Final Prophecy 04: Demonkeepers

by Jessica Andersen

  He snagged her arm, shaking it. “Jade! Wait up and listen for a second. This is important.”

  She looked up at him; her eyes were sleepy and blurred, and very, very sexy. She blinked at him, her eyes clearing with a final whole-body shudder. “Whoa.” She rubbed her face with both hands. “I went deep under the magic there.” She shook her head, seeming more like herself once again. “Okay. What’s up? Are you expecting there to be booby traps behind that fake wall?”

  “Gods, I hadn’t even thought of that. Maybe doing this on the sly wasn’t the best idea.”

  Her eyes sharpened. “Why are we out here by ourselves? If you’ve figured out something, then you should—” She broke off, her color draining as her eyes locked onto the rock formation he’d walked and jogged past a hundred times before, never once suspecting that it marked a concealed entrance until a nightmare showed him the way. “Flames,” she said, her voice gone dull with shock as she moved to touch the sinuous, flamelike rock and stare at the empty socket behind it. “Staring eyes.”

  “Yeah.” His voice rasped more than usual on the word. “I don’t think she was talking about just what she saw up at the mansion. I think she was talking about where she performed the ritual. If we ever find some in-depth info on the star bloodline—like the stuff they didn’t tell outsiders—I think we’ll find that this was a sacred chamber that was reserved for them alone, probably connected with the library.”

  “Assuming there’s anything behind the illusion spell.”

  “Why would it be there at all if not to hide something important?” He knew she wasn’t asking about the logic, though. Going on instinct, he gripped her shoulder, more a gesture of support from a teammate than an overture from a lover. But he suspected that was what she needed him to be right then: an almost-warrior who had her back.

  “We should go get the others.” She didn’t move, though. Just stood there touching what he supposed wasn’t really a rock at all, but rather a solid-seeming illusory rock.

  “It’s your call.”

  She hesitated, hand pressed to the stone. Finally, she said, “I’m going to try the on/off spell. If it doesn’t work, we’ll go get the others. If it does . . . I need to see. I want to be the first.”

  He nodded. “Then go for it.”

  “I’m too scattered to concentrate on finding the magic.” With that scant warning, she turned toward him, grabbed him by the front of his T-shirt, and kissed him, hard.

  The kiss vibrated with nerves and need, and hit him with a sledgehammer of lust that slammed him right back to where he’d been the night before in that gossamer white canopy bed, fresh from her body and wanting to promise her impossible things. When she pulled away, he had to stop himself from tugging her back and kissing her again, touching her. It wasn’t just about sex either. He wanted to wrap himself around her, shield her from whatever bad stuff was on the other side of the illusory wall, giving her the good stuff and taking the rest onto himself. The need was hard, hot, and sharp, and it made him take a big step back, wrestling for control.

  He cleared his throat. “Glad to help.”

  “Shh.” She pulled what proved to be a butterfly knife out of her pocket, flipped it open, and used it to score her palm. She didn’t explain about the knife and he didn’t ask; she wasn’t the only one going armed after what had happened the day before. With the blood sacrifice made, she pressed her bleeding hand flat to the fake stone surface and whispered a few words he didn’t catch.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then the wall shimmered. And disappeared.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Breathe, Jade told herself as she stared into the dark entrance of a tunnel leading into the canyon wall. Just keep breathing. She was glad she had someone with her, though, and she was glad it was Lucius, who was letting her take it slow when she knew he had to be dying to get in there, not just for discovery for discovery’s sake, but because he was hoping that the members of the star bloodline—or maybe even Vennie herself—might have left behind some additional clues that might, gods willing, get him back into the library. It seemed that love—or at least great sex—wasn’t the answer. It was all about the magic, after all.

  “Dumb ass,” he said suddenly. When she turned to him, he made a dope-slap motion. “I didn’t bring a flashlight.”

  “Let me try.” She held out her hand and kindled a foxfire. The magic shone brightly and didn’t sap her strength nearly as much as it had before. Was she actually getting stronger? It seemed so. She took a deep, steadying breath and didn’t let herself lean back into him. “Here we go.” Then, remembering the claustrophobia, she asked, “Are you going to be okay with this?”

  His grin was that of the overgrown boy he’d first seemed, in the body of the man he’d become. “Just try and stop me.”

  The tunnel was wide enough for the two of them to walk side by side, so they did. Unlike most of the Mayan-era Nightkeeper temples, it was tall enough that Lucius didn’t have to duck. At first, Jade thought that was because it was a natural fissure. As they moved inward, though, she saw smoothed-out areas, and one or two spots where narrow places had been widened by hand. In the absence of the close-fitted stonework and stylized carvings she’d grown used to in ritual settings, the tunnel almost didn’t feel Nightkeeper in origin. It rounded a gentle curve, cutting out the daylight and leaving them to rely entirely on the foxfire, but the magic stayed true, with little strain on her reserves.

  “I wonder how far—” She broke off when the tunnel widened to a cavern and she had an answer to how far it went.

  More, she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t speak or think as her entire consciousness logjammed on a rapid- fire kaleidoscope of images that she couldn’t process all at once.

  “Oh,” she said. That was all she could manage, really, because the breath backed up in her lungs and her throat closed until only a stingy trickle of oxygen got through.

  The budding symbologist in her locked on the spiral designs on the floor and ceiling, recognizing the multirayed galactic symbol of the Chacoans, who had appeared suddenly in the first few centuries A.D., flourished in the canyons of New Mexico, and then disappeared just as suddenly, leaving behind intricate stone cities built entirely for the dead. The scribe in her noted a small carved box of the sort the ancient Maya and Nightkeepers had used to store their most precious possessions.

  The daughter in her, though, focused on the dry, desiccated corpse slumped up against the far wall.

  Vennie’s corpse was much as Lucius had described its spiritual representation in the library, with a hooked nose and protruding teeth that bore little resemblance to the bright, laughing girl from the photos. Oddly, Jade found she could look at her mother’s death-ravaged face and hands without any real queasiness; on some level she’d been prepared for that. What she hadn’t been entirely prepared for, though, was for the body to be wearing the remains of high-top Reeboks, acid-washed jeans, a faded hot-pink sweatshirt, and a denim jacket that was two shades darker than the pants, and carefully decorated with iron-on patches for bands that now played on classic-rock radio.

  The clothes didn’t just date the corpse; they drove home the child her mother had been, somehow uniting the two inside Jade. Yes, Vennie had been a wife and a mother, and had been torn between the responsibilities of the bloodline she’d been born into and the strictures of the one she’d chosen. But at the same time, her life had just been beginning. If it hadn’t been for the massacre, she would have been in her early forties now. She would’ve been at her prime as a mage, whatever form that magic might have taken.

  “She barely even got a chance to know herself,” Jade murmured.

  Lucius gave her a one-armed hug and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. Then he stepped away, giving her some space she wasn’t sure she needed. “Are you okay with me checking out the box?”

  “Go for it.” She stayed with the body, though. It seemed like the right thing to do.

  Sooner than
she’d expected, he made a satisfied noise and held out something to her. “I think you should open this one.”

  It was a hot-pink spiral-bound notebook with glitter stars stuck to the cover. To Jade’s surprise, she felt her lips curve in a smile as she took the small volume. “She wasn’t subtle, was she?”

  “She was seventeen,” he said, which more or less said it all.

  She met Lucius’s eyes. “Thank you. Not just for the notebook, but for all of it. For being here with me, for letting me see her first . . . For all of it.”

  He tipped his head, but didn’t quite meet her eyes. “That’s what friends are for.”

  Telling herself not to read too much into that—or too little—she nodded and cracked open the notebook. The lined pages were brittle and yellow; the first half of the book appeared to be class notes, full of cryptic scribbles about the hero twins and the end-time interspersed with doodles of the spiral pattern that was echoed on the floor and ceiling of the cavern, along with two repeated symbols: the star and the warrior’s glyph. “A little full of ourselves, were we?” Jade commented, though more fondly than anything. She thought she was getting a handle on her feelings where it came to Vennie, slotting her—for the moment, anyway—in a mental position she thought was someplace between sister and mother.

  “Again, she was seventeen.” Lucius grinned, but lines of tension bracketed his eyes and mouth as he read over her shoulder. “Is there anything in there besides class notes?”

  She flipped a few more pages, then stopped. Everything stopped—her voice, her breath, even her heart—as she stared down at the single page filled with looping writing.

  It began: Dear Jade.

  “Oh,” she said, a single syllable of pained longing.

  Lucius read the top line over her shoulder, then simply touched his temple to hers in support. “Read it to me,” he suggested, his voice barely more than a whisper of breath in her ear. “More, read it to her. Let her know you got it, that she’s been found after all these years.” Then he moved away, giving her the room to make her own decision.

  She nodded, swallowing to clear the huge lump in her throat. “ ‘Dear Jade,’ ” she began, and had to start over when her voice cracked. “ ‘Dear Jade, please forgive me for what I’m about to do. And please ask the stars to forgive me too. I know I don’t belong here anymore. But I don’t really belong anywhere, do I? I’m an outsider, soon to become a Prophet. Please ask them to use my voice to help the king with his decisions. If it’s to be an attack, use me to win. If not, use me to plan the 2012 war, though that’s still so far away. Either way, please know that I am satisfied so long as the magi don’t march to their deaths the day after tomorrow, which is what I’m scared will happen if I don’t do this. And finally, please tell your father, tell Josh, that it wasn’t always easy loving him, but I never stopped. I love you both. Your mother, Venus.’ ”

  When Jade fell silent, the cave seemed to hum with the echoes of her voice, the sound becoming, for a moment, multitonal.

  “Vennie must’ve been a nickname for Venus,” Lucius observed. “Venus is one of the most visible stars in the sky, and its patterns form a cornerstone of the entire calendric system.”

  Jade found a ghost of a smile. “Venus. Yeah. That fits.” She sighed. “She must’ve written this part before she tried the soul spell. She was assuming that the Prophet’s magic would take her soul and she wouldn’t get another chance to say good-bye.” Something nudged at the edge of her brain—a question she hadn’t asked, a connection she was missing.

  “ ‘This part’?” Lucius said. “There’s more?”

  She nodded, skimming ahead, not sure what she was feeling, what she was supposed to feel. “The next one is another ‘Dear Jade’ letter. I think she was expecting the members of the star bloodline to find her once she became the Prophet—maybe there was some sort of magic signal to announce its arrival?—and wanted them to have this info, but couldn’t bring herself to write it directly to the family members who had turned away from her. So she wrote them to a six-month-old baby instead.”

  “Or else she wanted you to know she was, in her own way, a hero.”

  Nodding, Jade began reading again: “ ‘Dear Jade . . . Gods . . . oh, gods, how do I say this? How can it be true? I said the spell right, made the sacrifice, but the magic didn’t take me. Instead, it took her, took someone I didn’t even know about, but loved with all my heart—’ ” She broke off, her blood chilling as she made the connection that had been bothering her. “That’s why she ended up like you. She wasn’t possessed by a makol. She was pregnant, and she didn’t figure it out until it was already too late.”

  Gods.

  How was it that they had missed asking that question? Jade wondered. Or had it been asked and she skimmed over it, somehow guessing this might be the answer and not wanting to add it to the mix? Nausea pressed hot and thick against the back of her throat. A baby. A sister. Her mother had sacrificed her unborn baby to the Prophet’s spell. And being a soul spell, it wouldn’t have freed the child’s essence to enter the afterlife. The baby’s soul would’ve been completely and utterly destroyed. Poof, gone.

  Lucius made a move to reach for her, but she shook her head and held him off. “No. I need to finish this.” If she didn’t keep going, she might lose it entirely.

  “If you’re sure.”

  She nodded and read: “ ‘Tell the harvesters they lost one of their own because of me, because I was too proud, too vain, too sure that the elders of the star bloodline were wrong when they said it wasn’t yet time for the last Prophet, that he wouldn’t be made until just before the triad years. They were wrong, I thought, when really I was the one who was wrong, and an innocent paid the ultimate price. Her soul isn’t in the sky. It’s just gone, destroyed in order to propel me between the worlds. I still need to go back into the library again, gain what knowledge I can, and hope to hell it’s enough to convince the king not to march. I didn’t get any answers the first time because it took me too long to figure out the yes/no bullshit, which doesn’t work exactly like the stories said it would. I’m starving, but I ate all the bread, and the fountain ran dry, and . . . and I’m whining. I’ll stop now and rest so I can keep going. Sometimes it seems that all you can do is keep going. I love you. Your mother, Venus.’ ”

  “Now she’s starting to sound more like she did in the other journal,” Lucius noted. “Less like she’s writing a thank-you note—or rather, an apology—to an elderly relative, and more like a strung-out, confused kid.”

  “There’s one more line. Just a sentence scribbled at the bottom.” Jade scanned the sentence, and went still.

  “What is it?”

  “Information.”

  He took a step toward her, his eyes lighting. “Does it say how to get me back into the library?”

  “No.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “It says: ‘To reach the lost sun, play his game on the cardinal day.’ ”

  “Oh,” Lucius said. “Oh, wow. Oh, shit. I know what that means.” Their eyes met, and they said, nearly in unison, “We need to get this back to the mansion.”

  With the great room in the middle of being renovated, the residents of Skywatch gathered at the picnic tables beneath the big ceiba tree, mopping at sticky-humid sweat and bitching about the gnats that had made a sudden appearance in the normally bug- free canyon. Strike, who’d already been briefed on the discoveries, opened the meeting, then turned things over to Jade and Lucius.

  Jade was pale and withdrawn, so Lucius did most of the talking. He described the clues that had led him to the hidden chamber, and summarized what they had found inside it. He finished by reading Vennie’s words verbatim from the pink notebook, ending with what sure as hell sounded to him like a prophecy: “To reach the lost sun, play his game on the cardinal day.”

  When he finished, it seemed that the world itself had gone silent, save for the whine of gnat wings.

  After a moment, he said, “That’s random enough
that I’m willing to bet it’s a snippet from the library, especially given how well it lines up with both the triad prophecy and what we’re going through now. If she asked the library, for example, what information the Nightkeepers needed most from her, that might have been the answer.”

  “Was there anything else in the box?” Nate asked.

  “It was empty except for the notebook. My guess is that the stars may have removed their sacred texts from it, maybe in preparation for the attack. But there’s more.” He lifted the box from where he’d left it sitting on the table, and turned it in his hands, so the orange daylight made the shadows dip and move across the carved wooden surface. “I translated the glyphs on the outside of the box. It’s another prophecy, this one about the library, and presumably the über-Prophet who is supposed to arise during the triad years. Paraphrasing to modernize the grammar and clean up the end, where the grammar gets a little wonky, it reads: ‘In the triad years, a mage-born Prophet can wield the library’s might.’ ” He shook his head. “By becoming the non-Prophet, I must have blocked the true Prophet from being formed at the end of last year. So I think we can consider that a prophecy of the null-and-void variety.”

  “Is there such a thing as a voided prophecy?” Sasha asked. “It seems to me that all of the prophecies the ancients have left us have factored into things in some way or another. Maybe not the way we’ve expected them to, but they’ve factored.”

  “I don’t see how this one could,” Lucius answered. “I’m not mage-born, and there’s no mistaking that part of the translation.”

  Sasha looked thoughtful. “Maybe that’s not all of the prophecy.”

  “Gee. Why don’t I go to the library and check? Oh, that’s right. Because I fucking can’t.” He exhaled. “Sorry. It’s just . . . Shit. Sorry.” Sasha hadn’t done anything to deserve his mood. “You’re right; it’s certainly possible that there was another box that continued the saying. That might account for the funky way this one ends, glyph-wise. But that’s pure speculation, and we’re running out of time. I don’t think we dare waste the time searching for something that might be a figment of our imaginations.” He paused. “Besides, there’s another option. Something we can try relatively easily, right from our own backyard.” Lucius hooked a thumb over his shoulder, past the training hall to the high parallel walls that had been built back when Skywatch was originally constructed in the twenties. “I hope you’re all up for a game.”