Wonder shimmered through Jade. Though vaguely bunkerlike, it was elegant in its own way. More, it wasn’t a restored ruin of a bygone era or a computer-generated rendering of what an ancient Mayan temple might have looked like. This was the real thing. Somehow.
“Do you think that’s the library?” she asked softly. During its tenure on earth, the library had been hidden in a subterranean cavern that could be accessed only by a series of water-filled, booby-trapped tunnels. The natural cavern, embellished with carved scenes and ancient spells, had been empty when Nate and Alexis discovered it. Since then, the Nightkeepers had assumed—or at least Jade had—that when their ancestors had cast the powerful magic needed to hide the library within the barrier and create the Prophet’s spell to retrieve the information it contained, they would have replicated the stone-carved cavern within the barrier’s gray-green, foggy milieu. But this was no stone cavern, and that hadn’t been any ordinary barrier transition. Not to mention that the Prophet’s spell hadn’t said anything about the Prophet entering the barrier or traveling to the library itself; the magic was supposed to connect Lucius with the information, allowing him to channel it while he stayed on the earthly plane.
Instead, he—a human who wasn’t quite a Prophet—and she—a mage who barely rated the title—
had somehow been sucked . . . where?
When he didn’t answer her question, it was an answer nonetheless. She blew out a breath. “You saw the hellmouth too.” The image of the cave mouth overlain with a carving of a screaming skull was burned into her retinas. Iago might’ve locked and hidden the earthly entrance to Xibalba, but somehow they had gotten through.
Lucius nodded. “Yeah. I saw it.” He glanced upward. “And damned if that doesn’t look like the sky from the in-between, only way brighter.” The in-between was the limbo plane where his consciousness had been trapped while the makol demon had been in full control of his body. In it was the dusty road leading to the river-crossing entrance to Xibalba.
“The library is hidden in the barrier,” Jade pointed out. “If it had been in the underworld already, the Banol Kax wouldn’t have needed to infiltrate Iago’s camp to ensure that his people didn’t gain access.” Yet they had, through Lucius’s makol. Which suggested the library wasn’t in Xibalba. But if that was the case, why were they there? “Do you think someone—or some thing—pulled us here?”
“More things are possible in heaven and earth,” he misquoted, expression grim, but she also heard an undertone of suppressed excitement. He caught her hands and pulled her to her feet, so they stood facing each other in the lee of the big stone column, hands linked. “But given where we’ve ended up, I don’t like the idea of who might’ve been doing the pulling.” He glanced past the concealing pillar toward the pyramid, then looked sidelong at her. “We should go back and get weapons, maybe reinforcements.”
“You’re assuming the way spell is going to work.” The homing spell that was supposed to return an out-of-body mage to his or her body was notoriously fickle. “And that we’ll be able to get back here afterward.” What was more, the same skitter of excitement she saw on his face was running through her veins, urging her onward. “Let’s check out the pyramid.” The suggestion came partly from duty, partly from her growing need to do something . . . and also from her growing suspicion that whoever had brought them there would have to be the one to send them back. The day of the new moon wasn’t one of barrier flux, which meant she and Lucius shouldn’t have been able to enter the barrier, never mind get all the way through the hellmouth.
Beware.
“We’re unarmed. Shit, we don’t even have a pocketknife to blood our palms.” But he wanted to do it. She saw the building excitement in his face, felt it race in her own system, as though they were daring each other without saying the words.
“We’re just going to go look around.” But he had a point; stupidity didn’t favor survival of the fittest. So she took a deep breath. “I’ll shield us.” At his sharp look, she shook her head. “I know it’s a warrior’s spell, but there’s something—” In the air, she started to say, but broke off because that wasn’t it, precisely. The faint glitter of red-gold magic and the hum of Nightkeeper power were right there in front of her, misting the air between her and Lucius, close enough that she thought she could reach out and grab the power if she was brave enough. Do it, her instincts said. She didn’t know if it was the residual vulnerability from the sex magic, the barrier crossing, or something about the strange canyon, but the magic suddenly felt as if it were a part of her, in a way that was both foreign and compelling.
Acting on instinct, her body moving without her conscious volition, she bit down sharply on her own tongue, drawing blood. Letting go of Lucius’s hands, she stepped back and spit onto the sparkling, red-tinged sand, offering a sacrifice of both blood and water to the gods. The red-gold coalesced around her, then around Lucius, as it had done before, when they had been lying together in the aftermath. Magic spurted through her like lust, hot and hard. It caught her up, spun through her, making her want to scream with the mad glory of it.
Lucius said something, but she barely heard him over the hum of magic that gathered around her, inside her.
“I can do this,” she said, or maybe she only thought it. Either way, the certainty coiled hard and hot inside her, and the shimmering magic that hovered in front of her coalesced into . . . what? She could almost see shapes in the sparkles as she reached out to the magic, touched it. A soundless detonation ripped through her, a rush of power that strained toward something that stayed just out of reach. If she could just—
“Jade!” Lucius’s shout broke through, shattering her concentration. He had her by the arms and was shaking her, his eyes hard. “Pull it back, now!”
The magic snapped out of existence in an instant, without her volition. The loss of that vital energy sapped her, had her sagging against him. Her head spun, but his urgency penetrated. “What? What’s wrong?”
Then she heard it: a dog’s mournful howl coming from the other side of their concealing pillar.
Lucius crowded her closer to the column, pressing her flat against it with his body. Against her temple, he whispered, “There’s something going on in the pyramid.”
The carved stone was warm and rough where Jade’s fingers clutched at the grooved surface, grounding her even as her mind spun with the power of the magic she’d just touched on, and the sharp grief that she’d been unable to do a damned thing with it. Her heart banged against her ribs as she and Lucius eased around the edge to take a look.
“Oh, shit.” She wasn’t sure which one of them said it. Maybe they both had.
Whereas before the pyramid had seemed deserted, now a man stood on the first of the three big, god-size steps. He was wearing a simple white loincloth and had dark hair and strangely gray- cast skin, and after a moment of standing motionless, he raised a carved conch shell to his mouth and blew a shrill note. Moments later the call was answered by movement at the darkened doorways on the lower tier; then five more men emerged, but these guys were wearing ceremonial regalia and full-face masks carved to look like various creatures: a snake, an antelope, a white jaguar, a bird of prey, and a wolf. The masks were topped with elaborate feather-and-bone headdresses that created colorful halos, and the men’s bodies were asymmetrically shielded on their left sides, leaving their right arms free to wield the short- handled clubs they wore at their belts.
Jade just stared, stunned. The skin of the men’s arms and legs was gray-cast in places, missing in others, peeled away to show reddish meat, even down to glimpses of stained bone. Worse, the animal shapes weren’t masks; those were the actual heads of the man-beasts who had come from the pyramid.
For a second, denying the horror of it all, her brain locked on the image: five armored men and one musician against a background of rusty hues. It was just like the painting that’d been showing on Lucius’s flat-screen. But why? How? What did it mean?
�
�They sensed the magic,” she said, forcing the words. What had she been thinking, trying to wield a warrior’s spell? Worse, she’d let the magic take over, let it use her—or at least attempt to use her.
“I think so.” But he squeezed her shoulder in silent support. “Now the question is whether that’s a good thing.”
Jade held her breath, though it wasn’t as if that was going to change anything.
Without hesitation or consultation, the five armored men—demons? what were they?—headed straight for their hiding spot, with Jaguar-head in the lead and the others grouped behind him. He pulled the short club from his belt, held it out to the side, and uttered a sharp command. The weapon shimmered momentarily and a malicious rattle skidded through the air as the short club elongated to become a long, deadly looking shaft with a wickedly barbed spike at one end and a bulbous knob at the other. The blunt end roiled greasy brown.
Dark magic!
A cry caught in Jade’s throat. She locked eyes with Lucius as their question was answered all too clearly. “Not good!” they said in unison.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Come on!” Lucius grabbed Jade’s hand and dragged her to a skidding run that churned up the sparkling sand and pebbles underfoot. He kept his body between her and their pursuers, impelled by a vicious, bloodthirsty sort of protectiveness he’d never felt before. For all that he respected the hell out of the Nightkeepers’ egalitarian use of both men and women in the warrior caste and on the front lines, this was a different situation, a different woman. She shouldn’t even be there, damn it. Neither of them should.
As they burst from cover, the jaguar-masked warrior shouted something that probably translated to
“Halt, intruder!” or the equivalent, though Lucius didn’t know what language they were using. It wasn’t Mayan; at least, not any version of it he’d ever studied or heard.
From within the stone enclosure, the dog stopped howling and started barking, and was soon joined by a second set of snarling barks, feral-sounding and mean. Then, half a heartbeat later, the barks were drowned out by a roar that wasn’t made by anything so mundane as a canine. The noise shook the canyon floor and made the arched top of the temple start to seem less like an artistic flourish and more like the top of a cage.
Lucius glanced over his shoulder. Their pursuers were gaining fast, in a blur of ceremonial armor, ragged flesh, and flashing fangs. And what the hell were they? Animal- headed zombies didn’t feature in the Nightkeepers’ legends, at least, not that he knew. A connection nudged at him, but he couldn’t think about that right now. They needed to find a way out of the strange canyon, which was starting to feel too much like a gladiatorial pit. Gods knew that concept wasn’t outside the legends.
“Look!” Jade pointed toward one of the corners where the canyon ended—only it wasn’t a corner anymore. As they drew nearer, the optical illusion of a dead end gave way, showing where their canyon made a T intersection with another running at right angles. Maybe that was a way out!
They tore around the corner, hand in hand. Twenty feet into the narrower canyon, they slammed into an invisible, unyielding surface stretched across the opening. Lucius’s breath exploded from him on an “oof” that became a howl when unseen coils snapped tight around them both, jerking them off their feet to dangle in midair.
“Fuck!” He struggled to get to Jade, to free himself, to do something, anything. A harsh rattling noise surrounded them, marking the invisible force as the dark magic wielded by the denizens of the underworld. He had a nauseating image of him and Jade being caught in a huge, invisible spiderweb, with something terrible and eight-legged advancing intangibly toward them.
If you’re ever going to connect to the magic, now would be a good fucking time, he thought, and bit down viciously on his tongue. Pain flared and blood welled in his mouth, but that was it. No magic. No power. No nothing.
“Lucius!”
Jade’s shout was scant warning as Jaguar-head grabbed Lucius’s ankles and yanked, pulling him free of the web magic. Lucius hit the ground hard and let himself go limp, though his heart hammered in his chest, impelled by rage and the pounding need to get to Jade, to protect her, to somehow get her back to safety, though he wasn’t the mage she needed him to be.
Then Snake-head leaned over him, hissing in satisfaction. Revulsion lent added force as Lucius lunged to his feet, kicking hard at the demon warrior’s kneecap. He hit his target, felt a hell of an impact, and heard the sick pop of bone and cartilage. Snake-head howled and went down. Lucius kicked him in the face, connecting with a watermelon crunch that was disgustingly satisfying.
Blood pounding, he scrambled up and spun—straight into the stubby end of Jaguar- head’s spear.
The weapon rattled and belched greasy brown smoke, which whipped around Lucius, immobilizing him in the same invisible coils as before. Then Wolf-head stepped up and smashed Lucius in the temple with his short club. The impact thudded through him and the world spun as he dropped with the grace of a corpse. Jade screamed, but her cry cut off midway, choking to silence. Lucius roared in answer, struggling against the unyielding bonds. “Jade. Jade! ”
As the world faded around him, he tried to fight his way back to full consciousness, all the while praying, Gods, don’t let it end like this!
It didn’t. When he came to a short time later, he was being carried head and foot between two of the animal-headed warriors. Beside him strode Jaguar-head, who carried Jade over his shoulder; she lay still, but her eyes were open and reflected her relief when Lucius sent her a wink. He didn’t dare do more, though. Not until he better understood what the hell was going on . . . and what they could do about it.
He couldn’t see who had shoulders, but Snake-head was at his feet, not even limping. The damn things have healing magic, he realized. But what the hell were they? Not Banol Kax or makol, he knew. The dark lords of the underworld were huge and inhuman, and the archive said the demon souls of the makol took on a shadowy, green-eyed form when they weren’t possessing human hosts. So what other classes of badasses existed within Xibalba, and how could they be taken down for good?
Unfortunately, that was yet another example of the Nightkeepers’ critical need to fill in the gaps.
Someone, at some point in the past, must’ve known what these things were, and how to kill them. But that knowledge, like so much else, had been lost.
So think it through, he told himself. There’s got to be something we can do here. But unfortunately, the whole “everything happens for a reason” religious tenet of the magi had a major flaw in this case: With the skyroad destroyed and the gods unable to communicate with the Nightkeepers or directly influence things on the earthly plane, logic said that it hadn’t been a god that had brought them to the canyon. More likely, one of the Banol Kax or a powerful demon underling had detected the sex magic and the stirring of the Prophet’s powers and usurped the energy flows somehow. Which would suggest that he and Jade didn’t have a destined role to play in the underworld; the dark lords were just looking to cut down on their enemies.
Okay, so maybe thinking it through hadn’t been such a great idea.
Try the homing spell, he mouthed to Jade, chancing the communication. When she got a mulish I’m not going without you look on her face, he added, If you can get back, you can bring help.
Maybe. Maybe not, but at least she’d be safe.
The small party passed through the stone pillars, clearly heading for the pyramid and whatever had made that terrible noise earlier. They were running out of time. “Do it!” he hissed.
Eyes bleak, Jade nodded. But when she whispered the ritual word, nothing happened. Not one freaking thing.
Lucius cursed inwardly as that brief hope guttered and died. He had no illusion that he could summon the power on his own, and he doubted sex magic would be an option anytime soon. So what the hell else could he do? There had to be something, damn it. Problem was, he knew that was a self-
serving lie. Sometimes
life just wasn’t fucking fair.
The group came within view of the pyramid, which loomed ever larger in Lucius’s limited field of vision, bringing a mixture of awe and dread. Awe because he’d spent a third of his lifetime studying a dead culture suddenly coming alive in front of him. Dread because . . . well, he wasn’t an idiot. But that didn’t mean he was giving up, either.
The whistle-blower wasn’t on the ramparts anymore, and the dogs—and whatever else was inside—
had gone ominously quiet as the procession stopped short of the temple structure. Lucius’s captors unceremoniously dumped him facedown in the scuffed dirt. He landed cursing, and rolled onto his side as Jade thumped down on her butt next to him. She cried out when she hit, but then snapped her mouth shut and glared instead.
Good girl, Lucius thought. He didn’t get a chance to do more than lock eyes with her before Snake-
head and Pig-head moved in and dragged him to his feet. Still bound in the relentless yet invisible shield magic, he had zero choice in the matter. He hung between his captors, glaring when two of the others hauled Jade to her feet, so the captives and their animal- headed guards stood facing one of the low- linteled doorways that led into the pyramid’s lower tier.
Brain racing in search of a clue, explanation, or escape route, Lucius scanned the intricate Mayan glyphwork carved into the surrounding stones, automatically starting to arrange the phonemes into words and meanings. But before he’d gotten beyond, “On this cardinal day of . . .” there was movement within the temple and four newcomers emerged. They looked like men—in that they had all their flesh and normal human faces—and they wore elaborate cloaks over jewel-encrusted armor plates and armbands. But, incongruously, the armor wasn’t made of wood, leather, and stone, as were the traditional trappings worn by the animal-heads. Instead, it was made of burnished metal: copper, or maybe gold. Which didn’t make sense, because the Maya hadn’t been metalworkers, and the Mayan paradigm prevailed in Xibalba.
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