Nightkeepers notfp-1

by Jessica Andersen

  ‘‘Okay,’’ he said when everyone was settled. ‘‘Here’s the deal.’’ To her surprise, he brought them all up to speed on the ‘‘situation,’’ even though he’d indicated earlier that he was limiting the confab to Jox and Red-Boar.

  Even more surprising, from the looks on their faces, this was the first the two senior members of the group were hearing about the Kulkulkan connection. While the trainees and other winikin were wincing and glancing at Leah with expressions of Dude, major bad luck, Jox and Red-Boar just looked pissed.

  The elder Nightkeeper’s face flushed and his eyes went steely, but when he would’ve interrupted, Strike held up a hand. ‘‘Let’s wait on the questions—and the insults—until I’m done. What we’re looking for now is a way to either bring Kulkulkan through the barrier in one piece or cut him loose so he can return to the sky— without endangering Leah, the god, or the skyroad.’’

  ‘‘Our entire system is based on sacrifice,’’ Red-Boar snapped. ‘‘Yet you want to work perhaps the biggest spell there is without anybody getting hurt?’’

  Strike glared at him. ‘‘What I want is for us to think outside the box. Anna knows a guy who might be able to help.’’ He waved for his sister to take over.

  ‘‘His name is Ambrose Ledbetter.’’ Anna passed around a Web site printout that showed an unremarkable-looking guy with remarkably bad posture and a scowl not unlike the one Red-Boar was wearing. ‘‘He’s prickly as hell and regularly disappears into the rain forest for months at a time, but he’s one of the best Mayanists on the planet.’’

  ‘‘I read a few of his articles when I was researching Survivor2012,’’ Leah said. She glanced at Anna, whom she’d met briefly in the kitchen earlier in the day. ‘‘Read a few of yours, too. You guys didn’t seem to agree on much of anything.’’

  ‘‘True,’’ Anna agreed. ‘‘But my theories were based in part on knowing the barrier was sealed, and believing it was going to stay that way. His were . . . well, I’m not sure where he got some of his information, but now it looks like he was right.’’

  ‘‘What makes you think he knows anything relevant about the human’s problem?’’ Red-Boar asked, still refusing to call Leah by name.

  ‘‘Every now and then,’’ Anna replied, ‘‘he publishes something on the Web or in one of the smaller journals that makes me think he knows more about Nightkeeper magic than he ought to.’’

  Now Red-Boar looked at her. ‘‘Meaning?’’

  ‘‘I think he knows the location of at least one of the lost temples.’’ Seeing a few frowns of confusion from the trainees, she said, ‘‘During Mayan times, the Nightkeepers maintained a separate temple for each of the major gods. When the conquistadors burned our libraries and scholars, the temple locations went up in flames with them.’’

  ‘‘The Pyramid of Kulkulkan is the focal point of Chichén Itzá,’’ Jade said in her soft, barely-above-a-whisper voice. ‘‘Wouldn’t that have been the center of his worship?’’

  ‘‘For the Maya, yes,’’ Anna agreed. ‘‘But there was another center for the Nightkeepers’ worship. If we can find it, maybe the inscriptions will give us a hint how to help Kulkulkan escape from the skyroad.’’

  ‘‘And maybe not,’’ Red-Boar said. ‘‘Probably not.’’

  ‘‘From what Ledbetter’s written over the years, I think he has some of the lost spells,’’ Anna countered. ‘‘It doesn’t matter what you think of Leah, or even what you think of Strike. If we can get our hands on those spells, wouldn’t it be worth the trip?’’

  She held his eyes until he gave a curt, dismissive nod. ‘‘Good,’’ Strike said. ‘‘Get your stuff together. I’ll zap you and Anna down south as soon as you’re ready. Oh, and bring a weapon.’’

  Red-Boar’s eyes blanked. ‘‘I thought Ledbetter was a professor.’’

  ‘‘Apparently he’s done one of his solo disappearing acts into the field. The Guatemalan highlands, to be exact.’’ Strike fixed the senior Nightkeeper with a look. ‘‘Go pack.’’

  And, to Leah’s surprise, Red-Boar did exactly that.

  The meeting broke up soon after, once Strike had run through the training schedule for the next few days leading up to the equinox, and Jox had added some housekeeping complaints. When the trainees and winikin dispersed to their tasks, it seemed to Leah that they looked more resolute and, in a way, relieved.

  It was Strike, she realized, sliding him a look.

  He was deep in discussion with Anna, his head cocked at an angle as he considered something she was saying. Even standing at ease with his sister, he projected an aura of command he’d been missing before, a sense that it was his way or get-the-fuck-out.

  He’d lost weight, she realized suddenly, as though what little excess he’d had before had been burned away by the events of the past few weeks. His high cheekbones stood out sharper, and his eyes were a little more sunken beneath his dark brows, a little more intense in their gleam. And beneath yet another black T-shirt, she could practically count his ribs and the ripped six-pack of his abdomen.

  Lust kindled in her belly. They’d had each other only hours earlier, but she wanted him again, now, wanted to get her hands on him, and her mouth.

  As if she’d said the words aloud, his head came up and his eyes fixed on hers. The desire flared hotter, tempered with an edge of nerves. The man she’d ass-slapped ten days earlier over issues of leadership was gone. In his place was the ruler she’d wanted him to become.

  And damned if he wasn’t intimidating as hell. In a totally hot, sexy way, yes, but still, Leah found herself backing up a few steps as he crossed to her, staring into her eyes, making her feel stalked. He stopped a few feet away, yet she could feel his body heat on her skin, feel his energy slide against hers, dark against light.

  She licked her lips in an effort to wet her suddenly dry mouth. ‘‘Nice job. With the meeting, I mean.’’ Inwardly she thought, Man up and be a cop. You know this guy. You can handle him. Nothing’s changed.

  But something had very definitely changed. It was like he’d come to some sort of inner decision, one he hadn’t yet shared with her—if he even intended to.

  He leaned in and dropped his voice to an intimate rumble, even though there was nobody within earshot. ‘‘I had Jox move my things into the royal suite. It’s time.’’

  A shimmer of awareness touched her skin, a quiver of nerves. ‘‘Am I . . . where am I staying?’’

  ‘‘Your call.’’ He didn’t ask her to stay, didn’t tell her he’d like it if she did. Just left it up to her. Her choice. Her commitment. Damn it.

  She should put some distance between them now, before he figured out what she was planning and made it impossible. It was the smart thing to do, the right thing. But she heard herself say, ‘‘I’m staying.’’

  He nodded once, then turned and strode back toward the mansion, looking every inch the king in a black T-shirt and jeans. And damned if she didn’t want to chase after him.

  Instead, she headed in the opposite direction, back out to the shooting range, where she unloaded clip after clip of jade-tips into the shredded practice dummies, imagining that every single one of them was wearing Zipacna’s face.

  The section of rain forest where Anna, Strike, and Red-Boar zapped in was moist and fecund and smelled disconcertingly like antibacterial Febreze. Once Strike zapped back out, Anna checked her handheld GPS and set off in the direction Ledbetter’s grad student had indicated.

  It couldn’t have been someone easy to find, like Harts-horn or Cortes at the Institute of the Yucatán, or even Foohey up in Ottawa. They all had home bases and scheduled lectures, conferences, and tours. No, it had to be Ledbetter, who had all of those things and blithely ignored them to disappear into the highlands for months at a time, but got away with it because he was deranged enough—and brilliant enough—that everyone called him eccentric rather than unreliable. That had worked in her favor, though. She’d been able to bribe his senior grad student to give h
er Ledbetter’s approximate coordinates by dangling the promise of a job at UT.

  It wasn’t so much that the program in Austin was better, but the head epigrapher at UT—namely Anna— had less of a rep for flaking out.

  Between magic and GPS, she figured they were maybe two miles from Ledbetter’s camp. Within a half hour of hard hiking, her calves were burning, reminding her that the stair stepper was her friend, not just a place to hang dry cleaning. But she didn’t complain, because what would be the point? Red-Boar didn’t care if her feet hurt. He didn’t care about anything but the past. Never had.

  But when she sighed, he paused, looked back, and said, ‘‘Need a break?’’

  ‘‘Several, but not of the kind you’re thinking,’’ she said drily, then motioned for him to keep going. ‘‘We don’t have time for a sit-down. I’m fine.’’ More or less.

  He looked at her for a long moment, then turned away without comment.

  Anna followed him, her eyes glued to his wide shoulders, trying not to envision the scars she knew crisscrossed his back beneath the long-sleeved shirt he wore tucked into camo pants and hitched with a stocked weapons belt. She wore the same, though her belt wasn’t loaded with nearly as much firepower. Her aim was notorious, and not in a good way.

  Shrugging beneath her light pack, she tried to resettle the load, which suddenly seemed off-kilter. Faint nausea stirred, though she wasn’t sure if it was hunger or teleport sickness. Thinking to drown whatever it was, she reached for her bottle of purified water.

  She had the bottle halfway to her lips when she realized it wasn’t nerves or hunger. It was power. Not the kind she was used to, but a deeper, darker kind that grabbed her by the gut and squeezed, making her want to run and hide.

  Ahead of her, Red-Boar stepped through a curtain of hanging vines into the sunlight.

  ‘‘Wait!’’ she cried, but he’d already stopped dead.

  He turned back, expression grim. ‘‘Stay here.’’

  ‘‘What is it?’’ Ignoring his order, she stepped up beside him.

  They stood on the edge of a small clearing. Or not a clearing, she realized. At some time in the past, a sinkhole had broken through, allowing access to one of the subterranean rivers that formed the only source of freshwater in the Yucatán. Over time, the sinkhole—called a cenote—had filled with leaves and organics that eventually became soil, capping off the cenote and creating new ground within a perfectly circular depression.

  The Maya had believed the cenotes were entrances to the underworld; they had probably thrown sacred offerings into the sinkhole. The magic of those now-buried sacrifices would have accounted for a normal power surge. But there was nothing normal about the darkness Anna sensed. Power hummed through her hiking boots, feeling purple and black and discordant. Drawn by the magic, simultaneously fascinated and repelled, she approached the cenote, testing each step before she put her weight down.

  ‘‘Don’t.’’ Red-Boar’s single word was less of a command than a plea, as though he already knew what she would find.

  Then again, so did she. The air stank of death.

  It wasn’t until she reached the center of the depression that she sank into the dirt beneath her feet, not because the cap sealing off access to the subterranean river was giving way, but because the ground itself had been disturbed. She didn’t need to see the churned-up earth beneath a scattering of leafy camouflage to know that she was standing atop a human grave. She could tell by the smell of death, of violence.

  Her heart ached for a man she’d barely known.

  ‘‘It might not be Ledbetter,’’ she said, knowing it probably was. The makol had beaten them there, taking away a valuable resource.

  Red-Boar didn’t argue, simply made a wide berth around her, knelt, and used the flat of his machete to scrape away the soft covering at one end. He didn’t have to go far. Only a few inches down, he uncovered fairly fresh human remains that started at the neck, with dark, raw flesh and a severed vertebral column.

  The head was gone, no doubt taken elsewhere to add to the makol’s skull pile. His powers weren’t at full strength yet, but they were growing fast. She could feel it.

  Red-Boar uncovered the torso and abdomen, and she felt an unreasonable wash of relief to find them intact. He hadn’t had his heart cut out. Somehow, beheading was so much less gruesome to contemplate than vivisection. And if that didn’t prove how screwed-up her priorities were these days, she didn’t know what would.

  ‘‘Wallet.’’ Red-Boar flipped the leather bifold. ‘‘Money’s here. Cards. License.’’ He cut a glance at Anna. ‘‘Ambrose Ledbetter.’’

  ‘‘Oh,’’ she said faintly. Just oh, as the world took a long, lazy spin around her and she dropped down onto a nearby log. ‘‘Damn.’’

  They hadn’t exactly been pals—Ledbetter was prickly on a good day, downright bitchy the rest of the time— but they’d known each other in passing. And now he was dead because of what he’d known. Because of what the ajaw-makol didn’t want them to know.

  Red-Boar stared down at the headless corpse but said nothing. Not that she should’ve expected anything more, but a pithy ‘‘Poor bastard’’ would’ve been nice.

  Then again, the Nightkeeper didn’t waste sympathy on the living; why would he give it to the dead?

  After a long, shuddering moment, she forced herself to focus on the practicalities rather than the raw stump where Ledbetter’s head should’ve been attached to his shoulders. ‘‘We should bury him properly. Animals will dig him up if we leave him like this.’’

  There was no real reason to bring the body back to Skywatch, and she had a feeling he wouldn’t mind being planted near a sacred cenote. Gods knew she wouldn’t.

  And where had that thought come from? When had she started thinking like a Nightkeeper rather than a wannabe soccer mom?

  Since the barrier woke up and the pee stick started refusing to turn pink month after month, she admitted bitterly, at least to herself. If she couldn’t be a mother, and she was a pretty sad excuse for a wife, she might as well be a princess.

  There was little joy in the thought.

  ‘‘He have any family?’’

  It took her a moment to process Red-Boar’s question, another to frown. ‘‘Since when did you get sentimental?’’

  ‘‘Just wondering if anyone’s going to raise a stink when he doesn’t come home.’’

  ‘‘The university will notice, and his students. But friends and family? Um . . .’’ She frowned. ‘‘I’m pretty sure he mentioned a woman once in passing.’’

  ‘‘Girlfriend?’’

  She shook her head. ‘‘I don’t know.’’

  ‘‘You think anyone stateside is going to make trouble?’’

  Anna lifted one shoulder, staring down at the headless torso. ‘‘There’s always a risk when you come down here for fieldwork. Families get used to it.’’ Or they fell apart, which happened more often than the community liked to admit. ‘‘Besides, Ambrose was even more eccentric than the norm, and had the rep of disappearing for months at a time. Most likely this woman, or one of his students, will go to the university when they realize he’s overdue. They’ll contact the consulate, and either there’ll be a quick search or the government will pretend there was, and everyone will wave their hands and have benefit dinners. ‘Very sorry for your loss, he was a pioneer. Died the way he would’ve wanted, doing what he loved, blah, blah . . .’ ’’ She trailed off, staring at the hacked-through vertebrae and ragged flesh. ‘‘We can’t bring him back with us. We’ll have to rebury him here.’’

  The question was, where?

  They couldn’t leave him where he was, first because the grave was far too shallow, and second because if another researcher discovered the site in the future, odds were that he—or she—would eventually want to punch through the cenote cap and study the artifacts that’d been tossed into the sacred well. The discovery of a modern burial atop the cenote would trigger way too many questions.
>
  ‘‘Let’s put him at the edge of the trees.’’ She gestured to a sunny, pleasant-looking spot she thought the dour old researcher might’ve liked, assuming he got pleasure from anything other than making other researchers look like idiots.

  Gods, she was going to miss knowing the old coot was somewhere on the earth plane with her, she thought, then winced again at hearing herself think like a Nightkeeper. In that moment, Dick and her real life seemed very far away.

  ‘‘Grab his shoulders,’’ Red-Boar ordered. ‘‘I’ll get his feet.’’

  ‘‘Can’t we—’’ Anna broke off, realizing that no, they couldn’t. There really wasn’t a better way to get Ledbetter from point A to point B.

  Holding her breath, she grabbed Ledbetter’s shirt near the collar, and nodded. ‘‘I’m ready.’’

  He snorted. ‘‘Don’t be such a girl. Get him by the pits.’’

  ‘‘Fine,’’ she said. ‘‘Pits it is.’’ She forced herself to dig under and lift as Red-Boar tugged on the ankles, and the body came up from its thin covering of leaves and soil with a faint resistance and a noise she didn’t want to think about. As they carried him across the clearing, she tried not to breathe through her nose. Not that mouth breathing was a big improvement, but she told herself the heavy, oily taste was purely her imagination.

  ‘‘He’s lighter than I expected,’’ she said when they were about halfway across. Alive, Ledbetter had been nearly Red-Boar’s size. Now she could handle her half of his weight without too much trouble.

  ‘‘Ground’s dry in the direct sunlight,’’ Red-Boar said. ‘‘He’s partway to mummy already.’’

  ‘‘Any idea how long he’s been here?’’

  Red-Boar pulled a small, collapsible shovel out of his pack, assembled it, and got to work digging a hole at the site she’d chosen. The ground was moist at the edge of the rain forest canopy, and the flimsy shovel cut through the humus with little effort.