CHAPTER EIGHT
The library
During one of the
many roundtable discussions about what might or might not happen
once Lucius connected to the library, he remembered Sasha
suggesting that even if he managed to make the connection, his
energy reserves might be too limited to sustain it. The
Nightkeepers had high metabolisms and huge appetites, both designed
to feed the magic. He didn’t. And yeah, as he bent over the
notebook he could feel the drain, knew he had to get himself back
to Skywatch. Problem was, the notebook’s construction and the
warning on the first page were its most coherent aspects. The text
was a scant three pages of cramped writing done in a strange
stream-of-consciousness style. Some of it made sense; most of it
didn’t.
Scrubbing the heel of
his hand between his eyebrows in an effort to recenter his spinning
brain, he went back to the beginning and started over.
Within my bloodline—the keepers of the library’s secrets—they say that a powerful Prophet will arise as we get close to the end-time. This Prophet will be an outsider, one who has lost his way, but once he finds himself, finds his magic, he’ll have the power to avert a terrible tragedy. How could I not think the prophecy was talking about me? Ostracized from my bloodline, stripped of my powers, yet born for so much more than I had become, there couldn’t be anybody better for the job.Did this happen because of my pride? Because I wasn’t humble enough before the gods or the magic? Rather than dying and giving my people a Prophet, I’m stuck in here. I’ve got the answers, but no way to give them to those who once loved me.
That all made sense
to a point, Lucius supposed, but he could’ve used more context.
Unfortunately, the next page and a half contained confusing rambles
about flames and staring eyes. Then, finally, on the last written
page, there was something useful.
Therefore, as the last of my bloodline, the last keeper of the library’s secrets, I write this both fearing and hoping that nobody will ever read it. I hope that a true Prophet will arise at the end of the age, one who dies as is meant, leaving his body behind to transmit all that is hidden here. But I fear that this may not happen . . . and if you’re reading this, you’re like me. The gods didn’t take your soul during the spell, and they gave you only this small window into the library. To you, I write the following, some of which was known to my bloodline, some of which I’ve figured out here:The way-ya spell will get you back to your body from here, but only twice. If you enter the library a third time, you’re staying. Trust me—third time isn’t a charm in the library magic.You’re here, so you probably figured out how to get in. Just in case, let me spell it out for you: It’s talent-specific, so you’re going to have to use your own magic to get back here. When you do, make sure you’re bringing the right questions, because you’ve only got one shot. Don’t screw it up, because I can only imagine that you’re it. You’re the last Prophet. The one who’s supposed to help save the world.Finally—and this isn’t about the library so much as what I’ve figured out sitting here dying, wishing I’d done things differently—magic isn’t what’s going to save the world. Love is. So find someone to love, and tell them so. Better yet, show them you love them by making them happy rather than miserable. Don’t be an idiot like I was.
“Which in my
experience is a total contradiction in terms,” Lucius muttered. In
his experience, using the “L” word to a lover was the very
definition of being idiotic. At least it was the way he did it.
Granted, all the talk about bloodlines meant the journalist had
been a Nightkeeper, and from what he’d seen the magi tended to do a
good job in the couples department. Still, it seemed like an odd
thing to say, even odder to write as the very last entry in the
strange journal. “And who the hell wrote it, anyway?”
His body jolted,
lurched upright, and staggered back toward the stacks. “Whoa!
Wait,” he said, “I didn’t mean—” But he broke off at the
realization that he was far, far weaker than he’d comprehended. His
legs shook and the stone walls blurred around him as he headed
across the room, impelled by the magic. It was all he could do to
stay on his feet, but he’d be damned if he crawled.
By the time he
reached the other end of the narrow stone room, he was breathing
hard, nearly doubled over as he fought not to retch. Then he got a
good look at what the magic had brought him to, and he froze inside
and out.
A woman’s corpse sat
in the corner, wrapped in a yellow-edged green robe identical to
the one he was wearing.
He had his answer.
He’d asked who wrote the journal . . . and the magic showed him.
For half a second, the torch flames flickering on the body made it
seem to move, even though he knew it wasn’t alive. It couldn’t be.
Not looking like that. She wasn’t a mummy in the formal sense of
embalming and wraps, but she was mummified all the same, with her
skin tight and shiny, stretched over where flesh had wasted from
bones. Honey-colored hair hung to her shoulders, and the bone
structure of her face seemed oddly elegant despite the hooked-nose,
bared-teeth grotesquery of desiccation. The robe had ridden up over
her forearm, baring three marks: those of the star bloodline, the
warrior, and the jun tan.
“Bingo,” Lucius
slurred. “Now we know that the stars were the keepers of the
library.” Which was only partially useful, given that none of the
living Nightkeepers were members of the star bloodline. But it was
information, and he’d always been a fan of info. And, dude, he was
punchy. The torchlight seared his eyes, and the stones beneath his
feet heaved like the deck of a fishing boat, with the same
nausea-inducing consequences he’d suffered on his single lamented
attempt at deep-sea fishing. “I’ve gotta get out of here.” He
didn’t have the answers the Nightkeepers needed about the skyroad
or the sun god, but his body was flat-out done. If he collapsed and
passed out here, he would probably exhaust the last of his energy
reserves while unconscious. And death in the barrier was death
nonetheless, which meant it was time to go home.
The journal had
talked about the “way-ya” spell, not
the way spell, which was what he’d been
assuming he should use. “Way-ya” meant
“home,” but could also mean “spirit” or “portal.” Similar but
different. Chanting the word over and over in his thick-feeling
head, he dragged himself back to the study area, with its carved
medallions. His feet seemed very far away when he plonked them on
the way symbol of the snaggle-toothed
dragon. Wetting his gone-dry mouth, he croaked, “Way-ya.”
Power instantly
slammed into him, swept him up. Everything went dark, and the world
around him spun hard and fast. He might’ve puked but wasn’t sure;
he lost touch with his body, with his neurons—hell, with every part
of himself. Terror slashed as he glimpsed a dusty, barren roadway
that came from nowhere, led nowhere. The in- between. His own
private hell. Adrenaline slashed, sweeping away the cobwebs.
Screaming inwardly, he fought not to go there, fought to go
anywhere but there, but how could he
fight without power, without magic, without training?
As he slid toward
that dry, dusty purgatory, he lashed out, reaching invisible
thought hands to grab something, anything that might halt the
slide. He caught a flash at the edge of his consciousness, a hint
of power that wasn’t quite familiar, wasn’t entirely strange, but
was wholly, utterly compelling. He grabbed for it, touched it for a
second, then lost it. But at that brief touch, the in-between
winked out and the world went gray-green.
Then that too winked
out, and there was nothing but darkness and sick, aching
pain.
Panic hammered
through him as he sensed boundaries all around him, hemming him
into a space that was so much smaller than the vastness he’d just
traveled through. He was jailed by the pain, trapped
within—Oh, he thought as the inner
lightbulb went off and he recognized the sensation of being back in
his physical self . . . which felt like unholy shit. His head
hammered with the rhythm of his stumbling heart, and agony flared
in each of his joints, making him feel like he’d been stretched out
on a huge cosmic torture rack that had stopped short of actually
killing him, but only barely. And who knew the body had so many
damned joints? Even his pinkie toes were killing him.
“Ngh,” he said,
wincing when the word—the grunt?—echoed too loudly, setting off
cymbal clashes in his skull. He hadn’t felt hangover- crappy like
this since the day after Cizin had first entered his soul. The
thought brought a spurt of panic, but he beat it back. It feels like this because you’re a human trying to do
magic, he told himself, forcing the logic through the pain.
The library is not a makol; it’s not trying to possess you. Though the
ask-and-walk thing was borderline.
“Lucius!” Jade said,
her voice seeming to come from far above him. “Can you hear me? Are
you okay?”
Jesus Christ, don’t shout, he wanted to say, but he
caught the worry in her voice and felt the grip of her hand on his.
He hated that she was seeing him weak and helpless yet again, but
that was his hang-up, not hers, so he made an effort to be polite,
even through the hammering inside his skull. “M’fine.
Food?”
Okay, so maybe that
was still lacking in the polite-ness department. But he heard paper
and then clothing rustle and sensed motion nearby. What was more,
he didn’t sense a crowd nearby, which was a relief.
“Jox left a carb-
and-fat bomb in case . . . for when you came around.” Her voice
trembled on the words. She took a deep breath, and she sounded
steadier when she said, “I’ll call the others. We’ve been watching
you in shifts ever since Sasha said you were as stable as she could
get you. We’ve been waiting for . . . well. I’ll call
them.”
“ ’N a minute.”
Lucius slitted his eyes, saw the familiar details of his cottage,
and relaxed fractionally at finding that he was on his couch, not
locked up in the basement in the main mansion, or worse. Craning
his neck, he looked for Jade, and found her in the kitchen, leaning
on the counter with her arms braced and her head hanging. She was
wearing trim jeans and a soft button-down that clung to her skin as
her body curved in a private moment of what might have been relief,
but he found himself interpreting more as grief.
Regret.
What the hell had he
missed? He wanted to go to her, to hold her. Wanted to lean into
her and let her lean on him. But that was the weakness talking, he
knew. More, he knew that it was a private moment, and one she
wouldn’t thank him for watching. So he forced himself to look
away.
Focusing on the
changes that had occurred in his main room while he’d been out of
it, he saw that the TV was off, no longer showing the scene that
had been so strangely mimicked by what they had seen in Xibalba.
The coffee table held a notebook and a couple of volumes he
recognized from the archive, primary texts on the legends of the
sun god, clueing him in that Jade had caught the Kinich Ahau
connection. Good girl. There was an IV
stand beside the couch, a needle taped at the crook of his arm, and
a clear line feeding him the nutrient mix the winikin had come up with to offset the postmagic
crash experience by a mage—or in this case, a human wannabe—in the
aftermath of big magic. Which made him wonder how long he’d been
unconscious.
A look out the window
showed him that sky was blue-black, but with dusk, not dawn. Had he
lost an entire day? More? He cursed under his breath.
As he did, Jade came
back into the main room carrying a bowl of pasta mixed with the
heavy meat sauce he liked, liberally dosed with cheese. At his
colorful language, she raised an eyebrow. “That sounded coherent,
if physically impossible. I take it your head is
clearing?”
“How many days did I
lose?” He took the bowl and held out a hand for the fork she was
still holding, just in case she had any idea of trying to feed
him.
She passed it over.
“About twenty hours. From your perspective, it’s tomorrow night.”
She was wearing what he thought of as her counselor’s face, serene
to the point of blandness. But he knew her well enough to see
strain and nerves beneath, along with an unfamiliar
edginess.
“I made it to the
library,” he said before she asked.
“And?”
There was no simple
answer to that, he realized as he tried to come up with something
concise and vaguely coherent. He dug into the pasta, buying himself
a moment. Finally, he went with: “It’s amazing. I wish you could’ve
been there with me.”
And it was true, he
realized. Of all of the magi, she was the one who would’ve
appreciated the artifacts, the Ouija game, all of it. And he
would’ve liked to have seen it all for the first time with her.
Whatever else was—or wasn’t—between them, they meshed on that
level. Always had.
“I tried to find
you,” she blurted, locking her fingers together until her knuckles
whitened. “Last night we uplinked—Strike, me, everyone. I tried to
find your ch’ul song for Sasha, tried
to follow where you’d gone . . . but I couldn’t. Our connection,
the sex magic, just wasn’t strong enough. I wasn’t strong enough.”
“Oh.” Suddenly, her
sitting next to his bed, waiting for him to regain consciousness—or
die, though neither of them had said it outright—seemed less like
the vigil of a friend or lover, and more like
self-flagellation.
She continued, though
he wasn’t sure whether she was talking to him or to herself. “I
couldn’t find the sex link and pull you home. We thought . . . We
weren’t sure you were going to make it out.”
“But I did,” he
pointed out in between big bites of cheese-laden pasta, not
mentioning that it had been a close call. “And for the record, I
don’t think the library works the same way the rest of the barrier
does. It’s possible—even likely—that you wouldn’t have been able to
follow me even if I were a mage and we were jun tan mates.” He thought of the corpse’s mated
mark, wondered if someone had gone looking for her. And if so, what
had happened to them. He hated like hell that Jade felt like a
failure because of him, but knew she wouldn’t thank him for saying
it aloud. So instead, he said, “I’m guessing you gave the others a
full report on Kinich Ahau and the companions?” She had twenty
hours’ head start on him—it sure as hell hadn’t felt that long when
he’d been inside the library, but the barrier was known to fold
time oddly in some cases.
She nodded. “I gave
them what I could yesterday, and am just about finished filling in
the gaps from the archive.” She paused before saying softly, “The
Banol Kax are trying to put Akhenaton
in the sun god’s place.”
“Yeah.”
“How are we going to
stop them?”
At first he thought
it was a rhetorical question. But when she looked at him too
expectantly, he realized she was hoping for him to play Prophet.
Exhaling, he shook his head. “Sorry. It doesn’t work that way. I’m
not going to be able to channel info on command.”
Worse, now that he
had some food in him, he was seeing just how big an oh, holy shit of a problem that was going to be. If
he needed to use his own talent to get back into the library, as
the journalist had said . . . then the magi were going to be
waiting a long time, because humans didn’t have talents, and he was
pure human, do not pass “Go,” do not collect two
hundred.
She looked at him for
a long moment, and something sparked in the air, making him very
aware that they were alone again in his cottage, where the magic
had begun. All she said, though, was, “Do you feel up to a general
meeting?”
“That’d probably be
best.” He might as well break the bad news en masse.
“I’ll go spread the
word. But I don’t want to see you up at the mansion until you’ve
finished eating, got it?”
“Got it.” A quick
yank and he had the IV out, then had to fumble to shut the thing
off when it peed on his foot. “Yeah. Smooth,” he muttered under his
breath.
She flashed him a
grin that looked far more natural than anything she’d managed up to
that point. “Glad to have you back.”
Looking up, he met
her eyes. “Same goes.” They locked gazes for a three- count of
heartbeats, and more passed between them than had been said. At
least, it did for him, though he couldn’t have articulated what,
exactly, he took away from the moment beyond a hot pressure in his
chest and a more than fleeting thought of locking the door and
saying, Fuck the general meeting; they can
wait until tomorrow. But the problem was, he didn’t know if
they could wait, really. He’d already
lost a day, which put them at only eight to go until the summer
solstice.
Jade broke the eye
lock with a self-conscious head shake, then turned and headed for
the door, scooping up the books and papers on her way past the
coffee table. She paused at the archway leading to the kitchen,
glancing back. “In the pit . . . in Xibalba. You were amazing. I
don’t think I would’ve made it out of there if it hadn’t been for
you.” Before he could say anything—not that he had a clue how to
respond to something like that; it wasn’t like he’d had much
practice being amazing—she continued: “I froze. Here I am, trying
to tell everyone that I deserve to be in on the action, but when it
came down to it, I just stood there. I wouldn’t have run if you
hadn’t dragged me, and I wouldn’t have made it out if you hadn’t
come after me. When that guard started marching me toward the
fortress—” She broke off, shuddering, her eyes going stark and
hollow in her face. “I panicked. I didn’t do anything.”
He stood, forcing his
legs to hold him, and crossed to her. Without a word, he folded her
into his arms, hoping that this was one of those times when the
right action meant more than finding the right words.
Jade stiffened, and
for a moment he thought she was going to push away, but then she
let out a long, shaky sigh and melted into him. After a brief
hesitation, she slid her arms around his waist and hung on. They
stood that way for a long time. Finally, when he felt her coiled
muscles ease, he said into her hair, “You couldn’t have done
anything; neither of us could, unarmed and with no real fighting
magic to speak of. We owe our lives to the companions. And besides,
it was your magic that warned Kinich Ahau that there was a
Nightkeeper nearby, in trouble.”
Shifting in his arms,
she looked up at him, eyes gone very serious. “Maybe it was my
magic at first, but at the end it wasn’t my magic that got us out.
It was yours.”
“Maybe.” He didn’t
know what to think about that yet, or how to process it in light of
what the journalist had written about needing to use his talent to
get inside the library. He didn’t have a clue how he’d gotten there
in the first place. “Regardless, we got each other out of there. No
apologies, no regrets, okay? Let’s just be grateful we’re both back
where we belong.” Those words took on new meaning when he realized
he was stroking her from nape to hip, that her hands had migrated
from his waist to locked behind his neck. His body awoke, hard and
fast, and he saw in her eyes that she’d felt the change. Welcomed
it.
He eased down, giving
her plenty of time and room to step back if she needed to, as she’d
done before. Instead, she rose up on her toes to meet him halfway.
We’re okay, the kiss seemed to say.
We’re home now. We’re safe. More, it
suggested that their being together hadn’t been a one-shot deal
designed only to test the effects of sex magic. It said she was
into him, that she enjoyed touching him, kissing him. And when the
kiss ended and they leaned a little apart to look into each other’s
eyes, he saw a spark of heat that danced over his skin and made his
body hard and ready in an instant.
“We could . . .” He
trailed off with a suggestive head nod in the direction of the
couch, or better yet, the wide-open floor below.
“We could . . . but
we’re not going to. You’re going to eat, I’m going to collect the
others, and we’re going to rendezvous up at the mansion for a
powwow.” But she cocked an eyebrow. “As for the other . . . maybe
later, if you’re still on your feet.”
“Count on
it.”
She grinned and
headed out. And as the door closed at her back, he realized he was
smiling. The analytical side of him knew that the day—or rather,
the past two days—had to go in the minus column of shit news and
more shit news. But the man in him thought the crappy-ass intel was
balanced, at least in the short term, by the fact that he and Jade
were finally on the same page.
Now he just had to
make sure they stayed there.
The residents of
Skywatch met, as was their habit, in the great room of the main
mansion. The five in-residence winikin
sat at the breakfast bar that separated the big marble-and-chrome
kitchen from the sunken sitting area, where the Nightkeepers were
scattered on chairs and sofas—or in Sven’s case a couple of pillows
on the floor. Jade had staked out one end of a long couch, and
didn’t mind in the slightest when Alexis and Nate filled up the
rest of it. She wasn’t trying to distance herself from Lucius,
precisely, but she was hyperaware that the others knew they had
slept together. She’d known that would be the case going into
things, of course. And it wasn’t like she hadn’t been there before.
Private lives didn’t stay private for long around Skywatch, not
with sex so integrally connected to the magic. For some reason,
though, this time the sidelong looks put a strange shimmy in the
pit of her stomach and made her want to squirm.
Then there was
Shandi, who frowned down at her from the breakfast bar. The
winikin was in her late fifties, with
silver-threaded dark hair worn straight to her waist and
distinctive facial features she’d explained as Navajo heritage out
in the human world, but that had really come from her Sumerian
ancestors. She was petite, as were all of the winikin, and seemed to exist in a perpetual state
of Zen- like peaceful calm. Jade knew firsthand that the calm was
an illusion, though. In reality, the winikin had a cold, biting temper and a low
tolerance level.
As a teen, Jade had
offset Shandi’s regular “proper deportment and behavior” lectures
by coming up with various sets of the three “D”s for her
winikin. Most often, they were along
the lines of “disconnected,” “disapproving,” and “duty-bound.” And
while Jade had known she could’ve wound up in a worse situation
growing up—there hadn’t been any violence, no neglect; if anything,
Shandi had paid too much attention to her, stifling her with
rules—she’d often wished for something . . . different. She had
dreamed of what it would’ve been like if her parents hadn’t died,
if she hadn’t been left in the care of her chilly, rigid
winikin. Her mother would’ve been tall
and serene, with Jade’s long, straight hair and sea foam eyes. She
would’ve been unruffled by her daughter’s childish pranks and
youthful bounciness, maybe even playing along sometimes. Her
father’s image had been less clear, but his voice had resonated in
her imagination; he’d been big and strong, and his arms around her
had made her feel safe. They wouldn’t have lectured her on duty,
decorum, and diligence, or at least not all the time, over and over
again until she wanted to scream. But her parents were dead, and
she’d known Shandi was a better parent than some, so she had done
her best to live up to—or down to?—her guardian’s expectations of a
quiet, well-behaved child.
As Jade had grown to
adulthood, she and Shandi had maintained more of a relationship
than she might have expected, in part because Jade had discovered
over time that Shandi had been right about a number of things, from
the value of a calm facade to the advisability of thinking before
acting, which had been a hard lesson for Jade to learn when parts
of her had wanted to be rash. In the years before the Nightkeepers’
reunion, and even in the first months of life at Skywatch, Jade and
Shandi had coexisted peacefully under the terms of their unstated
agreement that if Jade didn’t act impulsively, the winikin wouldn’t lecture. Lucius’s arrival at
Skywatch hadn’t immediately changed that, but looking back, Jade
could see that it had been the beginning of the renewed strain
between her and Shandi. And the split had only worsened as time
passed.
Now the winikin was subtly ignoring Jade without seeming
to. And when Lucius appeared at the sliders leading from the pool
deck to the great room, Shandi’s face soured with a look of,
Ew, it’s the human.
“Come on in.” Strike
waved when Lucius stalled at the threshold. “I know you just ate,
but Carlos’ll hook you up with seconds to keep you going for the
meeting. You’ll still need some downtime—assuming that your
physiology works like ours does—but you won’t crash as hard or as
long as you would have without the IV.”
“Thanks,” Lucius
said, though it wasn’t entirely clear which part the word referred
to. Easing away from the sliders as though reluctant to commit too
far into the building, he dragged a carved wood chair out from
underneath a half-round table near the door, and turned it to face
the others, so he sat near but apart from them. Although he was
positioned above the magi on the higher level of the two-level
great room, it didn’t seem as though he sat in judgment, but rather
that he was offering himself up to be judged.
As he sat and leaned
back in the chair, hooking his hands across his flat stomach, Jade
was struck anew by how much he looked like a stranger, yet not. And
more, how much he now looked like one of them. He’d showered and
changed; his normally tousled brown hair was slicked back, his jaw
freshly shaven. Wearing jeans, an unadorned black T- shirt, and a
pair of heavy black boots she didn’t recognize from before, he
would’ve easily fit into a lineup with Strike, Nate, Michael, and
Brandt. All five men were dark haired, big, and built, with strong
features and auras of tough capability. They looked like a bunch of
honorable badasses who would make strong allies, fearsome enemies,
and dangerous lovers.
The realization that
she could easily lump him in with the mated warrior- males wasn’t a
comfortable one, nor was the inner tug at the thought of classifyng
him as her lover, with its implication of a future . . . or rather
the question of how she was supposed to balance that desire—and the
banked hum still coursing through her from his kisses—with the
things the strange nahwal had told her,
and its whispered warning: Beware . . .
But what was she supposed to be wary of? Him? Her response to
him?
She didn’t know, and
didn’t have time to figure it out just then, because Strike started
the meeting and then gestured in her direction. “Jade, how about
you run us through anything new you’ve managed to pull together
about the sun god, and give Lucius a chance to get a few more
calories on board?”
On cue, Jox dished up
another piled plate of food and handed it over to Nate’s
winikin, Carlos, who walked it over to
Lucius. Balancing the plate on his knee, Lucius said, “Before you
get started, I need to get something out there.” He paused, looking
grim. “The moment I saw that firebird, I remembered something from
when I was the makol, something I’d
been blocking, or that got lost in the fucked-up parts of my head.”
He paused, took a breath. “I don’t know whether he meant to or not,
but Cizin gave me a glimpse inside him, showing me the plans of the
Banol Kax. In short, they haven’t just
captured the true sun god. They’re planning to sacrifice it during
the solstice, and put Akhenaton in its place.”
Seeing half a day’s
work headed swiftly down the drain, Jade shot him a sour look. “It
would’ve been nice if you’d woken up and shared that little nugget
before I put six hours into convincing
myself that we really saw Kinich Ahau and Akhenaton down there, and
that it wasn’t a barrier vision like the one Sasha had—you know,
the one with the same black dogs in it?”
“That wasn’t a
vision; that was Xibalba,” Lucius said. “And those weren’t just any
dogs; they were the companions, the sun god’s protectors. They
meet—or used to meet—Kinich Ahau at the night horizon each dusk,
and escort the sun safely through the trials of the underworld to
emerge from the dawn horizon each morning, and”—he made a circular,
continuing motion—“rinse, repeat.”
“Again, thanks for an
off-the-cuff summary of info I spent the morning digging up.” Jade
wasn’t annoyed, exactly. Just tired of being redundant. “Question
is: Why were the companions in Sasha’s vision? Were the gods or
ancestors trying to warn us that the sun god was in trouble even
back then?”
“Oh!” Sasha’s dark brown eyes went stark as the
color drained from her face.
“What is it?” Michael
asked immediately, tensing. As he often did, he was standing behind
her in a relaxed but fight-ready position, always on guard,
protecting his own. The sight sent a harmless pang of envy through
Jade, because he’d never done that for her.
Sasha twined her
fingers together in her lap as she answered, “There’s that last
part of the triad prophecy, the part I never fulfilled about
finding the lost son. . . . What if instead of telling me to ‘find
the lost son,’ spelled ‘s-o-n,’ what if it was really supposed to
be ‘s-u-n’? That could be why I saw the companions in my vision
last year. The gods were trying to tell me to look for the lost
sun!” She looked stricken. “If I’d figured it out then, we could’ve
been planning a rescue all this time.”
The winikin and magi were silent for a long moment.
Jade started to speak, but caught Shandi’s don’t draw attention look and
subsided.
“Jade?” Strike said,
glancing at Shandi. “Did you have something to add?”
“I was going to point
out that . . . well, if we can free Kinich Ahau from Xibalba, we’ll
have access to a god again.” Jade glanced at Sasha. “And if we’re
thinking that the triad prophecy foretold a link between the sun
and Sasha, we could even gain a Godkeeper.”
Sasha went wide-eyed,
but didn’t knee-jerk a denial. After a moment she said softly, “We
don’t know that I’d be the god’s chosen. The prophecy said I was
supposed to find the lost sun, but I didn’t.”
“You were the first
of us to see the companions,” Jade countered.
“True. Except that
one, they were in a vision; two, they attacked me; and three,
Michael killed them, or at least their vision-selves. You and
Lucius are the ones they defended. And you’re the ones who found
the lost sun.”
Jade snorted. “Right.
I’m a daughter of the gods,” she said, referring to the first part
of the prophecy. She glanced at Lucius, expecting to see an
answering gleam of mirth . . . but he wasn’t laughing. None of them
were. They were all looking at her speculatively, with an intensity
that sent two opposing thoughts shooting through her brain:
Oh, hell no, coupled with, What if?
“What if . . .”
Lucius began as though echoing her thoughts, then paused a moment
before continuing. “What if the prophecy was, let’s say,
interrupted? What if the original child of prophecy became
unsuitable for the full foretelling?”
Michael shifted and
sent him a narrow look. “Don’t be a pussy. Say it.”
In the past, Lucius
might have—probably would have—backed down or turned things aside
with a joke. Now he met the other man’s glare. “Fine. What if
becoming your fiancée—and functionally your mate—has made Sasha
unsuitable to be a Godkeeper? You and she balance each other out as
the ch’ulel and Mictlan, life versus
death. Giving her more power as a Godkeeper could tip that balance
. . . or it could increase your magic to an equal degree. It’s
possible that some power source—if not the sky gods, then maybe
even the doctrine of balance itself—doesn’t want to put so much
power into a single couple.”
Jade’s throat went
tight and strange as her mind jumped from Lucius’s hypothesis to
its corollary—namely that she might have become the focus of the
prophecy when Sasha became unsuitable as a Godkeeper. She didn’t
look at Shandi, didn’t need to. She knew what the winikin would say: Don’t
overreach yourself, Jade. You’re just a
harvester.
Swallowing hard, she
pointed out, “The doctrine of balance isn’t an entity; it doesn’t
have opinions.” As far as they knew, the doctrine, which was
routinely mentioned in the archive but never really defined, was
more a pattern of thought, the belief among their ancestors that
the universe was not only cyclical, but sought balance within those
cycles.
“Maybe, maybe not,”
Lucius replied elliptically, his gaze catching and holding hers,
making her, for a moment, feel like they were the only two people
in the room. “But it sure seems as though you and I may have
inherited the last part of the triad prophecy.”