Final Prophecy 04: Demonkeepers

by Jessica Andersen

  A quick but thorough search of the living space turned up a big, fat nothing. No paperwork, no computer. She forced herself through the bedroom, which boasted glass walls on three sides and was dominated by a big, sybaritic bed that made her decidedly uncomfortable. But not uncomfortable enough to give up the search. She pressed on, skimmed through the closets and bathrooms, her nerves notching higher with each passing minute.

  Shit. Shit. Shit. Where could it be? They wouldn’t have taken the safe machine with them to the gun range. It was in the suite somewhere. Heart pounding, she checked the doorways leading along a short hallway that didn’t seem to have much of a purpose . . . until she got to a door about halfway down and hit pay dirt.

  As she opened the door, gas torches flared automatically to life, lighting a bathroom-size chamber lined with stone veneer and holding a chac-mool altar. Adrenaline zinged at the sight of a blond woman looking back at her; it took her a half second to recognize herself, wild-eyed and nervous, reflected in a highly polished obsidian disk hung behind the altar. The king’s heavily carved ceremonial bowl sat on the altar, with an unfamiliar knife beside it, weighing down a short stack of the heavy parchment that was used for small blood ceremonies. The room was imbued with magic, and a weighty sense of history. Under any other circumstance, Patience would’ve backed her ass out of there and pretended she knew nothing about Strike’s private place of worship. And she would have done that now . . . if it hadn’t been for the laptop case tucked in the corner of the ritual chamber. It was hidden, she suspected, not so much from Leah but from Jox.

  Last chance, a little voice whispered inside Patience. You can still take off. Nobody would know you’d been here. Which was true . . . except that she would know she’d wussed out. And that wasn’t an option for her, either as a warrior or a mother.

  Her legs shook a little as she knelt; her hands trembled as she fumbled open the case and powered up the little mininotebook. There was no password or security—why would there be? Strike wouldn’t have imagined anyone would break into his quarters, into his freaking shrine, and fire up his machine.

  “Come on, come on!” she chanted under her breath as the stupid thing took precious seconds to boot, longer to bring up the Windows screen, with its reassuring blue background. The desktop was stripped down to the absolute basics, just a couple of folders. She opened one labeled KINGLY CRAPOLA, which was pure Strike.

  It contained six subdirectories, none of them obviously what she wanted. She opened each of them and quickly scanned through, discarding anything with last-update codes well before the middle of the prior year, when Strike had ’ported Hannah, Woody, and the twins away from Skywatch. Nothing. Nothing. Still nothing. Oh, gods . . .

  She struck gold on subfolder number four; she couldn’t remember the name, knew only that she was looking at a reference request and credit check on Woodrow Byrd, who was applying to rent a four- room apartment in Seattle. The first name was right. The date was right. And Strike, with the help of the Nightkeepers’ tame PI, Carter, had made sure the credit checks all came back fine without linking to anything substantive. More, there was a second file in the subfolder: a lease agreement, signed for a year in Woody’s name . . . but in Hannah’s handwriting.

  A sob caught in Patience’s throat and the luminous screen blurred as tears filled her eyes. But when emotion would’ve put her on her ass, her warrior’s talent flared, clicking her over to logic and rationality on one level of her consciousness. That part of her fumbled out her family-only cell phone, punched in the address, and saved the precious information. Then she closed out of the files, powered down the mininotebook, and tucked it back into its case in the corner. Leaving the room as she’d found it, save for being a few degrees warmer, smokier, and lower on oxygen, thanks to the gaslit torches and her own hyperventilation, she slipped out of the shrine and shut the door, pausing to wipe the door handle, not because she thought anyone would be likely to dust for prints, but because . . . well, just because. Then, breathing shallowly through her mouth and moving on cat’s-paw feet, she retraced her steps through the royal suite.

  Even as her body was going through those motions, though, her heart and mind were focused on her phone, and the treasure within it. An address. She knew where her babies were—or at least where they’d been. Rather than exultation or excitement, she felt numb with the emotional hugeness of it, the prospect that she might soon be watching them walk past as she stood nearby, invisible. Hungry for even the sight of them. Would they sense her? Would they somehow know she was there?

  “Don’t get ahead of yourself,” she warned herself. “One thing at a time.” And just then, the one thing was getting out of there unseen. She’d been in the suite far longer than she’d planned, but a quick pause and scan at the main doors showed that the hallway was still empty, the coast still clear.

  Once she was out in the hall with the carved door closed behind her, she exhaled a long, deep breath and inhaled its return, the oxygen making her suddenly light-headed. Her blood buzzed in her veins and she could’ve sworn her feet weren’t touching the ground anymore, though it was joy rather than magic making her feel that way. Laughter bubbled in her chest as she spun a full circle, her hands spread away from her body and her hair flaring out.

  “Bullshit,” the king’s deep voice said, faint with distance. “I had you beat until the last set of targets. And you cheated.”

  Patience froze, her smile turning to an “O” of horror.

  “Gods, could you be any more of a sore loser?” Leah’s voice was light and teasing as the two of them continued their long-standing debate over who rocked the gun range. “I took out one more target with half a clip fewer jade-tips. And you shot one of the good guys; that’s an automatic forfeit.”

  “I still say she looks like a shifty bitch,” he said of one of the new false-alarm targets Michael had installed in an effort to train the warriors to avoid collateral damage.

  “She’s eighty if she’s a day, and she’s using a walker.”

  “Not anymore she’s not,” Strike said with dry satisfaction. “Bitch is dead.”

  Leah’s laughter burbled, but Patience felt only dread at the happy sound. Oh, shit. What was she going to do? The hallway dead-ended at the royal suite; the only other doorway along it led to the royal winikin’s rooms. Both of the suites had exterior doors, but if she could hear the royal couple’s footsteps, they’d be able to hear a door shutting—the heavy panels weren’t quiet, and it’d be far worse to be caught trying to escape versus bluffing it through. Going invisible wasn’t an option because the other magi could see right through the illusion; the magic worked only on non-Nightkeepers. So it was bluff time.

  You can do this, she told herself. You’ve prepared for this. She’d run through the scenario in her head a hundred times, thought of a dozen excuses for why she was in the royal wing univited. But as Strike and Leah rounded the corner and caught sight of her, their steps hesitating nearly in unison, her mind went completely and utterly blank.

  “I’m—” Sorry, she stopped herself from saying, because that hadn’t been in any of the scripts. A hot flush climbed her cheeks and flop sweat spiked its way down her spine. “Uh—”

  “Oh, good, there you are,” a new voice said from behind the royal couple. Patience boggled as Brandt rounded the corner, moving full steam ahead and looking purposeful. He nodded to her. “I was coming to tell you they weren’t still out at the gun range, but I see you found them.”

  Leah sent Patience a sharp glance; Patience tried to replace the look of panic with one of purpose. “Well, technically I’d say they found me.” She hoped to hell they couldn’t see her hands shaking.

  Strike seemed to buy it. He refocused on Brandt. “You need us for something?”

  “It’s just an idea I’ve been kicking around. Pretty preliminary stuff, but I wanted to get your take on it.” He nodded toward the royal suite. “Do you have a few minutes now?”

  The king nodded. “S
ure thing.”

  The three of them moved past Patience, but then Brandt paused very near her, letting the others get ahead. As she stared up at him, he looked almost like a stranger, all hard eyed and angry . . . until he leaned in and brushed a kiss across her cheek and whispered, “One of these days you’ll start believing we’re on the same side.”

  Then he straightened and walked away, motions stiff and angry. But instead of dismay at his anger, or the irritation she’d so often turned to recently, she felt warmth unfurl in her chest. And as she headed back toward their apartment with her phone clutched to her chest in an unconscious hug, she felt, for the first time in a long, long time, that maybe she wasn’t so far away from putting her family back together, after all.

  Texas

  Lucius and Jade made a quick stop at a drive- through for calories, after which she dozed off in the passenger seat, recovering, Lucius assumed, from the scribe’s magic. When they’d left the sublet, he’d been strung tight and jonesing for the sex her kiss had promised, but it was probably better this way. He’d been raw from the scene in Anna’s office and the knowledge that he was leaving his old life behind once and for all, making him more vulnerable to her than he’d wanted. He’d been shaken by the makeout session, loose kneed and knocked off-kilter by the intensity of his own response and the sudden, almost overwhelming urge to sweep her up, lose himself in her, promise her things he had no intention of promising.

  That was the old Lucius, the one who’d charged headlong into flawed relationships, only to pancake hard. That wasn’t him. Not anymore. Still, though, the need for sex rode his blood. He would’ve liked to think it was magic, that he was close to breaking through whatever barrier kept him locked on the earth plane, but he knew it wasn’t the magic. It was Jade.

  He kept glancing over at her as he drove. She was partway curled on her side facing him, with one hand under her cheek, the other fisted loosely in her lap. Her forearm marks were a dark contrast to her pale skin; he wanted to kiss her there, wanted to kiss her all over, until she felt desired. Cherished.

  Let her sleep, he told himself. There’s time yet.

  But how much time? They were down to less than four days to the solstice. If the Banol Kax managed to put Akhenaton into the sun god’s place, there was no telling what would happen. Would the pharaoh come after his ancient enemies once again? For all they knew, Skywatch would be a damned crater by the twenty-second, unless he found a way to get his ass back in the library to pull out the info they so badly needed. But, short of offering himself up for a soul sacrifice and hoping to hell his body would become the receptacle for a true Prophet, he didn’t know what he could do to help. More, he and Jade were bringing back news of Anna’s defection, which was going to have ripples beyond the cow Strike was going to have. But at the same time, Lucius couldn’t help wondering whether Anna might not have a point. The Nightkeepers needed a super-Prophet but didn’t have one. They needed Godkeepers, a seer, the library . . . hell, more manpower. None of those things seemed imminent. Some didn’t even seem possible.

  “The magic has to be the answer, for my part of things, at least,” he said, thinking aloud as the miles unfolded beneath the Jeep’s off- road treads. “I’m human, so therefore shouldn’t have magic, but Cizin was attracted to me. There had to have been nastier dudes than me on campus, and they would’ve been an easier sell on the ajaw-makol possession. So why me?” It was tempting to think that there was some reason the demon had been able to reach through the barrier and influence him the way it had. Although the Nightkeepers guarded their bloodlines and had strict mores against producing half-bloods, the fact that those mores even existed suggested there had been some strays over the years. So he supposed it was possible he could have a Nightkeeper descendant way back . . . but that didn’t play, given that his only real connection to Nightkeeper magic had been through the slave mark. Glancing at his forearm, he suppressed a shudder at the thought that he could just as easily be part Xibalban. Regardless, the library spell was Nightkeeper magic, suggesting that he could access either light or dark magic. “But how the hell am I supposed to do that?”

  A mildly irritated beep-beep from his left warned him that he’d better concentrate on driving; he’d gotten so caught up in his thought process that he’d wandered into the fast lane. A pickup truck zoomed past going a solid ninety, and pulled away, leaving him alone to wander the lanes. Startled from his mull-and-ponder, Lucius realized that he’d gotten farther than he’d thought; the city and suburbs were gone, leaving him on a long, straight stretch of highway with not much to see in all directions. It was also later than he’d realized; the orange sun was dying behind scrub-covered, rolling hill silhouettes. A few more miles down the road, when he passed a small sign for lodging, he pulled off the highway and followed three more arrowed signs that claimed to be leading him to the Weeping Willow Inn. It was farther off the highway than he really wanted to be, but just as he was getting ready to turn back, he saw the turnoff leading to the inn.

  The place had probably been a working ranch in the past; the driveway wound through the middle of sparsely covered grassland. Lucius didn’t see any livestock, though, and the lane was marked off with neat split-rail fencing rather than the more common barbed wire or electric used for working rangeland. That and the relative newness of the signage kept him from turning around, thinking the place would probably be way too sketchy for an overnight. Then he topped a low hill, got a look at the Weeping Willow Inn, and let the Jeep roll to a stop, not because the inn was sketchy at all, but because it wasn’t.

  Nestled in a small, scrub- furred valley, a half dozen bunkhouselike cottages were scattered behind a main ranch house that was fronted by a wide, welcoming porch. In the fading light, he saw that all of the buildings were done in earth-toned clapboards and rough-cut wood, and dressed up with fanciful touches of gingerbread molding that gave the buildings a distinctively feminine air. Window boxes and whiskey barrels bloomed with flowers, and stones marked winding paths from each cottage to the main house, which a discreet sign identified as both the office and the kitchen. Two vehicles sat in a fenced-off parking area: a dusty SUV with a cargo clamshell strapped to its roof, and a pickup with WEEPING WILLOW INN painted on the side. So there’s probably room for us, he thought wryly. More, he liked the cottage idea. He’d dealt with the high-rise hotel the night before, but even leaving the balcony door open to its screen hadn’t totally taken away his sense of being boxed in. He’d sleep better in a place like this.

  In fact, the inn was pretty much perfect . . . if he’d been planning a honeymoon. It was way more intimate than he’d been expecting, though. The generic hotel room they’d stayed in the prior night had been a way station. This was more like a spot for lovers. The man he’d been before would’ve rocked a place like this, buying into the kitsch in the hopes that the ambience would make up for his own shortcomings. The man he’d grown into since leaving UT told himself to do a one-eighty and find a Motel 6. A woman couldn’t possibly misinterpret a Motel 6.

  At the sound of a soft sigh, he looked over at Jade. She’d tucked her other hand beneath her cheek and was trying to snuggle into the hard foam seat, her neck crooking in a position that had to be getting uncomfortable. She’s tired, he told himself. Not to mention that he was tired too, or at least sick of driving. He wanted some downtime, some space to reset his brain. And the pretty little cottages made him think of Skywatch.

  “Fine. The Weeping Willow Inn it is.” He eased his foot off the brake and let the Jeep coast down the hill toward the parking area. As he did so, he was aware of a low-grade churning of nerves, one warning him that he was making a mistake. He ignored it, though. He had enough troubles already; he didn’t need to borrow more.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Jade awakened warm and rested, tucked into a sinfully soft bed that smelled faintly of minty sage. She was feeling deliciously loose and proud of herself, and that latter emotion was so unusual for her, she took a moment t
o track the pride to its source. Memory came flooding back in a flash: She’d found her magic through a kiss, and she’d had to give only part of herself to get it. More, she’d proved her second theory correct: She couldn’t touch the magic unless she was emotionally available. It wasn’t a comfortable discovery for a woman who’d spent years teaching others—and herself—how to self-protect, but there it was. What was it that Scarred-Jaguar was supposed to have said time and again? Sacrifice isn’t supposed to be easy. Well, this one wasn’t, but she thought she could learn to live with it, so long as she kept a firm grip on reality.

  Remembering another aspect of her present reality, she shifted under the bedcovers, reaching a hand to reassure herself that she was still wearing Anna’s skull effigy. She wasn’t looking forward to telling Strike what had happened, but she really didn’t want to follow it up by admitting she’d lost the irreplaceable pendant. She went still when she found she was wearing only her bra. No shirt . . . and no pendant.

  “Don’t freak,” Lucius’s now- familiar raspy voice said. “It’s on the nightstand.”

  Exhaling a long, relieved breath, she opened her eyes to mock-glare at him. “Way to give me heart failure.” Then her eyes widened as she caught her first glimpse of their surroundings.

  She had assumed he would’ve checked them into another no-tell motel while she’d been sleeping off her postmagic crash, but the rough- finished wood beams and pristine white plaster of the bedroom she found herself in were a far cry from the average offering of a highwayside chain. The sky was the blue-black of nightfall, visible through a pair of French doors and framed by gauzy white curtains that were repeated in the filmy swags that roped the huge canopy bed. A bedside lamp was on, sending soft light through a cut-glass dome to gleam on the yellow quartz skull, which sat safely on the nightstand, its chain neatly coiled beside it. The bedclothes were white; the whole room was white, except where splashes of violet and navy blue were picked out in framed watercolors on the walls and boxy accent pillows on the long couch along one wall. An open door offered a glimpse into a bathroom done in navy tile with violet edging and pristine white towels, with a Jacuzzi-jet tub big enough for two.