Dawnkeepers n-2

by Jessica Andersen

The two women were in the archive, having a one-on-one about the likely temple site. The three-

  room library was quiet, the temperature perfect, the air crisp from the high-tech filter system Jade had requisitioned a few months earlier. The whole effect should’ve been restful, but Alexis couldn’t settle.

  She was keyed up by the prospect of seeing the temple for real, and nervous about going with Michael, knowing she would have to proposition him if she wanted access to the goddess’s power.

  What was more, she wanted to talk to Jade, and make sure things were really over between her and Michael. She couldn’t bring herself to start the convo, though. Not because of Jade, but because thanks to some of what Nate had said the night before, Alexis couldn’t help feeling as though she were pimping herself out for the magic. She kept telling herself it wasn’t really like that, at least not by Nightkeeper standards. But at the same time, she had to admit that by modern standards it was borderline.

  Forcing herself to focus, Alexis peered at the Web site Jade had found. Seeing that the nav bar had buttons for tours and hotels, she frowned. “It’s a tourist attraction?” That didn’t play with her visions.

  Jade gave a yes/no hand-wiggle. “Not on the level of Yucatán sites like Chichén Itzá and Tulum, that’s for sure. Belize is sparsely populated, and has maybe a half dozen paved airstrips for the entire country. Not exactly a destination for the average tourist.” She tapped the screen, her fingertip hitting a picture of a calcified human skeleton. “The ATM cave system is a stiff three-mile hike in from the nearest road. Unlike the Yucatán, Belize has aboveground waterways; there are three river crossings between the road and the cave system, and when you get there you’ve got to swim in. Because of all that hassle, though, the complex still has most of its original artifacts in place. Access to the cave system is tightly regulated; only a couple of groups have permission to bring tours through, and those cost.”

  “So you’ve gotta really want it,” Alexis said. She looked at the pictures, then shook her head slightly. “I’m not sure. This looks similar to the dream-visions, but I’m not seeing an exact match.”

  She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the picture of the skeleton, though, couldn’t help thinking the feeling she got from the photographs resonated too much to be a coincidence.

  “This is your cave; I’m sure of it.” Jade slid a bound book across to Alexis, then clicked on one of the Web site buttons, bringing up a cartoon map of the cave system on the laptop. “Have a look.”

  The book was open to an age-yellowed map that bore a strong resemblance to the one on the computer screen, except that the hard-copy map, dated 1873, showed several additional chambers off by themselves, connected to the others only by blue water trails rather than brown-marked pathways or gray-shaded tunnels.

  The farthest chamber was a narrow rectangle with a serpent-and-rainbow altar sketched in at the far end, with a strange, looping figure extending away from it. The altar looked like a good enough match that Alexis felt the click she’d needed, followed by a burst of excitement mingled with unease. “Yeah.

  I think you found it.” She traced the blue waterways leading in. “We’re going to have to swim in through a submerged tunnel?” She shuddered a little, but there was no question that she had to go.

  “It doesn’t look too far. Or at least it wasn’t in the late eighteen hundreds. Jade paused. “There are two things you need to know before you decide you’re definitely going, though.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.” Alexis leaned back in her chair and gave the archivist her full attention.

  Jade tapped the date at the top of the page. “Does the map date ring any bells?”

  Alexis frowned and shook her head. “Sorry. You’re better at the history stuff than I—” She broke off, realizing why it should’ve connected. “Shit, that was when Painted-Jaguar’s expedition went south. You’re telling me this is the cache site?”

  After the Civil War, with “civilization” encroaching westward and the various Native American cultures being squeezed into smaller and smaller settlements, the Nightkeepers had once again been subject to the pressures acting on their hosts—in this case the Hopi. By the 1870s, the Nightkeepers had numbered less than a hundred, and the survivors were starving. Times were grim, prospects dim, until an itza’at seer had envisioned a fabulously wealthy cache of Mayan-era artifacts secreted away in a Nightkeeper temple far to the south. A small group of the strongest remaining magi traveled through the hostile Mexican territories, eventually finding the temple and the artifacts within. The journey had been harsh, though, the trip back even worse, and only two of the original twenty Nightkeepers had returned, bearing the recovered riches of their ancestors.

  They had sold off some of the artifacts immediately, and the proceeds had allowed the Nightkeepers to integrate into society. Their children were educated in human trades as well as Nightkeeper magic, and judicious investments, funded with artifact sales, kept them going for the next fifty years or so, while their numbers increased. In the twenties and thirties they’d liquidated the remainder of the artifacts—including those bearing the demon prophecies—to fund the construction of Skywatch.

  “This was the cache site,” Jade confirmed. “Meaning that just because your dream-vision showed the statuette fragment in that hidden alcove, that doesn’t guarantee it’s still there. For all we know, your vision showed where it was before Painted-Jaguar discovered the cache.”

  “True,” Alexis said, drawing out the word. “But I saw my mother and Two-Hawk with the statuette fragment, which would’ve made it sometime in the nineteen seventies or early eighties.”

  Jade countered, “Right, but we’re not sure how the visions work, and whether they’re going to prove fully accurate. What if your dream . . . I don’t know . . . folded time or something, showing you parts of two different scenes in the same temple?”

  “It’s still worth looking.”

  Jade grimaced. “Which brings us to numero duo of the things I think you should know before you decide to ’port.” She tapped the paper map, indicating the loop that extended beyond the temple chamber, and the unfamiliar glyph below it. “This seems to indicate that there’s a loop of tunnel extending beyond the temple, under the waterline. The glyph is och ja-ja, which according to Anna has two translations: One is ‘enter the water,’ which is pretty benign, but the other translation is ‘death,’ which was often associated with entering a watery tunnel on the way to hell, sort of a reverse of the birth process.”

  Alexis fought a little shiver as she looked down at the glyph and the map. “As in ‘you die if you enter the water’?”

  “I’m thinking it’s something like that. Booby traps, maybe?”

  “Well, that’s just great.” Alexis fought the shimmy in her gut. “Note to self: Don’t go into the tunnels beyond the temple room.” Fortunately, she didn’t see why she’d want or need to.

  “You could call it off,” Jade urged.

  “And do what?” Alexis asked, faintly irritated. “It’s not like I wouldn’t rather be doing something else, you know.”

  “I know, that wasn’t very helpful, was it? I’m sorry.” Jade rolled her shoulders. “I’ve been in a mood lately. I’m just . . .” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Frustrated. Sick of working in here by myself, pretty much functioning as a human Google.” She flicked the side of her laptop. “I can’t wait to finish scanning the last of the books into this thing and get the computerized system going. Then it’ll be up to you guys to query and find your own spells and stuff.” She paused. “Then again, once you can, I’ll be pretty much useless, won’t I?”

  “No,” Alexis said quickly. “You’ll have more time to concentrate on developing your magic.”

  “What magic?” Jade looked at her forearm, where she had her bloodline and talent marks, but no warrior’s glyph. “The scribe’s glyph is supposed to mean I can create new spells, but it’s not like there’s an instruction manual. I don’t even k
now where to start!”

  Seeing the opening, Alexis said, “What about, um, boosting your power? You know, try some autoletting, or . . . something else.” Like sex.

  Jade’s lips twitched. “Don’t worry, I already heard you all but propositioned Mike last night. It’s fine. Honest.” She even sounded like she meant it.

  “Are you positive?” Alexis pressed, feeling like total crap. Theirs was too small a community for her to be making waves. What was she doing?

  Getting away from a man who wants a woman who looks like you, but doesn’t act like you, thought her rational self, the one that’d suggested she switch partners in the first place.

  “I’m positive,” Jade said firmly. She took Alexis’s hand and pressed her fingers. “Truly. Mike and I aren’t a good fit—he wants the magic, and I . . . don’t. I really, really don’t.” She looked almost surprised to have said the last part, but added, “I’m not even sure I want to stay here.”

  “Wow.” Alexis rocked back, stunned. “What does Shandi think about that?” Shandi, Jade’s winikin, was quiet and ultratraditional; Izzy held her in high regard, which pretty much said everything that needed to be said.

  Jade blanched. “I haven’t told her, and you can’t either. Promise? I’m just thinking aloud. I don’t really mean it.” But that last part sounded more like rote than reality.

  “I won’t say anything,” Alexis promised, but her brain spun while she gathered the references Jade had pulled together on Belize and the ATM caves.

  As she headed back to her rooms, concern dogged her footsteps. What was happening to the Nightkeepers? They’d been a team during the equinox battle. Now, only five months later, they were bickering and scattered. How were they supposed to build an effective defense against Iago if they couldn’t manage to get along on a day-to-day basis?

  Complete the statuette, a voice whispered at the back of her brain. Alexis didn’t think it was hers.

  Stopping dead, she whispered, “Ixchel?”

  There was no answer, save for a flicker of color at the edges of her peripheral vision. That and a renewed determination. She was going into the ATM caves, and she was bringing out the second piece of the demon prophecy. They needed to figure out the meaning of the partial inscription . . . and time was ticking down to the next cardinal day, the spring equinox, which was when Jade’s nahwal vision had foretold that the first of the demon prophecies would be enacted. On that night, the magi would have to block the first of Camazotz’s death-bat sons from coming to earth and fulfilling the next step in the end-time countdown. And she was going to help them do it.

  Alexis felt a kick of excitement at the prospect of playing a major role, finally. But alongside that was nerves, because she wasn’t her mother, wasn’t a powerful mage or a mated Godkeeper. What if she screwed everything up?

  Nate woke far later than he’d intended or expected, and didn’t know where he was at first. Then he got his eyes focused, saw a plate-size copy of his medallion hanging on the wall, and knew exactly where he’d wound up. Exactly where he didn’t want to be.

  He flopped back on the sofa. “Fuck me.”

  Carlos had told him about his parents’ cottage early on. Or more accurately, the winikin had tried to tell him about the place, and Nate had cut him off midsentence with a stern warning that he had no intention of looking back. He didn’t blame his parents for how he’d grown up, hadn’t blamed them even before he’d known the circumstances. But he’d done just fine without a family history up to this point, and didn’t see the need to acquire one now. At least, he hadn’t intended to. Now it was looking like his subconscious might’ve had other ideas, probably egged on by the eclipse, maybe some sort of collective hawk consciousness bleeding through the barrier. Or whatever.

  “Gods damn it,” Nate grumbled, and swung up to vertical on the sofa, which was seriously dated, but non-musty, making him suspect Carlos had sneaked in and done some cleaning, just in case Nate came for a visit. A long look around supported the suspicion; there was very little dust, and the air smelled suspiciously of Febreze.

  The walls of the sitting room where he’d crashed were painted a warm putty color, and the floor sported an unfortunate shag rug a few shades darker. The sofa was beige and nubby, brightened with colorful pillows of red, green, and blue. Two large paintings hung on sturdy hooks on either side of the polished brass plate inscribed with the hawk-man emblem, giving the room a distinct personality.

  Nate stood and headed toward the paintings, drawn particularly by the one on the left, which was a canyon scene that might’ve come from right outside the window, but was seen from an unusual angle, sort of a three-quarter helicopter’s-eye view. He halfway expected to find it was a print, something done by an artist that Alexis’s expensive taste would’ve recognized.

  It took him a second to figure out that it wasn’t a print, another for his brain to decipher the painted scrawl in the lower right-hand corner: Two-Hawk.

  “Aw, shit,” he said, then realized that everything he’d said so far in the little house had been a swear. But who could blame him? It wasn’t like he’d wanted to be here, wasn’t like he wanted to know anything about his parents. He knew all he needed to: His father had been the king’s adviser, his mother a healer named Sarah, originally of the owl bloodline. They’d given him their DNA, a winikin whose expiration date had come way too soon, some bloodline magic, and a hell of a responsibility he wasn’t sure he wanted.

  So leave, he told himself. Nobody’s keeping you here. Instead of about-facing it, though, he looked at the other painting, which was of a group of partially restored Mayan ruins seen from a similar angle as the canyon picture.

  Then, when he couldn’t put it off any longer, he planted himself in front of the oversize medallion, or whatever it was. The big metal plate shone dully in a shaft of sunlight coming through one of the windows, making the hawk figure seem to move. Pulling out his medallion, he compared the two.

  Same etching, same shift from bird to man and back depending on the viewer’s angle. And that was about it. But they clearly matched; it had to mean something.

  Feeling dumb, he touched his medallion to the plate on the wall, then laughed at himself when abso-

  freaking-lutely nothing happened.

  “Admit it: The thing’s just a chain. It’s not a magic amulet.” Somewhere in the back of his head, ever since learning of his heritage, he’d wondered whether the medallion was something more than an identifier, wondered if it had power. Granted, it hadn’t shown any hint of activity during the cardinal days, and he hadn’t been able to get anything out of it when he was jacked in, but still, he’d wondered whether one day it wouldn’t suddenly wake up, more or less like the barrier had, and offer him increased magic, maybe a cool talent.

  Now, staring at the plate on his parents’ wall, he had a feeling he’d fallen prey to the gamer’s fantasy of thinking the thing would turn out to be an all-powerful amulet to be named at a later date, when it was really nothing more than a decoration.

  He started to swear, but bit it off and said nothing, just turned away and headed for the door. He found himself glancing back at his father’s paintings, caught himself wishing he’d been in that helicopter, skimming over the canyons and the Pueblo ruins, over rain-forest canopies and the mountain-shaped shadows of long-lost pyramids. But his early daydreams of becoming a pilot and flying free across the landscape, like his childhood fantasies of having a family, had long been lost to the practicalities of survival, of fighting for what he wanted and needed.

  Forcing himself to shove aside the thoughts and questions the cottage had brought, feeling a low burn of anger that he’d even gone there, he stomped across the courtyard and past the pool to the mansion. He’d meant to head straight to the kitchen and put something in his empty stomach, but his feet—and the growing rage gnawing at his gut—headed him toward the residential wing instead.

  He didn’t knock, just barged straight into Michael’s suite.

>   The other man was in the kitchen area, talking on the phone, which was no big surprise. He was wearing heavy black boots, worn jeans, and a plain tee. His too-long dark hair was pulled back under an unmarked ball cap, making him look far more like a blue-collar laborer than the jet-setting urbanite he usually played, leaving Nate wondering who the hell the real Michael Stone was, and whether the distinction mattered worth a damn.

  At Nate’s entrance he turned and clicked the phone shut without saying anything to the caller, and moved to block the kitchen pass-through with his big body. He said simply, “Let’s not do this here.”

  “Too late.” Nate slammed the door behind him and advanced across the sitting room, barely taking in the sparse furnishings, which were chrome and glass, and expensive. “And for the record, I don’t give a shit what you’ve got going on in the outside world, or what you’re hiding from, as long as you don’t bring it back here.”

  Michael seemed to consider that for a moment, then tipped his head in acknowledgment. “Fair enough. I assume you’re here about me and Alexis.”

  “There is no you and Alexis.”

  One dark eyebrow raised in speculation. “Is she aware of this fact?”

  Nate barely hesitated. “She will be.”

  But Michael had caught the quick pause. His dark eyes narrowed. “As soon as you figure it out for yourself, right? Wrong. You’ve already done the hot-cold thing too many times, and she deserves better.”

  Hands balled into fists, rage riding him hard, Nate advanced on his fellow Nightkeeper. “And what, exactly, do you consider ‘better’? You?”

  “In some ways, yes.” Michael unfolded from the doorway and advanced so the two of them were squared off.

  They were similar in height, and both dark haired, but as far as Nate was concerned that was where the similarities stopped. Back in Denver he’d worn Armani suits and good silk ties, got his hair cut every month in the same damn style by the same damn stylist, and ran a business that half a dozen other people depended on for their livelihoods. Michael, on the other hand, kept his hair long and flowing, his jaw artfully stubbled, and wore his trendiness like a badge. He also, as far as Nate knew, had never held down a tax-paying job in his life. He was a playboy at best, a gigolo at worst, probably somewhere in between, and Nate’s gut-check said the guy owed money to someone big and mean. The mob, maybe, or Vegas—which pretty much amounted to the same thing, depending on the circumstances.