"No. I sketch sometimes to clear my head." It'd been her attempt to drive the mysterious warrior out of her thoughts so that she could focus on her research and tests.
Hadn't worked. But it'd been a valiant effort on her part that had blown up in her face. Instead of clearing her thoughts, every line of his chiseled face and rock-hard body was now permanently branded into her mind.
For some reason, she'd drawn him from the side profile, looking to the left with the light falling across his face and highlighting his features and bare torso in a pose so sexy, she was sure it was outlawed in most states. She'd left his long hair down and his throat was bare of the silver, bone, and turquoise necklace he wore in her dreams. In his hands, he held a massive war club. It reminded her of a canoe paddle, except the paddle's edge was spiked with thin jagged pieces of glass. A forgotten weapon modern man only knew about from prehistoric glyphs, the club had a flat side that allowed Mayans to knock their victims unconscious while the obsidian glass could cut through flesh and bone faster than a scalpel or bone saw. She didn't know why she saw him with a Mayan weapon, but it was one he'd used several times in her dreams.
Even without it, though, he looked lethal and powerful. Mesmerizing, and absolutely lickable.
Things she didn't want Enrique to know she thought about. Ever. She slid the pad out of his hand and closed the cover.
With a devilish grin that said he knew more than he should, Enrique took it in stride. "By the way, did you hear about Dr. Drake?"
"Which Dr. Drake?" There were four of them on campus, and two of them in the geology department where she and Enrique lived most of the time.
"The one you went on your dig with last summer down in Mexico. It's in your e-mail. I forwarded you the notice earlier. He dropped dead on a plane a few days ago."
She gasped in shock at his lack of tact. Dang, boy, didn't your mother teach better? You don't just firebomb someone with tragic news....
A little warning would have been nice.
The Drake he referred to was Fernando Drake from the sociology and anthropology department at Millsaps College in Mississippi. She'd been friends with him since they'd met in Reed Hall as sophomores at the University of Georgia-Fernando had been kind enough to kill the bug in her dorm room that had been terrorizing her for days.
Something he'd done with flair as he heard her screaming for a shoe to kill the beast. Flame-red Doc Martens boot in hand, he'd rushed through her open door, and killed it on the floor by her roommate's bed. Even more heroic, he'd taken its remains and given it a burial at sea in the boys' bathroom.
No one could ever accuse Fernando of being anything less than the best of gentlemen.
And since they were barely thirty, Fernando was way too young to just fall over from anything. She'd never even known him to have a cold or a headache. "What?"
"Yeah. Freaky thing, too. They said there wasn't a mark on his body anywhere, but that when they did the autopsy, his heart was missing. How weird is that, huh? It's like something out of Fringe, you know?"
The room spun as old tales whispered through her head. She literally felt as if she were free-falling. Reaching out, she touched the table to center herself before she fell off her stool. "You're joking."
"Why would I joke about something so grisly? I'm not that big a jerk." He frowned. "You okay, Doc? You look a little sick."
She was a lot sick as her mind went to a place she definitely didn't want it to go. Raven mockers were said to eat the heart out of their victims and to leave no external trace whatsoever. The only way to see their work was to open the victim's chest and find the heart gone.
Unable to breathe through her constricted throat, she opened her e-mail so that she could read the article about Fernando's death herself. But it did nothing to calm her. If anything, it made it all the worse.
Enrique was right. Fernando had been flying home when the flight attendant had tried to wake him so that he could put his seat upright for landing. She'd discovered him dead and had assumed it a heart attack. Yet during that flight someone, or something, had removed his heart with surgical precision while not leaving a single mark on the body anywhere.
Not something one came across every day. Not unless one was completely insane or a medicine woman or man guarding the hearts and souls of the dying.
Yeah, right.
I don't believe in raven mockers. At least that was what her head kept saying. Too bad the rest of her consciousness wasn't listening.
Over and over, she heard her grandmother's stories and saw the twisted figure from her dreams that had flown out her window.
Stop it! This was the twenty-first century, not the first. She was sitting in a state-of-the-art lab facility at the University of Alabama-not some wattle-and-daub hut in a North Georgia field.
She forced herself to look around the room. She wasn't surrounded by cave paintings and questionable herbs that doubled as hallucinogens. She was here with the gas and ion chromatographs, an inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometer, electron microprobe, isotope ratio mass spectrometer, her electron microscope ...
Her world consisted of things such as Betsy guns, single- and three-component geophones, StrataVisor seismic acquisition systems, and CHIRP subbottom profilers. She was a scientist, not a medicine woman doling out concoctions made from things she grew in her garden.
She refused to believe in any of this. There was a logical explanation for what had killed Fernando. There had to be. "What do you think happened to him?" she asked Enrique.
Like her, he was a scientist who didn't buy into mumbo-jumbo.
"El chupacabra."
Well, so much for that theory. She rolled her eyes at him. "Really? A goat sucker? Last I checked, they only drank blood, and that from animals. I've never heard of one taking a human heart."
"Yeah, but you don't know, right?" His accent changed from regular American to a thicker Spanish that only came out whenever he was excited or angry. "Abuela, she used to tell me stories of el peuchen where she grew up."
And here she'd foolishly thought she was up to date on the scary legends. Leave it to Enrique to find one she'd never heard of before. "El peuchen?"
"Si. It's a gigantic flying snake, right? Or sometimes it can change its shape to other things, but it's mostly a feathered snake that hunts at night. And it's a cousin or something to el chupacabra. Abuela used to tell me how it would come out and suck their blood or eat their hearts. In the morning, they'd find the hapless victims in fields or near streams. Her mother was the village machi and, to protect the village, she would drum it out whenever it started feeding. So I'm thinking el peuchen must have hitched a ride on the plane and got him."