Skykeepers n-3

by Jessica Andersen

  “Are you sure?” Strike asked.

  “Positive. There’s no sign of an intersection at Tulum, Xel-Ha, Ox Bel Ha, or any of the other sites I tried.” Michael might not be able to call the offensive weapons usually brought by the warrior’s mark, but there was no way he’d missed an intersection—assuming, of course, that it acted like the one beneath Chichén Itzá. Before he could say anything else, though, he caught sight of an M-16-toting militiaman strolling around the edges of the watchtower’s lower level, “I’ve got company,” he reported. “I’ll call you back when I get to my hotel, sooner if I need an emergency pickup.”

  Sometimes it came in handy having a king who could teleport.

  Michael flipped his phone shut and jogged down the steep, faintly slippery stone stairway that ran down the backside of the watchtower pyramid. When he hit level ground, he headed away from the ruin, angling in the opposite direction from the soldier in the hopes that the guy was just staying visible to the tourists thronging the popular site.

  The other man changed vector to intercept, though, which had Michael muttering a curse under his breath. The ruins of Tulum weren’t normally under military control; technically they weren’t now, but there was a definite armed presence in the region, thanks to an ongoing tug-of-war between the government and a group of resorts that might or might not have been built on protected parkland right next to the ruins. Michael had bribed one of the soldiers to gain access to the watchtower ruin, which was supposed to be closed to the public. But the guy on his tail wasn’t the one he’d bribed; he was older and tougher looking, with a serious don’t screw with me; I’m having a shitty week look in his eyes.

  Although Michael had never been one to back down from a fight—fair or otherwise—things were apt to get dicey if the local militia took too much of an interest in him. The fake ID Jox had hooked him up with was good enough to get him across the border, good enough for most airports stateside, but it wouldn’t stand up to intense scrutiny. And while the other Nightkeepers could and would spring him out of a Mexican prison if it came to it, they preferred to avoid that sort of thing. The magi didn’t exist in absolute secrecy, but they kept a low profile when it came to normal human affairs.

  Moving fast, Michael ducked around a man-high pile of rubble that had probably once been a stela.

  The high pillars had been carved with glyphs spelling out births, deaths, politics, war, and just about anything else human beings of any time period found important. Now, the state of the art in thirteenth-

  century billboards was reduced to a hiding spot as Michael hunkered down behind the stela. Warning danced across his skin, courtesy of his warrior’s powers. But while he might not be able to call fireball magic like the others, he was hell on wheels with its antithesis, shield magic.

  As the soldier drew near, Michael pulled a carved obsidian knife from an ankle holster. Drawing the scalpel-sharp blade across his palm, he welcomed the bite of pain and the faint glow of red-gold Nightkeeper power it brought. Before the destruction of the skyroad he wouldn’t have needed the blood for a shield spell. Now, though, he needed blood for even lower-level spells.

  Concentrating, Michael touched his talent, calling the power of the barrier and using it to cast a thick shield around his body: a faint tremor in the air, a few degrees of refractive index that hadn’t been there moments earlier. He couldn’t make himself invisible like Patience could, but he’d learned that if he cast the shield at a certain angle from his body, it distorted both light and sound, confusing human perceptions. Once the shield was in place, the soldier shouldn’t be able to see or hear him.

  Moments later, footsteps approached, boots ringing on stone.

  Keep walking, Michael thought as the militiaman appeared, eyes sharp, M-16 still on his shoulder.

  Nothing to see here. Michael wasn’t a mind-bender like Rabbit, and thus wasn’t actually able to shove the thought into the human’s mind, but he figured the power of suggestion couldn’t hurt, and he needed the guy to keep going.

  Whether thanks to wishful thinking or the chameleon shield, or a bit of both, the soldier kept going, not even glancing in Michael’s direction. Once he was gone, Michael dropped the shield and slipped into a milling herd of tourists headed back toward the hotels. He hadn’t gotten far when his phone chirped in his pocket. Seeing the main Skywatch number on the display, he flipped the phone and answered, “Stone here.”

  “Get yourself someplace private.” It was Michael’s winikin, Tomas, sounding clipped and disapproving. As usual.

  Michael stifled a curse at his winikin’s tone. The two of them had been close from Michael’s youngest years through his teens, when he’d lived and breathed martial arts and aced his schoolwork with minimal effort. Tomas had played the role of Michael’s godfather, standing in for parents who had supposedly died in a drunk-driving accident when he’d been a baby. Tomas—short and slight, like most winikin—had been there for Michael through college, and had just about pissed himself with pride when Michael had been recruited into the FBI’s training program. Things had changed, though, when Michael washed out of the program, then took a high-tech sales job and started partying more than he worked out. Tomas had poked constantly, telling him he was better than his job, that he should do something more, be something more. Eventually, they had stopped really talking to each other . . . until almost eighteen months earlier, when the winikin had dropped the dime on the infamous, the Nightkeepers are real, you’re one of them, and you’ve got four years to save the world and six hours to get your ass on a plane to New Mexico bombshell.

  Hello, mind-fuck.

  After learning that Tomas was actually his winikin, Michael had partway understood where his supposed godfather had been coming from all those years, pushing him to be a fighter, to demand justice, hell, to be the best at whatever he chose to do. But knowing what had caused the pressure didn’t really change the fact that his de facto father had stopped loving him—or even liking him—

  when he’d refused to do as he was told.

  The tension between them had remained even after Michael gained his bloodline and talent marks, binding him to the barrier as a full-blood mage. Hell, things hadn’t even really improved between them over the past five months, ever since Michael had finally managed to cut ties with his old life and dedicated himself to becoming a better mage. On some level, he’d figured his new level of effort would finally make Tomas happy. That had been a “fail,” though. His growing role within the Nightkeepers hadn’t made any difference in his relationship with his winikin. They still rubbed each other very wrong.

  “Get. Your. Ass. Private,” Tomas gritted. “Strike needs to make an emergency grab.”

  Oh, hell. Shelving the interpersonal shit, Michael took a quick look around and headed for a likely looking gap between two buildings on the edge of the hotel district. “What’s wrong?”

  “Anna just got a phone message from Lucius,” Tomas reported.

  Michael’s warrior talent flared hard, revving his magic and sweeping all the other garbage aside.

  Strike’s sister, Anna, was a Mayan-studies expert at UT Austin; Lucius had been her grad student until he’d gotten himself possessed by an underworld nasty called a makol, one of the minion species of the demon Banol Kax. In the months since his possession, the Nightkeepers had been unable to find Lucius. Strike hadn’t even been able to get a ’port lock, and there were only three things that could foil ’port lock: death, rock shielding, or the efforts of a mage capable of breaking ’port lock . . . like Iago.

  “What did he say?” Michael asked as he headed for the alleyway.

  “Supposedly, Iago and thirty or so Xibalbans are holed up in the old Survivor2012 compound.

  They’ve got Sasha Ledbetter there . . . and they’re planning on sacrificing her tonight at the height of the meteor shower. They couldn’t torture the library’s location out of her, so they’re going to see if they can get the answer out of her spirit.”

&
nbsp; “Oh, hell.” Michael hissed out a breath as a complicated mix of emotions mule-kicked him in the chest and an image plastered itself across his mind’s eye; a promo shot of a dark-haired woman posing in a restaurant kitchen with a handful of peppers and a ten-inch knife, looking sexy as hell.

  Sasha was the only daughter of Ambrose Ledbetter, an old-school Mayanist whose body had been found by Anna and Red-Boar deep in the rain forest near a Nightkeeper temple, headless and buried in a shallow grave. That hadn’t been the biggest shock, though. No, the major oh, holy what-the-fuck moment had been when they’d found extensive scarring on his right inner forearm, as though Ambrose —or someone else—had burned that skin away.

  Did that mean he was a lost Nightkeeper, one who had somehow broken his connection to the barrier, thereby surviving the Solstice Massacre? The magi weren’t sure, but that had become an almost moot point when they learned that Ambrose had discovered, moved, and re-hidden the Nightkeepers’ ancient library, an extensive repository of spells and codices that should hold all the information the magi were lacking . . . like the location of a new intersection, and what, exactly, was going to happen during the three-year threshold leading to the end date, which was a little over a month away.

  Unfortunately, Iago had gotten to Sasha first. The Nightkeepers had been trying to find the Xibalbans’ main encampment and mount a rescue attempt since then, with no luck . . . until now.

  Michael’s gut twisted, partly with relief that she was still alive, partly with sick guilt that she’d been in Iago’s power for nearly a year now. Where the Nightkeepers sacrificed their own blood, the Xibalbans drew power from their prisoners and enemies. More, Iago was a borrower, able to divert talents from other magi and use them for his own purposes. There was no telling what foul magic they’d tried on her.

  “Godsdamn it,” he muttered under his breath. The curse wasn’t entirely directed at the Xibalbans, either. If the Nightkeepers couldn’t manage to rescue one woman, how the fuck were they supposed to save the world?

  The kick of anger brought an answering stir of heat. He’d never met Sasha, but ever since he’d first dug into the file that had been put together by the Nightkeepers’ tame private investigator, Carter, he’d been unable to get her out of his head. Part of it was revulsion toward the idea of a woman—hell, anyone—being held hostage by the Xibalbans. But that wasn’t what had him looking at her photos far too often, he knew.

  There was something engaging about the impish glitter in her dark brown eyes, consistently visible in each of the snaps Carter had culled from a series of restaurant Web sites.The tilt of her dimpled chin carried a hint of go-to-hell defiance he could relate to, and the rest of her stirred his hormones, from her loosely curled dark hair and angular, almost elfin face, to the long, curved fluidity of her body—what could be seen of it beneath chef’s whites, anyway.

  Carter’s factoid-laden report sketched the story of a child who had been raised partly in the field by her father, partly stateside by Ambrose’s live-in girlfriend, and had wound up breaking from them both when she left for culinary school. Estrangement, too, was something Michael could relate to, as was her extensive childhood training in martial arts. He’d always been a sucker for a woman with fight training.

  Michael had spearheaded several searches of potential Xibalban hideouts over the past few months, but those look-sees hadn’t turned up dick, leaving him frustrated and pissed off, and worried about a woman he’d never met, one whose picture was burned into his conscious mind.

  She’s in the Everglades , he thought, his pulse kicking at the realization that they’d finally gotten a break. But logic tempered the rush of battle readiness, and the stir of bloodlust that wasn’t entirely his own.

  “It’s got to be a trick,” he said, thinking aloud. “It can’t be a coincidence that Iago suddenly pops up at the old Survivor2012 compound, given how well Leah knows the property.”

  A former detective with the Miami-Dade PD, Strike’s human mate had studied the location as part of tying the site’s owner, cult leader Vincente Rincon, to her brother’s death and a series of ritualistic murders in the Miami area. With the help of Strike and the others, she’d gotten her revenge on Rincon, and the cult had disbanded. The property, which had been built up out of some seriously swampy land at the edge of the Everglades, had been resold before the Nightkeepers could snap it up. However, Strike and Leah had managed to search the property, discovering several ritual chambers hidden within a labyrinth of tunnels belowground. The compound had sat empty ever since. According to Carter, the place had been bought by a conservationist group looking to preserve the Everglades.

  Ten bucks says the conservationists are a front for the Xibalbans , Michael thought. But that didn’t necessarily make Lucius’s call a trap. Iago could have been drawn there by the compound’s history, its isolated location, or the power given off by the numerous Mayan relics Rincon had bought on the black market and reassembled on the property.

  “You willing to bet the library on its being a trick?” Tomas asked.

  “Doesn’t matter either way, does it? We have to check it out.” Michael ducked into a deserted alley, where it would be safe for his king to materialize. “Tell Strike he’s good to zap.”

  Tomas hung up without another word. A few seconds later, Michael heard the faint rattle in the air that presaged ’port magic, and then Strike materialized, zapping in maybe six inches off the ground and dropping to a bent-kneed landing.

  The king was an imposing figure.Tall,broad-shouldered, and muscular, bigger than even larger-

  than-average humans, as were all full-blood Nightkeeper males, Strike wore his shoulder-length black hair tied back in a queue, balancing the severity of the look with a narrow beard that traced his jawline. His right forearm was marked with the glyphs denoting him as a member of the jaguar bloodline, as royalty, as a warrior and a teleport. Higher up, on his biceps, where only the gods and kings were marked, he wore the geometric hunab ku, the symbol of the 2012 doomsday and the Nightkeepers’ king. Even though he was wearing thoroughly modern clothes in his black-on-black combat duds and heavy boots, he looked almost medieval. He could’ve been a crusader, perhaps, or one of Arthur’s knights. Hell, maybe even Arthur himself.

  Without preamble, Strike reached out and gripped Michael’s upper arm, forming the touch link necessary for him to transport another person. “Tomas has your armor and weapons waiting for you.

  This could be the break we’ve been hoping for.”

  “Or it could be a godsdamned ambush,” Michael countered as the ’port magic rose up around them.

  But ambush or not, he was on board with whatever the king was planning. A fight was a fight. And this rescue was long overdue.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Everglades

  Sasha awoke, blinking up into the light thrown down by an unshielded fluorescent tube. Something’s different, she thought. But a quick look around her said it wasn’t the scenery.

  She was still in hell. It wasn’t the Christians’ fire-and-brimstone hell or Ambrose’s nine-layered Mayan underworld of rivers and roads and monsters, though. No, this hell was one of cool, blank walls and a narrow cot in a ten-by-ten cell with gray walls, floor, and ceiling. This hell was being the prisoner of an enormous, green-eyed, chestnut-haired man who called himself Iago, but whom the others called “Master.”

  Where is the library? his red-robed, forearm-tattooed interrogators asked her over and over again while drug-spiced smoke oozed from stone braziers carved into the shapes of screaming skulls. Each time, her muscles screamed protest at the crucified position they’d tied her in, roping her to a wooden cross that represented not the son of the Christians’ god, but the world tree of the Maya and Aztec, with its roots delving into hell, its branches reaching to the sky. Where did your father hide it?

  Sometimes they lashed her with stone-tipped flails that drew bloody purple-black lines on her body.

  Other times they didn’t hit
her at all, but rather somehow put her in agony without touching her, watching with avid eyes as she writhed and screamed.

  She would’ve given anything to make the torture stop, but she couldn’t tell them what she didn’t know. She’d kept insisting that Ambrose had never told her anything about a library. They didn’t believe her, though, which meant that the cycle kept repeating over and over again—days of impotent, drugged fugue interspersed with pain and terror. She thought they might have moved her once or twice, but the details had blurred together, growing ever more distant as her mind insulated her consciousness from the reality her body was suffering. Each time the interrogators had opened the cell door, reality had receded further, her burgeoning fantasies coming clearer.

  She knew the waking dreams were nothing more than illusions, constructs that her mind created for her as an escape. But she clung fiercely to the fantasies in her drugged stupor, because if her consciousness was wrapped in the dreams, she wasn’t aware of what was happening in the interrogation chamber. And that was a blessed relief.

  Sometimes the fantasies brought her to a strange cave, a circular stone room that should have reminded her of the interrogation room and the horrors within it. But she wasn’t terrified in this chamber, wasn’t hurt. Instead, she was wildly aroused, wrapped around a big, powerful man with long, wavy dark hair and green eyes that reminded her of the pine forests up in Maine. In the dreams, she breathed him in, lost herself in his kiss, and felt, maybe for the first time in her life, like she was exactly where she belonged. Which was how she knew it was a fantasy, because Sasha had done many things in her life, but she’d never truly fit anywhere.

  Other times the dreams brought her back to Boston, to the pretty, sun-filled studio apartment where she’d lived across the hall from a firefighter’s widow, an elderly ex-concert violinist named Ada, who’d become her friend. Sasha had cooked for her neighbor a few nights a week, gladly trading pumpkinseed dip and spicy barbecued shrimp for snippets of Bach and Mozart, and the knowledge that someone cared whether or not she made it home at night. Only she hadn’t made it home, had she?