The Blood Gospel

She shielded her eyes with her free hand and squinted up at him. Standing on the edge of the trench, he was silhouetted against the scathing sun. He wore a straw Stetson pulled low, a pair of battered jeans, and a faded plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up to expose well-muscled arms. She suspected that he had rolled them up just to impress her. It wouldn’t work, of course. For the past several years, fully focused on her work, she acknowledged that the only guys she found fascinating had been dead for several centuries.

She glanced meaningfully over to an unremarkable patch of sand and rock. The team’s ground-penetrating radar unit sat abandoned, looking more like a sandblasted lawn mower than a high-tech tool for peering under dirt and rock.

“Why aren’t you over there mapping that quadrant?”

“I was, Doc.” His drawl got thicker, as it always did when he got excited. He hiked an eyebrow, too.

He’s found something.

“What?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” Nate bounced on the balls of his feet, ready to dash off and show her.

She smiled, because he was right. Whatever it was, she wouldn’t believe it until she saw it herself. That was the mantra she hammered into her students: It’s not real until you can dig it out of the ground and hold it in your hands.

To protect her work site and out of respect for the child’s bones, she gently pulled a tarp over the skeleton. Once she was done, Nate reached down and helped her out of the deep trench. As expected, his hand lingered on hers a second too long.

Trying not to scowl, she retrieved her hand and dusted off the knees of her jeans. Nate took a step back, glancing away, perhaps knowing he had overstepped a line. She didn’t scold him. What would be the use? She wasn’t oblivious to the advances of men, but she rarely encouraged them, and never out in the field. Here she wore dirt like other women wore makeup and avoided romantic involvement. Though of average height, she’d been told that she carried herself as if she were a foot taller. She had to in this profession, especially as a young woman.

Back home, she’d had her share of relationships, but none of them seemed to stick. In the end, most men found her intimidating—which was off-putting to many, but oddly attractive to others.

Like Nate.

Still, he was a good field man with great potential as a geophysicist. He would grow out of his interest in her, and things would uncomplicate themselves on their own.

“Show me.” She turned toward the khaki-colored equipment tent. If nothing else, it would be good to get out of the baking sun.

“Amy’s got the information up on the laptop.” He headed across the site. “It’s a jackpot, Professor. We hit a bona fide bone jackpot.”

She suppressed a grin at his enthusiasm and hurried to keep pace with his long-legged stride. She admired his passion, but, like life, archaeology didn’t hand out jackpots after a single morning’s work. Sometimes not even after decades.

She ducked past the tent flap and held it open for Nate, who took off his hat as he stepped inside. Out of the sun’s glare, the tent’s interior felt several degrees cooler than the site outside.

A humming electric generator serviced a laptop and a dilapidated metal fan. The fan blew straight at Amy, a twenty-three-year-old grad student from Columbia. The dark-haired young woman spent more time inside the tent than out. Drops of water had condensed on a can of Diet Coke on her desk. Slightly overweight and out of shape, Amy hadn’t had the years under the harsh sun to harden her to the rigors of archaeological fieldwork, but she still had a keen technological nose. Amy typed on the keyboard with one hand and waved Erin over with the other.

“Professor Granger, you’re not going to believe this.”

“That’s what I keep hearing.”

Her third student was also in the tent. Apparently everyone had decided to stop working to study Nate’s findings. Heinrich hovered over Amy’s shoulder. A stolid twenty-four-year-old student from the Freie Universität in Berlin, he was normally hard to distract. For him to have stepped away from his own work meant that the find was big.

Amy’s brown eyes did not leave the screen. “The software is still working at enhancing the image, but I thought you’d want to see this right away.”

Erin unsnapped the rag clipped to her belt and wiped grit and sweat off her face. “Amy, before I forget, that child’s skeleton I’ve been excavating … I saw some unusual marks that I’d like you to photograph.”

Amy nodded, but Erin suspected she hadn’t heard a word she’d said.

Nate fidgeted with his Stetson.

What had they found?

Erin walked over and stood next to Heinrich. Amy leaned back in her metal folding chair so that Erin had a clear view of the screen.