Lucius started to answer, but Jade held up a hand. To Anna, she said, “Is that what you’re going to tell the gods? How about your ancestors?” When Anna sucked in a breath, Jade pushed harder. “What will you tell your father when you meet him in the spirit world?”
Anna’s expression darkened. “Given that I’m the only one of the three royal kids who hasn’t had a conversation with the old man’s nahwal, I’m not sure we’ll have much to talk about.”
“Your old man,” Lucius repeated softly. “Where have I heard that before?”
Her flinch was almost imperceptible, but it was there. And her voice was sharply defensive when she said, “That’s not the point. The point is that we can’t live for our parents’ goals. Sometimes we have to define our own. You guys understand that; I know you do.”
Jade nodded. “Sure. But this isn’t about your father. It’s about you being able to help save the world.”
Anna lifted her chin in a gesture he recognized as a member of the jaguar bloodline getting her stubborn on. “Not anymore it’s not.”
Lucius could see he wasn’t going to win this one. But who among them could? Strike, he thought.
Maybe Jox. “We’re not going to tell the others that you’re quitting.” He indicated the polished crystal skull, gleaming softly amber on the desktop. “That’s what you’re saying by returning this, isn’t it?
That you’re not coming back to Skywatch. Not ever.” Leaning in, he dropped his voice. “Think about it for a moment; really think about it. And trust me: From someone who’s been on the outside most of his life, it’s not a comfortable place to live.”
“It is if you’ve chosen it,” she fired back.
“Fine, then. Come back with us and tell them yourself.”
Her lips turned up at the corners in an utterly humorless smile, as though they’d finally gotten to the meat of things. Nudging the pendant a few centimeters closer to him on the desk, she said, “You owe me, Lucius.”
There it was, he realized. And the bitch of it was that he couldn’t say she was wrong. He owed her.
Big-time. “You’re calling it all in . . . on this?”
“I am. I won’t be square with Strike and the others, I know. But I can at least leave things even between the two of us.” She rose and moved out from behind the desk, then reached down, grabbed his hands, and hauled him to his feet as she might have done before, in order to kick him back to his own office or out to the lab. Now, though, he towered over her, dwarfed her. And she kept hold of one of his hands once he was up, and stayed standing inside his personal space. Jade remained seated, watching with her counselor’s calm wrapped around her and faint panic at the back of her eyes.
Anna palmed a Swiss army knife, seemingly from nowhere. Lucius didn’t move, didn’t flinch as she scored a sharp stripe across his palm. Pain pinched and blood welled, but he didn’t feel any magic. All he felt was failure—his and hers.
“We don’t have to swear on blood,” he said. The ache spread through him as she blooded her own palm and he got that she really meant it. She wanted to leave the Nightkeepers behind. Or she wanted them to leave her behind; he wasn’t sure which was more accurate.
“We’re not swearing. I’m doing something I should’ve done a long time ago.” Clasping his bleeding hand in hers, she recited a string of words.
He caught a few, missed a few; he was far more used to working with glyphs than with speaking a language that had been dead for centuries. More, as she spoke, his head started spinning: a mad whirl of thoughts and blurred sight. He heard the words, glimpsed the fake antiquities, but they glommed together, tumbling around one another in a major Auntie Em moment. Pain slashed in his forearm—a wrenching sizzle that started at his marks and zigzagged up to his chest with a ripping, tearing sensation that left him hollow when it ended.
Jade lunged to her feet, reaching for him, but he held her off with an upraised palm, suddenly grokking what was going on. He yanked his hand away from Anna’s. “No,” he started. “Don’t—” But then he stopped, because he knew it was already done. “Fuck.” The world settled down around him, his vision coming clear as he flipped his arm and confirmed that the black slave mark was gone. He wasn’t bound to her anymore. Technically, he wasn’t bound to the Nightkeepers anymore, either. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“Yes, I did.”
His forearm now bore only the red hellmark, startling in its geometry, deadly in its coloration. “The quatrefoil’s not balanced anymore.” His heart thudded in his chest; his thoughts played demolition derby inside his head. What was this going to mean for his ability to tap the library? Something?
Nothing? Was it an entirely moot point?
Jade moved up beside him, so they were facing Anna as a couple. No, he thought, not a couple. As partners. A team. She snapped, “That was a rotten thing to do without talking it through. For all we know, that was his only link to the magic. And you just took it.” She was so angry she was practically vibrating.
“It was mine to take.” Anna turned her palms up, not to indicate the gods, but rather saying, Not my problem . In doing that, she bared her right palm, where the sacrificial slice had already closed to a thin scab. Lucius’s palm, in contrast, still bled sluggishly.
“That sucks,” Jade snapped.
“That’s life.”
Lucius followed the exchange as if from a distance, through a cool numbness that began where the slave mark had been and spread throughout his body. Anna was a Nightkeeper who didn’t want the magic. He was a human who did. “The gods have a strange sense of balance,” he muttered.
“The gods are gone.” Anna held out her hand to shake, human-style. “And as of today, so am I.”
Knowing it was futile to argue further, that he didn’t have the strength to shift an entrenched jaguar on his own, he finally nodded. “Okay. Fine. Whatever. Have it your way.” He moved to scoop up the effigy.
“No, wait,” Anna said. He paused, hopeful. But she gestured to Jade. “That’s why I asked you to be here. I want you to wear it back to Skywatch. If it’s not being carried by a member of the jaguar bloodline, it’s enough that it’s being worn by a mage I consider a friend.” Her voice caught on the last word.
Lips pressed tightly together, Jade merely scooped up the effigy, draped the chain over her head, and tucked the sacred skull beneath her yellow polo, doing up the lower two buttons to conceal the priceless artifact. Taking her hand, Lucius headed for the door, aching with the knowledge that, unless Strike and Jox worked some major magic, it would probably be the last time he’d see Anna, who’d been a big part of his life for so long. When he had the panel open, his eye caught the laminated sign.
What have you got to lose? When had the answer become “Everything”?
“Lucius,” Anna said.
He glanced back. “Yeah?”
“Good luck.” Her eyes shifted to Jade. “And to you. I wish . . . I wish I could be as brave and strong as you’re learning to be. Gods keep you both.”
Jade didn’t answer, but her eyes glittered with unshed tears. Lucius tipped his head. “Good-bye, Professor Catori.”
Out in the hallway, he tried to breathe through the numbness and the sense that the squat, dark building was collapsing inward around him. Jade’s eyes were stark, her face pale, but she said only, “Do you want to grab any of the stuff from your old office? She boxed most of the things you left behind.”
“Leave it,” he said curtly. “There’s nothing here I need.”
“You up for tracking down Rabbit?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Let’s do it.” In a way, he hoped the kid was up to something. Knowing Rabbit, it’d be guaranteed to take his mind off Anna’s defection, and the fact that Jade was wearing the crystal skull.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
When Jade couldn’t get either Rabbit or Myrinne on her cell, she and Lucius headed over to their summer sublet. The apartment proved to be the top floor of a detached garage. The main
house was a good-size, brick-faced residential house with freshly painted white trim, ruthlessly shaped shrubs, and a perfectly trimmed lawn.
“Huh,” Lucius said. “Doesn’t look like either of their styles.” It was the first thing he’d said since they left the art history building. He’d just walked beside her, grim faced and stone silent.
Jade slid a glance over at him. The fierce tension that had gripped his body seemed to have eased slightly, but his expression still had all sorts of Keep Out signs plastered across it. She didn’t blame him; the past half hour had been a serious shock to her system, and she hadn’t had nearly the relationship with Anna that he’d had. Unconsciously, she touched the bulge beneath her shirt made by the skull effigy. She felt a faint hum of power coming from it, but not one that resonated with the way she usually experienced the magic. That confirmed what Anna had said about the skulls being bloodline- and seer-specific. She didn’t think it would affect her magic, or Lucius’s . . . at least, not directly. Indirectly, though, its presence was a heavy weight between them, as was the bare spot on his forearm where the slave mark had been. She didn’t know what Strike and the others were going to think about that. Heck, she didn’t know what she thought about it. All she knew was that her plan of talking to Lucius about the emotional component of the magic on their drive home wasn’t seeming like such a good idea now. He might be standing right next to her, but he’d never seemed farther away.
Hoping he just needed time to work things out in his head, she focused on the task at hand: finding Rabbit. And Lucius had a point on the digs. Although the relative isolation was consistent with Rabbit’s fierce need for distance from everyone but Myrinne, the suburban-USA surroundings and soccer-mom minivan in the driveway didn’t jibe. If they had just been normal students, Jade would have assumed it was a cost thing, but the Nightkeeper Fund had been set up to support an army of hundreds, if not thousands. It was beyond sufficient for the two dozen survivors. Heck, she’d heard Jox urging the kid to just buy a damn house rather than worry about a sublet. Granted, the winikin had followed that by muttering something about getting as much fire insurance as possible, but still.
So why the sublet?
“Can I help you?” A dark-haired woman nudged open the storm door of the main house with one foot. She wore sweats, was jiggling a swaddled baby in one arm, and had a why the hell did I sign up for this? look on her face. In the background, an older kid was screaming something about spaghetti.
Jade took a step toward her, smiling. “We’re friends of Rabbit’s. Are he and Myrinne around, do you know?”
“Sorry, I haven’t got a clue if they’re home. I saw them headed out this morning; don’t know if they came back or not.” The woman tilted her head. “They expecting you?”
“Not specifically.” Though Rabbit had to know Strike wouldn’t put up with being ignored for long, and would have seen her number pop up on caller ID just now.
“You can go up and knock. Be careful on the stairs; a couple of the treads are loose. They’ll be fixed by the end of next week, though.”
“Thanks.” Jade headed toward the garage with Lucius falling in beside her, back in silent mode.
Something—instinct, maybe?—told her that the apartment was empty. She figured it couldn’t hurt to fake a knock. The woman had retreated back into the main house and shut the door, but Jade would’ve bet money she was watching through one of the curtained windows. At least Rabbit seemed to have landed in a decent living situation. The surveillance would, however, limit their options in terms of peeking through windows, trying to figure out what, if anything, he and Myrinne were up to.
On the way up, they discovered more than “a few” loose steps; the whole staircase groaned precariously under Lucius’s weight. “What do you want to bet they’ve been on the fix-it list for ‘the end of next week’ for a while now?” he asked, not seeming particularly worried either way.
“She should ask Rabbit to fix them.” Jade grinned. “Might be interesting to see what he’d come up with.” Though in all fairness, the in-Skywatch buzz said that the young, powerful mage had cleaned up his act in recent months. When they reached the landing, she motioned him to shield her with his body. “Stand there so she can’t see me.”
He obliged. “What’s your plan?”
“Working on it.” She knocked, but wasn’t surprised when she didn’t get an answer. The place felt empty.
“Want me to kick it in?” He paused. “It’d make me feel better.”
She grinned, glad he was thawing a little. Wait a minute . . . thawing. “Be my lookout, will you?
I’ve got an idea that’ll do less damage.” I hope.
The ice magic came quickly, without even a blood sacrifice. Keeping her inner rheostat turned low, she pushed a small quantity of the magic into the dead bolt and regular door lock, where the forming crystals would expand and create pressure inside the mechanisms. She hoped.
Heat poured through her, lighting her up and bringing a prickle of sweat to her forehead and behind her shoulder blades. The locks clicked in one-two sequence, like she’d planned it that way. Holy crap, I did it! She wasted a couple of precious seconds staring at the door as excitement skimmed through her, warming her skin and making her want to dance. She’d actually— finally! —used magic for something practical and tangible, something more than just finding a reference that another mage could use instead of her.
Then, aware they were probably still being watched, she called, “It’s me. Can I come in?”
Pretending she’d gotten an answer from within, she opened up and stepped through. Lucius followed, shaking his hand at the sting from the ice-cold metal doorknob.
“Nice job,” he breathed in her ear, sending shimmers through her. For half a second, the world seemed to shift a few degrees on its axis and the air sparked red-gold.
Steeling herself against the tug of lust—or rather, filing it for a “maybe later”—she lifted a shoulder. “I’m not sure I should be proud of my B-and-E skills when we’re talking about a teammate.”
Still, though, personal space was something of a fluid concept among the magi, who lived a lifestyle that landed somewhere between communal and private, with blurred lines separating the two. Shandi came and went freely from Jade’s suite, and the magi above her in the power structure could, theoretically, invade her space with impunity. The surviving Nightkeepers had tended to stick closer to the human theory of privacy, but there were exceptions. And this was one of them, she assured herself, even though there was a kernel of fear that Rabbit would come home, realize he had company, and fireball first, ask questions later.
On the theory of better safe than sorry, she reached into her pocket for one of the small, portable motion detectors they had used to secure their hotel room the night before, and set it up on the kitchen counter facing the door.
“We’re supposed to make sure he’s not in trouble,” Lucius said, paraphrasing Strike’s order as he scanned the room. “Okay. Where do we start? Or rather, what are the odds that Rabbit and Myrinne, who are both of above-average intelligence and deviousness, would leave something important just lying around?”
“Slim to none,” she agreed. “So let’s think devious.”
The door opened into a kitchen nook that was separated from the main area by a half wall. Doors on the far side of the main room opened into a bedroom on one side, a bathroom on the other. The furniture was upscale box store, the built-in shelves were filled with anatomy and physics texts, and the wall art leaned toward Things I Like to Stare at While I’m Stoned. The few photographs racked on the shelves showed a doughy-looking guy posing with carbon-copy parents and what appeared to be his sister. Or maybe a brother with low testosterone levels? It didn’t take a psych expert to guess the place had come furnished, and little—if any—of what they were looking at belonged to Rabbit or Myrinne.
Leaving the main room to Lucius, Jade moved into the bedroom, feeling seriously uncomfortable to be invading
the space of two people she might not consider friends, but who were certainly allies. She found a few fat red candles and some pretty crystals she could easily peg as Myrinne’s. She thought she recognized some of the clothes tossed over a chair in the corner as belonging to Rabbit, and the pair of Dark Tower books on the nightstand could’ve been his. But other than that, there was little for her to go on. It was like the mage and his human girlfriend hadn’t left any mark on the space, even though they’d been living there a few weeks already.
Unless . . . “What about magic?” she murmured to herself. Granted, the mental blocks meant that Rabbit theoretically couldn’t use his powers outside of Skywatch, but he’d already circumvented those strictures at least once, when Myrinne had talked him into using a pseudo-Wiccan ritual in an effort to call a new three-question nahwal. It was possible he’d done something like that again. Or, if she wanted to be cynical about it—which was a good bet when trying to outthink Rabbit—he could’ve left himself a loophole or two when he’d installed his mental filters. Just in case.
Moving to the edge of the sitting room, which put her in the approximate middle of the apartment’s footprint, she turned toward Lucius and crooked a finger. “Come here a minute.”
His eyes narrowed. “Why?”
“Humor me. It’s an experiment.” Under other circumstances she might not have tried it, but she was all too aware that Strike was going to be furious over Anna’s decision. Fortunately for them, he wasn’t the sort to shoot the messenger. But the news they were bringing home was going to seriously taint the king’s perception of the trip . . . and potentially of her. More, she thought she and Lucius needed the same thing just then, albeit for different reasons.
He moved into her, going toe-to-toe, the spark in his eyes suggesting that he’d guessed her plan.
“This close enough?”
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