“Oh, hell,” he grated, squeezing his eyes shut behind his hands, even though the weak gesture had never worked before. Still, denial was a natural human response to a situation that had gone well past human-level fuckup status and straight to cosmic proportions. Even worse, part of him didn’t feel shitty at all. It felt powerful, self-satisfied, and hungry for more of the killing, more of Sasha. And neither of those things was happening, period. Still, though, urgency burned beneath his skin, and the monster he’d been stirred within his mind.
The Other. That was what Bryson and Horn had called their creation, the piece of him that they had pulled forward and honed into a killing machine.
“Fuck off. Leave me alone.” But he knew the memories wouldn’t go away on their own. He was going to have to make them leave.
Michael didn’t call on the hypnotic conditioning and drug regimen Horn had used to keep the Other at bay—those blocks had given way during his talent ceremony. Instead, he turned to the mental discipline he’d practiced and honed until his inner shields were almost as good as his magical ones.
Dragging himself out of bed, he dropped down lotus-style on the cold floor. Straightening his spine vertebra by vertebra, he concentrated on his breathing, voiding his lungs of the old, stale air and replacing it with fresh. He breathed. He counted his heartbeats. And when relative calm descended, he pictured the flow of inner energy, and the dam at the back of his brain.
Concentrating, he cranked the heavy sluice gates shut, feeling the effort as a phantom burn in his arms and back, hearing the clank of mechanisms that didn’t really exist outside the construct of his own mind. It didn’t matter whether the physical effort or the metallic clangs were real, though. What mattered was his ability to shut off that part of himself.
The good news was that it worked: The sluiceways shut; the dam held. But, as Michael let himself drift within himself for a moment, he was conscious that closing off that part of himself left him incomplete. Although he’d been trying to improve the man who remained outside the dam, he was still a work in progress. Worse, because of Horn’s conditioning, when he was fully separated, as he was now, he tended to block his own knowledge of his other half, and what it meant, becoming the surface charmer that had been his cover. Remember all of it, you self-centered prick, he thought. Sasha deserves better than your dissociated ass. But even as he hung there, suspended between the physical and metaphysical, he was aware of a thrumming current of excitement, one that urged him to get his butt off the floor already and go see her.
He’d been searching for her for a long time now. And he sure as hell owed her his protection from the others after what had happened the night before. Not to mention an explanation.
Feeling the sharp edges of his soul dulling down, he flowed to his feet, hit the bathroom, shocked himself awake with a cold shower, shaved off a layer of stubble, and chewed a couple of Tylenol tabs on the theory that they tasted foul but ought to hit his bloodstream faster that way. Maybe. Movements quickening, he dragged on black nylon track pants and a ribbed white tank, shoved his feet into a pair of rope sandals, and was ready to go.
Six months earlier, he would’ve been wearing his high-toned salesman duds, even around the mansion, still playing a role he’d been programmed to forget was a cover story. The plan he’d so carefully executed just after the spring solstice meant that he could finally move on, lose the act, and become the guy he’d wanted to be—or at least try to. He’d been doing his damnedest since then to stay in control, to stay out of trouble and do the right thing, hoping to improve the good to bad ratio the nahwal had alluded to. But he’d blown that all to hell the night before, hadn’t he?
“Probably. But I’d do it again under the same circumstances,” he grated to the empty room, knowing that the sentiment did little to ameliorate the heavy debt on his soul. The writs said a Nightkeeper owed his allegiance first to the gods, then to the king, the end-time war, his fellow magi, mankind, and then his own family, wants, and desires. Or something like that. He wasn’t much into scripture, but he knew that relationships and personal desire went way down at the bottom of the list.
Yet he’d chosen Sasha’s safety over his own nahwal’s directive.
She’s important, he thought. It was worth it, given how badly we need the library. More, he needed the library. Having exhausted the archive, he was banking on the library having some answers, like whether there was some way to fix what was broken inside him.
And he was so rationalizing. He hadn’t been thinking about the library when he’d given over to the Other and its silver magic. He’d been thinking only of Sasha, his thoughts and perceptions telescoping down to her. Which was more evidence of how badly off balance she’d gotten him. She was inside him even now, her face right at the edge of his mind, her scent, her taste imprinted on his sensory memory. He’d dreamed of her and had awakened hard and alone.
“Get used to it,” he told himself. “Sacrifices aren’t easy, and she damn well deserves better.” Or rather, she didn’t deserve a man whose very soul was in question, one Iago seemed to think could become an ally.
Telling himself there was no way in hell he would turn—he’d die first—he headed out of his suite and down the long hallway that led from the residential wing.
The main mansion was a sprawling edifice done in sandstone, wood, and marble, housing a great room connected to a large open kitchen, with a banquet-size dining room that had become a war chamber. Hallways radiated from the great room, leading variously to the residential wings, the archive, a glass-roofed sacred chamber, and forty-car garage. The second and third floors of the main house were empty, as were many of the residential rooms, mute testament to the numbers the Nightkeepers had once boasted. As it had been in his suite, the decor was neutral Southwestern blah, except for the occasional splash of decent art, thanks to Alexis, who wasn’t afraid to hit the near-
bottomless Nightkeeper Fund for upgrade money, and had a good eye for investments.
Michael paused at the arched doorways that opened onto the sunken great room, glancing over at the big, open-plan kitchen. His system said he needed food. His conscience said he needed to talk to Sasha. He hated how he’d been forced to leave things between them. An orgasm followed immediately by a sleep spell wasn’t exactly up to his usual standard. More, there had been nothing “usual” about what had happened between the two of them . . . and she needed to understand that nothing else could happen. Especially given what Iago had said.
Ignoring an echo of his own voice rasping, Mine, he headed across the great room for the basement stairs, figuring she’d be down there for the time being. He was halfway across the sunken sitting area of the great room when Strike appeared in the hallway leading to the royal quarters, and gestured for him to divert. “Debriefing time.”
“Can you give me five minutes?”
The king’s expression flattened. “She’s still asleep.”
“You haven’t been able to wake her?” Michael didn’t like the sound of that. Even if the counterspell wasn’t working, the sleep spell should’ve worn off on its own by now.
“Not yet.” Strike’s cobalt blue eyes glinted with frustration and worry. “I’ve done what I can think of. Even had Rabbit try to bring her around.”
Michael’s head snapped up. “You had the kid mind-bend her? Again?”
Earlier that year, during Rabbit’s imprisonment with the Xibalbans, Iago had borrowed the young man’s talent—one of them, anyway—and used it to crawl inside Sasha’s head and attempt to force her to divulge the library’s location. She had fought the invasion hard, and even though the attempted mind-rape had given Rabbit his chance to escape from Iago, the kid’s eyes still went haunted when he spoke of the incident and its victim. Michael couldn’t believe that anyone had thought another such mind-bend would be a good idea for either party. Strike leveled a long, speculative look in Michael’s direction, one that held a measure of satisfaction, as though he’d just gotten an answer
to an entirely different question. All he said, though, was, “I made the call I felt I had to make. Remember, we’re not just looking at her as a potential new mage; we need the library, and we need it fast. And if that means making some tough calls, that’s part of my job description.”
Michael saw the logic even though he still didn’t like it, on a number of different levels, not the least of which being that he didn’t want the kid reliving his and Sasha’s encounter in the stone temple, from her point of view. Oh, holy squick factor. “Uh . . . what did Rabbit come up with?” His blood hummed in anticipation of the answer; it wasn’t that he was ashamed of what had happened with Sasha—far from it. But it was seriously complicated. He didn’t need the entire population of Skywatch involved.
Strike shook his head. “Her mind blocked him with some sort of music, just like before.” The king’s eyes went narrow. “Why? Did something else happen we should know about?”
“Nothing,” Michael said with absolute honesty. The others didn’t need to know any more than they could guess, at least until he’d had a chance to talk to Sasha about it, and set a few things straight.
Which brought him back to the issue of waking her up. “I don’t like that she’s still out. Should we get her to a doctor?”
“Let’s wait on that,” Strike said. “Rabbit said he thought she’d come back on her own sometime today, that her brain just needed some downtime to process what happened to her. While he was in there, he set a couple of filters to block off the memories of her imprisonment. She’ll be able to remember what Iago did to her, but only if she goes looking for the information. We thought it might help her come back faster.”
“That’s borderline,” Michael growled, but couldn’t really say it had been the wrong thing to do.
Rabbit had proven adept at installing spell-cast mental filters designed to reroute thought processes.
When he and Myrinne were on campus, they both wore filters he’d designed to keep them from talking about the Nightkeepers in public, and to keep him from working magic. That’d been Anna’s requirement before she leaned on the UT administration to grant them late admission and dorm singles across the hall from each other, both major concessions at the big school.
“I made a call. You don’t have to like it.” But Strike’s eyes said more than that; they challenged Michael to stake his claim.
He wanted to—gods and the Banol Kax knew he wanted to—but he didn’t dare. The thing inside him could make him unfit to be a mage, never mind a mate. So instead he growled, “Fine. Whatever.
You said you wanted to debrief me?”
“You can have your five minutes with her first.”
“I’ll take your word that she’s still asleep.” Even though he would’ve rather gone straight down to see her, he didn’t want to give his king hope of their becoming a mated pair. “Let me grab some food and I’ll be right in.”
“I’ve got you covered,” Tomas said from the kitchen, surprising Michael, who hadn’t realized he was within earshot. The winikin skimmed a trough-size bowl along the marble-topped breakfast bar that separated the huge kitchen from the great room; the bowl proved to be filled with scrambled eggs, sausage, and syrup-soaked pancake chunks, all mixed together. “Eat up,” the winikin ordered. “The king’s right. You look like shit.”
Michael snagged the bowl before Tomas could do his usual bitch routine over his charge’s postmagic food preferences. “Coffee?”
“There’s a fresh pot and clean mugs in the suite.”
“That’ll do.” Carrying his breakfast, Michael headed after Strike. The men pushed through a set of heavy wooden doors carved with the royal jaguar motif, and stepped into the main sitting room of the royal suite. Off to their right, a dining table had become a workstation, with laptops, printers, and piles of paper. The kitchen nook to their left was pretty bare, but then again, so were the kitchens in most of the Nightkeepers’ suites; the winikin did the majority of the cooking in the main kitchen. Hallways sprawled off to the left and right of the living room, leading to bedrooms and ritual areas.
Strike took a spot on the long, brown-upholstered couch, where Leah, Alexis, and Nate sat, forming the core of the royal council. Strike’s sister, Anna, sat in a love seat off to one side. She was a lovely woman in her late thirties, with red-highlighted brunette hair and the same piercing cobalt eyes as her brother. Wearing jeans and a soft blue sweater the same color as her eyes, along with an ancient crystal skull that hung from a chain around her neck, she looked tired. Strike must’ve ’ported her in first thing, maybe on the backside of the trip to return Rabbit to the university.
The final member of the day’s council meeting, the royal winikin Jox, lounged in a chair on the other side of a glyph-carved wooden chest that was probably more than a thousand years old, and served the jaguar royals as a coffee table. In his late fifties, with his gray-shot hair pulled back in a Deadhead ponytail, wearing jeans and a dark green button-down with its sleeves rolled up to reveal his forearm marks, Jox was the heart of Skywatch. These days, the royal winikin was spread thin, looking after not only his true bound charges, but also Leah, as Strike’s mate, and Rabbit, who had no winikin of his own, but had been partly Jox’s responsibility since toddlerhood. The royal winikin looked like he could use a serious vacation, but Michael didn’t figure it was his place to suggest it. Besides, it wasn’t like the rest of them weren’t run ragged. There was too much that needed doing, and not enough bodies in residence to do it.
Strike poured him a mug of coffee and handed it over black. “Ready to roll?”
Michael nodded his thanks and took a sip, needing the bite of caffeine. “What do you want to know?” Which was really his way of asking what they thought they already knew.
Leah smiled sweetly. “Nice try. How about you walk us through exactly what happened last night, step by step? And don’t skimp on the deets.”
So Michael went through the rescue minute by minute. He told them about Sasha’s dreams and copped to the power boost he’d gotten from kissing her, though he implied that kissing was as far as they’d gone. He then moved on to describe the red-robe’s arrival and Iago’s entrance, and was even able to tell them that the Xibalbans’ leader was searching for a specific Nightkeeper in addition to Sasha, and needed them both by the winter solstice. Then, for all that he’d vowed to be a better man, he started mixing lies with the truth, hiding the fact that Iago had later said he was the one—and that Sasha would be part of his transformation. He finished with, “Iago tried to grab Sasha and ’port her out, but I slapped the strongest shield I could manage around us both, and Iago’s magic misfired and killed the red-robe. I don’t know what the deal was with the corpse disintegrating like that—maybe it had something to do with using Xibalban magic in a Nightkeeper temple? Or maybe it was intrinsic to the red-robe? He was definitely a magic sniffer, one of the pilli, whatever that means.”
Michael made himself stop before he said too much, knowing that the best lies were the simplest.
Strike didn’t look like he was totally buying the story, but before he could get into it, Anna cut in, saying, “That’s why I’m here.” With a doctorate in Mayan studies and more than a decade in the field, she was their local expert on the historical stuff. “Pilli was a word used to represent a member of the elite nobility. In this case, it probably refers to the more powerful of the Xibalban magi, possibly those wearing the red robes.”
Jox frowned at Anna. “I’ve never heard the word before.”
“That’s because it’s not Mayan,” she said. “It’s Aztec. Which got me wondering . . . What if, rather than paralleling the Mayan system, like we are, the Xibalbans are patterned after the Aztec?” She paused. “Or, more accurately, what if the Aztec were patterned after the Xibalbans? It makes a twisted sort of sense; the Aztec arose right around the time the Xibalbans split off from the Nightkeepers, and were far more bloodthirsty than their neighboring cultures. Where the Maya largely practiced autosacrifi
ce, the Aztec made huge human sacrifices, taking sometimes hundreds, even reportedly thousands of victims at a time by the mid-fifteen hundreds. Granted, those were terrible times, when the influx of the Spanish invaders brought war, famine, and disease. The Aztec were just doing what they believed would appease the gods . . . but what if it wasn’t the gods they were really praying to?”
Nate leaned forward, suddenly intent. “You think the Aztec were being coached by the Xibalbans, that they were actually trying to hook up with the Banol Kax to drive the Spaniards away?”
“The timing fits,” Anna said, “and it would help explain why the Aztec went so far down a path that most human beings wouldn’t consider an option.”
Michael’s inner tension had settled some as the convo evolved around him, veering away from the red-robe’s death. Now he asked, “How does knowing about the Aztec connection help us against the Xibalbans?”
He should’ve kept his mouth shut. He knew it the moment Strike zeroed back in on him as he answered,“We’re not sure yet. Anna is going to work with Jade to put together a rundown of Aztec myths, rituals, and other things that might be pertinent to the issue.” The king hit Jade’s name harder than he needed to, another challenge.
Normally, Michael let things like that roll off, on the theory that he and Jade had worked things out the best they could, and it wasn’t anybody else’s business. Now, though, he figured he owed the royal council an answer—on this, at any rate. Choosing his words judiciously, he said, “None of what happened yesterday changes the fact that Jade and I were lovers, but we weren’t a destined-mates match. Nor does it mean that Sasha and I are destined, either. Yes, I was drawn to her, and yes, kissing her amplified my shield magic, and yes, she seemed to recognize me. . . .” When he said it like that, it seemed like a no-brainer. And maybe under other circumstances it would have been. But he wasn’t the man he was supposed to have been. Just ask Tomas. “However, Sasha has just been through a terrible ordeal, and, mental filters or not, she’s going to need some room. So I’m asking, as a personal favor, if you’ll pass the word to lay off the destined-mates rhetoric with her.”
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