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With my agent: Eye of the Mountain God Excerpt: Knuckles of both hands blue-white in the moonlight, Megan put the trembling foot back down and leaned her face against the smooth wood of the ladder. She tried again, but could not bring herself to raise her foot to the next rung. “Is she all right?” A woman’s voice. Megan’s head snapped up, eyes searching the cliff. If Corazón was here, the children were still alive. She didn’t know why she believed that, but she did. She raised her foot again and pulled herself up. A bit of debris, a stray leaf or twig or piece of bark, bounced across her cheek, whipped along by a small, chill breeze. She began to climb more quickly. Nearing the top, her head rose above a ledge about four feet deep. It was empty. She began to wonder if she had heard Corazón’s voice or only imagined it. Slightly to the right was the low doorway Miguel had described. The ladder’s vertical rails poked still higher but there were no more rungs. Hugging the rocky surface, Megan cautiously hauled herself between the rails onto the ledge. Without trying to stand, she crept toward the doorway. The room beyond it was tiny. Small bricks of mud rose on three sides, the cliff formed the fourth. Poles had been laid across the tops of the walls and the moonlight played across the chalk-like floor making uneven bars of shadow. Megan crept to a corner, turned and sat facing the doorway. Senses alert to every nuance of sound, she waited, mind empty of everything but Lizzy and her own determination to survive. Minute after minute passed. Her brain began to bend under the strain. By the time she finally heard the scuffled footsteps, she welcomed whatever they might bring. She barely saw the dark form that blackened the doorway before a beam of unbearably bright light seared her eyes. “Where are the arrowheads?” the male voice demanded. “Lizzie,” Megan faltered and drew a rasping breath, “I want to know the children are safe first.” A mirthless laugh, sad and eerie as the wail of a coyote, came from the dark blot behind the light. “You have nothing left for the bargaining.”
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