Skykeepers

by Jessica Andersen

  A heavy weight pressed on Michael’s gut. “Then what?”

  “Another near death. If you’re lucky, that purifies your soul, breaks the magic connection and you come back.” Strike didn’t continue with the “if you’re not lucky” corollary, but it was a given. You don’t come back at all.

  But what other choice did he have? Michael thought. He couldn’t go on the way he was. “It’s worth a try. When can we start?” But something changed in the air, kicking against his warrior’s mark. A flash in his peripheral vision brought his attention around to the kitchen. Tomas stood, white faced, looking like he might puke at any second. “What’s wrong?”

  “Can we . . .” The winikin swallowed hard. “We need to talk. In private. Now.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  There had been too many years of friction for Michael to snap to attention at Tomas’s order. And he’d kept himself hidden for too long, lied to his teammates too much. He shook his head. “No more secrets.”

  Tomas glanced at the others, stricken. His voice broke to a whisper. “I can’t. I made a vow.”

  “I didn’t,” Michael said. “And since I’m guessing whatever you promised to keep secret has major implications for what’s been going on in my damn life, you didn’t have the right to make the vow in the first place.”

  “It shouldn’t have mattered,” the winikin rasped. “No winikin of the stone bloodline has ever seen two in a single lifetime. There was one in our parents’ generation; there shouldn’t be another in this one.”

  “Tomas,” Jox said in a forbidding voice, in full-on royal winikin mode. “What the hell are you talking about? And don’t give me any shit about vows. Get your head out of your ass, man. The situations have changed. The rules have changed. If there’s a secret talent passing through the stone bloodline, then fucking spill it.”

  Tomas glared at Michael. “You should’ve told me you’d been recruited to black ops.”

  “Why?” Michael snapped. “So you could feel like less of a failure?”

  With a look at Jox, then the others, Tomas exhaled. His shoulders slumped. Then, finally, he said, “No, godsdamn it. So I could’ve explained what the hell was going on inside your head, and kept you from making the biggest fucking mistake of this war.” The winikin’s voice dropped to a hiss. “You’re a Mictlan; it’s your talent, jerkwad. The name doesn’t just mean the lowest level of hell; it’s what we call a mage who wields the muk magic. It’s a very rare, very secret talent that’s sent by the gods only in times of absolute need.”

  “The red-robes and Ambrose both mentioned the ‘mick,’ ” Michael rasped. “They were saying ‘Mictlan.’ ”

  “As for why I’m the only one who knows about it,” Tomas continued, his voice rising a little in defensive-ness, “each winikin of the stone bloodline knew about it, but was sworn to silence. The Mictlan himself is magically bound to maintain his silence on all matters pertaining to the talent, even to the point of lying to his king and family. There’s no talent mark for the same reason. It’s an avowed secret.” He paused. “The king’s winikin was the only one outside the bloodline who would’ve known.” His voice got smaller. “I guess it didn’t get passed along.”

  Jox shook his head. “There were things I wouldn’t have learned until Strike took the scepter. Which—hello?—means you should’ve told me yourself, when we reunited.”

  “I didn’t think it was necessary. Michael couldn’t even summon fireballs. He was a tech salesman, for gods’ sake. I didn’t think there was any chance he’d become a Mictlan.”

  “Which is what, exactly?” Michael said between his teeth.

  Tomas looked at him. Looked away. Muttered, “An assassin.”

  Michael’s breath exploded from him. “No. Absolutely not. Been there, done that, and I want out.”

  The winikin ignored him and continued, “The Mictlan is a special kind of assassin who works not for his king or the other magi, but for the gods themselves.” The winikin paused, face going drawn. “Because murder is one of the few truly damning sins, and the use of muk carries its own risk, the Mictlan is charged with making a single cold-blooded hit, using the muk. That’s why it’s such a secret; the target isn’t necessarily one of the enemy. Sometimes it’s one of us, someone the gods consider a mortal danger. The gods choose the target and show it to the Mictlan in a vision, usually in a mirror or pool of water. But it’s just a single hit. I’ve never heard of anyone using the muk as fighting magic.”

  “Well, thanks to our complete and utter lack of communication, I now hold that dubious distinction,” Michael said in a voice almost completely devoid of emotion, coming from a heart that felt like it had gone to stone. “I killed the red-robe back in Florida using the muk, and today I capped, what, a couple of dozen Xibalbans with it. Shit.”

  “Those shouldn’t count against your soul,” Tomas said, his words tripping one over the next as he started to babble in frantic release. “They were battle kills, not cold blood.” He paused, grimacing. “I don’t know how the earlier kills will affect the balance. They were part of a war, but didn’t occur during a battle.”

  And not all of them had been part of a war, Michael thought, but didn’t say because it wouldn’t change the new reality of things, which was that his brief ray of hope was gone. “I can’t break the muk bond, can I?” he said hollowly. “I’ve got to keep the magic and wait for my target.” There was no question that he could do the job. Gods knew he’d done it too many times before. But he wanted to be done with it, wanted a life, damn it. He wanted to be the hero he’d thought he could be going into the FBI.

  Tomas nodded. “If the gods have put a Mictlan among us, then they think there’s a need for you. I can teach you how to control your talent, but I can’t let you break the bond.”

  You don’t get to make that call, Michael thought, but didn’t bother because this wasn’t about him and Tomas. It was about the gods needing something from him. He’d gone willingly into Bryson’s employ. Could he really refuse to do the same job for the gods themselves? Maybe. But if they demanded that he kill one of the Nightkeepers . . . Yeah, he could see himself refusing that. “Have any previous Mictlan refused the charge?”

  “Three of them. They all committed suicide rather than accept their targets.” Tomas paused. “The first was supposed to kill Akhenaton, the second Cortés.”

  A chill reached up and grabbed Michael by the throat. “Fuck. Me.” His breath went thin in his lungs as he said, “And the third?”

  “Your uncle. He was supposed to kill King Scarred-Jaguar. He killed himself instead. If he hadn’t . . .” The winikin trailed off, but the message was clear.

  If Scarred-Jaguar had been assassinated, so many things might be different. The Solstice Massacre wouldn’t have happened. The Nightkeepers would have the numbers they needed for the end-time war, and the magi would’ve had an extra twenty-four years of looking for answers and coming up with a solid, workable strategy for confronting the Xibalbans and Banol Kax. And each of the residents of Skywatch would’ve had that time with their families, instead of being scattered, in hiding. Waiting.

  Nausea spiraled through Michael. If he knew it would prevent hundreds or thousands of other deaths, could he kill one of his own in cold blood? Maybe not. But the Other could.

  What if Sasha’s the target? something whispered inside him.

  “What if I refuse my target but don’t suicide?” Michael asked, not bothering to argue against his being a Mictlan. Hell, Iago had known it before he did. Once again, the bastard was ahead of them.

  “The name Mictlan is not a misnomer. The moment your target is revealed, you have nine hours to complete the kill. At the end of the ninth hour, if you haven’t completed your assignment—whether because you suicided or simply ignored the call—your soul will be yanked directly to the lowest level of hell, where you will become a powerful ajaw-makol.”

  The ajaw-makol were the most powerful of the demons capable of possessing a human
—or Nightkeeper—host; they retained their mage powers and human knowledge, and were damnably difficult to kill. If Michael became one, the Nightkeepers were fucked.

  “So let me get this straight,” Strike growled at Tomas. “You knew a talent like this runs in the stone bloodline and prevents its holder from discussing it openly, and you knew that large chunks of the normal information transfer hadn’t happened because of the Solstice Massacre . . . yet you never thought to mention this to me, or Jox, or, hell, Michael?”

  The winikin shrank in on himself. “He’d become a salesman. And kind of a prick. How was I supposed to know it was all a front?”

  Because you knew me, Michael wanted to say. You raised me. Couldn’t you see past the outside?

  Strike transferred his attention to Michael. “Going forward, it looks like you’ve got two options.”

  Michael nodded. “I can either use the scorpion spell to break my bond with the muk magic, and we take our chances with whatever comes from my not accepting the target . . . or I do the job I was born and trained for, and hope the kill doesn’t tip me to channeling hellmagic.” Which would be akin to having him become an ajaw-makol , except that he’d be allied to Iago rather than the Banol Kax. He held his king’s eyes, shaken by the thought that, in his uncle’s case, the king had been the target. Frustration welled up. Talk about shitty options. It’s enough to drive a guy—Michael broke off the thought, both because sanity had become a major focus the moment he’d learned of Sasha’s upbringing . . . and because he saw a connection he didn’t like one bit. A bolt of understanding hit him in the gut, and he glanced at Tomas. “That’s why the Stone males are all bachelors, suicides, or lovers, isn’t it? The bachelors and suicides are the ones with the mind-set—i.e., borderline sociopath, dissociative personality, whatever—to accept the Mictlan talent. The lovers don’t inherit the disorder; they carry on the bloodline.”

  Tomas nodded slowly. “I’m sorry.”

  “Shit,” Michael said hollowly as whatever small hope he’d briefly had of finding a way to have Sasha for his own died a painful death. He was a Mictlan, and a head case. Even if his target turned out to be someone he could see his way to killing—like Iago—and he went through with it, he’d still be a head case, still be half a killer, if not more. Or he could undergo the scorpion spell, break the muk connection, and go back to a seminormal life, one that might include Sasha. Only look what had happened with the others. Akhenaton. Cortés. Scarred-Jaguar. Three different powerful men. Three catastrophic massacres. Given the timing of things, he had to believe that whatever the gods had in mind for him, it’d be big. Like end-of-the-world big.

  Could he live with that?

  Damn it, Michael thought, his chest echoing hollowly. It took him a moment to realize there was no dark anger inside him, that Rabbit’s work was holding. Thank the gods for that much, at least.

  Correctly reading Michael’s overload level as reaching the critical point, Strike said, “How about we take a break. Jade and Anna can pull whatever else they can find on muk and the Mictlan, which probably won’t be much, given the level of secrecy surrounding the talent. We’ll keep working on the tomb translations, probably mount another trip out there in the next day or so. Michael . . . you can consider yourself off for the rest of the day. Take a walk. Play some vids. Blow off some steam.”

  “Thanks. I’ll do that.” Michael was acutely aware of the moment Sasha stood and slipped out of the room. He wanted to follow, but then he realized he hadn’t told the others everything important, after all. Looking at Strike, he said, “During the battle, when Iago was trying to ’port me and Sasha away, I got the image of a mountain.”

  The king narrowed his eyes. “Can you describe it?”

  “Not well enough to ’port. Sorry. But a voice said, ‘Paxil Mountain.’ That ring a bell?”

  “Paxil Mountain,” Jox said. “Yeah. That figures.” At Michael’s look, he elaborated, with a nod at Sasha: “It’s the source of cacao and maize. Legend has it that several of the greedier gods wanted to keep the plants for themselves, so they hid them in Paxil Mountain. When the other gods discovered this, they got angry and decided to give maize and cacao to mankind. The thunder god split open the mountain and the seeds sprayed across the empire, seeding the Mayan Empire with maize and cacao.”

  “Is it a specific place?” Strike asked.

  “I’m sure it is, or was.” The winikin tipped his palms up. “Not one we know about, though.”

  “Well, that’s something.” Strike turned to Michael. Waved him off. “Go. You’re looking too ragged for my peace of mind.”

  Michael nodded and left, but he didn’t head for the firing range or the ball court. He headed in the direction Sasha had taken when she’d slipped from the meeting a couple of minutes earlier, toward the residential wings. He was nearly there when Tomas stepped in front of him, scowling. “You should’ve told me, you young idiot.”

  Michael felt the old, familiar tightness stiffen his neck and shoulders. “When you say it like that, I can’t imagine why I didn’t.”

  “I could have—”

  “You could have done lots of things,” Michael interrupted. He was suddenly sick and tired of the friction and random jabs. His priorities had shifted; he just couldn’t waste his energy fighting with Tomas anymore. “And so could I. How about we agree that we both screwed up, give each other a pass on the last six years or so, and move on already?”

  That brought the winikin’s chin down a notch. “You’d do that?”

  “Consider it done.”

  They stood there for a moment, stuck somewhere between a standoff and reconciliation. When a hug—or even really a handshake—didn’t seem to make much sense, Michael gave a stiff nod, moved around his winikin, and headed for the residential wing.

  He hesitated at the closed door to Sasha’s suite, but what could he possibly say to make things right at this point? He’d pushed her away twice, and even though the danger she brought out in him was blocked—for the time being, at least—the underlying issues remained. More, although his status as a Mictlan explained a shit-load of what he’d been going through, it gave him a pretty crappy choice of actions, that between bad and worse. What right did he have to go to her now?

  Thing was, he couldn’t make himself give a shit. With the overt danger defused, he was through being noble, through being the better man. With the Other locked away and the anger banked, desire blazed that much higher, threatening to take him over. And this time, he intended to let it. If she didn’t want him, he would go. But she was going to have to be the one to turn him away this time.

  He knocked perfunctorily and, before she could answer, pushed through into her suite.

  She stood in the kitchen, a mug frozen halfway to her lips. The odor of hot chocolate enriched the air, calling to something inside him, linking the scent and the woman until the two became intertwined in his sensory memory. Slowly, she lowered the mug to the counter, setting it down with a decisive click. “Michael. Did you want something?”

  “We should talk.”

  Her eyes sparked with irritation. “Is that why you barged in here? To talk?”

  “Not really, but I thought we should probably start there.” He paused, steeling himself. “Or do you want me to turn around and go?”

  “Why would I want that?”

  “Because I’m a murderer.” He put it right out there.

  “You’re a warrior. Warriors kill.”

  “It wasn’t all in battle.”

  “It was all in war.” But although she defended him staunchly, she didn’t quite meet his eyes.

  “Then it’s not a problem for you?” he pushed, knowing they needed to get through this if they were going to go forward. Part of him said not to push, to give her more time, but what if they didn’t have time? He couldn’t believe it was a coincidence that his Mictlan powers had come online as they neared the triad threshold. Iago certainly hadn’t thought so.

  She sighed sof
tly. “I’m trying to make it not be. Intellectually, I understand that killing is a part of war, whether it’s a war on drugs, terror, or the Banol Kax. And I’m trying to accept that inwardly, as well. But I’m just not sure I’m cut out to be a warrior. The idea of killing someone—anyone, regardless of what they’ve done or what they might do in the future . . . in my heart of hearts, I’m not sure I can condone it.” She paused. “And I don’t know how I feel about what you’ve done . . . but whatever it is I’m feeling, it’s something.”

  “I can accept that.” He was going to have to. “I’ll give you whatever time you need.”

  She cocked her head. Lifted her mug. Sipped. “Who said I needed time?”

  His head came up, heat firing in his gut. “Don’t you?”

  “Yes and no. If we’re talking about something long-term, then yeah, I would need time, and not just because of the Mictlan stuff. But that’s not how this is going to work, is it?” Her eyes were a little too bright, her words a little too quick, but he didn’t interrupt because he couldn’t really argue the point. He was in transition, his life changing what felt like daily. Until he knew who he was, how could he offer himself up for any sort of relationship? After a short pause, she nodded. “Thought so.” But she didn’t look surprised, or even upset. “Then, if we’re talking about something day-to-day, enjoying each other in the moment, so to speak, then I don’t need time.” A smile touched her lips. “Not after that kiss this morning. If that’s the man you are right now, and the man you’re going to be for tonight, then I don’t need any time at all.”

  He didn’t know if he understood all of what she was thinking, but he definitely did feel like the hunter she’d once accused him of being as he stalked across the sitting room, skirted the breakfast bar, and joined her in the small kitchen, which was barely big enough for one mage, never mind two. The scent of fresh herbs joined that of the rich hot chocolate. “About that kiss . . .”