“Is it everything you thought it would be?” Jade murmured.
He didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “It is . . . and it isn’t. I can’t pretend I haven’t thought about what it would be like to come back here, looking the way I do now. And yeah, that part is pretty cool. But at the same time, the campus itself is different. . . . Okay, it’s not, but I am.” He gestured around them. “This used to be my whole world. This and the ruins down south. Now . . .” He trailed off, not sure how to put it into words.
“Now the whole world is your world. And not just figuratively.”
He exhaled. “Yeah.” They walked a moment in silence. Then, as they hooked the last turn heading to the art history building, he said, “Back when I was growing up, I used to picture myself living the adventure, you know? I’d read Tolkein or Bujold or whatnot, and I’d imagine myself in the starring role.” He didn’t need a former therapist to point out that both authors had often focused on smaller, weaker protagonists who fought with their wits rather than their bodies. That was then; this was now. “I’d think about what I would do if it were my job to save the world, and, of course, I always got everything right, always picked the right battles, fought the right enemies. The harder I fought, the better I did. But now . . . I don’t know. I’m doing my best, and I’m still not getting where I need to be.”
“Maybe you need to relax and stop trying so hard,” she said cryptically. “Besides, to paraphrase Strike, our best is all the gods can ask us to do.”
“And if that’s not enough?”
“Mankind is fucked.”
Her bluntly profane answer startled a laugh out of him. “Such language from a harvester,” he chided. He stopped in his tracks, just short of the moat leading to the office that had once been the focus of his life. Tugging on their joined hands, he spun her into his arms. The sparse foot traffic eddied around them, and the strange orange sun slipped behind an ocher cloud, but he was hardly aware of those peripherals. His entire attention was focused on the woman in his arms, the lover he never could’ve imagined having when he’d been a part of the UT world.
Their bodies brushed, then pressed together as she slid her arms around his neck and leaned in, her eyes and mouth laughing, but darker shadows lingering beneath. Suddenly wishing he could take those shadows away, that he could make it all go away, he leaned in and kissed her, not a friendly feel-good kiss, or one of the oh-yes-there-more kisses of their lovemaking, but a carnal kiss, a full-on public display of possession. Mine, he thought, wanting to snarl it at the other men he sensed watching them, wanting to say it to her. You’re mine. He spread his hands on either side of her waist, his fingers touching the outline of the nine-millimeter hidden beneath her shirt. If anything, the contrast between soft woman and hard-edged weapon made his blood burn hotter, made him want to wrap himself around her and protect the hell out of her, despite whether she could handle herself as a fighter, a mage, or both. More, he wanted to hear the same things from her, wanted to hear her say she wanted more than he was giving.
Heat flared through him, coiling hard and greedy inside him. His blood buzzed in his veins; colors sparked behind his closed eyelids. He wanted—
He wanted the hot girlfriend he’d dreamed of having on campus, he realized suddenly, the heat and buzz dying in the wake of the realization that he mostly wanted Jade as his arm candy for the next hour or so, wanted to know that the other guys envied the hell out of him. And that had nothing to do with him and Jade, and everything to do with his own stunted-ass psyche and a need to prove that he wasn’t still a scrawny, too-tall praying mantis of a dork with a history of Notting Hill-like public protestations of love that ended in monstrous flameouts rather than happily-ever-after.
Gods, could he be a bigger asshole?
Jade just stood there watching him, her expression making him wonder just what she saw in his face, what she took away from it. After a moment, she smiled softly and said, “It’s this place. It changes our perceptions, I think. Skywatch seems very far away. So does 2012. But at the same time, they both seem very important.”
Which totally wasn’t what he’d been thinking. It was a relief to know she was oblivious to the fact that he’d almost just imploded the good stuff they had going on, solely from a dorky need to prove a point that nobody but him gave a flying crap about. “Yeah,” he said, exhaling. “And we need to keep moving.”
Taking her hand once again, he led her across the moat and into the art history building. The heavy layers of reinforced concrete closed around them, swallowing him up. And for a moment, he was kicked back into the past.
The first time he’d visited Anna’s office, a little less than a decade earlier, he’d been a sophomore, tall and skinny, and practically quivering in his Reeboks as he’d made the trek, clutching a folder that contained his sacrificial offering: three crumpled pieces of paper that he’d picked up a week earlier, when Professor Catori had first announced that she was looking for an undergrad intern to put in some hours with her group, and she was leaving applications outside her office. The pages asked about the applicant’s basic stats . . . and included a glyph translation for them to take a crack at, if they wanted to.
And holy shit, did he ever want to.
He had snagged one of the first sets; they were all gone now. He knew, because he’d come back to get a fresh set when his originals started looking too sad for words. Without a spare, he was going to have to turn in the set he had, even though the last page had a big- ass coffee stain on it from where he’d upended the morning dregs in the process of reaching for a pen. Dumb ass. He’d tried to wipe it off, but that had just made things worse. His only hope was that he’d gotten close enough with the translation that she would overlook the fact that he was an almost complete disaster in all other facets of life. He was dying to work with her, to be around her, and maybe get a chance to work with some of the artifacts she’d shown them on PowerPoint slides projected up at the front of the stadium-seating lecture hall.
Those pictures had been too far away. He wanted the real thing. And the more he Web- surfed, soaking up pictures of Mayan ruins and the artifacts that had come from them, the more he wanted to know everything there was to know about a civilization that should have seemed strange and foreign to his modern viewpoint, but instead made sense to him. He’d understood their religion as if he were being reminded of it rather than learning it fresh. Human sacrifice might not be part of modern life, but he got where they’d been coming from: They’d been trying to protect themselves against the downfall portended by the stars, and the prophecies that said great white gods would arrive from the east, bringing the end of life as the Maya had known it. Hello, Cortes.
And the more he learned, the more he wanted to know.
He wanted to touch the pieces of that past culture, wanted to absorb all the information he could find on them. And when he’d been working on the glyph string she’d handed out, looking up each image in the seminal dictionary put together by Montgomery in the fifties, when archaeologists and linguists had finally cracked the Maya code, he’d gotten a glimmer of something bigger than himself, a kick of excitement when he realized it wasn’t just a translation. . . . It was a puzzle. There wasn’t much standardization among the glyphs, which had been as much an art form as a language. A given word could be represented by a pictograph or a string of syllables making up the word, or sometimes both. Then the syllables themselves could be represented by many different glyphs, or the same glyphs could look entirely different, depending on the artist who’d rendered them. That very fact had slowed his shit down when he’d gotten to the translation. He still wasn’t sure if the third glyph was a hook-nosed god’s face with suns where its eyes should be, or a really whacked version of a jaguar’s head, but he’d gotten up against deadline day and had to go with what he had.
Walking the halls now, with Jade at his side, Lucius remembered how badly he’d worked himself up by the time he’d headed over to turn in the application, h
ow he’d been practically puking with nerves. Back then, Anna had been less senior, so she’d had an upper- floor office. These days she had a primo ground-floor spot. But despite the difference in location, the clutter stuck to the corkboard hung on her door was much the same. Clippings of journal articles, some hers, some written by colleagues, offered the current state of the art in Mayan epigraphy. They bumped up against a scattering of cartoons and silly slogans, some hung by Anna, others by her coworkers and students. Slapped atop it all was a laminated page printed with her office hours and phone numbers, with a boldfaced note at the bottom: Knock. What have you got to lose?
The laminate looked new; the sentiment was an old, familiar friend. One that had been a mantra during certain parts of his life.
That first day, it had taken him nearly two full minutes to work up the courage. Now he just knocked, knowing that wasn’t the hard part.
“Come on in,” Anna’s voice called from within.
He pushed the door open, stuck his head through, and grinned past a sudden spike of nerves. “Damn. And here I was looking forward to climbing in the window again.”
Anna looked up, her face reflecting pretty much what he was feeling: a new awkwardness to an old friendship. Sitting behind her big, messy desk, she was dressed informally even for her, in a navy blue UT sweatshirt and collared shirt. He couldn’t see her lower half, but was betting on jeans, based on the fact that she had her red- highlighted hair up in a ponytail and was wearing little, if any, makeup. The lack of makeup wasn’t why she looked tired, though; the fatigue was real. He knew that because he knew her, and knew she dressed down at the university only when she was feeling crappy. Summer session or no summer session, she liked being put together.
Then again, things changed. People changed. Just look at him.
As if paralleling his thoughts, she glanced at the window he had B and E’d under Cizin’s influence. “Ten bucks says you couldn’t even fit through it anymore.” She waved him all the way in. “Come on. Hey, Jade. Glad you could both make it. Any problems getting here?”
Jade shook her head. “None.”
“How are you?” Anna asked her, the question clearly a woman to woman, we’ve got our secrets deal.
Lucius turned away, giving them a moment to catch up, and to remind himself it was largely his fault that his and Anna’s relationship had suffered. He’d stolen from her; he’d betrayed her—albeit inadvertently—with a Xibalban. Because of him, she’d been forced back into her brother’s sphere. Because of him, she wore a fourth mark, that of the slave- master, in addition to the jaguar, the royal ju, and the seer’s mark. He couldn’t blame her for not being excited to see him, after all they’d been through together and apart. Nor could he blame her for turning to Jade as a friend. Jade was warm and honest, analytical and near genius-smart. She was, he realized, a little bit like Anna in those ways. But where Anna tended to get caught up in her own emotions and had some drama-queen tendencies, Jade’s waters ran still and deep.
As the women did a brief what’s-up-how’s-it-going, he stuck his hands in his pockets and took a tour of Anna’s office, looking for new additions to her rogues’ gallery of fakes. She used the hobby as a teaching tool, showing her students—Lucius included—not just how to spot the fakes and haggle in fine old open-market style, but also how to get the so-called antiquities dealers to show them the real stuff they tended to keep under wraps. Her goals were twofold: first, to cooperate with local authorities in blocking the export of national treasures when possible, and second, to potentially track exciting finds back to their sources. Each year, particularly in the less developed areas of the former Mayan empire, new caches of antiquities were discovered and sold off, to the great loss of the archaeologists and the still-scattered knowledge of the two-millennium history of the Maya. At times during his graduate career, Lucius had pictured himself eventually working against the black-market trade in the low country, acting as sort of a reverse treasure hunter, trying to keep the finds in place rather than in museums—or at least making sure that the sites were rigorously documented before the artifacts were split up. He’d cast himself as sort of a geeky Indiana Jones without the fedora, working with some heavily armed locals, maybe even armed himself. In those dreams, he’d been doing his part to save the small corner of the world that he’d claimed as his own.
Now, eyeing the window, which seemed to have shrunk over the past two years, he admitted inwardly that there was no way he’d fit through there now, as he had when he broke in to steal the transition ritual that Cizin had needed to come through the barrier. Lucius’s body, like his world, had gotten a whole hell of a lot bigger since he’d left campus.
Anna’s voice interrupted his prowl. “Stop pacing and sit, Lucius.”
Jade had taken a folding chair off to one side, so he dropped into the visitor’s chair, which was an old friend. He’d spent many, many hours working with Anna, their heads bent together as they argued over interpretations. The good old days, he thought with a trace of nostalgia and a hint of bitterness. He focused on Anna, realized she was fiddling with her chain, a sure sign of nerves. “Why are we here?” he asked without preamble.
In answer, she lifted the chain from around her neck, pulling the skull effigy from beneath her shirt in the process. In the stark white light coming from the overhead fluorescents, the sacred yellow quartz glittered dully, and the shadowed eye sockets seemed to stare at him. Lucius wasn’t sure whether the jolt he felt was magic or awe at the sight of the ancient carving, which had been passed down, mother to daughter, through untold generations of itza’at seers.
The legendary crystal skulls were inextricably intertwined with the mythos of the 2012 doomsday, and had hit the mainstream with the last Indiana Jones movie—unfortunately so, in his opinion, but it wasn’t like Spielberg had asked him. And yeah, there were plenty of von Dänikenites who thought the delicately carved skulls that had been found at various Mesoamerican sites were proof of a higher—aka alien—intelligence. But they weren’t. They were pure Nightkeeper; always had been . . . going back to the last Great Conjunction, when cataclysmic upheavals had loosed the demons from the underworld and destroyed the crystal cities of the magi, sinking them into the sea. Only a few hundred survivors had been left to drive the Banol Kax back to Xibalba and erect the barrier that would contain them for the next twenty-six thousand years. Turning nomadic, the magi had brought with them the few remaining artifacts they had retained from their once-great civilization . . . including thirteen life-size crystal skulls.
The humans had found four of the skulls, all in clear quartz; three were in various museums, the fourth in a private collection. Rigorous science had concluded all four to be nineteenth-century fakes, based on their stone compositions and marks from tools that hadn’t been available to the Maya or Aztec to whom they were supposedly ascribed. Which wasn’t entirely wrong . . . The timing was just off by two dozen millennia or so. Of the remaining nine skulls, some of yellow quartz, some of pink, six were safely locked in the middle archive at Skywatch, two were missing in action . . . and one had been broken up into thirteen smaller skull effigies that had been given to the itza’at seers of the Nightkeepers. Twelve had disappeared the night of the massacre. Only Anna’s remained.
Lucius didn’t remember reaching out to touch it, but he was suddenly holding it in his hand, feeling the echoed warmth of Anna’s body and the unexpected weight of the skull, which looked far lighter than it actually was. Startled, he held it back out to her. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to grab. I just . . .” He shrugged. “This is what it’s all about, you know? It’s one of the skulls. I mean, holy shit!”
“Yeah. I know.” She didn’t reach for it, instead nodding to Jade.
He passed it over. “Watch out. It’s heavier than it looks.” When she took it solemnly, he looked back over at Anna, catching on that the effigy was why they had been summoned. “You think the skull might help Jade channel the scribe’s talent more reliably?” He t
ried to remember whether there had been itza’ats mentioned in the history he’d read on the star bloodline. He didn’t think so.
“No, the effigies are bloodline specific. It’d only work for a jaguar.” Anna paused, carefully folding her hands atop her desk blotter. “I need you to take the skull back to Skywatch and give it to Strike.”
Jade’s soft, “Are you sure?” was quickly drowned out when Lucius held up his hands in protest. “You—” Oh, no. Hell, no. “You’re kidding.”
“Not about this.” There was deep regret in her eyes, but behind that was a strange sort of peace. “Never about this.”
“But you’re our—their only seer!”
“I should have been,” she corrected. “Maybe I would have been, if I’d gone through my talent ceremony when I should have. But she said we should wait until after the attack on the intersection, so we could focus on my training.”
She was the queen, Lucius knew. Anna’s mother. She had been a powerful seer, but loyal to her husband and king. Nobody knew what she had seen, exactly, but her visions had led her to fake a stillbirth and send baby Sasha to be raised in seclusion. More, she had leaned on Anna to pretend she hadn’t yet reached menarche, thus ruling her out of her talent ceremony prior to the king’s attack on the intersection. Then, the night before the queen marched to battle at her husband’s side, she’d given the effigy to fourteen- year-old Anna, even though the teen hadn’t known how to use the pendant properly. Lucius had long suspected that some of the itza’at’s powers had reached out to young Anna that night, through the effigy’s connection to the queen. He had a feeling Anna had seen the massacre firsthand through that uplink . . . and that she’d been running from those memories ever since.
Jade set the pendant carefully on her desk; it made a hollow, echoing noise that seemed to reverberate on more planes than just the audible level. “Don’t give up on us. Please.”
Final Prophecy 04: Demonkeepers Page 22