Demonkeepers n-4

by Jessica Andersen

  “There aren’t any stars tonight. There’s a storm coming.” Jade turned slowly and found her winikin framed in the sliders, silhouetted against the light coming from the room beyond. To Jade’s surprise, an uncanny calm descended over her, one that said she would say what needed to be said and deal with the consequences. Maybe that was going to be part of her new middle-ground theory. “I’m not going to apologize for sleeping with Lucius, or for trying to help the others find him. I may not be a warrior, but I’m sick of being in the background.”

  Shandi didn’t argue the point. She simply said, “Come inside and sit down. We need to talk.”

  Jade was tempted to tell her that she was too tired and bitchy to talk now, that they’d have to deal with whatever it was in the morning, but the shimmer of nerves—and were those tears?—in the winikin’s eyes stopped the words in her throat. She nodded instead. “Okay.”

  She stepped inside, closed the sliders on the incoming storm, and headed for the couch. Shandi took the chair opposite, so the coffee table formed a wide space between them. Jade didn’t offer her anything and the winikin didn’t ask; they just sat there for a few moments, staring at each other. How could it be, Jade wondered, that she didn’t have anything to say to the woman who had saved her from the massacre, raised her, brought her to her birthright, and helped her adjust to being a mage? Why was it that for all they had in common, it sometimes seemed that they didn’t share anything?

  Finally, Shandi broke the silence. “I think the woman Lucius saw in the library was your mother.”

  On a scale of one to a million, that ranked pretty high on the things I didn’t expect to hear scale.

  Shock hammered through Jade . . . but she didn’t jump or run, or shout an instinctive, What the fuck?

  She just sat there, stunned.

  The words spaced themselves out in her head: I . . . think . . . woman . . . library . . . your mother.

  Still, though, the sentence refused to make any sort of cohesive sense within the scope of what she knew. “But I’m a harvester,” she said, because while that wasn’t the most important point, it was the one that defined her. “I’m not a star.”

  “Your father, Joshua, was a harvester. But your mother, Vennie, was a member of the star bloodline.”

  “But that’s—” Not how it works, Jade started to say, then broke off, reeling as the world downshifted around her, took a left-hand turn, and sped off in a new, unexpected direction. One with lots of bumps and potholes.

  Among the Nightkeepers, certain bloodlines had tended to interbreed while others hadn’t, forming the basis for talent clusters. The bird bloodlines tended to intermingle, concentrating the genetic traits —assuming that was how the magic was inherited—that conferred the talents of flight and levitation; the four-legged-predator bloodlines carried teleportation and telekinesis, among other things; while the reptilian bloodlines tended toward the fire and weather talents, and invisibility. The omnivorous peccaries could have any of the other talents, along with mind-bending, while the talents of the nonanimal bloodlines fell into two camps: low power and high. On the low end of the spectrum was the harvester bloodline. On the high end was the star bloodline, which was the third most powerful bloodline among all the magi, behind only the royal jaguars and the peccaries.

  And Jade was apparently fifty percent star.

  How had she not known that? How could she not have asked about her mother’s bloodline before?

  “It was a highly unlikely match,” Shandi said. “And, as it turned out, not a good one.” She paused as though weighing a decision, then said, “Your mother abandoned you and your father a few days before the Solstice Massacre. We thought she’d run off . . . and when I couldn’t find any sign of her afterward, I assumed the boluntiku had tracked and killed her as they had so many others.”

  Shock layered atop shock within Jade. Again, the individual words made sense, but the sum of them seemed to represent a foreign language. “You told me my parents loved each other,” she whispered, suffering a spasm of betrayal that was far stronger than the information probably deserved. But these were her parents they were talking about: the tall, sleek- haired woman with the soft voice and her strong, sturdy-armed husband. And even as Shandi’s stories of their having died in a car crash had morphed into the reality of their dying in the Solstice Massacre, Shandi had always said that they had loved each other, that they had died together.

  Apparently not so much, Jade thought as her stomach took a long, sick slide toward her toes.

  “They did love each other . . . in the beginning.” Shandi held up a hand. “Let me tell it my way, start to finish. Okay?” After a moment, she continued: “Vennie was a good Nightkeeper. She was loyal to her king and her magic, and she was a strong soldier. She wore the warrior’s mark and excelled at fireball magic. She was . . .” The winikin paused, her expression clouding. “Vennie was like a comet.

  She burned brightly, moved fast, and rarely looked behind herself to see what sort of mess she’d left trailing behind her. She’d been away from the compound for a few years with her parents, and when she showed back up for the solstice ritual of ’eighty-two, she was sixteen, gorgeous, talented, and reckless. It was easy to see why Joshua took one look at her and fell hard. It wasn’t so obvious what she saw in him . . . but before any of us knew what was happening, they were asking formal permission to marry, even though her family objected, saying she was too young to know her own mind.”

  While the winikin was talking, Jade did her level best to drop herself into therapist mode, drawing the analytic thought process tightly around her when emotion failed to make sense and threatened to swamp her. Now, putting things into their historical perspective, she said, “I thought that back then King Scarred- Jaguar and the royal council were encouraging gods-destined pairings and pregnancies between teenagers, on the theory that it was imperative to create as many fighting-age magi as possible before 2012?”

  “That’s true. And even before that, it was more common than not for young magi to pair up early; the magic is hardwired to seek the other half of itself. But this case wasn’t as clear-cut, first because their bloodlines weren’t considered inherently compatible, and second because they married without the jun tan.”

  Whoa. “My parents weren’t gods-destined mates?” Even through the counselor’s calm, she felt the world take a long, slow roll around her.

  Shandi tipped her hand in a yes-no gesture. “They eventually got their jun tan s, but not until a few months after they were married. That was around the time you were conceived, so there was some question of whether the ‘mated’ marks appeared because your parents were truly destined mates, or because the pregnancy kicked in a new level of the magic. More than a few people whispered that the gods were affirming your value, not actually sanctifying the marriage.”

  Dull unease twisted through Jade. “Surely there were pregnancies between unmated magi?” Love affairs and infidelity were, after all, part of the human condition. And although the Nightkeepers had a few skills normal humans didn’t, there were far more similarities than differences.

  “Of course. In those cases, the children were accepted into either their father’s or mother’s bloodlines—usually the more powerful of the two, to give the child the greatest chance of growing into the maximum magic they could command. Even in jun tan-sanctified marriages, the mother’s bloodline could accept the child if the father didn’t object. That’s how Alexis came to be a member of her mother’s stronger bloodline. The same thing probably should have been done in your case, giving you the protection and power of the star bloodline . . . but Vennie refused. And, as usual, she got what she wanted, which was a neat little harvester family. For about six months or so.”

  On one level, Jade was rapt, with energy humming beneath her skin alongside the sense that finally — finally—she was getting some of the information she had lacked all along. On another, she found herself wishing with every fiber of her being that she cou
ld fold time. If she could do that, she’d pop back ten minutes or so, to when she’d first come into her suite that evening . . . and tell herself to lock the door. She couldn’t deal with this right now, couldn’t deal with any of it. Or rather, she could deal with it, but she damn well didn’t want to. She wanted to shut it all out, turn it all off, go to bed, and pull the covers over her head. Maybe when she woke up, it would be 2013, and the others would have won the war without her. Foolish wishes, all of them. But how else was she supposed to deal with learning that she could’ve been a star, which pretty much would’ve guaranteed her the warrior’s mark? Only that hadn’t happened because her parents had decided against it. Her teenaged parents.

  Gone was the tall, stately woman she’d imagined singing her to sleep. Gone too was the strong press of her father’s arms, the deep rumble of his voice, and the feelings of safety. Now new pictures were forming, especially of her mother. Jade knew the type—simultaneously too young and too old for their ages, wiseasses who thought they knew everything, then took off when they finally figured out they didn’t know anything. Jade’s heart ached with the change, as though she had lost her parents all over again, when she’d never really had them in the first place.

  The winikin continued: “Vennie was crazy in love with your father and his family. She insisted on your being accepted into the harvester bloodline, and having a harvester winikin.” Shandi paused, her expression going unreadable. “I wasn’t actually in line to be your winikin—or anyone’s, really—but during your naming ceremony, the magic bypassed your intended winikin and tagged me with the aj-

  winikin mark instead.” She turned her palms up to say bitterly, “And who are we to argue with the will of the gods?”

  That in itself was a shock to Jade . . . yet at the same time it wasn’t, really. From what she’d read, magebound winikin had been selected through a rigorous process that had been part Nightkeeper foretelling, part psychological profiling, and had been designed to provide the best possible caregiver match. If Shandi hadn’t been chosen or trained . . . “What were you supposed to be, if not a winikin?”

  Those of the blood who weren’t chosen to wear the aj-winikin “I serve” glyph had formed the core of daily life at Skywatch, a layer of support staffers below even the harvesters.

  A spasm of pain crossed the other woman’s face, but she shook her head. “That doesn’t matter anymore. What’s done is done.” Conversation closed. “By the time King Scarred-Jaguar started planning to attack the intersection and seal the barrier, you were six months old, and your parents’ marriage had been limping along for about twice that.”

  “But the jun tan is supposed to mark a lifelong bond.”

  “Love doesn’t guarantee a problem- free re lationship.”

  Ouch. How many times had she thought that before? More, how often had she seen a client out the door and stood there after it closed, thinking to herself that she would never fall into the trap of pining after a man, or letting a bad relationship crush her? Don’t be like Edda , she’d told herself over and over again, using one particular client to proxy for the sum total of the broken hearts—and broken spirits—she’d counseled in her five years of active practice. In that time, she’d gained a reputation as a relationship expert when all she’d really done was help the women—and a few men, but mostly women—learn to be the best them they could be, without using a relationship as a value mirror. And while she’d been teaching her clients how to self-actualize, she’d been confirming the value of her own chosen lifestyle, one of casual dates and sex between friends.

  “So,” she said carefully, feeling her way, “when you used to tell me my parents loved each other, that was a lie?”

  Shandi nodded. “They were gone, and I . . . ah, I thought you needed the illusion of parents who loved each other.”

  “And who loved me?” Jade said softly.

  Instead of the knee-jerk, Of course they loved you, the question called for, Shandi stayed silent.

  When she met Jade’s eyes, though, her expression was resolute. “If you’d asked me that a few hours ago, my honest answer would have been that your father doted on you. All of your harvester relatives did.”

  Jade’s mouth had gone drier than the too- humid desert outside. “But not my mother or the stars?”

  “It wasn’t like human society. Once a woman married out of a bloodline, she might still wear her original bloodline mark, but her responsibility and affiliation shifted to her husband’s family. Vennie .

  . . I believe she truly loved your father at first, and came into the marriage fully committed to the harvester bloodline. But once the newness of being a wife wore off and she started to understand what it meant to be a harvester instead of a star, she chafed at the restrictions. More, she began losing her magic.”

  “But the jun tan bond is supposed to increase a Nightkeeper’s talent.”

  “I’m just telling you what she told me—and everyone else within earshot—on a regular basis.”

  Faint discomfort flitted across the winikin’s expression, but she kept going. “She was frustrated with the menial roles the harvesters were playing in the weeks leading up to the king’s attack. She wanted to fight, not sit in the background. More, she and your father fought over the attack itself. She questioned Scarred-Jaguar’s visions, which a harvester would never do. That was one of the few times I could ever remember seeing Joshua truly angry. He was furious with her for questioning the king, though I think a large part of it was a spillover of other, smaller disagreements that had been building up. Add that to the stress of their being young parents with a loud, colicky baby, and things got nasty.”

  Shandi paused. “She took off three days before the attack, and she didn’t come back. We assumed she ran off, not wanting to be part of a battle she didn’t believe in. Based on Lucius’s description, though, I think it’s possible she somehow found and enacted the Prophet’s spell instead, hoping to find something within the library that would help her convince Scarred-Jaguar not to lead the attack . . . or something that would help him win it. Knowing her, she wouldn’t have cared which, as long as she got the credit. Instead, she somehow got caught up inside the library instead of forming the proper conduit. And she died there.”

  Jade closed her eyes on a wash of emotion. She told herself it didn’t matter that her parents hadn’t died together, that their love hadn’t been the deep, abiding joy Shandi had let her believe. That was twenty-some years ago, and had little influence on her life now. She could only control her own thoughts and actions, not those of others . . . and certainly not the past. The sentiments rang badly hollow, though, and her chest ached. “You said she took off three days before the massacre. Didn’t the king and the others go looking for her? Surely, if she’d been lying around somewhere, half jacked into the library, someone could have found her.”

  But Shandi shook her head. “There wasn’t an extensive search because nobody in the council knew she was gone. Neither the harvesters nor the stars wanted to draw attention to her disappearance. Back then, the political situation was volatile. There were . . . I wouldn’t call them factions, exactly, but there was definitely dissent within the Nightkeepers. Parents held their teenagers back from their talent ceremonies so they wouldn’t have to fight, and a few of the magi even spoke openly about leaving. In the end the king, with the queen at his side, declared that anyone involved in desertion, whether by act or knowledge, was guilty of treason . . . which was—and still is—punishable by death.”

  “You all thought you were protecting her by covering up her disappearance.”

  The winikin nodded. “Your father was heartbroken that she’d taken off, but he didn’t want her being charged with treason.”

  Love strikes again, Jade thought, knowing that she should feel something but not sure what anymore. She was growing numb to the surprises, to the anguish. “He died thinking she had abandoned him. That she had abandoned both of us.” She paused as grief echoed through her.
“Didn’t anyone stop to think that a woman who was all bent out of shape about being kept out of the action wasn’t going to just walk away from a fight?”

  “Sure, there were questions, but like I said, she was impulsive . . . and I can’t say that motherhood had settled her down. She loved you fiercely when she was in the mood, but then, other times, she wanted to pretend she was the same girl she’d been before—the party girl who was always the center of attention.”

  My mother, the head cheerleader , Jade thought sourly. But at the same time, the logic didn’t totally play. She frowned, trying to think it through in her tired, overloaded brain, knowing that if she stopped thinking, she ran the risk of feeling too much. “The Prophet’s spell requires a soul sacrifice. By enacting it, she would have been offering her own life in exchange for the information.”

  Shandi turned her palms to the sky. “Like I said, she was a comet. That was exactly the sort of ‘act first, regret later’ move she specialized in. Though it doesn’t explain how she wound up in the same situation the human is in now. There’s no way she was harboring a makol or any other sort of soul link.”

  “The human’s name is Lucius,” Jade snapped, annoyance flashing a quick burn through her system.

  “Yes, it is, and he’s bright and shiny now, and you’re hot for him. What do you think is going to happen when all that wears off? Your mother was miserable as a harvester. She hated being on the sidelines. She was a warrior, and she was used to having power—not just magic, but a voice among others her age. When she married your father, whether from love or impulse, or a bit of both, she gave up more than she anticipated. She blamed him for that. And she blamed herself for following her heart, because in doing so, she’d lost the right to fight.”

  The words tugged at a connection in Jade’s brain, but she couldn’t make it take shape. She shook her head. “I don’t know what to say anymore. What to think.”