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Demonkeepers n-4

Page 32

by Jessica Andersen


  For a second he thought he’d misheard. When he went over the words and they didn’t change in his head, he bared his teeth. “In what way?”

  She seemed to miss the danger signs, instead rolling on: “I accessed my magic by opening myself up to my feelings for you; I was hoping you’d eventually come around to the point of doing the same thing on your own. You finally did just now, and the Prophet’s magic started to come back online, but —and here I am therapizing a little, to use your word for it, but bear with me, because it plays—I think the magic triggered some of the fears you carry from your experiences with the makol, namely those of being trapped and out of your own control. Your psyche knee- jerked that into a signal it knew you’d react to, namely the green glow of makol possession.”

  He ground out, “Back up to the part about hoping I’d come around, will you? Exactly how long have you been working on this theory?”

  Her encouraging smile—her counselor’s smile—faltered. “Since I started being able to access the scribe’s talent by thinking about you.”

  If he hadn’t been so shaken by the makol’s reappearance, the fear that it would block him from getting back to the library, and, yes, the intensity of the sex, he might have appreciated the irony. Here he was, facing down a lover who was looking up at him as if he were the answer to her freaking prayers, and all he could think about was escaping. From his own damn house.

  Hello, shoe on the other foot.

  He hadn’t gone into this looking for a relationship. He’d been looking to grow up and move on, and stop getting caught up in old patterns. He’d gotten caught, though, in reverse. And with a woman he cared about, one he hadn’t meant to hurt. Bullshit, a voice said inside him, sounding like Cizin all of a sudden. If you really didn’t want to hurt her, you would’ve cooled things off days ago. You knew she was falling, but you kept coming back. Hell, you carried her over the damn threshold. What the fuck was she supposed to think?

  He was suddenly chilled, both by the familiar mental tone of a creature that logic said was dead, and by the realization that whatever the source, the inner bitch-slap had a point. He’d been telling himself one thing while doing what felt good. Those weren’t the actions of the nice guy she’d painted him as.

  It was the sort of thing makol bait would do.

  There was a flicker of nerves in Jade’s eyes now, but she continued. “What just happened is good news, really, because it means that the next time, if you ignore the green and let the magic take over, you’ll wind up in the library.”

  “Maybe,” he said coldly. “Or maybe you’ll wind up with another ajaw-makol loose inside Skywatch. And maybe this time I won’t be strong enough to stop it.”

  She paled. “There’s no makol here right now. It’s your way of processing the fear of being vulnerable.”

  His anger drained, leaving a hollow ache behind. “Damn it, Jade, they were your rules. Just friends, you said. I was the one who started off wanting more, back before, and you let me down easy.” He shook his head. “Now I guess it’s my turn, for the first time ever, to try to do this right. So I’ll start off with the cliché: It’s not you; it’s me. If I’ve learned anything over the past nine days, it’s that love means putting the other person first, even over your own safety and life, and despite what the writs say about loyalty to the king and the war.” He paused, trying to get it right, and trying not to falter as her face fell. In the end, he said simply: “I can’t put you first.”

  Her eyes flared for a second and she snapped, “That’s—” Then she clicked her teeth shut on whatever she was about to say, and shook her head. “Forget it. Just forget it. I guess I misread what I thought I was seeing. I thought we were on the same page.”

  “So did I.” He was going to feel like unholy ravening shit in a few minutes, he thought. For the moment, he just felt numb and gray. Like all the color and life had leeched out of him. Was this what it felt like to break up with someone you liked but didn’t love? Gods. He’d thought it sucked to be on the other end. This was ten times worse. A hundred. He felt as if a piece of his world were suddenly out of joint.

  “I . . . I guess I’ll go. It’ll be morning soon.”

  Reminded that it was the cardinal day, Lucius fleetingly wondered whether he should have let the magic take him, on the chance that he’d been wrong somehow about the green. No, he knew that had been makol green. No question about it. He’d done the right thing, just as he was doing the right thing now. He didn’t know how to love as people like Shandi or Willow did. He had no basis for it, and didn’t want to learn. Jade had been right in the first place when she’d said that love destroyed lives.

  Love wasn’t the answer. Inner strength was.

  He watched in silence as she crossed the TV room and turned back at the kitchen threshold he’d carried her across less than an hour before. Her face was calm, composed, but he could see the strain beneath. “I’m sorry things got messy. I’ll see you on the ball court in a few hours. We’ve got a game to play.”

  She turned and left. He didn’t call her back.

  When her family-only cell phone rang, Patience nearly dropped a plate of eggs in her husband’s lap.

  Brandt’s head came up at the unfamiliar ringtone. “Who’s that?”

  The accusatory edge to the question assuaged her guilt when she flipped open the phone and blithely lied, “Kristie, at the dojo. I know I’m not an official owner anymore, but I gave her my private number in case there were any questions we didn’t go over during the transfer.” Don’t overexplain. She placed the plate in front of him at the dining table they hardly used anymore. “Dig in. I’ll take this in the bedroom while I finish getting ready for today.”

  Alone, she pressed the phone to her ear. “Ms. Montana?”

  “Nope. Apparently today my name is Kristie and I own a dojo. I’m betting I dot the ‘i’ in my name with a little smiley face. Or am I a Kristy-with-a-‘y’?”

  Having already discovered that the bounty hunter had a high retainer, a killer hourly rate for nonbounty work, a smart mouth, and little interest in making friends or even being polite, Patience didn’t bother responding to the dig. “Did you find something?”

  “Not just somethin g. I found your sons.”

  “You—” Patience’s voice broke on a surge of emotion.

  The other woman rattled off a quick summary about facial recognition and driver’s licenses, blah, blah, followed by an address.

  “Wait! Let me write this down.”

  “I’ll text it.”

  “Thanks.” Her heart was going rapid- fire and her palms were damp; it’d been months since she’d last felt this good. A year. “Do that.”

  The phone clicked. It took her a few seconds to realize the bounty hunter had hung up on her.

  Moments later, the text came through. She stared at the address, memorizing it. Then she pressed her lips together and made herself delete the info, just as she’d deleted all the other small nuggets of info as soon as she’d committed them to memory, just in case. All the while, her head spun with a litany of She found them! She found them! I can’t believe she found them!

  Dropping the phone back into her pocket, she headed back out into the kitchen to scare up some cereal for herself while Brandt finished his cholesterol bomb. He gave her a fork wave as she passed.

  “Everything okay?”

  She smiled. “Everything’s fine now. Just a few details we need to nail down.” And then, after that?

  Clear sailing.

  Within the first hour of playing Kinich Ahau’s game, Lucius discovered that being a jock wasn’t nearly as cool as he’d imagined it would be. Or rather, it was fun being one of the cool kids, but it was also damned hard work. By the second hour, he’d come to understand the game on a cellular level; his body seemed to know where to put itself to return each serve with a forearm, shin, or hip. By the third hour, he’d become almost prescient within the confines of the ball court, always placing himself at the point
of maximum impact, maximum play.

  The heavy ball, made of natural rubber and infused with some sort of magic that had kept it resilient despite the years, was heavy and irregular, meaning that it bounced erratically, often confounding lifelong athletes Strike, Michael, and Alexis, as well as more analytical players like Nate, Brandt, and Leah. Sven flung himself through the game with wild abandon, usually winding up out-of-bounds, while Rabbit played with vicious glee and lots of knees and elbows. By that time, the others had rotated out and were watching from above.

  The points stayed grimly even, rising and falling together, never hitting the magic thirteen. The hoop, eighteen feet in the air and mere inches larger than the ball of play, could’ve been an illusion; the ball passed by it, banged off it, arched over it, but never went through.

  By hour four, when the strange orange sun hit the apex of the sky and began its descent toward dark and destiny, Lucius had entered a glazed, numb-feeling zone where he was down to physical action without internal reaction, sport without soul. He’d even ceased being aware of Jade sitting up above, carefully not watching him with cool, hurt eyes.

  A finger tapped him on his unarmored shoulder and a voice said, “It’s over.”

  Anger surged through him, hard and hot and searching for an outlet. Blood hitting fever pitch in an instant, he whirled on his enemy, lifting his stone-weighted hand. “Fuck you.”

  Jox stood there in a referee’s robe, with the conch-shell pipe that acted as a time-out whistle, his eyes going wide and scared as the hand stone descended. Lucius’s vision flickered green, then normal; he didn’t pull the punch.

  “Son of a bitch!” A heavy blow slammed into him from the side, sending him to his knees; he lost his grip on the hand stone and came up swinging with his fists, dully surprised that it was Rabbit who had knocked him aside, Rabbit who protected Jox with his body and shouted, “Leave him alone, asshole; he’s just doing his job!”

  “He—” Lucius stopped dead, aware that the others had stopped playing, were ready to step in. “Shit.

  Fuck. Sorry, I—Sorry. I got caught up.” Was that all it had been? He hoped to hell so.

  “Understood.” Jox nodded, accepting the apology, though he stayed behind Rabbit’s bigger bulk.

  “But like I said, play is over for right now. We’re breaking for an hour. You might want to take two.”

  “I’ll take an hour,” Lucius grated. “I don’t have time to be tired today.”

  He grabbed food at random from the overloaded picnic tables that had been moved to just outside the court, found a spot far away from all the others, and sat on the steps of the ball court alone. He ate mechanically but didn’t make any headway against the hollowness inside.

  “I’m disappointed in you.” The censure came from slightly above him, in Jox’s voice.

  He glanced back and saw the winikin set down his plate and take a seat one step up and a few feet over, out of his immediate reach. Lucius shook his head. “I don’t have anything against you personally. You just seem to be the guy in my way when I lose it.”

  The winikin bit into a hot dog. “That wasn’t what I was talking about. You’re wimping out.”

  “The old me was the wimp. Try again.”

  “The old you might not have been able to bench-press a Hummer, but he wasn’t afraid to go after what he wanted.”

  “You’re talking about Jade.” Appetite gone, Lucius shoved aside his plate. “You’re off on that one; she didn’t want the old guy. Besides, he was terrified of being alone, and spent most of his time wishing, not doing. He . . . Shit. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You don’t need to talk to me anyway. Talk to her.”

  Lucius looked over to where Jade sat between Sasha and Patience, chatting. She was wearing a pale peach-colored shirt and had a matching scarf tied around her loose ponytail, its color nearly washed out in the funky sunlight. The others might think nothing had changed. Her face was smooth, her eyes clear, her tone light. Lucius, though, saw the hurt beneath the calm surface. “I can’t. I’m not ready to.

  She’s the one who says that people don’t change, not at their core, and I think that’s true to a point.

  I’m bigger and stronger now, better coordinated. I’ve made choices not to repeat old patterns. But deep inside, I’m still me.”

  “You’re the one distinguishing between the old version of you and the new one,” the winikin observed mildly. “The rest of us aren’t.”

  “She is. She gave the old me the ‘let’s just be fuck buddies’ speech. The new me got a watered-

  down version of the same speech at first. Then, the next thing I know, she changed the rules on me and tried to manipulate me into falling for her. How is a guy supposed to deal with that?”

  “Let me see. . . .” The winikin paused, considering. “A beautiful, talented woman you’ve been panting after decides she wants to be more than bed partners. . . . How should you feel? I’m thinking flattered would be a good start. Maybe grateful. How about overjoyed?”

  “She changed the rules.”

  “She changed herself. And she did it because of how she feels about you.”

  That brought Lucius’s head up. He turned to face the winikin more fully, but scowled. “Not until I got buff.” He didn’t know the resentment was there until he’d said it aloud.

  “Reality check. You don’t get to talk down about the old you and then get pissed when you think she likes the new-and-improved version better. And besides, I wasn’t talking about the past few weeks, or even the past few months. Think about it. When did she start standing up to Shandi and the others?”

  “While I was gone.”

  “It was because you were gone, dipshit. Anna had more or less checked out, and everyone else was concentrating on their own problems. Jade was the one who kept your name out there. Why do you think Michael put his own life on the line to get you out of the in-between?”

  “Because it distracted the boluntiku and bought him enough time to cast the spell he needed to free himself of the Mictlan’s magic.”

  “Screw that. He did it because he knew Jade wanted you back, and he owed her one. He did it for her. Because he knew how much she cared about you, even if she wasn’t ready to admit it at the time.”

  A dull rushing noise built in the back of Lucius’s head, and a heavy weight settled on his chest. “I thought about her all the time. It was the only thing that kept me going.”

  “So why are you pissed at her now?”

  Lucius looked up at her, catching her eye. She glanced away, her chin high and her features tight.

  “I’m not. I’m . . . Shit, I don’t know. I think it was easy for us to care for each other when we were apart; we could remember the good stuff and forget the rest. How can I be sure we won’t go through the same pattern over and over? What if chemistry and friendship aren’t enough? She’s the one who says people don’t change, but I think they do. I mean, just look at her. She’s getting stronger every damn day, whether she realizes it or not. How do people make it work when they can’t control what they’re going to get from day to day?” He thought of his parents, locked in a thirty-year stalemate between football and Tupperware, thought of his brothers and their interchangeable, silent girlfriends, and his sisters and their husbands and lovers, who could have been swapped out for his brothers without anyone noticing or caring. Who the hell wanted to live like that?

  “If two people truly want to stay together, then they grow in the same direction. Not accidentally, but because they work at it.” The winikin gestured at the picnic tables, where the mated pairs sat close together, sharing intimate looks and private smiles. “Doesn’t that look like people making it work?”

  “Those are magi, not people. The gods care for humans, but they don’t give them destinies.”

  Jox tapped Lucius’s wrist, right above the hellmark. “Don’t be so sure of that.” The winikin collected his plate and rose to his feet. “Break’s almost over, but l
ike I said, go ahead and sit out the first shift if you want to.”

  Lucius dumped his leftovers and headed toward the playing field, where the teams were assembling, the players looking steely eyed and rested, determined that one side or the other was going to get the upper hand. But when he reached the edge of the playing field, he paused and looked back to the tables, where Jade was helping Shandi clean up. As though she felt his eyes on her, Jade looked up, their gazes connecting.

  He saw the hurt beneath the calm. More, he saw her determination, her refusal to give up on the people who needed her, even though she might have preferred to be somewhere else, doing something else. Duty, dignity, decorum; she’d said it was the harvester way, and she had all of those qualities.

  But she was also brave and intelligent, quietly fierce and loyal. And none of those things, he realized, jibed with her being shallow or manipulative. She was a kind person, a healer, not of the body like Sasha, but of the mind and spirit. She hadn’t been trying to trap him into anything; she’d been trying to do what she thought was right, trying to let him find his own way rather than control him, because she knew he needed to not be boxed in.

  Which left them . . . where? Hell, he didn’t know, but he suddenly knew one thing for certain: They weren’t over. Not by a long shot.

  He tried to convey that in a look, but her face went blank and confused at first, and then gained an edge of anger beneath. That anger reminded him too strongly of his own, of the green flash and the echo of the makol ’s voice inside his skull. He couldn’t go to her, not yet. He needed to deal with the darkness inside him first . . . and pray to the gods it was possible to break free, finally, from his past mistakes.

  Then Jox blew the conch shell and tossed the heavy rubber ball to Nate for the first serve, and Lucius told himself to get the hell on the field.

 

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