Nightkeepers notfp-1

by Jessica Andersen

That had her hesitating long enough for the rest of the memories to hit—he saw it in the way her face flushed even harder, the color riding high in her cheeks as she remembered how they’d gone at each other in the sacrificial chamber.

  The blush—and his own memories—had his skin heating and his blood revving, and a whole lot of ideas jamming his skull. He wasn’t about to act on any of them, but some of the sizzle must’ve shown in his eyes, because she sat up abruptly enough that she swayed.

  Draping the serape around her shoulders to cover where the ruined shirt left her half-naked, she lifted her chin. ‘‘Don’t even think it.’’

  ‘‘I’m a guy, which means I’m hardwired to think it.’’ He deliberately turned his back on her and headed for the kitchen. ‘‘But I’ll give you my word I won’t act on it tonight.’’

  ‘‘Which implies you think there’ll be another night.’’ She winced and rubbed at her temples. ‘‘What the hell did you drug me with? My head’s killing me.’’

  ‘‘No drug,’’ he said, which was the truth. ‘‘You just sort of passed out on me.’’ Which wasn’t exactly a lie. ‘‘We weren’t safe in the ruins, so I brought you here.’’

  ‘‘Where is here?’’

  ‘‘A friend’s apartment. He’ll be here in the morning, and he’ll help us get home.’’ Which was more or less the truth, though it left out the part where Red-Boar would block off her memories first. When he saw her glance at the door, he added, ‘‘It locks from the inside, and the key’s in my pocket. And the window is four floors up, so please don’t try it. You have my word that you’ll be home by lunchtime tomorrow.’’

  He came out of the kitchen carrying a couple of spoons and an assortment of tinned meat. Jox had stocked the apartment’s small kitchenette with nonperishable proteins of the sort that’d outlive cockroaches on the evolutionary scale, but damned if SPAM, sardines, and Vienna sausages didn’t sound like manna from the gods just then.

  ‘‘Here.’’ He held out a tin and one of the spoons. ‘‘You need protein.’’

  She stared at the tin, then up at him, her eyes very blue against her porcelain skin, which had gone pale as she’d processed everything that’d happened to them, and between them. ‘‘I don’t understand,’’ she said in a small voice, one that had a little tremor in it.

  Aw, hell, Strike thought, cursing himself. She had to be terrified, and he was trying to feed her processed meat by-products. Like that was going to make it better.

  He sat down beside her on the sofa, put an arm around her, and hugged her in as nonthreatening a way as he could manage. ‘‘I’ll explain what I can.’’ He could tell her anything he wanted, knowing Red-Boar would block it all anyway. ‘‘And in return, I’d like you to answer a few questions for me.’’

  She sniffed and nodded. ‘‘If you think it’ll help.’’

  ‘‘I do.’’ He used his free hand to tip her chin up, so she would see the truth in his eyes. ‘‘You’re going to be home tomorrow. I promise.’’

  He’d intended nothing more than that safe vow, that small comfort, but the moment their eyes met it was like somebody cranked his libido to ‘‘on.’’ Heat roared through him, and he wanted nothing more than to grab the long white silk of her hair and use it to bare her throat, to hold her in place as he kissed his way down, taking the time he hadn’t had before.

  She sucked in a breath and held it, and damned if that color wasn’t riding her cheeks again, telling him he wasn’t alone in feeling the need.

  ‘‘I said I wouldn’t touch you tonight,’’ he rasped, throat tight with the horns that rode him, goading him on, urging him to screw his good intentions and take what they both wanted.

  ‘‘Did you?’’ she murmured, leaning in. ‘‘It seems to have slipped my mind.’’

  On the heels of that permission, that invitation, he slid his hand up into the long fall of her hair, which was still faintly damp. He felt the echo of the solstice power within him, but more than that he felt the pounding lust that had ridden him since he’d first dreamed of her, since he’d first awakened thinking of her eyes, and of the way she’d felt wrapped around him.

  She leaned in, so their lips were a breath apart, and whispered, ‘‘Go ahead. Kiss me.’’

  A harsh groan rattled in his chest, and he closed the distance between them and touched his lips to hers, softly at first, a faint whisper of sensation. She murmured pleasure and met him for the next, taking it wetter, deeper, opening her mouth beneath his and inviting him in.

  He crowded close, aligning their bodies and loosening his grip on her hair, sliding his hand down to cup the back of her neck. She whispered something, but the blood was pounding too hard in his veins, too fast in his ears for him to hear. ‘‘What was that?’’

  She eased away, cupped his jaw in her hands, and stared into his eyes. ‘‘I said, ‘Thanks for the key.’’’

  Then she brought up her knee and racked him in the balls.

  The attack was off center enough to be kind, but hard enough to drop him. He curled in pain as she shot to her feet and bolted across the room, headed for the door. ‘‘Don’t!’’ he shouted, his words garbling on a groan of agony. " ’S not safe."

  But she was already gone, pounding along the hall and down the stairs.

  ‘‘Shit!’’ Strike got to his hands and knees and breathed through the pain, tried to find the barrier power when he barely knew where to look, never mind how to handle it. But this was an emergency. No way was he admitting he’d lost her.

  He found the barrier, chanted the jack-in spell, and thought of Leah. The travel thread popped up in front of him immediately. Here goes nothing, he thought, and grabbed onto the thread with a mental touch and yanked.

  The world went gray-green and slewed sideways, and he crashed into an alley two streets over from the apartment, smack in front of Leah.

  This time she did scream.

  He grabbed her, envisioned the apartment, and zapped them back hard and fast. They landed in a tangle of arms and legs, and she immediately started thrashing, screaming at the top of her lungs. Worse, the world was starting to spin and go fuzzy at the edges, warning Strike that he was running out of magic fast.

  With his last ounce of power he put the sleep spell back on her, and she went limp against him.

  Breathing hard, he lay there for a minute while the world did doughnuts around him, and he thanked the gods that he’d managed to get her back before the locals noticed her half-naked self parading around the not-very -nice neighborhood. Then he thanked them some more that he’d managed to pull off two teleports and a sleep spell, which meant he wouldn’t have to admit to Jox that he’d nearly screwed the pooch and lost her.

  Then he lay there a minute longer because his balls hurt and he didn’t want to move.

  Eventually, though, the floor got hard and he forced himself to his feet. He laid Leah back on the couch and covered her up with the serape, and she murmured something in a soft, sweet voice and turned on her side, tucking her hands beneath her cheek. With her face smoothed out in sleep, she looked very young and vulnerable.

  ‘‘Vulnerable.’’ He snorted. ‘‘Not exactly accurate, eh, Blondie?’’

  He hadn’t enjoyed the experience, but he admired her flair. She’d played him hard and he’d fallen easy, and props to her. She might’ve gotten away, too, if it weren’t for the magic.

  Damn, he liked what he knew of her. She was tough and resourceful, soft and sexy, and she’d held her own against the makol. She was gorgeous and quick-minded and—

  And whether he liked her or not, dreamed of her or not, she hadn’t retained any magic past the equinox, which meant she wasn’t part of what was coming. And really, that was for the best, given the prophecy.

  At the thought, he looked at the far wall, where a framed piece of parchment hung on a bent nail. It wasn’t a decorative touch. It was a reminder of what was important. Ascribed to the god Kauil, whose origins and allegiances were unknown, the thirteenth pr
ophecy read: In the final five years / The king stands ready / To make his greatest sacrifice. / If the dark lord comes / The end begins.

  He sighed. Though he wasn’t the king yet, he was next in line, and the only jaguar male left. That meant the prophecy drove him, shadowed him. For so long he’d hoped it meant nothing, that the five-year mark would come and go, that 2012 would come and go. But now the barrier had churned back online, right on schedule, and now there was an ajaw-makol on the earthly plane, with the power to bring a dark lord through the barrier on the next cardinal day. It wasn’t much of a stretch to think the greatest sacrifice would be coming right on its heels.

  And didn’t that just suck. Cursing, he pushed away from the wall, intending to pace.

  He nearly fell on his ass.

  All of a sudden, his legs felt like bungees hooked to nothing, limp and elastic. The urge to sleep was almost overwhelming, and the floor was looking soft as a mattress, but he knew he couldn’t pass out. Not now. Not here.

  No way in hell was he leaving Leah unprotected. Not with a makol on the loose. So he headed back into the main room and scrounged the tinned meat he’d pulled out for their interrupted snack. By his fourth can of by-products, the world had stopped spinning. By his sixth— when the SPAM started tasting like SPAM, which wasn’t saying much—he was feeling almost normal, except for the part about needing to sleep for a week. Since that wasn’t an option, he went for caffeine instead, raiding the coffee supply and drinking the stuff black, because powdered creamer was just wrong.

  Fortified with a mug of sludgelike caffeine, he snagged a package of stale cookies from a cabinet, then headed back to Leah. He tucked the serape more tightly around her, set a chair near her head, facing the door, and sat himself down with the cookies and coffee within reach, along with the MAC-10 autopistol he’d pulled out of the gun locker hidden behind a secret panel in the bathroom closet. With the gun on his lap and a spare clip of jade-tipped bullets nearby, he watched the door. And waited.

  And waited.

  He was still waiting and watching, and was on his third pot of coffee when the dawn broke with quiet ferocity.

  In the aftermath of the solstice, the sun rose almost directly behind the great pyramid at Chichén Itzá, a black step-sided silhouette against the fiery red of dawn. The pyramid—dedicated to the creator god Kulkulkan— was a monumental calendar, with ninety-one steps on each of the four sides, plus the top platform, equaling the 365 days of a solar year. Built atop an earlier temple dedicated to the jaguars gods believed to hold up the four corners of the world, the pyramid of Kulkulkan was designed so a serpent shadow descended the stairs at the exact moment of each equinox, in spring and fall. It overlooked the city of Chichén Itzá, which had been the center of religious and military power in the Yucatán from 800-1100 or so, A.D., housing upward of fifty thousand Maya and Nightkeepers at its peak.

  Now, as the sun rose over the ancient city, Strike could just see the parking area that would fill with buses and rental cars in the next few hours, as tourists thronged the ruins, oohing and aahing over the ball court, where teams had competed to toss a heavy ball through stone rings set high on the parallel walls of the court. Little would the tourists know that the ball had represented the sun and the ring had symbolized the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which the Maya had believed was the entrance to Xibalba. In that way, they had reenacted the Great Conjunction over and over again, with the game’s winners offering blood sacrifices— and sometimes their lives—to the gods in the hopes of preventing the end-time.

  The tourists also wouldn’t know that the Sacred Cenote, a giant sinkhole opening onto the underground waterways that were the only source of freshwater in the Yucatán, was not only a sacrifical well into which the Maya had thrown thousands of offerings, it was also one of the two entrances to the sacred underground tunnels of the Nightkeepers. Because, hello, nobody even knew the Nightkeepers existed anymore. Thanks to the conquistadors and their missionaries, knowledge of the Great Conjunction had faded to an astronomical oddity, and the Nightkeeper-inspired Mayan pantheon had been lost to monotheism.

  Which meant what in practical terms? Nothing, really, Strike admitted to himself as the sun continued to climb the sky above the step-sided pyramid belonging to a god who might’ve been forgotten, but was far from gone. The Nightkeepers’ duties had been set long ago, codified into the thirteen prophecies. The Great Conjunction was coming whether mankind cared or not. The Banol Kax would seek to breach the barrier.

  And the Nightkeepers—what was left of them, anyway— would stand and fight.

  Exhaustion drummed through him. Or maybe that was depression. Grief. It was impossible not to think about the massacre, about what it’d meant. If the barrier was fully back online and the Banol Kax had sent their ajaw-makol to prepare the stage for a dark lord’s arrival, then everything was happening right on schedule despite the ultimate sacrifice represented by the massacre. Which meant his father’s dreams had been lies. Or maybe he’d failed to follow the visions to their conclusion? Nobody knew at this point, which was a real bugger, because it didn’t give Strike a damn bit of insight into how to deal with his own dreams. Or Leah’s.

  ‘‘We’ve known each other only a few hours, Blondie, and we’re already up against it,’’ he said to the sleeping woman. He ached over the necessity of wiping her memories and sending her back where she belonged, but the alternative was impossible.

  Nightkeepers were born, not recruited.

  Footsteps sounded in the hallway outside the apartment, jolting Strike from his reverie. He rose to his feet, autopistol at the ready, and relaxed only marginally when he heard the tapping rhythm on the door that signaled friend.

  Moments later, a key turned in the lock and the door opened, and he saw the relief in Jox’s face, the condemnation in Red-Boar’s.

  The sight of the two men loosened something inside Strike, making him feel a little less alone in the world. The second the door shut at their backs, the exhaustion he’d been fighting back all night rose up to claim him. ‘‘Don’t hurt her,’’ he said. ‘‘That’s an order.’’

  And he pitched to the floor, out cold.

  The party at the garden center was in full swing by two a.m. Music pumped from the surround-sound speakers in the apartment, and someone had rigged the intercom to blast the tunes out in the warehouse. It was so loud, nobody cared that it sounded like shit.

  The apartment above the store was jammed, and there were probably fifty or so kids packed into the warehouse. They were dancing in the main aisle and climbing on the stacked pallets of seeds and fertilizer, jumping from one leaning tower to the next and making bets on who’d fall first. A stack of 5-10-10 had already bitten the dust, and it looked like the leaning tower of diatomaceous earth was next. The dancers ground the fertilizer granules to dust beneath their feet, making the air sparkle faintly in the red-tinged emergency lights.

  Rabbit stood above it all, watching from behind the wide picture window that opened from Jox’s office onto the warehouse. He’d declared the room off-limits by slapping a crisscross of yellow-and-black caution tape over the door and locking it behind him, and so far the barricade had held.

  The office lights were off, leaving him watching in the darkness as somebody started lobbing five-pounders of birdseed from the top racks of the thirty-foot-high warehouse. The bags exploded when they hit, sending up millet and sunflower shrapnel and making the dancers scream with laughter.

  Rabbit knew he should be out there. This was his frigging party, and he was going to catch hell for it when the others got back. But he didn’t move, just sat and watched instead, wishing he’d had the guts to go toe-to-toe with the old man when it’d counted. But he hadn’t, so here he was, stuck in the middle of nowhere, doing nothing important. As usual.

  ‘‘Rabbit?’’ There was a knock on the door. ‘‘You in there?’’

  The voice was female, which pretty much guaranteed he was going to answer. He cracked the door
and saw Tracy Lindh, a dark-haired junior cheerleader he knew in passing, who scored about a seven of ten on the do-ability scale, mostly because her breasts balanced out her chunky legs. ‘‘Yeah?’’

  ‘‘I, uh, don’t want to interrupt or anything.’’

  ‘‘I’m alone. Just taking a time-out. You want in?’’ He let the door swing wide enough that she could get through, but kept it tight so she’d have to slide up past him.

  But she stayed put. ‘‘No, I, uh . . . You know that room in the apartment? The one with the padlock? Well, Ben Stanley and a couple of his buddies—’’

  Rabbit was out the door before she finished.

  He should’ve been cursing whatever asshole’d invited the terrible trio, when pretty much everyone who was anyone knew they’d made Rabbit’s life a living hell since junior high. It’d gotten so bad he’d actually studied so he could graduate early and get away from them.

  But all he could think as he bolted up the hallway and skidded through the front door of the apartment, heart pounding in his ears, was, Oh, shit. Oh, no. No, shit, please, no—

  He broke off when he saw that the door to the ritual room was splintered wide-open, with the padlock still attached to its hasp. Raucous male laughter sounded from within.

  Lunging for the door, hoping like hell he wasn’t too late, he shouted, ‘‘Hey, get out of—’’

  He stopped dead, heart slamming in his chest at the sight of three guys standing over the chac-mool altar, drinking beer from the ritual bowls.

  Ben Stanley—a big, arrogant blond jerk who was a second-stringer on the football team and acted like he was captain—stood in the middle. Rabbit didn’t recognize the guys on either side of him, because they were wearing the Nightkeepers’ sacred robes, one red, one black, with the hoods pulled forward to shadow their faces. The hems and sleeve points dragged on the floor, which was littered with broken nachos and what looked like a big spooge of string cheese.

  ‘‘Get. Out.’’ Rabbit tried to keep his voice even, but it shook with rage.

  They shouldn’t be in the ritual chamber. Hell, he shouldn’t even be in there. Not if the barrier had reactivated.