Dawnkeepers

by Jessica Andersen

  He wasn’t expecting that she’d be at the temple, was actually hoping he didn’t find her there, because if he did, odds were he’d be looking at her remains. But if luck—or fate—was with him, then he’d find a clue to where she and Ambrose had disappeared to.

  The background hum of the rain forest—bugs or something, he didn’t know what—rose as the sunlight went from afternoon slant to predusk dimness. He knew he should make camp, but something pushed him to keep going—a lighter patch up ahead, maybe, or perhaps simply the certainty that he was close, so close to his destination.

  And then he was there. One second he was hacking at clinging green fronds, and the next his machete broke clear. Expecting his rote-mechanical swing to meet resistance, he stumbled forward when it hit only air, and wound up in a small clearing that was barely the size of his apartment kitchen.

  A gap in the canopy let through a shaft of light from the setting sun, and the beam shone bloodred on a carved stone doorway leading into the side of a hill. Only it wasn’t a hill, he realized after a second. It was an unrestored ruin, a pyramid that had succumbed to a thousand years of zero maintenance and been reclaimed by the land. Vegetation had covered all the stone with leaves and clinging vines, with the exception of the doorway, which gleamed almost new-looking in the fading light. It was a stone arch, with the cornice and lintelwork that the Maya stoneworkers had put into regular use by the height of the empire. They might not’ve had the wheel or known how to work metal, but they’d been pretty damn untouchable when it came to rock.

  This wasn’t just Mayan, though. There was an elongated elegance to it, one that reminded him of another pyramid-building culture on the other side of the world, one that had faltered into despotism after the Nightkeepers left and the sun god Aten held sway.

  A faint shimmy started in Lucius’s gut and worked its way out from there. High above him parrots called to one another and loose-limbed monkeys played tag in the gathering dusk. Down at ground level, though, there was strange stillness, and a hum that touched the air. Rubbing his scarred palm, which ached from all the machete work, he took a step toward the doorway, almost expecting it to disappear, for him to wake up and find himself in his crummy apartment, in the middle of his lame-ass, going-backward life.

  But it didn’t. He was really there, and so was the doorway.

  “Here goes nothing,” he said, scrabbling in his knapsack for his flashlight. Clicking it on, he took a couple more steps, passed beneath the lintel—

  And nearly fell straight into nothing when the floor dropped out beneath him.

  He saw the pitfall in time—barely—and stopped at the edge, where interlocking stones formed a tunnel that descended at an acute slant, ending somewhere deep in the earth, beyond the reach of his flashlight beam. Adrenaline spiked and he stepped back a pace, but the stone didn’t give way beneath him. The trap had already been sprung.

  From the scrapes in the dirt, it hadn’t been triggered all that long ago, either. Rain had wiped the tracks within the first ten feet or so of the entrance, but beneath his own footprints he could see another set. Damned if they didn’t look like the same kind of boot treads too, only smaller, as though the person who’d been there before him was a woman, or maybe a teen. Wearing trekking boots of the sort favored by fieldworkers.

  His stomach did a nosedive as he shone his light downward once again. “Sasha? Are you down there?”

  There was no answer. Not that he should’ve expected there to be. She was a chef, not a field archaeologist, which suggested the boot prints weren’t hers. Besides, like it or not, whoever had gone down, they’d done it before the rains, which meant a couple of months at least.

  Lucius felt a beat of grief for whoever it’d been, along with relief that he had a good reason not to go down there. Clamping the flashlight in his teeth, he edged around the pitfall, not letting out his breath until he was safe on the other side and there was no sign of a second booby trap. Not yet, anyway, he thought. But the presence of the first trap was oddly encouraging: It suggested there was—or had been—something in the ruin worth guarding.

  “So onward we go,” he said, talking to himself because it was too damn quiet inside the low tunnel that narrowed beyond the pit trap. Using the flashlight to check his footing, he worked his way deeper into what he suspected wasn’t the ruins of a temple that’d been built up from the ground, but rather one that’d been dug into the earth itself. The tunnel sloped slightly downward as he walked, and the air was damp and chill.

  Once again he saw evidence of someone else having been there ahead of him fairly recently. Two someones, in fact: A man’s wide-footed tread was marked over with a woman’s print. Oddly, though, the woman’s print didn’t match the tread Lucius had seen near the booby trap. If he figured the prints he was following now belonged to Ambrose and Sasha Ledbetter, then who had made the first set? And why weren’t there tracks leading back out? That in itself seemed pretty damn ominous.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he told himself. “Keep going.” So he did just that, heading deeper into the Nightkeeper temple. Because that was where he had to be.

  The walls of the tunnel were uncarved, but the stone-work was meticulous, and the vibe . . . well, the vibe deep in his gut told him he’d found what he was looking for. He just needed some sort of proof to bring back to Desiree. And Anna.

  At the thought of Anna, a complicated mix of guilt and resentment bloomed in his chest. For a second his old crush on Anna surfaced, making him feel like total shit for doing what he was doing, the way he was doing it. Then the hum rose up once again, blunting the fear and the grief and the guilt, making him numb to everything except the footprints that led him on, and the tunnel closing in around him.

  Then, without warning, the shaft dead-ended at a pile of rubble. But it wasn’t just any rubble he saw in the yellow light of his flashlight beam. The debris had been cleared and stacked into a shrine of sorts, and a crude teepee had been formed of lashed-together sticks. And atop it sat a human head. Lucius reeled back, gagging at the sight and the sudden stench of rot and death. But even his response to finding the skull felt muted, as though the hum in his bones were overriding his natural instincts. Leaning closer, he inspected the thing. Strips of skin and flesh were still adhered in places, though creatures and time had done some serious damage. Still, though, he could see that the skull had once sported long gray hair; some of it was still caught back in a leather-laced ponytail.

  He’d found Ledbetter, or part of him, anyway. But where was the rest of him, and who had placed his head so elaborately? Why?

  He figured the shrine had probably been an effort to mimic the pyramidal piles of skulls, called tzomplanti that the Maya had built at the height of their sacrificial practices. They had piled the heads of their sacrifices one atop the next and left them on platforms or at the city limits as a warning to their enemies. This is what we’ll do to you, the tzomplanti had signaled. Be warned. But who had this warning been intended for?

  “What happened to you, old man?” Lucius whispered, his voice echoing oddly. “Where’s Sasha?”

  The second set of feminine footprints was there too, smudged and scuffed over the top of the bootprints, but the dust was really messed up at that point, churned up amidst rust-brown splashes he had to assume were blood. Strangely drawn by the stains he crouched down to touch one of the bloodstains with his fingers, and felt a tingle when he made contact. It was almost as though there were two of him inside: One wanted to touch the blood and the skull and see if the tingling grew stronger; the other wanted to keep looking and see if there was any evidence of where Sasha had gone from there.

  Forcing his fingers away from the bloodstains, he swept his flashlight in a low arc, stopping when he came across two new sets of footprints in the dust at the edge of the cave-in. They looked like the marks from . . . men’s street shoes and a pair of high heels?

  “You’re shitting me.” But even after he’d blinked a few times the marks were
still there. He hadn’t seen them anywhere else in the tunnel; nor did they seem to lead beneath the piled rubble. It was as though whoever belonged to the footprints had just appeared out of thin air, then disappeared once they’d done what they’d come to do. Which was just ridiculous. There had to be another explanation. He didn’t know what, but there had to be. So he kept looking, sending his flashlight beam arcing from one side of the tunnel to the other, hoping to hell the literal dead end wouldn’t turn out to be a metaphorical one too.

  Then the flashlight beam glinted off something, there and gone so quickly he almost missed it. But when he repeated the action he got the same gleam again. More important, he got another glow farther down the tunnel, then another. There were mirrors on the walls, he realized. Rather, they were highly polished spots on the stone angled precisely so they caught the light and bounced it from one to the next and then on again.

  The Egyptians had used metal mirrors to bring sunlight into their tombs and pyramids, Lucius thought as excitement kicked through his bloodstream. The ancient Maya, on the other hand, had worked by torchlight. The presence of the mirrors in the temple was another confirmation of the crossover, the connection from one continent to the next, one people to the other. But it was so much more, because for them to have bothered polishing the stone mirrors, there had to be something to see.

  And it’s probably on the other side of the damn cave-in, he realized, his stomach dropping in acid disappointment. Unless . . . he thought, jumping into the myth with both feet, not sure when he would hit bottom, what if it’s starscript? The Maya had sometimes used moonlight to hide secret text within public carvings. The Nightkeepers had used the stars.

  Holding his breath, he turned off his flashlight.

  It was damned eerie standing there, alone in the darkness waiting for his eyes to adjust, knowing that Ambrose Ledbetter’s skull was only a few feet away. He found himself saying quietly, “I promise that I’ll find her. I’ll protect her. I swear it on my life.”

  The words came out of nowhere, as did the urge to close his hand on the machete blade so it scored his palm across the thick ridge of scar tissue. Realizing he’d done exactly that without meaning to, he closed his eyes, balled his bleeding hand into a fist, and repeated the vow.

  His blood dripped to join the other stains, and the hum in the air went silent.

  When he opened his eyes once again he was surrounded in silver light, starlight that had reflected in from the distant entrance. And right in front of him were words picked out in starlight that hadn’t been there for his flashlight.

  It’s starscript, he thought, floored. It’s real.

  Sweat broke out all over Lucius’s body at the magic of it. This was confirmation, if he’d needed it, that he was in a Nightkeeper temple. But that wasn’t the most shocking part. No, the thing that blew him away and set him back on his ass was the words the starscript spelled out. Not glyphs, not ancient Mayan. It was freaking written in English.

  “Ledbetter,” he breathed. “Fuck me.” The old goat had left a message. In starscript.

  It was an address.

  Had Sasha read the message? Was that where she’d gone? Or had the owners of the other footprints taken her before she got the message? He refused to consider the alternative: that she’d been killed and her head was rotting on a skull pile somewhere else in the ruin. She had to be alive, had to be, though he didn’t know why the hell it was so important for him to believe that.

  Breathing shallowly through his nose, he fought the shock, fought the buzz, and ignored the questions. Riding the excitement of the starscript and the thrill of the hunt, he pulled a notebook and pen out of his knapsack and scribbled down the addy. He didn’t know who or what was there, but he sure as hell intended to find out.

  Anna might’ve told Strike that she’d catch an earlier plane and work on translating the starscript at the base of the Ixchel statuette, but after the cluster-freak of a thesis defense, along with Lucius letting drop that Desiree had been Dick’s mistress, Anna had needed the drive time from Austin to New Mex. She’d driven until she’d cried herself dry and moved on to exhausted, and then she’d flopped at some motel in the middle of nowhere and slept until she woke up. Which meant that by the time she got to Skywatch, it was just about the same time she would’ve been arriving if she’d kept her original flight.

  She’d needed the time alone, though. It wasn’t as if she would’ve done the Nightkeepers any good arriving early and all stuck inside her own head. While she couldn’t say she’d come to any earth-shattering decisions along the way, at least she was vaguely centered, which she needed to be, given that the lunar eclipse was less than twenty-four hours away. Her mental shields might be slammed and locked, preventing her from seeing good, ill or anywhere in between, but she could still feel the magic growing stronger as the time passed, as the miles passed. Finally, as she pulled into the circular driveway in front of the mansion that Leah had named Skywatch, Anna had a feeling she could break through the barrier if she chose, and see the future if she wanted to. Which she didn’t. Not ever again.

  “Which means the only thing I’m really contributing here is glyph geekage,” she said aloud. “So I should shift my ass and get to it.”

  Still, it took her a long moment to get out of her Lexus. She’d parked out front instead of in the big garage, figuring she should make it clear from the get-go that she wasn’t staying. She was just passing through again, fulfilling her promise. But parking out front had the downside that it aimed her toward the front door, and the plaque that Leah had given Strike as a kick in the ass the previous fall when he’d refused to step up as either king or leader, trying to deny the inevitable.

  That was the thing about destiny, though. Somehow the bitch always caught up with you.

  Sighing, Anna stopped with her hand on the doorbell and glanced at the plaque. The name Skywatch was engraved above an etched line drawing of a ceiba tree, very like the one that grew behind the mansion, rising from the ashes of the hundreds of winikin and Nightkeeper children who had been killed during the Solstice Massacre. There was no reason the rain forest-dwelling ceiba tree should’ve been able to survive in the desert canyon; nor had it been planted by any human hand. It had sprung from the ashes of the dead as a symbol. A reminder.

  It played the same role on Leah’s plaque, along with the words below it, which spelled out the motto the ex-cop had given them. Written in modern Mayan, it spelled out the three cardinal tenets the modern Nightkeepers had vowed to live: TO FIGHT. TO PROTECT. TO FORGIVE.

  Except that Anna wanted to do none of those things. She just wanted to be left alone.

  Sighing at the thought, and at the self-pity that had turned into too familiar a friend of late, she stopped herself from ringing the doorbell and pushed open the front door instead. She drew breath to shout a hello, knowing that Strike and Jox were expecting her, because she’d called from the road.

  The greeting died in her throat when a ghost stepped into the front hallway, one that had traveled in time.

  She knew his fierce eyes from her childhood, the slashing blade of his nose, and the high cheekbones. She knew the shape of his skull where he’d shaved his hair close, leaving faint bristles behind. He was slightly taller than she, and lean-hipped with youth beneath worn jeans, broad through the shoulders like all Nightkeeper males, with muscles to match the warrior’s mark he wore on his inner forearm, along with his bloodline and talent glyphs.

  “Red-Boar,” she whispered, though she wasn’t sure the words actually came out aloud. But did it really matter? Fantasy, figment, or spirit—surely it could read her mind?

  “Hey, Anna,” the apparition said, only the voice was wrong. And then the ghost shifted from one foot to the other and slipped something into his pocket, and the air around him changed and she saw that it wasn’t the father at all. It was the son.

  “Rabbit.” This time her voice had sound and shape, leaving her lungs in a rush. “You’ve grown.�
� It wasn’t just the size of him, either. His face was different than it’d been in the fall, which was the last time she’d seen him, because she’d made an excuse to skip the winter solstice ritual.

  He half turned, and jerked his head in the direction of the great room. “Strike’s in there.”

  “Thanks.” She was seriously unnerved by how much he looked like the young man his father had been, back when she was a girl and the Nightkeepers had numbered into the hundreds. She moved to pass the teen, then stopped when she saw the rough patch of a partly healed burn that twisted its way across the side of his neck, then down beneath the undershirt. She sucked in a breath. “What happened to your neck?”

  He raised a hand reflexively to touch the spot. “Long story.”

  Standing near him, she caught a strange smell. It was the odor of smoke and blood, but it wasn’t that of incense and ritual sacrifice. More like a house fire, though there was no sign of damage aside from the scar, which would fade in time, courtesy of their healing magic. “I can make time,” she said. “I’d like to hear it.”

  She hadn’t known Rabbit well as a little boy. She’d been in full-on teenage rebellion mode right about the time Red-Boar had reappeared in her, Strike’s, and Jox’s lives, towing a toddler he’d refused to give a proper name or bloodline ritual. She’d been reeling from the horrifying loss of her parents—and her entire world structure—and she hadn’t made it easy for anyone to like her, never mind love her. Not long after Red-Boar’s return, she’d taken off for college. After thoroughly embarrassing herself, of course, but Rabbit didn’t ever need to know that she’d once propositioned his father.

  Still, the history was there. The link was there.

  “Why do you care?” Whereas Rabbit had been in perma-sullen mode the previous fall, now there was an actual edge of curiosity in the question.

  “Because we’re both on the outside looking in.”

  He seemed to consider that for a few seconds, then nodded. “Fair enough.” He didn’t say yes or no and she didn’t press, but as she followed him into the great room she felt a little less alone than she had only moments earlier.