Eyes of Fire by Oliver Eade

A story of young love, set in Texas, with its challenges and uncertainties, against a backdrop of merging cultures and beliefs, whilst manipulation of the young lovers’ destinies by outside forces threatens more than just their futures because of who the girl really is.
Geeky Adam cannot believe his beautiful Mexican classmate, María, has dumped her hunk of a quarterback boyfriend for him. Her gift of an ancient bracelet, linked to the Golden Jaguar of the Sun, changes him, but love confounded by jealousy takes them on a perilous journey across different dimensions, shadowed by the mystical beast; from an Aztec temple where María, as a captive Tlaxcalan princess, Aríma, is saved from ritual sacrifice, to a drug gangsters’ Chiapas jungle hideout after she is kidnapped in retaliation for Adam saving a young African American boy from drug pushers in New York. Escaping from the gangsters, they seek refuge in a Mayan jungle village where María is fatally bitten by a venomous spider. She ends up, with Adam, in Xibalba, the Mayan afterlife ‘Place of Fear’. Confronting the Great Spider Goddess, to obtain venom with which the strange ‘Old Woman of the Hills’ promised to make antivenom to prevent the girl’s death in that other dimension called ‘Life’ is bad enough, but taking on the evil Lords of Xibalba without the Golden Jaguar, who cannot enter Xibalba, is terrifying beyond words. However, help is forthcoming from the legendary Mayan ‘Hero Twins’ who double up in Texas as the girl’s guardian angels, Art and Jeannie from Iowa, because of who María is. Return she must… and does… but the Xibalba Lords now want her for themselves. Can they cross over to the real world and change her destiny?
In Part 2, ‘The Merging’, Adam and María, now senior high school students, believe their troubles are behind them. How could Adam have guessed that his sister Chloe’s sixth sense, linking her in ‘real dreams’ with an ancient Anasazi Native girl, Earth Child, whose people are imperilled by a power-hungry usurper, Coyote Spirit, would transport him and his girlfriend back to 13th century Colorado, let alone become part of an ancient Puebloan prophecy? To fulfil the prophecy, Adam must confront Coyote Spirit. Does he have the strength to release the only power that can defeat his adversary: himself? To do this, the young Texan must also know his greatest enemy: his jealousy. This all but destroys him after Earth Child’s elder sister, Swimming Beaver, deceives them when she is seduced by Coyote Spirit and María is taken captive by the monster. However, once Adam realises the girl truly loves him, he and the Golden Jaguar merge, giving Adam supernatural strength. Overcoming Coyote Spirit becomes a doddle, but after returning to present-day Houston, he is still no closer to discovering why his Mexican girlfriend is so ‘special’ as Art, Jeannie and the ‘Old Woman of the Hills’ keep telling him.
In Part 3, ‘Revelation’, Adam, a university academic married to singer-songwriter María, with two children, is desperate to know what troubles his wife. It takes his clairvoyant sister, Chloe, now married to her childhood sweetheart, Lee, the boy rescued from New York drug pushers by Adam years back, to inform him that only Pepe, Adam’s 11-year-old son, can provide the answer. But first, Chloe must tell Pepe what happened when, as a 15-year-old madly in love the good-natured Lee, she persuaded her loveable Aunt Jac, a lawyer who looked after Chloe following her parents’ car crash deaths, to take her and Lee on a crazy search for Earth Child’s descendants out west because Chloe no longer had ‘real dream’ contact with her Anasazi friend from the past. Tricked into entering a strange tepee during a Native American show in New Mexico, Chloe found herself suspended above a Xibalba Ball Game court, captive of Coyote Spirit who used the girl as bait to lure the Golden Jaguar-come-Adam to rescue her. All seemed to be lost when the jaguar was overwhelmed and reduced to a transparent ghost of Adam as Coyote Spirit took over Adam’s body and returned to the real world to claim María for himself. Whether or not it was the true Adam or Coyote Spirit who made love to María when Pepe was conceived only becomes apparent later, but the reason for María’s unhappiness is now clear. The Hero Twins of Xibalba, Art and Jeannie in Texas, and Pepe’s sixth sense, together with that of the boy’s Aunt Chloe, finally establish who his true father is, and help to rescue Earth Child from Xibalba by defying the Xibalba Death Lords, and in doing so solve the mystery of who María really is.

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