Final Prophecy 04: Demonkeepers

by Jessica Andersen

  After that, Rabbit almost didn’t ask him about Red-Boar. The winikin was already dealing with massacre flashbacks. Didn’t seem fair to pile on another set of memories. But as they schlepped the boxes out of the first room and moved on to the next, and the boxes didn’t yield any surprises, the winikin unwound by degrees. What was more, Rabbit started hearing Myrinne’s voice in his head, telling him he had to look out for himself and not worry so much about other people’s opinions. Eventually, he said, “I’ve been thinking about my old man lately.”

  The winikin didn’t look up from his iPhone. “What sort of thinking?” He seemed okay with the question.

  Rabbit shrugged. “Trying to figure him out, I guess. The more distance I get, the more I realize that not everything he did or said was bullshit. It’s just tough deciding which is which.” And that was the gods’ honest truth. The more he and Myrinne had tried to figure out where Red-Boar had been during the years after the massacre, when he’d disappeared into the jungle and eventually came back out with a tagalong half-blood toddler he’d refused to give a proper name, the more Rabbit had started remembering his old man without the anger those memories usually brought. Granted, the useful shit Red-Boar had taught him had been pretty sparse when weighed against the me-me-me shit, but still.

  “Good luck,” Jox said dryly. “I couldn’t always tell the difference, and I knew him his entire life.” But after a minute of silent schlepping, he said, “Anything you want to know in particular?”

  “Well . . . Anna’s told me a bit about what he was like, you know, before.” He almost hadn’t bothered asking her, but had figured, What the hell? To his surprise, she’d talked for nearly an hour, making Red- Boar sound like the local big man on campus, his first wife the homecoming queen. Rabbit hadn’t known what to make of the picture she painted, couldn’t reconcile it with the stubborn, zonked- out asshole he’d grown up with. When Jade turned up with the skull effigy a few days later, though, he’d thought he understood. Anna had been saying good- bye to the memories. No wonder she’d made them sound better than they probably were. He continued. “And Strike’s filled in most of what I was too young to remember about growing up. So I was hoping maybe you could tell me about when the old man went missing . . . and what happened when he came back.” Even as he said it he felt like a total shit. Nothing like putting the guy right back where he didn’t want to go.

  At first he thought Jox was going to give him a well-deserved, Ask me that some other time . . . like never. But after a moment, the winikin said, “It happened a few years after the massacre. Every cardinal day, your father and I would hop a plane down to the Yucatán and sneak into Chichén Itzá, and he would try to jack in, to see if the barrier was still blocked. This one time, as we came out of the tunnel, he just . . . I don’t know. Snapped. I knew he was having trouble dealing—we all were. But this . . . It came out of nowhere. One minute he was treating me like furniture, like usual, and the next he was coming after me.” The winikin’s voice dropped. “Three times in my life now, I’ve thought I was going to die. Once was during the massacre. Once was when the makol took over Lucius and got loose inside the compound. And once was when Red-Boar came after me that day.”

  A shiver crawled down the back of Rabbit’s neck. “I thought he just up and disappeared.”

  “He did. But he beat the shit out of me first.” Jox clenched and unclenched one fist, staring at it as if remembering pain, or perhaps broken bones. “I don’t know what was going on inside his head, or what specifically triggered it. All I know is that I was surprised as hell when I woke up and found myself alive—more or less—and him long gone. I dragged myself to our bolt-hole in the village—remember that place?—doctored myself up, and managed to make my flight home, barely. I remember sitting there with his spot empty beside me, hoping to hell he wouldn’t show up.”

  “He . . . Fuck.” Rabbit gave up any pretense of hauling the next-to-last box and just stared at the winikin. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Those were his fists, not yours. I consider it damned lucky he didn’t use his knife on me. If he had, we’d all be living very different lives right now.”

  “Whoa.” Rabbit’s brain tripped over the sequence of what-ifs. If Jox had died back then, Strike and Anna would’ve gone into the foster system. Anna had blocked out most of her memories from before the massacre, and Strike’s had been those of an average, if doted-on, nine-year-old boy. What would they have done when the barrier reactivated? Where would they have gone? They wouldn’t have known about Skywatch, wouldn’t have known there were other survivors. More, Rabbit didn’t even want to think what his own childhood would have been like without Jox in it, and Strike and Anna as his unofficial siblings. Granted, Jox had been able to buffer his old man only to a point, but without that leveling influence . . . Hell, he probably would’ve ended up in the system too. If he’d been lucky.

  “Your father came back three years later. I had taken Strike and Anna down to Chichén Itzá for the cardinal day—with Red-Boar gone, it was up to them to try the magic. We were just coming out of the tunnel when he stepped out of the rain forest. I pulled a gun on him,” Jox said matter-of-factly. “I’d been carrying a piece the whole time he was gone, afraid that he’d show up and go after one of the kids instead of just me. But he didn’t try to hurt us. He put his hands in the air. A few seconds later, you came out of the underbrush and stood beside him. I looked at you for a moment and you looked back, and I put the gun away.” The winikin paused. “He never apologized, and I never asked him to, just like I never asked him where he’d been or what he’d been doing.”

  Rabbit’s throat had gone dry. “You let him come back because of me?”

  “Because of you . . . and because it was bad enough living through what happened at Skywatch. He was the only one who survived being ambushed by the Banol Kax at the intersection. I had to believe the gods kept him alive for a reason.”

  “Do you still believe that?”

  Jox sent Rabbit a long look. “I do. I hope you’ll do your best to prove me right.”

  “I . . . Shit.” When his chest got tight and funny at the idea that his old man might have lived solely so he could be born, and the pressure that idea put on him, Rabbit grabbed his box. “Weren’t we supposed to be schlepping this crap somewhere?”

  “That was the general theory.” Jox seemed willing to let the topic drop. But as they were heading along what Rabbit had started to think of as the Hall of Ghosts, the winikin said, “The only time he ever mentioned those missing years, he said something about a village called Ox Ajal, up in the highlands.” Jox looked sidelong at Rabbit. “But keep in mind that sometimes when you go looking for answers, you don’t get the ones you’re expecting, or particularly want.”

  Rabbit lifted a shoulder. “Nah. I appreciate your telling me about the old man. It . . . it helps to know it wasn’t just me, you know?” It wasn’t an evasion, precisely. But he still felt like shit, given how cool Jox had been to him just now, and what he’d revealed about the past.

  “After what’s been going on with Jade’s mother and the nahwal, I think most of us are thinking about our families, particularly our mothers. But do me a favor and keep it in perspective, okay? You’re doing a good job building your own life. Don’t fuck it up trying to prove something to a dead man.”

  Rabbit didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing. Part of him knew Jox was right, that he should let it go and concentrate on his role within the magi. He was making headway finally, and it felt good. But he already knew what Myrinne was going to say, because he was thinking it: The name of the village—his mother’s village?—couldn’t be a coincidence.

  In the old tongue, ox ajal meant “thrice manifested,” and its strange, double-skull glyph was used to represent the Triad.

  June 21

  Summer solstice

  Two years and six months to the zero date

  After the grueling winikin-led practice fina
lly ended at midafternoon the day before the solstice, Jade had dragged herself to her suite, curled up in her bed, and pulled the covers over her head to shut out the rest of the world. She had slept a solid ten hours and awoke well past midnight; the sky was dark and lovely beyond the balcony, with a sliver of moon providing pale blue light. She felt good; heck, she felt better than good, riding on the early buzz of barrier magic that would build exponentially in the hours leading up to the solstice. Driven by the magic-wrought urgency, she showered and dressed in jeans, a tight black tee, and her boots. It wasn’t until she was pulling on a long-sleeved shirt against the cool night air that she acknowledged she was headed outside. To Lucius. They hadn’t spoken more than a few words to each other in the past three days, but although the whirlwind of game practice, rescue plans, and magical preparations had left her with little in the way of time or energy, she’d never stopped being aware of him on an intimate, visceral level.

  Don’t be an Edda, she told herself, but the warning fell flat because she might be a mage, but on another level she was only human. And having spent the past two days watching Lucius practice the gracefully violent moves of the ancient ball game . . . wow. Just wow.

  After the first few times one of the winikin had demonstrated a move to have Lucius not only pick it up immediately, but sometimes even improve upon it with his greater mass and strength, his ability to instinctively shift his center of gravity lower to get a knee or a hip under the heavy ball to keep it aloft or in play, Jox had called him on it, and he’d admitted to having played some pickup games while out in the field, albeit with the smaller, lighter balls used in the modern era. It had startled Jade—and, she suspected, some of the others—to realize that the game was still played as pure entertainment among the Mayan villages, and not just as the tourist-focused reenactments they had found on YouTube. Indeed, it seemed to Jade like an unfortunate statement on humanity that the ball game, which had religion at its center, had survived the conquistadors while the Mayan writing system and codices were systematically destroyed as heathen tools. The game itself had evolved over time, but its core was largely unchanged, and Lucius’s experience with the moves put him at a substantial advantage.

  Watching him move lightly over the ground, completely at home in his body, entirely in control of his movements and reflexes, Jade had found herself brutally aroused despite her fatigue. Now, with the fatigue gone, the arousal remained, a sharp ache that drove her out of the mansion in search of Lucius.

  She found him sitting atop one of the ball court walls, staring into the night.

  She climbed up the steep stone staircase and sat beside him, so their arms brushed lightly as their legs dangled over the sheer twenty- foot drop of one of two parallel stone walls. To her right, she could just make out the moon shadow of the high-set stone ring that was the game’s ultimate goal. From down below, it had looked impossibly small in relation to the size of the game ball. From up atop the wall, it still looked damn tiny. No wonder there was also a point system of body hits and out-of-bounds penalties; the hoop seemed an impossible target.

  Without preamble, he held out his right hand and flipped his palm up to reveal the quatrefoil hellmark, which looked black in the moonlight, though she knew it was the bloodred of dark magic. “Do you think it’s possible that I’m part Xibalban?”

  “You—Oh.” She rocked back in startlement and fumbled for a few seconds, trying to redirect her brain from the sex buzz in the air to his question.

  “Is that an ‘oh’ as in, ‘I’m thinking,’ or as in, ‘Where the fuck are my jade-tips’ ? ”

  “That was ‘oh’ as in, ‘I’d like to say you’re crazy, but it would explain a few things.’ More than a few.” She paused, thinking that, unfortunately, it wasn’t the dumbest thing she’d heard lately. “One of the questions we’ve had about you from the beginning is: Why you? Why did the makol reach through the barrier to you, when you’re a fundamentally decent guy? Impulsive, maybe. Stubborn, definitely. Occasionally self-serving, check. But on balance, there never seemed a compelling reason why a demon would go after you, and more, why you’d be susceptible to it. What if the connection and susceptibility come from a few drops of Xibalban blood, but your makeup, your essential youness, runs counter to the darkness? That could explain why the makol was able to come through the barrier into you, but couldn’t integrate your soul with its own . . . thus making it possible for you to survive the Prophet’s spell.”

  Instead of looking appeased by the thought that his inner good guy had saved his life, he seemed pensive. “That would imply that I’ve got a part in the gods’ plan. That they intended for me to go through everything I’ve been through. For me to do the things I’ve done.” He scrubbed both hands over his face. “Hell, I just don’t know. I can’t think about it anymore or I’ll drive myself up a wall.”

  “Newsflash: You’ve already done that.” What was more, his vibe had gone dark and sad, his expression closed. Which was high on the not good scale if openness was the key to his magic. Leave it alone, her cautious self said. You came looking for him, not the other way around. But there was another voice now, a stronger, more adventurous one that said, Do it. I dare you. Her heart hammered against her ribs as the moment gained meaning and importance. Then, taking the risk, the leap of faith, she shifted to straddle him suddenly, so they were aligned center-to-center in an instant. Heat fired in her blood. Magic. Desire. He went stiff and still and his hands came up to grip her hips. Before he could pull her close or push her away, she leaned in so her face was very close to his and their breath mingled as she asked, “Question is: Now that you’re up the wall, what are you going to do there?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Gods. Lucius’s blood drained from his head to his lap and he went hard at the spot where they were pressed together, where she rode him unexpectedly. He didn’t answer her with words, didn’t think he could form a coherent sentence as a roar of heat came close to obliterating the train of thought he’d been locked into for too long. Intellectually, he knew that the question wasn’t whether he had mageblood a few generations back; it was whether he would give in again to the weakness that had given the makol its toehold. But as Jade’s taste exploded across his senses and heat roared within him, he knew the answer wasn’t as simple as the instinctive hell, no inside him, because if he didn’t know what the chink in his armor looked or felt like, how could he be sure of staying strong? That was what had kept him studying the paintings and prophecies long into the night, looking for an answer. That and struggling with thoughts of Jade, and the knowledge that he couldn’t go to her until he had his fucking head screwed on right. Except he hadn’t gone to her; she’d come to him, propositioned him with the glitter of solstice magic in her eyes. And what the hell was he supposed to do about that?

  She broke the kiss to whisper against his lips, “Stop brooding. It’s a cardinal day.”

  Wry amusement had his mouth curving despite his mood. “That doesn’t exactly equate to party time around here. In fact, it seems like the perfect time to brood. We’re pinning everything on a damned ball game. If this doesn’t work, we’re screwed.”

  “And your sitting out here alone is going to change that?” When he didn’t respond, she nodded as though he’d answered. “Exactly.” She took his hand in hers; their scars rubbed together in an inciting echo of being blood-linked. “This doesn’t have to be complicated. Right now, for today, it can just be about the solstice.”

  Deep inside, he knew he shouldn’t let it be that easy. But at the same time, there was nothing easy about the electricity that crackled between them, nothing simple about the roar of heat and need that pounded through him, or the frustration that had ridden him for the past three days. But then, unbidden, his hand rose to cup her cheek. He felt the softness of her skin, saw the wary heat in her eye, and he was lost. “Fuck it. Happy summer to me.”

  Throwing thought and caution aside with almost giddy relief, he kissed her, deep and dar
k, and he filled his palms with her curves. Her hands fisted in his hair and she whimpered at the back of her throat, her body molding to his, her breasts pressing against his chest. On a surge, he swung around and rose to his feet with her legs around his waist, her arms around his neck.

  “Lucius!” She grabbed on convulsively.

  “I’ve got you.” He carried her down the steep stairs like that, their mouths fused. The man he’d been wouldn’t have dared try it. The man he’d become reveled in how easy the move was for him now, just like the ball game had been. Whereas in the past he’d struggled with his own body, now he was in total control.

  When they reached his cottage, he carried her across the TV room to the bedroom, this time cradled close to his heart. In some atavistic corner of himself, he was aware of the danger, but just then he didn’t care. It was the solstice, a time for sex and magic. He set her on her feet just inside the bedroom door, sliding her against him inch by torturous inch. In unspoken agreement they shed their clothing with glorious abandon, not stopping until they were both naked. The earth-toned light reflected from the ball game scene on the TV screen limned the dip of her waist, the curve of her breast, and the long lines of her arms and legs. He reached for her, thinking to carry her Rhett- like to the bed, but she held him off with an upraised hand. “Wait. Let me.”

  Before the ridiculous image of her carrying him to the bed could form, she knelt down and closed her mouth over him almost in a single move. His vision grayed and he forgot what the hell he’d been thinking, damn near forgot his own name. All he could do was lock his knees, bury his hands in her hair, and hang on for the ride.