As he slid toward that dry, dusty purgatory, he lashed out, reaching invisible thought hands to grab something, anything that might halt the slide. He caught a flash at the edge of his consciousness, a hint of power that wasn’t quite familiar, wasn’t entirely strange, but was wholly, utterly compelling. He grabbed for it, touched it for a second, then lost it. But at that brief touch, the in-between winked out and the world went gray-green.
Then that too winked out, and there was nothing but darkness and sick, aching pain.
Panic hammered through him as he sensed boundaries all around him, hemming him into a space that was so much smaller than the vastness he’d just traveled through. He was jailed by the pain, trapped within— Oh, he thought as the inner lightbulb went off and he recognized the sensation of being back in his physical self . . . which felt like unholy shit. His head hammered with the rhythm of his stumbling heart, and agony flared in each of his joints, making him feel like he’d been stretched out on a huge cosmic torture rack that had stopped short of actually killing him, but only barely. And who knew the body had so many damned joints? Even his pinkie toes were killing him.
“Ngh,” he said, wincing when the word—the grunt?—echoed too loudly, setting off cymbal clashes in his skull. He hadn’t felt hangover- crappy like this since the day after Cizin had first entered his soul. The thought brought a spurt of panic, but he beat it back. It feels like this because you’re a human trying to do magic, he told himself, forcing the logic through the pain. The library is not a makol ; it’s not trying to possess you. Though the ask-and-walk thing was borderline.
“Lucius!” Jade said, her voice seeming to come from far above him. “Can you hear me? Are you okay?”
Jesus Christ, don’t shout , he wanted to say, but he caught the worry in her voice and felt the grip of her hand on his. He hated that she was seeing him weak and helpless yet again, but that was his hang-
up, not hers, so he made an effort to be polite, even through the hammering inside his skull. “M’fine.
Food?”
Okay, so maybe that was still lacking in the polite-ness department. But he heard paper and then clothing rustle and sensed motion nearby. What was more, he didn’t sense a crowd nearby, which was a relief.
“Jox left a carb- and-fat bomb in case . . . for when you came around.” Her voice trembled on the words. She took a deep breath, and she sounded steadier when she said, “I’ll call the others. We’ve been watching you in shifts ever since Sasha said you were as stable as she could get you. We’ve been waiting for . . . well. I’ll call them.”
“ ’N a minute.” Lucius slitted his eyes, saw the familiar details of his cottage, and relaxed fractionally at finding that he was on his couch, not locked up in the basement in the main mansion, or worse. Craning his neck, he looked for Jade, and found her in the kitchen, leaning on the counter with her arms braced and her head hanging. She was wearing trim jeans and a soft button-down that clung to her skin as her body curved in a private moment of what might have been relief, but he found himself interpreting more as grief. Regret.
What the hell had he missed? He wanted to go to her, to hold her. Wanted to lean into her and let her lean on him. But that was the weakness talking, he knew. More, he knew that it was a private moment, and one she wouldn’t thank him for watching. So he forced himself to look away.
Focusing on the changes that had occurred in his main room while he’d been out of it, he saw that the TV was off, no longer showing the scene that had been so strangely mimicked by what they had seen in Xibalba. The coffee table held a notebook and a couple of volumes he recognized from the archive, primary texts on the legends of the sun god, clueing him in that Jade had caught the Kinich Ahau connection. Good girl. There was an IV stand beside the couch, a needle taped at the crook of his arm, and a clear line feeding him the nutrient mix the winikin had come up with to offset the postmagic crash experience by a mage—or in this case, a human wannabe—in the aftermath of big magic. Which made him wonder how long he’d been unconscious.
A look out the window showed him that sky was blue-black, but with dusk, not dawn. Had he lost an entire day? More? He cursed under his breath.
As he did, Jade came back into the main room carrying a bowl of pasta mixed with the heavy meat sauce he liked, liberally dosed with cheese. At his colorful language, she raised an eyebrow. “That sounded coherent, if physically impossible. I take it your head is clearing?”
“How many days did I lose?” He took the bowl and held out a hand for the fork she was still holding, just in case she had any idea of trying to feed him.
She passed it over. “About twenty hours. From your perspective, it’s tomorrow night.” She was wearing what he thought of as her counselor’s face, serene to the point of blandness. But he knew her well enough to see strain and nerves beneath, along with an unfamiliar edginess.
“I made it to the library,” he said before she asked.
“And?”
There was no simple answer to that, he realized as he tried to come up with something concise and vaguely coherent. He dug into the pasta, buying himself a moment. Finally, he went with: “It’s amazing. I wish you could’ve been there with me.”
And it was true, he realized. Of all of the magi, she was the one who would’ve appreciated the artifacts, the Ouija game, all of it. And he would’ve liked to have seen it all for the first time with her.
Whatever else was—or wasn’t—between them, they meshed on that level. Always had.
“I tried to find you,” she blurted, locking her fingers together until her knuckles whitened. “Last night we uplinked—Strike, me, everyone. I tried to find your ch’ul song for Sasha, tried to follow where you’d gone . . . but I couldn’t. Our connection, the sex magic, just wasn’t strong enough.I wasn’t strong enough.”
“Oh.” Suddenly, her sitting next to his bed, waiting for him to regain consciousness—or die, though neither of them had said it outright—seemed less like the vigil of a friend or lover, and more like self-
flagellation.
She continued, though he wasn’t sure whether she was talking to him or to herself. “I couldn’t find the sex link and pull you home. We thought . . . We weren’t sure you were going to make it out.”
“But I did,” he pointed out in between big bites of cheese-laden pasta, not mentioning that it had been a close call. “And for the record, I don’t think the library works the same way the rest of the barrier does. It’s possible—even likely—that you wouldn’t have been able to follow me even if I were a mage and we were jun tan mates.” He thought of the corpse’s mated mark, wondered if someone had gone looking for her. And if so, what had happened to them. He hated like hell that Jade felt like a failure because of him, but knew she wouldn’t thank him for saying it aloud. So instead, he said, “I’m guessing you gave the others a full report on Kinich Ahau and the companions?” She had twenty hours’ head start on him—it sure as hell hadn’t felt that long when he’d been inside the library, but the barrier was known to fold time oddly in some cases.
She nodded. “I gave them what I could yesterday, and am just about finished filling in the gaps from the archive.” She paused before saying softly, “The Banol Kax are trying to put Akhenaton in the sun god’s place.”
“Yeah.”
“How are we going to stop them?”
At first he thought it was a rhetorical question. But when she looked at him too expectantly, he realized she was hoping for him to play Prophet. Exhaling, he shook his head. “Sorry. It doesn’t work that way. I’m not going to be able to channel info on command.”
Worse, now that he had some food in him, he was seeing just how big an oh, holy shit of a problem that was going to be. If he needed to use his own talent to get back into the library, as the journalist had said . . . then the magi were going to be waiting a long time, because humans didn’t have talents, and he was pure human, do not pass “Go,” do not collect two hundred.
; She looked at him for a long moment, and something sparked in the air, making him very aware that they were alone again in his cottage, where the magic had begun. All she said, though, was, “Do you feel up to a general meeting?”
“That’d probably be best.” He might as well break the bad news en masse.
“I’ll go spread the word. But I don’t want to see you up at the mansion until you’ve finished eating, got it?”
“Got it.” A quick yank and he had the IV out, then had to fumble to shut the thing off when it peed on his foot. “Yeah. Smooth,” he muttered under his breath.
She flashed him a grin that looked far more natural than anything she’d managed up to that point.
“Glad to have you back.”
Looking up, he met her eyes. “Same goes.” They locked gazes for a three- count of heartbeats, and more passed between them than had been said. At least, it did for him, though he couldn’t have articulated what, exactly, he took away from the moment beyond a hot pressure in his chest and a more than fleeting thought of locking the door and saying, Fuck the general meeting; they can wait until tomorrow. But the problem was, he didn’t know if they could wait, really. He’d already lost a day, which put them at only eight to go until the summer solstice.
Jade broke the eye lock with a self-conscious head shake, then turned and headed for the door, scooping up the books and papers on her way past the coffee table. She paused at the archway leading to the kitchen, glancing back. “In the pit . . . in Xibalba. You were amazing. I don’t think I would’ve made it out of there if it hadn’t been for you.” Before he could say anything—not that he had a clue how to respond to something like that; it wasn’t like he’d had much practice being amazing—she continued: “I froze. Here I am, trying to tell everyone that I deserve to be in on the action, but when it came down to it, I just stood there. I wouldn’t have run if you hadn’t dragged me, and I wouldn’t have made it out if you hadn’t come after me. When that guard started marching me toward the fortress—” She broke off, shuddering, her eyes going stark and hollow in her face. “I panicked. I didn’t do anything.”
He stood, forcing his legs to hold him, and crossed to her. Without a word, he folded her into his arms, hoping that this was one of those times when the right action meant more than finding the right words.
Jade stiffened, and for a moment he thought she was going to push away, but then she let out a long, shaky sigh and melted into him. After a brief hesitation, she slid her arms around his waist and hung on. They stood that way for a long time. Finally, when he felt her coiled muscles ease, he said into her hair, “You couldn’t have done anything; neither of us could, unarmed and with no real fighting magic to speak of. We owe our lives to the companions. And besides, it was your magic that warned Kinich Ahau that there was a Nightkeeper nearby, in trouble.”
Shifting in his arms, she looked up at him, eyes gone very serious. “Maybe it was my magic at first, but at the end it wasn’t my magic that got us out. It was yours.”
“Maybe.” He didn’t know what to think about that yet, or how to process it in light of what the journalist had written about needing to use his talent to get inside the library. He didn’t have a clue how he’d gotten there in the first place. “Regardless, we got each other out of there. No apologies, no regrets, okay? Let’s just be grateful we’re both back where we belong.” Those words took on new meaning when he realized he was stroking her from nape to hip, that her hands had migrated from his waist to locked behind his neck. His body awoke, hard and fast, and he saw in her eyes that she’d felt the change. Welcomed it.
He eased down, giving her plenty of time and room to step back if she needed to, as she’d done before. Instead, she rose up on her toes to meet him halfway. We’re okay , the kiss seemed to say.
We’re home now. We’re safe . More, it suggested that their being together hadn’t been a one-shot deal designed only to test the effects of sex magic. It said she was into him, that she enjoyed touching him, kissing him. And when the kiss ended and they leaned a little apart to look into each other’s eyes, he saw a spark of heat that danced over his skin and made his body hard and ready in an instant.
“We could . . .” He trailed off with a suggestive head nod in the direction of the couch, or better yet, the wide-open floor below.
“We could . . . but we’re not going to. You’re going to eat, I’m going to collect the others, and we’re going to rendezvous up at the mansion for a powwow.” But she cocked an eyebrow. “As for the other . . . maybe later, if you’re still on your feet.”
“Count on it.”
She grinned and headed out. And as the door closed at her back, he realized he was smiling. The analytical side of him knew that the day—or rather, the past two days—had to go in the minus column of shit news and more shit news. But the man in him thought the crappy-ass intel was balanced, at least in the short term, by the fact that he and Jade were finally on the same page.
Now he just had to make sure they stayed there.
The residents of Skywatch met, as was their habit, in the great room of the main mansion. The five in-
residence winikin sat at the breakfast bar that separated the big marble-and-chrome kitchen from the sunken sitting area, where the Nightkeepers were scattered on chairs and sofas—or in Sven’s case a couple of pillows on the floor. Jade had staked out one end of a long couch, and didn’t mind in the slightest when Alexis and Nate filled up the rest of it. She wasn’t trying to distance herself from Lucius, precisely, but she was hyperaware that the others knew they had slept together. She’d known that would be the case going into things, of course. And it wasn’t like she hadn’t been there before.
Private lives didn’t stay private for long around Skywatch, not with sex so integrally connected to the magic. For some reason, though, this time the sidelong looks put a strange shimmy in the pit of her stomach and made her want to squirm.
Then there was Shandi, who frowned down at her from the breakfast bar. The winikin was in her late fifties, with silver-threaded dark hair worn straight to her waist and distinctive facial features she’d explained as Navajo heritage out in the human world, but that had really come from her Sumerian ancestors. She was petite, as were all of the winikin, and seemed to exist in a perpetual state of Zen-
like peaceful calm. Jade knew firsthand that the calm was an illusion, though. In reality, the winikin had a cold, biting temper and a low tolerance level.
As a teen, Jade had offset Shandi’s regular “proper deportment and behavior” lectures by coming up with various sets of the three “D”s for her winikin. Most often, they were along the lines of
“disconnected,” “disapproving,” and “duty-bound.” And while Jade had known she could’ve wound up in a worse situation growing up—there hadn’t been any violence, no neglect; if anything, Shandi had paid too much attention to her, stifling her with rules—she’d often wished for something . . . different.
She had dreamed of what it would’ve been like if her parents hadn’t died, if she hadn’t been left in the care of her chilly, rigid winikin. Her mother would’ve been tall and serene, with Jade’s long, straight hair and sea foam eyes. She would’ve been unruffled by her daughter’s childish pranks and youthful bounciness, maybe even playing along sometimes. Her father’s image had been less clear, but his voice had resonated in her imagination; he’d been big and strong, and his arms around her had made her feel safe. They wouldn’t have lectured her on duty, decorum, and diligence, or at least not all the time, over and over again until she wanted to scream. But her parents were dead, and she’d known Shandi was a better parent than some, so she had done her best to live up to—or down to?—her guardian’s expectations of a quiet, well-behaved child.
As Jade had grown to adulthood, she and Shandi had maintained more of a relationship than she might have expected, in part because Jade had discovered over time that Shandi had been right about a number of things, from the value of a calm fac
ade to the advisability of thinking before acting, which had been a hard lesson for Jade to learn when parts of her had wanted to be rash. In the years before the Nightkeepers’ reunion, and even in the first months of life at Skywatch, Jade and Shandi had coexisted peacefully under the terms of their unstated agreement that if Jade didn’t act impulsively, t h e winikin wouldn’t lecture. Lucius’s arrival at Skywatch hadn’t immediately changed that, but looking back, Jade could see that it had been the beginning of the renewed strain between her and Shandi. And the split had only worsened as time passed.
Now the winikin was subtly ignoring Jade without seeming to. And when Lucius appeared at the sliders leading from the pool deck to the great room, Shandi’s face soured with a look of, Ew, it’s the human.
“Come on in.” Strike waved when Lucius stalled at the threshold. “I know you just ate, but Carlos’ll hook you up with seconds to keep you going for the meeting. You’ll still need some downtime—
assuming that your physiology works like ours does—but you won’t crash as hard or as long as you would have without the IV.”
“Thanks,” Lucius said, though it wasn’t entirely clear which part the word referred to. Easing away from the sliders as though reluctant to commit too far into the building, he dragged a carved wood chair out from underneath a half-round table near the door, and turned it to face the others, so he sat near but apart from them. Although he was positioned above the magi on the higher level of the two-
level great room, it didn’t seem as though he sat in judgment, but rather that he was offering himself up to be judged.
As he sat and leaned back in the chair, hooking his hands across his flat stomach, Jade was struck anew by how much he looked like a stranger, yet not. And more, how much he now looked like one of them. He’d showered and changed; his normally tousled brown hair was slicked back, his jaw freshly shaven. Wearing jeans, an unadorned black T- shirt, and a pair of heavy black boots she didn’t recognize from before, he would’ve easily fit into a lineup with Strike, Nate, Michael, and Brandt. All five men were dark haired, big, and built, with strong features and auras of tough capability. They looked like a bunch of honorable badasses who would make strong allies, fearsome enemies, and dangerous lovers.
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