The 52nd (The 52nd Saga Book 1) (34 page)

“What did Gabriella say to Dylan?” I asked, trying to keep
up.

“Dylan is a show-off. She told him to
behave.”

“Won’t his tattoo glow in the water?” My calves burned as we finally stepped onto a paved driveway.

“It only glows in waters of another land, as a reminder of where we come
from.”

My eyes flickered from Lucas, who kept walking, to the four wide double doors before us. When opened, they revealed a garage the size of my entire house. Inside were three fancy sports cars, Sea-Doos, and a large, shiny boat. Dylan was bending over the Sea-Doos, checking the engines.

“So, which one is yours?” I asked, observing the rainbow of
metals.

“That one.” Lucas pointed to a French blue convertible with the famous Jaguar logo and the letters
XKR-S
on the back. It looked dangerous.

“And those other two?” They were convertibles as well. I made a clever distinction: yellow car, black
car.

“That one is Dylan’s.” He pointed to the black one and then glanced at the smaller, yellow convertible. “And that one is Gabriella’s.”

I read the brand on the back. “His-and-hers Porsches?”

“Anniversary gifts to one another a couple years
ago.”

Nice.
“Where is your parents’ car?”

“In the other
garage.”

Of course you have another garage.
If we ended up together
, I wondered,
what color of car would I have?
Suddenly there was noise and loud laughter.

“No way! Is that a Porsche 959?” Casey ran to the shiny yellow convertible and gently petted the waxy
metal.

“Casey, look at this Jag!” Max seemed glued to Lucas’s car, but he wrenched his gaze away from it for a moment and then gaped. “Oh, man. Are you serious? A Spyder? Dylan, bro, which car is
yours?”

“The Spyder,” Dylan replied with a devious smile, wiping his hands on a dirty rag as he joined
them.

“What does your father-in-law drive?” Max wondered.

“A Maybach Exelero.”

They turned as one, searching.

“It’s in the other garage,” Dylan
said.

The spinning stopped, mouths gaped, and Max and Casey giggled like little girls. Lucas and I slid into the beige leather seats of his
car.

“You can take a spin in my car later if you want,” Dylan was
saying.

“Seriously?”

“Sure, no problem. It’s not like you’re going to crash it,” he
joked.

Casey stiffened.

Dylan pounded him on the shoulder—maybe a little too hard; Casey grabbed his shoulder and rubbed it. “I’m just kidding, Case.”

Max came around the boat as Lucas started the engine. “Lucas, I just wanted to tell you that earlier, we were only looking out for our sister, okay? Brotherly love, you understand, right?”

Lucas nodded. “Fully. If anyone ever did anything to Gabriella, I would kill him.” Max didn’t move until Lucas forced a deliberate fake chuckle.

“Yeah man, right,” Max replied shakily. “So look, just take care of our sister. Okay?”

“All right, man,” Lucas
said.

The tires squealed as Lucas sped down the driveway and then drifted silently over the long, narrow stretch of packed sand. I kept my head back, letting the cool wind on my skin revive me. After Lucas passed the gate, which daylight revealed to be flanked by lush flowering trees, he turned right onto paved highway. Minutes later, I saw a flock of flamingos, uninterested in us, wading in a small
pond.

Lucas sped to our destination, and I watched the thick green jungle and white sand, holding my hair back, for what seemed like hours. I began to feel the sunshine soaking through my skin, tinting it with pink. We approached a small town and started passing other cars, which moved like snails as we passed them. I looked at the speedometer.

“Holy crow! You’re going one sixty!” I shouted.

“It’s kilometers per hour, not miles. So really, I’m only going a hundred.” His shirt flapped in the abrasive wind as he grinned. “I
was
going one
thirty.”

“If you don’t want me to die of a heart attack, could you please slow
down?”

The airflow grew
softer.

“Better?” he asked. The needle now pointed to
140.

“Barely,” I groaned.

The sparse traffic increased with knots of taxis and buses, and a green sign flashed reflective letters that spelled
Tulum 5
km
.

“Tulum?”

He slowed significantly, and a smoldering heat descended upon me. The sound of rattling bus engines replaced the barreling
wind.

“I’m going to tell you about my transformation,” he said. He sounded strangely
meek.

I sat, stunned, as he turned off the road, paid a small fee at a white hut, and fell in behind a line of cars waiting to park. Finally, the last car ahead of us turned into a parking spot, but he carefully inched the car through the crowd, toward the entrance to the site. Barricades prevented cars from moving beyond the parking
lot.

“Lucas, I think we need to park with the others,” I suggested.

He leaned out the window over his bent arm and whistled. Two dark-skinned workers with
Tulum
written across their shirts emerged from the shade of the souvenir shop and moved one barricade to the right. We passed without a word; they moved it back and returned to the
shop.

“Aluxes,” Lucas commented, seeing my bewilderment.

He drove at nearly the same speed as the sweaty pedestrians, waiting patiently for them to clear the grainy road, usually after a few moments of gawking at him. The shaded path rose slowly, walled in by wild trees. As the leaves thinned and the sun penetrated the canopy, he pulled off to the side and parked in a shady
spot.

He was there as I crouched up from the low seat, reaching for my hand tenderly. My heart stuttered as his thumb pressed firmly over mine. I glanced up, awed by the change, how he was before Solstice and how he was now. Black sunglasses concealed his emotions, but he swallowed hard as he watched me, perhaps wanting to say more, maybe even what was on his
mind.

“This way,” he said, calm, though I was certain he was ready to
burst.

I let him lead me through a small stone archway into a roofless, narrow hall, brushing past the unavoidable tourists. Then I saw it on the edge of the cliff, across a field of summery grass: an ancient temple, nearly perfect despite the damage inflicted by time. A flat-roofed room with three doorways sat atop the steep
steps.

But Lucas drew me in the opposite direction, passing other classic stone structures less well preserved than the temple. He slowed at the easternmost edge of the cliff, where a makeshift fence of brown rope suggested we should stop. Behind it was a smaller platform reached by a short flight of stone
steps.

We slid under the rope, and I followed him up the uneven stone stairs to a single room with a narrow door in each wall. We hunched over to enter, then wedged close together in the opening of the door facing the ocean. I took my sandals off and sat down, dangling my feet over the edge. Sun poured over us as we stared across the endless green expanse of paradise.

“This is the only place in Mexico where you can watch the sunrise from the same room every single morning, no matter the sun’s position,” Lucas
said.

“It’s amazing.”

“I use to come here every morning to watch the sun, and sometimes Venus, when it was
there.”

“What is this
place?”

“This was our watchtower. We burned fires here to direct the men out at
sea.”

“Did you ever have to go out to sea with your father, trading?”

“I wasn’t allowed. It was
too dangerous
.” He sneered a bit at the old hurt. Then he looked serious, picked up a broken piece of rock, and threw it over the cliff. “Not that I was weak. But many men who traveled by sea never came back because of the pirates and storms. I couldn’t risk having our people find out I was only half-human. So I came to the watchtower to dream of other places and survive my boredom.” A sad, ironic chuckle fluttered out of his mouth. “And now I get to see the world, just as I dreamed—only it’s not what I thought it would
be.”

“Nothing is ever really what you
expect.”

I didn’t mean anything by my thoughtless proclamation—habit, I guess—but he looked at me seriously. “You are how I imagined.”

I chuckled even as my heart beat a good few paces more quickly. “Good
one.”

“You saved Jett. That takes courage.”

I sighed doubtfully. He pulled his citla out of his pocket and began spinning it between his fingers.

“I remember my last night here as if it was yesterday,” he said. He gazed away from me once more, emotion stilling as he stared beyond the horizon.

“My parents received word from a messenger that Cortez, who had already seized Tenochtitlan, was going to come after the cities in the south. At that time, we weren’t Watchers yet, but we knew we were going to be, and we were trying to find a replacement for my father. We knew that we couldn’t live among our people for many years without aging, but we didn’t want to abandon them. We were trying to do it as inconspicuously as possible, but when soldiers started invading the south, the Celestials ordered an immediate evacuation of Tulum. My parents had no choice but to do what any other rulers who cared for their people would have done: we abandoned the city before we could be slaughtered.

“We evacuated at night because the passageways were not safe during the day. There were too many soldiers waiting. The children cried as their mothers pulled them from their beds in the middle of the night. Tita and Gabriella led the women and children out of the city to the east, where they could hide in the thick jungle, while Dylan and I took up arms with my father’s warriors to secure the main roads in the north. We were ambushed: an army of Spanish soldiers was waiting for us. When they realized that only the men were fighting them, some of the soldiers went after the women and children. We fought and killed many of the white men that ambushed us, but our warriors dropped like flies. Dylan and I knew that if we stayed, our human father risked death, and that if we remained untouched, it would reveal our identity. Neither option would have been . . . acceptable . . . to the Celestials. We had no choice but to flee and pray the survivors would be
okay.”

I looked away from the turquoise glare to see the prince in pain. His eyes brimmed over as he choked up. “We abandoned our people, Zara.”

I didn’t move. I envisioned women and children crying, forced to flee into the wild jungle before heartless hunters. This glimpse of Lucas, bound up with emotion and regret, was somehow frightening. He wiped a tear with the back of his
hand.

I touched his back lightly, uncertain of what to do. “I’m so
sorry.”

He cleared his throat and sniffed as he straightened up. “Don’t be. I got even after the transformation.”

The sun reflected off his face as he hiked his knees to his chest. He looked peaceful again, but I also felt a sorrow there, brimming with hate and rage that went much deeper than I imagined. I felt bad for
him.

“When the transformation nears the end,” he began suddenly, “every human feeling, whether good or bad, burns from your insides out: greed, rage, jealousy, love, faith, hope, hatred. All those feelings become so intense that you are your own worst enemy. My father, Gabriella, and Tita were able to control it quickly. But for me . . . it turned me to an unreasonable monster.

“The hatred and the greed created a thirst for revenge that I didn’t know how to control. It nearly destroyed me. I blamed Cortez and Xibalba for making me become a Watcher. With the massacre fresh in my mind, I hunted down each soldier who was there the night we evacuated. The ones who killed the children I hunted
first.

“But it wasn’t enough. I wanted redemption. My father ordered me to leave Cortez alone.
He’s nothing
, he would say,
let it go—justice will find him
. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let it go. I blamed Cortez for making me this way, and I couldn’t let him get away with everything that he’d done. So I decided to leave my
family.”

“Where did you
go?”

“I went after justice, to Cuernavaca, where Cortez had just built his prized mansion to prove to the natives that he held all the power. I studied him, trying to figure out how a man could do such things. I watched him in the day with his wife and in the night with other women. I hated that lowlife, his conviction that he was invincible. I had his life in my hands; one swift movement and he’d be dead. I was ready to do it one night. I came close. I was in his bedchamber, waiting for him to return. But as I waited, and as much as I wanted his life, something inside me had changed. I realized it wasn’t my job to worry about him. I needed to be with my family, to worry about the balance of the Cosmos. I knew that eventually, as my father had said, justice would find
him.”

I sat motionless beneath the image of all that bloodshed in Lucas’s lifetime. Lucas noticed and cupped my hands with his. I shifted my gaze away, confounded by his history, and by ours. How long had I wanted his touch on me—and now, after learning this, I shivered for a new reason. His bare hands, hands that killed, were touching mine. But his skin was soft and his fingers gentle, not the kind that murdered people. I looked toward him again, shaky.

“That was a long time ago. I have learned to control my feelings,” he said
softly.

I nodded, waiting a moment until I could force a swallow down. “When did you go back to your
family?”

“As soon as I realized I was out of control. They helped me learn to control my feelings. It was easier for a while, until I had to witness the taking of the first fifty-two victims. That was hard for me, but then I saw how hard Gabriella took it, and I supposed that my time away helped me be stronger as a Watcher.”

“How long did it take for you to get back to
normal?”

“A few
months.”

Moments passed silently before he smiled. “There’s one more thing I want you to know: I’m not the jealous type—well, never was until I changed. Throughout my entire existence, I’ve never had anyone to be jealous over. But any time I saw you with Jett, I felt a new emotion stirring. I’m sorry if back in Tahoe I ever seemed possessive of you. I felt that you were
my
girl, not Jett’s. He hadn’t been waiting for you for three hundred years like I had, so somehow . . . all that time, I legitimately believed that you belonged to me. Then, when I realized that was insane—that you would never
belong
to me—I acted like a jerk. And I am sorry, truly.”