Demonkeepers n-4

by Jessica Andersen

  “That’s understandable. You’re tired, and that was a lot to take in.” Rising, Shandi brushed at her tailored pants, which fell in neat creases as though they didn’t dare wrinkle. “Just keep breathing,” the winikin said pragmatically, “and keep yourself steady. Sometimes, that’s all we can do.”

  Jade wanted to argue, wanted to scream that she was tired of only breathing, tired of being steady.

  She wanted to be unsteady, irrational; she wanted to do something, godsdamn it! But she didn’t want to prolong the conversation further; she wanted some time alone to process, or maybe just pull the covers over her head.

  “I’ll be in my room,” Shandi said. “Call if you need me.”

  “Of course,” Jade answered numbly. “I will.” But they both knew she wouldn’t.

  She saw the winikin to the door and locked it behind her. Then, drawn by the faintest rumble of thunder, barely detectable as a vibration on the air and in the floor beneath her feet, she moved to the sliders and pushed through to the balcony. Lightning flickered on the horizon and a deep-throated, thrumming thunder boom ran through the soles of her feet and up to her body, where it pressed on her heart.

  Closing the sliders behind her, she leaned back against the side of the mansion and slid down to sit balled up on the patio floor, with her chin on her knees and her arms wrapped around her shins, feeling the storm approach . . . and waiting for the rain to come and wash away her tears.

  PART II

  MIDDAY

  The sun reaches apogee

  CHAPTER TEN

  June 14 Two years, six months, and seven days to the zero date University of Texas, Austin

  “Hey, Pyro. You lost?”

  The hail startled Rabbit, who’d been head-down, lost in his thoughts as he’d hiked across campus.

  Pausing just shy of the cement bridge that led to the front entrance of the squat, bunkerlike structure that ironically housed the art history department, he did a mental eye roll and glanced back over his shoulder at the lanky, brown-haired guy who was waving at him. “Not lost, Smitty. Just slumming.”

  “Ha! Good one.” Anna’s newest grad student loped a few strides to catch up, made like he was going to punch Rabbit in the arm, then aborted the motion in a fake-out designed to show anyone watching that the two of them were buds, without actually making contact. Everyone who was anyone in the student social structure knew that Rabbit didn’t like to be touched, except by Myrinne. “Ready to come to your senses and give up on that science shit?”

  It was a running semijoke among the younger members of the Mayan studies department, who, after seeing Rabbit ace a few grad- level courses, had decided that he was the best naturally intuitive Mayanist the university had seen in forever, and ought to be majoring in their department rather than physics.

  What they didn’t get, and what he never intended to tell them, was that the whole Mayan thing wasn’t intuitive at all. It was the way he’d been raised. Rabbit’s old man might not have given much of a crap about his upbringing—Red-Boar had been far more concerned about the memory movies playing inside his own skull—but Jox had taken up the slack, with Strike and Anna helping off and on.

  Rabbit had learned the legends and histories from them, and had picked up a better than rudimentary understanding of the glyphs and language even before the barrier—and his own magic—had come alive. So really, the Mayan studies shit had been fluff classes for him. Cheating, really. Not that he was going to fess up on that one, though Anna had threatened to flunk him if he didn’t stop signing up for her classes.

  The mental filters he’d installed in his own skull to prevent himself from talking about—or performing—magic on campus wouldn’t let him tell guys like Smitty what was really going on with him. Even if he’d been able to talk about it, though, he wouldn’t have. Unlike in high school, where he hadn’t dared be good at anything lest he get more of the wrong sort of attention from the Reich High Command that had dominated the student scene, at UT he’d found that a guy got points for being good at shit, not just from the teachers, but from the other students.

  Granted, his popularity hadn’t really taken off until he’d set Myrinne’s dorm room on fire, thereby gaining his all too apt nickname, but still.

  “Nah,” he said, playing along. “I’m still into the science shit.” Which remained a low-grade surprise to him. He’d never seen himself as an egghead, but ever since his first day of the midlevel physics class he’d tested into, when Professor Burns had talked about how fire was nothing more than air molecules breaking the speed limit, he’d been hooked. And the deeper into it he’d gotten, the more he’d felt like he’d found something important, something he’d been looking for without knowing he was looking.

  Smitty shook his head. “Wasting your talent, Pyro. Wasting your talent.” Then he grinned, his brain shifting lightning-quick—as it often did—to another, unrelated topic. “You here to see your aunt?”

  Rabbit nodded. “Yep. She around?”

  As a shortcut to explaining his lifelong relationship with the head of the Mayan studies department, and why he checked in with her on a regular basis, he and Anna had decided he’d just pretend she was his aunt and move on. To his surprise, nobody had called him on the absolute lack of familial resemblance. It didn’t seem to matter that his eyes were pale blue to her cobalt, that his features were hawk- sharp to her classical beauty, or that his hair, which stood up in a pseudo-military brush cut these days, was blah brown to her chestnut-highlighted sable. When he’d asked Myrinne why that was, she’d given him one of her looks—this one conveying, You’re kind of cute when you’re being oblivious—and said that they gave off similar vibes, and that although the conscious minds of most humans were insensitive to magic per se, their subconscious minds registered those vibes and chunked him and Anna together in the category of “powerful bad-ass; don’t piss off.”

  He liked being in that category almost as much as he liked having a nickname and an open invite to most everything on campus that might interest him. But he wished to hell the same could be said of his status among the Nightkeepers. It seemed that the more functional he got in the outside world, the more Strike wanted to keep him there, away from the magic.

  “She’s in her office, last I knew.” Smitty waved in the direction of Anna’s first-floor window, which was closed and blocked off by the curtains she kept drawn most of the time these days.

  “Thanks. Catch you later.” Rabbit sketched a wave and headed across the causeway, which always made him think of the drawbridge leading to a castle, albeit a short, ugly castle.

  Smitty dogged him, apparently headed the same way. “You coming to the thing tomorrow night?”

  Rabbit didn’t have a frigging clue what thing he was talking about, but lifted a shoulder. “Maybe.

  Hafta see—family stuff, you know.” If he had anything to say about it, he and Myrinne would be back in New Mex by the weekend. Screw Strike’s plan for having them stay in Texas through summer school and on into the fall semester. There were more important things than class credits, especially when there was a solid chance that the credits themselves would cease to exist prior to graduation day, 2013.

  “You should come,” Smitty pressed. “It’s going to rock.”

  “I’ll bet.” They passed through the main entrance. Rabbit turned and made himself punch the other guy in the shoulder. “Have a good one.”

  As he headed off, Smitty was standing dead-ass still, looking like someone had just given him a million bucks. Rabbit nearly shook his head, but didn’t, because who was he to say the human college set had it wrong? Theirs was a different culture; that was all. One he was learning to live inside, and maybe even to thrive within.

  Didn’t mean that was where he wanted to be long-term, though.

  Pausing at Anna’s door, he knocked. “Professor Catori? It’s Rabbit. I need five minutes.” Maybe before he would’ve walked right in, or called her by her first name just to show he could. But
before, he’d admittedly been an asshole most of the time. These days, he tried to play the little things pretty straight . . . and save up his asshole quota for the big stuff.

  “Door’s unlocked,” Anna called, her voice muffled by the heavy panel separating them. When Rabbit pushed through and closed the door at his back, she looked up from where she was seated behind her desk, working on what looked like e-mail. She was wearing a soft steel gray sweater that blended with the backdrop of bookshelves holding artifacts that he privately thought of as All Forgeries Great and Small. She greeted him with a smile. “Hey, Pyro.”

  He winced, only half joking. “Great. Now they’ve got you doing it.”

  “Fits.”

  “No shit, huh?” But despite the friendly exchange, he stayed standing, not because he was trying to loom over her—even though he could loom if he wanted to these days—but because he was twitchy.

  Silence stretched between them for a moment . . . and that was enough to give him his answer. “Let me guess. It’s a ‘hell, no.’ ” Anna sighed. “Rabbit . . . you know he’s only trying to do what’s best.”

  “He” was Strike, and in the king’s world, “what’s best” was apparently keeping Rabbit and Myrinne as far away from the action as possible by loading them with classes regardless of the school year.

  Except, of course, when the magi absolutely, positively needed Rabbit’s specific talents, whereupon Strike zapped in, grabbed him for the job, then dumped him back in his dorm room as quickly as humanly—or magely—possible.

  “This sucks.” Rabbit heard his own tone border on whiny territory as a familiar churning frustration rose within him. Reminding himself that he was better than the anger, he tamped it down to a low simmer, lost the whine, and said, “Sorry. I know it’s not your decision. You’re not king.” Though there were times he’d thought she would’ve made the better ruler of the two of them, in large part because she wanted nothing to do with the job. Or really, he suspected, with the Nightkeepers.

  “You’re getting to him, though.”

  Rabbit narrowed his eyes. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. The longer you keep your nose clean here, kick it in the classroom, and generally behave like someone he’d want to have at his back, the more he’s going to forget why he doesn’t want you around.”

  From anyone else, Rabbit would’ve figured that for a blatant pitch to keep him on the straight and narrow, i.e., attempted bribery with no real commitment to an endpoint. Coming from Anna, though, he was tempted to believe it was for real. She thought she owed his old man a life debt, and upon Red-

  Boar’s death had transferred that owesie to Rabbit. That was why she’d stepped up and gotten in Strike’s face over whether Myrinne would be allowed to stay at Skywatch even though she was pure human, not bound to any of the magi, and had a history of dabbling in the occult. More, Anna had, for the most part anyway, tried to be available when Rabbit needed her, and tried to fix the considerable amount of shit he’d screwed up in past years.

  All that made him want to believe her, as did his desire to think that life was fair, that he’d be able to work his way into the fighting core of the Nightkeepers by proving that, six months shy of being legal to drink, he was ready to do a man’s job as a warrior. But he’d learned early and often that life wasn’t fair . . . and when Anna looked at him now, she didn’t quite meet his eyes. Maybe it was her vibe, maybe his blunted mind-bending talent, but he suddenly knew she was lying. He wasn’t sure about what, but she was definitely hiding something. Maybe not about Strike’s opinion or the school stuff, but there was something important going on that she wasn’t telling him about, no doubt because Strike-out had decided it was need-to-know and Rabbit wasn’t on the list.

  “Anything big going on back there?” he asked casually.

  She shook her head. “Nothing really. They’re gearing up for the solstice. Strike’ll pick you and Myrinne up for the day, like we planned.”

  The lie was still there. Whatever was going on, it wasn’t going to wait for the solstice, or else the solstice was part of it, but there were already major plans being made . . . without him. Anger flared, hot and hard and feeling like fire. For a second, he thought about yanking down his mental blocks and getting inside her head, looking for what she’d chosen—or been ordered—not to tell him. What is it? he wanted to scream at her. What’s going on? Why doesn’t he want me there? But he held it together.

  Barely.

  She looked at him for real, finally, and he didn’t see the lie anymore. It had been there, though. He was sure of it. “Be strong,” she said softly. “Your time will come.”

  “Thanks,” he said. But inwardly, he was thinking, What-the-fuck-ever.

  “Was there something else?”

  He didn’t know if that was a hint, or if she really wanted to know the answer, but either way, he wasn’t in a sharing mood anymore. Maybe he’d hiked over to the ugly castle rather than called because he’d been toying with asking her about the Order of Xibalba and some of the stuff Myrinne had been bringing up lately, sort of get Anna’s take. But now? Forget it.

  “Nah. Just wanted to check in with some face time, so you can report back to big brother that I’m behaving myself.”

  She smiled, the expression reaching her eyes. “I’ll do that. And, Rabbit?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m proud of you.”

  Under other circumstances—like if she hadn’t just lied to his face—that might’ve caught him hard.

  Gods knew he was working his ass off not to fuck up these days. Given the scenario, though, he just faked a smile. “Thanks. Some days, I’m proud of me too.”

  But as he headed back across campus, he didn’t know what the hell he was, other than torn. For a change he was doing his damnedest to think through all the possible outcomes and talk to the right people, rather than going off half-cocked and burning up on impact. Literally. But it wasn’t easy to talk things out when he didn’t know who the hell to talk to anymore.

  Anna had said time and again that she owed him, but he didn’t trust her not to blab if she thought it was in his best interest. She wasn’t a stickler for the writs, but if it came down to a choice between Rabbit and her brother, Strike was going to win out every time. Same applied to Jox. Michael was a possibility for a go-to guy; he’d gone to the mat for Rabbit the previous winter, when the gods had demanded his execution and Michael had refused. But Rabbit figured he owed the guy big for that one, and wasn’t sure it was kosher to dump something on top of that debt. Besides, although Michael had ruthlessly followed his own path in the beginning, now that he and Sasha were together, his path paralleled the party line more often than not. Which left Rabbit . . . where? Who could he go to when his usual go-to girl was the one he needed to talk about?

  A name ghosted through his brain, one he’d long ago told himself to forget, at least in that context.

  Not that he’d ever actually managed to forget her.

  Patience. The youngest of the Nightkeepers, she was only six years older than him, and after Red-

  Boar’s horrific death, she’d stepped in as his friend, his sister figure, his mother figure, and his first massive crush, all wrapped into one. She and the twins had let him into their lives, made him feel like he had a family, like someone gave a shit whether he woke up each morning, and whether he descended into the same sort of funk his old man had turned into an art form. Brandt had let him in too, but only because Patience had insisted. And after the twins were sent away and the problems in their marriage had gotten more and more obvious, Brandt had wanted less and less to do with him, until the day the shit finally hit the fan: Rabbit had been on guard duty during an op and got distracted, and Patience had paid for it. Terrified, Rabbit had bolted. By the time he’d made it back to Skywatch, he’d had Myrinne with him. He’d meant to apologize to Patience, but somehow that never happened, and then it got to a point where it was too late to apologize, too late to try to fix things.


  “Which is why you shouldn’t go there,” Rabbit told himself as he crossed a parking lot and sent a couple of waves at guys who “hey, Pyro’d” him.

  But deep down inside him, a voice was saying, Why not go there? It’d been a while since he and Patience had been tight, but she had an open, generous heart. She might be willing to forgive him for being an asshole. More, although she was loyal to the Nightkeeper cause, she wasn’t too keen on Strike, who still wouldn’t tell her where the twins were hidden. It was for their own good to stay incognito with their winikin, it was true. But still . . . not letting her see her kids for going on a year now? That was harsh. Rabbit figured that’d make her likely to keep her own counsel rather than run straight to the king if she thought he was in danger of making yet another Rabbit-size mistake.

  In fact, the more he thought about it, the better it sounded. Or was he talking himself into something stupid? Gods knew it wouldn’t be the first time. But it wasn’t like he could ask Myrinne her opinion.

  Yeah, that’d be smooth: Hey, babe. I’m not sure whether I like where you’re going with this whole

  “You should look into the other half of your heritage, because your old man might’ve been a real son of a bitch, but he doesn’t sound like the kind of guy who would’ve slept with the enemy. So maybe the Xibalbans aren’t inherently bad. Maybe Iago is an outlier with his own agenda, and the Xibalbans themselves could prove to be allies instead of enemies.” Which sounds good when you say it, but feels pretty cracked when I think about it on my own . . . so I was wondering what you thought about me hooking back up with Patience to talk about it. Yeah, Myr would just love that. Not only was she big into the idea of him doing his own thing, whether or not it coincided with the Nightkeepers’ paradigms, but she and Patience didn’t get along. At all.

  Still, before he was really aware that he’d made the decision, he had detoured off the track leading off campus to his and Myrinne’s summer sublet, and parked his ass on a cement ledge that was part of the so-called landscaping at UT—which, to his largely New England-raised self was more land-