Skykeepers

by Jessica Andersen

  “Just give us a sweep of the area, keeping an eye out for ambush,” Strike said into his mike. He turned to Leah. “You got any last-minute words of wisdom?”

  The Nightkeepers’ ex-cop queen was blond and classically beautiful, cool-eyed and all business as she answered, “The main building at the top of the hill is just the tip of the swampberg; most of the place is underground, tunnels done in a mix of stonework and prefab steel, sort of the bastard love child of a pyramid and a bunker. The access points are hidden inside temple ruins built into the landscaping; they lead to vertical tunnels running straight down into the labyrinth.” She went on to hit the highlights of the location, describing the underground rooms where it seemed most likely Iago would keep a prisoner, as well as the three concealed ritual chambers she and Strike had found during their search. She finished with, “We don’t know how long Iago’s been here, or how thoroughly he knows the site. Let’s assume the worst, hope for the best.”

  “Story of our lives,” Sven muttered from behind Michael. The former underwater treasure hunter had become Michael’s closest almost-friend at Skywatch, the two having bonded over video games and nine-ball, and the fact that they were effectively the last two bachelors among the magi.

  “Nah,” Michael replied, keeping his voice low. “The story of our lives is not knowing enough about any-fucking-thing, thanks to humanity’s habit of demonizing and destroying all the shit they don’t understand.”

  “You’re clear to move in,” Alexis’s voice said through the com system. “At least, as far as we can tell. This place isn’t ideal for aerial surveillance.”

  “Understood,” Strike responded. “Meet us near the temple of the Diving God.” At his signal, the Nightkeepers joined hands, forming the contact that allowed Strike to ’port them inside the compound. The group zapped in right near a low-slung stone edifice carved with Mayan hieroglyphs and the image of the Diving God, an exaggerated figure positioned head-down, as though he were plummeting toward the underworld. Which seemed only fitting.

  Michael landed in a crouch, braced for an ambush, but the only sound was that of huge feathers slapping the air as Nate cruised in for a landing and returned to man form. Alexis helped him dress from the knapsack she’d taken to wearing pretty much twenty-four/ seven, because of Nate’s clothes, only his amulet and armband—both integral to his talent—shifted when he did.

  Strike reached to slap the pressure pad that would open the hidden tunnel. Before he could do the honors, though, there was a grating noise, and a stone panel slid sideways into the elaborate carvings of the bastardized temple. A man stood in the opening, broad shouldered, his features obscured beneath the hood of a light-hued robe rendered colorless by the night. Michael tensed, going for his pistols as the figure reached up to push back his hood. Even though he instantly recognized Lucius’s pleasantly regular features, Michael didn’t stand down until he confirmed that the other man’s eyes were normal, not the luminous green of a makol.

  Lucius looked far more haggard than he had the last time Michael had seen him, his body language gone fighter-tough. On his inner right wrist, in addition to the black slave mark that had failed to blood-bind him under the Nightkeepers’ control, he now wore the red quatrefoil hellmark that denoted a connection to the Xibalbans’ hellmagic. That shouldn’t have been a surprise—how else would Iago have gotten through to the makol? Still, though, the sight made Michael wince inwardly. Of the magi, he alone knew that Lucius had been, very briefly, Jade’s lover, and that she still mourned him in secret.

  Lucius scanned the assembled magi, his eyes locking on Strike. Not bothering with preliminaries, he said, “Follow me.” Then he turned and disappeared into the darkness. Moments later came the sound of booted feet on a ladder leading down.

  After the briefest hesitation, Strike followed, with Leah at his back. Then, one by one, the others vanished into the earth. Michael took his customary position at the rear of the group, where he could protect them with his shield magic. As a team, the Nightkeepers descended into Iago’s realm, braced for almost anything.

  Lucius kept iron control of the alien consciousness he’d trapped at the back of his brain as he led the Nightkeepers into the underground labyrinth. The dank air smelled of stale incense and blood, making his stomach churn even more than it already was from the stress of holding the makol at bay.

  He wanted to stop, drop, and puke, wanted to claw at his own eyeballs in an effort to release the pressure inside his overstuffed skull. Instead, he forced his distant-feeling body to keep moving, putting one foot in front of the other as he led the small group in past the stone-lined rooms Iago used for interrogations. Thanks to the trapped makol’s thoughts, Lucius knew that this side of the complex would be deserted, because the Xibalbans were all up in the mansion itself, preparing for the Leonid ceremony and the planned human sacrifice. Which could not be allowed to take place.

  Save Sasha, he wanted to tell Strike and the others. Get her out of here. He didn’t dare speak more than the two words he’d already uttered, though; it was taking all his energy to keep the makol in check. But he had to lead them in safely, just as he’d fought to get those calls out to Anna—not to save himself, but to save Ambrose Ledbetter’s daughter. Sasha.

  She was the key to the next stage of the end-time war; he was sure of it, though he couldn’t say how he knew. Nor did he understand how, exactly, he’d regained control from the demon within him. The meteor shower had made him stronger, yes, but in theory it would’ve done the same for the makol, which he called Cizin. Despite the mockery of the name, which meant “flatulent one,” the creature was strong and fierce. It had been months since Cizin had allowed himself to be shut away at the back of Lucius’s brain, months since Lucius had escaped from the dusty, barren road inside his own head to retake control of his own body. Which meant . . .

  Took you long enough, the demon’s voice said inside their shared skull, sounding very like all of Lucius’s über jock male relatives combining to mock him in dissonant harmony. You really are an idiot. With just that split second of warning, Lucius’s vision went green around the edges and his hearing sharpened unnaturally.

  Shit! he thought with a vicious whip of self-directed anger.

  He spun and yelled for the magi to run. At least, that was what he told his body to do, but it didn’t listen to him, just kept walking at the head of the line.

  And, deep down inside, he heard Cizin’s dry, raspy chuckle. Pitiful, the creature said in its normal sand-papery mental tone. Pathetic. You really thought you fought through from the in-between? Please. You’re on this plane only because I allowed you to be, so you could bait the trap. For a second, Lucius saw within the makol and gained a flash of its true purpose within the Xibalbans, how its Banol Kax masters had used him to gain access to Iago as a toehold on earth. In his mind, Lucius heard a dog’s tortured howl, saw a terrible horned creature and the flash of teeth filed to a “T” shape. In that moment, he would’ve given anything to regain control of his body, to be able to warn the Nightkeepers of what the Banol Kax were planning to do, not now, but in the coming year.

  But it was already too late. Cizin shoved Lucius back toward the prison of his own mind, a barren expanse of dirt and muddy brown sky, and a road that led nowhere. The in-between.

  No! Lucius shouted in a voiceless wail as his makol-ruled body turned and beckoned to Strike and the others and whispered, “Her cell is on the next hallway, third down on the right.” Which was a lie.

  Screaming inside, Lucius fought to break through, to warn the magi, but Cizin quashed him easily as he led the Nightkeepers around the corner. And all hell broke loose.

  Sasha’s heartbeat thundered in her ears as she turned a corner and found herself at a three-way intersection. She took a quick look around, trying to get her bearings. It was no use, though, because the hallway looked much like all of the others she’d been down so far—bare, with zero in the way of character or distinguishing features. She migh
t be in a repurposed guerrilla compound south of the temple, over the border into Honduras or Guatemala. Or she might be on the thirtieth floor of a high-rise somewhere in the States. There was no way to tell.

  As long as she kept moving, she could keep the fear at bay. The moment she paused, though, suffocating doubts closed in. How was she supposed to find her way out? Even if she got free, what next? How would she get home? For that matter, where was home? Hysteria pressed, making her wonder whether, if she closed her eyes and wished hard enough, she’d wake up back in Boston and find that the last year or so had been a terrible dream.

  But she knew deep down inside that this wasn’t a nightmare—at least, not a sleeping one. This was a twisted version of reality created by a group of wack jobs obsessed with acting out ancient prophecies that meant nothing in modern times.

  “Their reality is your reality, at least until you get your ass out of here,” she muttered, trying to calm her racing thoughts. But which way was out? She hadn’t seen any sign of the brown-haired guy she thought might be an ally, didn’t have any clue where she was going, knew only that she had to keep moving. Taking a deep breath, she tried to once again become the tough fighter Ambrose had taught her to be, the one she’d rejected in favor of a normal life. Normalcy wouldn’t help her now.

  Moving quietly on her bare, chilled feet, she passed a row of metal doors and turned another corner, only to be brought up short by the sight of an ancient-looking stone slab blocking the prefab hall. She’d avoided the two other stone doors she’d passed, pretty sure they led to Iago’s torture chambers. This door was larger, though, and carved with the image of a winged crocodile, or maybe a dragon.

  Her instincts said it was the way out. Then again, her instincts had been known to make some really bad calls.

  Whispering a prayer to nobody in particular, she pressed the flat of her palm against a protruding stone that looked like it ought to be a pressure pad. For several agonizing seconds, nothing happened. Then the stone panel grated and slid sideways into the wall. Heart hammering, Sasha stepped through into the corridor beyond.

  Excitement kicked when she saw that she’d finally found someplace that looked different from where she’d been. The hallway was more like a tunnel, or a passageway in some ancient ruin. The walls, floor, and ceiling were made of interlocking stone blocks, some carved with worn motifs she didn’t recognize, others rubbed smooth, the whole of them pieced together in a pastiche of carved and uncarved sections, as though assembled from several older sources. Light came from bare bulbs hanging off an electric line that was bolted to the low ceiling. There was another doorway at the far end, steel again. What the hell was this place?

  Doesn’t matter, she told herself. What matters is getting the hell out of here. When she did, she was going to find some cops—or mercenaries, depending on where she was—and she was going to come back to kick . . . Ia go’s . . . ass. Gritting her teeth as cleansing anger surged, Sasha reached for the door. It swung open before she touched it.

  Four gray-robes stood in the opening, heavily armed and wearing body armor, as though they were expecting an attack. Or they already were under attack. They gaped at her.

  Shock hammered through Sasha, who screamed for the first time since she’d awakened. But then she bit off the cry and turned to run.

  “Get her!” the front man bellowed.

  She dodged his grab and jammed an elbow into his throat, driving him back into the others. Then she swung the door into him and fled down the stone-lined corridor.

  Behind her the door banged back open, and there were shouts of, “Shit, get her!” and “No, for fuck’s sake, don’t shoot. Iago needs her alive.”

  Breath rattling in her lungs, she fled up the hallway, heading for the sliding doorway and the prefab tunnels beyond. Booted footfalls rang behind her as she flung herself through the stone doorway and swung back around to scrabble at the pressure pad, trying to get the panel to shut. It started moving, but way too slowly, grating snail-like on its hidden mechanism as the footfalls pounded nearer.

  “Faster, damn you!” She hit the button again. Fear sizzled through her, along with the sudden certainty that she wasn’t ever going to get out of here, that Iago was going to—

  “Leave it, for fuck’s sake!” A pair of strong hands yanked her away from the door. “Come on!”

  A stranger dragged her down the corridor, hauling her into a stumbling run, but she was barely aware of moving. Her entire attention was focused on the man who had come to her rescue. He was wearing black paramilitary gear over a black muscle shirt, and bristling with weapons. But that wasn’t what had her brain vapor locking. What had her in a state of paralyzed shock was the fact that he was freaking huge. He was freaking gorgeous. And he had dark, wavy hair and eyes the same green as the pine forests of Maine.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sasha’s brain stuttered in disbelief. No. Impossible. It was just a coincidence that his eyes and hair matched those of the man in her dreams.

  Fantasy or not, though, the stranger hustling her down one hallway and across another was seriously impressive. His dark green eyes gleamed from beneath elegant brows, and his lean-bridged nose had a pronounced ridge in the middle. That, along with a square, stubbled jaw and the thick, wavy black hair, made his looks fiercely masculine, while a wide, mobile mouth and the rich gold of his skin saved him from looking too hard. The whole effect was one of raw, potent sexuality.

  He was wearing black cargo pants and combat boots, along with a black muscle shirt beneath torso-encasing body armor that revealed the bare skin of his powerful shoulders and arms. He moved with the economical grace of a trained hand-to-hand fighter, and had a small, high-tech-looking earpiece dangling at his collar, and wore a complicated utility belt loaded with a pair of autopistols, spare clips, and a gleaming black glyph-etched knife.

  He hooked the earpiece into place, not looking at her as he said, “I’ve got her. Where are we meeting up?” His voice was a deep, sexy rasp that had heat chasing across her skin despite the situation.

  Stirred by his touch and voice, confused by both his appearance and her response to it, she scrambled to catch up with his long-legged strides as he hustled them along. He was dressed as a soldier and carried himself like a highly trained fighter, and his words suggested that he’d come to rescue her. Yet he didn’t wear a logo of any sort—not FBI or SWAT, or whatever the hell other group would be involved in a kidnapping or cult raid. Was he a mercenary?

  “Who are you?” she blurted. “What’s happening? Where are we?”

  “Explanations later,” he said as he dodged them down a side corridor, keeping his attention on their surroundings. “We’ve got to haul ass.”

  She started to nod, but froze midmotion when she caught sight of his right inner forearm, where he wore two glyph tattoos, both done in black, both images she recognized from childhood lessons: the stone bloodline and the warrior’s talent. They were the marks of a mage. A so-called Nightkeeper.

  He was one of them, damn it. A role-player. Sasha knew she shouldn’t be surprised. More, she shouldn’t be disappointed. Because she was both, she stopped dead and yanked away from him, anger giving her strength.

  He spun back, brows snapping together over those fierce green eyes as he looked fully at her for the first time. “What the hell?”

  “You think you’re a goddamn Nightkeeper!”

  He leaned in, giving her a close-up of his square, shadowed jaw and the burning intensity of his gaze. “Correction,” he grated, the word seeming to vibrate beneath her skin, “I am a goddamn Nightkeeper. And right now, I’m your best chance of getting the hell out of here alive. So are you going to move your ass, or am I going to have to carry you?”

  “I don’t—” she began, but didn’t get any further than that.

  He muttered a sharp expletive under his breath and scooped her up against his chest as though she weighed nothing. Outraged and terrified, Sasha drew breath to scream—

&nbs
p; And the world went gray-green, then black.

  As Michael hustled down the tunnel cradling Sasha’s warm, curvy body against him, guilt pinched that he’d used a sleep spell on her. She wasn’t all the way under, which argued for her being a mage of some sort. But she’d gone far enough under that he could pick her up and get going.

  We’ve gotta move, not argue, he rationalized. But really, that had been only part of the decision—the other part was that he’d needed a moment to regroup. As in, a moment without her conscious and pushing his buttons, threatening his control.

  When Lucius had led the Nightkeepers into the Xibalban ambush, the magi had swung into plan B: Strike, Leah, Nate, and Alexis had dug in to return the enemy fire, while the others had scattered to search the compound, each assigned to a block of high-priority rooms. Michael had started to head for his assigned rooms, but halfway there his warrior’s talent had stopped him dead, turned his ass around, and sent him in the entirely opposite direction. He’d radioed his change of plans; to his surprise, Strike hadn’t argued. Instead, the king had muttered something about there being no such thing as coincidences, and got Sven and Patience to check his assigned rooms. Ignoring Strike’s reference to the writs and the will of the gods, Michael had followed his instincts—or whatever the hell it was—all the way across the labyrinth in the direction of the main mansion. There, he’d practically tripped over Sasha.

  He’d imagined rescuing her more times than he wanted to admit, and the scene had usually involved him kicking in a door—or some Xibalban ass—in the process of getting her free. But there hadn’t been a door, and she’d gotten at least partway free on her own. With nothing to kick, he’d been off his stride. And that first sight of her in person, where before she’d existed for him solely in the PI’s notes and pictures, had done the kicking, with him as the target.