Skykeepers

by Jessica Andersen

  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 autosacrifice, 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.”

  Leah, Jox, Nate and Alexis nodded as though that seemed reasonable. Strike, on the other hand, fixed him with a look. “Your winikin thinks you’ve got a commitment problem.”

  “My winikin thinks I’ve got lots of problems.” Michael met the king’s eyes squarely, letting him see the determination and control, but not the things that churned beneath. “I swear to you that I’ll do my best by Sasha.” And that was the man talking. The one who was in control, and was going to stay in control, damn it.

  After a moment, Strike nodded. “Okay. We’ll give you two some room.” He turned to Anna. “We need to figure out who Iago was looking for, and why. In addition, we need to know what happened with the red-robe. If that’s something new in the Xibalbans’ arsenal, we’ll have to figure out how to counteract it.”

  Michael shifted uncomfortably at the list of questions, suspecting that the answers all circled back to him. “I don’t think it’s a new Xibalban weapon,” he said, sticking to his lies. “It seemed more like a misfire of the ’port magic.”

  “Which is even more reason to figure it out,” Strike countered. “I’d hate like hell to do something like that to another human being.”

  You won’t, Michael thought. It was me. All me. With the Other locked safely away, he felt the kill weigh sickly on his soul. “What about the word ‘mick,’ and the mountains the gray-robes mentioned?” he asked, his voice rasping on the question.

  Anna sent him a long, slow look before answering. “The prefix ‘mic’ was used for many things relating to the realm of the damned, which was called Mictlan.”

  “I thought Xibalba was the Mayan equivalent of hell?” Nate asked.

  “Yes and no,” Anna replied. “Although Xibalba is the underworld, it’s not necessarily a negative place, not hell as the Christians think of it. It’s more a realm of challenges that the dead must win through in order to reach their end reward in the barrier or the sky—or reincarnation, depending on which set of beliefs you go with.”

  Michael frowned. “So there’s no punishment for bad behavior?” That didn’t fit with what the nahwal had told him.

  “Wrongdoers get caught up in the challenges, looping endlessly until they learn the lessons they failed to learn on earth,” Anna clarified. “Some never learn, just loop eternally. That’s the punishment, the hell, if you will. Not Xibalba itself. That’s in the formal sense, though. From what’s been happening around us over the past eighteen months, I have a feeling the coming of the end-time has shifted the hierarchy in Xibalba, that the Banol Kax, who used to be the overseers of the challenges and the dead, have started marshaling them as armies instead.”

  “Assuming the Banol Kax are still a factor,” Nate put in, referring to the complete lack of action from that front ever since the destruction of the intersection.

  “They are,” Strike said flatly. “Just because they’ve gone quiet doesn’t mean they’re not a threat. They’re doing something, or planning something. We just don’t know what.”

  The current theory was that with the intersection gone and Iago folding the hellmouth into the barrier except as needed, the demons of Xibalba had lost their direct access to the earth, forcing them to work through the Xibalbans and makol. But although they might be cut off temporarily, Michael was inclined to agree with Strike’s assessment. Given the tenacity of the Banol Kax throughout history, it would be dangerous to assume they would be out of action for long.

  “Anyway,” Anna said, picking up her thread, “four classes of dead go straight to the sky: suicides, sacrificial victims, women who die in childbirth, and warriors who die in battle. They skip the challenges, having earned their ‘get out of jail free’ cards by the manner of their death.”

  “Where does Mictlan fit in?” Nate asked.

  Anna hummed a flat note. “Depending on who you ask, it’s either a construct of the Spanish missionaries, a sort of culturally relevant hell that they used to threaten the natives—the old ‘repent and accept the one true God, or you’ll suffer eternally in Mictlan’ routine . . . or it’s the lowest level of Xibalba, where the true sinners go. Just like there’s a group of souls who go straight to the sky, do not pass go, do not collect, there’s a group of souls, albeit smaller, who bypass the challenges in the other direction: the traitors and the murderers. Some say these are the souls that become the makol.”

  A chill skimmed down Michael’s spine. “What about the mountain?”

  “Depends on whether we’re talking about the Mayan or Aztec perspective. The Maya believed the entrance of Xibalba was located at the top of a mountain, with tunnels leading to Scorpion River, which formed the boundary of the underworld.” She paused. “The Aztec preferred volcanoes.”

  “Why does that not surprise me?” Strike said dryly. “They sound like a bunch of
bloodthirsty psychopaths. Perfect fodder for the Xibalbans.”

  “Or they were no more warlike than their neighbors before the Xibalbans moved in on them,” Anna countered. “Chicken and egg, you know?”

  “Were there any volcanoes the Aztec were particularly fond of?” Michael asked. “Maybe one that’s extinct now, that the Xibalbans might have taken over as a stronghold?”

  “They worshiped Smoking Mountain and White Woman, near Tenochtitlán. East of there is Mount Tlaloc, where the thunder god was supposed to live.” She paused, frowning. “There are others, but I’ll have to hit the books to be sure.”

  “It’s a start,” Strike said. “We’ll check it out, but I hate splitting our forces. It’s hard enough trying to track the hints handed down to us in the Mayan legends, never mind figuring out the Aztec stuff. Add that to searching for both the library and a new intersection, and we’re spread very, very thin.”

  After a brief hesitation, Anna said, “How about Myrinne?”

  “No way.” The answer was an immediate knee-jerk from Strike, his expression darkening. Then, catching himself—due at least in part to Leah digging an elbow into his ribs—he toned it down to say, “She and Rabbit just got to school. Let them focus on that for now.” It was no secret Strike had sent them to UT partly in the hopes that the two would drift apart in the wider world. So far, though, that didn’t seem to be happening.

  “She would want to help,” Anna pressed. She’d been the one to claim responsibility for Myrinne, based on a debt she owed to Red-Boar, and therefore posthumously to his heir, Rabbit.

  But Strike shook his head. “We don’t know what she is.”

  “She’s a girl,” Anna said stubbornly.

  “Who might or might not be the daughter of a witch who might or might not have had actual powers,” Strike countered.

  “She dreamed of Skywatch before she got here,” Anna reminded him. “She described it to Rabbit, right down to the ceiba tree out back.” Myrinne’s vision suggested that she had seer’s powers. It wasn’t clear, however, what form those skills might take, whether Nightkeeper, Xibalban, or something else. So far, Strike had forbidden all experimentation. That hadn’t stopped Anna from lobbying the point, though. With her own itza’at powers dubious at best, the Nightkeepers badly needed a visionary.

  “I’ll take it under advisement,” Strike said grudgingly, and won a nod from Anna. He continued, “For now, Michael is going to focus on this new spell of Iago’s, while Anna and Jade do a first pass on the Aztec stuff. Basically, we need anything that’ll help us figure out what’s coming down the pipeline now that we’re bearing down on the three-year threshold.”

  In the absence of the library, the prophecies actually dealing with the events leading up to the end-time were few and far between. Despite the Nightkeepers’ best efforts to uncover additional artifacts with inscriptions that might help, all they had describing the events of upcoming winter solstice was a single carved inscription, badly degraded, that read, In the triad years, a daughter of the sky . . .

  And that was it. Which wasn’t much help at all.

  Worse, there was some debate about the actual time period it represented. Anna was convinced that the triad years corresponded to the final three years before the apocalypse. Lucius, on the other hand, had offered another interpretation, back when he’d been in his human guise, living with the Nightkeepers and helping Jade with the archives. According to him, the prophecy referred to the coming of the Triad, a legendary trio of über-powerful magi who were supposed to arise at the end of the age to join forces with the Nightkeepers. Without the rest of the prophecy, there was no way of telling which interpretation was correct. Then again, without the rest of the prophecy, the question was academic. They needed another source for information—which brought them back around, yet again, to the subject of the library.

  Draining the dregs of his coffee and figuring he could legitimately make a break for it, Michael shifted in his seat. “If that’s it for the debriefing . . . ?”

  Strike nodded and waved him off. “Yeah, we’re just about finished here anyway. Let us know if she’s awake, will you?”

  Michael narrowed his eyes. “Don’t get your hopes up. I mean it.”

  Strike turned his scarred palms up in a falsely innocent gesture. “Hey, can’t blame me for trying.” But then he turned serious. “Look, I know things were awkward for you after you and Jade split, and again when Nate and Alexis got back together.”

  “That’s one way to put it,” Michael conceded. With the skyroad gone and no new intersection found, the Nightkeepers needed all the power they could get. Because of that, there was serious pressure on the singles to pair up, whether or not the relationships made sense in real-world terms.

  Strike glanced at Leah, a hint of a smile curving his mouth as he said to Michael, “Do me a favor and don’t let that turn you off something that could benefit all of us, yourself most of all.”

  Or it could doom us all, Michael thought. He didn’t understand how Sasha, who seemed to embody positive energy, had reached inside him to stir up the Other, and he didn’t like things he didn’t understand, especially when they had to do with his alter ego. But once again, he was unable to break the silence that came from within him. So instead he said, “I’m just checking to see if she’s awake yet.”

  Because despite the logic that said he should stay far away from her, he owed her an explanation, and an apology. More, he damn well wanted—needed—to see her. It was as simple as that. And as complicated. So he went.

  The basement hallway was bland and austere compared to the lived-in feel of the level above. Back when hundreds of Nightkeepers had lived at Skywatch, the basement had been used for storage. These days, though, the storerooms were set up as more or less comfortable cells. Three of them were, anyway, having variously housed Leah, Rabbit, Myrinne, and Lucius when they’d been deemed potential security threats. And although Michael hated the thought of Sasha locked up, a prisoner, there was no arguing the fact that she was still a relatively unknown quantity.

  Stopping outside the second of the doors, Michael said a quick spell to drop the ward spell that barred magic users from entering or exiting the cell, and then turned the key stuck in the exterior lock. He was strung tight as he pushed through the door to the sparsely furnished fifteen-by-fifteen-foot cell, exhaling only when he saw that Sasha was there, still sleeping, curled up beneath a blanket.

  Wearing a set of Alexis’s workout clothes, with her hair bed-wild and the strain of the prior day evident in the circles beneath her eyes, she wasn’t the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. But call it her innate healing magic, call it Rabbit’s intervention—hell, call it good genes—whatever it was, even in repose she seemed to glow from within with strength and vitality, and the sort of go-to-hell attitude he’d never been able to resist. And that was a problem, because he was starting to realize he wasn’t just attracted to her, wasn’t just drawn to her on a magical or even physical level. He was in danger of liking her, of wanting to be with her. He told himself to about-face it and get out of there before he did something they would both regret, but he was already too late. She hadn’t been sleeping, after all; she’d been faking it. Now, having no doubt identified him through cracked lids, she sat up and glared at him.

  When their eyes met, magic and anger kicked, and every cell of his body lit with desire. Heat rushed through him, tensing his body, hardening his flesh. And he knew he wasn’t going anywhere, not just because of the library and the questions that needed answering, but because of her. Problem was, the Other felt the exact same way.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sasha took a good long look at her latest captor. With the clean, elegant lines of his body visible beneath soft black track pants, and a tight muscle shirt that showed off a whole hell of a lot of muscles, Michael was just as big and gorgeous as she had first remembered, when she’d awoken and found herself far more clearheaded than she would’ve expected. Or rather,
some things were fuzzy while others—like the two of them tearing into each other like crazed nymphos—were crystal.

  As their eyes met, heat chased through her. Still, though, she tried to hang on to rationality. What had she been thinking? Maybe she’d gotten into a couple of ill-fated relationships far too quickly in the past, but the incident in the smoke-filled chamber had to be one for the Guinness book: introductions to orgasm in fifteen minutes or less, with no payment involved. Hello, sex with a stranger. She’d nearly talked herself into believing that what had happened between them had come from nothing more than adrenaline and incense, that she’d imagined the connection they’d seemed to forge. But now, as his forest dark eyes looked right at her and saw her, really saw her rather than dismissing her or passing by, she knew she was in some big, bad trouble. He was trouble. Because even though she knew who and what he was, her blood ran hot for him and her chest tightened with the greedy, grasping need that was her downfall.

  She would have cursed him, but she had only herself to blame for the weakness. So many things would’ve been different in her life if she could’ve found a way to be happy alone, if she could’ve been enough for herself. Her ex, Saul, might not have been kind when he’d accused her of clinging too hard, of needing too much, but he’d been right. Even her ill-advised trip into the rain forest had been a quest for her father’s posthumous approval. And yesterday? Michael had told her he’d come looking for her, that he and his friends needed her, and she’d fallen right in with his plan of hiding until reinforcements arrived. Then, somehow, they’d wound up making love. And for a few moments, she hadn’t been alone. The sex had been flat-out, earthshaking, tooth-rattling amazing. More, it had made her feel powerful, as though she’d finally taken something for herself after too many months of having things taken from her. Yet it had to have been a huge mistake. Even though the dreams made him seem more familiar than he ought to, she didn’t know him, really. She thought she’d glimpsed something dark and angry in him the day before, something that reminded her too much of Ambrose on a bad day. And although it had been for just a second, and he’d gotten it under control just as quickly as it had flashed, it had been in there. She was sure of it.