CHAPTER SEVEN
The barrier
When the
disorientation of transition magic cleared, Jade was standing in a
sea of gray- green mist that came up to her knees. The fog
camouflaged the soft, slightly squishy surface underfoot and
stretched in all directions to the distant horizon, where the
gray-green mist met the gray-green sky.
She wasn’t quite sure
how she’d gotten there, but she was definitely in the
barrier.
Each Nightkeeper
perceived the magic in a slightly different way, depending on how
his or her brain worked. Strike saw his teleportation as a thin
yellow thread connecting him to his destination. Sasha perceived
the life forces of all living beings, their ch’ul, as different kinds of music. Jade, being
more practical than poetic, thought of the barrier as a big-ass
chat room. The gray-green mist was the lobby, and it wasn’t all
that hard to get in if you knew what time the room would be
open—the cardinal solstices and equinoxes, and a few other days of
astronomical barrier activity—and what address to type in—the
proper spell and blood sacrifice. The chat lobby was moderated by
the bloodline nahwal, a group of
dried-up stick people with apple-doll faces, who harbored the
collected wisdom of each bloodline without the attendant
personalities. Like god-mods in an exclusive chat room, the
nahwal were sometimes visible to all of
the barrier’s visitors at once, like during the Nightkeepers’
bloodline ceremonies. Alternatively, they could pull a specific
mage into an offshoot room for a private chat, or they could kick
users out of the chat entirely, either sending them back to their
corporeal bodies or stranding them in limbo.
Jade didn’t mind
being in the barrier; it was one of the few places she ever truly
felt like a mage, and an asset. One of her greatest contributions
to the Nightkeepers’ cause had been when her ancestral nahwal had given her a private message during one
of the cardinal-day ceremonies, warning her that the Nightkeepers
needed to collect the artifacts bearing the seven demon prophecies.
The heads-up had allowed them to defend the barrier against Iago’s
first major attack and had made Jade, albeit briefly, part of the
team.
So yeah, she liked
the barrier. And she liked visiting the squishy gray-green place .
. . during the cardinal days. But this was only the new moon, and
she didn’t command the sort of magic it would’ve taken to punch
through the barrier on such a low- power day. None of the surviving
Nightkeepers did. Even if she assumed her magic could’ve
piggybacked onto Lucius’s library transport somehow, she hadn’t
invoked the pasaj och spell required
for a mage to enter the barrier. Which suggested that someone—or
something—had summoned
her.
“Hello?” she called
into the mist, squinting in search of a wrinkled, desiccated
humanoid figure. “Are you there?”
There was no answer.
Just mist and more mist.
“Hello?” Frustration
kicked through her. “What, you’re going to drag me in here, then
ignore me? How is that fair?”
“Life’s not fair,
child.” The words came from behind her, in a nahwal’s fluting, multitonal voice.
She whirled as the
mist coalesced, thickening to reveal a tall, thin figure. As it
stepped toward her, she saw the ch’am
glyph of the harvester bloodline, that of an open, outstretched
hand. But while that was as she had expected, the nahwal itself looked different than it had before.
Instead of shiny, brownish skin stretched over ligament and bone,
there seemed to be a thin layer of flesh between, making the
nahwal look subtly rounded, bordering
on feminine. More, its eyes, which before had been flat,
featureless black, now bore gradations: There was a suggestion of
charcoal-colored whites, with irises and pupils in darker
gradations.
Unease tightened
Jade’s throat. “What’s going on here?”
“You—” The
nahwal started to answer, but broke off
as it was gripped by a weird shudder. When it stilled, its face
wore the neutral, expressionless mask she’d been expecting. More,
its skin seemed to crinkle more tightly over its bones and the
brief spark of personality she’d seen disappeared. In a multitonal
voice it said, “Hear this, harvester child: You have a duty to your
bloodline and your king. Do not seek to be more than you were meant
to be. Going against the gods can only end badly.”
A hot flush climbed
Jade’s throat as the nahwal’s words
echoed the things Shandi had been saying for months now—years.
Your role was defined long ago, the
winikin kept insisting. Don’t break with tradition when it’s all we have to go
on. And the last, at least, was true; the magi were being
forced to rely on legend, routine, and the few scattered artifacts
to tell them what they were supposed to do—and how to do it—in the
triad years, the last three before the end-time.
But, damn it, she
didn’t want to be a shield
bearer.
Choosing her words
carefully, all too aware that Rabbit had been attacked and nearly
killed by a nahwal, she said, “With all
due respect to my honored ancestors . . .” Saying it aloud, she
realized that, deep down inside, she hadn’t really thought before
about what, or rather who, the
nahwal embodied. For a second, she was
tempted to ask about her mother and father, to check if they were
inside the nahwal somewhere, if they
could talk to her. She didn’t, though, because she knew that the
only nahwal to retain any personal
characteristics was that of the jaguars, the royal bloodline. In
that regard, the harvesters didn’t even come close to ranking.
Taking a deep breath, she continued: “With all due respect, there
are too few of us left to stand on bloodline tradition; each of us
must do what we can for the fight.”
The nahwal started to say something, then stalled as a
second whole-body shiver overtook it. The shellacked skin writhed
like there were bugs under it, or worse. Caught between horrified
fascination and revulsion, Jade took a step back even as the
shivers stopped. When they were gone, the nahwal once again had pupils and emotion in its
eyes, and a hint of feminine curves. “Yes, you must do all that you
can and more,” it urged. “Be the most and best you can be, and
don’t yield your own power to another, particularly a man. Don’t
let emotion turn you aside from your true ambition, your true
purpose. Find your magic, your way to make a
difference.”
Shock and confusion
rattled through Jade at this abrupt one-eighty from the “duty and
destiny” rhetoric the nahwal had
started with. “But I thought the harvesters—”
“Don’t just be a
harvester,” the nahwal interrupted. “Be
yourself.” Abruptly it surged forward and grabbed her wrist, its
bony fingers digging into her flesh. “Find your magic,” it
insisted. The place the nahwal was
touching began to burn, and the gray-green mists around them
roiled.
Through the billowing
mist, Jade saw the nahwal twitch and
shudder, felt it start to yank away, only to grip harder. “What’s
happening?”
“Go,” the creature
hissed at her, its eyes neither alive nor dead now, but somewhere
in between. It let go of her and staggered back, moving jerkily.
“Go!”
The gray-green fog
began spiraling around Jade, making her think of the funnel clouds
several of the others had experienced within the barrier—terrible
tornadoes that could suck up a mage and spit him or her into limbo.
The others had escaped from their plights, but they were warriors
with strong magic. She wasn’t. Yet even as panic began to build
inside her, something else joined it: a spiky, electric heat that
lit her up and blunted the fear. It felt like magic, but it wasn’t
any sort of power she’d ever touched before. Had the nahwal given her a new talent? A glance at her
wrist showed the same two marks as before—one hand outstretched as
though begging, another clutching a quill. Those were the same
bloodline and talent marks she’d worn since her first barrier
ceremony. But the hot energy inside her was magic; she was sure of
it.
Biting her tongue
sharply, she drew a blood sacrifice. Pain flared, the salty tang
filled her mouth, and a humming noise kindled at the base of her
brain. For a split second, she thought she saw another layer of
organization to the mist-laden barrier and the rapidly forming
tornado—a layer of angles and structure, the metaphorical computer
code beneath the cosmic chat room. Then the perception was gone and
there was only the terrible funnel cloud that spun around her,
threatening to suck her up. The mists whipped past her, headed for
the gaping maw; wind dragged at her, yanking at her clothes and
hair as she braced against the pull. Around her, within her, that
strange, mad energy continued to whirl and grow. She wasn’t sure
whether it was a memory or real, but she heard the nahwal cry, in what sounded like a lone woman’s
voice, “Go!”
It was the same voice
she’d heard before, telling her to beware.
She wanted to stay
and demand answers, but didn’t dare. She had to get out of there. Spitting a mouthful of blood into the
whipping wind, she threw back her head and shouted, “Way!”
This time, the
response was instantaneous. Red-gold magic slashed through her, out
of her, twisting the barrier plane in on itself and folding her in
with it. Gray-green mist flew past and she had the disorienting
sensation of moving at an incredible rate of speed, while also
being conscious that she wasn’t physically moving at all. The sense
of motion stopped with a sickening jolt, and she was lying sprawled
on her back, still and chill, bathed in the rusty light from the
flat-screen TV that took up most of one wall.
She was back in
Lucius’s cottage, back in her own body.
And thank the gods for that, she thought, blinking
muzzily. She didn’t know how long she’d been out-of-body, or what
time it was, though it was still full dark outside. The sense of
emptiness in the room told her that Lucius wasn’t nearby. No doubt
he’d made it back from the library and had gone to get Strike and
the others, so they could wake her. Except that she’d awakened
herself. She’d made it home.
She lay blinking for
a moment, then let out a long, exultant breath and sat partway up.
“I did it.” She’d cast the “way” spell
by herself, had rescued herself from the barrier. “I did it!”
More, the magic was
still inside her. It hadn’t stayed behind in the barrier. And it
was showing her things. Where before
the glyphs on the TV screen had only hinted at another layer of
meaning, she now saw that the text string wasn’t illiterate
gibberish at all, but a fragment of a spell . . . or rather a
blessing, she realized, though she didn’t know what would have been
blessed, or why.
I’m a spell caster, she thought, using the
alternate meaning of the scribe’s talent mark, the one that had
never before felt accurate. Her throat tightened with the raw,
ragged joy of it. Or if I’m not now, at least
I’m heading in that direction. The nahwal had triggered her talent. It seemed that
Lucius wasn’t the only one to get a jump start
tonight.
Still staring at the
screen, as happy laughter bubbled up in her chest and stalled in
her throat, she put down her hands, intending to push herself to
her feet. Instead of finding the floor, though, she touched cold
flesh.
Letting out a shriek,
she yanked her hand back and spun, her heart going leaden in her
chest. “Lucius!”
He lay where he’d
been before. Even in the reddish brown light his skin was an
unhealthy gray, his lips blue. For a long second, she didn’t think
he was breathing at all. Then his chest lifted in a slow,
sluggishly indrawn breath. After another agonizing wait, it dropped
as he breathed out.
“Lucius?” She reached
out trembling fingers to check the pulse at his throat, steeling
herself against the chill of his flesh. She couldn’t detect his
heartbeat, but stemmed the rising panic. If
his heart weren’t beating, he wouldn’t still be breathing.
Instead of settling her, though, the thought brought images of
animated corpses with glowing green eyes.
No, she told herself harshly. The makol is gone. Lucius
isn’t. I won’t let him be.
Heart pounding, she
scrabbled around, found the earpiece, and keyed it to transmit.
“Hey, guys. Need some help in here.” Her voice was two octaves too
high.
“Are you okay?” Jox
asked immediately, his voice full of a winikin’s concern.
She tried to keep it
factual, tried not to let her voice tremble. “Lucius is out and
fading. I think we’re going to need Sasha, and maybe Rabbit.” Sasha
could heal him. Rabbit, with his mind-bender’s talent, could follow
where Lucius’s mind had gone. Maybe. Hopefully. Please, gods.
There was a murmur of
off- mike conversation, and then the winikin said, “Sit tight. Strike and the others are
on their way.”
“I’m on mike,” Strike
broke in, the background sounds suggesting he was running. “Where
is he stuck?” But they both knew he was really asking, Did he make it to the library?
“I don’t know.” She
sketched out a quick report of her and Lucius’s out- of-body jaunt
to Xibalba. She’d tell the others about her solo trip to the
barrier after she’d had a chance to think about it herself. By the
writs, it was her right to keep her nahwal’s messages private, and she didn’t think her
visit with the nahwal was relevant to
the library. Beyond that, it had confused her. Some of what the
nahwal had said made complete sense,
and it seemed that the creature had given her the missing piece of
her magic. But at the same time, some of what it had said jarred
against Jade’s own instincts . . . although admittedly those
instincts had been ingrained by Shandi, whose loyalty first and
foremost was to the harvester bloodline, Jade had long ago decided,
not necessarily to the needs and desires of her own charge. Which
left her . . . where?
Before she could even
begin to answer that, Strike booted the cottage door open and
strode through the kitchen with the others in his wake.
Instinctively—she couldn’t have said why, or where the urge came
from—Jade punched the remote to kill the image on the
big
TV, and clicked on
the light beside the sofa instead. The others didn’t notice her
actions or question them; they were intent on Lucius as, in a
flash, the cottage went from being too empty to being too full,
jammed with overlarge bodies, gleaming good looks, and expansive
personalities.
Michael and Sasha
were on the king’s heels: He was dark and green-eyed, with
jaw-length black hair, wide features, and a big fighter’s body that
all but oozed pheromones; she was lean and lithe, with flyaway
brunette curls and eyes the color of rich milk chocolate. They
balanced each other perfectly. More, they were Jade’s closest
friends at Skywatch. Under other circumstances, in another life,
that might have been odd, given that Michael had been her lover for
a time. But Jade was a pragmatist. Michael, though a death wielder
and their resident mage-assassin, was a good man; and Sasha was a
friend. They made it work. More, Sasha was a ch’ulel, a master of living energy, and Lucius
badly needed an energy infusion. Jade was glad Strike had brought
them both.
Behind them came the
two other mated mage- pairs in residence, bringing the exponential
power boosts of their jun tan mated
marks. Alexis led the way, a blond Amazon of a warrior whose
ambition had gained her the position of king’s adviser, as her
mother had been for Strike’s father. Nate was right behind her, not
because he was secondary in their mated power structure, but
because he didn’t feel any need to jockey for position, with her or
with the others. He was the Volatile, a shape-shifter who could
turn into a man-size hawk that featured prominently in some of the
more obscure end-time prophecies. He was also a loner, brought into
the Nightkeepers’ tightly knit group—and the royal council—by his
and Alexis’s rock-solid love match.
The couple following
them, in contrast, was far from rock-solid, in Jade’s opinion, both
professional and personal. Brown-haired, intense Brandt and blond
karate instructor Patience had found each other, and the magic of
love, more than three years before the barrier reactivated and they
all learned they were the last of the Nightkeepers. But for all
that they’d been married human-style for nearly five years now, and
had twin sons together, they walked apart, not touching. Barely
even looking at each other. The problems in their relationship had
been going on for some time, but Jade was struck anew by the
distance that gaped between two people who, on paper, at least,
seemed as though they should be the perfect couple.
Ghosting in behind
them came Sven, the lone remaining Nightkeeper bachelor within the
training compound. Loose limbed and all-American handsome, with a
stubby blond ponytail and a seemingly endless supply of ass-hanging
shorts and surf-shop T-shirts, he wore his
I-don’t-take-anything-seriously attitude like a shield. Jade,
though, saw beneath to a man who was deeply bothered that he’d
failed the Nightkeepers several times when they’d needed
him.
Although simple math
and the value added by matings between Nightkeepers would suggest
she and Sven should try the couple thing, the suggestion had never
been broached in her hearing. While she suspected that was largely
because she lacked the warrior’s mark, she was grateful it had
never come down to that for either of them. Duty would’ve demanded
she at least try to make it work, and that would have been . . .
uncomfortable. She liked Sven, but wasn’t attracted to him. She
liked a man who made her laugh, one who made her think. One who
challenged her, teased her, made her a little crazy.
At the thought, she
looked down at Lucius’s motionless form and heard a multitonal
whisper in her mind: Don’t let yourself get
distracted by the human. That wasn’t exactly what the
nahwal had said; she wasn’t sure if it
was her own reservations talking now, or something else. Still,
though, she was acutely aware that Strike’s human mate, Leah,
wasn’t there. For all that they loved each other fiercely, and he’d
gone against the gods to claim her as his own, ever since the
destruction of the skyroad had severed her Godkeeper connection,
Leah had offered little in terms of magic.
Leah wasn’t the only
one missing, either, Jade realized with a kick of unease. Rabbit
wasn’t there. Granted, Strike would’ve had to ’port out to UT for
him, but still. Who better than a mind-bender to find a lost
soul?
“Let’s get him up on
the couch,” Strike said, not really acknowledging Jade. He glanced
at Sasha. “Unless you think we should haul him to the sacred
chamber, or even down south to the tomb?”
She shook her head.
“Let’s see what we’re up against before we change too many things
at once. Couch first, then triage, then we’ll make decisions about
moving him.” Given that she was their resident healer it was
logical for her to take command of the situation. But that didn’t
stop resentment from kicking through Jade as the others crowded
around Lucius’s motionless form, putting her on the outside of a
solid wall of wide shoulders and too-perfect bodies.
The men lifted Lucius
onto the sofa, jostled him until he was wedged in place, then
nearly mummified him with the quilt. Don’t
trap him like that, Jade wanted to tell them. He’d hate it. But she stayed silent, feeling
invisible and unimportant. This wasn’t about her; it was about the
Nightkeepers doing what they could for Lucius. And even if the
nahwal actually had unlocked some part
of her talent, it wasn’t like she could rattle off a spell capable
of bringing him back. For now, Lucius was better off with Strike
and Sasha taking the lead, with the others lending power to them,
and through them into Lucius.
Feeling extraneous,
Jade eased back farther.
“Where are you
going?” Strike asked. It took Jade a second to realize he was
talking to her.
“Sorry. Did you want
me to stay for the uplink?”
The king locked eyes
with her, his expression unreadable. “Sex forges a connection
within the magic. You’re his lover, which means you’re our best
means of finding him.”
“I’m not his—” She
broke off the instinctive denial, because this wasn’t about the “L”
word. And she couldn’t claim there wasn’t a connection. It didn’t
make sense for her to argue on one hand that sex magic was just
about the sex, then on the other hand claim that a magic bond
between sex partners required an emotional bond that wasn’t
relevant to her and Lucius.
“You said you wanted
to step up into the fight, even without the warrior’s mark. Well,
here’s a chance for you to do exactly that.”
Strike’s challenge
hung on the air for a moment, seeming to suck all the oxygen from
Jade’s lungs. She was acutely aware of the others watching her,
waiting for her response. Part of her wanted to melt into the
woodwork. Another wanted to cut and run. Instead, she took a deep
breath and nodded. “Of course. I’m in.” She only hoped she was
strong enough to make a difference . . . and that the Nightkeepers
together could bring Lucius home.