CHAPTER TEN
It turned out there were only six of us on the actual trip: Adriana and Richard, Matt and I, and the twins. It was nice to finally meet Richard. He was tall with very dark hair, pretty gray eyes, and the darkest lashes I had ever seen. He introduced himself quickly and then went on loading the SUV. He was definitely all business, that’s for sure. Damian and Matt helped him, and as soon as they were finished, we all packed into the Explorer. Richard drove, with Adriana riding shotgun, Matt and I took the middle seats, and the twins were in the third row.
Our trip was a long one. Living in the middle of nowhere meant we couldn’t just hop on a plane and go to Mexico (or anywhere else). We had a long drive to get to any real airport. We also had to be sure that we weren’t followed. We couldn’t risk Toltec figuring out the location of the safe house in Mexico. The obvious route would be to leave from a major airport in New Mexico, but instead we drove a little over three hours to Tucson, where we boarded a private jet.
“Toltec aren’t the only ones with support and connections,” Adriana said, giving me a wink.
The long flight gave Adriana and Richard the opportunity to start working with me on energy exercises that would help me to recognize the k’ul inside of me and eventually control it.
“Should we start with becoming aware of energy?” she asked.
“Let’s just work on meditation and centering. I’m not sure having her work with energy on the plane is advisable,” Richard said.
“You’re right. Playing with energy in a small enclosed space….”
“Especially 30,000 feet up in the air,” I said.
“Technically,” Damian began, “Cruising altitude varies between 25,000 feet and—”
“Oh, whatever,” Lyssa said.
“Twenty-five thousand and what?” Adriana asked.
“Oh, no, see, it’s not good to encourage him,” I said.
“I know, right?” Lyssa giggled.
“Hey!” Damian protested. “I’m right here!”
“And here!” Lyssa pointed to her head. For some reason, that just busted everyone up. There had been so much tension over the past couple of days that I guess we just needed an excuse to finally let go. Everyone except Richard, who sat there grinning and shaking his head at us. (Seriously, I think for him that was letting go.)
And Matt slept through the whole thing. (I swear that guy could sleep anywhere.) While I sat in the lotus position on the floor of the plane and Richard played Yoda to my Luke, the twins worked on their telepathy.
When we arrived in Merida, Yucatan, it was night, but the city was wide awake. There were tons of people everywhere and a lot of traffic and noise. It took us a while to get through town in our unmarked van, but once we were out of town, everything went pitch black. There were no lights on either the highway or the road that ran alongside it.
“This drive normally takes under three hours in daylight,” Richard said, “but we really need the cover of darkness so our movements can’t be tracked.” He had to drive incredibly slowly to avoid hitting anything. We were all starting to drift off when a huge bang woke us up again.
“Sorry, everyone!” Richard said.
“Do we have a flat?” Matt asked.
“No, we hit a tope,” he answered.
Wha—?
“Speed bump,” Adriana said. “They’re all over out here. To keep traffic from speeding through the Mayan villages.”
“And, unfortunately, they’re impossible to see in the dark,” Richard added.
As we continued to drive, I finally managed to drift off. I didn’t wake up again until we stopped. We had made it to the safe house by first light. I looked at the villa-style white stucco home that stood before us. It was all one level and was quite large. It actually reminded me a lot of New Mexico. Beyond the house I could see a garden, and I also noticed that the house and land were totally surrounded by a tall, white stone wall that didn’t look original to the place. It must have been ten feet high. It reminded me that we weren’t here on vacation.
“Look, Maya!” Lyssa pointed across the yard.
Damian looked, too, and grinned. “Hey, it’s a ceiba tree. It looks just like your mark!”
“Yeah, it actually does,” I said.
“This used to be an inn before we acquired the property,” Adriana said. “Alma should be around here somewhere.”
We grabbed our bags and followed Richard into the house. The inside had an open floor plan with a large kitchen at its center. The living area and patio were at one end and a hallway with several rooms was on the other. The floor was all tile to help keep it cool on long, hot days.
Alma came down the hallway and greeted us with a warm smile. She was very petite, barely five feet tall, and had light mocha skin and short, cropped, dark hair. She looked like she was almost sixty. I noticed that she didn’t have a mark.
“Oh, you are here!” she said in accented English. She gave Richard and Adriana a hug.
“Where is everyone?” Richard asked.
“Oh, out prowling around.” She turned to the rest of us. “You must be the twins.” They babbled briefly with her in Spanish, then she directed them down the hall to their rooms.
“Alma, this is Maya Delaney,” Adriana said, “and this is Matt Caldwell, her mate.”
“It’s wonderful to meet you,” she said. “I gave you two the room with the blue door, across from the twins’ rooms. Why don’t you unpack and rest? I’ll have breakfast ready in half an hour. If you ever need anything, my daughter and I live in the little house next to this one.”
“Thanks, Alma,” I said, smiling.
Matt and I headed down the hallway. I looked across the hall into the twins’ rooms where Damian was listening to his iPod and Lyssa was unpacking. She wiggled her eyebrows at me when she saw me follow Matt into our room. I shut the door behind us. Man, she could be annoying.
“Uh,” I said, “slightly weird to be sharing a bedroom with my English teacher just down the hall.”
“Well, number one, she’s not really your teacher. And you know it’s different with shifters. They don’t even think about it. You know, when Richard told me that he and Adriana had been together fifteen years, I asked him if they were married and he was, like, ‘why?’”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess it’s not really part of shifter culture.”
“It is part of Catholic culture, though.”
“Yep. We’ll definitely be getting married.” I dropped my bag on the bed.
“No doubt. I might be a foot taller than my mom, but she still scares the hell outta me!”
We plopped down on the bed to wait for breakfast, and I totally surprised myself by drifting off for twenty minutes. Then we heard a slight knock on the twins’ door, then on ours, and we knew it was time to eat. For breakfast, we had tortillas with scrambled eggs, black beans, and plantains, along with fresh orange juice to drink. We were all starving after the trip, and the food was delicious. No one said a word while we ate, and afterward everyone gave a quick nod as we headed back to our rooms to catch up on some much needed sleep.
“Do you need to use the bathroom?” I asked Matt.
“Nope.” He was already heading for the bed. I should have known. By the time I had washed my face and brushed my teeth, he was fast asleep. I crawled in beside him. Sadly, I was sharing a bed with my mate for the first time and I was hardly awake long enough to notice.
When I woke up late that afternoon, I could hear Matt in the shower, so I decided to go across the hall and see if the twins were awake yet. They were both in Lyssa’s room, already showered and dressed.
“Hey, look who’s up,” Damian said.
“How long have you guys been awake?” I asked.
“Not long. So…how’s your mate?” Alyssa asked.
“Oh, shut it.”
“Touchy, touchy.”
I had to change the subject. “So have you guys met any of the other shifters yet?”
“Alm
a said most of them will be around later to eat and change up guard duty.”
Change guard duty? I wondered how many of them there actually were. I was more than slightly uncomfortable about all of that. It should have made me feel safer, but for some reason it only seemed to reinforce the fact that there were some serious haters out there…somewhere.
Sometime after dinner, the shifters began to trickle in, a couple at a time. I was surprised to see that they weren’t all Mayan, or even Hispanic for that matter. There seemed to be more or less equal numbers of men and women, maybe twenty or so, and they were all older than we were, with the exception of Ana, Alma’s daughter. She looked about twenty. She was very tall, taller than me, and I’m well over average height. It was kind of comical, seeing her next to her mom. She wore her dark hair in a chin length bob that was cut up in the back to show off her mark. It was a tribal mark of a snake. Her haircut was a really cool idea. Kinda made me wanna cut mine. Almost.
I loved the pride they all had in being shifters. Grandma had been right (as usual). Shifters were respected here. People looked up to them. No one here was hiding who they were. I could tell that it was definitely something that agreed with Matt, and I was so glad for him. Until….
“Matt, is it okay if you take the next watch with Chris and Sara?” asked a redhead named Liam. He had a cute brogue.
“Sure,” Matt said.
“Wait,” I said. “Whoa, you’re not going out there, are you?”
“Richard, could I speak to you for a moment?” Adriana said in a tone that made it clear she wasn’t really asking. They walked down the hallway that led to the bedrooms. A door closed.
“I told you this would happen.”
“He’s her mate, Adri. It’s natural instinct for him to want to protect her.”
“Well, I’m sorry if I’m less concerned with his manhood than I am about making sure that Maya is comfortable here.”
“She’ll be fine. I’ll just have him take one short watch a day, daylight only.”
“I can’t work with her and expect her to focus when she’s worried about Matt all the time. It’s just not gonna work. We’re all giving up things for this, Richard. He’s going to have to as well.”
I noticed Matt walking quickly toward me from across the room. I couldn’t imagine what my face must have looked like. I had just seen and heard everything that had happened between Adriana and Richard while they were a hundred feet away behind a closed door. What was happening to me?
“Matt, I….” I started to speak, but I stopped when I realized how incredibly dizzy I was. At this point, my senses were flashing between the two rooms and I couldn’t make them stop.
He must have figured it out because he started to lead me to a kitchen chair. “Richard!” It sounded like he was yelling under water.
“What is it?” Adriana asked, coming quickly into the kitchen.
“I don’t know. Something happened to her right after you left.”
“I’ll get her some water,” Richard said, heading to the refrigerator.
“I was afraid of this,” Adriana said. “Maya, can you hear me?”
“Er….”
“What’s happening?” Matt asked, looking from one to the other.
“She’s coming into her abilities so fast now, I’m going to have to start working with her right away. She either learns to control them or they will control her.”
“What’s going on?” Lyssa and Damian came in from the patio.
“Maya’s visions are advancing,” Richard said.
“She can see and hear what’s going on in other rooms,” Matt added.
“My guess is that she can do much more than that,” Adriana said. “But starting tomorrow, teaching her how to control her energy is going to be top priority. And that should give the two of you plenty of time to work with your own abilities,” she said to the twins. “You need to work on putting up a wall around your thoughts so that you can use your telepathy only when you want to.”
“Hellz, yeah,” Lyssa said.
“What she said,” Damian agreed.
“Well first,” Richard said, “everyone needs a good night’s sleep.”
Matt and I walked back to our room and got ready for bed. I couldn’t believe how tired I was, considering we had just gotten up a few hours ago. I crawled into bed next to him and he pulled me close. It felt so good to be in his arms. Slowly, the stress and weirdness of the day began to melt away.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Better,” I sighed. “Matt?”
“Yeah?”
“I want you to go ahead and do some guard duty with Richard.”
“Where did that come from?” he asked, propping himself up on an elbow.
“Well, when I overheard him speaking with Adriana in the other room, that’s what they were talking about. Adriana didn’t want me to worry about you. She was afraid it would break my concentration while I was working with her. Richard didn’t think so.”
“Well, will it? I’m all for contributing, but I don’t think I’d be helping out much by worrying you.”
“But you have a right to do it if you want to,” I argued.
“Sure, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the best thing for us. I can find other ways of helping out. There’s a ton of work that needs to be done around here.”
“Are you sure? Because Richard—”
“Hey, I’m not Richard. And I should have checked with you first. Right now we’re all on Team Maya. We need to be behind you.”
“Okay, well, just so you know it’s not always going to be that way.”
“I know, but for right now you’re just going to have to accept it or else,” he said, tickling me until I froze up in a little ball.
“I love you,” I said, snuggling into his chest.
“I love you, too, My.”
I lay there, awake and still thinking, long after I heard Matt’s breathing even out.
The weight on my shoulders was increasing. I had been a little nervous during the trip, but here everything around me seemed to remind me of what was expected of me (never mind the dangers). I mean, I had guards? WTF?
Finally I decided to get up and call Grandma to let her know that we had arrived safely. The Yucatan peninsula ran only an hour ahead of New Mexico time, so I didn’t think it would be too late to call. I found my cell, opened the door quietly, and tiptoed out to the living room. All the lights were off, so I assumed that everyone had gone to bed.
“Oh, Maya,” she said when she answered, “I’m so glad you called. How was your trip down?”
“It was fine, just long,” I said, “How are you feeling?”
“Much better. I’ll be going home in the morning.”
“Grandma, isn’t there someone you could stay with for a while, so you won’t be alone?” I wanted to make sure that she would be okay after leaving the hospital, but I knew that deep down I was also worried about Toltec trying to get to her again. It still upset me to think about that first attack.
“I’ll be staying with Jack and his wife,” she said. “I think you’ve met them before.”
“I think so, once, a long time ago. I’m glad you have somewhere to go.”
“I’ll be fine. I don’t want you worrying about me. Are you settling in okay?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
She must have heard something in my voice. “What is it, ts’unu’un?”
“I’m starting to have more visions, Grandma. Really powerful ones. I could see and hear Adriana and Richard when they were talking in another room. Then I got so dizzy. I dunno. Adriana says we have to start working with k’ul right away.”
“I know it’s hard,” she said, “but try not to be afraid. When you are able to balance your energy better, those kinds of things will stop.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, honey, I am. Now you go and get some rest, ts’unu’un. You have a lot of work ahead of you.”
“Okay,
Grandma. I love you.”
“I love you, too, sweetheart.”
I left my dad a quick voicemail to let him know we had arrived safely, then I turned my phone off. As I started to walk down the hallway, I stopped. A shadow moving in the kitchen startled me. As my eyes adjusted to the light, I realized that it was one of the shifters who had come in from duty after dinner. I could just barely make out the outline of his tall body and dark shoulder length hair. He said nothing as he turned and walked out into the moonlight.