Dawnkeepers

by Jessica Andersen

  “Keep your eyes open,” Leah said, pressing Strike’s hand. She patted her hip, where she wore a medium-range walkie-talkie. “Call us if you see anything.”

  Each of them had one of the radios, tuned to lucky channel thirteen. The walkies wouldn’t do much good down in the tunnels, but should be a simple, effective method for staying in contact during the aboveground portion of the stakeout.

  Strike dropped a kiss on his mate’s lips. “Count on it.” They stood together for a moment, leaning into each other, and a faint golden glow sparkled, haloing them as their strong love reached out and touched Kulkulkan’s power.

  Unable to do otherwise, Nate glanced at Alexis, who stood beside him. She caught the look and her lips turned up, as though she were determined to keep it light between them after what’d happened the night before. “Special effects courtesy of the equinox,” she whispered.

  He should’ve said something smooth and equally light, but what came out was a soft, “You look tired.”

  “Gee, thanks. You too.”

  “Didn’t sleep worth shit.” As he’d lain awake in the cottage, staring at the ceiling, Nate had told himself it was better to spend that final night alone, that he’d be sharper and more rested without Alexis in his bed. It’d turned out he wasn’t very good at lying, even to himself.

  “Ditto,” she said, and lifted a shoulder. “I probably shouldn’t have said anything the other night about . . . you know. Sorry.”

  “No.” He caught her hand, unable to leave it like that. “No, never. I’m . . .” He trailed off, unable to find the right word.

  Her eyes narrowed. “If you say ‘flattered,’ I’ll fireball you in the nuts.”

  Strike’s voice interrupted. “Come on, Blackhawk. First shift’s leaving.”

  “Lucky save,” Alexis murmured. But then her anger drained and she said simply, “Take care of yourself, okay?”

  “Yeah. You too.” There wasn’t anything more to say after that—at least nothing he could say truthfully, or that would come easily and feel real, so Nate followed his king out of the cottage and didn’t look back.

  Strike led the way, carrying a small flashlight that reminded Nate of the miners’ lamps he and Alexis had used in the ATM caves. The beam was just as pitiful, their surroundings just as dark. As they entered the path to the temple, the rain forest closed in on either side of them, pitching the darkness even blacker. Nate tried to shrug off the feeling, which was pretty close to a certainty, that this was the last time he’d be traveling along the narrow path, the last time he’d be glancing back and seeing only the glimmer of light through the dense vegetation, though the safe house was only a few hundred yards away.

  It’s nerves, he told himself. Nerves and the equinox. When they reached the temple, and the point where they would split up to stand watch, Strike lifted a hand. “Wait.”

  Nate looked up, surprised. “Nochem?”

  “I want you to take this.” The king held out his hand into the thin flashlight beam. On his palm rested something long, narrow, and flat, and glittering black. It was a knife, Nate saw, then realized that it wasn’t just a knife; it was the knife of the Volatile prophecy. His knife.

  Everything inside him went tight on a single, greedy word: Mine! It was the same way he felt about Alexis, the same way he’d always felt about her; it was just as simple as that, and as complex. He took the knife and balanced the weapon on his palm, staring down at the polished black stone and trying not to feel how well it fit in his hand, how natural it felt, in a way that no other ceremonial knife had done before. He knew the blade with a deep, thrumming possessiveness that seemed to originate from just above his breastbone. He wanted to keep it, to wear it, to blood himself with its blade.

  He glanced at his king. “I swear that I’ll die before I let the Volatile hurt her.”

  “I know.”

  They parted without another word. Taking up his position, Nate settled in to watch the small temple, and the surrounding rain forest. Periodic check-ins via walkie-talkie all brought the same message: All’s quiet. Eventually the sky went from black to blue, then deepened through purple to a vicious red that filtered through the leafy canopy and turned everything to blood. The light pinked out quickly to day, but that violent red hue stayed with him, seeming prophetic even to a man who refused to live by prophecy.

  His worries weren’t superstition, though; they were logic. How were they supposed to hold the barrier with so few magi? Not good odds, his gamer’s brain reported. We need a new strategy. Only they’d already explored all the options, hadn’t they?

  He withdrew the carved obsidian knife from his belt and flipped it through his fingers a few times, becoming familiar with the perfect balance of the blade and the feel of the worn carvings as he waited.

  And waited.

  There was no sign of Iago as the day warmed and the birds and monkeys started doing their thing overhead. The surveillance shifts changed, and changed again, and still nothing. In fact, exactly nothing happened all godsdamned day. By dusk, all of the Nightkeepers were hunched in the forest, watching a whole lot of nothing. Nate had positioned himself very near Alexis, as he had done all day whether she liked it or not, because the equinox magic was sparking in his veins, and his skin felt tight across his bones. Close to nightfall, when she glanced in his direction and their eyes met, he saw rainbows. Then she nodded to Strike and Leah, concealed in a cluster of ferns nearby, and he turned to find them deep in conversation, with the satellite phone forming a third party, no doubt bringing Jox in on the discussion.

  When Nate’s walkie crackled, calling the Nightkeepers in, he was moving before the king had finished speaking. He and Alexis converged on the royal couple’s position, and Strike said without preamble, “We’ll drop down into the tunnels now. We’ve got about an hour.”

  Nate nodded. “Yeah. It’s time.” He paused. “Anything from Skywatch?”

  “Nothing,” Leah reported. “It’s totally quiet there, just like here.”

  “Iago’s at the hellmouth,” Nate said grimly, which meant it was going to come down to a battle of magic versus magic. And pretty much everything they knew about the Xibalbans—which wasn’t nearly enough—suggested that the Nightkeepers were going to be seriously outmatched. Add in the seven death bats and the Volatile, and they were pretty close to fucked.

  Rabbit knew when darkness fell, even though he was locked in the lower level of the mansion, stuck in a windowless storeroom. He could feel the stars moving into position, feel the barrier thinning and the magic calling out to him.

  There was something else calling out to him, as well. Something that shouldn’t have been able to get through the wards surrounding Skywatch, not to mention the additional shield around his room. But the whispers penetrated, tempting him at first, taunting him. Then, as the equinox drew near and the power sink opened up inside him, lighting him with magic, the whispered temptation gave way to a demand. An order.

  Open your mind to me, Iago said, his mental tone vibrating with the power of a mind-bender, power he’d stolen from Rabbit in the first place. Add your magic to mine.

  “Fuck you, asshole,” Rabbit said aloud. “How did you get in here, anyway?”

  He didn’t expect an answer, and was surprised as shit when a chuckle vibrated along the connection. You invited me.

  “Did not!” Rabbit shouted, indignant. But beneath the bluster lay the suspicion that maybe he had. He’d been lying there all day, alone, in a room he’d ordered the winikin to strip of as much of the flammables as possible. TV was boring, he wasn’t in the mood for the game-loaded laptop Nate had hooked him up with, and his IM convo with Myrinne had lost steam a few hours earlier when she’d decided to nap, still recovering from her imprisonment.

  So yeah, he’d been lying there, thinking of Iago, thinking about how he’d crawled inside the Xibalban’s head. He’d mentally retraced what he’d done and how it’d felt to tell someone to die and almost have it work. And maybe, just m
aybe, while he’d been doing that, he’d inadvertently reached out and made contact.

  Anger kindled within Rabbit. Fury, and a burning need to protect what was his—his family and home. Myrinne.

  Well, guess what? he thought, burning with the magic. Two can play this game.

  He lay back on his cot, closed his eyes, and fisted his hands, digging his fingernails into his palms until blood flowed. Rather than fighting off Iago’s mental touch he sought it, grabbed on to it, followed it to its source. Whereas before it had been difficult to find his way into the Xibalban’s mind, it was easy this time, as though he were following the same path he’d blazed before.

  I’ve got you, you son of a bitch, he thought, keeping the flare of triumph to himself as he slid smoothly into Iago’s brain. Then, suddenly, he was looking through Iago’s eyes, seeing what Iago saw.

  And damn it, the Xibalban wasn’t anywhere near Chichén Itzá. The vegetation was wrong, the temperature and heavy cloud cover were wrong. And the temple Iago was facing looked like nothing Rabbit had ever seen before—all soaring stone arches cut directly into the side of a mountain, framing a godsdamned cave that was carved to look like a screaming skull.

  It was the fucking hellmouth. The entrance to Xibalba.

  Like what you see, Bunny-boy? Iago jeered, having yanked the nickname from Rabbit’s brain somehow. Good, because you’re not going anywhere.

  Mental shackles clamped down on Rabbit, and the pathway he’d followed into the Xibalban’s brain vanished in an instant. He turned to run, to flee, to fight, but couldn’t. He was cut off from his body, cut off from Skywatch and any ability to warn the others, cut off from Myrinne and any hope of escape.

  He couldn’t do a godsdamned thing except scream inside his own soul as Iago pressed his palms flat against the edge of the cave mouth and said a quiet spell, drawing on Rabbit’s power and his own to open the ancient hellroad, which had been locked tight more than a thousand years earlier, when the ancestral Nightkeepers had driven the demons from earth in the wake of the slaughter that had leveled an empire. Those Nightkeepers had trusted their true descendants to hold the barrier, and they had, for more than a thousand years.

  It’d taken a half-blood to fuck everything up.

  Lucius’s journey back from death seemed much quicker than the trek out to the archway; one minute he was on the roadway, putting one boot in front of the other. Then suddenly he was at a set of double doors. There was no wall or anything, just the doors, sitting in the middle of no-frigging-where.

  Taking a deep breath, he grabbed one of the door-knobs, twisted, and opened the panel slowly, so he could stick his head through and take a look.

  Without warning the door, the road, and the world around him vanished, and he was falling. There was blackness all around him, the sensation of gravity and air whipping past him, but no sound or smell. He opened his mouth and screamed but nothing came out; there was only silence. He couldn’t even hear his own rapid heartbeat or his pulse.

  Then he hit bottom, landing sprawled out on a giving, yielding surface. It was still dark but he could hear again. There was pain too. Monstrous, crushing pain that split his head and made him scream in pain, the howl coming out alien, like that of an animal, not a man.

  He writhed, digging his fingers into his scalp, tearing at his hair, trying to make the agony stop, make it all stop. Oh, sweet Jesus. If this is what living feels like, send me back to death!

  Slowly, though, the pain leveled. His skull felt overstuffed, but he could think now, could almost focus his eyes. He blinked, saw a fluorescent light overhead, and realized that it wasn’t really dark after all; it had all been in his mind. A nightmare, maybe, or a warning. He was in a bare room, lying on a cot. And wonder of wonders, he was seeing normally, with no luminous green haze obscuring his vision.

  He looked around, recognized his surroundings from his first night in New Mexico, and thought, I’m still in Skywatch, back in the dungeon, or whatever they want to call it. Which meant the Nightkeepers hadn’t sacrificed him, after all. They’d locked him up until the green haze passed. That must be why the voice had sent him back; it’d known that he wasn’t quite dead yet. Gratitude washed over him. He hadn’t wanted to die; he wanted to live, wanted to help the Nightkeepers in the battle ahead.

  His internal clock said it was nighttime, but he was pumped up, invigorated, ready to get rolling. Riding that energy, he stood and headed for the storeroom door, gave it a jaunty knock. “Yo! Anyone out there? Feeling human again, here.”

  There was a startled clatter from out in the hallway, then the sound of footsteps. A moment later the door opened a crack to reveal Jox’s face, pale with shock. “Did you just knock?”

  Lucius frowned and almost looked behind himself, to see if he’d missed there being someone else in the room. “Um, yeah?”

  “You shouldn’t have been able to reach the door. It’s warded.”

  “Apparently not so much.”

  “No, the ward’s working. Which means you’re back to being fully human.” Jox’s face relaxed; his whole body easing as he let the door swing a little wider. “A makol couldn’t have come through. A normal guy with a so-so academic record and a talent for getting his ass in trouble, though . . . he could get through just fine.”

  Lucius grinned, feeling as if he could run a few hundred laps and bench-press a Jeep. “Guilty on all counts, though I’ll have to talk to Anna about maligning her servant.”

  “Meh. Student, servant, big diff.” The winikin lifted a shoulder. “One of these days you and I can sit down and I’ll let you in on a few of the high points of the whole servant thing.” He flashed his forearm, which bore the aj-winikin “to serve” glyph, along with a pair of jaguars, one for Anna, one for Strike. “There are ways to work the bond magic, if you’re interested.”

  “I’m interested. Seriously.”

  “Come on.” Jox stepped back. “You’ve gotta be starving. You haven’t eaten in several days. I’ll catch you up on things while you eat.”

  “That sounds . . . Hang on, how long?” Lucius shook his head, unable to believe he felt so good after being in one place for days. Never mind wondering what the hell had gone on inside his head while he’d been walking along on that big-ass Xibalban treadmill. “Whoa. Hello, mind-fuck.”

  Jox snorted. “Come on, human.” He turned away and headed for the staircase.

  Lucius followed, but the moment he was clear of the door, something foul shoved him viciously aside, into a small corner of his own consciousness. His bones shifted and popped, his skin stretched tight, and the world went into slow motion. And everything got real green, real fast.

  He stretched out arms grown longer than normal, reaching for the winikin with fingers now tipped with pointed nails.

  Jox, run! Lucius screamed, but his lips didn’t move; no sound came out; the scream stayed stuck inside his head as his body was taken over by the makol that had somehow hidden deep inside him, fooling even the Nightkeepers’ ward magic.

  The winikin didn’t turn, didn’t know to defend himself. He was halfway up the stairs when the creature that wasn’t Lucius anymore grabbed him from behind, got an inhumanly strong grip on the back of his neck, and slammed him into the wall.

  Jox went limp, and Lucius—or the thing that had been Lucius—let him fall. Going to one knee beside him, the creature searched him and came up with a flip-blade buck knife. Flicking the blade open, the makol grabbed the winikin’s gray-shot hair and used it to pull his head back, baring his throat.

  The connection suddenly clicked in the small part of Lucius that still belonged to him. It was the goddamned equinox. A day for blood sacrifice.

  The knife descended. Lucius flung himself out of the corner of his mind, mustered all the mental control he’d never had, and shouted, “Hold!”

  The knife froze. Then, furious at the interruption, the makol turned its attention inward, grabbing what was left of Lucius’s consciousness and clamping down, squeezing
, pressing until everything went dark and life as he knew it ended.

  In the final hour before the equinox, the air inside the Nightkeepers’ small aboveground temple shimmered with gold and rainbows as the barrier greeted the Godkeepers. Alexis, Strike, and Leah joined together in the magic that would open the tunnel leading down to the intersection.

  “Pasaj och,” Alexis said in synchrony with the royal couple, and bowed her head in prayer as blood from her sliced hand dripped to the ground in sacrifice. She wore her mother’s combat shirt beneath her Kevlar, and for the first time felt at home, felt as though she belonged in the warrior’s garb, at the front of the pack. This was it, she knew; this was what her parents had wanted for her, what Izzy had trained her for. She had the power, the respect. But with it came a responsibility she wasn’t sure she could fulfill.

  Rainbows against demons. It seemed impossible, even more so knowing that the Volatile was out there somewhere, waiting for her.

  “Steady,” Leah murmured out of the corner of her mouth. “One step at a time.”

  “Easier said than done,” Alexis replied.

  “Amen to that, sister.”

  Then the magic stabilized, and the tunnel was fully open. “In we go.” Strike led, with Leah and Alexis falling in behind him, Nate behind her, and then Anna, Patience, Brandt, Jade, and Sven. As usual, Michael shielded the rear.

  They had debated closing the tunnel once they were inside, but that would’ve meant they could be trapped underground. Leaving it open, though, ran the risk of someone—or something—coming up behind them, which Alexis didn’t like one bit. She was coming to realize, though, that her job as an adviser wasn’t to steer the Nightkeepers’ away from risk—that was impossible. All she and Nate could do was to manage the risk as best as they could, and then pray.

  Or rather, she would pray, and he would keep stubbornly pretending that the gods and destiny didn’t rule their lives, despite all evidence to the contrary.