clung to her body. “See? No dynamite, no plastique, no Uzi, guys, just a woman who wants a straight answer.”

A wavering wolf howl floated down from above. She grinned, leaned back against her harness to wave, then swerved back to her attack line. If Kincade was aboard this rig—and her sources said that he was—then she and he were going to talk.

“So did you?” Jaye eased the pickup forward and braked again.

“A Brit met me down at the boat landing platform, all muscles and pressed khaki and a semiautomatic in a shoulder holster—a bodyguard. He informed me, oh so regretfully, that I seemed to be trespassing.” Raine tipped back her head to stare out the open window at a smoggy sky flecked with pigeons.

“What the heck is going on? That man was crazy for you.”

“Wish I knew. Everything seemed fine between us when I left for Ethiopia. But then I tried to call Cade when I reached Cairo, got his voice mail. Tried again from Addis Ababa, and his phone number had been cancelled. That seemed weird, but I called the Okab Oil number here in Manhattan. Left a series of messages with his personal assistant that he assured me he’d pass on. After that, I couldn’t call Cade, or anybody, for the three months while I was down in a mile-deep gorge.”

“Maybe you two were just not connecting. His first rig was bombed about a week after you hit the backcountry. His partner in Okab Oil was critically injured. It makes sense that he’d return to Kurat, pick up the pieces, rally the troops. How could somebody like Cade be a silent partner at a time like that?”

“Of course he couldn’t. But however busy he was, he had time enough to reach me on my sat phone.”

“Oh, Raine, I’m sorry.” Jaye inched the truck forward another few precious feet. “But what about Mr. British Muscles? Did he invite you up for tea?”

“No. He said that Cade was aboard, but that he was too busy to see me.”

“Maybe he was lying? Maybe Cade was asleep, or—”

“Nobody could have slept through that warning. And most of his crew was hanging over the rails of the platform, whistling and cheering, by the time I sailed in at its base. Somebody was bound to tell Cade that a woman was sailing around out there.” And he’d have known it was me. “No, Jaye, I finally got the message. That was a brush-off.”

“So did you punch Muscles in the nose, and ask him to please pass that on?”

“Tempted, but no. He was doing his best to arrange my transportation to anywhere in the world I wished to go. I could have the use of the rig’s chopper, with a transfer to the company jet. Or he’d take me ashore himself, in a crew boat. I could have anything I wanted.” Except access to Cade.

“So, did you take him up on his offer?”

“Are you kidding? I stomped back to my surfboard and sailed back to the dhow.” Cade’s bodyguard had idled along behind her in a crashboat, till he’d seen her safely aboard. And if anything convinced her that he was acting under Kincade’s direct orders, it was that final courtesy. Cade telling her by proxy that he cared for her.

But it was over. Now she blinked rapidly in the gathering dusk and swung to stare at the chains of red taillights, which miraculously had begun to move.

Home at last—or as near as Raine had to a home these days. The top floor of an old brownstone in the West Eighties, with fresh flowers in every room, and a bar of chocolate on her pillow. The welcoming touches came thanks to Eric Bradley, the freelance writer who lived on the floor below and traded office space in the seldom-used apartment for occasional concierge duties.

His fat orange tomcat came swarming up the fire escape as soon as he heard footsteps overhead. Strolling in from the balcony through the open French windows, Otto leaped to the desk and sat down on the heap of mail waiting there. Ignoring both women, he spit-washed his cheeks and nose, then he tongued his left shoulder.

“I met a lion in the Blue Mountains that had better manners than you,” Raine told him, “and a better figure, too.”

“Don’t let’s discuss figures, if we’re ordering pizza.” Jaye reached for the phone book. “I’ll do that, if you want to shower. Barbecue chicken and pineapple, with onions?”

“Yum. And there were a few bottles of Chianti under the kitchen counter when I left. If nobody has guzzled it all…”

The apartment served as a pied-à-terre for any member of the footloose clan who might be passing through the city. Their father and his twin brother had bought the place some forty years ago, long before the neighborhood had become fashionable, while they’d been working at the nearby Museum of Natural History.

“Still here,” Jaye called with her head in the cabinet. “Now go get that shower.”

When Raine returned, combing her damp hair, she wore a blue Indonesian block-print sarong. Cade had bought it for her in Borneo. She’d hesitated now before choosing it, then she’d made a face and slipped it around her bare body. Just because a man had barged into her heart, then wandered out again, she was damned if she’d mourn. Life was too short for that. Carpe diem was the family motto. Seize the day, seize the opportunity, seize the dinosaur, cherish every pleasure. Paleontological fieldwork was one of the most dangerous careers in the world, right up there with test pilots and smoke jumpers. If you lived on the edge, then you learned to savor each moment as if it were your last. You couldn’t do that looking wistfully over your shoulder at what might have been.

“Another twenty minutes till the pizza,” Jaye reported, handing her a glass of wine. She returned to the desk where she’d been sorting the mail, to tug another piece out from under the cat. “Not much here beyond the usual junk. We missed an opening at the Smithsonian last month: fossilized ferns.” She handed that over and drew out a long, smudged letter from beneath its furry paperweight. Jaye studied the return address printed on its backside. “Who do we know in Mexico?”

“Beats me. Maybe it’s for Trey?” The expediter for Ashaway All was an ex-SEAL, probably also an ex-mercenary. In his dubious travels to unspecified places, he’d collected a raffish circle of friends and contacts. But mail for Trey usually went to Ashaway headquarters in Grand Junction, Colorado.

Jaye reversed the envelope. “Nope. It’s for you, care of National Geographic.”

“Oh?” Raine ripped it open, drew out a single sheet of rather grubby paper and read aloud. “‘Dear Ms. Ashaway. Don’t know if anyone’s ever asked you this before, but if you’ll glance at the enclosed photo of the temple of Quetzalcoatl at Teotihuacan—could the stone faces there with the snouts that stick out—be depictions of some kind of dinosaur?’”

She exchanged a glance with Jaye and they burst out laughing. “Another kid.”

Since Raine’s discovery of the world’s only known specimen of a fire opal Tyrannosaurus rex, then its subsequent sale at Sotheby’s auction house for fifty-seven million dollars, she’d been getting loads of letters from strangers. Most of her correspondents were male; most of them were under the age of twelve. Each was bursting to tell her his latest theory about the coloration or speed or near-human IQ of T rex. Or he was writing to volunteer, offering to drive her Land Rover and tote her rifle on her next bone-hunting expedition.

Or he wanted to send her what he was firmly convinced was a dinosaur fossil—no matter what his dad said about it being just a dirty old cow bone—if she’d promise to put it up for auction at Sotheby’s, then send him a million dollars when it sold.

Raine could sympathize with dreamers, even when she couldn’t oblige them in their schemes. She was a hunter and a dreamer and a schemer herself. So she lifted the photo in question and studied it with an indulgent sigh.

Gradually her brows drew together. She reached past Otto for a magnifying glass. She could see what the writer meant. He’d sent a close-up shot of a decorative frieze, carved along the top rim of what seemed to be a large rectangular temple. It showed a repeating motif of a grotesque stone face that seemed vaguely human, alternating with the sculpted head of an animal with a spiked neck-frill and a massive, beaky muzzle. If one stretched one’s imagination, added in the missing nose horn and discounted a bit of artistic license on the part of the carver, the creature did look…

“He’s not entirely nuts,” she said, passing the photo to Jaye. “This does look like a cousin of Triceratops, maybe crossed with Styracosaurus.” Not a known ceratopid, but some species yet to be discovered.

And, of course, that was what every Ashaway of Ashaway All, the world’s foremost fossil supply house, lived to discover. New species of dinosaurs.

“So what’s he proposing?” Jaye murmured whimsically. “That the Aztecs hung out with dinosaurs?” Triceratops had vanished from this earth at the end of the Cretaceous Period, some 65 million years before the Aztecs’ forebears strolled across the Bering Strait land bridge, then drifted south in search of sunnier real estate.

“Don’t know.” Raine resumed reading. “‘And if you do see a resemblance, then here’s a second question for you. Is there any place in Mexico or the southwestern USA where the fossil bones of this sort of dinosaur might be common? Where an Aztec might have uncovered one?’ Ah, so that’s what he’d been getting at!” Dinosaurs were usually discovered when their bones were exposed by erosion of wind or water, a geologic process that would have been at work a thousand years ago, as well as today. “So he figures that some Aztec stumbled upon a dino skull, extrapolated what the live beast would look like, declared him a god—then carved his portrait all around the sides of this temple?”

“Aztec dinosaurs! Now I’ve heard everything.” Jaye jumped as the downstairs buzzer announced the arrival of their pizza. “Back in a flash.”

Raine studied the signature at the bottom of the page. A flourishing, angular, indubitably male signature. Too bold and quirky for a twelve-year-old. “Professor Anson McCord,” she murmured as she deciphered it. Nobody she’d ever heard of, but she could picture him. He’d be one of her juvenile dino-lovers grown large. Dry and dusty from years of academic pondering and pontificating. Horn-rim glasses hiding blinky blue eyes, and freckles galore. He’d be gangly as Ichabod Crane, earnest in the extreme. Not a professor of paleontology, or he wouldn’t need to ask her about his “dinosaur.”

A history prof, she’d bet, afflicted with a lingering case of his boyhood bone-fever. Probably he’d taken a vacation to Mexico City, toured the temple at nearby Teotihuacan and been thunderstruck with the daring and originality of his own theory, which he now desperately needed to share with a kindred soul. She resumed reading, If you have any useful thoughts on this, I’d sure like to hear ’em, he’d written in closing. I collect my mail at the address below, whenever I come to town.

“Magdalena’s Cantina in Mipopo?” The bar’s address placed it in the northwest of mainland Mexico, somewhere in the state of Chihuahua. Raine chose an atlas from one of a dozen that were wedged into the nearest overcrowded bookshelf. It took her magnifying glass to find the dot that was Mipopo. A speck of a town along a rim of the—“Barrancas del Cobre” Raine murmured aloud, savoring the words like music on the tongue. So the professor was poking around the Copper Canyons, one of the last truly wild regions in North America.

Looking for Triceratops. Or possibly for Aztecs. Which, come to think of it, must be just about as extinct as dodos and dinosaurs. Raine laughed softly and closed the atlas. She’d always had a weakness for academic eccentrics.

They ate out on the narrow balcony that overlooked the backyard gardens and balconies of the adjoining block. While they talked idly of family and friends, a candle burned on the table between them. “So what now?” Jaye asked when there was nothing left but the wine.

“I’m not sure. With Ethiopia on hold, my calendar’s empty.” Not good. She and her siblings were close, but the way their father and uncle had structured Ashaway All, the top earner in any year got first claim on operational funds in the following year to finance his or her next expedition. The others had to trim their sails and their projects accordingly. It was a tough but fair system that kept them all hustling. Unfortunately Ethiopia had been all out-go, with no resulting income. Raine sighed.

“You could help me and my guys while you’re figuring it out.” Jaye was excavating for prehistoric amber in the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey. Most of her field crew were interns from Princeton. “Fastest way to forget about Kincade is to surround yourself with a pack of flirtatious, adorable, Ivy League hotties. Beefcake and brains is a treat to behold.”

Raine snorted. “You’re not poaching in the playpen, are you?”

“No, just waving back at ’em through the bars. That’s thrill enough. And I do have a couple of grad students old enough to grow beards. Plus their professors cruise through whenever they get the urge to take off their ties and muck in the dirt.”

“Sounds like you’ve got plenty of company already.” Raine yawned, stretched, stared up at the night sky. Not a star to be seen; the city lights had banished every one. She was restless already. And this was no time to sit and brood. Miles and motion were what she needed right now.

That and something exciting—something wonderful—to chase. If by any miracle Professor McCord wasn’t entirely a crackpot…If he’d seen some old bones, or heard of some… “I appreciate the offer, Jaye. But I’m thinking maybe I’ll fly down for a few days and check out the Copper Canyons.”

Chapter 2

M ipopo didn’t qualify as a town, in Raine’s estimation. It was a squalid little crossroads, set back a quarter mile from the canyon’s awesome rim, as if its original founders had feared it might grow dizzy and tip over. Its main street had a general store with a battered gas pump out front, perhaps a dozen ancient adobes still standing. The only inhabitants in sight were several discouraged dogs and a flock of optimistic chickens pecking the rutted road.

And if there was a bar in town, they were hiding it pretty well. Maybe the professor had made it all up? “When in doubt, ask,” she muttered, swerving in to stop alongside the gas pump.

The ancient proprietor limped out to fill the tank on her topless Jeep, then wash her bug-splattered windshield. But when it came to directions, he was a man of few words. Make that one. “Que?”

“La Cantina de Magdalena,” Raine repeated in careful Spanish. “Could you tell me where it is?”

“Que?” Raising his voice, he smiled wide enough to show her his steel eye-tooth.

“Magdalena’s bar?” Raine tried in English. Or maybe ‘what’ was all the Spanish he spoke, since that was the secondary language in these parts.

The Copper Canyons were home to the Tarahumara Indians, second largest tribe of native Americans in the northern hemisphere. According to the guidebook Raine had bought this morning in Creel, it took a linguist about twelve years to learn their language—if he had an exceptional ear. “What about a place to stay for the night?” she tried without much hope, as she settled behind the wheel of her Jeep.

She folded her hands, prayer-fashion, pressed them to one ear and cocked her head. Closing her eyes, she sighed blissfully, as if snuggling down into a comfy pillow.

“Oh, si! El doctor.”

“Clearly we don’t have a meeting of minds here. But muchas gracias, señor, all the same.”

As she eased the Jeep past a swaggering rooster and onto the road, Raine figured she had two hours before the sun dipped below the craggy peaks beyond the canyon to her west. If she couldn’t find a place to bed down in Mipopo, she supposed she could return to the motel where she’d stayed in Creel last night. Some eighty miles of butt-bruising road to the north, the little logging and tourist town boasted the main stop on the railway that skirted the canyon rim. It was the last place even pretending to civilization for a hundred miles in any direction.

On the other hand, she could press on regardless, heading south into the hinterlands. According to her map, a dotted line swerved off the rim road about ten miles past Mipopo. This track appeared to switch back down the canyon wall, dropping from bench to bench. If she made it down to the river before dark, she’d surely find a place to pitch a camp.

“Darn,” she muttered aloud. She’d pictured herself finding the professor tonight. Professor McCord had started out as the longest of longshots, barely more than an excuse for this escapade. But after her discovery yesterday in the Creel gift shop, her urge to consult him had grown more urgent. “So how do I find you?” she murmured, then glanced to her right at the building she was passing—and stepped on the brakes.

It was one of the few two-story buildings in Mipopo, and there were three battered cars and an overloaded lumber truck parked in the vacant lot beside it. Farmacia, proclaimed the rusty sign that swung above its torn screen door and sagging boardwalk, though the blinking red, chili pepper Christmas tree lights that framed each window were sort of festive for a drugstore. Plus they were either too early or way too late, this being only the first week in October. Still, if there was a pharmacist lurking within, surely he’d speak Spanish? The screen door banged shut behind her and Raine stood, half-blind in the dusky light.

“Dame una tequila!” demanded someone at her ear in a metallic monotone. She spun to find herself eyeball to beady black eyeball with a mynah bird, perched on a plastic coat hanger suspended from the ceiling.

A hand-lettered sign hung from the bird’s trapeze. “Magdalena,” Raine read aloud. “You’re Magdalena? Then this must be—”

“¡Una tequila o tu vida!” A tequila or your life! Feathers brushed her ear as the bird swooped away.

Turning to follow its flight, Raine saw the bird flutter down behind a long marble counter, fronted by a row of red-topped stools. Back in some distant and glorious past, this must have been the town’s ice cream parlor and drugstore. The round white wrought-iron tables remained, but nowadays they didn’t accommodate miners’ wives and children, sipping ice cream sodas and limonada. Half a dozen men slouched here and there, with their beers frozen halfway to their open mouths and their dark eyes drilling into Raine.

“Buenas tardes,” she said to the room in general.

Nobody smiled back or even twitched.

Wonderful. Raine walked between the tables and up to the bar.

Somewhere overhead, a woman burst into wild laughter. A bed creaked, then kept on creaking, settling into an age-old, familiar rhythm. “Great taste in post offices, Professor,” Raine muttered under her breath. From upstairs she heard two distinctly different guttural groans of masculine bliss added to the woman’s rolling giggles. So there was a trio up there.

“How d’you get a drink around here?” she asked the bird, now perched on a beer tap, as raptly attentive as the rest of Raine’s audience. Choosing one of the tattered vinyl stools, she turned her back on the tables.

As a girl brushed through the beaded curtain that hung over the doorway behind the bar, Raine greeted her. “¡Hola!” The kid teetered on the low edge of her teens, with big black eyes and long black pigtails. “Una cerveza, por favor.”

The girl reached for a heavy glass stein. She whisked the mynah off its perch; with an indignant squawk, it hopped down to strut along the countertop.

“Yo busco—I’m looking for—un norteamericano,” Raine said as the amber liquid rose inside the glass. “Se llama Professor McCord.”

The girl paused in the act of serving Raine the drink. Her eyes narrowed to slits.

“You know him?” Clearly she’d heard of him.

The kid shrugged, rummaged under the counter, drew out a second stein. This one had a smear of red lipstick along its rim. Deliberately she poured the beer from the clean glass into the dirty one, and then thumped it down before Raine.

“And welcome to Mipopo.” Raine contemplated the spillage while somebody snickered behind her. The girl moved down the bar, to pick up a rag and scrub an invisible stain.

From her shoulder bag, Raine fished out her prize souvenir of the trip so far. Wrapped in a red bandanna to protect it, it was a mug made of low-fired local clay. She’d found it in Creel, in a gallery near the train station. After she’d spotted it, she’d realized that this trip might not be entirely a fool’s errand. That she really ought to find Professor McCord and pump him for information.

Against a creamy background, the design was glazed in irregular squares of mottled greenish blue. Glaring out from the side of the mug, the critter’s beaky face looked precisely like the professor’s photo of the carvings on the temple of the Feathered Serpent at Teotihuacan—except for one added feature: The hornless Triceratops appeared to be covered with a turquoise mosaic.

Raine leaned across the bar to fill her blue dino-mug from the tap. With a toast to the outraged child, she took a long cool swallow. “Delicioso!” she assured the girl. Then she skated the dirty stein down the counter.

The kid caught it before it flew off the end. “Una bebida para la pájara,” Raine directed. A drink for the bird. “Or give her a tequila, if she prefers. Con gusano.” The premier tequila always came with a pickled worm in its bottle.

Behind her, one of the men gave a snorting guffaw and then instantly hushed. The screen door banged, as somebody walked into the cantina.

Just for a change, could it be someone sociable? Raine petitioned, staring straight before her as she drank.

Whoever the newcomer was, he smelled of peppermint and cigars. He was big enough to make the stool creak as he settled in, leaving only one seat between them. Not a local, judging from the well-cut shirt sleeve and crisp khaki trousers Raine could see from the corner of her eye. Neither was he an American professor, she concluded, stealing a glance while the stranger ordered a beer in halting Spanish. This guy was German or Swiss, if you added his sandy mustache and ruddy coloring to his syntax.

The kid gave him a come-hither smile, and he responded with courtly boredom, his gaze locked on the glass she held hostage.

Raine drew a notepad from her bag and penned a quick note:

Professor McCord,

Got your letter regarding the temple at Teotihuacan and your question’s intriguing. I happen to be in the area for a week or two, so could I buy you a drink? I’ll check back here at Magdalena’s whenever I can these next few days. Set a date and a place at your convenience and I’ll be happy to meet you.

Yours sincerely,

Raine Ashaway

She folded the page in thirds, then sealed the message with a strip of tape from her bag. She addressed it to the professor, then set it to one side with a five-dollar peace offering laid on top.

“A most handsome cup,” observed the stranger, swinging on his stool to face her. “Might I please examine it?” His suntanned fingers were already extended.

Pushy, but she supposed he meant well, and for an icebreaker, it beat the weather. Raine handed the cup over with a smile. “Like it? I understand the artist is local.”

The German inspected it gravely. “It is really quite…charming.” His blue eyes lifted to include her in the compliment. “Might I introduce myself?”

He might. His name was Johann Grunwald, and he insisted on standing Raine to a second beer while they moved casually from names, to observations about Mexican pottery, to their reasons for being there.

Not that Raine told the truth. You never knew when you were going to bump into the competition these days. Even if Grunwald had no interest in paleontology, he might talk, and news spread fast where there was little to gossip about. “I’m just a wandering travel writer. I’ve heard about the Copper Canyons for years. Deeper than the Grand Canyon, with almost three times its area. Thought they might be worth an article.”

That launched Grunwald into an oration on the most spectacular of the canyons; the trails offering the finest panoramas or the best swimming holes. He’d be delighted to show her his favorite spots, since it was so very easy to get lost down there. Beyond the point where the roads played out, the canyon system branched like a gigantic labyrinth. The footpaths vanished or changed with each flash flood or rockslide. The maps were imprecise, GPS reception was abysmal and the natives were hardly helpful.

“But after six months of surveying the terrain, I assure you I know my way around. My men and I study the geological structures and the hydrographics in anticipation that my company—” beaming with pride, he named one of the biggest contractors in the world “—will soon build a dam hereabouts. A most magnificent and enormous dam.”

In that case, the kid could have him. Raine didn’t believe in drowning natural wonders for the convenience of mankind. Even if she had, she’d noticed in her travels that building dams might be a lucrative pastime for politicos and engineers, but it rarely improved the lot of the natives.

But why waste her breath arguing? Her companion wasn’t the type to be shaken in his convictions. Raine dried her cup with the bandanna, preparing to tuck it away.

“That really is a most delightful cup,” Grunwald observed. “I hope you will not be offended, but I have been seeking a gift for my, uh, sister, to send for her birthday. You would not, by any chance, consider selling to me this mug?”

He needed a gift for someone nearer and dearer than a sister, Raine suspected. He didn’t wear a ring; still she’d lay money that he had a wife back in Hamburg. “Sorry, but I’m quite attached to it. And I’m afraid I bought the last one in Creel. The gallery owner said its maker was a new artist, a young Tarahumara she’d never dealt with before. She took only a few of his designs on trial. But perhaps you could buy something from the artist directly,” Raine suggested at Grunwald’s look of chagrin. “The shop owner said that he’s built his kiln at a town called Lagarto.”

Boot heels shuffled on the plank floors and Raine glanced behind to find one of the men from the tables standing at her shoulder with an empty mug. She turned back to the engineer. “In fact, do you know where Lagarto is?” After she located Professor McCord, she meant to track down the artist, ask him where he’d gotten his idea for the turquoise creature.

While the kid drew a refill for her thirsty customer, then exchanged a few rapid words with him in a language that sure wasn’t Spanish, Grunwald explained that Lagarto was a ranchito some sixty miles south, on a branch of the Rio Verde. “It is not a town. Many of the names you will see on your map are ranchitos—just the little farm of some Indio family, no more than that. There will be no stores to buy food or drink, no one to rent you a bed. The Tarahumaras are shy and standoffish, not fond of strangers. You must carry your own supplies down in the canyons, and even so, without a knowledgeable and trustworthy guide…” He patted her fingers reassuringly where they rested on the cool marble.

“I see.” Raine smiled and drew back her hand. She should go. Grunwald was pleasant enough in small doses, but he was starting to lean too close and lick his fleshy lips too often. “I had one other question. Do you happen to know an American hereabouts—a Professor McCord?”

“Anson McCord, the archaeologist? Yes, I’ve run into him down in the canyons once or twice. We share an interest in caves.”

“Ah.” So the professor wasn’t a scholar of history, though she’d not been too far off the mark—ancient man instead of modern. “Do you know where I could—” But she paused at the clatter of several sets of feet on an unseen stairway, then the sound of a body slipping and crashing the rest of the way down.

A burst of drunken hilarity was followed by a man’s bitter cursing in Spanish. Two men staggered through the beaded curtain. The skinny one held a bleeding elbow as he swore, while his hulking companion laughed uproariously. Behind them stalked a dark-haired woman with the seething impatience of a caged panther. With her bed-tossed hair and her kiss-swollen lips, she was surely the giggler from upstairs, but she was amused no longer.

The kid ran to her, stood on tiptoe to hiss in her ear. The woman’s eyes swerved like black lasers to focus on Raine.

“Ah, Magdalena,” said Grunwald under his breath. “Cuidado! She’s in one of her moods.”

“I thought—” Raine glanced at the mynah bird, who’d discovered the rejected beer down the counter, and was dipping its beak.

“That’s Magdalenita, but this one is—How do you say it? The real thing.” Grunwald stood to make a gallant introduction, but Magdalena glared at Raine, ignoring the hand she’d offered across the bar.

“Mucho gusto,” Raine said pleasantly, though it wasn’t. “I was asking Señor Grunwald if he could direct me to el profesor McCord. Or I understand that he collects his mail here. Perhaps you might tell me where to find him?”

“We know of no such man around here!” snapped Magdalena.

“Er, ah, well—” objected Grunwald.

The barkeeper raised her black brows at him. “None of us know such a man, do we?”

The German shut his mouth and sat down.

Wimp. Raine shouldered her bag, then handed Magdalena the note she’d prepared along with the fiver. “Todo el mismo—all the same—should you encounter this man McCord, I’d be grateful if you give him this. I would pay another twenty dollars gladly if by any chance he receives it.” In all likelihood, Magdalena would toss her message, but what else could she do?

She turned to bid Grunwald an ironic farewell, but the German muttered something about using the facilities. He ducked around the bar, then through a door.

Raine dropped bills on the counter, headed for the exit. But threading between the tables, she stopped as a pair of long legs stretched out to block her path. The hulking thug from upstairs smirked up at her, then shaped her a wet kiss.

His skinny pal scooted his chair back to extend the blockade. At the next table, the young man she’d crossed gazes with at the counter was dreamily contemplating the rear wall. No help would be coming from him.

“Perdóname,” Raine said, deadpan. Dogs generally didn’t bite till you showed fear.

“Hoy es mi cumpleaños,” confided Señor Double-wide, his smirk broadening to show teeth he ought to have hid.

“Happy birthday. You don’t look a day over twelve.”

His single ear-to-ear eyebrow bunched in confusion, then his smile turned mean. “So where’s my present, puta? How ’bout you gimme that pretty mug?”

Ah, a crafts lover of impeccable taste. “I don’t think so.” If she tried a detour, he’d just block her new path. Raine stepped over his legs—then spun back fiercely as he grabbed her wrist. “Don’t touch!” Her boot toe caught him square in his sweaty armpit.

As he squealed and doubled over, she chopped his elbow and jerked her wrist free. Kicked his chair out from under him. He crashed to the floor in a welter of clanging iron tables and smashing beer steins, and Raine walked out the door.

Chapter 3

A s Raine turned the corner of the building, cutting past the overloaded lumber truck toward her Jeep, a man stuck his head out a window. Grunwald.

“Pssst! Miss Ashaway! Raine! Over here!”

In spite of herself, she swerved to stand below him. “Gotta run, Johann. Thanks for the drink.”

“I must apologize for my manners. But this is the only place to find a cold beer or a home-cooked meal in fifty miles. If I offend Magdalena…”

“I understand. But about the professor. Can you tell me where to find him?”

“I can only say where I last encountered the man, about a month ago. He was conducting one of his digs along the Rio San Ignácio, east of its junction with the Batopilas. You cannot miss his camp.” He glanced nervously over his shoulder. “I think that perhaps I’d better—”

“Me, too,” she agreed as he withdrew like a gopher down its hole.

Raine started her Jeep, glanced toward the front of the cantina. No sign of pursuit yet. She spread her map out on the seat beside her. Back to Creel or onward?

“I said I’d give you twenty dólares Americano for the mug—not to make a fool of yourself,” Antonio said, squatting on his boot heels beside the fallen mestizo. The young man pulled the bill out of his pocket, waved it before the other’s flushed face. “Do you still want it? Then go after la rubia.” The blonde.

“I go stomp that bitch for free, but first, for my troubles—!”

The big man ripped the bill from the other’s fingers. Laughter clogged in his throat as the switchblade flicked into view.

“Ah, no,” Antonio said gently, touching the point to the fool’s lower eyelid. “You haven’t earned it yet.” He plucked his bill from slack fingers, tucked it away.

“I’ll—I’ll kill you for that,” blustered the big man, blinking frantically as a bead of blood oozed along the bright steel.

“You may try at your pleasure, but meanwhile, la rubia drives away, laughing. She’ll tell all her rich fancy lovers back in the city how she met a fool in Mipopo. ‘So easy,’ she’ll say. ‘One kick and I brought him to his knees. And he was a cobarde—a whimpering coward. He took my abuse and tucked his tail like a puppy!”’

“Oh, yeah?” bellowed the big man, as the knife snapped back into its handle and moved away. “If that’s what she thinks!” He staggered to a swaying stand. “Once I’ve done her I’ll be back with the mug—to break it over your lice-ridden head, you dirty indio!” He slammed out the screen door.

His skinny friend giggled and trotted after to watch the fun.

“Ah, Antonio, you were always a troublemaker,” Magdalena said fondly from behind her bar. “Now pick up my damn tables.”

Raine steered the Jeep across the bumpy lot toward the road. She stole a glance toward the cantina. Still no sign of trouble. Maybe Señor Double-wide had passed out from mortification? “Fine by me,” she muttered, easing her foot off the clutch.

With a blast of its horn, a pickup loomed up on her blind side. Storming out of the north, it cleared the winch on her front bumper by a foot.

Raine stomped on the brake, staring after the dwindling truck, and the herd of black-and-white goats that filled its rusty bed.

Having stalled the Jeep, she coaxed it back to life, then sat in Neutral. Might as well give the cloud of dust that the pickup had raised a minute to settle—along with her heart. She glanced toward the cantina’s screen door just as it banged open. The barroom brawler plus his skinny pal lurched out onto the boardwalk. “Uh-oh.”

As he spotted her, the hulking man pointed her way, and the two broke into a purposeful trot.

Raine turned out onto the road and ran smoothly up through the gears. The Jeep reached the veil of dust that swirled in the pickup’s wake. The last rays of the sinking sun struck it and Mipopo vanished beyond a wall of shimmering copper. Raine stomped the pedal to the metal.

Within minutes she caught up to the pickup with its four-legged cargo. “Pull over and let me by!” she fumed, beeping her horn.

But here in the land that invented machismo, the driver had his honor to defend. The pickup swung out to the crown of the road and trundled on at its top speed. The goats gazed back at her with demonic yellow eyes, their wispy white beards blowing in the breeze.

And behind her, she heard the first rumbles of pursuit. The dust cloud swirled as they rounded a bend, and Raine caught a glimpse behind. Here came the lumber truck, its pile of raw pine logs towering above the battered cab, the whole top-heavy load swaying monstrously on the curve.

Trey had trained her and all her siblings in hand-to-hand combat, but the foremost lesson the ex-SEAL had drilled into their heads was: “Run when you can. Fight only when you must.”

Given an open road, she could outrun that truck. Then with a few miles lead, she could dive down the side trail she’d intended to take and vanish down into the canyon before they had a clue where she’d gone. The road widened suddenly and Raine pulled out to pass, but the pickup swerved to block her. “You son of a—” She got a grip and swung back to the right.

Behind her, Señor Skinny leaned halfway out the passenger window to jeer and hoot as he pumped his bony arm.

Okay, forget about passing. She supposed she could simply follow the pickup till her lunatic lumberjacks grew bored with the chase. “Hey!” she yelped as the truck made a roaring charge at her back bumper. She stepped on the gas and surged ahead, till the goats could have leaped out onto her hood.

“What is with you guys?” Harassing a lone foreign female seemed just their style, but instigating a three-way pileup was downright suicide.

If they knocked her off the road, she had to respond at maximum intensity. She hadn’t brought a gun this trip; flying made it impossible. And her usual weapons, her blowpipe and her knife, she’d stowed with the rest of her gear beneath a tarp in the back, before she’d strolled into Magdalena’s.

There’d be no time to put her pipe together, but maybe she could get to her knife in time. Meanwhile, she leaned toward the glove compartment, fished out a heavy flashlight and laid it in her lap as, up ahead, the road took a rising bend to the right. And there at last, beyond a screen of wind-tortured pines, the rim of the canyon yawned, a dark slash in the ground, falling away out of sight.

If she remembered correctly, the road snaked back to the east just beyond that promontory, while a side road cut away to her right and down. At this speed it lay maybe a minute ahead.

Just then the truck crunched her bumper, and Raine’s teeth clicked together as her head slammed back against her headrest.

“So be that way!” She grabbed the flashlight, flipped it up and over her shoulder.

In her rearview mirror, she saw the truck’s windshield glitter in a crazy spiderweb of cracks. Above the cab, the logs groaned against their chains. An outraged bellow sounded over the engine’s roar.

Up ahead, the goat chauffeur was finally realizing he was traveling in bad company. The pickup belched smoke and squeezed out a few more miles per hour, but Raine didn’t close the gap. She’d gut it out, ride the lumber truck’s front bumper for another quarter mile, then hang a last-second hairpin right down the canyon trail. The truck’s greater momentum should carry it well past the turn.

The engine behind her revved, roared. She gritted her teeth and eased ahead, hoping to soften the oncoming crash.

“Ooff!” Another blow like that and she’d be riding with the goats. She kept her eyes trained for her turn. Couldn’t be more than a hundred yards to go…then fifty, then… “Where the hell is it?”

McCord was driving up the last switchback on the trail out of the canyon, when the coyote popped up on his right. “No way!” He braked the ancient Land Rover, raising a wave of sandy gravel, as the dusky form flashed past his front bumper then flowed over the drop-off to his left. “Jorge?” McCord cut the ignition and leaned out of his doorless vehicle to whistle, then call, “George-boy? C’mere, fella.” He scanned the brush that edged the track, the top branches of a pine jutting up from below.

“No way that coulda been George.” He’d left the mangy beggar back at camp, forty miles down the gorge. The coyote liked to tag his tracks, but he’d never have followed him this far. Besides, he couldn’t have gotten ahead of him, if he had followed.

“Jorgito? If that’s you, go home. Take it from one who knows, city life’s not what it’s cracked up to be.” Magdalena kept a shotgun behind the bar, and the only varmints she tolerated walked on two legs. “Follow me there and she’ll chop you up for chili.”

No answer but a breeze, sighing through the pine needles.

McCord engaged the parking brake, then reached for the canteen on the seat beside him. He swung around to watch the sun flaming on a purple peak, far beyond the far rim of the canyon. He took a cool swallow while the light faded from copper to blue, sighing happily at the thought of the cold beers to follow, with a plate of tamales and mole on the side. Definitely a slice of real bread; he was sick of campfire biscuits and hush puppies. His stomach rumbled at the thought.

It had been complaining ever since he’d declined an invitation to supper when he’d stopped by the doc’s place, an hour back down the trail. But McCord had his first-night rituals for whenever he straggled out of the canyons. It was best to ease back into civilization like a bather into a hot tub, and Magdalena’s made a good halfway stop on the road to polite society. His first night out from camp, he didn’t need stimulating conversation or a fight for his life on the doc’s treacherous chessboard. He’d rather kick back, let a warm, curvaceous woman swaddle him in comfort and admiration.

Whilst he’d sat there anticipating, the sun had sunk itself, curving off toward the Gulf of California, and Baja beyond. “The Blue Hour,” he mused aloud, then frowned at the noise coming from just above—a big roaring diesel rasping at the quiet, rumbling down the road from Mipopo. One of those damned lumber trucks, carting off pine trees that had struggled a thousand years or more to attain their rightful growth, cherishing every drop of rain, standing fast against landslides and winter gale—only to fall to some greedy little guy with a rusty chainsaw.

With a rueful grunt, McCord glanced back down the long sloping track that clung to the canyon wall. Too late for supper at the doc’s? Maybe he wasn’t in the right mood for the cantina tonight. It was no place to pick a fight. If that crowd ever suspected he was a closet tree hugger…

On the other hand, if he meant to change his mind, he’d have to drive the last little stretch up to the main road, then turn around there. Only a fool would attempt a K-turn on this one-lane ramp that was scarcely wide enough for two burros. And if he got as far as the main road, then he might as well—

He’d swung back around with this resolution and now McCord sat, transfixed. “What the—” A car plunged out of the twilight, heading straight at him, its left flank hugging the mountainside, scraping a shower of sparks as it came. “Shit! Stop, you—”

No time to start his engine, no place to swerve aside if he did. He dove for the passenger door. Jump the other way and next stop was the canyon floor, about a half mile below.

The car clipped his left headlight. Head and shoulders out of the Rover, he clung to the doorframe as it spun counterclockwise.

Tree limbs crackled; the pine tree groaned like a wounded beast. Glass shattered, metal shrieked. His heart was going to burst right out of his chest and run for high ground!

Shaking and swearing, McCord lay, staring at the road only inches below his face. He listened for the sound of the other car striking the canyon floor.

It was a long way down, but still…He blew out a breath. Should have struck by now, and serve the jerk right. Driving at that speed, without his headlights? He struggled to a sitting position. “What the—” Almost afraid to look, he swung slowly around. “Sweet Jeez in the morning.”

The other car—a topless Jeep—hung at his eye level, wedged in the branches of the pine tree that grew up the cliff face.

“Good God.” McCord scrambled out onto the road till his knees gave out, and he landed on his butt, contemplating this miracle. “You’re the luckiest damn fool in the—”

Something cracked. The Jeep settled gradually, rolling toward its left side as it sank. It paused, still cradled by the pine, suspended out there, maybe five feet beyond the edge of the cliff. “Oh, boy.” McCord pulled himself up the Rover’s fender to his feet. That wasn’t a very big tree, and if—

Another branch cracked. The Jeep listed a few more degrees, allowing him to see the driver, who still gripped the wheel as if he meant to drive out of this mess—or straight on to Kingdom Come. “I, uh, think you better get outta there.” McCord limped closer, swallowing hard.

“No kidding!” She reached out the gap where a door would be in a standard car to grope for a hold, only to touch thin air.

It was a woman, he realized, noticing her pale-colored braid now. And what was the matter with her, just sitting there so calm? Was she drunk or stoned?

Or maybe stunned. He swallowed and said casually, “Got your seat belt fastened?” If the Jeep tipped any farther and she didn’t, she’d better have packed a parachute.

“Yeah.” She swung her arm again. “What am I hung up on?”

Another snap of a branch and the Jeep rolled ten more degrees.

“I’m in a…tree?”

She’d hit her head, he decided. Was concussed. Maybe in shock. “That’s about the size of it. Now listen, honey, I want you to just sit tight, while I…” Whatever damn-fool thing he did, it entailed going out there and getting the crazy bitch. Or maybe—“Hang on. Don’t move. I’ll be right back.” He spun, heading for the rear of the Rover.

“What happens if I move?” she called behind him.

“You don’t wanna know.” Returning on the run with a rope, he built a bowline loop. “I’m going to throw you a rope now, okay?”

She grabbed in the wrong direction. It slipped past her fingers and fell away.

“I’ll try again.”

And damned if she didn’t miss again. “Um, by any chance, do you wear glasses?” And she’d lost them in the wreck.

“I’m seeing triple, okay? Now throw me the fricking rope!” An edge of panic laced her husky voice.

“Sorry. Maybe if you—Oh, jeez!” he yelled as, in a crackle-storm of snapping branches, the Jeep rolled toward him—entirely upside-down. With its wheels turned up to the sky, it looked like a dying animal.

“Oh, shoot me,” came her voice, from somewhere down below. “I’m off the edge, aren’t I?”

“I’m afraid so.” He tied the tail end of his rope to the roll bar on the Rover.

Down below the cliff face, she’d started laughing. “Lost the love of your life? Chased by rabid lumberjacks? No problemo! Come to the Copper Canyons and leave your troubles behind!”

“Least it puts ’em all in perspective,” he agreed absently as he twisted the rope over his hip and shoulders in a body rappel. He was a firm believer in equality of the sexes; theoretically there was no reason he should risk his neck for a damned woman driver. Not that reason and women mixed very often, in his experience.

It was her husky laughter that was the clincher. She wasn’t hysterical; she just had a fine black appreciation for life’s little pratfalls, on top of what must be a whopping concussion. Still, if she showed that kind of guts in the face of disaster, what could he do but match her? “Just hang on now.”

“Oh, believe me, I’m hanging.”

Paying out rope, he walked down the cliff face, till he was looking up at the Jeep and the Dangling Beauty.

An ice cube slid down his spine. Only a couple of big limbs remained; the weight of the car had settled upon them. If they let go—when they let go, he amended, seeing the jagged crack in the crotch of the closer one—then down would come the Jeep like a Detroit-made guillotine, on his head. Two tons of dusty steel would ride him and the woman down to the ground.

“I’m gonna toss you the rope again,” he said as he coiled up its dangling tail. “And this time, believe me, you want to catch it. Now let your arms hang.” She’d never do it, he realized as he spoke. Though the belt ought to hold her weight, instinct would weld her hands to the steering wheel.

She drew an audible breath, then said in a rueful moan, “Oh, man.” She let go the steering wheel to hang, arms extended, swaying faintly in the breeze.

“Good girl. Here it comes.” The loop slapped her wrists and she clawed for it frantically, finally capturing it.

“Now get the loop around your waist,” McCord instructed.

Somehow she wriggled into it. “Beautiful!” Quickly he explained what she had to do. She had to release her seat belt, but hang on tightly to the steering wheel, and get herself aimed head-up, feet-down. “I’m wedged in right over here, and I’ll take in your slack. When you’re ready, all you do is let go, then I’ll do the rest. I won’t let you fall.”

She’d swing into the cliff below him and bang herself good, but she ought to hit feet-first, not head-on. It might work. Except that nobody in his right mind would release that seat belt, no matter how much he wanted to live.

But she fooled him again. Her hand fumbled at the buckle.

“Oh, honey, we’re gonna do this,” he almost sang. She was one in a million.

Somewhere in the tree, something snapped.

“Um, I hate to say this, Tex, but the buckle seems to be jammed.”

Another branch crackled—and the Jeep settled one foot closer to Kiss Your Ass Goodbye.

Chapter 4

N ot a minute to lose, McCord told himself when the Jeep stopped moving. He scrambled back up to road level, then realized what he had to do. Bending low, he called down through the gap between the car and the cliff. “Uh, honey? Guess we’ll have to do it the hard way. You’ve gotta untie that loop and let it drop.”

“Are you outta your tiny mind?”

“Trust me on this. Drop the rope.” That loop around her waist must have felt like her last link to life, but if the Jeep fell when he added his weight to it, the line would saw her in half. A half-mile drop would be kinder.

She muttered something surly. The rope shivered, then slackened, and McCord was amazed all over again as he coiled it and slung it over one shoulder. “Okay, you’re going to hear a thump, but don’t worry. That’s just me.”

He leaped—and landed dead center on the Jeep’s chassis, flapping his arms for balance as the Jeep wobbled and wood crackled. His ankle touched hot metal and he swallowed a yelp. “Piece of cake.”

“Yeah,” she agreed bitterly. “Angel food.”

She was hyperventilating, it sounded like, as he picked his way along the hot greasy metal till he could reach an upper branch of the pine. It was the only unbroken one in a position to help, and it might hold the two of them.

“What are you doing up there?” she snarled.

“Just making us a sky hook,” he said soothingly as he tied the rope around the branch, then knotted in foot loops. Once he’d done that, he shinnied down the rope, to swing there level with her, toeing frantically for the last loop. He found it and settled his weight into it, then drawled cheerily, “Well, hey!”

Her upside-down face turned back and forth, then homed in when he whistled softly. “This is not the brightest idea you ever had in your life.”

“You always this bitchy when you’re scared?” He snagged the doorframe to pull himself closer. “Okay, here’s the drill.” He’d cut her loose, while she hung on to the steering wheel. Then she’d rotate, till they were no longer in sixty-nine position. “And then—”

“I get the picture. Just do it!”

“Right.” Drawing his Buck Knife from its sheath, he sawed at the seat belt. “Okay, here it comes. It’s all yours!”

Panting with terror and effort, she worked her legs out, her knees knocking him in the chest as she rotated upright. Then she dangled, treading air, her head stuck somewhere up in the Jeep’s foot well. “N-now what?”

He grabbed the wheel, pulled himself closer. “Get your legs around my waist.”

Easier said than done, but they managed. She had miles of leg, and he’d swear she wrapped them twice around, squeezing him like an anaconda.

“Now all you have to do is let go of the wheel, and wrap your arms around my neck. Just let go, honey, and reach for me.”

“I—I can’t.”

He opened his mouth to argue—and the Jeep shifted. With a screech, she let go and boarded him, hugging him in a stranglehold. The car slid farther and McCord kicked off its moving side. As they pendulumed outward, tons of steel sighed and slipped past and was gone.

“Yowsa!” he said reverently as their lips met. No telling who kissed whom, but still they brushed, and brushed again, then locked on tight.

Half a mile below, the Jeep pancaked on rock. The sparks singed him from here, or maybe that was the hot woman, almost welded to his belly. No sane man would feel a twinge of arousal, dangling over his own death on not much more than a healthy twig, but with the way she shuddered against him and the wild, wet taste of her…

Wham…wham…wham…wham…The echoes bounced off the far wall of the canyon and back again. McCord rubbed his lips across her cheek and up through her hair. She smelled like a surfer girl, whiff of coconut oil and sun-kissed sweat. He must be purely out of his mind. He glanced up at the bending branch. “There’s just one thing more we have to do.”

The first ten feet was the hardest part, but she had the slender arms of a rock climber and McCord gave her a boost. She swarmed up his body, then the rope.

By the time they heaved themselves over the cliff edge to collapse face-down and gasping on the road, it was just about pitch-dark. McCord rolled over and lay beaming gratefully up at the sky.

“God!” She groaned and flopped over beside him. Her shoulder was pressed against his and it started to shake. He swung his head to look at her. So here came the girlish tears at last, and who could blame her? But no, this was laughter, bubbling and building from a silent chortle to wholehearted hoots of relief as he joined in. They struggled to a sitting position and clung to each other, yelping like a couple of moonstruck coyotes.

At last they wound down, till they sat, shaking with their last spasms, his arm around her shoulders, their foreheads resting comfortably against each other’s. She pulled away to lean back on her hands in the dirt. “Th-thanks.”

“Heck, I only climbed down there to get the name of your insurance company. Next thing I know, I’m hanging by my fingernails, wearing—” You. And she’d fit him better than his favorite wet suit. McCord turned to study her. Her pale, tousled hair and long, lithe form, backlit by the first stars were about all he could make out, but there was something about her growly, soft voice that curled his toes. Down, boy, he told himself absently, then stood. “Stay right there, honey.”

“Name’s Raine,” she called as he walked to the Rover to find his flashlight.

And she didn’t care to be patronized, he noted with a grin; not with her feet on solid ground. “Watch your eyes.” He aimed the light down at the gravel and switched it on, wondering if the rest of her matched that come-to-bed voice. “Well,” he said, and found himself grinning wider. He must look like George the coyote when McCord pulled a chunk of rabbit off the fire and prepared to toss him his share.

She must be used to that reaction. Her smile quirked wry and resigned as she met his eyes. Or tried to. Instead she focused somewhere left of his ear.

“Still seeing double?” he asked her.

Actually, I figured you for the Twirling Triplets from Texas. “Guess I banged my head on the steering wheel.”

“That’s not good.” He touched her forehead, making her jump. “Easy. Sorry. I just want to check you out.” His gentle, work-roughened fingertips explored her temples with feathery strokes that set off ripples in her stomach. “Yeah, you’ve got a split here, right at your hairline. You’ll need a few stitches and a good shampoo.” His voice went brisk with decision. “I think the doc better have a look at you.”

It took him nearly fifteen minutes of inching forward and back to turn his car from its slewed position till it pointed downhill. Finally he helped her into the passenger seat, then fastened her seat belt. “Not that you’re going to need this. I’m the world’s best driver, so just lean back and relax.” He adjusted the seat till she was tipped almost horizontal.

The fear had left her drained and it would have felt good to lie back, if it hadn’t made her feel less in control, being carried off into the dizzy dark. She fumbled for the lever as he walked around to his side, but she couldn’t find it. “Really, I don’t need a doctor,” she tried again as he climbed in beside her and drove away.

“Probably not, but I can’t leave you sitting in the road, and I don’t think you’d care to be dropped off at Magdalena’s Cantina. Might get more help than you need.”

“God, no. That’s where all my troubles started!” She told him about the lumberjacks. “I guess their truck was too wide for this track. That must be why they stopped chasing. But what I’m wondering is why they hassled me in the first place. Maybe Magdalena sicced them on me?”

He swore as the car bounced through a pothole, then landed with a sickening slither on the gravel. “Why would she do that?”

“I was trying to connect with a guy, a Professor McCord, who picks up his mail at the cantina. She seems to think she owns him.”

“Huh.” He drove in silence for a while, then muttered, “I suppose Magdalena figures she’s got a lease on every man who walks through her door.”

“She’s welcome to ’em. I’ve no intention of jumping her claim. My interest is strictly professional.”

“Hmmm. You’re a…travel writer?”

“Nope.” She winced as she realized she’d just blown her cover.

“Ah, a mountain climber. You’re lookin’ to hire a camp manager.”

“Not me. But McCord does that?” She shifted to look at him, then winced as it hit her again; there were three overlapping images where there ought to be one.

“When he’s trying to scrape some cash together, he’s been known to do that. And worse things,” he added under his breath as the car slid again and he shifted to low. “You with the ATF? The DEA?”

“McCord runs guns? Or dope?”

“Not if he wants to live. That’s strictly a local franchise, no gringos welcome. But the damn feds—and the federales—are always shopping for snitches down here. No, McCord keeps his nose clean and he keeps to himself.”

“Sounds like you know him pretty well.”

“Too well.”

“So maybe I could get an introduction?”

“’Fraid we’re way past that. I’m McCord, and who the heck are you? Tell me please I didn’t kiss an agent of the IRS, hell-bent on an audit. I’d have to shoot myself. You’re Lorraine who?”

“Not Lorraine—Raine. As in Raine Ashaway. You wrote me about the temple at Teotihuacan, and yes, the Feathered Serpent looks like a dinosaur.”

Just then the car slid again, and this time what remained of his left headlight clipped the mountainside.

“So you thought so, too—that it looks like a dinosaur?” he asked after he regained control of the car.

“Given a bit of artistic license on the part of the carver, yes. Something like a Styracosaurus, with that spiked neck-frill.”

“Bless you! But what about my other question—the biggie. Do you know of any place in the world—preferably around here—where such a beast might’ve been found?”

“It’s not a known species, so I haven’t a clue. Though, actually—” She remembered her mug, which by now must be bits of ceramic sand at the bottom of the canyon.

“What?”

At his tone, she turned toward him—and blinked. At the center of her vision, all his shuffling images had steadied to one silhouetted profile, led by a nose like the bow of a distant icebreaker.

“What?” He stopped the car in the middle of the road to poke her in the shoulder. “Come on, Ashaway, give! You thought of a clue? Where to look?”

“What’s…” Enchanted by the miracle of sight—functional sight—Raine found it hard to heed mere words. He had wonderfully carved lips when she moved her focus, though she should know that already. The man was a natural-born kisser, if she’d ever met one. “What’s your angle on this?”

“Aw, jeez, you’re going to hold out on me, after I risked my neck to rescue you?”

“No. I never said that.” But the reflex had been ingrained from childhood: Guard your information. Bone hunting was the Ashaways’ livelihood; you shared your finds with the family and the firm, but never with strangers.

“So say it! ‘McCord, I owe you my sorry life. If I know where to find a dino, it’s yours with a bow on it.’ Or would you rather I turn around and hang you back in the tree where I found you?”

She smiled in spite of herself at this show of temper; he didn’t mean it. “I owe you my life and I swear I don’t know where to find this dino—if it even exists. I was thinking about a ceramic mug I lost. It was in my luggage.”

“Oh.” He drove in silence for a minute, then growled, “I’ll see about salvaging what’s left of your gear in the morning. But as for a tacky tourist mug, it’ll be busted to smithereens.”

And, but for you, I would have been down there with it. She touched his arm and confessed, “The mug had a design on it. Exactly like the photo you sent me.”

Chapter 5

R aine drifted up from sleep to the fragrance of honeysuckle, the murmur of bees outside the open window beside her bed. She lay blinking at a rough plaster ceiling, tinged gold by the rich slant of light. Must be morning, she realized, stretching full-length. A soft tap on the door brought her up to one elbow. “Come in!” she called, assuming it would be McCord.

Last night he’d practically carried her into the Casa de los Picaflores, the House of the Hummingbirds, home and guesthouse of Dr. Sergio Luna. The aftereffects of adrenaline, followed by the car’s vibrations on the long, rumbling descent into the canyon, had wiped her out. She dimly remembered McCord’s arm around her waist as he helped her up the crude stone stairs of a winding path. Moonflowers and honeysuckle twining around the cedar pillars of a long porch. A flood of lamplight as a massive door opened.

Then the embrace of a big leather chair and a deeper-than-deep voice behind a moving candle flame, asking her to follow the light. A soft aside to McCord in Spanish noted that her pupils reacted to light, that he could see nothing to cause a man worry.

“At least, not that kind of worry,” McCord drawled in the same language.

The doctor gave her a warm potion, bitter with herbs, laced with wild honey. It must have contained a painkiller, because when he stitched the gash at her hairline, it didn’t hurt. After that she remembered McCord’s arms again, easing her down a long hall. But beyond that? Some time later she’d stumbled into the adjoining bathroom, once by starlight, then once again by daylight, and now…Raine blinked. Was this morning, or—

The door creaked and a tiny, elderly woman nudged it open with the tray she held. With a timid smile she shuffled across the room to set it on a bedside table.

“Buenas días,” Raine said, adding a fervent “gracias” as the smell of coffee tickled her nose. There was bread with slices of papaya on a plate; it must be morning. “Puede decirme, señora—could you tell me—” She paused as the woman’s brown, wrinkled face produced a smile of shy confusion.

The woman murmured soft apologetic sounds in a language that wasn’t Spanish, ducked her scarfed head, then retreated and shut the door.

A Tarahumara, Raine guessed, as she hitched up against the headboard to pour herself a cup of coffee flavored with cinnamon and chocolate. Her questions would have to wait, which was fine by her stomach. It awoke with a lurch and practically leaped at her fingers as she tore off chunks of pan dulce, a bread of melting sweetness, to feed the ravening beast.

Once her first pangs had been quelled, Raine yawned, then rolled out to meet the day. Wrapping her naked body in a lighter blanket from the foot of the bed—and just who had undressed her?—she drifted over to sit on the wide sill. “Whoa!” she murmured aloud. Below the house, the hillside fell away in broad terraces till it vanished in purple, plunging shadows. A mile beyond the abyss rose sheer cliffs, crowned by a forest of toothpick-size trees.

So the House of the Hummingbirds wasn’t at the bottom of the gorge, but perched on a bench carved by the river she’d yet to see. A rambling one-story adobe, it followed the contours of the hillside like a train of sugar cubes. Its walls were painted pink by the rising sun, which had just cleared the far side of the canyon.

“Wait a minute.” Raine straightened with a frown. The track where she’d come to grief had descended from the eastern rim. Had McCord driven her clear across the canyon last night, and she was looking back the way they’d come? No, she’d dozed off through much of the journey, but still, surely she’d have noticed a river crossing. Which meant she must be looking west and the sun was setting! “I slept through a whole darn day?”

To her left, someone stepped out from behind a vine-covered pillar and started down the steps of the porch. A man, but not McCord. This one was short and almost portly. Supported by a cane, he moved with an awkward limping lurch. The doctor? She’d been too befuddled last night to note more than his voice and his suturing skills.

He paused where the first run of steps opened out onto a stone ledge, and swept off the Panama hat that had hidden his face. The gesture revealed ruddy, sun-weathered skin, a bold hawk’s nose on a man of middle years. Plucking a crimson trumpet flower from the buttonhole of his white tropical suit, he called in a loud voice, “Venga, bellezza!” Come, beauty! He placed the stem of the flower between his teeth, spread his arms wide and tipped back his dark head.

He had to be the doctor, Raine told herself, with that voice deep as a canyon, but what on earth was he doing?

If she’d blinked at that moment she’d have missed it; a shimmering ruby-and-emerald colored hummingbird arrowed in to the prize. It hovered before the man’s face, sipped—and flashed away. With a laugh, the doctor drew the plundered blossom from his lips, kissed it lightly and tossed it to the molten air. Donning his hat, he limped toward the next flight of stairs.

“The House of the Hummingbirds,” Raine mused, smiling to herself.

He couldn’t have heard her, yet, he turned, swept his hat off again with a flourish as their eyes met. “Señorita Ashaway, buenas tardes! I trust you slept well?”

“Wonderfully, thank you.” And where was McCord? Still snoozing somewhere down the hall?

“As you can see, I’m off to visit my clínica. Evening rounds. But when I return, I hope you’ll dine with me.” He aimed his cane at a sliver of crescent moon, chasing the sun. “About the hour that she sets, shall we say?”

“With pleasure!” Then, as Raine ducked back into the room, she realized she had nothing but a blanket to wear. Or no, wait—there was her duffel bag and her pack, on the floor beyond the bureau. “Bless you!” she said to the absent McCord. She’d feared it would take a jaws of life to rescue her gear.

Best of all, he’d salvaged her parasol; it lay propped across her bag. Opening it, she sighted along the length of its lead-dipped, aluminum shaft, which didn’t seem unusually thick, unless you really scrutinized it. “Not bent,” she muttered gratefully. A blowgun didn’t work worth a darn with a kink in it.

If anyone did look twice at her parasol—say, a customs agent—the design on its top served to divert his or her attention. An orange Chinese tiger painted in elegant brushstrokes on silk, the cat sat grinning through his whiskers against a sky-blue background. Raine twirled him and smiled. She’d been born in the Year of the Tiger, which meant, according to every place mat she’d ever read in a Chinese restaurant, that she should have been a race car driver. “Next life, maybe.” Raine set it aside and dove into her bag. Since the doctor was a dude, she’d wear something dressy for supper. How about a midnight-blue tank top of heavy satin, plus her calf-length rainbow-hued skirt, with its broomstick pleats that defied every wrinkle? And her opals, of course.

Her hands paused as it hit her. Where was her leather shoulder bag, with her passport, her wallet…and the mug?

“Professor McCord isn’t joining us tonight?” Raine asked, as soon as she decently could. Clearly he was not. There’d been only two places set at the long table before the crackling fire when she came in to supper. She’d made small talk with Dr. Luna while the same elderly servant poured apple cider into green crystal goblets, then brought them a first course of goat cheese with a delectable peasant bread. So far she’d learned about the doctor’s free clinic down the hill. This was a service he provided gladly for the locals, the only medical care available for all this southern region of the canyons. He also ventured out to the surrounding ranchitos, when his patients were too sick to make the journey here.

To his own amiable prodding, Raine had replied simply that she was here on vacation, and that she was a fossil hunter back in the States. Too late to lie now, since she hadn’t a clue what McCord might have told him. Besides which, there was something about this man’s dark gaze that commanded confidences.

“Ah, no, I’m sorry to say. The professor has gone to Creel. Had some arrangements to make, I believe, concerning his next group.”

“His group? I’m afraid he and I didn’t have much time to chat.”

“So I would think! Professor McCord hosts digs for…how shall I say this? For rich amateurs; Americans who would play at archaeology. He teaches them the techniques of excavation, and they help him in his work for a week or two. With many a break for exploration and swimming, when the work grows hot and boring, I understand.” He made an impish face. “But how can I condemn? The professor employs my nephew, Antonio, as his cook and assistant in this enterprise. And I also profit, when these same Americans stop here at my inn, coming and going.”

“I see.” Raine turned her glass in the dancing light cast by a silver candelabra. How could she say that, of course, she meant to pay for his hospitality, without offending the man?

He chuckled and shook his finger playfully as she opened her mouth to try. “Do not even think it, Raine! You are my honored guest, a delight at my table. The only payment I’ll accept is that you listen to an old man’s tales, and that, perhaps you join me later in a game of chess?”

Raine laughed. “Of course, if you like. My father’s been trouncing me all my life at chess, so I’ve got lots of practice in losing.”

“Somehow I doubt that. I smell a—how do you Americans call it? A setup.”

Should she warn him that her father could have been a Grand Master, but he’d preferred to chase dinosaurs around the world?

They paused as the servant returned with bowls of dark, spicy stew—venison cooked with onions, peppers and pozole, the doctor explained. He said something to the woman, and she replied in her soft, oddly clicking speech, then departed.

“She’s a Tarahumara?” Raine asked, once she’d gone.

“She’s a Raramuri,” Luna corrected, the warmth fading from his voice. “Tarahumara is the name the Conquistadores imposed on the tribe, in their arrogance and ignorance. They misheard the word, or they couldn’t pronounce it, or they did not care. Raramuri means the People who run.”

“They run?”

“They’re renowned throughout the world for their endurance. Men and women both. We sent runners to your state of Colorado a while back, for a footrace of one hundred miles through the mountains, at a town called Leadville. The Raramuri raced in their sandals soled with worn-out truck tires, against young professional athletes wearing their fine running shoes. All the same, the Raramuri placed first, second and fifth. The winner was fifty-five years old.”

Raine whistled her appreciation. “And you, sir? Are you one of the People who run?” He’d said “we,” but should she dared to have asked? In some parts of class-conscious Mexico, the word indio was still a term of contempt, connoting poverty and backwardness. In spite of his urbane manners, clearly Luna wasn’t Castilian Spanish, but if he cared to maintain that fiction? Bad move, she told herself as the silence stretched.

“One can only wonder,” he said at last, with cool obscurity. “There were other people here, long before the coming of the Raramuri. The Raramuri retreated to the Barrancas del Cobre in the early 1600’s, fleeing west before the Spanish soldiers and the Jesuits, who would tame them to their missions.”

So you’re not a Raramuri? With his beaked nose and his deep-set eyes below a broad craggy brow, Luna’s features did seem harsher and more rugged than his servant’s. But that might be simply individual variation. Whatever, she’d gotten too personal. “So…if Professor McCord left this morning for Creel, he won’t be back tonight?” And what made her think he’d return at all?

“He left yesterday, not this morning. But I suspect you have truth. He’ll stay in Creel till his business is accomplished.”

Her fork froze halfway to her rounding mouth. “He left yesterday? But that means—”

The doctor smiled. “It means you were very tired after your mishap.”

Tired enough to lose a whole precious day and a half? She’d never done that before!

“What’s wrong, Raine? The stew does not please you?”

“Oh, no. It’s…delicious.”

After supper, the doctor led her to his library. While Raine paced its book-lined walls, scanning medical tomes, histories of Mexico and Central America, firsthand accounts of the conquests, Machiavelli and Sun Tzu’s military strategies, Luna brought out a chessboard from a side table. Its pieces were warriors carved of green onyx and white. “But you’re in the midst of a game,” she protested.

“Yes. The professor is beaten, though he won’t yet admit it.”

“And now he won’t have to,” she said, as the doctor returned the chessmen to their original ranks.

“Ah, but he will. I’ll set the pieces as they were, once we’re done.”

Meaning he could remember the position of two dozen pieces? In that case, this might be a very short game. The doctor excused himself for a moment, and Raine returned to his books. One floor-to-ceiling case was devoted to birds, everything from Petersen’s field guides to an Audubon facsimile. “Why hummingbirds?” she wondered aloud, when he limped up behind her.

“Well, herons won’t stop here so far above water.”

As good a non sequitur as any. She laughed and sat down to the board.

“That’s how I met your friend McCord,” the doctor recalled, waiting for white’s first move. “He heard that I’m an authority, hereabouts, on birds. He stopped by for a visit, asked me if I knew anything about herons, if they nest around here.”

“Herons?” She had the oddest feeling that he was holding his breath for her response. “Why herons?”

Luna shrugged, smiled; if she hadn’t imagined the tension, it faded to self-deprecating charm. “I wrote a book about the migrations of wading birds, once, back when I was young and foolish enough to think I had time for hobbies.”

But why would McCord want to know?

“Your move, señorita.”

He was too sharp for her to throw him the game discreetly, Raine told herself a half hour later as she sat, her knight poised in midair, considering. Jump it there, and she’d checkmate him in four moves. Land it beside his bishop, and she could prolong the game, perhaps sparing his ego.

“That reminds me.” The doctor stood abruptly, lurched across the room to open a cabinet and pulled out her shoulder bag.

“Why, there it is! I figured McCord couldn’t find it—that it’d fallen out of my Jeep. Or he’d kept it.” And since you had it all along, why wait till now to hand it over?

“And the professor left this note for you, along with a request that I show you this.” The doctor limped over to another shelf, chose a small carving from among several. He handed her a blue lizard, shaped from wood, painted in patches that looked like stylized scales.

“It’s charming.” Puzzled, she turned it in her hands, then opened the folded note.

Hey, sleepyhead!

I stuck around as long as I could, then gave up and went on errands. Back tomorrow or the next, then my wheels are yours to command. Meantime, I looked for your mug and found a heap of shards in a bandanna. But here’s a thought: check out the doc’s carving of a cielito lizard. Five’ll get you ten that’s the critter on your mug. Till you see me, kick back and stay put, okay? The canyons are no place to snoop around without a guide.

Yours,

McCord.

PS. Don’t play chess with the doc if you like to win.

Second man in two days—no, blast it, make that three—who wanted to be her guide. Raine turned the lizard till it faced her head-on, tipped her head and frowned. Could this be what the potter had been thinking of when he’d glazed her mug? “No neck-frill,” she murmured.

“Your pardon?” The doctor had returned to the chessboard and sat, contemplating his fate.

“Oh, just thinking. It’s a lovely lizard. Now, where were we?”

“Your move.”

“Yes.” Might as well put him out of his misery, so she could straggle off to bed. Raine lifted her knight again—and blinked. That pawn there, last time she’d looked, had been sitting on the f4 square.

Yet now it rested demurely on g5, blocking her attack. She glanced up through her lashes to find the doctor smiling benevolently into the distance, his hands crossed on his rounded vest.

Well, that changed everything.

Chapter 6

T hough the view from this overlook was no more spectacular than the previous ten they’d passed this morning, something about it grabbed the burro. Pausing on an outcrop above a sheer two-hundred foot drop to the green river, the jenny braced her stubby legs, lowered her grizzled neck and let loose with a truly astonishing, “Haw, hee-hawng, hee-hawng.”

As the echoes bounced, then died, Raine took her fingers from her ears. “Well, if they didn’t know we were coming before, they know it now.” She set off, tugging on the burro’s lead. “You wouldn’t consider going any faster, would you?”

Apparently not. This was a beast that believed in mañana, if not next week. They’d covered perhaps twenty miles yesterday, Raine estimated, after leaving the Casa de los Picaflores in the early afternoon. She’d waited for McCord to return, but finally she’d lost patience.

She’d asked the doctor for directions to the ranchito of Lagarto, home of the potter who’d made her mug. When he couldn’t persuade her to wait another day, he’d insisted she take his spare burro, Poquita, to carry her backpack.

She’d have made much better time without her. But while the vegetation changed from temperate to near tropical as they switchbacked deeper and deeper into the canyons, the temperature climbed to the low eighties. And somewhere in the next twenty miles or so, the doctor had advised that she’d come to a point where nothing on four legs could handle the trail. Might as well spare her own back, while she could.

The doctor had assured her that she’d recognize this point when she came to it. Then Raine should remove Poquita’s lead so she wouldn’t trip on it, turn her around and shoo her on her way. “I’ll send a boy to meet her and hurry her home, but in truth, it is not necessary. She knows where to find her oats.”

Without stopping, Raine reached high up the wall of rock on her left, to pick a clump of dry grass. She offered the burro one blade to munch, tucked the rest of the bribe in the hip pocket of her khaki pants, where it wagged enticingly. That gained them maybe a tenth of a mile per hour. At this rate they hadn’t a prayer of reaching Lagarto by nightfall, and the doctor had warned that she should not attempt the trails in the dark.

“Besides the danger of falling, there are rattlesnakes and…” He’d paused, then added in a regretful whisper, “worse things!”

“Bats, scorpions, what are we talking here?” she’d teased.

He’d shrugged good-naturedly. “That depends on who you ask. The Raramuri have legends of werewolves and ghosts and witches.”

She’d met none of that crew last night, when she and Poquita had camped in a lush little meadow. In fact, she’d felt more comfortable alone out under the stars than she had at the Casa de los Picaflores. The doctor was a sweetie, but still, there was something about him. She had an odd sense of unplumbed depths…Something moving below that playful surface. Anyway, she was glad to be on her own again. At least, till she met up with McCord.

If they met up again.

“If McCord goes sniffing after la rubia, instead of searching for the treasure, this is no good! Time flows like water through our fingers. I say she should fall from a high place. It could be easily done.”

“A man should trample flowers only when he finds no stones to run upon.” The doctor chose an apple from the basket beside his chair on the veranda, then drew a handkerchief from his breast pocket. While he polished the fruit, he gazed dreamily across the canyon. “No, do nothing till I have considered this.”

“But, my uncle—”

“Ssszt! You begin to argue like a gringo. And speak your own language, lest you forget it.”

“If I do,” Antonio growled in Raramuri, “it’s because you sent me to live with a gringo. To wash his pots and pans! To carry his pickax and shovels like a pack mule!”

“To be my eyes and my ears, Antonio. To be the raven that perches in the pine and sees all.”

“And does nothing!”

“When the time comes, then may you swoop.” The doctor crunched through the apple’s rosy skin. “While we speak of doing, what have you done since the night you came here to tell me of the mug you saw at Magdalena’s—only to find I had its blond owner already in my hands?”

“I’ve done no more than you directed.” The young man dropped down on the steps beside his uncle’s feet, to gaze glumly into the distance. “I went to Creel. Looked in all the tourist shops for more such mugs and found nada.”

“That is good news. If the design on this mug looked like the Quetzalcoatl as you say, then it could attract attention, draw interest, should a person of learning chance to see it. We need no more seekers after treasure here in the canyons. McCord is hard enough to control.” The doctor took another bite, munched thoughtfully. “And so, you went to Creel. It must have taken you all of an afternoon to search the shops. But since then, my brother’s son? What have you been doing? Perhaps you have a sweetheart in Creel. Young men like to keep such matters secret. And provided she’s of the Blood, in this I see no harm.”

“Maybe I do.” Antonio twitched his wiry shoulders.

“Or perhaps there was a—How do you say this? An Internet café where you wasted your hard-earned money?”

Antonio jerked half around. “You—I—Who told you that?”

“A little bird.” The doctor showed his teeth in a lazy smile. “They hum all sorts of news in my ear. Of good things and bad. Like Internet cafés, where young men worship new gods. War games to rot their brains and harden their souls. Photos of naked gringas to steal their hearts. By the Sun God, Antonio, if you’re to be seduced, at least choose a warm, sighing woman, not a picture of one! You can’t lie with a computer.”

“I don’t look at photos of women,” Antonio protested. “I look at things. Places to travel. Like Hollywood. Or New York City.”

“Canyons filled with honking cars and choking smog instead of singing birds and a running river? Now there’s a bargain! A very fine trade.

“And do you know what those people in the city do? They look into their computers and dream of escape to a world of peace and beauty—a world such as this.” The doctor had risen to sweep his cane around the sun-drenched vastness. Now he limped to the closest pillar and buried his nose in the honeysuckle. With a gusty sigh he plucked a scarlet blossom, stooped to tuck it behind his nephew’s ear. “It’s a wise man who knows his luck while it perches on his hand, Antonio. A wiser one who refuses to let it fly away.”

“Yes, uncle.”

“So.” The doctor settled again into his chair and laced his fingers on his paunch. “I’ve had some news while you were gone. There’s a man in Batopilas, a man of the People. He works in one of the silver mines. He sent word that he can liberate us a case of dynamite, possibly two.”

“Excellent!” Antonio shot to his feet. “I’ll go at once.”

“Ah, but there’s no hurry, nephew. I doubt we’ll need it for a few weeks yet. Unless…” The doctor twiddled his fingers to some inner thought. “The big German…you said he, also, was at the cantina? Perhaps it is time to—Well, we’ll speak more of this once you’ve completed your task.”

“And what’s that?”

“Antonio, Antonio, I keep telling you, you must learn to think ahead. To see not just the path before your running feet, but the next canyon, the next season. Why, if a wise man listens carefully, he can hear the rumble of the coming flood months before it sweeps the fool away.”

“Sí, my uncle, I’m sure this is so. But what would you have me do?”

“Bueno. If an ignorant village potter makes a mug painted with the face of the Quetzalcoatl, then tell me: How did he know what the God looks like?”

They reached the river around noon. Poquita waded to her knees and drank deep of the chuckling current. “Think we should stop and have a swim?” Raine asked the burro.

Nothing but slurps and a belch in reply.

“Better not,” Raine decided. Stop now, and in all conscience she’d have to unsaddle the jenny. By the time they got moving again, they’d have lost hours, and she was determined to reach Lagarto on the morrow. “Maybe this evening we’ll find a swimming hole.”

Preferably some spot more private than this. The paths through the canyons were the roads of the Raramuri, the doctor had told her. And this time of year the People were on the move.

Most Raramuri had two seasonal homes, he’d explained. A little cabin on the cool heights, safe from the torrid summer floods. Then another cabin—or frequently a cave—in the warm depths of the canyons, when the winter snows fell above. Some families were more nomadic—with a third shelter near good grazing for their animals, perhaps a fourth where they’d planted beans and corn.

So far Raine had been overtaken by three bands of Raramuri. First would come the men, striding on ahead; they carried massive loads on their backs, supported by the tumplines across their brown foreheads. Behind them trotted the boys, bearing burdens according to their size. The women brought up the rear. With babies tucked in their shawls, they herded the goats, a few cows if this was a prosperous family.

The black eyes of the men would slant sideways at Raine as they passed, then flick away. If they understood her greetings in Spanish they didn’t deign to respond. The boys were gleefully fascinated; they elbowed each other and whispered. The women were shy, but not austere like their husbands. They’d steal glances, then cover their mouths and giggle, ducking their scarved heads as they hurried past.

Raine was used to being a source of amusement in foreign lands. If her pale-blond, ripply hair didn’t strike the locals as bizarre enough, there was always her height. At five foot eight, she was taller than most Raramuri men, nearly a foot higher than their women. She must look like a big gawky white bird, blown down from the north. “As long as you leave ’em laughing, you’re doing fine,” her father had always advised. “It’s the ones who can’t take a joke you have to look out for.”

An hour’s walk brought them to the end of the floodplain. The canyon boxed in on both sides to rise a thousand feet straight up from the water, while the path climbed the left wall—and narrowed. “We meet any oncoming traffic here and somebody’ll have to back up,” Raine told the burro. Or dive into the river, which now tumbled over toothy rapids, some fifty feet below.

She must have sensed something subconsciously. A minute later, she could hear it clearly, the drumbeat of overtaking footfalls. Her pulse quickened to match their padding rhythm. In her experience, a runner sometimes brought bad news, even danger.

But in the world of the People who run, this must be a standard encounter. They’d come to a slightly wider stretch of trail and Raine swung her back to the cliff, then tugged Poquita inward—at least she tried to. The donkey swerved toward a clump of weed growing along the brink. “Poquita, dammit, not now!”

Intent on the prize, the jenny flattened her long ears, stretched out her neck. With the lead pulled tight between them, they’d trip the runner, if they didn’t watch out! Raine swore and stepped out to stand alongside the rebel, with a hand on her halter. The runner would have to squeeze past on the inside. “Look out!” she called toward the oncoming sound.

He burst around a shoulder of the cliff, startled at the sight of them, then bounded on. A young man, lean and fit, stripped to the waist; for an instant Raine thought he must be an Anglo. The Raramuri were prim about showing skin. But no, even if he was breaking the dress code, this one had the face and coloring of an indio. His black eyes locked on hers and Raine blinked. Prolonged eye contact was unusual, and—Where have I seen you before?

He slapped the burro’s rump as he passed, and not with a smile.

“¡Hola!” Raine said as he drew abreast. “¿Sabe usted si—Oh!”

His flying foot hooked behind her knee and she spun backwards into space.

Chapter 7

B ut a burro makes a good anchor—if her halter holds. Raine’s left hand clutched Poquita’s cheek strap. Dangling over the gorge with one arm flailing and her feet scrabbling at stone, she found no foothold.

Eyes rimmed with white, Poquita ducked her head and braced her short legs as she brayed her outrage at these gringo antics.

Half-deafened, Raine got her other hand on the halter. “You think this was my idea?”

Snorting and jerking her head, the burro hunched backwards along the path, doing her best to shake herself free.

“Calmate, you jackass!” Raine’s boot toe found a protruding rock. She stomped upward just as the jenny tossed her head, and Raine’s knee crested the ledge. She rolled inward to land on her back, panting in the dirt, clinging to the burro.

Noses only inches apart, they glared at each other, upside-down to right-way up. Poquita gave a snort that summed up her opinion.

“Are we having fun yet?” Raine found the lead, gave the beast some slack. She shifted to lean against the cliff. Arms clasping elbows to hold in her shudders, she gazed out over the drop-off. “Whew, that was a close one.”

After a long, disgruntled pause, the burro noticed the same clump of weed that had started the trouble. While she swallowed it, grubby roots and all, Raine muttered, “But what d’you think, was it an accident?”

Whether that shove had been a silent “gringa, go home” or mere clumsiness, it was over, the runner long gone. So they went on their way—slowly at first, till Raine’s knees stopped wobbling. Another hour’s walk brought them again to the canyon floor. The river had twisted to flow due west, and the sun was setting straight down this slot in a bonfire that dazzled their eyes. “Next thing that looks like a swimming hole, we’re stopping,” she assured the jenny.

At the moment, the path cut through a field of chest-high green weeds. The river ran somewhere off to their right, but Raine preferred not to bushwhack. “With our luck, there’re werewolves or witches out there, and I’ve had enough excitement for one—Hey!” She staggered backwards as Poquita crouched on her haunches, yanking the lead. “What the—?”

An eerie buzzing filled the hot air. The burro squealed and scuttled backwards, dragging Raine with her.

The fine hairs stood straight up on her arms as her slower instincts kicked in. Rattler! But where?

When it came to snakes, anywhere was too near. They retreated another five yards, then wheeled, peering wildly. Raine shielded her eyes with a palm against the glare—and there it was. A diamondback—a big sucker, easily as long as Raine was tall. He lay coiled in the middle of their path, shaking like a meth-crazed marimba band.

“Good spotting!” Raine rubbed the burro’s fuzzy ears, which for once, were standing straight up at attention. “That’s two I owe you.”

Poquita whuffled and jerked at her lead, trying to swing right around.

“No, no, we can’t go home yet. Not for a silly snake. We just scared him is all.” Raine leaned to scoop up a fistful of pebbles. “Snakes are all cowards at heart. Go on, shoo!” She tossed the gravel underhanded.

The snake struck at the missiles. He slithered a yard closer—and coiled again. The burro squeaked and retreated, hauling Raine with her.

“Great. We have to meet the tough guy.” Raine scooped up more rocks to pelt him. “Go on, beat it! Don’t make me break out my blowgun.”

The snake struck and advanced—assumed the position and rattled his intentions.

This would be a whole lot less amusing once the sun went down. “Okay. If that’s the way you want it.” Raine chose a rock the size of a cantaloupe—and bowled it down the trail. “Scat!”

That broke the thug’s nerve. He flinched at the oncoming menace, then whiplashed off into the bushes at a speed that made Raine gulp. But once he started moving, he’d keep on going. She patted her heart a few times; it refused to be comforted.

That went double for the burro. When Raine tugged on her lead, she flattened her ears and engaged the parking brake. “Hey, this is no time to play the diva. Get over it. He’s gone. We get past this field and we’ll call it a day. Find a nice waterhole, take off your saddle, settle in for a lovely night of grazing. How’s that sound?” Raine rubbed the spot beneath the ear strap where the burro liked to be scratched. “Good girl, you ready now? Then why don’t we—”

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