Final Prophecy 04: Demonkeepers

by Jessica Andersen

  “Use the grenades to get their heads down,” Jade ordered. “Then we run. I’ll shield us.”

  “You’ve got shield magic?”

  “No, but I’ve got ice. It’ll have to be enough.”

  He nodded, his jaw tight, his expression set in lines of concentration. “It will be. I believe in you.” Leaning in, he kissed her hard and fast, and when he pulled back, there was something new in his eyes, something that made her heart lurch in her chest. “I’ll cover you.”

  For a crazy moment, those three words rearranged themselves in her head to become something else entirely. So she merely gaped when he heaved against her, overturning the sofa and in the same motion yanking the pins from three jade-loaded grenades. He counted, “One . . . two . . .” On “three” he heaved the grenades through the blown-out windows. They landed on “four.”

  On “five,” there was a rending, tearing explosion outside, followed by screams of agony as jade shrapnel tore into their attackers.

  “Come on!” Lucius grabbed her and dragged her up, and then they were running for the door. As they ran, Jade yanked the combat knife from his belt, used it to nick her palm, and called the ice magic. Power formed around her, coalescing to include Lucius in a circular swirl of cold air convecting with hot. She had originally intended to put an actual shield of ice around them, but saw the better option immediately. Instead of casting the iceball magic, she built it around them. Ahead of them it was clear. Everywhere else around them, sleet whipped in a twenty- foot whirl, obscuring them as Lucius flung open the cottage door and they ran out into the night.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Lucius’s heart rattled in his ears, sounding like machine-gun fire, but that was the only rat-tat-tat he heard as they fled through where he thought the enemy lines had been laid. The grenades had done their work. In the low-lying solar lights planted on either side of the pathway, he saw a hand, a foot, a dark smear he thought was blood, and his gorge rose at the knowledge that he had done that. Not Cizin this time. Him.

  But he’d do all that and more if that was what it took to keep Jade safe. Dull rage pounded through him, hatred for the bastards that had come after them, and—Not now, he told himself. He couldn’t think about that right now, just as he couldn’t think about the crazy intensity of their lovemaking, or the clutch of his heart when the first salvo of bullets had ripped through the French doors and he’d seen her go down.

  Without warning, a machine gun chattered from nearby, sweeping a wide arc that glanced off the icy shield. The bullets passed through the sleet. Jade gasped and the magic winked out.

  “Jade!” Lucius grabbed her and dragged her into the lee of the next cottage over. “Are you hurt?”

  “I couldn’t hold it any longer.” Her face was bloodless; she was shaking. But she hadn’t been shot. Yet.

  They needed to buy more time. But how? Between the dim illumination from the solar walkway lights and the bright, welcoming porch lights up at the main house, he could see back to the shattered windows of what had been their cottage, and in the other direction to the cottage where the road-tripping family was—had been?—staying. Everywhere he looked there were dark, slinking shadows and the flash of luminous green eyes. “Makol,” he hissed, the word coming out as a curse.

  A few of the figures came clear; he saw a pudgy guy in a cheap suit, another in coveralls, a third in insignia-less fatigues. Their eyes were pure makol but their motions were jerky and uncoordinated.

  Trying to look in every direction at once, Lucius nudged her in the direction of the parking area. “We’ve got to keep moving. Head for the Jeep. Strike and the others should be—”

  A whistle split the air and their cottage exploded.

  “Go!” Lucius put himself between her and the blast, feeling shrapnel ping off the body armor. He shoved her toward the Jeep, then jerked her back when the next missile—RPG? fireball?—hit the ground in front of them. Shitshitshit. He pushed her back into their scant shelter, trying to think of a way out, trying not to think about what would happen if they couldn’t escape.

  Adrenaline and denial roared through him. He wouldn’t let them have her, wouldn’t let her become what he had been. His body flared hot and cold; his head spun; his vision narrowed to pinpoint focus as six makol stepped into the light. He took out the first with a blast from his shotgun, nailed the second before the first had finished falling, then ducked a spray of gunfire that chewed up the corner of their hiding spot. He locked onto the third, finger tightening on the trigger—

  And the bastard burst into flame. As did the makol next to him, and the next, the fire leaping one to the next in a mad, destructive dance. In an instant, the night was lit day-bright with flames that gouted twenty feet into the air.

  Lucius stared, transfixed with horror as the makol screamed in agony, reeling and pinwheeling, trying to douse the inexorable flames, which burned their clothes away, melted their skin and flesh. They were still linked in a napalm chain; he followed it back into the shadows, just in time to see a man step into the light.

  The newcomer was tall and built, his hair trimmed into a military brush cut. Sharp featured, looking to be somewhere in his twenties, he was wearing ass-hanging, ripped-up jeans and a tight wife-beater, and bore the hellmark on his inner forearm along with three Nightkeeper glyphs in black: the peccary, the warrior, and the pyrokine.

  It was Rabbit, Lucius realized with a hard, hot jolt of relief. Their backup had arrived.

  The young man’s face was set, his eyes hot and hard, and flames laced from his outstretched hands as he fed power to the fire magic, driving it higher and higher still while the makol folded, slumped to the ground, and broke apart into dark, hard lumps of char.

  Then, abruptly, Rabbit dropped his hands and the magic winked out.

  The afterimage burned into Lucius’s retinas left him momentarily blinded, blinking. By the time his vision cleared, it was all over. The makol were briquettes and he and Jade were surrounded by heavily armed Nightkeepers. With a few terse orders, Strike sent Nate and Alexis—apparently back from Ecuador, just as Rabbit seemed to have reappeared—to sweep the perimeter and set a watch.

  The abrupt shift from threat to rescue left Lucius feeling badly off balance. Or was that the aftereffects of the strange sensation he’d felt just before Rabbit showed up and played human blowtorch? Had he been on the verge of breaking through to magic of his own? Had he sensed the incoming teleport? Or had it been some sort of entirely human altered consciousness associated with imminent death?

  “What the fuck happened here?” Strike demanded.

  The question seemed evenly divided between him and Jade, who had moved up to stand beside him. When she didn’t answer right away, Lucius said, “Your guess is as good as mine right now. We heard the—” He broke off when it registered. “Willow. The innkeeper. We heard her scream.”

  Michael nodded as he joined the group. “I count five human casualties in the other buildings, a family in one cottage, an older woman in the main house. The makol were—” He broke off. “Let’s just say I’ve seen a lot of shit in my life. This was pretty bad.”

  Gods. Lucius didn’t let himself close his eyes, though he very badly wanted to. His stomach pitched with the knowledge that Willow and the road-tripping family of four would’ve been snoozing in safe oblivion if he hadn’t turned off the highway and followed the arrows.

  “After the scream,” Jade said, picking up his report, “the makol breached our perimeter.” She sketched out the attack, her voice impassive, her mien gone counselor-cool.

  Lucius told himself it was a good thing she could pull herself together so quickly and thoroughly, that he shouldn’t resent her recovery. But he was still reeling, and the blood ran hot in his veins. He wanted to shoot something, wanted to tear into someone and let off some steam. Crazy impulses pounded through him, strange and unfamiliar.

  Forcing himself to focus, he grated, “The makol were new, and they were locals.”

&n
bsp; The magi zeroed in on him. Strike ordered, “Keep going.”

  “Their movements were slow and jerky, like the makol controlling the bodies weren’t used to all the synapses yet. Which was lucky for us, as it made them inaccurate, if well armed. There wasn’t any continuity of clothing, so they weren’t an assembled fighting unit. There was a mechanic, a guy in a suit, a soldier-wannabe type in military surplus. I bet we’ll find a bunch of cars parked down the road.” He looked at the charred lumps, wondering if the magi had known Rabbit’s magic didn’t require the head-and-heart spell to nuke makol. From the looks the kid was getting, he suspected that would be a “not.”

  Michael nodded grimly. “I took down four of them in the main house. One was wearing a T-shirt from a gun shop with a local address. The other three were in military surplus. What do you want to bet there’s a private militia quartered somewhere in these hills?” He paused. “It’d be a good hunting ground for someone looking for bad guys.”

  “Like an ajaw-makol,” Strike agreed. He looked back at Lucius. “That’s what you’re thinking, right?”

  “It plays,” Jade said, her voice strong, even if her color wasn’t. “We’ve suspected there might be an ajaw-makol on the earth plane. Either the Banol Kax sensed that Lucius and I were outside the Skywatch wards and sent the demon after us, or the thing sensed us and came on its own.”

  “I’d guess the latter,” Lucius said. When the others looked at him, he lifted a shoulder. “My impression—and that’s all it is—was that makol are similar to the magi in that they have different skill sets. I didn’t get the sense that Cizin was in constant contact with its masters, more that it phoned home now and then, probably during the cardinal days.”

  “What was in your demon’s toolbox?” Michael challenged.

  Lucius bared his teeth. “How about the ability to reach through the barrier and compel an otherwise decent guy to steal from someone he respected?” But that brought his thoughts circling back to what he’d been thinking on the drive, about birthrights and tendencies. Shelving that for the moment, he continued. “Regardless of who or what gave the order, my guess is that the ajaw-makol got here and recruited a couple of dozen locals, pulling the gnarliest and nastiest, and handpicking a couple of specifics, like the gun store owner and the militants, both of whom came with access to firepower.”

  Strike considered that for a few seconds before nodding. “It plays. Now for the million- dollar question: How did they track you? Or, more important, what changed between last night and tonight? Was it just a question of timing, or was there something more?”

  Lucius didn’t say anything about the whirling buzz that might or might not have been his magic, because that had happened after the attack began.

  Jade, though, said, “I think I know.” She loosened her hastily applied body armor, reached in, and lifted Anna’s pendant from around her neck. Letting the chain flow through her fingers, she held it out to him. “On the way home, I was carrying this.”

  The king stared at the skull effigy, which glinted in the porch lights of the main house. His face ran through a range of emotions, none of them comfortable. In the end, he settled not on the fury that Lucius had anticipated, but on a sharp grief of the sort Lucius had seen before at the gravesides of loved ones cut down unexpectedly. Leah touched Strike’s arm and murmured something in his ear. The king blinked, his face went to stone, and he took the pendant from Jade with an almost violent swipe.

  “I’m sor—” Jade began, but Leah cut her off with a lifted finger that said, Not now, and Jade subsided.

  Strike folded the chain carefully and slipped the pendant into his pocket before refocusing on the others, his cobalt eyes gone hollow. “That probably explains it. She should’ve brought it back to Skywatch herself. It’s not safe to separate these sorts of things from their bound bloodlines.”

  Lucius didn’t have an answer to that, so he stayed silent. Inwardly, though, he cursed Anna. Bad enough that she’d given up on the Nightkeepers; worse that she’d endangered Jade in her cowardice.

  Four dark shadows melted from the darkness: the sweep teams reporting back that the site was clear. Strike nodded. “Okay. Michael, you and Lucius wait for Rabbit and take the Jeep. I’ll ’port everyone else back with me.” He moved away to an open space, and he and the others started forming the palm-to-palm link he typically used for group ’ports.

  Neither Jade nor Lucius argued against their separation. As far as he was concerned, if there was a demon out there hunting Nightkeepers and their relics, he wanted her safely back at Skywatch ASAP.

  When they were gone, Michael tapped his shoulder. “Come on. Let’s get the Jeep.” The mage claimed the driver’s position and waved Lucius to shotgun.

  “Isn’t Rabbit coming with us?”

  “In a minute.” Michael burned rubber out of the parking area and didn’t stop until they’d hit the top of the hill. Then he spun a quick one-eighty and parked, leaving the vehicle idling as he looked down at the Weeping Willow Inn.

  The first lick of flames came from an upper floor of the main house. The second came from one of the cottages. Then it was hard to keep track of where the fire was tracking as it danced back and forth, lighting the buildings, consuming them. Rabbit stood at the edge of the visitor’s parking lot, visible in silhouette against the firelight, as he conducted the destruction with wide sweeps of his arms, a maestro of fire.

  “Oh,” Lucius said as understanding dawned.

  “I did my best with the bodies,” Michael said quietly. “If their families ask questions, the sort of investigation there’s likely to be out here will conclude that they died quickly in their beds, with no suffering.”

  “Which is a lie,” Lucius said hollowly. “They suffered.”

  “Yeah, they did. But it won’t help for the people left behind to know it.”

  Lucius thought of what he’d yelled at Anna, sanctimoniously bitching at her to think about how she would feel to know that people were dying and she could have done something to stop it. Well, now you know, asshole. How does it feel?

  The ranch was fully involved now, the fire tongues reaching up to the sky where the deaf gods lived. He pressed his forehead against the now-warm glass of the Jeep’s window and watched the flames, how they swirled and slashed, almost but not quite making pictures that seemed they should have meaning. In them he saw the garrulous innkeeper, not as she’d been that evening, but as the young woman in the framed picture that had sat on the front desk. In it, she’d had her arms wrapped around a smiling GI, neither of them knowing they would both die under enemy fire, some fifty years apart.

  She’d never remarried, she’d told him; had never really even dated. Her Bobby had been her man, her one true love. She might not have died for him, as Jade’s mother had done for her family, but in a way, Willow had given her life just as surely to love.

  Gods, how do people do it? Lucius wondered, making himself watch as Rabbit conducted events down below. Why do they do it? What was the upside of love, when there seemed to be so many downsides?

  “You kept Jade safe,” Michael said suddenly, unexpectedly. “You got her out of the cottage.”

  “We should’ve kept driving.”

  “Then they would’ve hit the Jeep and you probably wouldn’t have made it out.” Michael paused. “Look, I know the math doesn’t work on that one: two people if they hit the Jeep versus five people at the ranch. I’m sorry, but not all of the ‘we the people’ are actually created equal. Jade is valuable, potentially vital. You’re . . . well, we’re not sure what you are. But you’re something. So, yeah, I’ll trade the two of you safe for the lives of five noncombatants.”

  “Is that the sort of math they taught you in assassin school?” Lucius asked bitterly. “Or is that more of an us-versus-them Nightkeeper thing? How many humans would you trade for a single Nightkeeper’s life and still consider it a fair trade? Fifty? A hundred? A thousand?”

  Although Michael’s temper had mello
wed since his engagement, he still had a hell of a glare. He used it now. “Honestly? However many it took. There are eleven of us and however many billion of you. If our survival now means that you all get to see Christmas Day 2012, then fuck the math and protect the magi.” He sent a sidelong look in Lucius’s direction. “Same goes for the woman you love, mage or not. You do what it takes, whatever the sacrifice.”

  Lucius let that one pass and returned to staring down at the ranch, where Rabbit was concentrating his fire white-hot on a couple of key locations. “Doesn’t he ever get tired?”

  “Apparently not this week,” Michael said cryptically.

  It was another ten minutes before Rabbit, satisfied with his work, doused the flames and trudged up the hill to the Jeep. Michael dug through Jade and Lucius’s road supplies and pulled out a gallon of water and Lucius’s spare clothes, and made the soot-covered, sweat-soaked mage wash and change before he let him in the Jeep. Still, the smell of smoke was thick and cloying.

  Rabbit opened the passenger-side door and jerked his thumb at Lucius. “Out. I’ve got shotgun.”

  Lucius bristled. “Why? Mage’s prerogative?”

  “No, asshole. You grubbed through my apartment. Not that there was anything to see there other than Pervy Doughboy’s wiener pics, but still. It’s the principle.”

  Discovering that he didn’t have a comeback for that, Lucius climbed into the cramped rear deck, collapsed across the bench seat, and found a semicomfortable position as Michael sent the Jeep back along the narrow secondary roads and out onto the highway. They passed a couple of fire trucks headed the other way, sirens going. Lucius didn’t know why that made him feel a little better about leaving. After that, he didn’t fall asleep so much as his brain simply shut off, unable to process anything more. It didn’t turn off all the way, though; instead it sent him dreams of dead eyes and flames, and a wall of stone that looked solid, but wasn’t.

  PART III