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Gina crossed her legs, stilling when her knee brushed his. Teo shifted, as if he just needed to change positions, but she knew better. The electricity that had jumped between them at that simple touch was disturbing. Would he
r body ever stop calling out for his?
He pointed to the notebook. “These are the glyphs that led me here.”
Gina leaned closer, careful to avoid brushing any more body parts. “Reminds me of kindergarten stick figures.”
“Not everyone was van Gogh.”
“More like Picasso.”
“Yes!” he agreed, both surprised and pleased. “The colors, the glyphs that appear to be half person, half something else. Excellent comparison.”
Gina felt again the warm rush in her chest and stomach that his praise brought to her. Why she craved it, craved him, she had no idea. But she couldn’t seem to stop.
“This is the section about the superwarrior.” Teo pointed to another picture. “The Aztecs marched to—” He slid his index finger, dark against the creamy sheet, to another glyph. “A land north,” he tapped what appeared to be a yellow and black knife, “of the big river.”
Gina leaned closer, barely registering the graze of her shoulder against his in her eagerness to see what he meant. The drawing of the river next to his nail was definitely bigger than the other drawings of rivers elsewhere on the page.
“There isn’t another big river in Mexico?” she asked.
“Not like the Rio Grande. Hence the moniker Grande.”
“Good point,” Gina said, and he turned his head to smile. Because she was leaning against his shoulder their faces were far too close. His nose nearly brushed hers as his breath breezed across her cheek.
She straightened, cleared her throat, and made herself glance away. “How do you get north out of this?” She indicated the bumblebee-shaded knife.
“The Aztecs believed each direction was the realm of a particular god. Tezcatlipoca governed the north; he was the god of night and destiny, of war. His glyph was a tecpatl—the weapon used for sacrificing victims.”
“Weren’t all Aztecs—from the farmer in the fields to the warrior on parade—ruled by sacrifice?”
“Yes.”
“So why did this guy have the sacrificial knife as his symbol? Was he more vicious and violent than the rest?”
Teo’s eyes seemed to lose focus. He’d gone away for a minute in his mind. Gina was starting to understand that sometimes he had to.
“No,” he said at last. “North was also associated with the xerophyte tree, which grew at the northern reaches of the empire in a place called the land of death.”
“Cheery group of people, those Aztecs.”
His lips quirked. “It would make sense to them to use the weapon of death to symbolize the god of the land of death.”
“I suppose so,” Gina agreed. “What else?”
“Uh…” He stared at the pages for several seconds as if he’d forgotten what the pictures meant or perhaps just didn’t know where to begin.
Gina slid her finger beneath a string of colorful drawings all in a row. “What about these?”
Teo pushed his glasses up his nose, even though, from what she could tell, they hadn’t moved at all. “Those describe the superwarrior. A glyph can have several levels of meaning—the actual thing it represents, as well as a trait, and sometimes even a letter of the alphabet.”
“I don’t get it.”
“You’ve seen those games where you have to figure out a sentence from a string of pictures?” Gina shook her head. “Like this.”
Frowning, he patted the pocket of his shirt, then his pants, then, muttering, patted the bedroll surrounding them, triumphantly pulling a pencil from beneath his ass, before flipping to the back of the journal and scribbling.
He offered the page so she could see what he’d drawn. An eye. A heart. An alligator. “What does that say?”
