DUSK
The sun descends, light is lost, the world darkens, and
secrets grow in the shadows
CHAPTER TWENTY
June 18
Two years, six months, and three days until the zero date
Skywatch
Jade awoke groggy; for a few moments, she stared at the ceiling of her suite, seeing a gauzy white canopy that wasn’t there.
As she dragged her ass out of bed and into the shower, she ached, not physically, but mentally and spiritually. There had been too many highs and lows lately; she just wanted a few hours of peace, maybe with a mindless project that would occupy her brain just enough that she wouldn’t have to think about the five dead strangers, or the fact that she would’ve sworn on her soul that she and Lucius had been simpatico when they’d made love in the cabin. That had been lovemaking, damn it, not fuck-buddy sex. Only his magic hadn’t kicked in. Which meant the emotions hadn’t been there for him—or at least, not the way they were for her.
Worse, she was becoming the thing she feared, falling prey to the pattern she despised. As she made herself coffee, she was practically counting the hours until the Jeep rolled in, even though she wasn’t sure where things stood between them now; wasn’t sure where she wanted them to stand.
“Gah!” She threw up her hands, unable to stand herself. “Go . . . do something.”
If it hadn’t been three days until the solstice, with the whole of Skywatch locked in a state of tense expectation, waiting for something to break with regard to Kinich Ahau, she might have headed out to the greenhouse. The gardens were mostly Jox and Sasha’s territory, with Michael’s winikin, Tomas, doing the lion’s share of the manual labor—because, he said, it kept him too tired to bust Michael’s chops nearly as much as he used to. But even so, Jade occasionally stopped in for an hour or so of dirt work, which she’d always considered damn good therapy.
Under the circumstances, though, hitting the greenhouse would’ve seemed self-indulgent. Considering that just yesterday—gods, it seemed like forever ago—she’d finally called the scribe’s magic on command, she figured she was duty-bound to hit the Idiot’s Guide again and see what she could do with some of the other spells.
To her surprise, she found Patience in the temporary archive, frowning at one of the computer workstations, which the winikin had moved into the room while the reno crews worked on repairing the archive.
Pushing aside an inner stab of frustration that she’d done more damage to Skywatch than to the enemy so far, Jade dredged up a smile. “Can I help you with something?”
The power button is the big one with the circle on it, she thought with uncharacteristic bitchiness. But then again, she and Patience weren’t exactly tight. Even though Jade had given her a number of tips on beating depression in the weeks and months after the twins had been sent away, the other woman had ducked hard whenever Jade needed help with data entry or any of the other grunt tasks the archive occasionally required. Jade had let Patience get away with the mommy excuse while it was relevant, and the depression excuse after that, but Jade didn’t think she was the only one losing patience with the pretty blonde.
Patience looked up from the computer—which was already powered up, so at least she’d gotten that far—and smiled so warmly that Jade promptly felt like a bitch. “Yes, thanks. I’m looking for the ongoing file. Strike asked me to update it with a rundown of the Egypt trip, for good or bad.”
“Sure. That’s no problem.” Unusual, yes, but not a problem. Jade clicked her way through a couple of levels of the computer desktop and pulled up the metafile that was part of Strike’s efforts to ensure that the current Nightkeepers’ experiences would be transmitted to subsequent generations—assuming that, gods willing, there were future generations—far more smoothly than had been done previously.
Given that the Nightkeepers had found themselves fighting a rearguard action against things they quite often should have known about, but didn’t, the king had made a point of asking each of the magi, winikin, and humans in residence to chronicle his or her experiences, thought processes, strategies, and action plans as they went along. In theory that sounded great. In practice, Jade often found herself transcribing the quick vignettes that the warriors tossed off to her in passing, or patching together fragmentary e- mail missives from off-site ops. Less frequently, the others would write their own stories longhand for her to transcribe. The others almost never came to the archive to type into the raw file . . . as in, she could manually count the number of times that had happened without using her toes.
More, Jade realized as she ran through those few incidents in her head, each of those times had been less about the mage in question wanting some hands-on writing time, and more about their wanting to hide out in the archive, needing some productive- feeling peace. A glance over at Patience suggested that was the case here, as well. The other woman’s face was etched with stress and fatigue, and she toyed with the hilt of the ceremonial dagger she wore on her belt.
I can relate, Jade thought sourly. She pushed back from the computer. “You’re good to go.”
“Thanks.” Patience got to work; within moments, her fingers were flying across the keyboard with a clatter that sounded like machine-gun fire.
Breathing past the adrenaline kick brought by the comparison, Jade snagged the Idiot’s Guide and carried it over to the other workstation. She found herself sneaking looks over at Patience, though. It was strange seeing her at the computer, even stranger that she didn’t look out of place. The image jarred Jade’s perception of her teammates and the way they fit together . . . or didn’t, as the case might be.
“Go ahead, say it.” Patience stopped typing and glanced over at her, eyes lit with faint challenge.
Caught out, Jade fell back on counselor mode. “What is it you think I want to say?”
“That I should get over myself, stop whining about being separated from my boys, make up with my husband, and do whatever else I possibly can to strengthen the Nightkeepers and make sure Harry and Braden have a world to live in—and lives to lead—in 2013.” Patience lifted her chin, blue eyes defiant, yet wary.
Jade grinned, comforted to find that she wasn’t the only one having a pissy morning. “Honestly? I was thinking that you type way faster than I would’ve expected. What was that, seventy words a minute? Closer to eighty?”
Patience just stared at her for a second. Then she burst out laughing, though the laughter carried an edge. “Why? Because I come off more like a fluffy ex-cheerleader than anything? Are you wondering if I took touch typing as part of an admin course?”
“Is that how you think other people see you?” The question came from both parts of Jade; the therapist framed it, but the woman saw the pain and wanted the answer.
“Don’t you?”
Questions and more questions, classic defensive-ness. This isn’t therapy. Patience was a teammate, though perhaps not a close friend. The two women were acquaintances at best, not just because of Patience’s lack of interest in academics, but also because she had come to Skywatch with her life already fully formed. She and Brandt had both known all along that they were the Nightkeepers of legend, that they might one day be called upon to serve. Granted, they hadn’t told each other about their true natures, leading to a hell of a surprise when they’d arrived separately at Skywatch, but still, they seemed to have gotten past that, seemed to have made a family unit within the Nightkeepers. Or was that only the surface of things? Jade wondered suddenly. She’d known there was trouble in the relationship, but had thought it was strong enough to withstand the bumps. What if she’d been wrong?
“I can’t say the word ‘cheerleader’ has ever come to mind,” she answered. “I see you as a woman who was a warrior even before she came here. You started your own dojo and made it a success, even as a young mother, which means you’re focused and driven, and you’ve got good business sense.” She turned her palms upward. “I don’t know why the typing was a s
urprise, except that you’ve always been so much more focused on the physical than I am. You spend most of your day in the gym, on the range, in the training hall . . . so maybe I pegged you as a girl jock, and not someone who would keep her touch typing up to speed.”
A slow, almost shy smile had crept onto Patience’s face as Jade was speaking. Now the blonde stretched her long, elegant fingers and looked at them. Nine nails were shaped and painted a pale, pearlescent pink. One, the left pinkie, was snapped off near the quick, leaving a ragged edge. “Typing’s physical . . . it’s really just hand-eye coordination, after all. In fact, it’s almost a sport.” She paused. “But thanks for seeing me as capable. Sometimes I forget that I used to be that person. Here . . .” She looked around the plain auxiliary room, though Jade suspected she was seeing all of Skywatch and the responsibilities it symbolized. “Here, I feel like a misfit cog in the calendar wheel. I’m a day that’s just slightly out of step. A week with too many hours in it, or too few.”
“I think we’ve all felt that way, some more than others.” Jade lifted a shoulder. “We just lose track that we’re not the only ones feeling it.”
Patience glanced at the computer screen, though Jade wasn’t sure what she saw there. “It just sucks, you know? There are enough of us here that it shouldn’t feel like we’re all alone.”
“Welcome to my world,” Jade said emphatically.
Patience frowned. “But I thought you and Lucius—”
“Are having sex. Great sex, mind you, but that’s it.”
“Don’t knock it,” the blonde said dryly. “Sometimes the love part really stinks.”
“There’s a song in there somewhere.”
“Very funny.”
After that surprising exchange, the women fell companionably silent. As Patience once again started her rapid-fire typing, Jade steeled herself, closed her eyes, and thought back to the night before—not the attack, but the lovemaking. She tried to remember only her own thoughts and feelings, but instead found herself locked on the look in Lucius’s eyes as he’d taken her, possessed her, branded her. Her skin heated as the magic came; her body tightened and throbbed as she remembered his hands on her, his mouth, his fingers—
Jerking herself out of the memory, she opened her eyes. But instead of the spell book, she found her attention drawn inexorably to the man who was standing in the doorway as he had the night before, leaning on the door frame, watching her.
“Lucius!” she exclaimed, hoping he didn’t see from her face how open she was to him at that moment, how much her senses lit at the sight of him, and how much she wished they were alone.
Patience’s head snapped up. “Oh!” She did something with the mouse, then very deliberately looked back at the screen and started typing again. “Just pretend I’m not here. Or tell me to get lost if you need to.”
“You’re fine,” Jade said, but her attention was locked on Lucius. “I’m not sure I can say the same about you,” she told him. “What happened?” He looked tired and run-down, and although his hair was slightly damp and he was wearing clean clothes, he smelled inexplicably of wood smoke.
“Rabbit sterilized the scene,” he said when she wrinkled her nose. He held out his hand to her. “Let’s take a walk. I need your help with something.”
“Is that a euphemism?” Patience asked without looking up.
Lucius grinned. “I thought we were pretending you had turned yourself invisible.”
Her head came up and she glanced speculatively at him. “Given that she would be able to see me but you wouldn’t, that thought has potential. Weird potential, granted, but potential nonetheless.”
Jade snorted. “Glad to see you’re feeling better.”
“I haven’t been feeling good for way too long,” the blonde answered bluntly. “I’ve decided it’s time for me to get over myself.”
“Fair enough.” Jade set aside the Idiot’s Guide, let the magic dissipate, and stood. To Patience, she said, “After the solstice, you, Sasha, and I should have a chick date.”
A shadow crossed the younger woman’s face. Jade was familiar with the look, having seen it plenty in her practice. It was one part excitement at the thought of making plans, one part, Oh, no, I couldn’t; I need to spend time with my child/boyfriend/husband, and one part dismay at realizing that number two wasn’t true anymore, whether because of a divorce, a breakup, or a death. Patience rallied quickly, though with a smile nowhere near the wattage of the others. “I’d like that.”
To Lucius, Jade said, “A walk, huh? Anywhere in particular?”
“Humor me. I have an idea.”
Jade and Lucius left hand in hand. Patience watched them go and felt a twist of envy, not just for the great sex they were apparently having, but for the uncertainty and excitement of a new relationship. New love was supposed to be simultaneously wonderful and awful; that was okay. If it was tearing you up inside, you were doing it right. When that sort of thing started happening for the first time at year six . . . that was a different story.
“Just get through this and you’ll be fine,” she told herself for the hundredth time. After checking to make sure nobody else was coming to hang in the book room—since when was the archive party central?—she returned to the computer and the two files she had open.
She saved and closed the first one, a quick rundown of her and Brandt’s trip to Egypt that she’d named “Camel butter, Cairo, and nothing new on the pharaoh.” That left the one she’d really been after, a doc Strike had entitled simply “Finding Mendez.”
Patience had been afraid to read it openly with Jade in the room, because she knew that pretending interest in recent history wasn’t going to fly with the archivist. So she’d waited the other woman out—and had enjoyed the process far more than she had expected to.
Now, though, she focused on her objective, skimming through the story of how, as a new-made king, Strike had gone personally to collect two of the hold-outs who hadn’t answered the messages informing them of their true Nightkeeper natures and calling them to Skywatch. The first had been Nate, who had initially resisted, but had eventually come around. The second had been Snake Mendez, and that was where things had gotten complicated. Strike had walked into the middle of the mage’s apprehension on an outstanding warrant for several all-too-human crimes. Raised by a less than sane winikin, Mendez had found the magic on his own, and potentially had access to one of the lost spell books. He also had an impressive list of arrests. Amid the chaos of trying to re-create the Nightkeepers out of a dozen human-raised magi, Strike had decided to let Mendez stay in jail rather than orchestrating anything.
But Patience wasn’t interested in Mendez; she wanted the person who’d taken him down. The address she’d stolen off Strike’s laptop had been six months too old. A call to their landlord had revealed that Woody, Hannah, and the boys had moved on. Patience couldn’t ask Carter to look into it; he was the king’s PI. Nor was she interested in picking someone out of a phone book. She wanted the best.
Halfway down the screen, Patience’s eyes locked on the name Reese Montana. “Bingo.”
Who better than a bounty hunter to find a couple of winikin who were doing their blood-bound best to stay lost?
Lucius elected to walk himself and Jade out to the back of the box canyon on the theory that, one, he was sick of the Jeep, two, they could return for wheels later if necessary, and three, he didn’t want to make a big deal out of the expedition, in case his hunch didn’t pan out. So they walked hand in hand along the canyon floor, breathing the strangely humid air and passing ragged clumps of the algaelike plants that were growing throughout the canyon now. They didn’t talk about the plants, though, or the way the dim sunlight made the humidity feel ten times stickier than it might have otherwise. In fact, they didn’t talk at all, which he thought was probably best, because he couldn’t think about much of anything other than what he hoped they were about to find . . . and how much he dreaded finding it. But at the same time, he was awar
e of walking in sync with her, breathing in sync with her. She was someone he could share silence with.
When they reached the back wall of the canyon, Jade started automatically for the shallow staircase leading up to the pueblo ruins.
Lucius tugged her back. “Wait. Not up there.”
She turned back. “No? Where are we going, then, and what do you need my help with? I’m assuming that wasn’t, as Patience suggested, a euphemism.”
“I need your magic.”
Her brows snapped together. “Okay, that’s not what I expected you to say to me.” She paused. “For that matter, it’s the first time anyone has said that to me.” But she was intrigued. “Go on. What are you—or rather, what am I looking for? Are you thinking buried treasure?”
“Not exactly.” He turned her so she was looking off at an angle. “See that curvy rock over there, the one that makes sort of an ‘S’ shape? And see how next to it there’s a round hole that looks man-made?”
“I see them. What do you want me to do?”
“I need you to look for energy patterns, the way you did in Rabbit’s apartment. Do you need a boost?”
“Nope, I’ve got it covered.” That shouldn’t have irritated him, but it did. Beneath the irritation, though, his worry persisted as she took a couple of calming breaths and faced the rock formation he’d seen in his mind’s eye as the burning inn had receded in the distance.
Was there a better way to do this? He’d thought to have her look for a hidden door first, then—
“I see it,” she said.
He exhaled in a rush. “Okay. I have to warn you, though—”
“It’s a spell I’m not familiar with,” she interrupted. “I think it might be like the one that the ancients used to hide the First Father’s tomb, not just a visual illusion but a physical one as well. Michael said that one was very old magic, but he figured out how to turn it off and on. Let me see if I can remember the spell he used. It didn’t work for me back then, but it might now.” She headed toward the spot.
Final Prophecy 04: Demonkeepers Page 28