I woke up early and was standing at the front window, staring out at the street, when Kim wandered out of the bedroom.

"You're up early," she cooed from behind me.

"Yeah, the driver said he was going to be here at seven." The sky was just beginning to show the colors of dawn. The horizon was an almost majestic purple.

"It's six fifteen," Kim slipped her arms around my midsection and nuzzled her face into my neck. I closed my eyes. She was still warm from our bed. She smelled like she had just woken up, you know, that almost animal smell left over from being curled around someone all night – skin to skin.

I closed my eyes and leaned into her embrace. She was right, it was way too early to be staring out the window. I had beaten my alarm by more than half an hour – not something I normally did, but the prospect of a new find had kept me up half the night. All I could think about were the pictures James had sent over the day before.

"Come back to bed," Kim quietly moaned.

I opened my eyes and smiled. To say she was making a convincing argument would have been an understatement. She gave me a squeeze and slid her hands around me until her fingertips touched the underwire of my bra.

"I hate bras," she sighed and her breath washed across my neck. I leaned back until I felt her lips against my skin and then shifted my stance so the curve of my breasts filled her waiting palms.

Both hands squeezed and a shiver of delight ran through me. It was sweet torture.

"Come on. You have time." She turned me around and I met her smile.

Her blue eyes were locked on mine and her bottom lip was firmly pinched between her teeth. It was sultry and pouty at the same time. It didn't hurt her argument that she was naked and her breasts were pressed up against mine. And even through a bra and my cotton button up were between us, I felt her little, rock-hard nipples.

I leaned in and kissed her.

Her mouth was hot. Her tongue immediately wandered between my lips while her right hand slipped down the back of my pants until she had a solid grip on my left ass cheek. She pulled me close, used her strength to press our bodies together.

Kim was not one to take no for an answer. An olive-skinned brunette with blue eyes and swimmer's physique, whatever she wanted, she usually got. We had known each other for almost three years. We had worked together in Egypt, back when I was fresh out of college and dating Brian. Even then, one night when Brian and I were hanging out with a bunch of diggers and shovelbums, she walked right up, clinked my beer with hers, and told said: "Hey, you know we are going to sleep together some day, right?"

I remember the look on Brian's face. It wasn't jealously or disgust as much as awe and excitement.

When I got the call for the jungle, I had no idea that she would be on the team, but once I arrived, got settled, and she found out I was unattached - it didn't take two days before she abandoned her flat and moved into mine.

I admit, I had imagined us together on and off for the two years we were apart. Every time we talked on the phone, she was in England while I was in New York, there was always a quip or comment about getting into each other's pants. She was a master flirt, a girl who had the confidence and looks to get into anyone's pants.

I pulled away from the kiss and looked her over – one of my favorite things to do, a gentle turn on – stand back and let me admire you, let me take it all in.

We were about the same height, but Kim's body was stronger, her shoulder's a little broader, and the way her dark hair was cut – just so it barely reached the bottom of her neck – she looked like a woman with an edge. She was dangerously sexy - all sharp edges and muscles. Her breasts were only b-cups, but her ass was almost perfectly round. Having a middle-eastern mother only added to her beauty, covering her with the softest, olive-colored skin I had ever had the pleasure to touch and eyes that were mysterious and exotic.

"I can't," I said. "You know what'll happen..."

She tilted her head and waited for me to tell her.

"I'll follow you in there, you'll lie across the mattress, give me that mischievous grin, and I won't be able to stop myself from climbing between your legs." I reached out and traced my finger across the curve of her perfect, naked pussy.

Her body tensed and I grinned.

"Then Pablo is going to be honking the horn and I am not going to want to leave." I pulled my finger back and popped it between my lips. It was torture and I knew it.

"That's not fair," Kim stepped forward but I stepped back.

"You're going to have to wait." I held my hand up and stopped her. "I'll be back tonight. Besides, you should be getting those photos together for the magazine."

She rolled her bottom lip out, disappointed.

I chuckled. "You're such a girl."

She grinned.

We were in the kitchen finishing our coffee when I heard the car horn. I kissed Kim, grabbed my bag, and headed for the door.

"What do you want for dinner?" Kim shouted from the kitchen.

"You!" I yelled before closing the door.

Pablo smiled when he saw me. He had been my driver/interpreter since I had arrived. He was a young guy, in his mid-twenties, a hustler who not only drove for me and two other archeologists, but also worked with doctors without borders as an interpreter, and sold imported electronics out of the back of his 1980's BMW.

He was a good guy, always smiling, always ready with a compliment, and eager to please. "Good morning, Ms. Alexys, here is some coffee." He said when I slipped into the front seat and tucked my bag into the back. "Thanks," I said and ran the cup under my nose.

The coffee was unlike any coffee I had ever smelled; it had a deep richness that was almost chocolate and just a hint of something else, something I didn't expect, almost floral. I took a sip and savored it. It was amazing.

"Do you like it?" Pablo looked at me expectantly. "It's from my brother's mountains. He roasts them himself. I tell him over and over, we should sell them in America."

Pablo had an obsession with everything American. He was up to date on the weirdest things in America. He knew who all of the most popular bands and singers were, but he also knew about things like laundry detergent commercials and body wash. It was the strangest thing, his weird mix of Americana.

"Yes, oh, that is really good." I took another sip and luxuriated in the smooth chocolaty goodness while I tried to identify the floral notes. "What does he roast it with?"

"A mountain flower that grows on the mountains. It's so good, right?" Pablo's face beamed with happiness. "I get you some to take home. Maybe your girlfriend, Kim, maybe she like too?"

I could feel the hustle coming but didn't care. He was right, Kim was going to love it, and I wanted a bag no matter how many Peruvian nuevo sols it cost. "Yes, get me half a kilo," I said.

"Yes, Ms. Alexys. You like, that is good." Pablo smiled and nodded like a bobble head and I looked through the dusty, dirty windows of the car as the city's hotels and businesses slipped away and we headed out toward the dig.

Two hours outside of the city, Pablo dropped me at the now familiar fence post with the little red flag, and then drove west down the narrow dirt road. It was still a twenty minute walk through the jungle to get to the dig, but James was convinced that the site needed to maintain some level of secrecy, at least until we had catalogued enough pieces to garner some international attention.

He wasn't wrong. The temple –like structure we had uncovered was like nothing else any of us had ever seen, especially for the time period we were working with. In the space of weeks, we had already uncovered ten truly unique pieces and our I had a feeling that we were standing on the earliest evidence of a pantheistic religion that dated back further than four thousand years.

It was more fascinating than we had ever imagined. I mean, sitting around the table at Fin's in London, we had expected to find some evidence that there was a prehistoric village at the site, but a temple? And not only that, but a temple with immeasurable value for its age and the religious findings – it was the biggest thing any of us had ever been involved in. Want an idea of how big? Think of King Tut and the people who discovered his tomb.

There was no doubt the site would be internationally recognized once we published our findings and the idea of presenting at museums around the world was more exciting than I can even describe. But right then, a few weeks into the excavation, the excitement was really less about what we would tell the world and more about what we would find next. It was almost maddening really, how eager everyone was, how happy and excited.

This was the first site in my career where I wasn't just a digger. In Peru, most of my time was spent taking pictures and notes before sitting in front of computers and emailing colleagues trying to get a handle on what we were finding.

For the first time in my life, the stuff we were finding had no context. There were no legends or bedtime stories that spoke of these people – they were before time, even the locals couldn't give us a clue as to what we had uncovered. The statues we found had never been seen before, the lettering and hieroglyphs were unknown, everything was new.

It was, in reality, only a guess that the structure had once been a temple. It seemed to be about the size of a large house, but we were still uncovering new walls and basements, outbuildings and old foundations to really know what we were getting into. All we knew for sure was that we were finding evidence of a people no one knew existed.

I found James in the main tent, staring down at a table full of various pieces.

He smiled when he saw me. "Alexys, you aren't going to believe this!"

I smiled and walked over to find the table in front of him covered pieces I had never seen before. "Oh my god," I whispered.

"I know! Three more – I think we found the center!" He picked up a small stone piece about the size and shape of a dinner plate and held it up to the hanging light. The intricate carving seemed to move across the stone. A woman wrapped in a long gown and wearing an ornate head dress filled with feathers and strange symbols, held a square box in front of her chest. On the box were more symbols I didn't recognize, and over her right shoulder was a crescent moon.

I leaned in close trying to see the detail along the bottom. Under her bare feet were what appeared to be dead animals like she was walking across ground littered with dead ... something. I tried to make out the shapes, but the carving was too faint. "Sacrifices?" I pointed to the mounds the woman was standing over.

"Maybe? She could have been a goddess or a priestess. We have no idea. It was a wall piece that was buried under dirt." James set the piece down and reached for another one of similar size but with a large piece missing from the left hand side. He lifted it to the light. "We think this was part of the same stone, although it was found about ten meter away from the first."

This was a woman very similar to the first. She wore a similar gown and head dress, but she carried a long, black knife or sword in front of her and over her left shoulder, instead of the moon, was a star. The way the panel was laid out, it looked like she was walking toward the first woman but the breakage didn't match, it was a puzzle with a missing piece.

I looked down at the table. "Is there a center panel? A middle piece?" The table was covered in little fragments of the same stone. Some of the carvings had obviously seen more weather than others – some carvings were dull, some were almost completely washed away, almost smooth to the touch.

"Yes, but what are they walking on?" James tilted the tablet in his hand so that the light moved across it. The ground under this woman's feet wasn't as worn as the first, but it was only slightly better.

It looked like bodies, the bodies of women. I could almost make out their shapes, even twisted and broken, they looked like women – a pile of dead women in robes, stabbed with knifes and spears.

"You said there were three?"

The words broke him out of his thoughts and a smile swept across his face. "It was the center of this carving. It has to be. And it was buried under 500 kilos of stone, maybe the wall it was carved on collapsed on top of it, but it is far clearer than the other two." James stepped over to another table and lifted a red cloth off of the broken stone carving.

I stepped beside him and stared down at the piece. My breath caught in my throat. A woman, dressed like the other two but with a headdress that was far larger, stood against the back of the carving. Her hands were spread to her left and right as if she were about to take the sword and box from the women who approached from her left and right. Over her left and right shoulder were circles filled with strange symbols, over her head was a huge, blazing sun, but it was the altar she stood over that I couldn't believe.

Laid on her back, and bound with heavy vines on top of the altar was a woman.

"Have you ever seen anything so well preserved?" James tilted a lamp so the light flooded across the stone. Remnants of color showed. It was unusual to find a carving so old in pieces this large, but it was unheard of to find a piece with paint still on it.

My eyes followed the green traces of the vines as they left the floor and wrapped across the naked body of the woman – first across her neck, then her breasts, which seemed unusually large – even for a carving from the time period, and then across her belly.

I glanced at James who only stared down at the piece wistfully. I saw his thoughts turning. He was working on the speech he would give at the royal academy. He was almost glowing he was so excited. But his world was discovery, mine was interpretation.

To James, just finding ancient pieces from a temple in Peru would guarantee him digs for the rest of his life. My work, on the other hand, was not only to find them, but to give them significance, understand them, and, if I could, tell their story.

"Yes, well," James seemed like someone had just snapped their fingers and jolted him from a trance, "I will leave you to take notes and pictures." He smiled. "Then I want to show you what we found this morning." His eyebrows bobbed up and down. "I saved it just for you."

I watched him leave the tent and then looked back down at the naked woman on the altar. I stared at her. Who are you? Why do they want you dead?

My eyes traced the vines as they continued winding their way down from where they cut across the center of her large breasts. They wrapped across her arm where it was pinned to her side and then across the smooth shape of her belly. Then they came up across the altar and her waist and across what looked like.

Grabbing a brush from a nearby table, I swept it back and forth across the carving sure that what I had seen was a clump of stone or dirt still attached to the carving but it didn't move.

I leaned in closer and moved the light so it fell differently across the stone.

No, that's impossible. I blew across the piece still unconvinced but nothing moved.

The vines in the carving wrapped across her waist and then across an impossibly large penis (three times) before they continued on around her legs and ended at her ankles. I took a breath and held it. I couldn't help it - I was a little turned on. A woman with large breasts and a giant dick? The idea tickled some strange part of my sexuality.

Standing back from the piece, I did my best to regain some composure and immediately thought hermaphrodite – the medical condition where people are born with both male and female genitalia but there wasn't a human penis on earth as large as the one the vines wrapped across.

It could be an exaggeration. Look at her breasts, they are far too big and round. Perhaps the artists over emphasized the genitalia to make sure everyone understood why she was going to be killed?

I stood back and thought for a moment. It made sense but something about it didn't sit right. What was the Japanese folklore, the Dosojin? The gods and goddesses had gender changes, didn't they? But that was Japan? Did Peru have something similar?

After putting on silk gloves, I moved the other two pieces to the left and right of the altar piece. I wanted perspective, something to help me understand what was going on.

The pieces didn't fit exactly, nothing in archeology ever did, but it was fairly obvious they were from the same carving. All four women looked alike. Their faces were almost identical, same nose, same lips, same hair ... same body shape? I pulled a magnifying glass out of my bag and began examining each in detail, going over each woman from head to toe.

The woman on the left, walking toward the center with the long, black sword, was a little shorter than the other two and her hair, though cut the same, was also shorter. I also noticed her head dress didn't have as many feathers as her sisters, but her body seemed as proportioned. Her gown fell straight down her body to her ankles and the shape of her breasts was only slightly visible. I glanced at the star. The youngest sister?

Highlighted in the center, was the tallest woman, with a head dress that contained almost twice as many symbols and feathers as the woman on the right. Her arms were outstretched with two waiting hands for the weapon and box the other two carried. She was the older sister, the one in charge of the ceremony? The one who would kill the woman on the altar?

Lastly, on the right, seemed the middle sister. The box she carried was large and ornately carved with symbols I had never seen before, but everything else about her matched my theory. The middle sister?

I moved back to the left and gazed through the magnifying glass at the bottom of the carvings. I desperately wanted to make out what the women walked on but the carvings were too far gone, too marred by the elements and time. They could have been bodies, they could have been animals, it wasn't unusual for there to be a pile of sacrificial evidence, but there were was no way to tell for sure.

"What do you think?"

I jumped back from the table. It was James but I hadn't heard him come in.

"How about that penis, right?" He tilted his head and chuckled. "No modern medicine in their day. Girl born with man parts, straight under the knife."

It didn't matter to him that none of what he was saying made any sense. He was so excited by all of the things we were finding, he hadn't begun to put any of it together.

I went along. "Yeah, crazy. Now, what was it you wanted to show me?"

James' eyes grew wide like he had just remembered he was about to share the biggest secret in the world. "There's a tunnel."

"A tunnel?"

"Yes," James clapped his hands and did a little jig. "A temple and a tunnel!"

It was exciting to find a temple in the middle of the jungle. It was more exciting to find artifacts in that temple that seemed to date prehistoric. But it was even more exciting to find out that the temple itself was bigger than you first thought. Bigger, naturally, meant more stuff or, at least, the hope for more stuff, which in turn, meant that you were going to get more money to stay out there and keep digging, which in turn meant ... well, you get the idea.

I glanced back at the three tablets and then at James. "When can we go in?"

"We cleared the entrance this morning. I haven't let anyone else in because I figured you would want to go, but its wide open. I've never seen anything built so well. The Egyptians didn't have tunnels that looked this good."

"So ... now?"

James laughed. "Give me a few more minutes. I want everything perfect."

A shiver of excitement went through me. It wasn't every day that you got to be the first person inside a tunnel built thousands of years before – especially one attached to a strange temple in the middle of the jungle.

James slipped out of the tent and I turned back to the four women in the carvings. The hermaphrodite theory didn't hold. The woman were all too old. The penis was incredibly large. No, there was something else going on, there was something more. I didn't know why, but I kept looking over the woman on the altar. I felt like I did the first time I had seen a pornographic magazine that my brother had hid under his mattress. It was dangerous and sexy and the women inside it were beautiful and large and the thing they did.

I moved over to the table with the fragments, the giant jigsaw puzzle of pieces that accompanied the three big pieces. There were more strange symbols. I pulled out my notebook and traced them onto the pages beside the others we had found.

None of them made any sense. They were part language, part hieroglyph. Every once in a while we would come across something that looked like a bird or a cow, but otherwise it might as well have been a child scribbling.

I moved over the woman's body on the altar again. Her face was like the others, her hair, the shape of her eyes. Four sisters. Four important, rich, and powerful sisters. They kill one their own. The one with the... I stared down at the enormous phallus trapped under the binding vines. The carving was intricate. There was no doubt that it was erect, standing up between her legs, and bound back against her stomach, the tip almost to the under curve of her breasts.

I clicked off the light and left the tent in search of James.

Outside of the tent, the dig was a hive of activity. Shovelbums, some Peruvians, some from other parts of the world (college kids, professors on sabbatical, etc.) moved across the hill with pickaxes, brushes, bags of dirt, and buckets filled with stone. I recognized more than a few, but there was no time to stop and talk.

Shouts came from all sides as people uncovered things they wanted investigated. I had never been at a dig so full of artifacts in my life. Even in Egypt which was a dig that pulled out more than a hundred artifacts in the space of 3 months; things were not uncovered as quickly or as often as they were in Peru. I mean, that temple was a hive of activity. Every shovel full of dirt seemed to bring something to light.

On the east side of the camp, I saw a new tent and James was standing outside of it with Chance, a cameraman from Australia who had come along to do a documentary. Chance already had one camera on a monopole in his hand and a smaller one mounted on his hardhat above the light. I didn't know him well, we had talked a few times over the past weeks, and he seemed likeable. He was also what Kim called: "Put together incredibly well."

I smiled as I thought of the way she said it. She wasn't wrong. Chance was tall with a wide chest (he had surfed most of his life) had blonde hair that was just shaggy enough to hide the fact that he was almost forty, and eyes that were almost gray they were so blue. He was quick with a smile, a constant flirt, and, as Kim I had discussed late one night after too many cold beers, probably a stallion in bed.

He saw me walking toward the tent and winked while he filmed James talking about the tunnel.

"We aren't sure, Chance. I mean, we have no idea what is down there, but there are steps, old lamps along the walls, and we have never seen a tunnel in better shape." James said.

"Care to guess then?" Chance said with his signature Australian accent.

"I have no idea," James said, "but I can't wait to find out."

Chance pushed a button on the side of the camera and swept his hand through his shaggy curls. "Hey Alexys, how's Kim?"

"Good," I chuckled. It was no secret that of the two of us, Chance liked Kim more, the way she was... put together she always had an edge on me. "You're the lucky one going in with me, then?"

"I thought it served us both well," James said as he held open the tent flap. "His documentary, the possibility of our biggest find."

It was no surprise James was staying topside. He never did like small spaces.

"Alright, I can work with that." We made our way down a flight of steps into one of the temple's sublevels, and then through a small corridor and into a circular room adorned with large stone statues of birds, monkeys, and lions.

I couldn't believe my eyes. Lights were setup along the perimeter all shining down at a perfect descent into darkness, complete with stairs of carved white stone.

The opening was about three meters by three meters and had long capstones around it. "How did, what the..." I walked up and stared down at the staircase. It didn't make any sense. There were no stairs in prehistory. Pits with ladders, yes, but stairs? The light from the surface disappeared about twenty steps down.

I smelled something. Something sweet. "What is..."

"We don't know," James said, "When we uncovered the tunnel, it was there, it's like a flower or..."

"Flowers don't grow in the dark, mate." Chance shined the spotlight from his camera into the darkness but it only illuminated a few more stairs.

"Broken jars of perfume? Like in Egypt?" James asked.

I thought back to the tombs we had uncovered. There were clay jars that were broken as the workers dug and some of them had contained spices and perfumes for the tombs inhabitants once they crossed over. It wasn't an outlandish thought.

We all stood staring down the stairs in silence. It was one of those moments when excitement and fear mix, when words don't work, and everyone's imagination runs away with them.

"Come here," James pulled me close and gave me a squeeze. "Be careful."

I wrapped my arms around the small of his back and squeezed. "I will."

The staircase was narrow. The light from Chance's camera mixed with the light from lamp and illuminated more and more steps as we carefully descended. I wanted to look back over my shoulder, back up at the surface, but I knew that all I would find were familiar faces getting smaller and smaller and besides, Chance was trying to film the back of my head descending.

"What do you think?" Chance asked. "What do you think we'll discover down here, Ms. Sans?"

"I don't know," I tried to make my voice sound conversational. "We've discovered what we believe to be a temple so there could be any number of things in these sub-basements –tombs, storage, there really are number of possibilities."

We kept going, walking further and further. The shaft seemed endless, smooth stone walls and a stone ceiling surrounded us. Every few meters there would be a smooth hole for a torch or lamp to be set in, but everything else was identical. We kept going - stair after stair of smooth, square stone. Nothing changed except the temperature dropped but the sweet, floral smell grew stronger like we were walking toward a garden.

"Thee hundred and twelve," Chance said. "In case you were wondering."

"I was," but as I said it, my light struck across a stone wall that looked to be carved – the staircase ended at a hall that went left and right.

We reached the bottom. Chance stood on my right and aimed his light left and right down the hall but we couldn't see an end. "Where do you think they go?" He asked in a whisper.

"I don't know," I said. I wasn't especially concerned with his question or the halls on our right and left. Right then, all I could focus on were the carvings on the wall in front of us.

It was almost life-sized; the entire wall had been used as a single panel. On the left of the carving, three of the four sisters we had discovered on the surface carvings were standing around a doorway. On the right, with her back turned to the door, was the fourth sister.

"Oh my god," Chance said as his light fell on the right side of the carving. "Is she..." His voice was a mix of confusion and excitement.

" ... it looks that way." I found myself grinning at the image in front of me.

The carving, preserved so far from the surface, still held all of its original color. The three sisters in the doorway, all wore long gowns of green with gold symbols along the necks and sleeves. Their head dresses were filled with various kinds of feathers, and their jewelry all contained more of the strange language we had already discovered. The work was amazing in its detail. Their lips were painted red and their eyes with a blue that almost glowed.

The fourth, her back to the doorway and her three sisters, stood over a kneeling woman. The woman had both hands wrapped around the fourth sister's enormous penis. She was naked and seemed to be caught in the act of pleasing the sister in secret.

It was the same sister from the carving; her gown was thrown open revealing the same mammoth breasts and huge phallus. She had her head thrown back and her mouth was open as if she were about to cum.