by Bryn Donovan
“You can’t actually shoot demons. You can block them with metal or stone, but bullets don’t affect them. If they possess a human, you can only kill the human.”
“That’s not the point,” she said. “Who takes care of the kids?”
“Andre was always here. And Gabi’s sister. But her boys are teenagers now. The older one might go to Athens soon.”
He stopped at a red door, rapped on it twice, and waited. A woman in an untucked flannel shirt opened it. Her hair, dirty blond with dark roots, was a mess, and her bangs fell half in front of her glasses. It took Cassie a moment to notice that the woman’s eyes were a striking crystalline green. Circles below them suggested a lack of sleep. Although she appeared to be a few years older than Cassie, she also looked something like a college student during a particularly rough finals week.
Jonathan said, “Salaam, Lucia.”
“Salaam.” She cast a look of keen interest in Cassie’s direction. “You must be Cassandra Rios.”
“Call me Cassie.”
“Please, come in. Give me a couple of minutes. I need a break and more coffee.”
Cassie wondered what kind of accent Lucia had. Dimitriou sounded like a Greek name to her, though she wasn’t positive. The Scholar trotted off, and Cassie followed Jonathan inside. Neat stacks of paper lined the huge L-shaped desk, and a big world map covered one wall, stuck with clusters of white pins. Dozens of square photos tiled another wall. Several pictured a handsome man with heavy-lidded eyes, a short moustache and beard, and shiny, coiffed, dark hair. In one, he was kissing Lucia. “Cute couple,” Cassie said, pointing to it. “Is he a Knight?”
Jonathan came over to her. “Yeah, that’s her fiancé, Samir Hassan. I killed a Black Dog with him in Manchester.”
“You killed a what?”
“Not a real dog. A barghest.” She must have had a blank expression, because he added, “Something bad.”
The people in a few of the photos looked like Lucia’s parents and siblings, but most of them seemed to be friends. Jonathan’s gaze lingered on a picture of a woman with porcelain skin and bright red lipstick raising a glass of wine toward the camera. Cassie said, “She’s pretty.”
“We broke up.”
Her head swiveled in his direction. “What?”
“Um. That’s Sophie Kazakov. She basically broke up with Manus Sancti.”
“You used to date her,” she said.
“When we were both in London.”
Her looks contrasted sharply with Cassie’s, with her turned-up nose and fine blond hair in a pixie cut. She looked like a Russian elf model. Did he always date tiny blondes? Maybe Cassie wasn’t his type. “How long were you together?” As if that were her business.
“Almost two years.”
Pretty serious, then. Cassie kept her voice light as she asked, “Did you ever think about getting married, having kids, the whole nine?”
Jonathan rubbed at his shoulder. “She, uh, doesn’t want kids.”
Well, this was interesting. “Do you? Is that why you broke up?”
“No.” He shrugged. “I mean, we fought about it.”
Cassie snorted. “Why would you try to argue someone into having kids? How is that going to end well?”
“She’s a psychometrist.” For a moment, Cassie thought he said psychologist, but he went on to explain. “She can learn things about people just by touching something they touched. It’s a rare gift. But a daughter would probably inherit it.”
“A daughter she didn’t want.” Cassie had wanted kids once. When she’d first broached the subject with Rick, he’d wanted to put it off until he got another promotion. By the time he’d done that, things had gotten so bad between them that Cassie hadn’t wanted to bring a baby into the mess.
“It wasn’t the only thing we fought about,” Jonathan said dryly. He walked away from the wall of photos and took a seat in one of the clear acrylic chairs. “We broke up a month before she left.”
“Why did she leave?”
“It hardly ever happens.” His brows drew together as though he were considering how much to say. “Her cousin was a Knight in London, and he was…killed on a mission by another Knight.” Cassie took in a sharp breath and he looked up at her. “On accident.”
This didn’t dampen her shock. “How do you kill your partner by accident?”
He closed his eyes briefly. “It’s so much easier than you might think. It happened in Delhi last year. In this case, it was also her cousin’s mistake that got him killed. We all screw up sometimes.”
“But that probably didn’t make her feel any better,” Cassie guessed.
“She was devastated. He was basically her best friend. She wanted the other guy kicked out, or worse, which didn’t happen. Actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea.”
Cassie recalled the gist of the saying. “You’re not guilty if you didn’t mean to do it.”
“Right. I said something like that to her—which didn’t help. Capitán Renaud and the comandante in London said the same thing. She broke up with me, she was furious with everyone, and she left.”
“Jesus.” Cassie looked back at Lucia’s wall. No one would have guessed, from all of the smiling faces, that they dealt with these kinds of tragedies. “So they let you guys leave if you want to?”
“No. Nobody can find her.”
Cassie peered at him. “I would’ve thought you guys could find anybody.”
“Sophie’s different. She can hack any computer, get money out of any ATM machine.” Damn. Why couldn’t Cassie have wound up with powers like that? Not that she would steal from people, but still… “Plus she knows all of our tricks. She just disappeared. They looked for a while, and then I think they gave up.”
“Aren’t they worried she’ll go to the media and tell them all about you?”
He shook his head. “They’d think she was crazy. But anyway, she’d never do that. Her family’s still with us.”
Lucia came back, interrupting Cassie’s lesson about how incredible Jonathan’s ex was, and set her coffee well out of reach. “Pull up a chair.” As Jonathan and Cassie complied, Lucia pulled on rubber surgical gloves, covering up an emerald ring in an ornate yellow gold setting on her left ring finger. “Let’s talk about the codex.”
Cassie said, “The what?”
She took down Cassie’s grandfather’s journal from a shelf. With a gloved forefinger and thumb, she flipped through the pages. It struck Cassie as silly. It was an old journal, not the Dead Sea Scrolls. “Here is the page you read aloud, yes?” A guilty, prickly heat rose on the back of Cassie’s neck as she nodded. Lucia knew the trouble she’d caused. “It matches no written language in existence.”
What the hell? Jonathan leaned forward in his chair as she continued to explain.
“They handed this project over to me because, given your great-grandfather’s explorations, it was easy to guess that this was a phonetic transliteration of ancient Mayan. It’s a specialty of mine. Well, I began with Egyptian hieroglyphics and moved on to Mesoamerican languages. But this is a different form of the language than any on record.” Her green eyes took on a nerdy sparkle. “There are thirty-two modern variations, not all of them formally recognized. But this”—she pointed at the page without quite touching it—“this is proto-Mayan. Maybe twelve hundred, thirteen hundred years old.”
Cassie stared at the page. “Holy smokes.”
“When your great-grandfather was digging in the Yucatán, he found something very interesting. He makes a reference in his journal to a certain Mayan codex, one lost to the entire world.”
Cassie asked, “A codex is like an old manuscript, right?”
“Yes.” She pulled a huge black leather book with no title down from another shelf. “How much do you know about the Mayans?”
“Hardly anything. They were native Americans, they knew a lot about astrology, they built amazing buildings. Then the Spanish wiped them out.”
“Not exactly. There are seven
or eight million Maya still.” She opened the big volume. Printed, full-color drawings of hieroglyphs, all in rounded square shapes like keys on a keyboard, filled the page. Looking closer, Cassie could see human and animal faces in the little pictures. Lines and dots separated some of the rows. “Three authentic codices by the Mayans from before the time of Columbus exist today. They contain information about astrology, as you say, and horoscopes, as well as religious rituals and ceremonies.”
“I guess most of the books disintegrated, huh,” Cassie said.
She looked pained. “Doubtless some of them did. The jungles of Mexico and Central America aren’t the best environment for preservation. But the Spanish colonists burned hundreds of books and destroyed countless other objects and artifacts carrying inscriptions. At that time—the mid-sixteenth-century—many of those records were already hundreds of years old.”
“My God.” Cassie wasn’t a book lover the way Lucia was, but this still made her feel ill. “Why? What were they about?”
“Of course, we don’t know. The Spanish couldn’t read them. But their understanding was that many of them contained Mayan history, religious rituals, and beliefs. Bishop Diego De Landa wrote of one such burning that the books contained ‘superstition and lies of the devil’.” Lucia pushed her glasses up on her nose. “This is the language of the witch trials.”
“What a waste.” To lose books forever—it was almost hard to imagine, now that pretty much everything was on the Internet.
“About a hundred years ago, we obtained four letters from a priest employed by Montejo the Elder, one of the Spanish invaders. In one, he writes about a magical spell that caused several soldiers to be unable to raise their swords.” Her mouth quirked. “It’s unclear if they referred to weapons or virility. Regardless, the suspected shaman was slowly tortured to death.”
“That’s a horrible story.”
“The point is, we’ve long believed that some of the destroyed codices contained powerful magic.” She took a deep breath. “And that’s why your great-grandfather’s journal is so exciting. I’ve come up with a rough translation of this page you read aloud.”
Cassie sat up straighter. “Let me see it!”
“As I say, it’s still very rough. Essentially, it begins by calling on the privilege of your bloodline.”
“My what?” Cassie asked.
“It refers to your family inheritance—a spiritual or magical one.”
As smart as this woman was, she seemed to be missing a very obvious point. “I’m not Mayan.”
She pointed at Cassie, her eyes dancing with glee. “We’ll get back to that. Then it calls on the birds of the air, the beasts that walk the earth, the insects and snakes that creep on the ground, and the fish that swim in the sea to be linked to your heart and to defend you from all mortal and immortal enemies.”
Cassie stared at her. Finally, she said, “There haven’t been any birds or fish yet.”
“Attack fish,” Jonathan muttered. “I’d like to see that.”
Lucia shook her head in disbelief. “I don’t think you understand. Almost all of the Mayan lore was lost. All that knowledge, that insight. And this—” She waved her arms. “A lost codex. A spell from four thousand years ago, at least. And it works. This is an astounding find.”
It wasn’t their astounding find. Cassie put her hand on the book and slid it across the table to rest in front of her. Lucia flinched, maybe because she didn’t think Cassie was treating it carefully enough.
Jonathan cleared his throat. “How do you know this is from a codex?”
“He refers to it.” Lucia reached over and delicately flipped a few pages back. “The word is encrypted, as are some others in his writings, but it’s a simple enough code. We’re positive he found a Mayan manuscript.”
“This does all sound amazing,” Cassie said. “But can we go back to the part about how I’m not Mayan?”
Lucia pointed at Cassie again. “But you are. From the buccal swab, Dr. Morales tested your DNA, and it coincides with our genealogical research.” She pulled out a piece of paper from a stack and folded it out into a chart. “This shows your family tree to twelve generations back.” Cassie looked down at the sheet of paper, stunned and a little excited. No one had ever told her much about her history. “Also, according to his journal, your great-grandfather was deliberately searching for artifacts of his ancestors, based on family stories passed down from generations.”
They knew so much more about her and her family than she did. “How did you get all this done already?”
“Jonathan sent me a photo of the journal page you read from a couple of days ago.” He must have done it right after they’d retrieved the book from her parents’ house. It made sense, but it bothered Cassie that he hadn’t told her. “And we have good researchers and good computer programs.”
“Still. Don’t you ever sleep?”
She apparently regarded this as a rhetorical question. “Look here.” She pointed to a name above Rodrigo De La Garza. “Your great-great-grandmother, Jacinta De La Garza. Maiden name Canul, born in Campeche, daughter of Mayan revolutionaries.”
“Wow.” Cassie felt a glimmer of pride for this ancestor she’d never heard of before this moment. “She sounds like a badass.”
Jonathan asked, “Lucia, can any person with Mayan ancestry use the same spell as Cassie?”
“I need to refine the translation, but based on the way it’s written and similar spells we’ve seen, we suspect one has to be a direct descendant. And there’s probably more than one spell. I haven’t translated the other two pages yet.”
Cassie said, “Maybe the other two spells make plants and minerals attack people.” Lucia flashed a grin. Finally, somebody thought she was funny. “Did my great-grandfather ever say the animal spell?”
“According to the journal, no. He knew it was a spell, but he was struggling to translate it, so he didn’t say the words aloud.” Lucia smiled. “Smart man.”
“Even if the spells only work for direct descendants,” Jonathan said, “with a book that old, there must be thousands of people it would work for.”
Lucia nodded. “Yes, even given how thoroughly the Europeans decimated the indigenous Mesoamerican populations. We could track many of them down if we wanted to. There’s no one in Manus Sancti. We only have two others with specifically Mayan ancestry, and they have no connection.” She tapped the ancestry chart. “As far as Cassie’s immediate relatives, they are surprisingly few and far between. Her great-great-grandmother Jacinta had five siblings, all of whom died of typhus, along with her mother. Rodrigo was Jacinta’s only child, because her husband was murdered not long after his birth, apparently in connection to their revolutionary activities. Cassie here, her mother, her sister, and her great-aunt in Tapachula are the only heirs we’ve found so far.” Cassie hadn’t even known she had a great-aunt.
She put her hand on the open journal. Maybe there would be other spells, like one that made everything one touched turn to gold. Wait, no, that story ended up bad. But maybe a spell to teleport or to make someone fall in love with her. The possibilities were endless.
Or maybe it would be more horrible spells that she’d never want to utter, and she could just burn the thing. “Do you know how to reverse the animal attacks yet?”
Lucia blew her floppy bangs out of her eyes. “We haven’t gotten that far.”
“Maybe it says how in this codex. Does the journal say where it is?”
She tilted her head. “I was hoping you could help with that. Does your family have any more of your great-grandfather’s belongings?”
Cassie shook her head. “Hardly anything, as far as I know. I found a few things in the basement. A photo of my great-grandma, an old toy army tank, and a key.”
“The toy is probably just a memento of the war,” she mused.
“Which one?”
“The Spanish Civil War. De La Garza went to fight for the republic. He was already in his late thirties by th
en.”
Did Cassie’s mom know about that? Probably. She never told her anything.
Lucia stood up to take a big swig of her coffee before returning it to the shelf. “The key is interesting. Rodrigo made one reference to guarding the codex in a hidden place.”
Cassie had tossed all the stuff into her big purse. “It’s in my room if you want to see it.”
Her mouth parted. “Yes, definitely.”
“I have that tank, too.”
She shrugged. “We should look at anything that belonged to him. But the key may be, well, the key we’re looking for.”
“Okay, but I need them back. And I’ll take the journal now.”
Lucia cast a worried glance at Jonathan. She told Cassie, “I still need to translate the next two pages of Mayan.”
“Right.” She frowned down at the volume. “I wish I could read it.”
Lucia brightened. “I almost forgot. We did translate the rest of it into English, if you’re curious.”
Cassie blinked at her. “Seriously?”
“Yes. All of the portions that are in Spanish—the journal entries.” From the bottom of the stack of papers, she pulled out a blue binder. “Would you like them?”
“Yes!” Cassie grabbed the binder. “I’ll read it right here.”
Jonathan said, “Actually, you’re going to need to go back to your quarters.”
“I just came from my quarters!”
“I have to meet with Capitán Renaud.”
“Why?” They’d just seen each other in the hallway. But he would have read Val’s report since then. “Are you in trouble?”
“Nothing serious,” he said, which Cassie took as a yes. She gave an exasperated sigh. Hero or not, his boss seemed hard on people. And as nice as her little spaceship capsule was, she didn’t care to live there.
Lucia said cheerfully, “You’ll need time to read, anyway.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Her great-grandfather’s journal began with days of entries about preparing for an archeological expedition. At first, this made her swell with pride, having this ancestor who was so educated and adventurous.