Dawnkeepers n-2

by Jessica Andersen

Desiree didn’t respond right away, taking a moment to carve a shallow slice in Myrinne’s flesh, tracing a line where the real cut would’ve gone.

  Iago snapped, “Damn it, woman, I said hold!”

  Myrinne was sobbing—broken, hollow sounds that reached inside Rabbit and twisted his soul.

  Blood tracked down her belly, flirted with her tattooed navel, and soaked into the waistband of her jeans, flowing more with each sob.

  Iago flicked his fingers, and the field surrounding Rabbit disappeared. Gravity took over and he fell with a shout, splatting inelegantly on the floorboards, face-first. He lay there for a second, gasping for breath, then struggled to his feet and stood, swaying. “Son of a bitch.”

  He wanted to rage, wanted to puke, wanted to wake up and be back at Skywatch and have it all be a bad dream. But it was far too real as Iago waved him into the center of the room.

  The moment he crossed the skull-drawn circle, fire roared to life in the carved skulls, shooting several feet into the air and heating Rabbit’s already scorched skin, making him want to scream with the pain, with the power. The magic was inside him, called by anger, beating at him, begging to be set free. But alongside the familiar Nightkeeper fire was another power, a quiver at the edge of his senses that tempted him, telling him that all he had to do was let it inside and he would rule, he would command.

  Myrinne shouted his name on a broken sob, but he hardly heard her, could hardly hear anything but Iago’s voice as the mage began to chant, starting down low and bringing it up, calling the strange magic in words Rabbit didn’t understand but somehow did, as though they were cousin to the old language he knew.

  “Here.” Desiree held out the carved obsidian knife Iago had stolen from him in New Orleans. “You know what to do.”

  And he did, though he couldn’t have said how, only that the compulsion ran through his veins like liquid fire as he bared both forearms and began the ritual.

  Rabbit had started the day a Nightkeeper. He would end it something else entirely.

  The ATM cave site looked the same as it had weeks earlier. The vegetation was still vibrantly green, the parrots and howler monkeys were still doing their thing high above, and the pool outside the cave still flowed slowly, collecting in a swirl and then moving on, deeper into the ceremonial cave system.

  Nothing was different. Yet to Alexis, everything was different.

  She felt strange inside her own skin, as though her bones had shifted and realigned while she’d slept. Nate was different too. He seemed bigger and tougher, staying close behind as they worked their way down to the pool, shouldered their knapsacks, and started to wade, then swim. The routine was the same, but the man had changed.

  He wore an eccentric now.

  Her surprise that the king had offered him a second adviser’s position had been nothing compared to her shock when Nate had actually accepted. He hadn’t looked nearly as thrilled as his winikin, but still. He’d accepted, and wore the eccentric beneath his shirt and Kevlar, next to his medallion.

  It shouldn’t have made a difference that the position put them back on par, that it gave him equal weight in the adviser’s council. But it mattered, and if that made her the small-minded, position-

  loving snob he’d called her on more than one occasion, then she owned it. The promotion—or maybe something else?—had him carrying himself bigger, and had his power revving just below the surface, so it sparked along her nerve endings, reminding her that she might not need sex with him to touch the goddess’s magic, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t enjoyed the sex, didn’t think about it. Didn’t dream about it.

  “That’s different,” he said from behind her, startling her.

  For a second she thought he was talking about her dreams, which had stopped feeling like they were happening to other people, becoming just the two of them, alone together as they were now. Then she glanced back and saw him treading water and looking up to where the cave roof arched overhead. A huge crack ran with width of the cave, and several raw stumps showed where stalactites had broken loose and fallen.

  She surveyed the damage. “Looks like it’s holding well enough.”

  He nodded, but stayed pensive. “Hope nothing collapsed farther in.”

  “We’ll deal with that if and when it happens. Let’s keep going.” Like there had ever been a question of turning back. If there was any hope that their ancestors had hidden a library beyond the submerged tunnels, then they needed to go after it, no matter what. The Nightkeepers were struggling too much, needed the knowledge too badly.

  They worked their way onto dry land and continued onward from arcade to arcade, past the sacrificial relics and skeletons to where the realm of the modern researchers ended and that of the Nightkeepers began. They rearranged their packs, and donned their headlamps and masks, acting in tandem even though the air jarred with faint tension between them, partners slightly out of step with each other. Once Alexis was ready, she gave a quick thumbs-up and jumped in first, with Nate splashing down behind her a moment later.

  She was only maybe a yard or two down the tunnel when the jangle she’d thought was tension grew to a rumble, then a roar.

  Pressure slammed into her from all sides, forcing the air from her lungs, and she scrambled to keep hold of her pony bottle even as she turned to retreat. But Nate was blocking the way, urging her on, so she kept going, swimming deeper into the cave system as the water began to boil, then shake. Only it wasn’t the water shaking, she realized a heartbeat later. The rocks around them were trembling, and the tunnel itself.

  Earthquake!

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Panicked, Alexis kicked for all she was worth, but up and down had gotten scrambled in her brain. She couldn’t see, couldn’t tell where anything was, where she should be going as the water swept her along. Then a thick stone column appeared out of nowhere, inches from her face. Screaming bubbles, she backpedaled, but Nate ran into her from behind and the world shifted hard. She slammed into the stalagmite and saw stars.

  She heard Nate shout her name through bubbles and water. Then he was there, grabbing her, hanging on to her as the world went mad around them.

  Up was down and down up. Something slammed into her upper arm and she gasped with pain, only then realizing that they weren’t underwater anymore, that Nate was dragging her out of the temple pool, onto the narrow stone shelf, which heaved and plunged with the temblor. They were both working by feel; her headlamp and knapsack were gone.

  “Hang on!” He pushed her away from the water and she bumped into a wall. Scrabbling with her fingers, she tried to find something to grab on to, some sort of anchor against the mad pitch of the surface beneath her. She found an edge, a handhold, and latched on, only then realizing that it was the stone altar, that they were on the wider platform at the short end of the narrow room. But the platform didn’t seem as wide as it should have; water touched her toes, then her ankles.

  “Nate!” she cried. “The water’s rising!”

  The earthquake faded, quieting the rumbling roar. Which was worse, in a way, because then there was silence, broken only by the sound of water trickling nearby.

  Nate didn’t answer.

  She strained toward the pool, screaming, “Nate!”

  There was a splash in answer, then his voice. “Here. I’m here.” Coughing, he dragged himself up onto the platform—she tracked his movement by the slap of displaced water and the racking coughs, which echoed in the darkened stone chamber. “Sorry I scared you.” Breathing hard, he joined her on the narrow ledge. “Come on.” He took her hand and tugged. “Water’s rising. We should get higher.”

  Together they climbed up onto the carved throne. As Alexis huddled against Nate’s solid bulk, she couldn’t help thinking that the throne had probably doubled as a sacrificial altar. Was that the end that awaited them?

  Fear reached up to grab her by the throat, thinning her breath in her lungs. The water noise was increasing by the moment, going from a trickle
to a steady stream, warning that they weren’t safe yet.

  Far from it.

  “The quake must’ve broken through to another waterway higher up than this one,” Nate said, his voice a painful-sounding rasp. He shoved something into her hand. “Take this.”

  It was one of the flashlights. Relieved, Alexis fumbled it on. When the cone of yellow-white light sprang to life, she turned it toward Nate. He was sopping wet and bleeding from a cut above one eye.

  He’d lost his goggles but somehow kept his headlamp; it sagged down over one of his ears and had a cracked lens, and gods only knew whether it still worked. A huge rip cut across his Kevlar vest, probably where he’d been bashed into the rocks as she had been, and the tear drove home the fact that they’d likely both be dead if they hadn’t been wearing their vests. Which was a hell of a thought.

  “Nice job hanging on to your knapsack,” she said, nodding at the sodden lump.

  He rummaged through it for a second. “Actually, I think this one’s yours; it banged into me and I grabbed on. Same difference, though. Flashlight, satellite phone that won’t do jack underground, weapons, and . . . water?” He pulled out a bottle of springwater and sent her a disgusted look, then pointedly glanced down below, where the water level was halfway up the carved throne and rising.

  “What, you thought we’d run out or something?”

  She sniffed. “You want to drink out of a river in a foreign country and get parasites, go ahead. I’d rather bring my own.”

  “I don’t know about you, but I think I already swallowed a couple of gallons, thanks.”

  She exhaled. “Okay, fine. It was stupid; I get it. Let’s move on.”

  “Not stupid.” He touched her cheek, her chin, his fingers warm despite the chill of the water and the soggy air. “Very you.”

  She wasn’t sure how to take that, didn’t trust the skirr of warmth that ran up her arm at the contact, or the contemplative look in his eyes. A piece of her said that if he was being nice to her now, when all they’d done was bicker or avoid each other for the past several days, that meant he didn’t think they had a chance. Her voice was low and shaky when she said, “The tunnel collapsed, didn’t it? There’s no way out.”

  “I’ll have to go back under and see,” he said. Then, when she just kept looking at him, he nodded.

  “Yeah. I think so.”

  “The map didn’t show another exit.”

  “Doesn’t mean there isn’t one.” But his optimism was false and forced, and after a moment he let his hand fall away from her face and drew a deep breath. “I’m going back down. If nothing else, I think I know where I dropped my pony bottle.” Not that there was any guarantee it’d still be where he’d left it, they both knew.

  “There could be aftershocks.”

  “Probably will be,” he agreed, but didn’t say anything else, because that didn’t change the situation.

  Alexis turned her flashlight out over the gallery. The beam showed that the water was most of the way to the top of the throne, with more streaming in every second, coming from a big split in the ceiling about halfway down the wall. It must’ve been a trick of the light that made the carved figures look as if they too were staring up at the cracked spot.

  “Take this.” She held the flashlight out to Nate. “You’ll need it to check the tunnel entrances.”

  “It’s water-resistant, not waterproof,” he reminded her. “Might not survive.” He didn’t correct her use of the word “entrances,” plural, because they both knew their best chance of making it out was getting into the library that—hypothetically, anyway—led off the dead-end loop, and hoping to hell it had a set of stairs leading out.

  “We’ll have to chance it,” she said to both points, though the idea of being without light brought a serious shiver, as did the idea of swimming into the booby-trapped tunnel. “Besides, fireballs aren’t the best light source, but they’re better than nothing.”

  Rueful awareness flickered in his eyes. “Fireball. Shit.” They’d both forgotten about the magic during the quake. A barrier spell would’ve gone a long way toward blunting its impact.

  “We’ve only been practicing half a year.” She lifted her shoulder in a half shrug. “It’s not always going to come naturally.” Which was an understatement. Even with the goddess’s power, her magic tended to feel awkward and unnatural.

  For that matter, where had the goddess been during the earthquake? she wondered. There had been no flash of gold and rainbows, no impulse to protect herself from the danger. Yet when she sent her senses to the back of her skull, she could feel the connection, alive and well. Which meant either the goddess hadn’t thought she was in true danger . . . or she’d wanted the danger.

  “Drowning,” she said softly, looking around the chamber once again, this time seeing how similar it was to the sacrificial chamber beneath Chichén Itzá, not in size or shape, but in essence, and in the rising water. “The goddess didn’t let us drown before. Maybe this is the same thing. Maybe she wants me—or us—to have another near-death experience.”

  Nate shot her a look. “You willing to bet on the ‘near’ part?”

  She held his eyes for a moment, then shook her head. “No.”

  He flicked the switch on his headlamp a couple of times, but the small blub was dead, forcing him to take the flashlight. “I’ll be right back.”

  She wanted to tell him to be careful, wanted to say . . . hell, she didn’t know what she wanted to say, only that she wished so many things had been different between them, wished they’d been the people —the couple—the gods had meant for them to be. But none of those things really mattered just then, so she simply said, “Good luck.”

  He nodded as though she’d said all those other things instead. “Yeah.” Then he was gone, slipping over the edge of the throne and wading across the short platform. He paused and looked back, and she raised a hand to give him a little finger wave.

  Then he was gone, slipping into the water, leaving her alone.

  She saw the light move down and away, diffusing in the murky water, which had gone nearly opaque from stirred-up silt. Soon the water glowed faintly, lit from beneath, but it was impossible for her to tell precisely where the light was coming from. Had the glow been still for too long? She didn’t know, told herself not to panic. Not yet, anyway.

  A hint of motion drew her attention upward. The faint illumination just barely lit the carved figures of the serpent and the rainbow on the arching ceiling, and the rippling of the water made the figures seem to move. Or was that for real? The air whispered of magic, and the connection at the back of her brain kindled a faint rainbow glow. “What do you want me to see?” she whispered. “I don’t understand.”

  There was no answer in the trickle of water, no sign of success or failure from down below. Needing to do something, anything, Alexis spoke the necessary words and jacked into the barrier’s power, finding it quickly in the holy place. Then, holding her palms cupped together, she called a small fireball.

  It appeared immediately, and in the multicolored light she saw that the movement had been an illusion, that the serpent shape of Kulkulkan and the arching rainbow remained where they had been before. Or were they? She frowned, trying to decide if the serpent’s head had moved closer to the crack that was letting in the water from above. No, she decided. It was her imagination. Wishful thinking that the carvings meant something, that the power of the feathered serpent Kulkulkan, wielded by her king and queen, was somehow meant to be joined with the goddess’s rainbow, that together they’d be strong enough to fight Iago and the sons of Camazotz when the vernal equinox arrived. Because if that’s not the case, she thought with a flare of anger, then we’re shit out of luck.

  She’d been raised to succeed, not fail. But what if the balance between success and failure wasn’t in her hands anymore? What if it was up to the gods, or fate, or destiny?

  “Then it seriously sucks,” she said aloud, hearing her words echo in the chamber
and thinking maybe she understood part of where Nate had been coming from all along.

  She hadn’t minded following fate’s path up until now, because it’d pretty much led her where she’d wanted to go. She’d wanted power and position, had wanted to feel like she was part of something important. Finding out she was a Nightkeeper had more than fulfilled those needs, as had the training, and the way the magi had come together as a team during the fall equinox battle. But ever since then things had been different, seeming slightly skewed from where they’d been before. Or maybe she was the one who’d been changed, both by her experiences in battle and the failure of her relationship with Nate. She’d always thought it should’ve worked, would’ve worked if he could’ve been more flexible.

  She’d put the failure on him; he’d been the one to break it off, after all, and he’d been the one unable to put into words what hadn’t been working for him.

  Now, as the water crested over the top of the altar and wet her already sodden clothing, and her fist-

  size rainbow fireball cast colors on the walls of the ceremonial chamber, she had to wonder whether she was the one who hadn’t tried hard enough. After so many failures with men like Nate—powerful and charismatic, big and strong enough to make her feel feminine, though not weak—maybe she’d been too ready to hide her feelings behind fate and destiny rather than claiming the emotions for herself. Maybe if she’d let him know how she’d felt about him as a person, rather than as a Nightkeeper or a stepping-stone to more power, he wouldn’t have bailed so quickly.

  Or maybe not, said her practical self, the part of her that’d lived through too many breakups to think this one had been any different. Most likely he’s exactly what he seems, thinks exactly what he says and says what he thinks. Which was true enough. Nate was a guy’s guy, and not particularly subtle on the best of days. Or was that her seeing him through a lens crafted by the other men, the ones who’d thought she was good enough for a fun time, but not forever?

  “Goddess help me to know what’s right,” she whispered, cupping the rainbow close to her heart and realizing that for the first time in a long time—maybe forever—she didn’t know what defined success.