Demonkeepers n-4

by Jessica Andersen

  Covering the scowl that threatened to form, she took the seat beside him on the theory that it was better to sit there than to have to explain why she didn’t. She kept a careful distance, though, and told herself that the soft flush of warmth that touched her skin was nothing more than body heat. Physics, not chemistry.

  Evidently seeing the dark circles beneath her heavier-than-usual makeup—and apparently not needing to keep his distance in order to maintain his sexual sanity, damn him—he frowned and leaned in to ask in a low rasp, “What’s wrong?”

  Nothing, she started to say, when the answer was really: Everything.

  Before she could answer, though, Strike and Leah came through the archway leading to the royal quarters, and the king did the okay, we’re all here; let’s get started thing. When the crowd settled, Strike said, “Before we talk about the possible scenarios for rescuing Kinich Ahau, Jade has some new info for us.” He gestured in her direction. “Go ahead. You’ve got the floor.”

  If she’d been a different person, she might have found a way to soften the delivery. Since she was who she was, though, she went with the naked truth. “We have good reason to believe that the dead woman in the library was my mother.”

  A ripple of shock ran through the room. Beside her, Lucius sucked in a breath. She could guess the questions that must be racing through his overactive brain. Are you sure? Why was she in there? What does it mean?

  “Shandi came to me last night . . .” she began, and repeated what she’d told Strike earlier. Shandi herself wasn’t available for questions, or even to nod encouragement; she had locked herself in her suite, pleading a headache. Wish I could’ve done that, Jade thought wistfully, as she finished, “So, for better or worse, it all fits. She would’ve had access to the Prophet’s spell via her bloodline. Thinking that she was supposed to be the last of the Prophets, she enacted the spell. But it misfired somehow, putting her in the same sort of position Lucius is in now.” She spread her hands. “I don’t know how this will help us, or even if it will. But I thought everyone should know.”

  There was a long moment of stunned—or perhaps merely thoughtful?—silence. Then Strike said, “Since she wrote about being able to enter the library twice, with the third time being the trap, she must’ve come back to this plane.” He glanced up to the breakfast bar to ask Jox, “You said you don’t remember seeing her in those last three days?”

  The royal winikin shook his head. “None of us did—at least, not that we can remember.” The other winikin made various apologetic motions as Jox continued. “Not to mention that Vennie wasn’t exactly subtle. If she was around, you knew it. And if she had discovered something that would’ve impacted the attack, she would’ve made sure everyone heard about it, and knew where it’d come from.” He tipped his head in Jade’s direction. “No offense.”

  “None taken,” Jade said with absolute sincerity. “I am not my mother, and vice versa. Despite what the writs say about ‘what has happened before will happen again,’ I’m not the sort of person who acts on impulse. You can count on that.”

  “Flames and dead, staring eyes,” Lucius said abruptly, in a total non sequitur.

  A chill touched the back of Jade’s neck. She turned to him and found him gaunt faced, his expression turned inward. “What?”

  “It was in the middle of the journal, where the handwriting was really tough to read, and what I could read was all jumbled up; she kept talking about flames and dead, staring eyes. She used those same words over and over again. I was assuming she was dazed when she wrote it, maybe confused from the transition.” He paused, locking his eyes with hers. “What if she wasn’t confused? What if she saw exactly what she described?”

  Jade’s stomach headed for her toes. “Oh, gods.”

  Lucius continued. “I felt like I was only in the library for a couple of hours, but I lost most of a day out here. She was a full mage, so she was probably able to stay in there longer than me. Maybe she came out once to rest someplace safe, like you were saying, then went back in, maybe because she hadn’t found what she was looking for. By the time she found what she was looking for, came back out of the library, and headed for the mansion . . . What if she was already too late? What if Scarred-

  Jaguar’s attack—and the Solstice Massacre—was already over?”

  Flames and dead, staring eyes, Jade thought, and shuddered, her heart twisting in her chest.

  When Scarred-Jaguar led the magi to war, hundreds of children and their winikin had gathered in the big rec hall. That was where the Banol Kax had found them. And killed them. The next day, when Jox had emerged from hiding with Strike and Anna, he had found bodies everywhere: stacked in the rec hall, cut down mid-flight, some even dead in Jeeps headed away from the compound. Every Nightkeeper child over the age of three, and their attending winikin, had been killed, as had all the adults involved in the attack. Only the babies and their winikin had survived, a scant two dozen left to fight against the end-time war.

  “If she saw the bodies, she must have come back that night,” Jox said, his voice ragged, his eyes dark and hollow. “I burned the bodies the next day. I didn’t see Vennie.” He looked at Jade, stricken.

  “I would have seen her if she’d still been there. I would’ve stopped her from going back into the library.”

  Up at the breakfast bar, silent tears trickled down the cheeks of several of the winikin. They had survived because they had fled the scene with infant charges who had been too young to have forged their first connections to the magic, thus rendering them invisible to the minions of the Banol Kax.

  But whereas those children had all—with the exception of Strike and Anna—been too young to remember the carnage, the winikin didn’t have that luxury.

  It struck Jade suddenly that they were a week away from the massacre’s twenty-sixth anniversary.

  “She must’ve panicked,” Lucius said. “Maybe she ran back to wherever she’d been hiding and put herself into the library because it seemed safer there. Then, once she’d pulled herself together and tried to get out, she realized that she couldn’t.” He swallowed hard. It was one of the few outward signs of the revulsion Jade knew he had to be feeling. He’d been trapped in his own skull, and in the in-between. She could only imagine what he would do to avoid being trapped permanently in the barrier, library or no library. His voice rasped as he said, “Question is, if she came out of the library to rest, but nobody saw her, where was she?”

  Strike’s head came up. “You’re thinking she may have left some clues wherever she was hiding?

  Maybe something that could help you get back into the library?”

  “I’m not usually that lucky,” Lucius observed dryly, “but it’s a possibility.”

  “Too bad Rabbit offed the three-question nahwal ,” Brandt put in, earning him a sharp look from Patience.

  “I’ll ask Shandi,” Jade said. “Of all of us, she knew Vennie best. Maybe she’ll be able to guess where . . .” She trailed off as Brandt’s comment struck a chord, resonating against a connection that had almost, but not quite, formed in her brain the previous night. Something about the . . . “Oh,” she said dully. “Oh, gods. It was her. Vennie.”

  Beside her, Lucius stiffened. “Who? Where?”

  She closed her eyes, feeling idiotic as the pieces clicked together. She should have figured it out sooner, probably would have if she hadn’t been so focused on so many other things. “The other night, as you were being transported into the library, I was pulled along too, only I wound up in the barrier itself. I think the library magic must’ve weakened the barrier enough that my nahwal could call me through, and then boot me again when it was done with me.” She held up a hand when Lucius drew breath to interject. “I know, I should’ve said something sooner. And I would have if I thought it had anything to do with Kinich Ahau or the library. But I didn’t. Not until just now, when Brandt mentioned the nahwal . . . and I realized what had been bothering me since last night.” She paused, shakin
g her head as the impossible began to seem frighteningly possible. “The nahwal was acting very strangely. I didn’t understand it at the time. Now, though, I think I do.” She looked over at Strike. “It was acting like my mother.”

  Her thoughts raced as she tried to remember the exchange, word for word, gesture for gesture. She described how the nahwal had alternated from a normal form that had transmitted the “duty and diligence” tenets of the harvesters, to a more feminized version that had talked about Jade finding her own path and maximizing her strengths, even if they led her away from the harvesters’ paradigm. “It was just what I would expect Vennie to have said, based on what Shandi told me about her resenting the harvesters’ limitations. If I’d seen that sort of behavior in a patient, I would’ve taken a serious look at schizophrenia. But in a nahwal?” She turned her palms up. “I know that technically she shouldn’t play much of a part in the collective of the harvester nahwal, given that she’s a married-in, and her priorities weren’t aligned with theirs. She should be . . . outvoted, I guess you should say.

  Except she wasn’t. She was there.”

  The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became. And the more confused, not by the logic, but by her own response. She felt . . . numb.

  “It’s not out of the realm,” Strike allowed. “The jaguar nahwal wears Scarred-Jaguar’s earring and has some of his traits.” She noticed he didn’t say “my father,” and wondered why.

  Lucius said slowly, “What if the bloodline nahwal are morphing as the end-time gets nearer? The dominant personalities could be moving to the forefront and taking over because they’re stronger, have the closest ties to the survivors, or have the most pressing need to speak with their descendants.”

  Jade imagined more than a few of the others were thinking, Why her? Why not me? She didn’t have an answer for that one, except that maybe Vennie had urgently needed—wanted—to talk to her.

  Why did that feel like too little, too late? She’d never met her mother, didn’t have a relationship with her beyond shared DNA. But then again, if she couldn’t judge Vennie, who could? Shandi? The king?

  Suddenly Lucius sat up, his face reflecting a lightbulb moment. “What if the nahwal are gaining personal characteristics in preparation for the Triad spell?”

  The room went dead silent.

  Legend held that in times of the most acute need, the Nightkeepers would gain the ability to enact a spell that would call on the gods to choose three Nightkeeper magi: the Triad. Once chosen, the three would be given the ability to channel all of their ancestors, not just the wisdom contained within the nahwal, but also their personalities, and, most of all, their magical talents. In the space of a single spell, three of the Nightkeepers would become superbeings. But that was the good news. The bad news was that—historically, anyway—the Triad spell had an attrition rate of two-thirds.

  Only one Triad had been called previously, back at the end of the first millennium A.D., when a rogue group of Nightkeepers had splintered off, allied themselves with the king of a Mayan city-state that controlled a potent ceremonial site, and called six Banol Kax through the barrier to the Earth. The dark magi, who later took to calling themselves the Order of Xibalba, had wanted to control the empire; instead, unable to rein in the creatures they had summoned, they changed civilization forever.

  Modern archaeologists still puzzled over why the population of the Mayan empire had crashed abruptly in the late ninth century, with entire cities abandoned seemingly overnight. The theories usually touched on plague, drought, and warfare, with the artifactual evidence to back them up. But that told only a small part of the story; in the larger realm, each of those catastrophic breakdowns of civilization had been wrought by the six Banol Kax, which had run amok in Mesoamerica while the Nightkeepers fought to force them back to the underworld, where they belonged.

  In the end, in the most extreme of exigencies, the gods had sent the Triad spell to King One-Boar, who had searched his soul . . . and enacted it. One-Boar was chosen, along with his brother, Boar Tusk, and One-Boar’s only child, a girl barely out of her teens. Boar Tusk died almost instantly; One-Boar went mad from the voices inside his head . . . and the girl survived. Wielding the talents and knowledge of her forebears, she rallied the Nightkeepers and used dire magic to drive the Banol Kax back to Xibalba. In the aftermath, with the males of the royal branch of the peccary bloodline gone, One-Boar’s daughter married into the jaguars, who became the Nightkeepers’ new ruling bloodline.

  She ruled well, died an old woman, and time passed without a Triad . . . but a single fragmentary codex reference decreed that the Nightkeepers were supposed to call a Triad during the third year prior to the zero date. If they didn’t, the end-time was screwed.

  They were almost halfway through the year in question. And they didn’t have the spell needed to call the Triad.

  “Which means,” Lucius said, making it sound like he was answering a question, though nobody had spoken, “that we need the Triad spell.” He turned to Jade. “But there’s a problem.”

  Only one? she thought, a bubble of half-hysterical laughter lodging in her throat. But she knew what he meant. “If I can reach my nahwal and Vennie can take over again, she could tell us how to get you back into the library, or at least where to look for information here on earth. But in order for me to reach my nahwal, you need to invoke the library magic so I can follow you into the barrier.” Maybe.

  There were a lot of ifs there.

  “We sure as hell can’t wait for the solstice,” Strike said bluntly. He wasn’t looking at Jade or Lucius, but the message was clear. What wasn’t nearly so clear was what Jade’s response should be.

  Before, she’d volunteered for booty duty because it had seemed like her best chance of contributing, and because, well, it was Lucius they were talking about. But the sex magic had come with an unnerving level of intensity. Then there was the nahwal’s words, which too closely paralleled her own experiences. Vennie had urged her not to let emotion weaken her. Should she listen to the nahwal and focus on her own magic instead? She didn’t know. And because she didn’t know, she found herself far too aware of Lucius as the meeting continued. She was acutely sensitive to each of his breaths, to every shift of his body. Her peripheral vision showed the bunch and flow of muscles beneath his jeans and tee, and her mind replayed the sight of him naked against her, atop her, lit by the art of her ancestors. Although she told herself to concentrate on what was being said, she was far more aware of what was going on inside her as desire heated and built, and her body readied itself for something her mind told her she should walk away from.

  But which part of her should she listen to? Did she even have a right to make a choice when so much was riding on her and Lucius’s getting back into the barrier before the solstice?

  The meeting lasted well past afternoon, as the magi and winikin brainstormed various plans to get into Xibalba and rescue Kinich Ahau, all of which hinged on the magi finding a way to get into—and, more important, back out of—the underworld. The winikin—including Shandi, who reappeared quietly and shook off both questions and concern—dished out pasta and drinks, and the group worked through dinner and up to the late-summer dusk, which turned the sky bloodred. Finally, Strike called it a day and dismissed the meeting, which had covered a great deal and resolved almost nothing.

  The story of our lives, Jade thought as the magi and winikin dispersed to their rooms and tasks, very carefully not making a big deal of leaving her and Lucius alone.

  When they were gone, she braced herself for Lucius’s anger; she hadn’t missed his tension upon learning that she’d gone into the barrier alone, without sufficient magic to get back out on her own, and hadn’t told anyone. But that was her prerogative; it had been her nahwal , her message. And she’d revealed it the moment it became clear that it related to Vennie and the library.

  Bracing herself, she turned to him. “I didn’t—” She didn’t get any further; her words were m
uffled by his hard, solid shoulder as he hauled her into his arms. For half a second she stiffened, thinking he was presuming far too much, far too publicly. But then she realized it wasn’t a sexual overture, not really.

  He was, quite simply, holding her.

  “I wish you’d woken me up last night and told me what was going on,” he said into her hair. “I don’t like thinking of you dealing with all that shit alone.”

  “I—” She had to swallow against an unexpected and inexplicable sob. “I had Shandi.”

  “Like I said. Dealing with it alone.”

  Finding too much comfort in the embrace, she tried to push away. “I can handle myself.”

  He wouldn’t let her push. “I know you can. But you shouldn’t always have to.” He paused. “If you don’t want to lean on me as your lover, lean on me as your friend. I’ve always been that, even when we weren’t really talking to each other.”

  She sagged against him, defeated. “Shit. You played the friend card.”

  “My mama never called me stupid.” He hugged her hard and eased away, so he was looking down at her when he said, “Granted, she babied me, told me I was fragile, and made me carry an inhaler I’m not sure I ever needed. Then, when my dad couldn’t figure out what to do with me, sitting inside with my nose in a book, she told him I was lucky I got her brains, because my body wasn’t ever going to amount to much.”

  Jade frowned at him, trying not to notice how right it felt to be in his loose embrace, with her half on his lap as they cuddled together on the couch, the mansion gone conveniently empty and quiet around them. “Your point?”

  “Family is the luck of the draw. It might not seem fair that your winikin is less than warm and fuzzy, or that after all this time you find out that your parents were younger than you thought, and your mother made some decisions that don’t seem compatible with the responsibilities of a mother, though that might depend on your interpretation of the writs. But fair or not, that’s the family—or at least the family history—that you’ve got. Question is, what are you going to do about it?”