Final Prophecy 04: Demonkeepers

by Jessica Andersen

  Jade shifted within the winikin’s grip, until they were holding hands in a rare moment of physical contact. “Listen to me, and please believe me. I’m proud of being a harvester. That’s one of my biggest problems right now. I feel like I should be doing more—my nahwal is telling me to be more, for gods’ sake—but I know that’s not the harvester way. It’s because of my respect for the bloodline, and for you, that I’m all screwed up right now.” At least in part. Great sex, a guy who was sticking to the friends-with-benefits arrangement she’d demanded, and the threat of her inner Edda weren’t helping. But the winikin’s stricken expression didn’t ease, even with the reassurance. Confused, Jade gave their joined hands a shake. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  The winikin’s voice broke. “Yesterday . . . all that talk about the day of the massacre brought it back. Not that it’s ever far away, but it was suddenly right there. They were there again, beside me, inside me. They’re why I need . . . I need you to be perfect. I need to know it was worth it.”

  Jade nearly recoiled from the pleading in the older woman’s face. I can’t be perfect. Nobody can! But the counselor in her set that aside, pushed it deep beneath the shell, and said, “You need to know that what was worth it?”

  Shandi’s eyes were wide and stark, not seeing the archive anymore. “Letting my husband and son die.”

  “Your—” Jade’s breath left her in a rush. “Oh, Shandi.” Her heart twisted, shuddering in her chest. “Oh, gods.” Oh, shit.

  The winikin chosen for binding to Nightkeeper children typically didn’t marry or have children of their own, as their first and foremost priority had to be their charges. There had been exceptions, of course, but those families had, of necessity, been loosely knit, with the children often raised crèche-style in extended networks of relatives. The system had evolved over generations and had been part of the fabric of Nightkeeper- winikin life. The chosen winikin focused on their charges; the unchosen fell in love, got married, and had families.

  Unless an unchosen winikin was somehow picked by the gods to serve in a role she hadn’t planned for, hadn’t been prepared for. Oh, Shandi.

  “Denis and little Samxel,” the winikin said, pronouncing the “x” with the “sh” sound it took in the old language. “On the night of the attack, Denny went with the king, along with all the other unchosen adults, the fighting-age magi, and their chosen winikin. I stayed behind with you. Samxel was there too, dancing with the other children in the middle of the rec room. He was ten, not old enough to fight, thank the gods. Or so I thought. In the end, it didn’t make a difference.” A tear tracked down her cheek. “They were playing a Michael Jackson song and trying to moonwalk when the first boluntiku broke through the wards and attacked the great hall. Dozens were dead within the first few seconds. There was blood everywhere, children screaming. It was . . . it was chaos. Hell on earth.”

  You don’t have to tell me if it hurts too much, Jade wanted to say, but what she would’ve really meant was, I don’t want to hear this, so she said nothing. She just held on to Shandi’s hands while the other woman broke into harsh, ugly sobs that rattled in her chest. “You were in one direction, Samxel in the other. I started to go after him; gods help me, I did. But then my marks started burning. I looked down and saw them disappearing, one after the other, doing this crazy vanishing act right in front of my eyes. The harvesters were among the last to die, of course, because they were in the rear guard. But they died. All of them, except you.”

  Back in the day, each chosen winikin had worn, in addition to the aj-winikin glyph of service, row upon row of small bloodline marks denoting the individual members of their bound bloodline. The night of the massacre, the loss of those marks had warned the winikin that the attack was a disaster, the Nightkeepers dying. That warning had preceded the attack on Skywatch by mere seconds. Now, most of the surviving winikin had only the single bloodline glyph of his or her lone charge.

  Shandi continued: “When I saw that, I knew Denny was gone too. He would’ve been right near the harvesters in the ranks with the other unbound winikin. I looked for Samxel, but I couldn’t see him anymore. The children were screaming, crying. Some of the older boys were trying to get through the doors to fight, and there were boluntiku everywhere. I couldn’t see him. . . .” Her face shone now with tears. “I tried to get down there, but my legs wouldn’t work. My arm was burning. I only had one bloodline mark left, but it was flaring, throbbing, not letting me go get my baby. It was the magic, you see. It wouldn’t let me go to Samxel because you were my charge, my first and only priority. It made me go get you first.” There was bitterness now in her voice and her eyes. “So I went. You were in the nursery zone, surrounded by a sound barrier that kept the music from disturbing the youngest ones. I grabbed you and started running for the dance floor, screaming Samxel’s name. Then the next thing I knew, I was outside, headed for the garage. It was the magic again. It made me get you out rather than go back for him.” She stopped and pulled her hands from Jade’s, not in an angry gesture, but so she could mop her face with her sleeves. Her words were muffled behind the cloth as she said, “I would’ve tried to go back in, but I knew. Somehow I knew he was gone.” She lifted a shoulder. “A mother’s instincts, I guess. Or maybe I needed to believe he was dead so I could do my duty by you.”

  And that was what she had always been to her winikin , Jade realized. Duty, pure and simple. More than even she’d realized, raising her had been Shandi’s job. The knowledge bit with sharp, greedy teeth, but she said only, “I’m sorry, Shandi. I’m so sorry.”

  “We might have gotten away,” the winikin said softly. “Only the chosen were marked with the aj-winikin; the unchosen weren’t marked at all. If I hadn’t been chosen, the boluntiku wouldn’t have been able to track us through the magic. Maybe Denny and I would’ve even taken Samxel and slipped away before the attack; who knows?”

  “Did other unchosen do that?” Were there others out there, unmarked and anonymous?

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not sure I even care at this point—they’re gone, just like everyone else.” Shandi shook her head, blinking tear- drenched eyes. In their depths, though, Jade saw the winikin’s habitual hardness coming back into focus. The starch—bitterness? resentment?—was back in her voice when she said, “That’s why I’m not like the other winikin, why I couldn’t ever love you the way you wanted me to. Loving you would’ve been giving in to the magic that bound me to you and forced me to save you rather than Denny and Samxel. So there you have it, the truth. Are you happy now?”

  It was one thing, Jade found, to think that the woman who raised her had never loved her. It was another to have it confirmed flat-out. Breathing shallowly past the hurt, she said, “It explains some things. But does it make me happy? Hell, no. There’s nothing good about that, nothing fair.”

  Shandi sniffed. “Life’s not fair.”

  Jade found the ghost of a smile. “That was the first thing the Vennie nahwal said to me. ‘Life’s not fair, child,’ she said.” And then everything had started to change for her. Or had things been shifting around her for weeks before that? Months even? Where did the old Jade end and the new one begin? Or, hell, was she even changing at all? What had happened to the whole “people don’t change” thing? What if she was just deluding herself into thinking she’d begun to evolve? Gods. This was at once too much for her to bear, and not enough for her to believe in.

  Wrenching her mind back to the conversation, she said, “If life were fair, you wouldn’t have been tagged with the aj-winikin glyph, and both our lives would’ve been different.” This time, hers was the voice carrying a slash of bitterness. Who would she have been, she wondered, if she’d grown up with a loving, supportive winikin like Jox or Izzy?

  Shandi made a sour face. “Don’t be so sure about that. I deliberately tanked the psych profile.”

  “You . . .” Jade trailed off, gaping. “During the winikin testing? But why? What about the three ‘D’s?” Be
ing chosen had been the ultimate honor in winikin society. She couldn’t picture Shandi turning that down. She just couldn’t.

  The winikin smiled with faint wistfulness, and her voice was soft with memory when she said, “I’d only known Denny for a couple of months when I went for testing, but I already knew he was the one. I tanked my chance to become a winikin because I wanted to be with him instead. In the end, though, the gods and destiny got their way.” She sniffed again, and blotted at her now-dry face with jerky motions. “That was far more than I meant to tell you, but maybe it’s good that you know why I’ve pushed you to be the best harvester you can be. That’s . . . It’s the only way I can justify what happened, the only way I can see to make their deaths mean something on a personal level. For you to be what you were meant to be, what you were born to be.”

  Jade sank back against the conference table, staring at the walls of books. Her thoughts coiled around another of those truisms she’d learned over the years: Love could make a woman defy her own nature. More, the loss of love was a terrible thing. But she said, “You can’t put that on me.”

  “I already did. I’ve been putting it on you your entire life.”

  “Okay, then let me rephrase: I won’t let you put that on me, not anymore. I want to be a good harvester, but I also want to be the best mage I can be, the mage the Nightkeepers need me to be right now. If that means going beyond the restrictions of a harvester, then so be it.”

  “But you are a harvester.”

  Thinking of the Vennie nahwal, Jade lifted her chin. “I’m half star.”

  “That’s not the way it works.”

  “Maybe not before. But what if it’s time to change the rules?” Strike had said something similar to her the night of the new moon, she remembered. He’d said that the modern magi sometimes had to make their own choices, their own rules.

  So then why did it suddenly seem like a revelation?

  Shandi pushed away from the table, her face setting once again in the fallback expression of peaceful calm that hid so much. “The rules are the rules. If you try to defy or avoid them, you’ll pay for it one way or the other, just like I did.” She headed for the door stiff-shouldered, turning back at the threshold to pin Jade with a look. “I lost my entire world because I tried to have a love outside my gods-determined destiny. Your mother lost her life doing the same thing, and your father died thinking she’d abandoned him. Who are you to think you can do better?”

  “I don’t know who I am,” Jade snapped. “All I know is that the person you want me to be isn’t all there is.”

  Shandi bared her teeth. “That sounds like something she would have said.”

  “I—” Shit. Jade’s stomach roiled. Pressing her lips together, she shook her head. “I don’t want to fight with you.”

  “But you don’t want to follow my advice either.”

  “Which is what, exactly? What would it take to make you happy?”

  The winikin took a long, hard look at her. Then she just shook her head and walked away, pushing through the door without another word. The message was clear, though: Nothing you could do would make me love you, because you’ll always be second-best.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Shandi’s rejection was an almost physical slap, one that left Jade pressing a hand to her lurching stomach as the door swung shut at the winikin’s back. Gods, she hated fighting. And if more than once along the line she’d thought she could deal with Shandi if she only knew what the winikin’s problem was, she’d been way off on that one. Knowing the winikin’s history only made things worse by slapping her upside the head with the reality she’d long avoided: Her winikin didn’t just not love her; she actively resented her, and blamed her—rightly or not—for the deaths of the people she had loved.

  And oh, holy hell, that sucked.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” Jade whispered, finding a kernel of frustration amidst the sickening dismay. “I didn’t pick her as my winikin, and I didn’t force her to choose me over them. The magic might have, but I’m not the magic. I shouldn’t be blamed for it.” Unfortunately, knowing that she had a valid point didn’t do anything to smooth over the raw, ragged edges.

  The counselor’s cool was long gone. Jade took brief satisfaction in imagining a cartoon version of herself, red faced, with steam coming out of her ears, but that was still a woefully inadequate outlet for the churned-up feelings inside her. For the first time since completing the rudimentary firearms training course all the magi had gone through when they had first come to Skywatch, she was tempted to head down to the firing range and shoot the crap out of some targets. She hadn’t been all that great a shot, but a pump-action shotgun loaded with jadeshot required approximately the finesse of spray paint. Point and shoot she could do, she thought, as long as she didn’t try one of Michael’s advanced training runs, which featured moving targets and good guys standing next to bad. Bull’s-eyes she could handle. She would go shoot some stationary targets. That’d make her feel better, she thought, or at least allow her to burn off some steam.

  Pleased to have a plan of sorts, even one that was uncharacteristically violent, she made a quick circuit of the archive to put away the few things that were out of place. She was suddenly buzzed to get going; she wanted the thud of recoil, the tearing of paper targets. Hurrying now, her skull throbbing with a headache that was rapidly turning to a rattling, humming whine, she reached to grab the Idiot’s Guide, which lay on the conference table where she had dropped it.

  It was still open to the fireball spell. Her eyes skimmed over the glyphs as she moved to shut the book. And she froze.

  On the page, the glyphs began to glow, radiating off the page and drifting toward her, outlined not in ink, but in bright red-gold fluorescence against a sudden backdrop of blurred images. She gaped as two of the glyphs shimmered and morphed, becoming entirely different syllables in the phonetic system. The humming whine became a song, and the buzz of anger in her blood suddenly felt like . . . magic.

  Abruptly, the red-gold, almost holographic writing flared brightly, then disappeared, but the afterimage stayed imprinted in her brain. The air had gone strangely cold.

  She mouthed the syllables and felt something wrench inside her. A tingling sensation flared from her center to her extremities and then reversed course, fleeing back up her arms and into her body, leaving her chilled. Breathing hard, unable to get enough oxygen, she looked around wildly, but nothing had changed in the shelf-lined room. Nothing but the syllables that danced in her mind’s eye. Cool heat spun inside her; the spell hovered at the edges of her mind, tempting her. Daring her. Mad euphoria gripped her as something deep inside whispered, Try it. What have you got to lose?

  Leaving the book where it lay, she held her lightly scarred palms out in front of her, making it look as if she were cupping an imaginary basketball, as she’d seen the warriors do when she’d watched them practice their fighting magic and pretended she didn’t mind being on the sidelines. Then, halfway convinced that nothing at all was going to happen, she tipped her head back, closed her eyes, and recited the spell aloud.

  Magic detonated within her, ripping a scream from her throat, more from surprise than pain. The air shimmered between her outstretched hands, and then blinding blue-white flashed simultaneously with a crackling roar that was like being inside a clap of thunder. On the heels of the flash-boom, a shock wave hammered away from her, sending her staggering back as the archive door exploded. Cold seared across her skin, a frigidity so intense that she couldn’t tell if it was fire or ice; she knew only that it burned. She heard crashes and shouts in the hallway and main mansion, then a second huge detonation that rocked the whole damn building, even the reinforced security of the archive.

  As quickly as it had come, the magic drained from her in a rush. The noise quieted. Or rather, the noise of the immediate destruction died down, to be replaced with shouts of alarm and tersely snapped orders as the warriors prepared to man a defense.

  Oh, s
hit, Jade thought on a spurt of horrified adrenaline. They think we’re under attack! She had to get out there and explain, but she couldn’t move. She was frozen in place, not by the magic or shock now, but by the sight of the crazy, misplaced winter wonderland that surrounded her.

  She hadn’t created a fireball. She had summoned ice.

  The walls, floor, ceiling, bookcases, and every other damn thing that had been to the sides or behind her when she’d recited the spell were covered in a thick layer of furry white frost, as though the whole room had been stuck in a giant freezer that had missed out on the past fifty years of frost- free technology. In front of her, where her inadvertent and out-of-control . . . iceball, she supposed, had exploded away from her, the door was gone, along with most of the wall. In their place were sheets of ice and drifts of frosty snow that extended far out into the hallway. The opposite wall was frost-crazed, the windows cracked from the quick war between the heat outside and the insta- freeze within. And, as far as she could tell, the snow and ice kept going on down the hallway. She was pretty sure that last big detonation had come from the great room.

  “Oh, gods,” she moaned. What if she had hurt someone? Yanking herself from her paralysis, she bolted out of the archive, slipped on a wide patch of ice just outside the door, and went down on her knees. Water soaked through her jeans almost immediately; the frost layer was already melting, saturating the walls and floor and dripping from the ceiling.

  “Jade!” It was Sasha’s voice, relieved. Armed with a submachine gun she held with easy familiarity, she was partway up the hall, slipping and slithering as she followed the ice trail to its source. “What happened? Was it Iago?”