Demonkeepers n-4

by Jessica Andersen

I can relate, Jade thought sourly. She pushed back from the computer. “You’re good to go.”

  “Thanks.” Patience got to work; within moments, her fingers were flying across the keyboard with a clatter that sounded like machine-gun fire.

  Breathing past the adrenaline kick brought by the comparison, Jade snagged the Idiot’s Guide and carried it over to the other workstation. She found herself sneaking looks over at Patience, though. It was strange seeing her at the computer, even stranger that she didn’t look out of place. The image jarred Jade’s perception of her teammates and the way they fit together . . . or didn’t, as the case might be.

  “Go ahead, say it.” Patience stopped typing and glanced over at her, eyes lit with faint challenge.

  Caught out, Jade fell back on counselor mode. “What is it you think I want to say?”

  “That I should get over myself, stop whining about being separated from my boys, make up with my husband, and do whatever else I possibly can to strengthen the Nightkeepers and make sure Harry and Braden have a world to live in—and lives to lead—in 2013.” Patience lifted her chin, blue eyes defiant, yet wary.

  Jade grinned, comforted to find that she wasn’t the only one having a pissy morning. “Honestly? I was thinking that you type way faster than I would’ve expected. What was that, seventy words a minute? Closer to eighty?”

  Patience just stared at her for a second. Then she burst out laughing, though the laughter carried an edge. “Why? Because I come off more like a fluffy ex-cheerleader than anything? Are you wondering if I took touch typing as part of an admin course?”

  “Is that how you think other people see you?” The question came from both parts of Jade; the therapist framed it, but the woman saw the pain and wanted the answer.

  “Don’t you?”

  Questions and more questions, classic defensive-ness. This isn’t therapy . Patience was a teammate, though perhaps not a close friend. The two women were acquaintances at best, not just because of Patience’s lack of interest in academics, but also because she had come to Skywatch with her life already fully formed. She and Brandt had both known all along that they were the Nightkeepers of legend, that they might one day be called upon to serve. Granted, they hadn’t told each other about their true natures, leading to a hell of a surprise when they’d arrived separately at Skywatch, but still, they seemed to have gotten past that, seemed to have made a family unit within the Nightkeepers. Or was that only the surface of things? Jade wondered suddenly. She’d known there was trouble in the relationship, but had thought it was strong enough to withstand the bumps. What if she’d been wrong?

  “I can’t say the word ‘cheerleader’ has ever come to mind,” she answered. “I see you as a woman who was a warrior even before she came here. You started your own dojo and made it a success, even as a young mother, which means you’re focused and driven, and you’ve got good business sense.” She turned her palms upward. “I don’t know why the typing was a surprise, except that you’ve always been so much more focused on the physical than I am. You spend most of your day in the gym, on the range, in the training hall . . . so maybe I pegged you as a girl jock, and not someone who would keep her touch typing up to speed.”

  A slow, almost shy smile had crept onto Patience’s face as Jade was speaking. Now the blonde stretched her long, elegant fingers and looked at them. Nine nails were shaped and painted a pale, pearlescent pink. One, the left pinkie, was snapped off near the quick, leaving a ragged edge.

  “Typing’s physical . . . it’s really just hand-eye coordination, after all. In fact, it’s almost a sport.” She paused. “But thanks for seeing me as capable. Sometimes I forget that I used to be that person. Here . .

  .” She looked around the plain auxiliary room, though Jade suspected she was seeing all of Skywatch and the responsibilities it symbolized. “Here, I feel like a misfit cog in the calendar wheel. I’m a day that’s just slightly out of step. A week with too many hours in it, or too few.”

  “I think we’ve all felt that way, some more than others.” Jade lifted a shoulder. “We just lose track that we’re not the only ones feeling it.”

  Patience glanced at the computer screen, though Jade wasn’t sure what she saw there. “It just sucks, you know? There are enough of us here that it shouldn’t feel like we’re all alone.”

  “Welcome to my world,” Jade said emphatically.

  Patience frowned. “But I thought you and Lucius—”

  “Are having sex. Great sex, mind you, but that’s it.”

  “Don’t knock it,” the blonde said dryly. “Sometimes the love part really stinks.”

  “There’s a song in there somewhere.”

  “Very funny.”

  After that surprising exchange, the women fell companionably silent. As Patience once again started her rapid-fire typing, Jade steeled herself, closed her eyes, and thought back to the night before —not the attack, but the lovemaking. She tried to remember only her own thoughts and feelings, but instead found herself locked on the look in Lucius’s eyes as he’d taken her, possessed her, branded her. Her skin heated as the magic came; her body tightened and throbbed as she remembered his hands on her, his mouth, his fingers—

  Jerking herself out of the memory, she opened her eyes. But instead of the spell book, she found her attention drawn inexorably to the man who was standing in the doorway as he had the night before, leaning on the door frame, watching her.

  “Lucius!” she exclaimed, hoping he didn’t see from her face how open she was to him at that moment, how much her senses lit at the sight of him, and how much she wished they were alone.

  Patience’s head snapped up. “Oh!” She did something with the mouse, then very deliberately looked back at the screen and started typing again. “Just pretend I’m not here. Or tell me to get lost if you need to.”

  “You’re fine,” Jade said, but her attention was locked on Lucius. “I’m not sure I can say the same about you,” she told him. “What happened?” He looked tired and run-down, and although his hair was slightly damp and he was wearing clean clothes, he smelled inexplicably of wood smoke.

  “Rabbit sterilized the scene,” he said when she wrinkled her nose. He held out his hand to her.

  “Let’s take a walk. I need your help with something.”

  “Is that a euphemism?” Patience asked without looking up.

  Lucius grinned. “I thought we were pretending you had turned yourself invisible.”

  Her head came up and she glanced speculatively at him. “Given that she would be able to see me but you wouldn’t, that thought has potential. Weird potential, granted, but potential nonetheless.”

  Jade snorted. “Glad to see you’re feeling better.”

  “I haven’t been feeling good for way too long,” the blonde answered bluntly. “I’ve decided it’s time for me to get over myself.”

  “Fair enough.” Jade set aside the Idiot’s Guide, let the magic dissipate, and stood. To Patience, she said, “After the solstice, you, Sasha, and I should have a chick date.”

  A shadow crossed the younger woman’s face. Jade was familiar with the look, having seen it plenty in her practice. It was one part excitement at the thought of making plans, one part, Oh, no, I couldn’t; I need to spend time with my child/boyfriend/husband, and one part dismay at realizing that number two wasn’t true anymore, whether because of a divorce, a breakup, or a death. Patience rallied quickly, though with a smile nowhere near the wattage of the others. “I’d like that.”

  To Lucius, Jade said, “A walk, huh? Anywhere in particular?”

  “Humor me. I have an idea.”

  Jade and Lucius left hand in hand. Patience watched them go and felt a twist of envy, not just for the great sex they were apparently having, but for the uncertainty and excitement of a new relationship.

  New love was supposed to be simultaneously wonderful and awful; that was okay. If it was tearing you up inside, you were doing it right. When that sort of thing started
happening for the first time at year six . . . that was a different story.

  “Just get through this and you’ll be fine,” she told herself for the hundredth time. After checking to make sure nobody else was coming to hang in the book room—since when was the archive party central?—she returned to the computer and the two files she had open.

  She saved and closed the first one, a quick rundown of her and Brandt’s trip to Egypt that she’d named “Camel butter, Cairo, and nothing new on the pharaoh.” That left the one she’d really been after, a doc Strike had entitled simply “Finding Mendez.”

  Patience had been afraid to read it openly with Jade in the room, because she knew that pretending interest in recent history wasn’t going to fly with the archivist. So she’d waited the other woman out—

  and had enjoyed the process far more than she had expected to.

  Now, though, she focused on her objective, skimming through the story of how, as a new-made king, Strike had gone personally to collect two of the hold-outs who hadn’t answered the messages informing them of their true Nightkeeper natures and calling them to Skywatch. The first had been Nate, who had initially resisted, but had eventually come around. The second had been Snake Mendez, and that was where things had gotten complicated. Strike had walked into the middle of the mage’s apprehension on an outstanding warrant for several all-too-human crimes. Raised by a less than sane winikin, Mendez had found the magic on his own, and potentially had access to one of the lost spell books. He also had an impressive list of arrests. Amid the chaos of trying to re-create the Nightkeepers out of a dozen human-raised magi, Strike had decided to let Mendez stay in jail rather than orchestrating anything.

  But Patience wasn’t interested in Mendez; she wanted the person who’d taken him down. The address she’d stolen off Strike’s laptop had been six months too old. A call to their landlord had revealed that Woody, Hannah, and the boys had moved on. Patience couldn’t ask Carter to look into it; he was the king’s PI. Nor was she interested in picking someone out of a phone book. She wanted the best.

  Halfway down the screen, Patience’s eyes locked on the name Reese Montana. “Bingo.”

  Who better than a bounty hunter to find a couple of winikin who were doing their blood-bound best to stay lost?

  Lucius elected to walk himself and Jade out to the back of the box canyon on the theory that, one, he was sick of the Jeep, two, they could return for wheels later if necessary, and three, he didn’t want to make a big deal out of the expedition, in case his hunch didn’t pan out. So they walked hand in hand along the canyon floor, breathing the strangely humid air and passing ragged clumps of the algaelike plants that were growing throughout the canyon now. They didn’t talk about the plants, though, or the way the dim sunlight made the humidity feel ten times stickier than it might have otherwise. In fact, they didn’t talk at all, which he thought was probably best, because he couldn’t think about much of anything other than what he hoped they were about to find . . . and how much he dreaded finding it.

  But at the same time, he was aware of walking in sync with her, breathing in sync with her. She was someone he could share silence with.

  When they reached the back wall of the canyon, Jade started automatically for the shallow staircase leading up to the pueblo ruins.

  Lucius tugged her back. “Wait. Not up there.”

  She turned back. “No? Where are we going, then, and what do you need my help with? I’m assuming that wasn’t, as Patience suggested, a euphemism.”

  “I need your magic.”

  Her brows snapped together. “Okay, that’s not what I expected you to say to me.” She paused. “For that matter, it’s the first time anyone has said that to me.” But she was intrigued. “Go on. What are you—or rather, what am I looking for? Are you thinking buried treasure?”

  “Not exactly.” He turned her so she was looking off at an angle. “See that curvy rock over there, the one that makes sort of an ‘S’ shape? And see how next to it there’s a round hole that looks man-

  made?”

  “I see them. What do you want me to do?”

  “I need you to look for energy patterns, the way you did in Rabbit’s apartment. Do you need a boost?”

  “Nope, I’ve got it covered.” That shouldn’t have irritated him, but it did. Beneath the irritation, though, his worry persisted as she took a couple of calming breaths and faced the rock formation he’d seen in his mind’s eye as the burning inn had receded in the distance.

  Was there a better way to do this? He’d thought to have her look for a hidden door first, then—

  “I see it,” she said.

  He exhaled in a rush. “Okay. I have to warn you, though—”

  “It’s a spell I’m not familiar with,” she interrupted. “I think it might be like the one that the ancients used to hide the First Father’s tomb, not just a visual illusion but a physical one as well.

  Michael said that one was very old magic, but he figured out how to turn it off and on. Let me see if I can remember the spell he used. It didn’t work for me back then, but it might now.” She headed toward the spot.

  He snagged her arm, shaking it. “Jade! Wait up and listen for a second. This is important.”

  She looked up at him; her eyes were sleepy and blurred, and very, very sexy. She blinked at him, her eyes clearing with a final whole-body shudder. “Whoa.” She rubbed her face with both hands. “I went deep under the magic there.” She shook her head, seeming more like herself once again. “Okay.

  What’s up? Are you expecting there to be booby traps behind that fake wall?”

  “Gods, I hadn’t even thought of that. Maybe doing this on the sly wasn’t the best idea.”

  Her eyes sharpened. “Why are we out here by ourselves? If you’ve figured out something, then you should—” She broke off, her color draining as her eyes locked onto the rock formation he’d walked and jogged past a hundred times before, never once suspecting that it marked a concealed entrance until a nightmare showed him the way. “Flames,” she said, her voice gone dull with shock as she moved to touch the sinuous, flamelike rock and stare at the empty socket behind it. “Staring eyes.”

  “Yeah.” His voice rasped more than usual on the word. “I don’t think she was talking about just what she saw up at the mansion. I think she was talking about where she performed the ritual. If we ever find some in-depth info on the star bloodline—like the stuff they didn’t tell outsiders—I think we’ll find that this was a sacred chamber that was reserved for them alone, probably connected with the library.”

  “Assuming there’s anything behind the illusion spell.”

  “Why would it be there at all if not to hide something important?” He knew she wasn’t asking about the logic, though. Going on instinct, he gripped her shoulder, more a gesture of support from a teammate than an overture from a lover. But he suspected that was what she needed him to be right then: an almost-warrior who had her back.

  “We should go get the others.” She didn’t move, though. Just stood there touching what he supposed wasn’t really a rock at all, but rather a solid-seeming illusory rock.

  “It’s your call.”

  She hesitated, hand pressed to the stone. Finally, she said, “I’m going to try the on/off spell. If it doesn’t work, we’ll go get the others. If it does . . . I need to see. I want to be the first.”

  He nodded. “Then go for it.”

  “I’m too scattered to concentrate on finding the magic.” With that scant warning, she turned toward him, grabbed him by the front of his T-shirt, and kissed him, hard.

  The kiss vibrated with nerves and need, and hit him with a sledgehammer of lust that slammed him right back to where he’d been the night before in that gossamer white canopy bed, fresh from her body and wanting to promise her impossible things. When she pulled away, he had to stop himself from tugging her back and kissing her again, touching her. It wasn’t just about sex either. He wanted to wrap himself around he
r, shield her from whatever bad stuff was on the other side of the illusory wall, giving her the good stuff and taking the rest onto himself. The need was hard, hot, and sharp, and it made him take a big step back, wrestling for control.

  He cleared his throat. “Glad to help.”

  “Shh.” She pulled what proved to be a butterfly knife out of her pocket, flipped it open, and used it to score her palm. She didn’t explain about the knife and he didn’t ask; she wasn’t the only one going armed after what had happened the day before. With the blood sacrifice made, she pressed her bleeding hand flat to the fake stone surface and whispered a few words he didn’t catch.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then the wall shimmered. And disappeared.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Breathe, Jade told herself as she stared into the dark entrance of a tunnel leading into the canyon wall.

  Just keep breathing. She was glad she had someone with her, though, and she was glad it was Lucius, who was letting her take it slow when she knew he had to be dying to get in there, not just for discovery for discovery’s sake, but because he was hoping that the members of the star bloodline—or maybe even Vennie herself—might have left behind some additional clues that might, gods willing, get him back into the library. It seemed that love—or at least great sex—wasn’t the answer. It was all about the magic, after all.

  “Dumb ass,” he said suddenly. When she turned to him, he made a dope-slap motion. “I didn’t bring a flashlight.”

  “Let me try.” She held out her hand and kindled a foxfire. The magic shone brightly and didn’t sap her strength nearly as much as it had before. Was she actually getting stronger? It seemed so. She took a deep, steadying breath and didn’t let herself lean back into him. “Here we go.” Then, remembering the claustrophobia, she asked, “Are you going to be okay with this?”

  His grin was that of the overgrown boy he’d first seemed, in the body of the man he’d become. “Just try and stop me.”

  The tunnel was wide enough for the two of them to walk side by side, so they did. Unlike most of the Mayan-era Nightkeeper temples, it was tall enough that Lucius didn’t have to duck. At first, Jade thought that was because it was a natural fissure. As they moved inward, though, she saw smoothed-