Skykeepers n-3

by Jessica Andersen

  “Now, ask your question aloud; then hold it in your head as you keep looking into the flame and the mirror.”

  He stared into the patterns, imagining that he saw men and women in the flames. “How can I summon a new three-question nahwal?” The flames skipped and danced, showing nothing but light and shadow. For a second he saw an animal—maybe a coyote?—and something that might’ve been a boat. But then it was just flames and shadows again, and nothing more.

  After a few minutes, when their clasped hands were starting to get damp with sweat, she said, “Anything?”

  Rabbit shook his head. “Nothing I’d call an answer.”

  “Maybe the way you said it was too specific. Maybe you’d be calling the same old nahwal, so the word ‘new’ in the question short-circuited the answer. Or maybe the answer isn’t replacing the nahwal; maybe there’s some other sort of oracle you can summon instead.”

  “Good point,” Rabbit agreed, adding, “Damn, you’re smart.” He felt a little drunk and a lot horny, sitting there holding her hands, achingly aware that she was naked beneath the robe. But he made himself focus, and asked, “What can I do to help the Nightkeepers?”

  Again, he thought he saw patterns in the reflected light—a burning tree, a big house in flames—but nothing that gave him a clue how to fix what he’d broken.

  He glanced sidelong at his and Myrinne’s intertwined fingers, and at the stark marks on his forearm: three black, one red. In contrast, her forearm was creamy white and unmarked, which made him ache. He wanted her to wear his jun tan, wanted the world to know they were bound to each other.

  But no matter how much he wished for it, no matter how much he loved her, the gods hadn’t marked them as a mated pair. Not yet, anyway.

  “Try another question,” she suggested. “Maybe one that’s more personal. Something about you rather than the Nightkeepers.”

  “Are—” He broke off, ashamed to realize he didn’t have the chops to ask if he and Myrinne were destined mates, partly because he didn’t want a “no” from the candle flame and partly because he didn’t want one from her. So he fudged it, saying aloud, “What is my destiny?” Inwardly, though, he asked the question he really wanted the answer to: How can I make Myrinne mine?

  Nothing happened. He sighed, frustrated and more disappointed than he would’ve thought, given that he hadn’t really believed her so-called scrying spell was going to work in the first place. “I guess I’m not—” He broke off as the reflected flames suddenly turned liquid and blurred together before his eyes. “Holy shit. I think it’s working.”

  Myrinne said something, but he couldn’t hear her, couldn’t hear anything but the pounding of blood in his veins, in his head. His heartbeat sounded like ritual drums, his bloodstream like a waterfall.

  What is my destiny? he asked inwardly. How can I make Myrinne mine?

  The world went silent, as though his heart had stopped entirely. The liquid flames merged and separated, merged and separated . . . and then they roared up, reaching for him. And when they touched him, they burned like fury.

  Rabbit felt his mouth stretch wide in a scream, but couldn’t hear his own voice, could hear only the horrible roar of flames. He was dimly aware of Myrinne shaking him, then leaving him to beat at something nearby. He saw her mouth move in panicked shouts he couldn’t hear, couldn’t respond to.

  He could only curl in agony, screaming silent howls of pain that quickly turned to denial as he blinked back into the vision and saw himself standing over Myrinne, who lay at his feet in a spreading pool of blood, her lovely eyes wide and fixed in death. As he watched, a drop of blood fell from the ceremonial knife he held in his fist, to land on her upturned, waxen face.

  “No!” He writhed, pushing the image away, rejecting it, rejecting himself. “No, I won’t do it;I won’t!” He heard the words now, heard them echo inside his skull.

  And in those echoes was embedded another voice, deeper yet familiar, growling, “Then fucking get rid of the hellmark, shit for brains! As long as Iago can find you, he can control you, and the gods can’t touch you. Get rid of the godsdamned hellmark, or you’re godsdamned screwed.”

  “Red-Boar?” His voice cracked on the name as his lungs filled with the acrid smell of char. He doubled over, coughing and retching, dimly aware that Myrinne’s dorm room was full of smoke, the fire alarms shrilling. “Dad!”

  “Come on!” Myrinne hauled him up. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

  The room was aflame around them. For real. Rabbit’s head swam, he was nauseated as shit, and he felt like he had one foot on the earthly plane, one foot somewhere else. He couldn’t wipe the hellish visions out of his head, couldn’t do anything but moan and lean on Myrinne as they staggered out into the hallway and joined the stream of bodies headed out of the dorm.

  There were a few screams and a surge of the traffic flow when they staggered out of the burning dorm room and the other students realized that there actually was a fire, that it wasn’t a drill.

  As they shuffled down the stairs, packed cattle car- tight with the other evacuees, Myrinne yanked Rabbit’s cell out of his pocket and speed-dialed. Shouting over the din, she said, “Anna? We need you.

  Meet us outside your office building. And bring me some clothes.” She was still wearing her black silk robe, and didn’t have any shoes on. Rabbit noticed those details as if from a great distance away.

  When they hit the great outdoors, his breathing eased but his head didn’t clear. If anything, the spins were getting worse and he was feeling less and less connected to his body by the second. “I d-d-

  don’t think we should leave when the fire’s in your room . . .” he got out, then lost the thread of his thought.

  Waxy face. Blood dripping from a knife.

  “Anna will fix it,” Myrinne said, hustling him away from the crowd. “She’ll call admin and tell them where we are, and some version of what happened.”

  That had him glancing back over his shoulder to the dorm, where flames licked out an upstairs window. He moaned, a low, broken sound, and turned away, hanging his head and gulping oxygen as he and Myrinne staggered to Anna’s office.

  Strike was going to fucking kill him this time, he thought. But behind that thought came another, a whisper in a dead man’s voice: Get rid of the godsdamned hellmark, or you’re godsdamned screwed.

  Which made sense, because the hellmark not only connected him to the first level of Xibalba, it bound him to Iago, giving the Xibalban bastard access to Rabbit’s head under certain circumstances. So getting rid of the hellmark made sense . . . but it wasn’t exactly an original concept. Strike and the others had tried everything they could think of to break the hellbond, but none of the spells had worked.

  “What about it, old man?” Rabbit croaked, earning a wide-eyed look from Myrinne. “Want to tell me how the fuck I’m supposed to get rid of the damned thing?”

  The darkness rose up, grabbed Rabbit, and dragged him down. He pitched forward, nearly taking Myrinne down with him as he collapsed against the side of the art history building. An he passed out, an image flashed through his brain, that of a carving, rough-hewn and powerful, showing a glyph that wasn’t Mayan, but far older: a scorpion with a double zigzag line beneath it.

  Skywatch Michael stood on the upper level of the great room with his back to the wall, watching over Sasha from afar because he didn’t dare get within touching distance. She sat on one of the big sofas, describing the barrier vision the nahwal had sent her into. When she was done, Michael filled in with a few of his own observations.

  Finally, Strike summed it up: “So it seems like a good bet that the library scroll is somewhere in the temple, and Sasha is probably the key to gaining access, given that the thing we’ve been calling the mad nahwal is Ambrose’s ghost . . . or I guess demi- nahwal is as good a term as any.” He paused, his lips curving. “Meanwhile, on the ‘oh, holy shit’ front, Sasha got her bloodline mark, the warrior talent, another talent we’re going
to have to look into, and—hello, bonus—the royal ju.” He was playing it pretty cool, but blinking a little too much, evidence of what it’d meant to him to gain a sister.

  Sasha’s answering smile was strained around the edges. “That’s going to take a little while to sink in, I think.”

  “For all of us,” Leah said from her position beside Strike. She dropped a hand to his shoulder and squeezed. “So can I be blatantly practical and suggest we call it a night and reconvene tomorrow? We all pulled a fair bit of magic tonight, and probably shouldn’t make any major decisions until we’ve recharged. Let’s eat and crash.”

  “I second that,” Sven said from his position flat-out on the floor in the middle of the great room.

  “I’m whupped.”

  As if that’d been the signal they were waiting for, the winikin moved in and started shepherding their charges toward food and then bed. Jox beelined for Sasha, his face alight, as if to say, This one’s mine! On one level, Michael was overjoyed for her. If any of them had needed to step into a ready-

  made family, it was her. More, Sasha, Strike, and Anna should be able to uplink and increase one another’s power significantly—the sibling bond wasn’t as powerful as the twin bond or that of a mated pair, but it was meaningful nonetheless. With Strike and Leah’s Godkeeper bond negated by the destruction of the skyroad, Sasha’s ability to amplify the king’s power would be invaluable in battle, since she also wore the warrior’s mark.

  Which meant that while there was no denying the power of the sex magic boost she and Michael made together, she didn’t technically need him for the magic anymore. She could lean on Strike or Anna. Michael told himself that should be a relief, that the less she needed him, the better off they all were. He’d gotten away with kissing her to bring them both back out of the barrier, but he had a feeling the Other had been almost . . . toying with him. Like it was waiting for something. But what?

  Big surprise, he thought, irritated. More questions, no answers. He shifted against the wall, strung tight with a restless, edgy energy entirely at odds with the postmagic burn he should’ve been feeling.

  He wanted to run into the night, wanted to pick a fight, wanted to throw his head back and howl at the moon.

  Fuck all that; he wanted sex. He wanted Sasha, hard and fast, tight and wet around him, bowing back, her name tumbling from his lips as he pounded himself against her, poured himself into her, marking her as his own. Lover, killer—he didn’t even totally care which aspect of him got the score, as long as he was buried deep within her, and they were—

  Oh, shit, he thought, squeezing his eyes shut as he figured it out. The hormones.

  Sasha might have gotten her bloodline and talent marks at the same time, but that didn’t mean she was totally clear of the hormone surges they’d all experienced between their bloodline and talent ceremonies. In fact, from the look of her flushed face and the way she’d suddenly become the center of attention in the kitchen, where Jox was plying her with tamales and some sort of seafood concoction, Michael would’ve bet his left nut she was on the brink of a really compressed version of the pretalent hormone surges. And it was going to be a Very. Long. Night.

  Peeling himself away from his wall perch, he took a step in her direction, then made himself stop.

  She didn’t need him near her right now. In fact, he should stay the hell away from her for the duration.

  You’d rather someone else do the honors? a sly voice said from deep within him. He wasn’t sure if it was the Other or his own black mood talking. Either way, it was a valid point, Michael thought, glaring down at Sven, who’d pried himself off the floor to join the testosterone party in the kitchen.

  The other magi were happily mated—they’d soak up some of the sex-magic buzz she was giving off, then take to their own beds. The winikin weren’t sensitive to the magic, so they were safe. But Sven was neither mated nor a winikin. And as Michael watched, he moved in, dipped his head toward Sasha with intimate familiarity, and said something that made her laugh.

  Rage flashed through Michael, blinding him. For a second all he could see was Sven’s eyes bugging, his mouth drawing wide in horror; all he could feel was the hammer of the other man’s carotid under his thumbs as he choked the living shit out of the bastard who’d pretended to be his friend, then taken his woman. He—

  Oh, shit. I’ve got to get the fuck out of here. Blinking hard in an effort to banish the horrible sensory image and the way it both repulsed and tempted him, Michael spun and headed for the sliders. He nearly plowed over Tomas, who stood in his path.

  “Out of my way. I need air.”

  The winikin stood fast. “You need food. How about we head over to the kitchen and I can—”

  “Not the kitchen,” Michael said, his voice going ragged. “You want me to eat, snag me something and bring it out. You know where I’ll be.” He was pretty sure the winikin had followed him out to the ball court at least once over the past few weeks.

  “Do you really care so little for the will of the gods?” the winikin said, eyes narrowing. “I know you too damn well to believe you haven’t picked up on it. She’s for you. Don’t you get that?”

  Desire flared so hot that it felt like desperation. “I can’t—” Michael almost got it out that time before the inner shields slammed down, stopping the words in his throat.

  Tomas made a disgusted noise, and Michael figured the next thing out of his mouth was going to be a variation on the old, Get your head out of your ass and take some damned responsibility, for gods’ sake! Instead, the winikin fixed him with a look and said, “I want you to promise me something.”

  The seriousness of his tone had Michael focusing on the other man. “Maybe,” Michael answered, momentarily distracted by the sound of Sasha’s laugh when Sven—the bastard—said something else to her. He growled. “On one condition. You promise me that once we’re done here, you’ll grab Carlos, and the two of you will get Sven good and drunk. I want him legless until midday tomorrow.

  Understand?”

  “It’s a deal,” Tomas said immediately.

  Reluctantly, Michael refocused on him. “What do you want from me?” The question might’ve started as a reference to the promise at hand, but once it was out there, it somehow expanded to cover so much more than that. Even if he’d been able to talk to Tomas about his work with Bryson, he suspected the winikin still would’ve found fault somehow. There had always been something, going back as far as he could remember. There was perfection. Then, beyond that, there was Tomas. “Let me guess,” he said when the winikin didn’t answer immediately. “You want me to shape up and be a better man. You want me to work harder, try harder. You want me to give what’s between me and Sasha a chance. Better yet, you want me to pair up with her, regardless of what my gut is telling me, just because the signs say we’re meant to be. News flash, winikin: The gods aren’t here anymore. We’re on our own.”

  He expected Tomas to bark at him, and was disconcerted when the other man just shook his head, looking sad and strung out. “You’re so much like him. It scares the hell out of me sometimes.”

  “Like who? My father? I don’t know why that would scare you. You’ve always made him sound like the model mage, the ideal.”

  “He was. I was talking about his brother. Your uncle Jayce.”

  Michael zeroed in on him. “I didn’t know I had an uncle Jayce. Let me guess—he was an underachieving disappointment, a general blot on the stone bloodline until he semiredeemed himself by dying for his king during the Solstice Massacre.”

  “No, actually. He was a brilliant man, a wicked fighter, and a highly respected mage . . . until the day he killed himself.”

  A beat of silence hung between the two men before Michael could bring himself to say, “You think I’m suicidal?”

  Maybe not now. But there had been days.

  “No. But then again, nobody thought Jayce would kill himself,” Tomas answered. “Least of all his winikin. My father.”r />
  Michael winced. “Oh, shit. Sorry.”

  The winikin culture was one of protection and support. It was a winikin’s job to keep his charge alive and functional. Although suicide wasn’t necessarily a sin in the Nightkeeper world—far from it —he had to figure that an unexpected autosacrifice would be seen as the ultimate failure for the suicide’s winikin, whose job it was to keep the magi alive and kicking.

  Uncle Jayce, Michael thought as a few more pieces fell into place. He supposed that explained even more of Tomas’s control-freak ways, though it didn’t make him any easier to live with. “I’m not going to off myself now,” he said, letting the last word acknowledge Tomas’s instincts.

  When he’d come to Skywatch, Michael hadn’t had a clue he was anything but a salesman with an eye for women and a good, if slightly shallow, heart. When Bryson had terminated him as an operative, Horn had used him as a guinea pig, splitting his halves so thoroughly, he’d thought his cover was really him. That is, until he’d jacked in for his talent ceremony, his bloodline nahwal had laid the warrior talent on him, and he got a hell of a “This is your life, Michael Stone!”

  In the aftermath, hell, yes, he’d thought about killing himself. All he’d been able to think about was murder, reliving the Other’s kills over and over again. He’d eventually regained control, and had decided he could do the Nightkeepers more good than harm by staying alive. But still, it had definitely been an option.

  Unlike the Christian viewpoint of suicide as a sin, in the Nightkeeper culture it was the act of greatest sacrifice to the gods, thereby earning a trip straight to the sky. Michael figured that, in his case, it might at least balance out the bad shit. But at the same time he couldn’t help wanting to think the gods really did have a plan for him, that they wouldn’t have let him get so far toward damnation without some reason.