At least, he thought it did. But the more he looked at the metal-armored men, the more he became convinced that they were outfitted like pharaohs’ guards, pure Egyptian from their kohl- lined eyes to the rayed-sun symbols on their cloaks. Before he could do the necessary brain shift to figure out what the hell it meant, there was another stir of movement from within the temple, followed by a glint of luminous green that obliterated every other thought inside Lucius’s skull. Rage and revulsion surged to tunnel his vision as a smoky shadow emerged, becoming a dark, man-shaped ghost with glowing green eyes. Makol!
The demon soul drifted across the ground, moving toward him. The air went cold and Lucius’s bones ached with death and damnation, and the things he’d sworn he would never be, ever again.
Clamping his teeth against a stream of foul curses, he strained against the unyielding shield magic. As the makol drew nearer, the shifting shadow morphed and solidified, becoming almost a man, one that wore a tall diadem marked with the sun symbol that had been in use for only a single Egyptian dynasty, that of the pharaoh who had converted the empire to monotheistic sun worship, largely by killing off anyone who preferred the polytheistic religion that had been entrenched for thousands of years.
Gut tightening further with the ID, Lucius bared his teeth. “I thought you’d had yourself declared a god. Is this your idea of a deity’s fitting reward . . . Akhenaton?” Although the pharaoh’s animal-
headed minions—which he belatedly recognized as perverted versions of the Egyptian pantheon Akhenaton had outlawed—might still speak their native tongue, he had no doubt the makol understood him. The damn things could see straight inside a man.
“Akhenaton. ” Jade spat the name of one of the Nightkeepers’ most ancient enemies: the pharaoh who had been responsible for the first of the three massacres that had driven the Nightkeepers nearly to extinction.
At her gasp, the demon spirit turned. Started drifting toward her.
“Stay the hell away from her,” Lucius snarled. The demon’s dark presence scraped along his nerve endings; worse, he could feel its interest in Jade, its dismissal of him. What makol would want a human when a Nightkeeper was available? The thought of Jade going through the transition sickened him beyond reason, past caution. “I said, hands off!” Deep within, the rage spun higher, becoming a strange, edgy energy that buzzed through him, coalescing at the places where the shield magic held him fast.
From within the temple, the dogs suddenly started barking again, their cries sharp and frenzied.
Excited.
Akhenaton hesitated at the sound, and Lucius thought he caught a thread of satisfaction coming from the damned soul. Some message must have passed, because the four pharaoh’s guards broke from their positions and closed on Jade.
“Lucius!” She craned her head, looking back at him as the guards started dragging her into the fortress. The dogs went nuts, barking and howling, sounding almost human in their cries.
“Jade!” Anguish hammered through Lucius, catching him up and taking him someplace within himself, someplace he hadn’t been before. Pain ripped through him, his vision washed red-gold, and pressure detonated inside his head. Liquid flame poured through his veins, bringing a burning agony that he latched onto, instinctively sending it toward the places where the shield magic held him immobile.
A terrible roar of rage split the air; for a second he thought it had come from him. Then the air went instantaneously from cool to blistering hot, huge feathered wings boomed in the air, and a red-orange specter rose into sight, lifting from behind the step-sided wall, flapping hard to stay aloft on ragged, bleeding wings. The sky lit supernova bright in an instant, driving back those standing below on the sand.
Squinting into the flare, Lucius couldn’t pinpoint the thing’s image: One second it seemed a terrible winged and feathered demon with curling horns and fangs, its outline wreathed in fire; then in the next it shifted, seeming to flash the image of a huge figure, that of a masked man, his face obscured behind the symbols of a god. More important, Lucius knew the symbols . Was he really seeing what he thought he was seeing, or was this another of Akhenaton’s creations?
He didn’t know, but he had to chance it. Throwing back his head, he shouted, “Kinich Ahau!”
The horned Mayan firebird, one aspect of the great sun god itself, roared in answer, beating its wings against the stone bars that held it contained. Flames poured from its beak and eyes, licking along the bars and turning them gradually molten. And, as Lucius squinted against the blazing light, he remembered having seen this before.
Or rather, he hadn’t seen it . . . but Cizin had. His demon possessor had been a double agent, planted within the Order of Xibalba to keep Iago in check when the dark lords began to worry that their earthly namesakes were getting above themselves. The Banol Kax didn’t want Iago to ally with Moctezuma’s demon soul, not just because the bloodthirsty Aztec king had once led powerful armies and plotted his own version of the end-time, but also because he’d elevated himself to the status of a god, one affiliated with the sun itself . . . and the Banol Kax didn’t want that to happen because they already had plans to put in place a sun god of their own choosing: the sun king Akhenaton.
They had captured the true sun god, Kinich Ahau, along with his canine companions. When the barrier’s activity peaked during the summer solstice of the first triad year—aka in nine fucking days —the dark lords were going to sacrifice the true sun god and elevate Akhenaton in his place.
And oh, holy fuck, that couldn’t be allowed to happen.
Snarling, Akhenaton turned on the firebird, lifted shadowy arms, and chanted a spell. In an instant, a chill wind blew, the air cooled, and the molten stone bars turned solid; they were slightly deformed, but not by enough to free the god. But that hadn’t been the firebird’s aim, Lucius realized seconds later, when two dark blurs hurtled through the widened openings between two pairs of archways: pony-size black dogs with sharp white teeth and red eyes.
The companions!
One of the dogs went for Jade’s captors, the other for Lucius’s. Dark blood sprayed as the ravening canine ripped out Snake-head’s throat; the man-beast went down and stayed down. When it did, the shield magic surrounding Lucius disappeared.
The old Lucius wanted to stand and gape at legends come to life. The better man he was becoming landed running. He lunged for Jade; three of the pharaoh’s guards were using their elongated pikes to keep the big black dogs at bay while the fourth force-marched her toward the fortress, following the demon shadow as it disappeared into the darkness within. Inside the pyramid, the sun god shrieked in rage and pain.
“No!” Lucius bolted after them, catching up with the rearmost guard just outside the temple. The guard spun and leveled his pike, his eyes lighting with battle glee as dark magic rattled. Seconds later, though, they flattened to terror, and a dark blur flashed past Lucius and hit the guard in the chest, sending the bastard down and away from Jade. Blood sprayed and vertebrae crunched. Lucius charged forward and grabbed Jade, who stood where the guard had left her, blank eyed and shocky-looking.
The magic that had been holding her fast was gone.
“Lucius!” She sagged into him, grabbed onto him. She might’ve said something else, but he couldn’t hear her over the tidal roar that was rising within him. His body heated to flash point and beyond; he was burning without flames, writhing in agony without screams. The world closed in on him from all sides until he could feel only hot agony and the press of Jade’s body. A howling scream slammed through him, out of him.
He felt that same slipping, sliding sensation from before, only this time it was sucking him up, not down. There was a jolt of movement; he heard the makol’s screech of anger, Kinich Ahau’s roar of satisfaction, the companions’ howls . . . and then it was all gone. The world whipped past him; he caught a glimpse of the hellmouth, the cloud forest, and what he thought might be the barrier, followed by the outlines of his cottage at Skywatch. Then ther
e was a dizzying jolt and he was back in his body, sprawled inelegantly on the living room floor.
Home.
He lay still for a moment, blinking as his body came back online. When a few of his larger muscle groups checked in, he used them to roll over and stretch out a hand to where Jade lay, an arm’s length away. Her eyes were open, though blurred with disorientation. She was there, though. She was okay.
Thank you, gods, he thought, but then jolted as the rest of it returned. “The firebird! We have to”— go back and rescue the sun god, he started to say, but couldn’t get the words past a sudden rushing noise in his head. His vision blurred. He heard her call his name, felt her grab his hand, but those inputs seemed very far away, and so much less important than the powerful surge that caught him up, feeling very different from the magic that had yanked the two of them to Xibalba. He saw her worried eyes through the whirling tunnel of power as he was yanked back into the magic . . . this time alone.
“Lucius!” Jade screamed his name, even though deep down inside, she knew he was already gone. His eyes were rolled back in his head; his body had gone limp. She told herself not to freak, that it was normal for that to happen when a mage entered the barrier. Except that he wasn’t a mage . . . and the magic had already gone very wrong once tonight. Which meant . . . what? What should she do now?
Her hands were shaking; her whole body was trembling. But strangely, the memories of what she’d just been through seemed oddly blunted, allowing her to think and react rather than just freaking the hell out. She’d heard the others talk about the preternatural focus conferred by the warrior’s talent, and how it helped them function under terrifying conditions. She thought she might be experiencing something like that now, only coming from shock rather than innate talent.
Pushing to her feet, she reached for her pocket, intending to call Strike, both to report in and to get help with Lucius. She didn’t know where he’d gone, hadn’t even felt the magic that had taken him, and that worried her. If their shared magic had dumped them in Xibalba, where would he wind up now that he was flying solo? If they were lucky, he’d make it to the library . . . but it wasn’t as if luck had been with them so far.
She had the earpiece partway to her ear when a whispery word echoed through the room: “Jade.”
It was a woman’s voice. The same one she’d heard just before being yanked into Xibalba.
Freezing, she looked around. “Who is that? Where are you?”
“I’m here. Come to me.” The world wavered. Red-gold magic flared, surrounding Jade unbidden.
This time, the power jolted her in the familiar sidelong direction of the barrier, but she hadn’t performed any transition spell, hadn’t called the magic. Lifting the earpiece, she screamed, “Help me! ”
But as Lucius’s cottage shimmered and disappeared, she realized she’d forgotten to turn the damned earpiece on. The others wouldn’t know there was a problem for hours, maybe longer. And by then it might be too late.
CHAPTER SIX
Lucius materialized in a long, narrow stone chamber that was lit by a row of burning torches running down either side. He’d zapped into a relatively open space at one end of the room; the other end was lost in the distance, obscured by countless rows of racked objects that blurred one into the next in the dim torchlight.
Exhilaration slammed through him. The library!
Then gravity caught up with him and he fell a good three feet to land face-first on the chamber floor. His chin cracked against granite and the breath left him with a hiss of pain as he pancaked it hard. He was also unexpectedly naked, which made the pancake thing suck more than it would have otherwise. Stone slapped his belly and mashed his ’nads, and he let out a grunt as he hit. But the pain didn’t last long in the face of the crazy-making wonder that surrounded him.
He rolled onto his back, laughing and gasping for air. “I did it. I fucking did it!” Granted, the Prophet wasn’t supposed to physically—or metaphysically, for that matter—travel to the library, but maybe that was the sacrifice required for his having kept his soul intact. If so, that’s not going to be much of a sacrifice at all, he thought. Aloud, he crowed, “What glyph geek wouldn’t want access to a place like this?”
The walls were carved in the Classical Mayan style, with figures turned in profile as they bent over codices, holding quill pens and feather-and-fur paintbrushes, or hammering away at chisels, carving stories into stone. And if those walls pressed too close, sparking a hint of the suffocating claustrophobia that had plagued him for the past half year, he’d learned to shove the weakness aside and focus on the things that mattered. Like the library.
He’d finally gained access to the knowledge the Nightkeepers needed. Deaf gods be praised. More, there was a new and oh-holy-fuck problem facing them: namely that the Banol Kax had stolen the sun god and were planning on making a switcheroo in nine days. And although the information surrounding him dated only up to the fifteen hundreds, when the conquistadors’ pillaging of the so-
called New World had prompted the surviving magi to hide the library and create the Prophet’s spell, the Nightkeepers were hoping—praying—that the cache would contain additional prophecies dealing with the end-time . . . including the role the sun god was supposed to play.
“So all I’ve got to do is find those prophecies . . . or better yet, a spellbook entitled, How to Put the Sun Back into the Sky.” But, standing naked in the room he’d spent the past six months trying to find, and a decade prior to that dreaming of, even when he hadn’t known precisely what he’d dreamed, he looked around the narrow, jam-packed arcade . . . and realized that he didn’t have the faintest clue where to start. It wasn’t like there was a computerized, searchable cross-ref system already in place.
The memory of putting together just such a system for the Nightkeepers’ archive caught him hard, bringing a blast of the mingled desire and frustration that had ridden him as he and Jade had worked together day after day. Back then he’d done his damnedest to get her to notice him as more than just a friend, only to find that, when he thought he’d gotten past the friends zone, it was only to friends with benefits. At the time, that wasn’t what he’d wanted or needed. And now . . .
“It’s not important,” he said aloud, though that wasn’t entirely true. Jade was very, very important to him, whether as a friend or as . . . whatever they were now. But at the same time, he couldn’t focus on her, or on trying to figure out what sort of relationship they were going to have going forward. He was in the library.
Reminding himself to breathe, he took a long look around.
He was standing in a relatively open space at one end of the narrow room. There was a study area nearby with a low stone table and a couple of fixed benches. Three intricately carved stones were set into the floor beside the table, and several wall hooks held lush-looking woven green robes worked with brilliant yellow at their edges. In one corner, a deep wooden rack contained an assortment of quills, tools, fig-bark strips, limestone wash, and all the other necessities for making the ancient, accordion-folded codices of the Mayan-era Nightkeepers. There was a jaguar statue in the opposite corner; he thought it might have been a fountain at one point. It looked as though water would have emerged from a tiny spout halfway up the wall, then dropped into the open mouth of the snarling stone jaguar. The animal’s lower jaw formed a bowl that would have drained down the back of the creature’s throat, presumably to recirculate.
A second bowl rested between the recumbent jaguar’s paws; it was marked with a looping glyph that resembled a thumbs-up gesture made by a stubby-fingered hand. The glyph, which translated to
“sa,” represented corn or corn gruel, but was more generally taken to mean “food.”
Okay. Food and water. He got that. If he was lucky—or as smart as he liked to think he was—he’d be able to figure out how the rest of the place worked.
He prowled the study area, trying to get a mental picture of the magi who had set it up. If he
could understand how they ordered their workspace, maybe he could guess at how they had organized the contents of the shelves. He badly wanted to dive right into the stacks, but held himself back, knowing his own ability to hyperfocus and lose track of things. Odds were that unless he went in there with a plan, he’d get sucked in by the first codex he laid hands on, regardless of its contents. So he behaved, staying in what passed for his analytical brain.
Everything was bright and new, dust free and fresh seeming. Magic, he thought, knowing that also accounted for the torches that burned steadily without emitting smoke or noticeably impacting the oxygen level in the room. Almost as an afterthought, he snagged one of the robes and shrugged it on; it proved to be a loose-fitting ceremonial garment worked with quills and feathers down the back, in the geometric pattern of repeating “G” characters that was often associated with the gods, or places of sacred thought. The realization humbled him with the reminder that he wasn’t just a guy on a mission; he was the latest in a long line of scholars who had served the library. He might not be a mage, but he’d kick the shit out of anyone who tried to take the title of “scholar” away from him. He’d damn well earned it.
“And now it’s time to earn it all over again,” he said, staring at row upon row of racked artifacts and codices and noting the total lack of distinguishing marks on any of the shelves. “But I’ve gotta ask: Is there any way to find what I’m looking for without cataloging every bloody artifact myself?”
With a sudden lurch, his body seesawed into motion without his volition, walking him stiff- legged to an open space near the stone table. Shocked, Lucius cursed under his breath and tried to stop moving but couldn’t, tried to change direction, but couldn’t do that, either. He flashed back hard on the memory of his body doing things his mind couldn’t control. Godsdamn it! But before either panic or rage could fully form, the compulsion drained away and he found himself standing beside the study table, near where the three carved stones were set into the floor.
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