Nightkeepers notfp-1

by Jessica Andersen

  ‘‘Jesus, Anna! I don’t know where you’re coming from sometimes. You’ve been nagging me to set aside time for you, and now that I have, you’re too busy to grab a bite? For Christ’s sake, I can’t seem to win for trying these days.’’ The Dick’s voice carried a harsh, dismissive impatience that set Lucius’s teeth on edge.

  ‘‘Based on what? One night out of the past four months? That’s fair.’’ Anna was trying to keep her tone reasonable, but he knew her well enough to hear the hurt.

  ‘‘This isn’t about what’s fair or not. I’m trying to—’’ The Dick broke off. ‘‘You know what? Forget about it. I’ll just eat at the club.’’

  A door slammed and footsteps rang in the hall. Once they’d passed, Lucius stuck his head out his office door and flipped the retreating form of Anna’s husband a double-barreled bird.

  ‘‘God, what a jerk.’’

  For a second, he thought he’d said that, because he was sure as hell thinking it. Then he turned to find the sentiment shared by Neenie Fisher, a second-year grad student who’d only recently joined Anna’s team full-time.

  She was petite and borderline mousy, with pale eyes and thin lips that didn’t exactly command attention. Rumor had it she was dating some sort of local grunge rock star, which suggested she could catch attention when she wanted it.

  Not so much in the glyph lab, though.

  ‘‘Hey, Neenie.’’ Lucius glanced back to the empty hallway where Anna’s husband had been moments ago. He wanted to agree with the jerk comment and add a few of his own, but he usually tried not to bad-mouth Dick Catori out loud.

  Neenie, however, had no such compunction. ‘‘I don’t get it. Anna is frickin’ gorgeous—why does she put up with that guy? Did you hear him? It’s like he doesn’t give a crap that she’s putting in overtime trying to translate a codex fragment that is, as far as I can tell, completely new to the literature. Doesn’t he get how huge that is? I mean, honestly. I’ll bet if he had some sort of economics emergency—is there even such a thing?— she’d let him bail on dinner. Heck, she probably has more than once, and I bet I can tell you the name of the emergency. My friend Heather’s in his Intro to Econ class, and she said that Desiree—’’

  ‘‘Stop.’’ Lucius capped a hand across Neenie’s mouth, having learned that there wasn’t much else he could do to shut her up when she got on a roll. ‘‘Back up.’’ He took his hand away. ‘‘What codex fragment?’’

  The fact that she didn’t immediately launch into an explanation spoke volumes. Instead, her eyes went wide and she slapped her own hand across her mouth. ‘‘Oh!’’

  Aware that they were out in the hallway, two doors down from Anna’s office, and she was likely to be in a pretty prickly mood after the spat with her husband, Lucius dragged Neenie into his office and shut the door. ‘‘You weren’t supposed to mention it to me, were you?’’

  Eyes still wide, she shook her head, keeping her hand firmly over her mouth. ‘‘I promised,’’ she said, words muffled behind her hand.

  ‘‘So unpromise,’’ he said, as if it were no big deal, which it probably wasn’t to someone like her, a conduit through whom gossip flowed at approximately the speed of sound. ‘‘Come on . . . you know you want to tell me.’’

  Looking undecided—which as far as he was concerned was a big step up from ‘‘Oh, shit, I’m gonna get canned if I tell’’—she dropped her hand from her mouth and looked around his office. ‘‘Well . . .’’

  He followed her gaze, saw it lock onto a small, graceful figurine of a jaguar, and winced. ‘‘That’s real jade. And it’s hand-carved.’’

  He’d gotten the effigy at a small open market at the foot of the Guatemalan highlands during one of his early trips out into the field with Anna. The statuette wasn’t old, but it hadn’t been cheap either.

  She looked back at him and raised an eyebrow. ‘‘Then I guess a promise is a promise.’’

  He scowled, grabbed the effigy, and held it out to her. ‘‘You suck.’’

  ‘‘I had brothers. Deal with it.’’ She accepted the jaguar and tucked it into her pocket, then gestured for him to lean closer so she could whisper her secret.

  ‘‘The door’s closed, for chrissakes. Just say it.’’

  ‘‘Fine. Go ahead, ruin my dramatic intro.’’ She straightened and made a face at him, but now that she’d given herself permission to give with the goods, she couldn’t hold it in a second longer. ‘‘The fragment is gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous. Some of the glyphs are degraded, but you can still see an incredible level of detail, and the colors . . .’’ Her eyes practically glazed over at the memory. ‘‘God, the colors are so awesome now, it’s hard to imagine what it must’ve looked like when it was new.’’

  ‘‘Hello, Neenie?’’ Lucius waved a hand in front of her face. ‘‘Someone else in the room here, remember? Let’s focus. Okay, so Anna showed you a piece of a codex. What did she say, ‘Hey, Neenie, come in here and see what I got my hands on’?’’

  ‘‘No.’’ She shook her head. ‘‘It was more like, ‘Come in and close the door. Now, promise me this is just between us. Okay . . . what does this look like to you?’ ’’

  And all of a sudden, he got it. Anna had called Neenie in because she didn’t know how to translate the glyphs yet, but she’d shown an almost uncanny knack for being able to identify the pictures themselves.

  The writing system of the ancient Maya was seriously complex, the symbols often difficult to interpret, meaning that field epigraphers got real good at pattern recognition real fast, or they moved on, and they often asked one another’s opinions and went with the consensus vote, at least until something else in the text proved the interpretation wrong. It also meant that an epigrapher who didn’t want anyone else to know what she was working on might use, say, an untrained pattern recognizer to help with the gnarly stuff. Anna must’ve gotten stumped on something and needed a second set of trained eyes, but hadn’t wanted to use someone—namely him—who could translate the glyphs themselves. So she’d taken a chance on Neenie, not realizing that her vault had some serious leaks when it came to keeping secrets.

  ‘‘What did you tell her you thought it was?’’ Lucius asked, feeling an itch of excitement. If Anna was working on something huge, it would explain so much of what had gone on lately—from the stress she’d been under, to the weird working hours, to the fact that she’d been kicking him out of the lab as often as possible over the past week.

  Yeah, he was cheesed that she hadn’t let him in on it, but he’d forgive her if it was the sort of thing that would land her—and, by extension, the senior member of her lab—on the cover of National Geographic or Smithsonian magazine or something.

  Already envisioning the two of them suited up in full kit, posing beside the chac-mool throne inside the step-sided Pyramid of Kulkulkan at Chichén Itzá—because that was the sort of thing the big magazines wanted, even if the codex page had come from someplace else entirely and most of their work was done in a lab in Austin—Lucius almost missed Neenie’s answer.

  Then he got it. And froze.

  ‘‘What did you just say?’’

  ‘‘I told her I thought it looked like a screaming skull.’’ Neenie gave him a weird look. ‘‘Are you okay?’’

  No, I’m not. I just took a big whack upside the head with the every-glyph-groupie-for-herself stick.

  He shook his head, hoping those last few words would rattle loose and turn into something else. But they didn’t, leaving him with only one question: Why hadn’t Anna shown it to him? She knew damn well he was looking for text with a screaming skull, so he could compare it to the images on his computer, the ones he thought were screaming and she insisted were nothing but more of good old King Jaguar-Paw Skull’s laughing skeletons.

  If she had one and hadn’t showed it to him, it meant . . .

  Fuck, he didn’t know what it meant.

  ‘‘What else did you see?’’ he demanded.

  Neenie went a l
ittle wild-eyed. ‘‘Do you need to sit down or something? You’re freaking me out.’’

  ‘‘You had brothers. Deal with it.’’

  ‘‘Yeah, okay.’’ Still, she edged a little closer to the door before she said, ‘‘She kept most of it under that protective paper, so I didn’t see all of it. There were a few of those jellyfish blobs with the dots in them.’’

  Which represented numbers, or sometimes dates. ‘‘How many dots? Do you remember?’’

  She shook her head. ‘‘That’s not how my brain works. I can see the patterns, kind of out-of-focus, but if I concentrate too hard the lines get all jumbled up.’’

  ‘‘Great. Well, how about—’’ Lucius broke off. ‘‘Wait. Could you draw it from memory?’’

  She looked offended. ‘‘Of course. I remember this one time my brother Max—’’

  ‘‘Not now. Don’t care.’’ He rummaged through his horizontal filing system—aka the pile beside his desk— and came up with a piece of sketch paper and a pencil with some lead left. ‘‘Draw.’’

  She hesitated and looked at him as though considering another negotiation, but whatever she saw in his face must’ve convinced her otherwise, because she took the pencil and began to sketch.

  Lucius watched, his heart actually racing as the images emerged: the curve of a skull with its mouth gaping wide; three blobs stacked one atop the next with dots beside them, spelling out a date; a highly stylized jaguar with its jaws clamped around the neck of a human figure, with spurting blood that formed a waterfall leading to a round circle wreathed in flames.

  No, Lucius realized. Not a circle. A planet. Earth. Or, more specifically, the end of planet Earth.

  And the transition of a god to the plane of mankind.

  ‘‘Fuck me,’’ he said, loud enough to make Neenie jump and drop her pencil. ‘‘Don’t stop now,’’ he said, excitement riding his tone. ‘‘Keep going!’’

  ‘‘I can’t. That’s all I saw.’’ She looked up at him. ‘‘What does it say?’’

  He shook his head. ‘‘I don’t know.’’

  ‘‘You’re lying.’’

  ‘‘Prove it.’’ He snagged the paper before she could and stuck it in his top desk drawer. ‘‘And before you make a stink about it, don’t forget you’re the one who broke your promise.’’

  She lifted her chin. ‘‘I sold out. There’s a difference.’’ Unable to argue that point—and not sure why he’d want to—Lucius crossed the room and opened the door. ‘‘Whatever. Go away.’’

  She paused in the doorway and turned back to stare him in the eye, and the semiteasing look fell away from her expression. ‘‘You’re defending soon. Now is not the time to do something stupid.’’

  He dipped his chin. ‘‘I know.’’

  But once she was gone, heading down the hall in the same direction the Dick had taken maybe ten minutes earlier, Lucius sucked in a deep breath, told himself there was nothing gained from venturing nothing, and headed for Anna’s office.

  He knocked and waited for her to call, ‘‘Come on in.’’

  Her eyes widened slightly when he entered—not something he would’ve picked up on if he hadn’t been looking, but did because he was. ‘‘Expecting someone else?’’

  ‘‘Only because you knocked,’’ she teased, but the humor didn’t reach her eyes. She started neatening up her desk, pushing the papers to one side and reshelving a couple of books in the cases to the left of the desk. ‘‘What’s up? And make it quick, because I was just headed home.’’

  Which meant either she’d decided to give in to her jerk husband, or she was lying. Lucius wasn’t sure which option pissed him off more, but he throttled it down. ‘‘Never mind, then. I thought you were staying late, so I was checking to see if you wanted anything from Dirty Martin’s,’’ he said, knowing she could occasionally be bribed with a Sissy Burger and a chocolate shake.

  Her expression eased. ‘‘No, thanks. I’m good.’’ She shoved a couple of folders into her soft-sided leather briefcase and stood, slinging the strap over her shoulder. ‘‘See you tomorrow, Lucius. And . . . thanks.’’

  ‘‘For what?’’

  She squeezed his hand briefly in passing, then tugged him out into the hallway so she could shut and lock her office door. ‘‘For being you.’’

  Which left him completely baffled as she marched off, her heels clicking and her long, red-highlighted dark hair swinging opposite the motion of her walk, which he was pretty sure had an added wiggle in it as she turned the corner.

  Damn it, she was going home to make nice with her husband, he realized, which led to a second realization: He really would’ve preferred if she’d been lying to him. He hated thinking of her with the Dick, hated knowing she was trying to save something that everyone around her could see was fatally flawed.

  ‘‘Or maybe you’re the one who’s fatally flawed,’’ he said aloud when he realized he was standing in the middle of the damn hallway, staring after her with his tongue hanging out.

  He turned his attention to her office door, and after a quick check up and down the hallway, gave the knob an experimental rattle.

  The lock held, which was no big surprise. It was also a no-brainer that he didn’t know how to pick the damn thing. That was the sort of thing the people he read about knew how to do—it wasn’t the sort of skill that’d been easy to pick up in the ruthlessly middle-class neighborhood where he’d been raised. However, he and his sisters had been awfully good at sneaking in and out after curfew. And, if he remembered correctly, Anna had been in such a hurry to get home to the Dick that she hadn’t latched the window.

  ‘‘Here goes nothing.’’ He headed outside and around the building, took a quick look around to make sure nobody was watching, slid the casing up, and climbed through.

  At least being a skinny, too-tall beanpole was good for something.

  He landed hard in a disorganized heap, but there was nobody there to laugh, so he didn’t worry about how he looked, only that he didn’t knock anything over and break it. Then, after he’d managed to right himself, he got to work, trying to figure out where she would put something she didn’t want the casual observer to see.

  No doubt she normally carried the codex fragment with her for safekeeping, but he was pretty sure she hadn’t grabbed it in the rush of hustling him out of her office. She hadn’t dared, because she’d known he would’ve asked about it.

  Therefore, the text was still in the office somewhere. All he had to do was find it.

  Anna headed for her car, which was stashed in one of the minuscule lots that peppered the gigantic campus, which had approximately one parking space for every ten students and faculty members. She figured she’d grab a bite to eat and then double back once Lucius left for the night.

  She’d hated leaving the codex behind, but hadn’t had a choice. It was safely hidden, and if she’d pulled it out in front of Lucius the unshakable, she never would’ve gotten away. And besides, she could use an hour without feeling the power scrape along her nerve endings, whispering promises, whispering threats.

  After Strike had mailed the package back to her with a pleading note—the bastard—she’d ignored the codex fragment for as long as possible. Which had been about a day. She’d deciphered only the first few lines so far, but what she’d gotten both thrilled and profoundly disturbed her.

  Why? she wanted to ask her brother. Why are you trying to pull me back in? But she didn’t, partly because she didn’t want to run the risk of falling any farther back into the past, and partly because she already knew the answer: because he needed her. The world was about four years from ending and it was up to him and Red-Boar to fix things, with good old Jox holding their coats.

  Anna sighed as she dropped into the driver’s seat of her car, a powder gray Lexus with more than fifty thousand on the odometer. Dick had wanted to trade the car in last year, but she’d refused, partly because she didn’t see the point in more payments, and partly because there had been so
mething disturbingly symbolic about the argument.

  ‘‘And here I am,’’ she said aloud over the engine’s purr, ‘‘trying to decide between a husband who might or might not want to trade me in when I hit fifty thousand miles and a brother who wants me to—’’ She broke off. Hell, she didn’t know what Strike wanted at this point. He hadn’t tried to contact her directly. He hadn’t even brought the codex fragment in person the first time. He’d sent Red-Boar, one of the few people in the universe she actively disliked.

  Telling herself that didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, Anna slapped the transmission into drive and hit the gas far harder than she’d intended. She gasped as the Lexus launched itself out of the parking spot, then shrieked when another car suddenly materialized in front of her. She went for the brake, but missed, stomping down in shock when she recognized Dick’s beloved Explorer right in front of her.

  The Lexus was accelerating when it hit.

  The impact jolted her against her seat belt as a crunching, rending noise surrounded her on all sides. She screamed again, mostly out of surprise and dismay, and then just sat there for a second, staring at the Lexus’s popped-up hood, the Explorer’s caved-in quarter panel, and the shocked expression on her husband’s face.

  Oh, shit. She’d T-boned Dick’s Explorer.

  She hadn’t been going fast enough to hurt herself— not even fast enough to detonate the air bags—but she’d sure as hell been going fast enough to do some damage. Hands shaking, she fumbled for her seat belt and shoved open the door. Her legs trembled as she stood and tried to think of something—anything—she could say to undo what she’d just done.

  ‘‘Are you okay?’’ He appeared around the back of the Explorer, almost running, his eyes wide and his hands outstretched to her. ‘‘Anna, are you hurt?’’