The ones in the blue robes looked dazed as shit, shaking their heads and staring around as if they’d been someplace else and were happy to be back. In contrast, Black Robe, older and tougher and seeming just as pissed off as the guppy, shot to his feet, glanced at Leah, and immediately looked like he wanted to kill someone. Again.
He was maybe a few years younger than Jox, and had a Last of the Mohicans thing going on, with a skull trim, hawk nose, and eyes that would’ve done any predator proud. He looked scary as hell, in a don’t-want-to-meet-him -in-a-dark-alley-without-backup way. But when he crossed the room and got in Blue Eyes’s face, the two men seemed evenly matched in brawn and charisma. And pissed-offedness.
‘‘What the hell were you thinking?’’ Black Robe spat. ‘‘Two escorts means two escorts. As it was, I got kicked off course and had to come back here and follow them. If I hadn’t, they would’ve died in there. All of them. How dare you leave them like that to go chase tail? What the fuck kind of kingship is that?’’
Leah’s chest tightened, not at being called a piece of tail—hell, she’d been called worse—but at the reference to royalty, which underscored that she’d somehow wound up exactly where she’d vowed not to go—deep inside Cultsville. If this wasn’t an offshoot of Survivor 2012, then it was something similar, and at least two of its members were killers.
Yet she wasn’t nearly as afraid as she ought to have been, as though the fear and unreality were blunted somehow by the golden warmth that fuzzed her brain.
She glanced up at her dream warrior, who had taken a protective stance a little in front of her, as though he thought Black Robe might hurt her. ‘‘King?’’ she asked in a voice that sounded smaller then she’d intended.
‘‘Call me Strike,’’ he said without looking at her.
The name struck a chord, as though she’d heard it before, but the memory was gone before she could grab onto it.
‘‘I saw my father,’’ Strike said to Black Robe. ‘‘He told me to go to her. That you and the others would be okay, but she’d die if I didn’t go.’’
Black Robe’s breath hissed out. ‘‘You’d risk your people for another vision?’’
‘‘Don’t start. Besides, you got them back.’’
‘‘Barely.’’ Black Robe’s eyes flicked over to the blue robes. ‘‘There were . . . complications.’’
Some of the blue robes were still blinking stupidly, while others were shoving up their sleeves and staring at black tats on their forearms. The youngest of them, a pale teenager, sat apart, both forearms bare.
‘‘Speaking of complications,’’ Leah interrupted, putting herself between the two men so she could get in Strike’s face. ‘‘You promised me an explanation. You can start with where we are and what the hell is going on.’’
‘‘What is that?’’ The sharp question came from Black Robe.
Leah turned. ‘‘What?’’
At first she thought he was staring at her ass. Then she realized he was locked onto the oilskin packet jammed in her back pocket.
She pulled it free, feeling a little queasy when the red glow spread from the packet to her arm. ‘‘I got it from the guy Strike here killed and then vaporized. It was in a trunk of some sort. Trunk didn’t glow red like this thing, though.’’ She looked from Strike to Black Robe and back. ‘‘You guys want it? Start talking.’’
‘‘You can see the red?’’ Strike asked, his expression going intent.
‘‘That’s what I said, isn’t it?’’
Strike looked at Black Robe. ‘‘Lose the blocks.’’
The older man shook his head. ‘‘Bad idea.’’
‘‘Lose. The. Blocks.’’
Black Robe scowled and looked at the smaller man, the one Strike had called winikin. ‘‘What do you think?’’ he asked, as though winikin meant ‘‘arbiter of common sense’’ in whatever fucked-up universe she’d stumbled into. At the other man’s slight nod, Black Robe crossed to her and touched her forehead, then spoke a few words.
Something clicked in Leah’s brain. A rushing noise filled her ears.
And she remembered everything: Nick’s death, Zipacna holding her prisoner in the Mayan temple, Strike rescuing her, the water filling the chamber, her nearly drowning. His kissing her awake.
She stood there, frozen in place, staring at Strike, and all she could think was, Holy shit. Because he wasn’t just a whacked-out doomsday freak with above-average sex appeal and some tricks she hadn’t even begun to process.
He was also her lover.
Strike saw it in her eyes, the moment he went from ‘‘weird guy wearing nothing but a red bathrobe’’ to the guy she’d had raunchy, no-holds-barred sex with approximately five minutes after the first time she’d laid eyes on him. Which would have been right after the ajaw-makol had tried to cut her heart out of her chest with a stone knife and she’d subsequently drowned and been reborn.
Not to mention the part where she’d dreamed of him coming to her in her attic bedroom, only it hadn’t been a dream.
When the color drained from her face and she swayed, he stepped forward to catch her if she went down. ‘‘Easy there. Lots to take in.’’
But she didn’t go down. She pulled back, swung from the shoulder, and punched him square in the mouth.
Strike reeled back, cursing and clapping a hand to the lip Jox had split an hour earlier. Not that he could blame her—he figured he’d earned that and more.
‘‘How dare you?’’ she hissed, then winced and dug her fingers into her scalp, massaging beneath the white-blond hair he’d dreamed of. ‘‘Ow, damn it.’’
He crossed to her and caught her arm when she sagged. ‘‘Postmagic hangover. You need to eat something and get some sleep. Then we’ll talk.’’
Even though her eyes were practically crossed with the pain-fatigue of the hangover, she glared up at him. ‘‘Take me home.’’
He knew he should do it, wipe her one more time and take her home. But that just wasn’t possible. ‘‘I can’t,’’ he said. ‘‘You’re not safe in Miami anymore.’’ They had come after her again, and not just because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He wasn’t letting her out of his sight until he figured out why.
‘‘And I’m supposed to take your word that I’m safe here?’’
‘‘I’m guessing a promise wouldn’t get me very far,’’ he said drily.
‘‘I’ll take it anyway.’’ She paused. ‘‘Along with the MAC-10 you were packing the other night. With one of those under my pillow I’ll sleep fine.’’
And she’d put some serious holes in anyone who disturbed her, Strike warranted. He wasn’t too keen on having an autopistol loose in the mansion, and knew that Jox would tear a strip out of him if he agreed, but he couldn’t blame her for wanting the protection.
Besides, she’d be unconscious for the next half day or so, whether she liked it or not.
He raised a hand as if he were pledging allegiance. ‘‘I swear that you’ll be safe here tonight.’’ He didn’t dare promise beyond that, and saw her register the qualifier. ‘‘As for the autopistol’’—he nodded to his winikin—
‘‘Jox will take care of that.’’
The winikin glared at him. ‘‘What does she mean, ‘the other night?’’
‘‘Later,’’ Strike grated out. ‘‘Christ.’’ His head was starting to pound, too, and the room had a pretty good spin going on. ‘‘We all need to eat and have some—’’ He broke off. He’d been about to say, ‘‘have some sex.’’
Maybe it was the aphelion, maybe having Leah nearby, all blond hair and edgy attitude, standing up for herself even though she was so far out of her depth she could barely see the surface. But suddenly, he wanted nothing more than to take her somewhere private, where none of the others would matter, where nothing would matter but the two of them and the heat they created together.
Hello, pretalent hornies.
Trying to banish the sex buzz he was getting off the blue r
obes, Strike grated, ‘‘Jox? Please show Leah where she’ll be staying.’’
‘‘And that would be . . . ?’’ the winikin asked coolly.
The pool house, Strike almost said, because he wanted her in his space, wanted her within reach. But he didn’t dare keep her so close, not with the hormones in the air. ‘‘Put her in the royal quarters.’’
Jox’s jaw was locked tight, though Strike didn’t know if it was solely because he was pissed, or if he was also picking up on the do-me vibes that were flying around the room, thicker with every passing minute.
Sweat popped out on Strike’s brow, and he was careful not to touch Leah when he waved for her to follow the winikin. ‘‘Go ahead. Jox will take care of everything, including the MAC. Get some food in you, get some rest, and I’ll scrounge some clothes for you. When you’re feeling steadier, we’ll talk.’’
‘‘Okay.’’ Leah nodded. Her eyes were starting to glaze a little, though he wasn’t sure if it was the shock and postmagic hangover, or if she was picking up on the vibes. She shouldn’t be able to, because she wasn’t a Nightkeeper. But then again, she shouldn’t have been able to tell that there was anything special about the oilskin packet she clutched in one hand as she followed Jox from the room.
Strike hoped like hell that the packet contained a fragment from one of the old spellbooks. There was no other explanation for why it glowed red—royal red. He’d wanted to ask her for it, wanted to commandeer it, but she needed to keep it for now, needed to trust that he wouldn’t take it by force. Besides, assuming it was one of the lost spells, they couldn’t do anything with it right now. Not without a translator.
For the moment, its greatest strength would be helping him convince Red-Boar and the others that the gods well and truly meant for Leah to be involved with the coming battle. Then it’d be up to him to figure out how to manage that without endangering her further.
Step one, he thought as he watched her leave, keep your hands off her. Which was going to be far easier said than done. He’d already touched her, already tasted her. He’d heard the sexy catch of her breath against his skin, and knew what it felt like to come inside her.
And it couldn’t happen again, or she was dead.
PART III
THE VENUS CONJUNCTION
Alignment of the Sun, Earth, and the planet Venus, which was the morning star used by the Maya to predict the equinoxes and solstices.
CHAPTER TWELVE
July 5
Deep in the bowels of the art history building at UT Austin, Lucius Hunt was hunched over his desk, hard at work. Okay, technically he was in his first-floor office, but it was nearly three a.m. and pitch dark outside, so it was feeling bowelish. Or maybe that was his total, utter lack of success at deciphering the line of Mayan text that sat on his computer screen, mocking him.
‘‘I can’t tell if the damn skull is grinning or screaming. ’’ He hunkered down in his desk chair until he was eye level with his laptop screen, but all that did was give him a crick in his neck. Sometimes being tall sucked.
Thanks to fifteen hundred years’ worth of tropical weather at the ruins of Chichén Itzá, the Mayan glyphwork was badly eroded. If he adjusted the contrast, he could distinguish what looked like a skull carved inside the outline of a jellyfish, but that could make it any one of twenty-plus glyphs he’d accumulated for his thesis on the end-time prophecy, depending on what the damned skull was doing. Digital comparison to other symbols in the text had allowed him to narrow his options down to grinning or screaming. If the skull was grinning, he’d found himself an ode to Jaguar-Paw Skull, the fourteenth ruler of the ancient Mayan city. Boo-ring.
But if it was screaming . . . if it was screaming, he was looking at something seriously important, a discovery that could blow the lid off the prevailing theories on the end-time. If the skull was screaming, then the zero date on the Mayan Long Count calendar wasn’t a metaphor for social change at all. It was a prophecy, just like the doomsday nuts kept saying. A warning.
Game over.
His boss, top Mayanist Anna Catori, didn’t believe the world would end on the day the backward-counting calendar zeroed out. She and the rest of the naysayers chose to ignore the modern astronomers who’d discovered that the zero date on the Long Count calendar was the same exact day the earth would pass through the precise center of the Milky Way galaxy while in conjunction with the sun and moon.
Half the astrophysicists Lucius had interviewed said there was a good chance that the earth’s magnetic poles would flip abruptly on that day, making north become south and south, north. The other half said that was bullshit. There seemed to be a general consensus, though, that the sun-moon-earth conjunction in the galactic center was likely to spark the sort of sunspot activity that hadn’t been seen in twenty-six thousand or so years, since the last time there was a meta-conjunction like this one.
Oh, and by the way, twenty-six thousand years ago, the magnetic poles had flipped, and the earth had actually owned an ozone layer capable of protecting it from the sunspots.
The question was, how much of this had the ancient Maya known, and—and here was where Anna kept accusing Lucius of straying over into the tinfoil-hat zone— what was with the handful of inscriptions he’d found that mentioned the Nightkeepers, a secret sect of warrior-priests supposedly sworn to protect the earth when the zero date came?
Ergo, the screaming skulls.
Excitement buzzed through his veins, alongside the caffeine from the six-pack of Mountain Dew he’d downed since midnight. With T minus six weeks and counting to his thesis defense, he needed one more find, one last bit of oomph to put him over the top and counteract his less than stellar disciplinary record at UT. This could be it.
‘‘Come on, baby. Scream for me.’’ He clicked a few keys on his laptop and swapped the colors over to a deep, vibrant purple, which he’d found sometimes popped details the other views washed out.
The result was a purple jellyfish containing a lavender skull that looked like it was snickering at him.
‘‘Son of a bitch.’’ He pushed away from the desk and scrubbed his hands over his eyes, which burned with fatigue and too many hours at the computer. When he blinked against the sting, he saw his favorite skeptic standing in the doorway to his tiny office.
Anna was a dark-haired beauty in her late thirties, lovely and sad-looking, with the most gorgeous blue eyes he’d ever seen in his life. She was wearing jeans and a clingy blue shirt a shade darker than her eyes, with the sleeves rolled up over the forearm tattoos she didn’t like to talk about. One was a perfect representation of the Mayan balam glyph, representing the sacred jaguar, the other the ju glyph of royalty. Together, they were dead sexy, at least as far as Lucius was concerned.
When she didn’t move from the doorway, didn’t say anything, he started to think he was having a waking fantasy, the kind where she’d glide across the room, haul him down to the desk, and make love to him amidst his thesis notes.
Then she scowled. ‘‘Don’t you ever sleep?’’
Not a dream, then. Bummer.
Lucius glanced at his watch. Three fifteen. Over the past few months he’d been sleeping less and less, kept awake by dark dreams and a strange, growing restlessness. ‘‘What makes you think I’m not just getting a really early start on tomorrow?’’
She pointed to the line of empties on his desk. ‘‘I count six dead soldiers, and you’re wearing yesterday’s clothes.’’ She paused, her expression softening. ‘‘Go home and sleep, Lucius. I don’t want to see you back here before noon. You’re no good to me if you burn out before the ink dries on your doctorate.’’
"But I found—"
‘‘Go.’’ She crossed the room, pulled him out of his chair, and shoved him toward the door. ‘‘It’ll still be here in a few hours. One nice thing about the study of an ancient civilization is that life-threatening emergencies are rare.’’
The sentiment was so un-Anna-like that he paused. ‘‘Is everything oka
y?’’
She avoided his eyes. ‘‘Everything’s fine. I want to get a jump on things before the grant vultures descend this afternoon.’’
‘‘Don’t bullshit a bullshitter, Anna.’’ Talk to me, he wanted to say. Tell me what’s wrong. I’ll listen; I want to help. But he didn’t go there, because she’d already let him know in so many little ways that she was flattered, but not interested in a student nearly ten years her junior. Rumor said her marriage to Dick Catori of the economics department was on shaky ground, but she left that at the door. At least, she usually did. Tonight, she seemed to waver, seemed to lean toward him for half a second.
Then she straightened and shook her head. ‘‘It’s nothing you can help me with.’’
‘‘Try me.’’
Her eyes softened to the you’re so cute look he hated like poison, and she nudged him toward the door. ‘‘It’s not your fight. Go home.’’
Lucius didn’t like the thought of her sleeping at the lab because things had gotten bad with the Dick, but he’d just look like an idiot if he invited her to his place, a shared apartment furnished in Early Roach, so he said, ‘‘Call me if you change your mind.’’
‘‘I will,’’ she said, but they both knew she wouldn’t.
‘‘See you in a few hours.’’
‘‘Not before noon, or I’m docking your stipend.’’ He shot her a grin. ‘‘Can’t threaten me. Half of nothing’s still nothing.’’ But the moment the door swung shut at his back, his smile faded.
What was going on? She’d been distracted lately, worried by more than just the grant committee. A bubble of anger worked its way through his normal calm. If the Dick was giving her grief, he’d . . .
You’ll do what, he thought bitterly, tell on him?
Lucius was two inches taller and a good fifty pounds lighter than his younger brothers and his father, who were all cut in the Hunt mold of dark, handsome, and built. Lucius looked more like his mother and sister, and while light and willowy was gorgeous on them, he looked more wussy than willowy, and doubted Anna’s ex-linebacker husband would be impressed.
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