Final Prophecy 04: Demonkeepers

by Jessica Andersen

  “No, thanks,” he muttered under his breath. “Been there, done that, doesn’t work for me.” For now, and maybe for the long haul, he was far better off alone.

  Strike had been right on target, Jade realized. She was seriously strung-out and needed some downtime. But as she pushed through the door into her suite, instead of the place making her feel at home and inviting her to turn it all off for a while, the small apartment made her feel jumpy and out of sorts. Or maybe the problem wasn’t with the place. Maybe it was with her.

  Like most of the other three-room apartments, hers had a kitchen nook and seating area opening off the mansion hallway, with doors on the far wall leading to a bathroom and bedroom. Unlike the others, though, hers was a corner room and had a bonus: a set of sliders leading to a private balcony that offered a heck of a view of the canyon wall as it rose to meet the horizon beyond. Soon after her arrival at Skywatch, she’d redecorated the suite from the bland faux-Southwestern nondecor it had started with, to a kitschy blend of colors and styles that appealed to her. The end result was part feng shui, part Zen, part hey-that’s-cool impulse buy. The walls were painted a soothing blue-gray, the wall-to-wall had been replaced with eco-friendly bamboo, and the comfy furniture was covered in calm, natural-fiber pastels. A trickling water feature burbled in the corner near the sliders, powered not by electricity, but by sunlight and condensation.

  She’d been away at the university for nearly six months, but the suite was spotless and fresh-smelling, and her few plants were bright green and tended to. That was all Shandi’s doing, she knew, and was grateful for the winikin’s efforts, even if done only out of duty.

  All of it looked like she remembered it, but nothing there seemed to explain the restless, edgy energy that ran through her, making her prowl from room to room, looking for something, though she didn’t have a clue what.

  Finally, unable to stay inside, she unlatched the sliders and pushed through to the balcony. The air surprised her anew with its heavy moisture, and it carried a snap of ozone that hinted at one of the quick summer storms that sometimes swept through the canyon, fierce and loud. Though such storms were normally rare, Sasha had said they were getting more frequent as the microclimate changed. Jade had a feeling things were going to get worse before they got better, too, since their improvement hinged on the Nightkeepers returning Kinich Ahau to the sky. Prophecy or no prophecy, it was one thing to find the lost sun, another to storm the underworld itself. She shivered at the thought of the fearsome firebird and its companions, and at the idea of going back down there. She didn’t want to. She couldn’t.

  Exhaling, she leaned on the railing for a moment and stared out into the night. As she’d sat, watching Lucius breathe and praying he would come back safely, she’d arrived at three important conclusions. Her first was that the gods had gotten it right when they failed to tag her with the warrior’s glyph. She wasn’t cut out to fight—when the moment had come she’d frozen instead of fighting, and could’ve gotten her and Lucius both killed. Which meant she was going to have to find some sort of middle ground between shield bearer and warrior, a way to be involved without actually being on the front lines. The knowledge stung, as did the need to let go of that long-held goal.

  But that led to her second conclusion, which was that she needed to focus on the talent the gods had given her. Problem was, it seemed to have died on her. Since the strange meeting with her nahwal, she’d tried over and over again to call up the magic that had so briefly let her see patterns in the power, but she hadn’t gotten squat. And when she’d stared at the painting on Lucuis’s laptop, she hadn’t been able to pick out the blessing she was sure she’d seen in there before. The glyphs had reverted to their original gibberish. Which meant . . . what? Had the magic come from the nahwal, lasting only long enough to get her out of the barrier? Or was something blocking her from using her scribe’s talent, something the nahwal had briefly unlocked so she could feel what it ought to feel like, see what it ought to look like? For the moment she was going with the second option, shifting her goal from becoming a warrior to becoming the magic user she was meant to be. Somehow.

  The third and last conclusion was one she’d come to deep in the middle of the night, as she sat and stared at Lucius’s face, which had softened with the absence of his now-forceful personality, returning to the younger-looking lines she remembered from before. She didn’t prefer the old Lucius, necessarily, but he was far less intimidating. And in seeing her friend in the face of the man he’d grown into over such a short, tumultuous time, she had realized that just as she needed to find a middle ground between being a bookkeeper and a soldier, perhaps she could find a middle ground with him. Maybe their relationship didn’t have to be a choice between keeping it friends-only and losing herself to him. If she’d learned anything over the past two years—hell, the past few days—it was that things could change in a blink of magic or fate. Maybe it was time to try putting more of herself into her various relationships now, rather than waiting until it was too late and she was stuck sitting at a friend’s bedside, wishing she’d made more of an effort when she’d had the chance.

  She’d long attributed her reserve to Shandi, sometimes in gratitude, sometimes in blame. The winikin wasn’t warm and fuzzy; she was efficient and effective. That upbringing had served Jade well in her career, allowing her to pick through the darkest parts of her patients’ lives and emerge relatively untouched. But that same defensive shell had kept her insulated from the outside world. Lucius had called her on it, she remembered with a faint smile. Over and over again, when she’d tried to fob him off with something cool and distant, he’d told her to get out of therapist’s mode and feel. She’d brushed him off, pretending to laugh, but the comments had stuck. The question was: How did she find that middle ground, the one between feeling nothing and feeling too much?

  “Watching the stars again?” Shandi said from inside the suite. Jade tensed, but didn’t let the winikin see her startlement, or the bite of irritation brought on by the question. As a child, she’d often slipped out of bed and sneaked up onto the balcony or roof of wherever they were living at the time, to lie out and watch the stars. Shandi had invariably found her before too long, bringing her back inside with a few cool words about keeping her eyes on the path in front of her.

  “There aren’t any stars tonight. There’s a storm coming.” Jade turned slowly and found her winikin framed in the sliders, silhouetted against the light coming from the room beyond. To Jade’s surprise, an uncanny calm descended over her, one that said she would say what needed to be said and deal with the consequences. Maybe that was going to be part of her new middle-ground theory. “I’m not going to apologize for sleeping with Lucius, or for trying to help the others find him. I may not be a warrior, but I’m sick of being in the background.”

  Shandi didn’t argue the point. She simply said, “Come inside and sit down. We need to talk.”

  Jade was tempted to tell her that she was too tired and bitchy to talk now, that they’d have to deal with whatever it was in the morning, but the shimmer of nerves—and were those tears?—in the winikin’s eyes stopped the words in her throat. She nodded instead. “Okay.”

  She stepped inside, closed the sliders on the incoming storm, and headed for the couch. Shandi took the chair opposite, so the coffee table formed a wide space between them. Jade didn’t offer her anything and the winikin didn’t ask; they just sat there for a few moments, staring at each other. How could it be, Jade wondered, that she didn’t have anything to say to the woman who had saved her from the massacre, raised her, brought her to her birthright, and helped her adjust to being a mage? Why was it that for all they had in common, it sometimes seemed that they didn’t share anything?

  Finally, Shandi broke the silence. “I think the woman Lucius saw in the library was your mother.”

  On a scale of one to a million, that ranked pretty high on the things I didn’t expect to hear scale. Shock hammered through Jade . . .
but she didn’t jump or run, or shout an instinctive, What the fuck? She just sat there, stunned.

  The words spaced themselves out in her head: I . . . think . . . woman . . . library . . . your mother. Still, though, the sentence refused to make any sort of cohesive sense within the scope of what she knew. “But I’m a harvester,” she said, because while that wasn’t the most important point, it was the one that defined her. “I’m not a star.”

  “Your father, Joshua, was a harvester. But your mother, Vennie, was a member of the star bloodline.”

  “But that’s—” Not how it works, Jade started to say, then broke off, reeling as the world downshifted around her, took a left-hand turn, and sped off in a new, unexpected direction. One with lots of bumps and potholes.

  Among the Nightkeepers, certain bloodlines had tended to interbreed while others hadn’t, forming the basis for talent clusters. The bird bloodlines tended to intermingle, concentrating the genetic traits—assuming that was how the magic was inherited—that conferred the talents of flight and levitation; the four-legged-predator bloodlines carried teleportation and telekinesis, among other things; while the reptilian bloodlines tended toward the fire and weather talents, and invisibility. The omnivorous peccaries could have any of the other talents, along with mind-bending, while the talents of the nonanimal bloodlines fell into two camps: low power and high. On the low end of the spectrum was the harvester bloodline. On the high end was the star bloodline, which was the third most powerful bloodline among all the magi, behind only the royal jaguars and the peccaries.

  And Jade was apparently fifty percent star.

  How had she not known that? How could she not have asked about her mother’s bloodline before?

  “It was a highly unlikely match,” Shandi said. “And, as it turned out, not a good one.” She paused as though weighing a decision, then said, “Your mother abandoned you and your father a few days before the Solstice Massacre. We thought she’d run off . . . and when I couldn’t find any sign of her afterward, I assumed the boluntiku had tracked and killed her as they had so many others.”

  Shock layered atop shock within Jade. Again, the individual words made sense, but the sum of them seemed to represent a foreign language. “You told me my parents loved each other,” she whispered, suffering a spasm of betrayal that was far stronger than the information probably deserved. But these were her parents they were talking about: the tall, sleek- haired woman with the soft voice and her strong, sturdy-armed husband. And even as Shandi’s stories of their having died in a car crash had morphed into the reality of their dying in the Solstice Massacre, Shandi had always said that they had loved each other, that they had died together.

  Apparently not so much, Jade thought as her stomach took a long, sick slide toward her toes.

  “They did love each other . . . in the beginning.” Shandi held up a hand. “Let me tell it my way, start to finish. Okay?” After a moment, she continued: “Vennie was a good Nightkeeper. She was loyal to her king and her magic, and she was a strong soldier. She wore the warrior’s mark and excelled at fireball magic. She was . . .” The winikin paused, her expression clouding. “Vennie was like a comet. She burned brightly, moved fast, and rarely looked behind herself to see what sort of mess she’d left trailing behind her. She’d been away from the compound for a few years with her parents, and when she showed back up for the solstice ritual of ’eighty-two, she was sixteen, gorgeous, talented, and reckless. It was easy to see why Joshua took one look at her and fell hard. It wasn’t so obvious what she saw in him . . . but before any of us knew what was happening, they were asking formal permission to marry, even though her family objected, saying she was too young to know her own mind.”

  While the winikin was talking, Jade did her level best to drop herself into therapist mode, drawing the analytic thought process tightly around her when emotion failed to make sense and threatened to swamp her. Now, putting things into their historical perspective, she said, “I thought that back then King Scarred- Jaguar and the royal council were encouraging gods-destined pairings and pregnancies between teenagers, on the theory that it was imperative to create as many fighting-age magi as possible before 2012?”

  “That’s true. And even before that, it was more common than not for young magi to pair up early; the magic is hardwired to seek the other half of itself. But this case wasn’t as clear-cut, first because their bloodlines weren’t considered inherently compatible, and second because they married without the jun tan.”

  Whoa. “My parents weren’t gods-destined mates?” Even through the counselor’s calm, she felt the world take a long, slow roll around her.

  Shandi tipped her hand in a yes-no gesture. “They eventually got their jun tans, but not until a few months after they were married. That was around the time you were conceived, so there was some question of whether the ‘mated’ marks appeared because your parents were truly destined mates, or because the pregnancy kicked in a new level of the magic. More than a few people whispered that the gods were affirming your value, not actually sanctifying the marriage.”

  Dull unease twisted through Jade. “Surely there were pregnancies between unmated magi?” Love affairs and infidelity were, after all, part of the human condition. And although the Nightkeepers had a few skills normal humans didn’t, there were far more similarities than differences.

  “Of course. In those cases, the children were accepted into either their father’s or mother’s bloodlines—usually the more powerful of the two, to give the child the greatest chance of growing into the maximum magic they could command. Even in jun tan-sanctified marriages, the mother’s bloodline could accept the child if the father didn’t object. That’s how Alexis came to be a member of her mother’s stronger bloodline. The same thing probably should have been done in your case, giving you the protection and power of the star bloodline . . . but Vennie refused. And, as usual, she got what she wanted, which was a neat little harvester family. For about six months or so.”

  On one level, Jade was rapt, with energy humming beneath her skin alongside the sense that finally—finally—she was getting some of the information she had lacked all along. On another, she found herself wishing with every fiber of her being that she could fold time. If she could do that, she’d pop back ten minutes or so, to when she’d first come into her suite that evening . . . and tell herself to lock the door. She couldn’t deal with this right now, couldn’t deal with any of it. Or rather, she could deal with it, but she damn well didn’t want to. She wanted to shut it all out, turn it all off, go to bed, and pull the covers over her head. Maybe when she woke up, it would be 2013, and the others would have won the war without her. Foolish wishes, all of them. But how else was she supposed to deal with learning that she could’ve been a star, which pretty much would’ve guaranteed her the warrior’s mark? Only that hadn’t happened because her parents had decided against it. Her teenaged parents.

  Gone was the tall, stately woman she’d imagined singing her to sleep. Gone too was the strong press of her father’s arms, the deep rumble of his voice, and the feelings of safety. Now new pictures were forming, especially of her mother. Jade knew the type—simultaneously too young and too old for their ages, wiseasses who thought they knew everything, then took off when they finally figured out they didn’t know anything. Jade’s heart ached with the change, as though she had lost her parents all over again, when she’d never really had them in the first place.

  The winikin continued: “Vennie was crazy in love with your father and his family. She insisted on your being accepted into the harvester bloodline, and having a harvester winikin.” Shandi paused, her expression going unreadable. “I wasn’t actually in line to be your winikin—or anyone’s, really—but during your naming ceremony, the magic bypassed your intended winikin and tagged me with the aj-winikin mark instead.” She turned her palms up to say bitterly, “And who are we to argue with the will of the gods?”

  That in itself was a shock to Jade . . . ye
t at the same time it wasn’t, really. From what she’d read, magebound winikin had been selected through a rigorous process that had been part Nightkeeper foretelling, part psychological profiling, and had been designed to provide the best possible caregiver match. If Shandi hadn’t been chosen or trained . . . “What were you supposed to be, if not a winikin?” Those of the blood who weren’t chosen to wear the aj-winikin “I serve” glyph had formed the core of daily life at Skywatch, a layer of support staffers below even the harvesters.

  A spasm of pain crossed the other woman’s face, but she shook her head. “That doesn’t matter anymore. What’s done is done.” Conversation closed. “By the time King Scarred-Jaguar started planning to attack the intersection and seal the barrier, you were six months old, and your parents’ marriage had been limping along for about twice that.”

  “But the jun tan is supposed to mark a lifelong bond.”

  “Love doesn’t guarantee a problem- free re lationship.”

  Ouch. How many times had she thought that before? More, how often had she seen a client out the door and stood there after it closed, thinking to herself that she would never fall into the trap of pining after a man, or letting a bad relationship crush her? Don’t be like Edda, she’d told herself over and over again, using one particular client to proxy for the sum total of the broken hearts—and broken spirits—she’d counseled in her five years of active practice. In that time, she’d gained a reputation as a relationship expert when all she’d really done was help the women—and a few men, but mostly women—learn to be the best them they could be, without using a relationship as a value mirror. And while she’d been teaching her clients how to self-actualize, she’d been confirming the value of her own chosen lifestyle, one of casual dates and sex between friends.