Final Prophecy 04: Demonkeepers

by Jessica Andersen

  The realization brought a tremor of fear, but she squelched it as best she could. You wanted to be involved? Here’s your chance.

  “Are you hurt?” Lucius’s face crossed her field of vision, his head casting a shadow over her. His eyes held concern, but behind that was a layer of reserve, of battle readiness. The old Lucius would’ve been jittering with a combination of fear and exhilaration, resolved to do his best but not sure it would be good enough. The man he’d become seemed to be waiting for additional intel before panicking, or else he’d gotten better at hiding his feelings. Maybe both.

  Either way, it was comforting solidity, especially given that neither of them had the warriors’ skills of shield or fireball magic, and they didn’t wear warriors’ knives or automatic weapons loaded with jade-tips. With them unarmed, she could only hope that wherever they were, it was safe. Considering that Lucius hadn’t taken one look around them, grabbed her, tossed her over his newly massive shoulder, and taken off at a dead run, she was hopeful. For the moment, at least.

  “I’m okay.” As the churn of the strange barrier crossing subsided, she found it was true. She felt fine. Better than fine, actually; despite the mad rush to yank on their clothes as they’d been vacuumed into the magic, her body still hummed with deep satisfaction. Her skin was acutely sensitive, open-pored and prickling in the heat, giving off the faint, shared scent of sex. Some of that realization must have shown in her face, because his eyes suddenly locked onto her with new intensity, bringing a heightened curl of sensual awareness, an added kick that notched her temp up even further. In an instant, she wanted him inside her, though he’d been there only minutes before. Or maybe that was why the desire was so much more acute now; she knew what it could be like, how his big body felt against hers, inside hers.

  She had reached for him before she was aware of moving, cupping his angled jaw in her palm, then sliding her hand around to the softer skin at his nape, up into the thickness of hair that had gone from unruly to luxurious with the magic-wrought changes that had taken him from the man she had known as a friend and pleasant diversion, to one who compelled her, fascinated her. She wanted to strip him naked and stare at him, wanted his solid weight pressing into her, grounding her. Pounding into her. Caught in a spell of heat and sensation, she levered herself up as he leaned down. Her heart raced; her eyelids eased shut even as her lips parted on a low moan of anticipation.

  The sound emerged very loud in the strange silence around them, shattering the moment. Jade froze, and felt Lucius’s neck go tense and tight beneath her caressing hand. When she opened her eyes, she found him staring back at her, his expression mirroring her own inner shout of, What the hell are we doing?

  They were in a completely unknown situation, brought there by a type of barrier magic she’d never experienced before. Gods, she hadn’t even looked around. One glance at Lucius, one touch, and she’d lost all sense of rationality and self- protection. Love isn’t a miracle, she remembered writing once in a patient’s notes; it’s a damned mental illness. Here was her proof, and this wasn’t even love. It was just good sex.

  Okay, really, really good sex. But still.

  Lucius’s face went shuttered, but one corner of his mouth kicked up. “I think I’m starting to understand why sex magic is such a driving force for you Nightkeepers. If that’s what this is, it’s powerful stuff.” He eased away from her, shaking his head. “Somebody should’ve warned me it’s like hammering a double Red Bull with a Viagra chaser.” He cut her a look. “Not that I’ve ever tried that, mind you. I’m just saying.”

  Jade didn’t say anything; she wasn’t sure she could’ve managed to meet his wit, given the sudden hollowness that had opened up inside her. It wasn’t that she minded his attributing the intensity of what had happened between them to sex magic—she was relieved by the explanation, though a little embarrassed that she hadn’t figured it out first. No, what had her breathing deeply to fill the emptiness was the knowledge that she’d bought into it so quickly, so thoroughly. And that she’d been helpless in its throes, vulnerable in his arms, without the slightest thought for safety or the job at hand. For all that she had bragged inwardly about not losing herself to the sex magic before, she had come damned close this time.

  You’re a mage, she reminded herself. Use the magic. Don’t let it use you. But deep down inside, she couldn’t escape the fact that she wasn’t much of a mage, and didn’t know bupkes about using the magic, not really. Shit.

  “Well,” she said, blowing out a breath that did little to settle the churning in her stomach, “the magic got us here. Let’s see where ‘here’ is.” Though even as she straightened to look around, she remembered the strange downward lurch of the magic. Had it been her imagination, or had someone really whispered, “Beware”? And if so, who? The only true occupants of the barrier were the nahwal, a group of strangely withered ancestral ghosts that spoke with many voices all in synchrony. This had been a single female voice. At least, she thought it had.

  Then she got a look around herself, and she stopped thinking about the voice, about the magic, and even about the man beside her, because all she could do was stare as her mouth fell open.

  They were . . . Dear gods, she didn’t know where they were. They had materialized roughly in the center of a long, perfectly rectangular canyon—or maybe a pit? an enclosure?—that was a mile or so long, a quarter mile wide, and open to the mauve sky. Red rock walls rose up around them, sheer and unbroken, stretching several stories high before ending in perfectly straight lines. The sand underfoot was a gritty version of the same reddish stone, with something else that sparkled faintly in the unchanging light. Huge, unadorned columns sprouted from the sand, one right beside where Jade and Lucius had landed. More important, several hundred yards away from where she and Lucius crouched, in what looked like the exact center of the enclosure, sat a huge four-sided pyramid made of three tiers that descended in size from bottom to top, forming god-size steps leading upward. At each corner was carved a humanoid head, easily ten feet tall, with a fiercely scowling face that was surrounded by a halo of radiating lines. She couldn’t immediately place the image, but thought it was familiar. Each tier was painted a different color: red at the bottom, black in the middle, white at the top. As was the case with many Mayan pyramids, human-size staircases ran down the center of each of the four sides, with rectangular doorways set on either side of the staircases on the upper and lower tiers. Practically every available surface was worked with intricate glyph carvings that were the traditional blend of art and language. Unlike the other pyramids she’d seen in person or studied at UT, though, this one didn’t culminate in a ceremonial platform, or with a boxy temple built at the top. Instead, the center of the pyramid was an open, empty space crowned by a series of stone archways running parallel to one another, looking like some ancient creature had died atop the temple and gone to fossil with its rib bones bared to the bright, sunless sky.

  Wonder shimmered through Jade. Though vaguely bunkerlike, it was elegant in its own way. More, it wasn’t a restored ruin of a bygone era or a computer-generated rendering of what an ancient Mayan temple might have looked like. This was the real thing. Somehow.

  “Do you think that’s the library?” she asked softly. During its tenure on earth, the library had been hidden in a subterranean cavern that could be accessed only by a series of water-filled, booby-trapped tunnels. The natural cavern, embellished with carved scenes and ancient spells, had been empty when Nate and Alexis discovered it. Since then, the Nightkeepers had assumed—or at least Jade had—that when their ancestors had cast the powerful magic needed to hide the library within the barrier and create the Prophet’s spell to retrieve the information it contained, they would have replicated the stone-carved cavern within the barrier’s gray-green, foggy milieu. But this was no stone cavern, and that hadn’t been any ordinary barrier transition. Not to mention that the Prophet’s spell hadn’t said anything about the Prophet entering the barrier or trav
eling to the library itself; the magic was supposed to connect Lucius with the information, allowing him to channel it while he stayed on the earthly plane.

  Instead, he—a human who wasn’t quite a Prophet—and she—a mage who barely rated the title—had somehow been sucked . . . where?

  When he didn’t answer her question, it was an answer nonetheless. She blew out a breath. “You saw the hellmouth too.” The image of the cave mouth overlain with a carving of a screaming skull was burned into her retinas. Iago might’ve locked and hidden the earthly entrance to Xibalba, but somehow they had gotten through.

  Lucius nodded. “Yeah. I saw it.” He glanced upward. “And damned if that doesn’t look like the sky from the in-between, only way brighter.” The in-between was the limbo plane where his consciousness had been trapped while the makol demon had been in full control of his body. In it was the dusty road leading to the river-crossing entrance to Xibalba.

  “The library is hidden in the barrier,” Jade pointed out. “If it had been in the underworld already, the Banol Kax wouldn’t have needed to infiltrate Iago’s camp to ensure that his people didn’t gain access.” Yet they had, through Lucius’s makol. Which suggested the library wasn’t in Xibalba. But if that was the case, why were they there? “Do you think someone—or something—pulled us here?”

  “More things are possible in heaven and earth,” he misquoted, expression grim, but she also heard an undertone of suppressed excitement. He caught her hands and pulled her to her feet, so they stood facing each other in the lee of the big stone column, hands linked. “But given where we’ve ended up, I don’t like the idea of who might’ve been doing the pulling.” He glanced past the concealing pillar toward the pyramid, then looked sidelong at her. “We should go back and get weapons, maybe reinforcements.”

  “You’re assuming the way spell is going to work.” The homing spell that was supposed to return an out-of-body mage to his or her body was notoriously fickle. “And that we’ll be able to get back here afterward.” What was more, the same skitter of excitement she saw on his face was running through her veins, urging her onward. “Let’s check out the pyramid.” The suggestion came partly from duty, partly from her growing need to do something . . . and also from her growing suspicion that whoever had brought them there would have to be the one to send them back. The day of the new moon wasn’t one of barrier flux, which meant she and Lucius shouldn’t have been able to enter the barrier, never mind get all the way through the hellmouth.

  Beware.

  “We’re unarmed. Shit, we don’t even have a pocketknife to blood our palms.” But he wanted to do it. She saw the building excitement in his face, felt it race in her own system, as though they were daring each other without saying the words.

  “We’re just going to go look around.” But he had a point; stupidity didn’t favor survival of the fittest. So she took a deep breath. “I’ll shield us.” At his sharp look, she shook her head. “I know it’s a warrior’s spell, but there’s something—” In the air, she started to say, but broke off because that wasn’t it, precisely. The faint glitter of red-gold magic and the hum of Nightkeeper power were right there in front of her, misting the air between her and Lucius, close enough that she thought she could reach out and grab the power if she was brave enough. Do it, her instincts said. She didn’t know if it was the residual vulnerability from the sex magic, the barrier crossing, or something about the strange canyon, but the magic suddenly felt as if it were a part of her, in a way that was both foreign and compelling.

  Acting on instinct, her body moving without her conscious volition, she bit down sharply on her own tongue, drawing blood. Letting go of Lucius’s hands, she stepped back and spit onto the sparkling, red-tinged sand, offering a sacrifice of both blood and water to the gods. The red-gold coalesced around her, then around Lucius, as it had done before, when they had been lying together in the aftermath. Magic spurted through her like lust, hot and hard. It caught her up, spun through her, making her want to scream with the mad glory of it.

  Lucius said something, but she barely heard him over the hum of magic that gathered around her, inside her.

  “I can do this,” she said, or maybe she only thought it. Either way, the certainty coiled hard and hot inside her, and the shimmering magic that hovered in front of her coalesced into . . . what? She could almost see shapes in the sparkles as she reached out to the magic, touched it. A soundless detonation ripped through her, a rush of power that strained toward something that stayed just out of reach. If she could just—

  “Jade!” Lucius’s shout broke through, shattering her concentration. He had her by the arms and was shaking her, his eyes hard. “Pull it back, now!”

  The magic snapped out of existence in an instant, without her volition. The loss of that vital energy sapped her, had her sagging against him. Her head spun, but his urgency penetrated. “What? What’s wrong?”

  Then she heard it: a dog’s mournful howl coming from the other side of their concealing pillar. Lucius crowded her closer to the column, pressing her flat against it with his body. Against her temple, he whispered, “There’s something going on in the pyramid.”

  The carved stone was warm and rough where Jade’s fingers clutched at the grooved surface, grounding her even as her mind spun with the power of the magic she’d just touched on, and the sharp grief that she’d been unable to do a damned thing with it. Her heart banged against her ribs as she and Lucius eased around the edge to take a look.

  “Oh, shit.” She wasn’t sure which one of them said it. Maybe they both had.

  Whereas before the pyramid had seemed deserted, now a man stood on the first of the three big, god-size steps. He was wearing a simple white loincloth and had dark hair and strangely gray- cast skin, and after a moment of standing motionless, he raised a carved conch shell to his mouth and blew a shrill note. Moments later the call was answered by movement at the darkened doorways on the lower tier; then five more men emerged, but these guys were wearing ceremonial regalia and full-face masks carved to look like various creatures: a snake, an antelope, a white jaguar, a bird of prey, and a wolf. The masks were topped with elaborate feather-and-bone headdresses that created colorful halos, and the men’s bodies were asymmetrically shielded on their left sides, leaving their right arms free to wield the short- handled clubs they wore at their belts.

  Jade just stared, stunned. The skin of the men’s arms and legs was gray-cast in places, missing in others, peeled away to show reddish meat, even down to glimpses of stained bone. Worse, the animal shapes weren’t masks; those were the actual heads of the man-beasts who had come from the pyramid. For a second, denying the horror of it all, her brain locked on the image: five armored men and one musician against a background of rusty hues. It was just like the painting that’d been showing on Lucius’s flat-screen. But why? How? What did it mean?

  “They sensed the magic,” she said, forcing the words. What had she been thinking, trying to wield a warrior’s spell? Worse, she’d let the magic take over, let it use her—or at least attempt to use her.

  “I think so.” But he squeezed her shoulder in silent support. “Now the question is whether that’s a good thing.”

  Jade held her breath, though it wasn’t as if that was going to change anything.

  Without hesitation or consultation, the five armored men—demons? what were they?—headed straight for their hiding spot, with Jaguar-head in the lead and the others grouped behind him. He pulled the short club from his belt, held it out to the side, and uttered a sharp command. The weapon shimmered momentarily and a malicious rattle skidded through the air as the short club elongated to become a long, deadly looking shaft with a wickedly barbed spike at one end and a bulbous knob at the other. The blunt end roiled greasy brown.

  Dark magic!

  A cry caught in Jade’s throat. She locked eyes with Lucius as their question was answered all too clearly. “Not good!” they said in unison.

  CHAPTER FIVE
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  “Come on!” Lucius grabbed Jade’s hand and dragged her to a skidding run that churned up the sparkling sand and pebbles underfoot. He kept his body between her and their pursuers, impelled by a vicious, bloodthirsty sort of protectiveness he’d never felt before. For all that he respected the hell out of the Nightkeepers’ egalitarian use of both men and women in the warrior caste and on the front lines, this was a different situation, a different woman. She shouldn’t even be there, damn it. Neither of them should.

  As they burst from cover, the jaguar-masked warrior shouted something that probably translated to “Halt, intruder!” or the equivalent, though Lucius didn’t know what language they were using. It wasn’t Mayan; at least, not any version of it he’d ever studied or heard.

  From within the stone enclosure, the dog stopped howling and started barking, and was soon joined by a second set of snarling barks, feral-sounding and mean. Then, half a heartbeat later, the barks were drowned out by a roar that wasn’t made by anything so mundane as a canine. The noise shook the canyon floor and made the arched top of the temple start to seem less like an artistic flourish and more like the top of a cage.

  Lucius glanced over his shoulder. Their pursuers were gaining fast, in a blur of ceremonial armor, ragged flesh, and flashing fangs. And what the hell were they? Animal- headed zombies didn’t feature in the Nightkeepers’ legends, at least, not that he knew. A connection nudged at him, but he couldn’t think about that right now. They needed to find a way out of the strange canyon, which was starting to feel too much like a gladiatorial pit. Gods knew that concept wasn’t outside the legends.

  “Look!” Jade pointed toward one of the corners where the canyon ended—only it wasn’t a corner anymore. As they drew nearer, the optical illusion of a dead end gave way, showing where their canyon made a T intersection with another running at right angles. Maybe that was a way out!