Skykeepers

by Jessica Andersen

  “Or worse, your brother.”

  She grimaced. “Yeah. He’s not a happy king at the moment.”

  “Doubt what I’m about to tell him is going to help.”

  “The truth is what it is,” she said pragmatically, her arms still wrapped around his neck, his hands fastened to her waist, holding their lower bodies together, warm and sure, the contact enticing. After a pause, she said, “And the truth is, I was right. I like this version of you.”

  You would’ve loved him, he’d said, and she had a feeling that was the truth too. But at the same time, she knew she was in danger of falling for the man he was now, not just because of his kiss, but because of what he’d sacrificed in an effort to keep her safe, how he’d driven himself to the edge trying to do the right thing. Where Ambrose had wallowed in his own pain, rarely noticing when it caused her distress, Michael had tortured himself, nearly killed himself in an effort to protect her. Could she blame him for that?

  No, of course not, her most logical self said. But there’s a difference between not blaming him and loving him, or even trusting him. Who knows what will set him off again? Ambrose had sane spells too.

  As if hearing her thoughts, or catching an echo from the bond of their magics, he eased away from her, his expression tightening to wariness. “Don’t make any decisions until you’ve heard the whole story. It’s fucking ugly.”

  The harshness of his voice on the last two words had her flinching back. But she nodded. “Okay. Let’s go.”

  They left the cell hand in hand, but when they hit the stairs he released her and led the way. She followed him up, much as he’d done to her that first day. Now it was the other way around, and it was his turn to hesitate at the top step, when the assembled winikin and magi, who were sitting in the great room waiting for his story, all turned at once to stare.

  The hesitation lasted only a moment, though. Then he squared his shoulders and kept going. Which was all anyone could do, really, she thought. Just keep going.

  But as she kept herself going, heading for an empty spot on one of the long couches while Michael took a centrally located chair that had been left conspicuously empty, she couldn’t help thinking that sometimes going forward wasn’t enough, while other times, life took a sharp corner when she wasn’t looking. And went off the road into uncharted territory.

  For all that Michael had sometimes imagined being able to tell the others about the shit inside his head, he’d never come up with the right words. How could he make them understand why he’d made the choices he’d made, why he’d done the things he’d done, when he didn’t even understand it himself? Or rather, he understood why he’d done it, but he didn’t know what it made him, besides royally fucked-up. Was he a hero? A monster? Both?

  Michael looked for Tomas, found him up at the breakfast bar with most of the other winikin. A thumbs-up would’ve been nice. He got a level stare he couldn’t even begin to interpret. A glance at Sasha netted him an encouraging eyebrow lift, and he figured he’d have to make do with that. It was probably better than he deserved—she was definitely better than he deserved—but it helped. It was because of her that he hadn’t lost it entirely back at the temple. And he suspected it was because of her that he hadn’t died back there.

  Taking a deep breath, he faced the big sofa, where Strike, Leah, Anna, and Sasha sat ranged together, a family unit. Figuring he’d start at the beginning, he said, “First, I owe each and every one of you an apology. I’ve lied to you all, both overtly and by omission. Hopefully by the end of this you’ll get that I honestly couldn’t tell you the truth before. It’s entirely thanks to Rabbit that I can tell you now.” He nodded to the young mage. “Thanks, man.” Not kid anymore.

  “My pleasure,” Rabbit said, deadpan, though they both knew that messing around in his sewer of a brain would have been far from pleasant.

  Then, Michael drew breath and dove in. “The truth is, I didn’t exactly wash out of FBI training—a man named Maxwell Bryson recruited me into a covert arm of government ops. Washing out and taking the tech job was part of my cover.” Up at the breakfast bar, Tomas jolted upright. Michael waved him down. “Don’t get too excited; it wasn’t nearly as sexy as it looks in the movies. No ‘shaken or stirred’ for me, though I did have a gadget or two.” He paused. “This was maybe a year after nine/ eleven. Homeland Security was running in all different directions, and not all of those directions were purely on the up-and-up. Bryson’s group wasn’t new, but it got expanded to handle situations the other arms of the terror response system didn’t want to—or flat-out couldn’t—handle. I’m not even sure the president knew what we were up to half the time. It was like there was this reflex arc of plausible deniability built into the war on terror. Either that, or Bryson and his cronies didn’t trust that there would be definitive action if it didn’t come from them.”

  Sasha said, “You were an assassin.” She didn’t look all that surprised. More like things were finally starting to make some sense.

  “Among other things.” Michael had tried—and failed—to imagine how she would take learning that he’d been a killer even before his entrance into the Nightkeepers and their war. Granted, he’d killed in the context of another war—that on terror—but his kills hadn’t come in battle, and he hadn’t sacrificed his victims to a higher power. He’d killed in cold blood, and even among the Nightkeepers, that was murder. He continued, “Here’s where it gets uglier still. They didn’t come after me because I was top of my class—far from it. They wanted me because my psych tests showed a tendency for dissociation. I could split myself when necessary, compartmentalizing the bad stuff, shoving it to the back of my head, and more or less forgetting about it. According to Dr. Horn, who was Bryson’s number two man, I was a budding sociopath, and lucky for me they found me when they did.” He didn’t try to stop the resentment from coloring his tone. “I bought into that because they gave me a choice—I was going to be booted from the FBI program either way, thanks to my psych evals. I could either join Bryson, or they’d cut me loose.”

  “An offer of therapy and some meds would’ve been nice,” Jade said sharply.

  “In retrospect, that probably would’ve been on the table if I’d turned down Bryson’s offer. But I was young and pissed off, and I’d liked the training part of the academy. I thought I’d be a good agent, and I wanted to make a difference.” He glanced at Tomas, whose expression had gone unreadable. “That’s what happens when you raise a kid to save the world. Sometimes he gets there ahead of schedule.”

  “They trained you to kill,” the winikin said, his voice hollow.

  “According to Horn, I was most of the way there on my own. All they did was emphasize the split between the two personalities I already had going on inside my head. Using hypnosis, drugs, and some serious meditation training, Horn taught me to subsume the Other, keeping it compartmentalized until they needed it.”

  “The Other?” Sasha asked quietly.

  He couldn’t read her, wasn’t sure he wanted to yet. Not until he got through the rest of it. “That was what we called my killer instinct, my alter ego. I was good at both of my jobs. Mostly I sold techware. A couple of times a month, though, I’d get a call on a second phone, with drop coordinates. There, I’d find info on the target and how they wanted it done. Sometimes it was a straight-up hit, just get it done and get out. Other times it was up to me to make it look like an accident, or frame someone else for the kill. Whatever the powers that be decided would offer maximum results.” He hesitated over the one that had hit him hardest, even through the dissociation that separated him from the Other. “Once it was a kid, designed to look like a drive-by gone wrong. The kill sparked a gang war that nearly wiped out both sides, which had been the point. But the job showed me that Bryson wasn’t sticking to the war on terror anymore. And he’d started getting pretty vague on what the targets had done.”

  “So you got out?” Sasha ventured.

  “No,” he said, sticking with the ho
nesty she’d demanded. “I stayed. Partly because by that point Horn’s work was about the only thing keeping me in one piece, but also because I’d become addicted to the double life and the adrenaline high, and was using one part of myself to excuse the other, at least inside my own head. I don’t know how much of it came from Horn’s programming, but by the end, I was living for the hunt and the kill, existing from job to job. In the end, it was their choice to cut me loose. They said it was budget cuts and the downsizing of the terror response, but I have a feeling it was because they knew I was on the verge of going hunting on my own, without orders.” He told the story as dispassionately as he could, but heard the self-disgust leaching into the words.

  In the end, he’d been too dangerous even for the men who’d made him.

  “I’m surprised they cut you loose,” Nate said, his eyes reflecting a sort of morbid fascination. “I would’ve thought they’d be better off putting a burn notice on you. No offense.”

  “None taken, because I’m inclined to agree, though most days I’m grateful they didn’t.” Michael paused. “It was Horn’s project, his decision. I think in the end it came down to hubris, and a certain scientific bent. He’d proven with me—and presumably others—that he could program a susceptible brain to split fully. Then he set out to prove that he could put it back together again, only better, effectively ‘curing’ me of my dissociative identity disorder. He reprogrammed me, cutting off my access to the Other once and for all, and convincing me I was exactly what I’d been playing for the previous three years: a decent-looking salesman who liked women and nice clothes, and had the depth of a puddle.”

  “And they just let you go?” Nate persisted.

  “Yes and no. He implanted a compulsion: If the Other ever returned to my conscious mind, I was programmed to call in.” He paused, grimacing. “The conditioning worked great, and probably would’ve kept me sane and ignorant for the rest of my life . . . except for the magic. The first of the memories started breaking through right around the time the barrier reactivated; I thought they were just nightmares. But then, during the talent ceremony, it all came spewing back. The Other. The jobs. Killing the kid. Everything. More, it brought this crazy power with it, though I didn’t really realize it at first. My bloodline nahwal helped me push the Other back at first, and warned me not to let it through, and not to use the magic. The nahwal said that my soul balance was already tipped toward darkness, and if I used the magic, I’d tip it further. Too much, and I’d switch to channeling hellmagic.”

  He glanced at Jade, “It’s an understatement to say that I came out of that ceremony in a really bad place, mentally. What was more, the Other’s return had triggered the conditioning, and before I knew what I was doing, I was on the phone with Horn. When I realized what was happening, I shut it down, but the damage was done. Thank the gods I’d had the sense to sneak out to Albuquerque to make the call, so they didn’t know to look for me here at Skywatch, but I knew they were looking for me, and they wouldn’t stop until they found me and shut me up for good. So I held them off. And I started to make a plan.”

  “Which explains the bat phone,” Sven said, with his typical inability to take much of anything seriously. When the others just looked at him, he said, “What? You know you were thinking it. It’s not like anybody had ‘government agent’ in the pool.” It was common knowledge that the occupants of Skywatch used to speculate widely on the purpose of Michael’s second cell phone, the subject of the secretive calls he got at strange hours, and what he’d really done in the outside world.

  Michael found a strained grin. “What did you have, ‘he owes money to the mob’?”

  “Vegas, actually.” Sven slid a look around the room.

  “Jade had ‘illegitimate half-blood child he doesn’t want us to know about,’ Leah picked the mob, and Rabbit guessed you were some sort of gigolo.”

  “Shit,” Michael said mildly. “I should’ve put in a hundred for ‘borderline sociopathic assassin.’ ” But saying it aloud killed the brief spurt of humor that had temporarily lightened the room. He continued, “Basically, in the weeks following the talent ceremony I worked my ass off using a combination of visualization, martial arts, and the meditation tricks Horn had taught me, and managed to reassemble some mental defenses. I pictured them like a big dam, with sluice gates that opened now and then to let the Other slip through sometimes. We . . . I don’t know, we reached a standoff of sorts, inside my skull. All the while, I was working on my magic and trying to hold off Bryson and Horn, and figure out how to keep them from coming after me—and finding Skywatch—without just luring them somewhere and killing them. Not because I was against killing them per se. I figured it would attract more attention than it would defuse. So I worked, and I planned, and I stalled until the spring, just after the equinox.”

  He looked at Sasha, still unable to see past the blank unease on her face. He said to her, “That was when Carter first got us your file. I can’t necessarily say it was your photo—and what I felt when I saw it—that got me off my ass, but you were part of it. I’d also figured out the chameleon shield by then.” He spread his hands, condensing weeks of sweat equity and split-second timing. “I contacted Horn and let him talk me into meeting him at a remote safe house for an ‘evaluation,’ knowing they would plan to take me out. Instead, I got my hands on some C-4 and detonators, ducked their attack, faked a counterattack, made it look like my detonator misfired early, and then shielded the hell out of myself when the blast went off.” It had been a terrible, terrifying experience. And the Other had loved every fucking minute of it. “Horn and Bryson left, convinced I wouldn’t be a danger to them anymore, and I dropped the chameleon shield and came home.”

  Strike nodded. “That would be when you started wearing tanks, chucked the phone, and turned into someone we could stand.”

  “Pretty much.” Michael took a long look around, thought he saw more understanding than condemnation on his friends’ faces, and let himself uncoil a fraction, thinking maybe he was going to be okay, after all. At least generally. He couldn’t help thinking that Sasha was far too quiet, far too still. She looked like she’d crawled away inside herself, someplace he couldn’t follow.

  They would talk later, he assured himself. He didn’t know which way it would go, but they sure as hell needed to talk.

  “Is the Other why you don’t use your offensive magic?” Sven asked.

  Michael lifted a shoulder. “Depends on your definition of ‘offensive.’ All along, I’ve assumed that in blocking off the Other, I had blocked off that part of my magic. After these past few weeks, though, I’ve come to realize that wasn’t all of it. I’d known all along that anger could bring the Other closer to the surface. When I met Sasha, though, I realized that there was more to it than just anger.” He looked at her, trying to choose his words carefully. “Being around you, wanting you and riding high on sex magic and frustration . . . all those things also brought the Other forward, and weakened the defenses I’d built up. The silver magic the nahwal warned me against started breaking through more often. It was attracted to you.” He paused, then pressed on. “The silver magic is called muk. It’s the original form of our power; our ancestors deemed it too dangerous to use, because it often corrupted its user. They split the muk into Nightkeeper magic and hellmagic, which the Xibalbans later claimed as their own.”

  “I felt it,” Sasha said softly. “I didn’t know what it was, but I felt it. It was . . . seductive.”

  Their whole relationship was tangled in the silver muk, Michael thought. The question was whether they untangle it far enough to find something that was theirs alone.

  Actually, the question was whether they’d get that chance.

  “I don’t know much more about the muk for certain,” he continued, “but I have a feeling it’s attracted to Sasha’s ch’ulel talent, that it wants to . . . cancel her out.” He met her eyes, didn’t look away. “I told you guys that Iago was looking for one of us, back durin
g Sasha’s initial rescue. I also told you that he dismissed me as a lightweight, but that was when I had the Other fully blocked. What I didn’t—couldn’t—tell you was that after Sasha and I made love”—he put it out there, staking his claim, as Strike had wanted him to do weeks ago—“and the Other came through, bringing the muk with it, Iago seemed to recognize me. He said I was the one he was looking for, and that Sasha was going to trigger some sort of transition. He implied that after that, I would come to him on my own. And then yesterday the red-robe said they’d come for both of us. I think that’s confirmation that she and I are linked, not just as two people who probably should have been destined mates, but through the opposition of our magics. I don’t know whether he’s planning on turning me or sacrificing me outright, but either way, he’s looking for some serious power.”

  He fell silent then. There were other details, things he could fill later. But that was the bulk of things.

  After a moment, Sasha said softly, “Is the Other gone now?”

  “Contained. Not gone. But I have an idea about getting rid of it, or at least the connection to the silver magic.”

  “The scorpion spell,” Rabbit said. “The one from the tomb.”

  Michael zeroed in on him. “Has Anna looked at the photos you took?”

  “Yeah.” The young man nodded. “She even did a rough translation that makes it look as though it’ll break the most recently formed magical connection.” His teeth flashed. “In my case, the hellmagic connection. In yours . . . maybe the muk connection? Or did that come before the Nightkeeper magic?”

  That was a hell of a thought. “I’m a Nightkeeper first and foremost,” Michael said firmly. “How bad is the spell?”

  “Nasty,” Strike said. “It requires pulque and a particularly debilitating near-death experience to get into the in-between, which is a barren plain on our side of the entrance to Xibalba. Once you’re there, you’ve got to find the Scorpion River, which is the first challenge the dead need to overcome to enter Xibalba. They cross over. You go for a swim.”