Skykeepers Read Free

playing it well. At home, though, he’d let it rip. Which was why Sasha had eventually stopped going home. She hadn’t seen or spoken to her father in more than eight years, save for a single brief encounter over the summer. The day after that he’d disappeared into the rain forest.
    Missing, presumed dead . The words banged around inside her head as she wormed her way along the narrow trail she’d found partly from childhood memories, partly from a crude map Ambrose’s grad student had drawn for her. She paused at the circular clearing that she thought was where they used to make camp, but it seemed smaller than she remembered, and there was no sign of a tent. Granted, the forest claimed everything after a while, even stone pyramids ten stories high, but she still would’ve expected to find a few pieces of rip-stop or scattered equipment. Something, anyway.
    Her pulse bumped, but not with hope. After so many months with no word, it was hard to believe that he could still be alive. No, the skim of nerves came from thinking that instead of a relatively peaceful end in the place he loved, maybe he’d been attacked by human predators, bandits who’d taken his equipment to use what they could, sell what they couldn’t.The possibility had haunted her ever since she’d learned he was missing—a notification that had been delayed months because he hadn’t listed her anywhere as next of kin.
    “Don’t talk yourself into freaking out,” she said, swiping at another incoming bug.
    And really, there was no reason to panic. Even though she’d gone to culinary school rather than following Ambrose’s charted path for her to become a doctor, she’d taken enough bio classes to know that lack of evidence in favor of one hypothesis didn’t prove the opposite. The absence of tent scraps didn’t necessarily mean he’d been murdered by bandits. Maybe he’d just camped somewhere else.
    Still, she sheathed her machete and popped the snap on the midback holster she wore beneath her sweat-soaked tee, and withdrew the .22 chick gun she’d bought at a pawnshop a few miles from the airport. Just in case.
    Walking as quietly as she could, though she’d lost some of her childhood forestcraft in the years since she’d cut ties with her old life, she eased along the narrow path, which was little more than a groove in the soft rain forest floor. Ignoring the screeches of parrots and monkeys far above in the canopy, she strained to hear other, closer sounds. Nerves fisted in her chest, and the skin at her nape prickled, but again, there was no evidence supporting her fear. There was only the fear itself.
    The lush vegetation thinned out as she crested a low rise that might have once been a fortified wall. From that high spot, she caught a glimpse of hewn stone forming a stark grayish white contrast to the surrounding greenery—an entrance leading into the earth. Ambrose’s temple. His obsession.
    Faint anger twisted at the sight—and the memories it brought—but she ignored it as she headed for the temple entrance, reminding herself she was through chasing love, or even affection. Those were things that had to be given freely, or not at all.
    In Ambrose’s case, that would be the latter.
    A slight downhill slope led to the temple entrance, which was a plain, unadorned rectangle of stone: vertical slabs on either side, twice the height of a tall man, topped with a wide, uncarved lintel. The dark, forbidding doorway led into a high mound of green-covered stone that had once been a huge ceremonial pyramid.
    When she reached the entrance, she fished in her pack for the military-grade flashlight that had been another pawnshop find. She’d passed on the night-vision goggles in favor of a decent one-man tent, but thanks to the creepy-crawlies still working their way up and down her spine, she found herself wishing she’d splurged and bought both.
    “Man up. You’re just imagining things,” she muttered, making herself take the first