Final Prophecy 04: Demonkeepers

by Jessica Andersen

  “So,” she said carefully, feeling her way, “when you used to tell me my parents loved each other, that was a lie?”

  Shandi nodded. “They were gone, and I . . . ah, I thought you needed the illusion of parents who loved each other.”

  “And who loved me?” Jade said softly.

  Instead of the knee-jerk, Of course they loved you, the question called for, Shandi stayed silent. When she met Jade’s eyes, though, her expression was resolute. “If you’d asked me that a few hours ago, my honest answer would have been that your father doted on you. All of your harvester relatives did.”

  Jade’s mouth had gone drier than the too- humid desert outside. “But not my mother or the stars?”

  “It wasn’t like human society. Once a woman married out of a bloodline, she might still wear her original bloodline mark, but her responsibility and affiliation shifted to her husband’s family. Vennie . . . I believe she truly loved your father at first, and came into the marriage fully committed to the harvester bloodline. But once the newness of being a wife wore off and she started to understand what it meant to be a harvester instead of a star, she chafed at the restrictions. More, she began losing her magic.”

  “But the jun tan bond is supposed to increase a Nightkeeper’s talent.”

  “I’m just telling you what she told me—and everyone else within earshot—on a regular basis.” Faint discomfort flitted across the winikin’s expression, but she kept going. “She was frustrated with the menial roles the harvesters were playing in the weeks leading up to the king’s attack. She wanted to fight, not sit in the background. More, she and your father fought over the attack itself. She questioned Scarred-Jaguar’s visions, which a harvester would never do. That was one of the few times I could ever remember seeing Joshua truly angry. He was furious with her for questioning the king, though I think a large part of it was a spillover of other, smaller disagreements that had been building up. Add that to the stress of their being young parents with a loud, colicky baby, and things got nasty.” Shandi paused. “She took off three days before the attack, and she didn’t come back. We assumed she ran off, not wanting to be part of a battle she didn’t believe in. Based on Lucius’s description, though, I think it’s possible she somehow found and enacted the Prophet’s spell instead, hoping to find something within the library that would help her convince Scarred-Jaguar not to lead the attack . . . or something that would help him win it. Knowing her, she wouldn’t have cared which, as long as she got the credit. Instead, she somehow got caught up inside the library instead of forming the proper conduit. And she died there.”

  Jade closed her eyes on a wash of emotion. She told herself it didn’t matter that her parents hadn’t died together, that their love hadn’t been the deep, abiding joy Shandi had let her believe. That was twenty-some years ago, and had little influence on her life now. She could only control her own thoughts and actions, not those of others . . . and certainly not the past. The sentiments rang badly hollow, though, and her chest ached. “You said she took off three days before the massacre. Didn’t the king and the others go looking for her? Surely, if she’d been lying around somewhere, half jacked into the library, someone could have found her.”

  But Shandi shook her head. “There wasn’t an extensive search because nobody in the council knew she was gone. Neither the harvesters nor the stars wanted to draw attention to her disappearance. Back then, the political situation was volatile. There were . . . I wouldn’t call them factions, exactly, but there was definitely dissent within the Nightkeepers. Parents held their teenagers back from their talent ceremonies so they wouldn’t have to fight, and a few of the magi even spoke openly about leaving. In the end the king, with the queen at his side, declared that anyone involved in desertion, whether by act or knowledge, was guilty of treason . . . which was—and still is—punishable by death.”

  “You all thought you were protecting her by covering up her disappearance.”

  The winikin nodded. “Your father was heartbroken that she’d taken off, but he didn’t want her being charged with treason.”

  Love strikes again, Jade thought, knowing that she should feel something but not sure what anymore. She was growing numb to the surprises, to the anguish. “He died thinking she had abandoned him. That she had abandoned both of us.” She paused as grief echoed through her. “Didn’t anyone stop to think that a woman who was all bent out of shape about being kept out of the action wasn’t going to just walk away from a fight?”

  “Sure, there were questions, but like I said, she was impulsive . . . and I can’t say that motherhood had settled her down. She loved you fiercely when she was in the mood, but then, other times, she wanted to pretend she was the same girl she’d been before—the party girl who was always the center of attention.”

  My mother, the head cheerleader, Jade thought sourly. But at the same time, the logic didn’t totally play. She frowned, trying to think it through in her tired, overloaded brain, knowing that if she stopped thinking, she ran the risk of feeling too much. “The Prophet’s spell requires a soul sacrifice. By enacting it, she would have been offering her own life in exchange for the information.”

  Shandi turned her palms to the sky. “Like I said, she was a comet. That was exactly the sort of ‘act first, regret later’ move she specialized in. Though it doesn’t explain how she wound up in the same situation the human is in now. There’s no way she was harboring a makol or any other sort of soul link.”

  “The human’s name is Lucius,” Jade snapped, annoyance flashing a quick burn through her system.

  “Yes, it is, and he’s bright and shiny now, and you’re hot for him. What do you think is going to happen when all that wears off? Your mother was miserable as a harvester. She hated being on the sidelines. She was a warrior, and she was used to having power—not just magic, but a voice among others her age. When she married your father, whether from love or impulse, or a bit of both, she gave up more than she anticipated. She blamed him for that. And she blamed herself for following her heart, because in doing so, she’d lost the right to fight.”

  The words tugged at a connection in Jade’s brain, but she couldn’t make it take shape. She shook her head. “I don’t know what to say anymore. What to think.”

  “That’s understandable. You’re tired, and that was a lot to take in.” Rising, Shandi brushed at her tailored pants, which fell in neat creases as though they didn’t dare wrinkle. “Just keep breathing,” the winikin said pragmatically, “and keep yourself steady. Sometimes, that’s all we can do.”

  Jade wanted to argue, wanted to scream that she was tired of only breathing, tired of being steady. She wanted to be unsteady, irrational; she wanted to do something, godsdamn it! But she didn’t want to prolong the conversation further; she wanted some time alone to process, or maybe just pull the covers over her head.

  “I’ll be in my room,” Shandi said. “Call if you need me.”

  “Of course,” Jade answered numbly. “I will.” But they both knew she wouldn’t.

  She saw the winikin to the door and locked it behind her. Then, drawn by the faintest rumble of thunder, barely detectable as a vibration on the air and in the floor beneath her feet, she moved to the sliders and pushed through to the balcony. Lightning flickered on the horizon and a deep-throated, thrumming thunder boom ran through the soles of her feet and up to her body, where it pressed on her heart.

  Closing the sliders behind her, she leaned back against the side of the mansion and slid down to sit balled up on the patio floor, with her chin on her knees and her arms wrapped around her shins, feeling the storm approach . . . and waiting for the rain to come and wash away her tears.

  PART II

  MIDDAY

  The sun reaches apogee

  CHAPTER TEN

  June 14

  Two years, six months, and seven days to the zero date

  University of Texas, Austin

  “Hey, Pyro. You lost?”

  Th
e hail startled Rabbit, who’d been head-down, lost in his thoughts as he’d hiked across campus. Pausing just shy of the cement bridge that led to the front entrance of the squat, bunkerlike structure that ironically housed the art history department, he did a mental eye roll and glanced back over his shoulder at the lanky, brown-haired guy who was waving at him. “Not lost, Smitty. Just slumming.”

  “Ha! Good one.” Anna’s newest grad student loped a few strides to catch up, made like he was going to punch Rabbit in the arm, then aborted the motion in a fake-out designed to show anyone watching that the two of them were buds, without actually making contact. Everyone who was anyone in the student social structure knew that Rabbit didn’t like to be touched, except by Myrinne. “Ready to come to your senses and give up on that science shit?”

  It was a running semijoke among the younger members of the Mayan studies department, who, after seeing Rabbit ace a few grad- level courses, had decided that he was the best naturally intuitive Mayanist the university had seen in forever, and ought to be majoring in their department rather than physics.

  What they didn’t get, and what he never intended to tell them, was that the whole Mayan thing wasn’t intuitive at all. It was the way he’d been raised. Rabbit’s old man might not have given much of a crap about his upbringing—Red-Boar had been far more concerned about the memory movies playing inside his own skull—but Jox had taken up the slack, with Strike and Anna helping off and on. Rabbit had learned the legends and histories from them, and had picked up a better than rudimentary understanding of the glyphs and language even before the barrier—and his own magic—had come alive. So really, the Mayan studies shit had been fluff classes for him. Cheating, really. Not that he was going to fess up on that one, though Anna had threatened to flunk him if he didn’t stop signing up for her classes.

  The mental filters he’d installed in his own skull to prevent himself from talking about—or performing—magic on campus wouldn’t let him tell guys like Smitty what was really going on with him. Even if he’d been able to talk about it, though, he wouldn’t have. Unlike in high school, where he hadn’t dared be good at anything lest he get more of the wrong sort of attention from the Reich High Command that had dominated the student scene, at UT he’d found that a guy got points for being good at shit, not just from the teachers, but from the other students.

  Granted, his popularity hadn’t really taken off until he’d set Myrinne’s dorm room on fire, thereby gaining his all too apt nickname, but still.

  “Nah,” he said, playing along. “I’m still into the science shit.” Which remained a low-grade surprise to him. He’d never seen himself as an egghead, but ever since his first day of the midlevel physics class he’d tested into, when Professor Burns had talked about how fire was nothing more than air molecules breaking the speed limit, he’d been hooked. And the deeper into it he’d gotten, the more he’d felt like he’d found something important, something he’d been looking for without knowing he was looking.

  Smitty shook his head. “Wasting your talent, Pyro. Wasting your talent.” Then he grinned, his brain shifting lightning-quick—as it often did—to another, unrelated topic. “You here to see your aunt?”

  Rabbit nodded. “Yep. She around?”

  As a shortcut to explaining his lifelong relationship with the head of the Mayan studies department, and why he checked in with her on a regular basis, he and Anna had decided he’d just pretend she was his aunt and move on. To his surprise, nobody had called him on the absolute lack of familial resemblance. It didn’t seem to matter that his eyes were pale blue to her cobalt, that his features were hawk- sharp to her classical beauty, or that his hair, which stood up in a pseudo-military brush cut these days, was blah brown to her chestnut-highlighted sable. When he’d asked Myrinne why that was, she’d given him one of her looks—this one conveying, You’re kind of cute when you’re being oblivious—and said that they gave off similar vibes, and that although the conscious minds of most humans were insensitive to magic per se, their subconscious minds registered those vibes and chunked him and Anna together in the category of “powerful bad-ass; don’t piss off.”

  He liked being in that category almost as much as he liked having a nickname and an open invite to most everything on campus that might interest him. But he wished to hell the same could be said of his status among the Nightkeepers. It seemed that the more functional he got in the outside world, the more Strike wanted to keep him there, away from the magic.

  “She’s in her office, last I knew.” Smitty waved in the direction of Anna’s first-floor window, which was closed and blocked off by the curtains she kept drawn most of the time these days.

  “Thanks. Catch you later.” Rabbit sketched a wave and headed across the causeway, which always made him think of the drawbridge leading to a castle, albeit a short, ugly castle.

  Smitty dogged him, apparently headed the same way. “You coming to the thing tomorrow night?”

  Rabbit didn’t have a frigging clue what thing he was talking about, but lifted a shoulder. “Maybe. Hafta see—family stuff, you know.” If he had anything to say about it, he and Myrinne would be back in New Mex by the weekend. Screw Strike’s plan for having them stay in Texas through summer school and on into the fall semester. There were more important things than class credits, especially when there was a solid chance that the credits themselves would cease to exist prior to graduation day, 2013.

  “You should come,” Smitty pressed. “It’s going to rock.”

  “I’ll bet.” They passed through the main entrance. Rabbit turned and made himself punch the other guy in the shoulder. “Have a good one.”

  As he headed off, Smitty was standing dead-ass still, looking like someone had just given him a million bucks. Rabbit nearly shook his head, but didn’t, because who was he to say the human college set had it wrong? Theirs was a different culture; that was all. One he was learning to live inside, and maybe even to thrive within.

  Didn’t mean that was where he wanted to be long-term, though.

  Pausing at Anna’s door, he knocked. “Professor Catori? It’s Rabbit. I need five minutes.” Maybe before he would’ve walked right in, or called her by her first name just to show he could. But before, he’d admittedly been an asshole most of the time. These days, he tried to play the little things pretty straight . . . and save up his asshole quota for the big stuff.

  “Door’s unlocked,” Anna called, her voice muffled by the heavy panel separating them. When Rabbit pushed through and closed the door at his back, she looked up from where she was seated behind her desk, working on what looked like e-mail. She was wearing a soft steel gray sweater that blended with the backdrop of bookshelves holding artifacts that he privately thought of as All Forgeries Great and Small. She greeted him with a smile. “Hey, Pyro.”

  He winced, only half joking. “Great. Now they’ve got you doing it.”

  “Fits.”

  “No shit, huh?” But despite the friendly exchange, he stayed standing, not because he was trying to loom over her—even though he could loom if he wanted to these days—but because he was twitchy. Silence stretched between them for a moment . . . and that was enough to give him his answer. “Let me guess. It’s a ‘hell, no.’ ”

  Anna sighed. “Rabbit . . . you know he’s only trying to do what’s best.”

  “He” was Strike, and in the king’s world, “what’s best” was apparently keeping Rabbit and Myrinne as far away from the action as possible by loading them with classes regardless of the school year. Except, of course, when the magi absolutely, positively needed Rabbit’s specific talents, whereupon Strike zapped in, grabbed him for the job, then dumped him back in his dorm room as quickly as humanly—or magely—possible.

  “This sucks.” Rabbit heard his own tone border on whiny territory as a familiar churning frustration rose within him. Reminding himself that he was better than the anger, he tamped it down to a low simmer, lost the whine, and said, “Sorry. I know it’s not
your decision. You’re not king.” Though there were times he’d thought she would’ve made the better ruler of the two of them, in large part because she wanted nothing to do with the job. Or really, he suspected, with the Nightkeepers.

  “You’re getting to him, though.”

  Rabbit narrowed his eyes. “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. The longer you keep your nose clean here, kick it in the classroom, and generally behave like someone he’d want to have at his back, the more he’s going to forget why he doesn’t want you around.”

  From anyone else, Rabbit would’ve figured that for a blatant pitch to keep him on the straight and narrow, i.e., attempted bribery with no real commitment to an endpoint. Coming from Anna, though, he was tempted to believe it was for real. She thought she owed his old man a life debt, and upon Red-Boar’s death had transferred that owesie to Rabbit. That was why she’d stepped up and gotten in Strike’s face over whether Myrinne would be allowed to stay at Skywatch even though she was pure human, not bound to any of the magi, and had a history of dabbling in the occult. More, Anna had, for the most part anyway, tried to be available when Rabbit needed her, and tried to fix the considerable amount of shit he’d screwed up in past years.

  All that made him want to believe her, as did his desire to think that life was fair, that he’d be able to work his way into the fighting core of the Nightkeepers by proving that, six months shy of being legal to drink, he was ready to do a man’s job as a warrior. But he’d learned early and often that life wasn’t fair . . . and when Anna looked at him now, she didn’t quite meet his eyes. Maybe it was her vibe, maybe his blunted mind-bending talent, but he suddenly knew she was lying. He wasn’t sure about what, but she was definitely hiding something. Maybe not about Strike’s opinion or the school stuff, but there was something important going on that she wasn’t telling him about, no doubt because Strike-out had decided it was need-to-know and Rabbit wasn’t on the list.