A heavy darkness crept in, surrounding her. Dime-sized drops of moisture splattered on her head, shoulders, and into the pitch. Soft rustling sounds appeared overhead.

Lilith directed her light at the source.

Bats. Tens of thousands of them.

‘They won’t harm us,’ Don Rafelo assured her.

And so she continued on, her scalp tingling from the moist bat droppings, her insides repulsed by the ammonia-like stench.

For two hundred yards she followed a terrain last visited by men more than eleven centuries earlier. Eventually she came to the mouth of the pit, the thirty-foot-wide hole’s depths disappearing into darkness.

Long ago, ancient cave dwellers had fastened a bamboo ladder to the hole’s near-vertical walls. As Lilith looked down, the face of the walls seemed to sparkle in her light, the limestone underworld transformed into quartz crystal.

Cool waves of air rushed up from the hole, chilling her face.

‘Uncle … I’m scared.’

‘Holes in the earth cannot harm you. Once your true father embraces you, as he embraced me, nothing will ever scare you again. You will know yourself intimately and see the universe in ways you never dreamed.’

‘Our Fallen Angel will speak to me?’

‘Yes. You will feel his presence as he slips inside your mind, you will register the reverberations of his power as he touches your soul, imparting his wisdom, guiding you as he has guided me.’

‘Lead me to him. I need to feel his love.’

Gripping the handle of the lantern in her teeth, she climbed down the ladder, her mentor following her into the heavy blackness.

Sixty feet down … Seventy.

Lilith stumbled as the ground suddenly reappeared without warning.

She was at the bottom of the pit, standing in the rubble from an ancient human sacrifice. Splintered bones crackled beneath her feet. Human skulls and their twisted vertebrae lay entwined by the remnants of jade jewelry and the remains of sacrificial cloths.

A thousand years ago the pit had been a freshwater cenote. The water had eventually drained, exposing the decayed flesh to the rats.

She turned to Don Rafelo. ‘Who were these people?’

‘Followers of the cult of Tezcatilpoca. See? His spirit points the way.’

Lilith’s light revealed a narrow passage—a drain for the cenote’s waters. Gathering her strength, she continued onward.

A tricky forty-minute descent through the winding tunnel led into another chamber, this one as vast as an indoor sports arena, its curved walls reflecting surface waters of a subterranean lake.

Don Rafelo pointed. ‘The fifth level. You have arrived.’

‘Uncle, the walls—why do they sparkle?’

‘This entire chamber is composed of quartz crystal. Crystal is a living organism, possessing trapped electrical energy. The walls sparkle with their knowledge.’

She followed him to the edge of the underground lake, its freshwater surface as clear as glass, the saline layer along the bottom enshrouded in mist.