Demonkeepers n-4

by Jessica Andersen

  The realization that she could easily lump him in with the mated warrior- males wasn’t a comfortable one, nor was the inner tug at the thought of classifyng him as her lover, with its implication of a future . . . or rather the question of how she was supposed to balance that desire—and the banked hum still coursing through her from his kisses—with the things the strange nahwal had told her, and its whispered warning: Beware . . . But what was she supposed to be wary of? Him? Her response to him?

  She didn’t know, and didn’t have time to figure it out just then, because Strike started the meeting and then gestured in her direction. “Jade, how about you run us through anything new you’ve managed to pull together about the sun god, and give Lucius a chance to get a few more calories on board?”

  On cue, Jox dished up another piled plate of food and handed it over to Nate’s winikin, Carlos, who walked it over to Lucius. Balancing the plate on his knee, Lucius said, “Before you get started, I need to get something out there.” He paused, looking grim. “The moment I saw that firebird, I remembered something from when I was the makol, something I’d been blocking, or that got lost in the fucked-up parts of my head.” He paused, took a breath. “I don’t know whether he meant to or not, but Cizin gave me a glimpse inside him, showing me the plans of the Banol Kax. In short, they haven’t just captured the true sun god. They’re planning to sacrifice it during the solstice, and put Akhenaton in its place.”

  Seeing half a day’s work headed swiftly down the drain, Jade shot him a sour look. “It would’ve been nice if you’d woken up and shared that little nugget before I put six hours into convincing myself that we really saw Kinich Ahau and Akhenaton down there, and that it wasn’t a barrier vision like the one Sasha had—you know, the one with the same black dogs in it?”

  “That wasn’t a vision; that was Xibalba,” Lucius said. “And those weren’t just any dogs; they were the companions, the sun god’s protectors. They meet—or used to meet—Kinich Ahau at the night horizon each dusk, and escort the sun safely through the trials of the underworld to emerge from the dawn horizon each morning, and”—he made a circular, continuing motion—“rinse, repeat.”

  “Again, thanks for an off-the-cuff summary of info I spent the morning digging up.” Jade wasn’t annoyed, exactly. Just tired of being redundant. “Question is: Why were the companions in Sasha’s vision? Were the gods or ancestors trying to warn us that the sun god was in trouble even back then?”

  “Oh! ” Sasha’s dark brown eyes went stark as the color drained from her face.

  “What is it?” Michael asked immediately, tensing. As he often did, he was standing behind her in a relaxed but fight-ready position, always on guard, protecting his own. The sight sent a harmless pang of envy through Jade, because he’d never done that for her.

  Sasha twined her fingers together in her lap as she answered, “There’s that last part of the triad prophecy, the part I never fulfilled about finding the lost son. . . . What if instead of telling me to ‘find the lost son,’ spelled ‘s-o-n,’ what if it was really supposed to be ‘s-u-n’? That could be why I saw the companions in my vision last year. The gods were trying to tell me to look for the lost sun!” She looked stricken. “If I’d figured it out then, we could’ve been planning a rescue all this time.”

  The winikin and magi were silent for a long moment. Jade started to speak, but caught Shandi’s don’t draw attention look and subsided.

  “Jade?” Strike said, glancing at Shandi. “Did you have something to add?”

  “I was going to point out that . . . well, if we can free Kinich Ahau from Xibalba, we’ll have access to a god again.” Jade glanced at Sasha. “And if we’re thinking that the triad prophecy foretold a link between the sun and Sasha, we could even gain a Godkeeper.”

  Sasha went wide-eyed, but didn’t knee-jerk a denial. After a moment she said softly, “We don’t know that I’d be the god’s chosen. The prophecy said I was supposed to find the lost sun, but I didn’t.”

  “You were the first of us to see the companions,” Jade countered.

  “True. Except that one, they were in a vision; two, they attacked me; and three, Michael killed them, or at least their vision-selves. You and Lucius are the ones they defended. And you’re the ones who found the lost sun.”

  Jade snorted. “Right. I’m a daughter of the gods,” she said, referring to the first part of the prophecy. She glanced at Lucius, expecting to see an answering gleam of mirth . . . but he wasn’t laughing. None of them were. They were all looking at her speculatively, with an intensity that sent two opposing thoughts shooting through her brain: Oh, hell no, coupled with, What if?

  “What if . . .” Lucius began as though echoing her thoughts, then paused a moment before continuing. “What if the prophecy was, let’s say, interrupted? What if the original child of prophecy became unsuitable for the full foretelling?”

  Michael shifted and sent him a narrow look. “Don’t be a pussy. Say it.”

  In the past, Lucius might have—probably would have—backed down or turned things aside with a joke. Now he met the other man’s glare. “Fine. What if becoming your fiancée—and functionally your mate—has made Sasha unsuitable to be a Godkeeper? You and she balance each other out as the ch’ulel and Mictlan, life versus death. Giving her more power as a Godkeeper could tip that balance . .

  . or it could increase your magic to an equal degree. It’s possible that some power source—if not the sky gods, then maybe even the doctrine of balance itself—doesn’t want to put so much power into a single couple.”

  Jade’s throat went tight and strange as her mind jumped from Lucius’s hypothesis to its corollary—

  namely that she might have become the focus of the prophecy when Sasha became unsuitable as a Godkeeper. She didn’t look at Shandi, didn’t need to. She knew what the winikin would say: Don’t overreach yourself, Jade. You’re just a harvester.

  Swallowing hard, she pointed out, “The doctrine of balance isn’t an entity; it doesn’t have opinions.” As far as they knew, the doctrine, which was routinely mentioned in the archive but never really defined, was more a pattern of thought, the belief among their ancestors that the universe was not only cyclical, but sought balance within those cycles.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Lucius replied elliptically, his gaze catching and holding hers, making her, for a moment, feel like they were the only two people in the room. “But it sure seems as though you and I may have inherited the last part of the triad prophecy.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Lucius found himself on the receiving end of a long, considering look from Strike. After a moment the king said, “Since you don’t seem inclined to eat, you ready to tell us about the library?” It wasn’t really a question.

  Lucius nodded. “To put it bluntly, it’s not going to be the resource you’d hoped for. Or rather . . . not the way I can use it.”

  Strike’s face tightened, though he didn’t look all that surprised. “Go on.”

  “When I zapped in, the air was dry, it was pitch-dark, and I was naked. . . .” Lucius told them everything, exactly the way it had happened. He described the library itself, how he figured out the Ouija board deal, and how he used it to find the notebook. He recited as much of the text as he could from memory, including the massive buzz-kill about how he could enter the library only once more safely, and then only if he found his own magic. Which he didn’t have. He left out the last little bit, though, the part about love. He figured that had been a message just for him.

  As he spoke, he watched the faces around him fall from hope to confusion, and from there to dismay. In Jade’s expression, he saw a soft, sad emotion alongside the others, this one directed at him.

  But where before he would have labeled it pity and resented the hell out of it, now he recognized it as sympathy from someone who knew what it felt like to want to be more than her ancestry suggested she should be, more than the people around her assumed she was capable of being. She knew,
or at least could come pretty close to guessing, what it had meant to him to be chosen, albeit accidentally, to be the Prophet. He’d dreamed of the library, of the adventure, of finally being a part of things. And now .

  . . nothing. He’d glimpsed the library’s glory, only to have it taken away from him again, in a cosmic backhanded slap of you’re not good enough. Apparently, despite his new and improved physique, he was still Runt Hunt at his core. And boy, didn’t that just suck?

  Continuing, he told them about his strength fading, and his inadvertent discovery of his predecessor entombed at the far corner of the library. “She wore the marks of the star bloodline, a warrior, and a mated woman . . . and based on her use of language and the way she spiral-bound the book like a modern notebook, I’d say she lived in the past few decades.” He turned up his palms. “Beyond that, we’ll need to do some digging to try to figure out who she was . . . and what happened to her.”

  He fell silent, aware that he’d been talking for a long time with no interruptions. The faces that had been hopeful, confused, and dismayed were now slightly glazed, most wearing expressions he recognized from his lectures as the fugue the human brain tended to slide into when given too much information at one time, or being asked to change too many preconceptions all at once. He thought it was a combination of the two in this case. Gods knew he was feeling almost numb from everything that had happened in the past day. Two days. Whatever. He’d been to hell and back, been to the library and back. And he’d been with Jade.

  “There’s a book about the star bloodline in the archive,” Jade said after a moment. “It was in one of the boxes of books Jox had salvaged from the private suites before the big renovation. I just scanned and cataloged it without really reading it because . . . well”—she lifted a shoulder—“it didn’t seem all that relevant, since none of us are of the bloodline. I’ll go back through and read it, see if there’s anything pertinent.”

  Strike nodded. “While you’re at it, run some searches on the star bloodline, the keepers of the library, that sort of thing.” He looked from her to Lucius and back. “Tomorrow. Right now, you two both look like you need some major downtime.”

  Until Strike mentioned it, Lucius hadn’t been fully aware of the exhaustion hovering at the edges of his consciousness. The second he noticed the fatigue, though, it was all over: The world grayed out and he suddenly could’ve napped quite comfortably in the straight-backed chair. Postmagic crash, he thought. Huh. He was too tired even to worry about looking weak, or to fend off Michael and Brandt when they each took a side of him, got him on his feet, and headed him toward the sliders leading out.

  It was all he could do to crane his head around, catch Jade’s eye, and see that she looked tired and sad, but otherwise okay. He flashed back on what she’d said to him earlier, in his cottage, and the way she’d kissed him. And in the back of his mind, he couldn’t help hearing the journalist’s words, spoken now in a woman’s voice: Find someone to love . . . and tell them so. It was tempting . . . and a proven recipe for disaster.

  “No, thanks,” he muttered under his breath. “Been there, done that, doesn’t work for me.” For now, and maybe for the long haul, he was far better off alone.

  Strike had been right on target, Jade realized. She was seriously strung-out and needed some downtime. But as she pushed through the door into her suite, instead of the place making her feel at home and inviting her to turn it all off for a while, the small apartment made her feel jumpy and out of sorts. Or maybe the problem wasn’t with the place. Maybe it was with her.

  Like most of the other three-room apartments, hers had a kitchen nook and seating area opening off the mansion hallway, with doors on the far wall leading to a bathroom and bedroom. Unlike the others, though, hers was a corner room and had a bonus: a set of sliders leading to a private balcony that offered a heck of a view of the canyon wall as it rose to meet the horizon beyond. Soon after her arrival at Skywatch, she’d redecorated the suite from the bland faux-Southwestern nondecor it had started with, to a kitschy blend of colors and styles that appealed to her. The end result was part feng shui, part Zen, part hey-that’s-cool impulse buy. The walls were painted a soothing blue-gray, the wall-to-wall had been replaced with eco-friendly bamboo, and the comfy furniture was covered in calm, natural-fiber pastels. A trickling water feature burbled in the corner near the sliders, powered not by electricity, but by sunlight and condensation.

  She’d been away at the university for nearly six months, but the suite was spotless and fresh-

  smelling, and her few plants were bright green and tended to. That was all Shandi’s doing, she knew, and was grateful for the winikin’s efforts, even if done only out of duty.

  All of it looked like she remembered it, but nothing there seemed to explain the restless, edgy energy that ran through her, making her prowl from room to room, looking for something, though she didn’t have a clue what.

  Finally, unable to stay inside, she unlatched the sliders and pushed through to the balcony. The air surprised her anew with its heavy moisture, and it carried a snap of ozone that hinted at one of the quick summer storms that sometimes swept through the canyon, fierce and loud. Though such storms were normally rare, Sasha had said they were getting more frequent as the microclimate changed. Jade had a feeling things were going to get worse before they got better, too, since their improvement hinged on the Nightkeepers returning Kinich Ahau to the sky. Prophecy or no prophecy, it was one thing to find the lost sun, another to storm the underworld itself. She shivered at the thought of the fearsome firebird and its companions, and at the idea of going back down there. She didn’t want to.

  She couldn’t.

  Exhaling, she leaned on the railing for a moment and stared out into the night. As she’d sat, watching Lucius breathe and praying he would come back safely, she’d arrived at three important conclusions. Her first was that the gods had gotten it right when they failed to tag her with the warrior’s glyph. She wasn’t cut out to fight—when the moment had come she’d frozen instead of fighting, and could’ve gotten her and Lucius both killed. Which meant she was going to have to find some sort of middle ground between shield bearer and warrior, a way to be involved without actually being on the front lines. The knowledge stung, as did the need to let go of that long-held goal.

  But that led to her second conclusion, which was that she needed to focus on the talent the gods had given her. Problem was, it seemed to have died on her. Since the strange meeting with her nahwal, she’d tried over and over again to call up the magic that had so briefly let her see patterns in the power, but she hadn’t gotten squat. And when she’d stared at the painting on Lucuis’s laptop, she hadn’t been able to pick out the blessing she was sure she’d seen in there before. The glyphs had reverted to their original gibberish. Which meant . . . what? Had the magic come from the nahwal, lasting only long enough to get her out of the barrier? Or was something blocking her from using her scribe’s talent, something the nahwal had briefly unlocked so she could feel what it ought to feel like, see what it ought to look like? For the moment she was going with the second option, shifting her goal from becoming a warrior to becoming the magic user she was meant to be. Somehow.

  The third and last conclusion was one she’d come to deep in the middle of the night, as she sat and stared at Lucius’s face, which had softened with the absence of his now-forceful personality, returning to the younger-looking lines she remembered from before. She didn’t prefer the old Lucius, necessarily, but he was far less intimidating. And in seeing her friend in the face of the man he’d grown into over such a short, tumultuous time, she had realized that just as she needed to find a middle ground between being a bookkeeper and a soldier, perhaps she could find a middle ground with him. Maybe their relationship didn’t have to be a choice between keeping it friends-only and losing herself to him. If she’d learned anything over the past two years—hell, the past few days—it was that things could change in a blink of magic or fat
e. Maybe it was time to try putting more of herself into her various relationships now, rather than waiting until it was too late and she was stuck sitting at a friend’s bedside, wishing she’d made more of an effort when she’d had the chance.

  She’d long attributed her reserve to Shandi, sometimes in gratitude, sometimes in blame. The winikin wasn’t warm and fuzzy; she was efficient and effective. That upbringing had served Jade well in her career, allowing her to pick through the darkest parts of her patients’ lives and emerge relatively untouched. But that same defensive shell had kept her insulated from the outside world.

  Lucius had called her on it, she remembered with a faint smile. Over and over again, when she’d tried to fob him off with something cool and distant, he’d told her to get out of therapist’s mode and feel.

  She’d brushed him off, pretending to laugh, but the comments had stuck. The question was: How did she find that middle ground, the one between feeling nothing and feeling too much?

  “Watching the stars again?” Shandi said from inside the suite. Jade tensed, but didn’t let the winikin see her startlement, or the bite of irritation brought on by the question. As a child, she’d often slipped out of bed and sneaked up onto the balcony or roof of wherever they were living at the time, to lie out and watch the stars. Shandi had invariably found her before too long, bringing her back inside with a few cool words about keeping her eyes on the path in front of her.