Final Prophecy 04: Demonkeepers

by Jessica Andersen

  They tore around the corner, hand in hand. Twenty feet into the narrower canyon, they slammed into an invisible, unyielding surface stretched across the opening. Lucius’s breath exploded from him on an “oof” that became a howl when unseen coils snapped tight around them both, jerking them off their feet to dangle in midair.

  “Fuck!” He struggled to get to Jade, to free himself, to do something, anything. A harsh rattling noise surrounded them, marking the invisible force as the dark magic wielded by the denizens of the underworld. He had a nauseating image of him and Jade being caught in a huge, invisible spiderweb, with something terrible and eight-legged advancing intangibly toward them.

  If you’re ever going to connect to the magic, now would be a good fucking time, he thought, and bit down viciously on his tongue. Pain flared and blood welled in his mouth, but that was it. No magic. No power. No nothing.

  “Lucius!”

  Jade’s shout was scant warning as Jaguar-head grabbed Lucius’s ankles and yanked, pulling him free of the web magic. Lucius hit the ground hard and let himself go limp, though his heart hammered in his chest, impelled by rage and the pounding need to get to Jade, to protect her, to somehow get her back to safety, though he wasn’t the mage she needed him to be.

  Then Snake-head leaned over him, hissing in satisfaction. Revulsion lent added force as Lucius lunged to his feet, kicking hard at the demon warrior’s kneecap. He hit his target, felt a hell of an impact, and heard the sick pop of bone and cartilage. Snake-head howled and went down. Lucius kicked him in the face, connecting with a watermelon crunch that was disgustingly satisfying.

  Blood pounding, he scrambled up and spun—straight into the stubby end of Jaguar- head’s spear. The weapon rattled and belched greasy brown smoke, which whipped around Lucius, immobilizing him in the same invisible coils as before. Then Wolf-head stepped up and smashed Lucius in the temple with his short club. The impact thudded through him and the world spun as he dropped with the grace of a corpse. Jade screamed, but her cry cut off midway, choking to silence. Lucius roared in answer, struggling against the unyielding bonds. “Jade. Jade!”

  As the world faded around him, he tried to fight his way back to full consciousness, all the while praying, Gods, don’t let it end like this!

  It didn’t. When he came to a short time later, he was being carried head and foot between two of the animal-headed warriors. Beside him strode Jaguar-head, who carried Jade over his shoulder; she lay still, but her eyes were open and reflected her relief when Lucius sent her a wink. He didn’t dare do more, though. Not until he better understood what the hell was going on . . . and what they could do about it.

  He couldn’t see who had shoulders, but Snake-head was at his feet, not even limping. The damn things have healing magic, he realized. But what the hell were they? Not Banol Kax or makol, he knew. The dark lords of the underworld were huge and inhuman, and the archive said the demon souls of the makol took on a shadowy, green-eyed form when they weren’t possessing human hosts. So what other classes of badasses existed within Xibalba, and how could they be taken down for good? Unfortunately, that was yet another example of the Nightkeepers’ critical need to fill in the gaps. Someone, at some point in the past, must’ve known what these things were, and how to kill them. But that knowledge, like so much else, had been lost.

  So think it through, he told himself. There’s got to be something we can do here. But unfortunately, the whole “everything happens for a reason” religious tenet of the magi had a major flaw in this case: With the skyroad destroyed and the gods unable to communicate with the Nightkeepers or directly influence things on the earthly plane, logic said that it hadn’t been a god that had brought them to the canyon. More likely, one of the Banol Kax or a powerful demon underling had detected the sex magic and the stirring of the Prophet’s powers and usurped the energy flows somehow. Which would suggest that he and Jade didn’t have a destined role to play in the underworld; the dark lords were just looking to cut down on their enemies.

  Okay, so maybe thinking it through hadn’t been such a great idea.

  Try the homing spell, he mouthed to Jade, chancing the communication. When she got a mulish I’m not going without you look on her face, he added, If you can get back, you can bring help.

  Maybe. Maybe not, but at least she’d be safe.

  The small party passed through the stone pillars, clearly heading for the pyramid and whatever had made that terrible noise earlier. They were running out of time. “Do it!” he hissed.

  Eyes bleak, Jade nodded. But when she whispered the ritual word, nothing happened. Not one freaking thing.

  Lucius cursed inwardly as that brief hope guttered and died. He had no illusion that he could summon the power on his own, and he doubted sex magic would be an option anytime soon. So what the hell else could he do? There had to be something, damn it. Problem was, he knew that was a self-serving lie. Sometimes life just wasn’t fucking fair.

  The group came within view of the pyramid, which loomed ever larger in Lucius’s limited field of vision, bringing a mixture of awe and dread. Awe because he’d spent a third of his lifetime studying a dead culture suddenly coming alive in front of him. Dread because . . . well, he wasn’t an idiot. But that didn’t mean he was giving up, either.

  The whistle-blower wasn’t on the ramparts anymore, and the dogs—and whatever else was inside—had gone ominously quiet as the procession stopped short of the temple structure. Lucius’s captors unceremoniously dumped him facedown in the scuffed dirt. He landed cursing, and rolled onto his side as Jade thumped down on her butt next to him. She cried out when she hit, but then snapped her mouth shut and glared instead.

  Good girl, Lucius thought. He didn’t get a chance to do more than lock eyes with her before Snake-head and Pig-head moved in and dragged him to his feet. Still bound in the relentless yet invisible shield magic, he had zero choice in the matter. He hung between his captors, glaring when two of the others hauled Jade to her feet, so the captives and their animal- headed guards stood facing one of the low- linteled doorways that led into the pyramid’s lower tier.

  Brain racing in search of a clue, explanation, or escape route, Lucius scanned the intricate Mayan glyphwork carved into the surrounding stones, automatically starting to arrange the phonemes into words and meanings. But before he’d gotten beyond, “On this cardinal day of . . .” there was movement within the temple and four newcomers emerged. They looked like men—in that they had all their flesh and normal human faces—and they wore elaborate cloaks over jewel-encrusted armor plates and armbands. But, incongruously, the armor wasn’t made of wood, leather, and stone, as were the traditional trappings worn by the animal-heads. Instead, it was made of burnished metal: copper, or maybe gold. Which didn’t make sense, because the Maya hadn’t been metalworkers, and the Mayan paradigm prevailed in Xibalba.

  At least, he thought it did. But the more he looked at the metal-armored men, the more he became convinced that they were outfitted like pharaohs’ guards, pure Egyptian from their kohl- lined eyes to the rayed-sun symbols on their cloaks. Before he could do the necessary brain shift to figure out what the hell it meant, there was another stir of movement from within the temple, followed by a glint of luminous green that obliterated every other thought inside Lucius’s skull. Rage and revulsion surged to tunnel his vision as a smoky shadow emerged, becoming a dark, man-shaped ghost with glowing green eyes. Makol!

  The demon soul drifted across the ground, moving toward him. The air went cold and Lucius’s bones ached with death and damnation, and the things he’d sworn he would never be, ever again. Clamping his teeth against a stream of foul curses, he strained against the unyielding shield magic. As the makol drew nearer, the shifting shadow morphed and solidified, becoming almost a man, one that wore a tall diadem marked with the sun symbol that had been in use for only a single Egyptian dynasty, that of the pharaoh who had converted the empire to monotheistic sun worship, largely by killing off anyone who prefe
rred the polytheistic religion that had been entrenched for thousands of years.

  Gut tightening further with the ID, Lucius bared his teeth. “I thought you’d had yourself declared a god. Is this your idea of a deity’s fitting reward . . . Akhenaton?” Although the pharaoh’s animal- headed minions—which he belatedly recognized as perverted versions of the Egyptian pantheon Akhenaton had outlawed—might still speak their native tongue, he had no doubt the makol understood him. The damn things could see straight inside a man.

  “Akhenaton.” Jade spat the name of one of the Nightkeepers’ most ancient enemies: the pharaoh who had been responsible for the first of the three massacres that had driven the Nightkeepers nearly to extinction.

  At her gasp, the demon spirit turned. Started drifting toward her.

  “Stay the hell away from her,” Lucius snarled. The demon’s dark presence scraped along his nerve endings; worse, he could feel its interest in Jade, its dismissal of him. What makol would want a human when a Nightkeeper was available? The thought of Jade going through the transition sickened him beyond reason, past caution. “I said, hands off!” Deep within, the rage spun higher, becoming a strange, edgy energy that buzzed through him, coalescing at the places where the shield magic held him fast.

  From within the temple, the dogs suddenly started barking again, their cries sharp and frenzied. Excited.

  Akhenaton hesitated at the sound, and Lucius thought he caught a thread of satisfaction coming from the damned soul. Some message must have passed, because the four pharaoh’s guards broke from their positions and closed on Jade.

  “Lucius!” She craned her head, looking back at him as the guards started dragging her into the fortress. The dogs went nuts, barking and howling, sounding almost human in their cries.

  “Jade!” Anguish hammered through Lucius, catching him up and taking him someplace within himself, someplace he hadn’t been before. Pain ripped through him, his vision washed red-gold, and pressure detonated inside his head. Liquid flame poured through his veins, bringing a burning agony that he latched onto, instinctively sending it toward the places where the shield magic held him immobile.

  A terrible roar of rage split the air; for a second he thought it had come from him. Then the air went instantaneously from cool to blistering hot, huge feathered wings boomed in the air, and a red-orange specter rose into sight, lifting from behind the step-sided wall, flapping hard to stay aloft on ragged, bleeding wings. The sky lit supernova bright in an instant, driving back those standing below on the sand.

  Squinting into the flare, Lucius couldn’t pinpoint the thing’s image: One second it seemed a terrible winged and feathered demon with curling horns and fangs, its outline wreathed in fire; then in the next it shifted, seeming to flash the image of a huge figure, that of a masked man, his face obscured behind the symbols of a god. More important, Lucius knew the symbols. Was he really seeing what he thought he was seeing, or was this another of Akhenaton’s creations?

  He didn’t know, but he had to chance it. Throwing back his head, he shouted, “Kinich Ahau!”

  The horned Mayan firebird, one aspect of the great sun god itself, roared in answer, beating its wings against the stone bars that held it contained. Flames poured from its beak and eyes, licking along the bars and turning them gradually molten. And, as Lucius squinted against the blazing light, he remembered having seen this before.

  Or rather, he hadn’t seen it . . . but Cizin had. His demon possessor had been a double agent, planted within the Order of Xibalba to keep Iago in check when the dark lords began to worry that their earthly namesakes were getting above themselves. The Banol Kax didn’t want Iago to ally with Moctezuma’s demon soul, not just because the bloodthirsty Aztec king had once led powerful armies and plotted his own version of the end-time, but also because he’d elevated himself to the status of a god, one affiliated with the sun itself . . . and the Banol Kax didn’t want that to happen because they already had plans to put in place a sun god of their own choosing: the sun king Akhenaton.

  They had captured the true sun god, Kinich Ahau, along with his canine companions. When the barrier’s activity peaked during the summer solstice of the first triad year—aka in nine fucking days—the dark lords were going to sacrifice the true sun god and elevate Akhenaton in his place.

  And oh, holy fuck, that couldn’t be allowed to happen.

  Snarling, Akhenaton turned on the firebird, lifted shadowy arms, and chanted a spell. In an instant, a chill wind blew, the air cooled, and the molten stone bars turned solid; they were slightly deformed, but not by enough to free the god. But that hadn’t been the firebird’s aim, Lucius realized seconds later, when two dark blurs hurtled through the widened openings between two pairs of archways: pony-size black dogs with sharp white teeth and red eyes.

  The companions!

  One of the dogs went for Jade’s captors, the other for Lucius’s. Dark blood sprayed as the ravening canine ripped out Snake-head’s throat; the man-beast went down and stayed down. When it did, the shield magic surrounding Lucius disappeared.

  The old Lucius wanted to stand and gape at legends come to life. The better man he was becoming landed running. He lunged for Jade; three of the pharaoh’s guards were using their elongated pikes to keep the big black dogs at bay while the fourth force-marched her toward the fortress, following the demon shadow as it disappeared into the darkness within. Inside the pyramid, the sun god shrieked in rage and pain.

  “No!” Lucius bolted after them, catching up with the rearmost guard just outside the temple. The guard spun and leveled his pike, his eyes lighting with battle glee as dark magic rattled. Seconds later, though, they flattened to terror, and a dark blur flashed past Lucius and hit the guard in the chest, sending the bastard down and away from Jade. Blood sprayed and vertebrae crunched. Lucius charged forward and grabbed Jade, who stood where the guard had left her, blank eyed and shocky-looking. The magic that had been holding her fast was gone.

  “Lucius!” She sagged into him, grabbed onto him. She might’ve said something else, but he couldn’t hear her over the tidal roar that was rising within him. His body heated to flash point and beyond; he was burning without flames, writhing in agony without screams. The world closed in on him from all sides until he could feel only hot agony and the press of Jade’s body. A howling scream slammed through him, out of him.

  He felt that same slipping, sliding sensation from before, only this time it was sucking him up, not down. There was a jolt of movement; he heard the makol’s screech of anger, Kinich Ahau’s roar of satisfaction, the companions’ howls . . . and then it was all gone. The world whipped past him; he caught a glimpse of the hellmouth, the cloud forest, and what he thought might be the barrier, followed by the outlines of his cottage at Skywatch. Then there was a dizzying jolt and he was back in his body, sprawled inelegantly on the living room floor.

  Home.

  He lay still for a moment, blinking as his body came back online. When a few of his larger muscle groups checked in, he used them to roll over and stretch out a hand to where Jade lay, an arm’s length away. Her eyes were open, though blurred with disorientation. She was there, though. She was okay. Thank you, gods, he thought, but then jolted as the rest of it returned. “The firebird! We have to”—go back and rescue the sun god, he started to say, but couldn’t get the words past a sudden rushing noise in his head. His vision blurred. He heard her call his name, felt her grab his hand, but those inputs seemed very far away, and so much less important than the powerful surge that caught him up, feeling very different from the magic that had yanked the two of them to Xibalba. He saw her worried eyes through the whirling tunnel of power as he was yanked back into the magic . . . this time alone.

  “Lucius!” Jade screamed his name, even though deep down inside, she knew he was already gone. His eyes were rolled back in his head; his body had gone limp. She told herself not to freak, that it was normal for that to happen when a mage entered the barrier. Except that he wa
sn’t a mage . . . and the magic had already gone very wrong once tonight. Which meant . . . what? What should she do now?

  Her hands were shaking; her whole body was trembling. But strangely, the memories of what she’d just been through seemed oddly blunted, allowing her to think and react rather than just freaking the hell out. She’d heard the others talk about the preternatural focus conferred by the warrior’s talent, and how it helped them function under terrifying conditions. She thought she might be experiencing something like that now, only coming from shock rather than innate talent.

  Pushing to her feet, she reached for her pocket, intending to call Strike, both to report in and to get help with Lucius. She didn’t know where he’d gone, hadn’t even felt the magic that had taken him, and that worried her. If their shared magic had dumped them in Xibalba, where would he wind up now that he was flying solo? If they were lucky, he’d make it to the library . . . but it wasn’t as if luck had been with them so far.

  She had the earpiece partway to her ear when a whispery word echoed through the room: “Jade.”

  It was a woman’s voice. The same one she’d heard just before being yanked into Xibalba.

  Freezing, she looked around. “Who is that? Where are you?”

  “I’m here. Come to me.” The world wavered. Red-gold magic flared, surrounding Jade unbidden.

  This time, the power jolted her in the familiar sidelong direction of the barrier, but she hadn’t performed any transition spell, hadn’t called the magic. Lifting the earpiece, she screamed, “Help me!”

  But as Lucius’s cottage shimmered and disappeared, she realized she’d forgotten to turn the damned earpiece on. The others wouldn’t know there was a problem for hours, maybe longer. And by then it might be too late.