He had loved his family growing up, he supposed, in a love-but-not-like sort of way. Or had that been coexistence rather than love? His older brothers had tormented him, his father had cheered them on, his older sisters had put bows in his hair, and his mother had pitted them all against one another in a subtle battle of passive aggression he hadn’t recognized as such until he was well away from the whole mess. He’d escaped to UT, floundered a bit, then eventually found his place with Anna. He’d leaned on her, idolized her, and thought for a time that he loved her. But his feelings for her, like the brief flashes of affection from his few lovers, which he’d taken too far, too fast with scant encouragement, hadn’t been the sort of bone-deep emotion that had spurred Vennie to sacrifice herself so her husband and child might live, or that had embittered Shandi so deeply that she’d carried the fear and resentment with her for decades. He’d never felt that way. More, he didn’t think he wanted to, because wasn’t it really another form of possession? He didn’t want to have to think of someone else; he was just starting to figure out how to think of himself.
That was why he’d ducked Jade’s almost-offer just now. Always before, she had guarded herself so carefully, protected herself so fiercely. The last thing he wanted was to peel those layers back to find the woman within . . . and realize he was incapable of letting himself be equally vulnerable to her.
He wanted her. But he didn’t want to be owned by her. And that was what love translated to, wasn’t it? Ownership.
They could be friends. They could be friends with benefits. They could even be lovers. But he wasn’t interested in falling in love, not anymore. And for a guy who had always thought he was someone who fell too easily, that was a hell of a thing to figure out. Especially when he and Jade were finally lovers. Things were changing too fast around him, inside him, for him to make any sort of commitment. At least, he hoped that was what had happened, because he hated to think he’d been chasing something half his life, only to figure out that once he had it, he didn’t really want it after all.
“In a different lifetime,” he murmured, but didn’t bother continuing, because in another lifetime he and Jade never would have met. And it was this lifetime that they needed to make matter, and not just for their own sakes. Which was why, instead of turning around and heading back to her room, as so much of him was tempted to do, he let himself into his cottage and locked the door behind him, not so much to keep anyone out, but as a symbol, to let himself know he was staying there.
Everything was just as he’d left it when the big boom from the mansion had interrupted him: a garbage-bag tarp was spread in front of the TV, waiting for him to man up and do what needed to be done. Sacrifice. There had to be magic inside him. He wouldn’t have gotten into the library without it, regardless of the sex or the new moon. It was in there somewhere. He just had to get it out. The magi needed Kinich Ahau. They needed the Triad. They needed more from him than he’d given them so far.
Flipping on the TV, he woke his laptop, which projected another of the images he’d been studying. Similar to the one that had been on-screen the other night, this one showed a scene from the ritual ball game of the Maya, with masked, shielded players clustered around the ceremonial rubber ball that symbolized the sun. He hit the “back” arrow a couple of times, returning to the painting that had overseen his and Jade’s barrier transitions. He stared at the glyphs coming out of the musician’s conch-shell instrument, the ones that were supposed to be gibberish, but that Jade thought were something else.
“A blessing, huh?” He didn’t see it, but she’d certainly proven herself with the ice spell, so he’d give it a shot.
Seating himself cross-legged on the plastic, so he wouldn’t ruin the rug or upholstery, he palmed the butcher knife he’d lifted from the main kitchen. It was solid in his hand, and far sharper than the steak knife he’d used to offer himself to the makol almost exactly two years earlier. Turning his right hand palm up, he set the knife along the gnarled scar that followed his lifeline. Then he closed his fingers around the blade in a fist and yanked the knife free of it. Cool steel burned, then sang to pain as blood welled up, then dripped down. Taking a moment to review the questions he meant to ask if—or rather when—he made it back in, he focused on the painting and began to chant the nonsensical words formed by the musician’s glyphs, trying different tones and variations, mixing up the order of the symbols, all while seeking the power that had to be inside him somewhere.
Nothing happened.
In fact, nothing happened for long, long into the night. Grimly, he kept going, letting blood from different ceremonial spots on his body and working every spell fragment he’d absorbed during his months at Skywatch, knowing that he had failed at many things in his life, but he couldn’t afford to fail now. Jade’s mother might have been right about love being a key to winning the war; gods knew the magi drew their powers from one another. But he knew damned well that in this case, it wasn’t about love. It was about the magic. All he had to do was find it.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
June 16
Two years, six months, and five days to the zero date
Jade slept later than she’d intended, but woke more or less refreshed. Trying not to resent that she’d woken alone, in her own suite, when she would’ve rather been elsewhere, she pulled on jeans and a tight, dark T-shirt, and laced on the boots she’d taken to wearing in place of sandals. Anticipation thrummed low in her gut: She had been banished to the training hall to experiment with her magic. And that felt damned good.
When she headed over to the main mansion to scrounge some breakfast—her appetite had skyrocketed—she found the place nearly empty. Which felt seriously weird. “Hello?” she called, and heard the word echo back to her.
Granted, the compound wasn’t actually deserted, but with half the magi out on assignment, it sure felt that way.
After a failed attempt to ’port Lucius himself out to Ecuador—something about Lucius, whether the hellmark, the library connection, or something else, had fouled the magic—Strike had ’ported several of the warriors to Ecuador to search for the hellmouth, in case the Banol Kax had somehow returned it to the earth plane in advance of the solstice. Patience and Brandt had gone to Egypt, to the site where Akhenaton’s capital city had stood. The city itself had been thoroughly defaced by Akhenaton’s successors, who had returned the empire to worshiping their familiar pantheon and done their best to wipe Akhenaton from the historical record. Lucius had put the Nightkeepers in contact with a curator he knew from the 2012 doomsday message boards, in the hopes that Patience and Brandt would get lucky and find an artifact or reference giving a clue as to how Akhenaton thought he might usurp the sun itself . . . and from there, how the magi could stop him.
Jade had been left behind, but not in a business-as-usual way. She had an assignment of her own, and it wasn’t in the archive. Which seriously rocked.
Over a breakfast of cold cereal, she wrote down the iceball spell for Strike and the others to try, in the hopes that it wouldn’t be specific just to her. Then, refusing to let herself hesitate at the place where the path split off and ran down to the cottages, she headed to the training hall—which was fire-, water-, and freezeproof—to practice her new magic.
She felt a quick, hard jolt of relief when she called up the spell in her mind and got a buzz of power in response. Grinning in solitary triumph, she held out her hands, shaped an invisible, intangible ball, and whispered the iceball spell. Magic detonated, blue-white light flared, and a shock wave exploded away from her, sending a lettuce-size iceball whizzing across the open hall to slam into the far wall. When the light died down, exhilaration roared through her. “I did it!”
The wall was ice crazed and coated with thick frost. It had held, but just barely.
After giving herself a moment to do a booty-shaking solo dance that wasn’t the slightest bit dignified or decorous, she pulled herself back to the task at hand, namely figuring out whether she could manag
e the spell. It didn’t take her long to figure out how much energy to put behind the spell in order to create a manageable blast of cold magic that froze whatever it touched and went where she wanted it to. Remembering a scene from X-Men, she tried to make an ice-sculpture rose, but wound up with a blob instead, so she decided that wasn’t how the magic rolled. But that was okay, because at least it was rolling. Which meant it was time to try morphing another spell.
Jumpy with anticipation, she headed to the temporary archive—aka an unfurnished spare room where the winikin had set up laundry racks and hung the worst of the waterlogged books out to dry under fans. There, she hunted up the Idiot’s Guide, which was boxed up among the other books, the ones that had survived relatively unscathed, with just a little frost damage. Flipping to the last chapter, she paged past the fireball spell to the next standard in the warrior’s arsenal: shield magic. Okay, she thought, let’s do this! She focused on the page and opened herself to the magic.
Nothing happened.
The glyphs were there; the translation was there . . . but the shimmer of power wasn’t. She stared at the page for a full minute before she was finally forced to admit that whatever magic she’d been jacked into the day before had deserted her. Again.
“Oh, come on!” she snapped, disgusted. “This isn’t”—fair, she didn’t say, because it was probably past time to man up and accept it. Life wasn’t fair, which sucked, but wasn’t something she could change. The magic worked on its own schedule and by its own rules. And more often than not, apparently, it didn’t work for her. Resisting the urge to bang her forearm against the table, to see if the same brute- force approach that worked for her TV remote might apply to her talent mark, she flipped back a couple of pages and tried another spell. Still no dice.
Frustration welled up inside her along with the aching drag of imminent failure. No, she told herself. You’re not giving up. Not this time. She was better than that, stronger than that.
“Okay,” she said, dropping down cross-legged on the floor. “You’re smart; you can think it through. Yesterday you looked at the spell the first time and there wasn’t any magic. Then, later, there it was. What changed?” When she put it that way, the answer was obvious: The difference had been her. The first time she’d been relatively calm. Then Shandi had shown up and dropped an emotional shitstorm on her, and in the aftermath, she’d had her magic. “So . . . what?” she asked the empty room. “I’ve got to be pissed off to access my talent?”
Predictably, the damp books didn’t have an answer for her. But she had a feeling she already knew at least part of the answer; she just didn’t want to go there. Honesty, though, and a certain degree of self-awareness, compelled her to admit that it probably wasn’t about being angry, per se. . . . It was about being open to the emotion. Any emotion. Problem was, emotional openness wasn’t her forte, not by a long shot. Just the opposite, in fact—she had built a career on teaching others how to distance themselves from drama and guard against upheaval. She had Shandi to thank for that. The winikin had closed herself off to affection and emotion in the wake of the massacre, and had taught her charge the value of control for control’s sake, making it Jade’s automatic fallback when it might not have been her natural inclination.
The more she thought about her mother, the more she realized that her first, wholly negative reaction to Shandi’s description of Vennie had come from the fact that Jade had been exactly the same sort of strongwilled, brash, egotistical teenager—or she would have been if it hadn’t been for Shandi’s iron discipline. Having been told, over and over again, that impulsiveness was a sin against her bloodline and the gods, that she had to control herself or terrible things would happen, how could she not paint her mother with that same brush? But that brought up the question of nature versus nurture. How much of the person she was today was because of her bloodlines and genetics, and how much of it had been created by her upbringing? Gods knew most of her career was based on a single sentence: Tell me about your childhood.
What did the gods want from her, really? They had sanctified her parents’ marriage, but not until after her conception. Was she, then, a child of the gods? The thought brought a shiver, because that was what the triad prophecy—the one that spoke of finding the lost sun—had called for. But if her parents had been meant on some level to unite the harvester and star bloodlines to create her, why had the gods chosen Shandi as her winikin?
“That one’s easy,” she said aloud. “To teach me to control the impulsiveness that got Vennie killed.” Or rather, the impulsiveness that had led her mother to sacrifice herself in vain. If Vennie had been a different, steadier mage, still allied with the star bloodline, maybe they would have listened to her. Maybe they would have tried to make her a true Prophet. And maybe, just maybe, she could have averted the massacre. And oh, holy gods, how different things would have been then.
Which meant . . . what? Was she supposed to be open to her emotions or was she supposed to control them, or was there some ineffable balance she was supposed to find between the two?
“Shit. I don’t know.” She knew it was ironic that she was a therapist who didn’t know how to deal with emotions, but there it was. Or rather, she knew how not to deal with them, because Shandi had taught her well: Turn the emotions off. If you’re not having them, they can’t hurt you. You’re not vulnerable. Now that she understood the reason for those lessons, though, she wasn’t sure they played.
Magic isn’t the answer. Love is. The words drifted through her brain, bringing a complicated mix of reactions. A warm fuzziness came from Lucius’s having brought her the message, keeping it private between the two of them. But countering that warmth was a kick of self-directed anger that she had wanted—needed—to believe he’d meant more than he had, only to have him withdraw when she reached out to him. More, there was the layer of guilt she suspected he’d meant to in-still with the message, one that said her winikin wasn’t the only one to blame for the lack of real friendship between them. As a winikin, even a reluctant one, Shandi would have been fully interwoven with the harvester way of life, culturally programmed to support the bloodline’s doctrines. It couldn’t have been easy for her to see the rebelliousness of the star bloodline surfacing within Jade, when such personality traits had led to heartache and loss of face for the harvesters before. She should’ve said something, Jade thought as anger stirred. How was I supposed to know? I—
She broke off the thought train, partly because it wasn’t going to get her anywhere, and partly because there had been no change in the spell book she held open on her lap. The glyphs hadn’t risen up into the air and danced in front of her, shifting to become something else. The page was just a page, the book just a book. Which suggested that the magic didn’t come from anger, and further indicated that the key had to be some sort of emotional openness. Of course it couldn’t be easy, Jade thought morosely. Pissed off she could have managed these days. It was the other stuff she was going to have trouble with.
Magic. Love.
Shit.
Annoyed, she climbed to her feet and returned the Idiot’s Guide to its drying rack. Not sure where she was going, just that she needed to be up and moving, she stalked out into the hallway—and nearly slammed into Shandi.
The winikin stumbled back, putting up both hands as though warding off an attack. “Whoa, slow down!”
I don’t want to slow down, Jade wanted to snap at her. I’ve never wanted to slow down! But, knowing that her mood was as much about the magic and Lucius as it was the winikin, she held in the knee-jerk snarl and tried to smooth herself out. As she did so, she realized that her previously slow- to-boil temper was heading toward becoming vapor-fast. What had happened to peace, serenity, and her counselor’s cool? She was off balance and reactive, borderlining on the drama she had so pitied in her patients, keeping herself above and apart from it all.
Which way of dealing was right? Was there even a right or wrong? Gods, this was exhausting.
; Consciously exhaling, both her mood and a sigh, Jade said, “I’m sorry. I should’ve looked where I was going.” Shandi hesitated with her mouth partway open, as though she’d planned one response, but Jade’s apology called for another. Into that gap, Jade said, “I’m also sorry for how we left things last night. You shared something painful and I made it about me, not you.”
The other woman narrowed her eyes. “I don’t need therapy.”
That’s debatable, Jade thought but didn’t say, not the least because her own winikin was one of the last people she would’ve taken on as a patient. She might be going a little crazy—to use the woefully unprofessional term—with everything she was dealing with right then, but she wasn’t that crazy. “I’m not being a therapist right now. I’m apologizing for being insensitive last night, and for not always understanding what you need from me. I’m going to try harder from now on.” That much she could promise. And, as she said it, she imagined she felt a faint tingle of magic.
“I—” Shandi broke off and shook her head. “Never mind. We’ll talk about it later. You’re wanted in the kitchen.”
The star inside Jade wanted to ask who wanted her, for what, whether it had to be that exact moment, and what the “never mind” meant. The woman inside her, the one who thought she was starting to understand that the three “D”s were less about never rebelling than they were about carefully picking her rebellions for maximum effect, said only, “Okay, I’m on it. Thanks.”
Final Prophecy 04: Demonkeepers Page 20