Lucius looked at her as if he expected her to say something, to defend him, but what more could she do? To an extent, he’d dug his own grave. She’d told him to stay the hell away from that crap until after his defense. If he’d been posting on message boards with the dooms-dayers, there wasn’t much she could do about it now.
When he saw there would be no help forthcoming, his expression darkened, something shifting in his face so he almost looked like a different person—older and less open—as he met Desiree’s smirk with a glare. “I don’t see how my online presence should concern this committee. I’ve never put myself forth as a representative of this university or a member of Professor Catori’s staff while on those boards.”
Desiree arched one elegant eyebrow. “Shall I take your nonanswer of my question as an answer in and of itself?”
He hesitated so long that Anna thought he was going to play it smart. Then he sat up straight and squared his shoulders, suddenly looking less like a praying mantis and more like a taller-than-average guy who’d broadened out through the shoulders and gained twenty pounds or so of muscle while she hadn’t been paying attention. Before she could process that realization, he said to Desiree, “I believe in the Nightkeeper myth. So what?”
Anna winced, even though she’d warned him. Not that having an out-there opinion was a crime, but with Desiree gunning for the entire Mayan studies department and not being real picky about the actual legalities of the matter, he was effectively throwing himself on the academic sword.
Desiree tapped her manicured fingernails—which were pale mauve, rather than the more appropriate bloodred—against her lips. “You actually believe that ancient magicians from Atlantis—Atlantis, mind you—survived the flooding that came the last time this so-called Great Conjunction rolled through, twenty-six thousand years ago, and went on to shape, not just the Mayan Empire, but the Egyptians before them?”
“There are demonstrable parallels,” Lucius said before Anna could intervene. “For example, the dating of the Maya Long Count calendar begins circa 3114 B.C., which is well before the Maya were a people, before even their predecessors, the Olmec, started thinking about being more than scattered pastoralists and hunter-gatherers. It was, however, right about the time the first ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs started popping up, which many people consider the beginning of legitimate human civilization.”
Thor perked up a little. “You’re talking about von Däniken?”
Anna cringed. The Dutch pseudoscientist’s publication of Chariots of the Gods? in the sixties had been good in that it’d popularized the idea of connections and parallels amongst a number of ancient civilizations, prompting “real” researchers to investigate the possibility of trans-oceanic voyages long before the time of the Vikings. On the downside, it’d also popularized what Lucius often called the Stargate effect, i.e., the notion that most of early human civilization had been shaped by aliens.
Welcome to the tinfoil-hat zone.
“Not von Däniken per se, though he wasn’t entirely wrong,” Lucius told Thor. “The Nightkeepers were—maybe even are—far more than that. They were mentors, magi who lived in parallel with several of the most successful early civilizations, teaching them math and science, especially astronomy.” There was a subtle shift in Lucius’s face, making his features sharper, more mature as he said, “The commonalities between the Egyptians and Maya are too close to be coincidental—both religions were based on the sun and sky, and on the movement of the stars.”
Thor frowned. “I thought the Egyptians worshiped a single sun god. The Maya were polytheistic.”
“Exactly.” Lucius thumped the table, making his laptop jump. “The Cult of the Sun God was conceived by the pharaoh Akhenaton, who forcibly converted all of ancient Egypt from their long-held pantheistic religion to his new god, Aten. His guards slaughtered the priests of the old religion and defaced all of their temples and effigies, destroying millennia of worship in the space of a few years.” Leaning forward in his enthusiasm, he said, “That was when the Nightkeepers fled Egypt—the survivors, anyway. Most of them were killed in Akhenaton’s religious ‘cleansing,’ but a few survived. Those survivors eventually made their way to Central America, where they stumbled on the Olmec, who were just beginning to centralize, and were ripe for the teachings the Nightkeepers brought. Over time the Olmec, with the Nightkeepers’ help, eventually bloomed into the Mayan Empire. It’s . . .” He paused, then said, “It’s perfect. It all fits. Just look at the time line.”
Dead silence greeted that pronouncement.
For a second, Anna thought she caught a glint of satisfaction in Desiree’s eyes, but the dragon actually sounded sympathetic when she said, “That was what we were afraid of, Lucius. Given that, along with the disciplinary problems you’ve had in the past, your mediocre GPA, and the general lack of substantiated evidence underpinning your thesis, it is the opinion of this committee that you should not be granted the degree of doctor of philosophy in art history at this time.”
Anna wasn’t altogether surprised, but the punch of it still drove the breath from her lungs. When she got her wind back, she said, “I wish to formally appeal this decision.”
“Of course you do,” Desiree said, sounding as if she couldn’t care less. “The request is noted.” Shuffling her papers into a pile, she rose, indicating that the meeting was over.
She and the others filed out, leaving Anna and Lucius alone in the conference room. He hadn’t said anything since Desiree had made her decision. Anna would’ve thought it was shock and denial, except that neither of those things was in his face. Instead he looked . . . pissed. Resentful. Like this was somehow her fault.
“What’s that glare for?” she snapped, annoyed.
“Please. Like you don’t know.” He stood, towering over her, and for the first time she was aware of him not just as a man, but as someone significantly bigger than she. “I just got mowed down in the cross fire of the art history department pissing contest you and the Dragon Lady have going. You think I should be happy about that? Spare me.”
He gathered up his papers and the handouts the others had left behind, shoving them into his knapsack with jerky, angry motions.
Anna stood. She wanted to go to him, wanted to touch his arm, hug him, something to bridge the gap that’d grown between them. What happened to us? she wanted to say. What happened to you? But it didn’t take an itza’at seer or a mind-bender to know he wouldn’t welcome the contact or the questions. There was something seriously bad going on with him, far worse than she’d suspected.
“Lucius, what’s wrong? You can talk to me.” She reached out but didn’t touch him, just made the gesture and left it up to him whether to step toward her or away.
Something flashed in his eyes: guilt, maybe, or sadness. But it was quickly swept away by disbelief, then mirth. “Do you actually not know? Is it possible you’re really that dense?” He moved toward her, but didn’t take her proffered hand. Instead he leaned in and said in a low, angry voice, “Think about it, Anna. The crap with Desiree started right about the time you came back from your little mental-health break in New Mexico, and your not-so-saintly husband swore off other women, right? You do the math.”
He straightened and jerked the knapsack over his shoulder. Tucking his laptop under one arm, he strode away, not looking back.
Oh, hell.
Anna didn’t move; she couldn’t. She was trapped, not in the soul-searching that should’ve followed Lucius’s revelation, but in something that was a thousand times worse because it came with pictures and a sound track.
The vision caught her unawares, slamming through her subconscious blocks as if they were nothing, hammering her with the sounds of lovemaking, and the sight of her husband and Desiree twined together in the sort of raw, unabashed sex that Anna didn’t remember having had with him in years. Shock blasted through her. Heart-break. She’d known he’d had a lover, had dealt with it as best she could when they’d reconciled after the
fall equinox. But seeing it, seeing the look on his face as he . . . She couldn’t bear it.
“No!” She clawed the air, slapping at the images that were buried deep in her soul, in the seat of her magic. “Gods, no!”
Pain seared the skin between her breasts, where the skull-shaped effigy rested. Inert in the months since Strike had returned it to her, the pendant’s power flared now, hot and hard. More images crashed through her, snippets of them together, sometimes naked, sometimes not. To her surprise she realized it was worse seeing them together clothed, strolling arm in arm along streets she didn’t recognize, telling her that they’d traveled together, that his frequent business trips hadn’t been all business.
On some level she’d known that, accepted it. But she hadn’t known—and damn well couldn’t accept—that it’d been Desiree. Her boss. Her nemesis. Worse, Anna’s gut—or maybe the magic?—told her that Desiree’s undeclared war on her was more than jealousy or jilted love. The bitch thought she was still in the running . . . which meant she had some reason to think it. Dick had left the door open, damn him.
“No.” This time the word was little more than a broken sound, a sob that hurt Anna’s ribs as the burning power drained and the images faded. Eventually she became aware of her surroundings, aware that she was in a conference room with the door open, and there were people passing by in the hall.
New grief tore through her at the realization that the safe security of her “normal” job was as much an illusion as her “happy” marriage. She’d forsaken her brother and the responsibilities of her royal blood in order to be a regular person and be married to the man she loved, yet that life was coming unraveled just as the Nightkeepers were reconnecting.
Fate, she thought. Destiny. There are no coincidences. This was the gods’ will, their way of punishing her for turning her back on her duties, their way of reminding her where she belonged.
“I give up,” she said to the gods as her heart cracked into a thousand pieces, each sharper than the last. “You win.”
She crept to her office, moving slow, feeling sore. Grabbing her purse, she headed for her car, a four-year-old Lexus that Dick kept wanting her to trade in for something newer and shinier. Once she was on the road, she turned away from home. Or rather, she turned away from the home she’d made with her husband and headed toward the one she’d grown up in. The one hundreds of people had died in, though she had survived, a small piece of her always wondering why she’d been spared and other, better, more dedicated Nightkeepers hadn’t.
Sometimes the phrase the will of the gods didn’t even begin to cover it. But, she thought through a sheen of tears as she hit the highway and put the hammer down, Skywatch was a stiff fifteen-hour drive away. Maybe by the time she got there, she would’ve figured out what the hell she was doing with her life, and why.
After the thoroughly weird moment when Alexis had come out of her statuette-induced fugue, Nate shut himself up in his three-room suite in the residential wing of the mansion, ostensibly to get some work done for Hawk Enterprises. That was bullshit, though: first, because he was making zero headway on Viking Warrior 6 and had been for some time, and second, because his real motivation had been to get the hell away from the crowd and away from Alexis’s puzzlement.
She’d been looking at him the way she had right after they’d broken up, like she didn’t know what’d just happened, or why.
Sure, he’d given her a reason back then—several of them, in fact, starting with, “It’s not you, it’s me,” and ending with, “My life is too complicated right now to start something serious.” All of which had been true, as far as it went, but it hadn’t begun to touch on the reality, which had been more along the lines of, “You scare the shit out of me,” and, “I want to make my own choices and can’t get enough distance from all the crap that’s flying around in our lives right now to figure out if we’re good together or just convenient.” He’d just told her it was over, and hadn’t let her see that the decision tore him up, made him mean and surly, not because he’d known it was better for both of them that way, but because it sucked knowing she was a few doors down the hall and he’d given up the right to knock. Hell, he’d not only given it up, he’d taken it out behind the woodshed and shot the shit out of it, all in the name of free will. Goddamn it.
None of which explained what’d happened with the Ixchel statuette, he reminded himself when a low burn of lust grabbed onto his gut and dug in deep. And the here and now was what he should be concentrating on, not what’d happened in the past.
What the hell had Alexis seen in the barrier? Obviously he’d been in whatever vision she’d had, and from the way she’d been looking at him he had to figure it’d been a sex fantasy. Which meant . . . ?
Damned if he knew, but as far as he was concerned, it changed nothing.
“So stop thinking about it and get the hell to work,” he muttered, glaring at his laptop screen. The storyboard for Viking Warrior 6: Hera’s Mate had been three-quarters done on the day Strike had shown up at Hawk Enterprises, asked Nate about his medallion, and given him his first taste of magic. Now, because he’d dumped a bunch of shit out of the middle, the game was less than half-finished, and he wasn’t sure he liked what was left.
Hera was a goddess and a hottie, a leader of her people, a magic user and a prophet. She deserved—hell, demanded—a mate who was worthy of her, and one who could kick ass just as well as, if not better than, she could. The gamers needed a strong, interesting character to get behind, and Nate needed to give her a fitting match. And yeah, maybe—probably—he was projecting, but so what? He was the boss. He could get away with crap like that, as long as he produced.
Right now, though, he wasn’t producing. The hero that his head story guy, Denjie, and his other writers had come up with originally had been a solid character the gamers would’ve liked well enough. Problem was, Nate didn’t think Hera would’ve given him the time of day; the dude had been an idiot, with a vocabulary of approximately six words that weren’t swears.
Hera, for all her ass-kicking prowess, had a spiritual side as well.
So Nate had taken over the project and blown up the guy’s story line. While he was in there, he’d morphed the hero from blond to dark, and taken him from meat-head to something a little more refined. He’d ditched the guy’s name—who the hell thought Hera would fall for someone named Dolph? Please. He’d put Hera and Nameless together, let them fight it out a little, and then, just when things had been getting good and the two of them were teaming up to go after the main bad guy . . . Nate had stalled.
He knew what ought to happen next, what the storyboard said should happen next, and it sounded like a pile of contrived, clichéd shit.
“Get a grip on yourself,” he said to himself, or maybe to the characters that lived inside the humming laptop. “Contrived, clichéd shit sells; it’s a fact of life. The gamers aren’t looking for originality; they want something that looks familiar but a little different, something challenging but not impossible. You’ve done it a hundred times before. What makes this any different?”
He didn’t want to look too closely at himself to find the answer, and damn well knew it. Which was why, when there was a soft knock at the door to his suite, he was relieved rather than annoyed, even though he had a pretty good idea who it was going to be: his winikin coming by for another round of This Is Your Life, Nate Blackhawk.
Sure enough, when he opened the door he found Carlos standing in the hallway.
“Hey.” Nate stepped back and waved his assigned winikin through the door. “Come on in.” He didn’t figure he could avoid the convo, so he might as well get it over with. Maybe they could even get a few things settled. Or not.
Carlos was a short, stocky guy in his mid-sixties who wore snap-studded shirts, Wranglers, and a big-buckled belt with the ease of someone who actually was a cowboy, rather than just pretending to be one because the clothes were cool. His salted dark hair was short and no-nonsense, and his n
ose took a distinct left-hand bend, either from bulldogging a calf or losing a bar fight, depending on which story Nate believed.
On his forearm Carlos wore the three glyphs of his station: a coyote’s head representing his original bound bloodline, the aj-winikin glyph that depicted a disembodied hand cupping a sleeping child’s face, and a hawk that was a smaller version of the one on Nate’s own forearm. If either Sven or Nate died, their glyphs would disappear from the winikin’s arm in a flash of pain. That was a sobering thought, as was the realization that back before the massacre, each winikin had worn one glyph for each member of their bound bloodline, in numbers so large the marks had extended in some cases across their chests and down their torsos, reflecting the might of the Nightkeepers.
Now each winikin wore a single bloodline mark, aside from Carlos and Jox, who each had two.
Carlos had escaped the massacre with his infant charge, Coyote-Seven, and stayed on the move as the winikin’s imperative dictated, making sure the young boy remained safe from the Banol Kax. Eventually, they had wound up in Montana, where Carlos had changed Coyote-Seven’s name to Sven and taken a job as a ranch manager. Eventually he’d married a human woman and they’d had a daughter, Cara. By the time the barrier reactivated, Cara had been in her last year of college, her mother had died of cancer, and Sven had been wreck diving off the Carolina coast, all but estranged from his winikin’s family.
There was something there, Nate knew, having seen the subtle tension between Sven and Carlos, and the overt tension between Sven and Cara, who’d been pressed into service as the Sven’s winikin when Carlos had transferred his blood tie to Nate. Not long after they’d all arrived at Skywatch, Sven had ordered Cara to leave, claiming he didn’t need her, didn’t want her. Cara had seemed relieved. Carlos had been devastated.
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