Final Prophecy 04: Demonkeepers

by Jessica Andersen

  Granted, he wasn’t a Nightkeeper. But despite the ongoing debate among the Nightkeepers, particularly the members of the royal council, Jade didn’t think the problem was his humanity, his former demonic connection, or the fact that he’d retained his soul when the library spell had called for its sacrifice. Her instincts said he just needed a jump start, with an emphasis on the “jump” part—as in, he needed to get himself jumped. And if that was bound to make things complicated between them, so be it. She’d made herself scarce for the past five-plus months since his return to Skywatch; she could leave again afterward if she had to. It wasn’t like anyone was begging her to come back. And didn’t that just suck?

  “There’s one big difference between your situation and the other cases you’re talking about.” Anna raised an eyebrow. “Unless there isn’t?”

  And there was the crux of another major debate. Was it the sex magic itself that unlocked the bigger powers, or was the emotional pair- bonding of a mated couple the key, with sex magic as a collateral bonus? Hello, chicken and egg. Of the three couples Jade had named, in the aftermath of the big battles they’d been instrumental in winning, two had gained the jun tan marks signifying them as mated, soul-bound pairs. And although Michael’s connection to death magic prevented him from forming the jun tan, he and Sasha had gotten engaged human-style, diamond ring and all. Which suggested it wasn’t just the sex magic that was important; it was the emotions too.

  Jade had heard the argument before—ad nauseam— but it pinched harder coming from Anna, who had become a good friend in the months since Jade had fled from Skywatch to the university for a crash course in Mayan epigraphy and some breathing room . . . And Anna’s relationship with Lucius went a good six years farther back than that—she’d been his boss, his mentor, and briefly his bond-master under Nightkeeper law.

  “I don’t think it’s a question of love,” Jade said, glancing past Anna’s shoulder to the shelf beyond, where a crudely faked statuette of Flower Quetzal, the Aztec goddess of love and female sexuality, seemed to be smirking at her. Doggedly, she continued: “I think in each of the prior cases, the couples were struggling with identity issues, trying not to lose their senses of self to the magic or their feelings for each other. That won’t be a problem for Lucius and me. I don’t have much in the way of magic, and we’re not . . . Well, we had sex once; that was it.” And oh, holy shit, had that been a disaster. Not the sex, but the way she’d flubbed the aftermath. “We’re just friends now,” she finished. Sort of.

  “The jun tan the others earned through sex magic doesn’t symbolize friendship . . . and neither does what Strike wants you to do.”

  “It’s just sex.” Jade glanced at her friend as a new reason for the cross-examination occurred. “Unless you think he’s still too fragile?” Even with his grisly wounds on the mend, thanks to Sasha’s healing magic, Lucius had been badly depleted in the weeks following his return to the Nightkeepers. He’d been disconnected and clumsy, as though, even with the makol gone from his head, he wasn’t at home inside his own body. More, he’d been deeply ashamed of the weakness, thanks to a childhood spent as the weakling nerd in a family of hard-core jocks. Had his condition deteriorated?

  “Fragile is not the word that comes to mind.” There was an odd note in Anna’s voice.

  “Then what’s with the ‘don’t do it’ vibes?”

  “I think . . .” Anna trailed off, then shook her head. “You know? Forget I said anything. It’s not fair for me to say on one hand that I want Strike to deal me out of the hierarchy, then on the other go running around trying to subvert the royal council’s plan.”

  Jade winced at learning the should-Jade-jump-Lucius discussion hadn’t just been a three- way of her, Strike, and Anna, as she’d thought, but had also included the other members of the royal council: Leah, Jox, Nate, and Alexis. Michael had probably been involved too, as he was practically a council member; and if he knew what was going on, then so did Sasha. Shandi had also likely been in on the conversation, though the winikin probably hadn’t added much beyond, “Whatever you think is best, sire.” Jade was determined not to let any of that matter, though. For once, she was the one taking action while the others hung back and played supporting roles. The harvester bloodline might have traditionally produced shield bearers rather than fighters, and she might be the only living Nightkeeper aside from Anna who didn’t wear the warrior ’s talent mark, but this time she was on the front lines, ready to take one for the team.

  So to speak.

  Anna touched her chain again. Though Jade couldn’t see the heavy pendant it held, she could easily picture the yellow crystal skull. Handed down through the maternal lineage, the quartz effigy was the focus of an itza’at seer’s visionary gift. Normally Anna blocked her talent, which was glitchy at best, but Jade thought she caught a faint hum of power in the air as Anna said, “I’m not sure. . . .” She trailed off, eyes dark and distant.

  Jade straightened. “Are you seeing something?”

  “Gods, no.” Anna self-consciously dropped her hand from her throat, pressing her palm to the solid wood of the desk. “It’s just a feeling, probably coming from the fact that I care deeply about both of you, and hate that I can’t be there for Lucius without breaking promises that I’ve made to people here.”

  Jade didn’t bother pointing out that vows made to humans were pretty far down in the writs when it came to the list of a mage’s priorities. Anna was forging her own path, which wasn’t necessarily the same one set down by the First Father and the generations of magi since. “Will it help if I promise to be gentle?”

  Anna made a face. “Again. Ew.”

  Jade laughed, but the humor was strictly on the surface. Underneath it all, she wanted to press further—about whether Anna was having visions, about how Lucius had looked when she’d last seen him . . . and whether he’d asked about her. But, just as Jade had cut off Strike and Anna whenever they had tried to tell her about Lucius’s progress before, she didn’t ask now. In the end, what mattered most were the results. Besides, she’d given her word to her king, and according to the writs, a vow made to him was second only to a promise made to the gods. Since the gods were currently incommunicado, thanks to Iago’s destruction of the skyroad . . .

  She had a booty call to answer.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Skywatch

  Near Chaco Canyon, New Mexico

  The strange orange sun was slipping toward the horizon as Strike and Jade materialized, not in the great room, where the teleporter king usually landed his homeward bounds, but out behind the big mansion that formed the heart of Skywatch. Jade appreciated his discretion; she wasn’t exactly jonesing to endure a round of “Hi, how are you?” pleasantries while everyone tried not to say anything about what she was there to do. Except Sven, who was perpetually seventeen, and would probably do a wink-wink-nudge-nudge routine.

  Yeah, she’d skip that, thanks.

  She and Strike had zapped in beneath the big ceiba tree that stretched over the picnic area out behind the mansion and pool. There, cacao saplings grew beneath the rain forest giant, the out-of-place tropical plants flourishing in the arid New Mexican landscape thanks to Sasha’s lifegiving ch’ul magic and her affinity for plants. Nearby, the steel building that served as the Nightkeepers’ training hall was a dark silhouette of deepening shadows.

  The scenery was all very familiar to Jade. The atmosphere, though, wasn’t.

  Stepping away from the big, black-haired king, who was wearing his usual nonregalia of jeans, T-shirt, and sandals, with his right sleeve just brushing across the hunab ku mark that denoted his gods-validated kingship, Jade filled her lungs with moisture-laden air that seemed more appropriate to the lowlands of the Yucatan than a box canyon in New Mex. The air smelled faintly wrong, though she couldn’t immediately place the odor, which clung to her nasal passages and made her want to sneeze. She glanced at Strike, who was a dark shadow in the rapidly dimming light. “Did you guys install a gi
ant Glade air nonfreshener while I was gone?”

  “I wish. At least then we’d know what we’re dealing with . . . and it’d presumably come with an ‘off’ button.” His deep voice was edged with frustration. “We seem to be going from desert to tropics, and it’s not just the ceiba tree growing out of place now, or even the cacao. There are patches of slimy green crap—like dry-land algae or something—growing all over the area, though it’s worse down here. Sasha says it’s only partly her talent that’s promoting the growth; mostly it’s the funky sun.”

  Jade glanced at the horizon just as the last sliver of orange light disappeared. The gas giant had been off-color worldwide since the previous fall, when humanity had awakened one day to a sun that had turned from white light to blood-tinged orange overnight.

  The amount of solar energy reaching the earth had dropped precipitously even though the earth’s atmosphere was its same ragged, ozone-depleted self. Scientists worldwide had various theories—no big surprise there—but the consensus seemed to be: Beats the living hell out of us. The astrophysicists were testing whether a cosmic dust cloud or something was blocking things between the earth and sun; the ecologists were freaking about issues of climate change, crop losses, and killer red tides; and the threat of mob stampede was growing as food prices skyrocketed and microclimates shifted over the course of weeks or even days. And all the while, people were asking, Why is this happening? How?

  Unbeknownst to most of humanity, the answers that came the closest to reality were those of the supposed crackpots who blamed it on aliens . . . or, rather, demons and the approach of a doomsday predicted by the calendar of the ancient Maya. In depicting the end-date, the Dresden Codex, one of only four Mayan codices to survive the conquistadors’ book burnings of the fifteen hundreds, showed a terrible horned god standing in the sky, tipping a jug that poured fire onto the earth. Although most human scholars assumed that meant the Maya believed that the world would be demolished by a fiery apocalypse, Jade had dug up information from the archive suggesting that the solar fire would be part of the gods’ efforts to help the Nightkeepers during the final battle, which was good news. . . . Or it had been until the sun got sick.

  Unfortunately, in the absence of a reliable oracle—aka the Prophet—there was no way for the Nightkeepers to ask what the hell was going on or how to fix it.

  Shivering, Jade scrubbed at sudden gooseflesh. “Maybe there’ll be something in the library,” she said, voicing the sentiment that had grown to a refrain over the past six months. “Which is my cue to get down to business.”

  But when she turned toward the mansion, which was a darkly solid, reassuring silhouette in the gathering dusk, Strike caught her arm and one-eightied her in the direction of a nearly invisible path leading away from the main house. “Lucius moved into one of the cottages a few months back. Said the mansion made him feel claustrophobic after being trapped inside his own head for so long.”

  “Oh.” She tried not to let the change unsettle her, though when she’d pictured the pending booty duty, she and Lucius had always been in his suite, which was a few doors down from her own and nearly identical in floor plan and bland decor. Not a big deal, she told herself. It’s just a shift of scenery. Experience had taught her that people didn’t fundamentally change; only peripherals did. Human, Nightkeeper, it didn’t matter. Some people were good, some bad, most a mixture of the two. She trusted Lucius despite knowing that he harbored a deep darkness that had attracted the makol and allowed it to gain a foothold within his soul. But he also had a strong core of innate goodness; that was what had kept the demon from possessing him fully, setting up the internal tug-of-war he’d suffered through for more than a year.

  “Is that a problem?” Strike asked. The deepening dusk made his voice seem to come from the humid air around her rather than from the man himself.

  “Which cottage?” she said, ducking the question because she knew it would take far more than a change of scenery to scare off a warrior, and she was determined not to let herself be anything less.

  “The one farthest from the mansion; you’ll see the lights. He sleeps with them on. Or else he doesn’t sleep at all; we’re not sure.” The king paused. “Nate and Alexis are spending the night in the main house rather than their cottage. With Rabbit and Myrinne at school, you’ll have privacy.” Closing the distance between them, he pressed something into her hand. “Take this.”

  Feeling the outlines of one of the earpiece-throat mike combos the warriors used to stay in contact during ops, she didn’t ask why. “Who’s going to be on the other end?” Even knowing that the mike would transmit only if she keyed it on, she couldn’t help picturing a voyeuristic tableau in the great room.

  “Either me or Jox. Unless you’d prefer Leah.”

  He was doing his best, she realized, to maintain the illusion of privacy while keeping her safe, letting her know the warriors stood ready to come to her defense if the sex magic went awry and Lucius once again drew the attention of the underworld lords of the Banol Kax. Which had been only one of the numerous daunting possibilities that had been thrown around over the past few weeks.

  “Whatever you think is best,” Jade said, just barely managing not to tack on “sire” at the end, as her winikin ’s voice echoed in her head, reminding her of the three “D”s. I’m not following orders this time. This was my idea. My choice. Raising her chin, she said, “Lucius won’t hurt me.” No, she’d manage that part on her own. Always had.

  “He’s not the guy you used to know. Becoming the Prophet has changed him.”

  “He’s not the Prophet yet. If he were, you wouldn’t need me.”

  Strike didn’t have anything to say to that, which pinched somewhere in the region of Jade’s heart. Given her inability to tap her scribe’s talent for the spell crafter’s gift it was supposed to convey, she didn’t bring much in the way of a unique skill set to the Nightkeepers . . . except in the matter at hand. She was the only female mage who remained yet unmated, and she and Lucius had—briefly, at least—shared a sexual connection. More, in the wake of her and Michael’s failed affair, back when they’d all first come to Skywatch and gotten their bloodline marks, she’d proven that she could be sexually involved with a man and not lose her heart. While that was more innate practicality than skill, she knew the royal council saw it as a plus. Lucius wasn’t one of them, with or without the Prophet’s powers.

  Realizing that Strike was waiting for her to make her move, she took a deep breath. “Okay. Wish me luck.”

  She halfway expected him to come back with something about getting lucky. Instead, he said, “I want you to remember one thing: You can call it off at any point. This was your idea. I wouldn’t have summoned you today if you hadn’t volunteered. So promise me that you’ll stop if it doesn’t feel right.”

  She frowned at the sudden one-eighty. “But the writs say—”

  “Fuck the writs,” he interrupted succinctly. “Which probably isn’t what you expected—or wanted—your king to say, but there you have it. Over the past two years we’ve proved that the writs aren’t perfect or immutable. So now I’m telling you—hell, I’m ordering you, if that makes it better—to make your own decision on this one. Take me out of it. Take the others out of it. This is between you and Lucius. Sleep with him or don’t, your call.”

  Jade drew breath to whatever-you-say-sire him, but then stopped herself. After a moment’s pause, she said, “I get where you’re coming from, but with all due respect, it’s bullshit. I’m here because we’re out of other options. If we don’t get our hands on the library soon, the earth might not even make it to the zero date. Between whatever’s going on with the sun, and the threat that Moctezuma could come through into Iago any day now, we might be looking at going into full-on war with the Xibalbans long before the barrier falls in 2012. Sorry, but you don’t get to tell me to take all that out of the equation just so you can feel better about making the call. If it doesn’t bother me to offer myself to Lucius
this way, under these circumstances, then it shouldn’t bother you. And if it does, that’s not my problem.”

  There was a moment of startled silence. Then Strike said, “Huh.”

  Jade didn’t know if that meant he was offended, taken aback, or what, but told herself she didn’t care, three “D”s or no three “D”s. “What? You didn’t know I have a spine?”

  “I knew you had one. I just wasn’t sure you’d figured it out.” He made a move like he was going to touch her, but instead let his hand fall to the warrior’s knife he wore at his belt. “Good luck, then. And remember that we’ll be monitoring the radio in case . . . well, just in case.”

  Without another word, he spun up the red-gold magic of a Nightkeeper warrior- mage and disappeared in a pop of collapsing air, leaving her standing there thinking that the ’port talent was a hell of a way to get the last word in an argument. Not that they had been arguing, really, because they were both right: She couldn’t separate the act from the situation, but at the same time, the act itself was her choice. Strike had called only to tell her that the other magi and the winikin were out of ideas, and they were up against the new moon, which was the last day of any real astrological significance—and hence increased barrier activity—before the summer solstice that would mark the two-and-a-half-year threshold. Her response to the information was her responsibility, just as the suggestion had been hers in the first place.

  “So why are you still standing here?” she asked herself aloud.

  “Maybe because you’re not sure this is such a good idea after all,” a stranger ’s voice rasped from the darkness.

  Adrenaline shot through Jade, making her skin prickle with sudden awareness. “Who’s there?” But even as she asked the question, she realized that the voice hadn’t been entirely that of a stranger. The whispery tone wasn’t familiar, but she knew the cadence and faint Midwest accent. Knew them well, in fact. Swallowing to wet her suddenly dry mouth, she said, “Eavesdropping, Lucius? That’s not like you. And why are you whispering? Trying to creep me out? Well, congrats. You succeeded.”