Nightkeepers notfp-1

by Jessica Andersen

  Carrying a battered canvas knapsack over his shoulder, wearing worn jeans, a T-shirt, and sandals, with his hazel eyes clear and guileless, his brown hair too long to be stylish, too short to be a fashion statement, he looked so damn young. Too damn young. The eight years separating them could’ve been twenty, the way she was feeling these days—at least, that was what she told herself, because it was best to think of him as a boy rather than a man, better to ignore the occasional urge to lean on him, especially now, when she was so close to falling apart.

  Instead, she forced herself to lean away. ‘‘I’m fine.’’

  He tilted his head. ‘‘You’ve been saying that a lot lately,’’ he said. ‘‘Why don’t I believe you?’’

  Anna exhaled. ‘‘Weren’t you headed to the library?’’

  ‘‘I’m on my way.’’

  But he didn’t move, just kept looking at her until she was tempted to wipe a palm across her face, thinking she had something on her cheek. A hint of something sparkled in the air between them, an attraction that had no business existing.

  ‘‘Lucius,’’ she finally whispered, feeling weak and small. ‘‘Please go.’’

  ‘‘I will. But first, I have something for you.’’ He shifted, dipped into his knapsack, and pulled out a flat, paper-wrapped package. He held it out to her. ‘‘A guy came by my office and asked me to get this to you. I’m not sure why he gave it to me and not you, but . . .’’

  She didn’t hear the rest of his sentence, as his voice faded to a buzz—or maybe the buzz was coming off the package, she couldn’t tell. She felt the power before she recognized the handwriting, the shock jolting through her like heat. Like temptation.

  ‘‘I’ll take it.’’ She snatched the thing away from Lucius and gritted her teeth when the magic sang up her arm, even through the wrapping.

  What the hell was in there?

  I don’t care, she told herself sternly. This means nothing to me now. I’m a wife. I’m trying to become a mother. I’m not that person anymore.

  Yet the power called to her, reaching deep down inside and curling around her soul, warming the places that had grown so cold.

  ‘‘What man?’’ she asked, more for something to say than because she needed to know. It would’ve been Strike, her baby brother, coming to bring her back to the fold.

  ‘‘He didn’t give a name, just told me to take the package straight to you, nobody else.’’ Lucius frowned. ‘‘Huh . . . that’s weird. I can’t really picture him. I know there was something seriously cool about him, but . . .’’ He scrubbed a hand down the back of his neck, and as he did so, she saw that the coarse hairs on his forearm were raised, as if drawn upright by static electricity. His voice went serious. ‘‘What’s going on, Anna? Things have felt . . . weird around here since the night you conked out, and I’m not the only one who’s noticed it. Half the artifacts are suddenly under lock and key, you’ve got strangers dropping off mysterious packages, the interns are practically living at the library, and I get the feeling you’d be happy if I joined them.’’ He paused. ‘‘I’d like to think you know me better than that, so why don’t you spare us both the argument and tell me what’s up?’’

  Anna almost told him, but didn’t, because he wasn’t part of what was going on behind the scenes of everyday life. Hell, she wasn’t even part of it, not anymore. She was a consultant. A convenience. I’ll give it to Anna, she could picture Strike saying. She’ll translate it.

  No, she decided, she bloody well wouldn’t.

  ‘‘Trust me, you’re better off not knowing,’’ she said, pinching the bridge of her nose. ‘‘I’m trying to spare you a headache you can’t even begin to understand.’’

  ‘‘I’m tougher than I look.’’

  ‘‘It’s not about being tough; it’s about—’’ She broke off, shaking her head. ‘‘Never mind. Everything is fine. I’m fine; I promise.’’ She forced a smile. ‘‘And if it feels like I keep shuffling you off to the library, it’s because I do. Or have you forgotten that you’re defending your dissertation in a few weeks?’’

  Refusing to be distracted, he tapped the package, which she still clutched in both hands. ‘‘Are you going to let me see what’s in there?’’

  Not on your life, she thought, but said aloud, ‘‘Maybe later.’’

  ‘‘Which means no.’’ His voice held faint reproach, but his grin was pure and sweet and held just enough of the devil to have her taking a second look when he said, ‘‘You know I’ll get a look eventually. I have my ways.’’

  ‘‘Keep on believing that.’’ She waved him out. ‘‘We all need our little delusions.’’

  But her smile died the moment he was out the door. She stared down at the flat packet. It seemed like such a small, innocuous thing—an oblong rectangle wrapped in brown paper and secured with packing tape. Inside, though, was something beautiful. Something terrible. She could feel it hum up her arms, begging to be unwrapped. To be seen. To be used.

  It was one of the lost spells. It had to be. But where had Strike found it? Where had it been all these years?

  Jox had told her the stories, of course. He’d told both her and Strike as part of their training, and then repeated them over again when Red-Boar’s young son, Rabbit, had been old enough to understand. The winikin had told them how the Maya had welcomed Cortés’s ships, ignoring the Nightkeepers who said they should be wary, pointing to the third prophecy: When the solstice sun rises, a fair-skinned man arrives from the east, bringing destruction.

  The Mayan hosts, believing the lies of the demon-worshiping Order of Xibalba, had welcomed the conquistador’s ships as heralding the return of the winged serpent god, Kulkulkan. Instead, the galleons had brought utter destruction. What happened before will happen again, said the writs, referring back to the massacre that had driven the Nightkeepers out of Egypt when Akhenaten decreed there was only one true God. And history had indeed repeated itself, with the conquistadors slaughtering all but a handful of the magic users and burning their books, forcing the Maya to convert to Christianity. The accumulated wisdom of thousands of lifetimes had perished in the second massacre, with only scraps surfacing from time to time. What were the chances of one surfacing now, as the portal was wakening, as power was building and the end-time approached?

  There are no coincidences, Jox had always said, his voice suddenly fresh in Anna’s mind even after all these years. There is only destiny. It was that destiny that had driven her away. Now it was looking to suck her back in, looking to make her into something she didn’t want to be, to take her away from the things she did want to be. A wife. A teacher. Hell, a soccer mom.

  She ripped the package open more violently than necessary, because it was hard to be a soccer mom without kids.

  Beneath the outer layer of packing, there was a layer of acid-free paper, a layer of cardboard, and another of acid-free paper. Inside that was a flat packet of oilcloth, tied shut with a boot lace. Within that was a scrap of power.

  The codex fragment bore lines of glyphwork so ornate that it was difficult to make out the symbols themselves. Soon, though, the lines and shapes began to resolve into flattened faces with heavy, hooked noses and elaborate headdresses, stylized caricatures of animals and plants interspersed with the dots and slashes. And the skulls. So many skulls, all tipped back, mouths opened as they screamed agony into the darkness.

  Gods, she thought, feeling awe shimmer over her, through her. It’s gorgeous. Hideous, but gorgeous, and giving off so much power just sitting there that her skin grew warm in the center of her collarbone, where her quartz crystal used to rest. She even reached up to touch her pendant before she remembered it was gone. Then she let her hand fall and shoved the damned packet in a drawer, locking it tight, as though that would make it all go away.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  In the weeks following Strike’s revelation of the thirteenth prophecy, Leah channeled her excess energy into finding the bastard who’d killed her brother and frien
ds . . . and learning how to kill the creature Zipacna had become. Logic—and rationality—said she should go home and work the case from there. But home wasn’t safe, and besides, the things she’d seen and done recently had separated her from that life somehow. She didn’t feel like that world fit anymore.

  Which was unfortunate, because she sure didn’t fit into the Nightkeepers’ world, either.

  As agreed, she and Strike avoided the hell out of each other. It wasn’t easy, considering that they crossed paths just often enough to keep the sizzle at a maddening background hum. But because he’d been right, damn it, the sex hadn’t been just sex, and because she didn’t want to be anybody’s sacrifice, she ignored the hum as best she could and threw herself into her work.

  Unfortunately, she didn’t have much more in the success department there, either.

  She was a bust in Magic 101, showing zero power, which was both a relief and a disappointment—a relief because she wasn’t sure she wanted to play the magic game when it seemed like a good way of getting dead, but a disappointment because she really, really wanted to fry Zipacna’s ass. Then she found out the deal with the MAC-10s: The bullets were tipped with jade, which was apparently anathema to the denizens of the nine-layered hell called Xibalba. They were the Nightkeepers’ silver bullets.

  And they were a way for her to fight Zipacna.

  According to Jox—who had no use for her but proved to be a bit of a weapons junkie—the jade-tips wouldn’t kill a makol because its human aspect would protect it from the jade while its magic protected it from getting dead right away. But the jade-tips would sure as hell slow it down long enough for her to do the head-and-heart thing and recite a simple banishment spell. Jox said he wasn’t sure whether the banishment spell would work for a human—and of course he said the ‘‘human’’ part with a superior lip curl. That meant maybe the makol would vaporize . . . and maybe it’d sit its headless ass up and make a grab for her.

  She had a feeling the winikin was hoping for the latter. But who the hell cared? At least she had a weapon with some hope of success. All she had to do was track down Zipacna, who might or might not be traveling with a hundred or so of his freak-show disciples.

  That turned out to be easier said than done.

  She leaned on the Nightkeeper’s private eye, Carter, and called in all her markers and then some. She tracked the 2012ers from Miami to the Keys and lost them when they hit the water, headed south. A week later, she picked them back up in south Texas, near the border. Once she had the location, she forced Strike and Red-Boar to take her along on the teleport recon by refusing to give up the location—and the relevant photographs— until they agreed.

  They got there half a day too late. Zipacna and his freaks were gone.

  Then the same thing happened in Fort Worth, and again in Philly, of all places. Then LA. Each time they were a fraction too late, sometimes a day, sometimes just a few hours, as if the bastard had known they were coming.

  ‘‘He’s got a seer,’’ Strike said at one point. ‘‘It’s the only explanation.’’

  The knowledge hurt him doubly, she knew—once because they couldn’t catch the ajaw-makol, and a second time because it drove home the continued separation between him and his sister, Anna—a rift Leah had learned of when she’d come across him one day, sitting at the kitchen table with the mail open in front of him and his head in his hands. Eventually he’d revealed that he’d given Anna a text for translation and she’d sent it back, refusing to get involved. Which left them with no seer, and no translator the Nightkeepers could trust.

  With so much of their magic lost over the years—to time, to persecution—they couldn’t afford to waste any of their assets. But instead of zapping to UT Austin and dragging his sister’s butt back to the compound, Strike had withdrawn completely, giving Jox and Red-Boar control of Magic 101 and spending most of his time locked in the archives. When he did come out in public, he was snarly at best, churlish at worst. Even Red-Boar started giving him a wide berth, which was saying something.

  As days turned to weeks, Strike’s absence meant that Leah didn’t have to work so hard at avoiding him, and she could spend as much time as she wanted on the firing range at the back of the compound, perfecting her aim with the jade-tips without his figuring out what she planned to do. But it also meant that the buzz of desire became an ache of loneliness. And she wasn’t the only one missing him, either. The trainees, whom she’d gotten to know little by little, were starting to fall apart . . . and she was the only one who seemed to see it.

  Granted, on the surface everything looked pretty good. Patience and Brandt were the perfect couple, and their twins didn’t seem to miss not having other kids around. The boys played with each other under the watchful eyes of the winikin, or tagged after Rabbit, who had the rep of a delinquent but seemed to get a kick out of the twins. Of the others, Alexis and Nate were a couple, though they didn’t spend much time together outside of the bedroom, and Michael and Jade’s romance had fizzled out around the one-month mark, right about the time he discovered a knack for casting force fields. Sven was . . . well, he was Sven. He hung loose, seeming even more chilled out after his young winikin went back to college. Even Red-Boar, whom Leah tagged as living on the manic-depressive side of life, seemed to have settled into the teaching role pretty well.

  But beneath the surface, she didn’t like how Rabbit spent so much time alone, and how the others treated him differently, not because he was younger, but because he was half-human, and didn’t have his mark. She didn’t like seeing Patience and Brandt with their heads together, shutting out the rest of the world—and not in a we’re deeply in love way, but in a we’re making plans that don’t include you way. She didn’t like that Nate spent a big chunk of his time on the computer, trading e-mails with his business partners and working on something about a Viking sex goddess, or that Michael got a dozen cell calls a day and always took them behind closed doors.

  They trained hard; she’d give them that, though it wasn’t like Jox or Red-Boar would’ve tolerated anything less. In the mornings Jox did a sort of Nightkeepers for Dummies, which was a blinding speed-sampling of their history, starting with Atlantis—and boy, had that made Leah’s cop side cringe—and running through to the present, along with a short version of the Popol Vuh creation myth and a dizzying number of prophecies, some coming from the earliest Nightkeepers, others supposedly from the gods themselves.

  In the afternoons, the trainees met up with Red-Boar in the steel-sided training building, which was almost always either too hot or too cold. There, they worked on basic barrier spells like shielding and wielding fire. Of the trainees, only Rabbit could reliably make fire, and Michael showed a talent for shields. Patience got pretty good at the invisibility thing—which was the freakiest by far, in Leah’s opinion—and even figured out that she could occasionally throw her talent to distant objects or people, especially if her husband was boosting her with his power. Which was all well and good, but Leah didn’t see how most of the things they were doing—with the exception of Jox’s late-afternoon lessons on the firing range—were preparing them to fight.

  Worse, she was pretty sure the others felt the same way. They were taking their classes, finishing their home-work, and otherwise doing their own things. And that was not a good recipe for teamwork.

  Maybe she noticed it because she was an outsider, maybe because Connie had exposed the members of the MDPD to a wide range of touchy-feely exercises designed to build their team spirit. Or whatever. But while the cops had universally mocked Connie’s team-building crapola, as far as Leah could tell, the MDPD had been one big, happy, tolerant family compared to the Nightkeepers. And that was bad. They—and that would be the whole-wide-world ‘‘they’’—needed the magi working together, or very bad things were going to happen. Leah believed that, even if she didn’t totally understand it.

  A week before the Venus conjunction, she decided she’d had enough of the bullshit, enough of
Strike locking himself away and pretending Jox and Red-Boar were a fine substitute for leadership.

  So she sucked it up and went to find Jox.

  The winikin was in his quarters near the royal suite, and answered the door barefoot, in jeans and a T-shirt, and carrying a book about miniature roses. His expression went cool when he saw her standing there. ‘‘Is there something I can help you with, Detective?’’

  You can get your thumb out of your ass and take a good look around, she thought, but didn’t figure that would get her very far. So instead she said, ‘‘Yeah. I need you to help me arrange a party.’’

  Strike’s eyes were nearly crossed, and he was pretty sure he’d put a permanent kink in his neck from sitting at the long archive tables in front of a messy stack of books. Unfortunately, the Mac Pluses that’d held the computerized files had shit the bed long ago, leaving him working with some sort of perverse index-card system.

  He’d been going through the cards for weeks now, one by one, searching the short annotations and pulling likely-sounding journals, translations, whatever, hoping for a clue, any clue that would help them understand why Leah had shown powers at the solstice and again at the aphelion, but had lost every hint of magic since. He’d also take something about how to track a makol when there wasn’t an itza’at seer handy.

  There hadn’t been a Zipacna sighting in nearly three weeks. Strike was guessing he’d gone to ground someplace with some serious power lines—one of the old ruins down south, maybe—and used them to construct a ward barrier. Which meant the bastard was functionally untouchable and free to work whatever magic he had at hand until the equinox, when it was a sure bet he’d be at the intersection, looking to bring a dark lord through.

  Time was running out too fast. They had three weeks until the equinox, and it seemed highly doubtful the trainees would be ready. According to Jox and Red-Boar, most of the newbies—with the notable exception of Jade—had mastered the basic pretalent spells of jacking in and manipulating the barrier’s energy, but only Patience had shown any spark of breakthrough talent. And Rabbit, of course, but that was a whole ’nother can of worms. Which left them exactly where they’d been six weeks ago—with a group of untrained magi and no idea what they’d be able to do.