CHAPTER ELEVEN
Skywatch
The morning after
Shandi upended Jade’s childhood dreams of the parents she’d never
known, Jade took the new information straight to the king, who
called an all-hands-on-deck meeting to discuss the new info and
what—if anything—it might mean in terms of accessing the library.
Which meant that Jade was yet again going to be the focus of
attention, when she would far rather have sat in the back and
blended.
Intellectually, she
knew it shouldn’t matter that she was fifty percent star blood. She
wore the mark of a harvester, had the talent of one, and there was
no shame in either of those things. Similarly, it wasn’t critical
that her parents hadn’t been the people she’d imagined them to be.
That didn’t change who she was or what she could do. But as she
headed for the great room, the churning in her stomach warned her
that the prior night’s crying jag might have left her scratchy eyed
and headachy, but it had been far from cathartic.
She was still pissed
that Shandi had let her believe a lie for so long, and borderline
ashamed of what her mother had done. Who was to say that Vennie’s
actions hadn’t played a part in what Lucius was dealing with now?
Her death might have upset the balance or the mechanics of the
Prophet’s spell somehow, or . . . Don’t, she told herself as she stepped through the
arched doorway that opened from the mages’ wing to the great room.
You’ll only make yourself crazy. So she
pushed her emotions down deep and told herself not to dwell on the
feelings. Just the facts,
ma’am.
She scanned the room
in search of a seat—or at least that was what she told herself she
was doing. But when her eyes immediately locked on Lucius and a
flush heated her skin, the inner lie was obvious. She’d been
looking for him, had needed to know he was there. Although things
were far from settled between them, she knew he was on her side, in
this at least.
He looked well rested
and less hollow- cheeked than the night before, and was wearing
jeans, a navy rodeo-logo tee, and the heavy black boots he seemed
to have started wearing in place of his former choice of rope
sandals or skids. He was sitting down in the conversation pit with
the magi; he’d saved her a seat beside him, like they used to do
for each other, back before things got complicated between them.
And although he’d been deep in conversation with Sasha, he turned
to look at Jade as though he’d felt her eyes on him.
When their gazes
connected, the churning in her stomach went to flutters. Worse, she
had to suppress an urge to tug at the too- large sweatshirt she was
wearing over old, worn jeans and a loose tee. They were her comfort
clothes, the ones she wore when she was tired, PMSing, or otherwise
needed a proxied hug. It had been the only outfit she could stand
to drag on that morning, but now she wished she’d dressed with more
care . . . and then cursed herself for wishing. She wasn’t trying
to impress him, damn it.
Covering the scowl
that threatened to form, she took the seat beside him on the theory
that it was better to sit there than to have to explain why she
didn’t. She kept a careful distance, though, and told herself that
the soft flush of warmth that touched her skin was nothing more
than body heat. Physics, not chemistry.
Evidently seeing the
dark circles beneath her heavier-than-usual makeup—and apparently
not needing to keep his distance in order to maintain his sexual
sanity, damn him—he frowned and leaned in to ask in a low rasp,
“What’s wrong?”
Nothing, she started to say, when the answer was
really: Everything.
Before she could
answer, though, Strike and Leah came through the archway leading to
the royal quarters, and the king did the okay,
we’re all here; let’s get started thing. When the crowd
settled, Strike said, “Before we talk about the possible scenarios
for rescuing Kinich Ahau, Jade has some new info for us.” He
gestured in her direction. “Go ahead. You’ve got the
floor.”
If she’d been a
different person, she might have found a way to soften the
delivery. Since she was who she was, though, she went with the
naked truth. “We have good reason to believe that the dead woman in
the library was my mother.”
A ripple of shock ran
through the room. Beside her, Lucius sucked in a breath. She could
guess the questions that must be racing through his overactive
brain. Are you sure? Why was she in there?
What does it mean?
“Shandi came to me
last night . . .” she began, and repeated what she’d told Strike
earlier. Shandi herself wasn’t available for questions, or even to
nod encouragement; she had locked herself in her suite, pleading a
headache. Wish I could’ve done that,
Jade thought wistfully, as she finished, “So, for better or worse,
it all fits. She would’ve had access to the Prophet’s spell via her
bloodline. Thinking that she was supposed to be the last of the
Prophets, she enacted the spell. But it misfired somehow, putting
her in the same sort of position Lucius is in now.” She spread her
hands. “I don’t know how this will help us, or even if it will. But
I thought everyone should know.”
There was a long
moment of stunned—or perhaps merely thoughtful?—silence. Then
Strike said, “Since she wrote about being able to enter the library
twice, with the third time being the trap, she must’ve come back to
this plane.” He glanced up to the breakfast bar to ask Jox, “You
said you don’t remember seeing her in those last three
days?”
The royal
winikin shook his head. “None of us
did—at least, not that we can remember.” The other winikin made various apologetic motions as Jox
continued. “Not to mention that Vennie wasn’t exactly subtle. If
she was around, you knew it. And if she had discovered something
that would’ve impacted the attack, she would’ve made sure everyone
heard about it, and knew where it’d come from.” He tipped his head
in Jade’s direction. “No offense.”
“None taken,” Jade
said with absolute sincerity. “I am not my mother, and vice versa.
Despite what the writs say about ‘what has happened before will
happen again,’ I’m not the sort of person who acts on impulse. You
can count on that.”
“Flames and dead,
staring eyes,” Lucius said abruptly, in a total non
sequitur.
A chill touched the
back of Jade’s neck. She turned to him and found him gaunt faced,
his expression turned inward. “What?”
“It was in the middle
of the journal, where the handwriting was really tough to read, and
what I could read was all jumbled up; she kept talking about flames
and dead, staring eyes. She used those same words over and over
again. I was assuming she was dazed when she wrote it, maybe
confused from the transition.” He paused, locking his eyes with
hers. “What if she wasn’t confused? What if she saw exactly what
she described?”
Jade’s stomach headed
for her toes. “Oh, gods.”
Lucius continued. “I
felt like I was only in the library for a couple of hours, but I
lost most of a day out here. She was a full mage, so she was
probably able to stay in there longer than me. Maybe she came out
once to rest someplace safe, like you were saying, then went back
in, maybe because she hadn’t found what she was looking for. By the
time she found what she was looking for, came back out of the
library, and headed for the mansion . . . What if she was already
too late? What if Scarred-Jaguar’s attack—and the Solstice
Massacre—was already over?”
Flames and dead, staring eyes, Jade thought, and
shuddered, her heart twisting in her chest.
When Scarred-Jaguar
led the magi to war, hundreds of children and their winikin had gathered in the big rec hall. That was
where the Banol Kax had found them. And
killed them. The next day, when Jox had emerged from hiding with
Strike and Anna, he had found bodies everywhere: stacked in the rec
hall, cut down mid-flight, some even dead in Jeeps headed away from
the compound. Every Nightkeeper child over the age of three, and
their attending winikin, had been
killed, as had all the adults involved in the attack. Only the
babies and their winikin had survived,
a scant two dozen left to fight against the end-time
war.
“If she saw the
bodies, she must have come back that night,” Jox said, his voice
ragged, his eyes dark and hollow. “I burned the bodies the next
day. I didn’t see Vennie.” He looked at Jade, stricken. “I would
have seen her if she’d still been there. I would’ve stopped her
from going back into the library.”
Up at the breakfast
bar, silent tears trickled down the cheeks of several of the
winikin. They had survived because they
had fled the scene with infant charges who had been too young to
have forged their first connections to the magic, thus rendering
them invisible to the minions of the Banol
Kax. But whereas those children had all—with the exception
of Strike and Anna—been too young to remember the carnage, the
winikin didn’t have that
luxury.
It struck Jade
suddenly that they were a week away from the massacre’s
twenty-sixth anniversary.
“She must’ve
panicked,” Lucius said. “Maybe she ran back to wherever she’d been
hiding and put herself into the library because it seemed safer
there. Then, once she’d pulled herself together and tried to get
out, she realized that she couldn’t.” He swallowed hard. It was one
of the few outward signs of the revulsion Jade knew he had to be
feeling. He’d been trapped in his own skull, and in the in-between.
She could only imagine what he would do to avoid being trapped
permanently in the barrier, library or no library. His voice rasped
as he said, “Question is, if she came out of the library to rest,
but nobody saw her, where was she?”
Strike’s head came
up. “You’re thinking she may have left some clues wherever she was
hiding? Maybe something that could help you get back into the
library?”
“I’m not usually that
lucky,” Lucius observed dryly, “but it’s a
possibility.”
“Too bad Rabbit offed
the three-question nahwal ,” Brandt put
in, earning him a sharp look from Patience.
“I’ll ask Shandi,”
Jade said. “Of all of us, she knew Vennie best. Maybe she’ll be
able to guess where . . .” She trailed off as Brandt’s comment
struck a chord, resonating against a connection that had almost,
but not quite, formed in her brain the previous night. Something
about the . . . “Oh,” she said dully. “Oh, gods. It was her.
Vennie.”
Beside her, Lucius
stiffened. “Who? Where?”
She closed her eyes,
feeling idiotic as the pieces clicked together. She should have
figured it out sooner, probably would have if she hadn’t been so
focused on so many other things. “The other night, as you were
being transported into the library, I was pulled along too, only I
wound up in the barrier itself. I think the library magic must’ve
weakened the barrier enough that my nahwal could call me through, and then boot me
again when it was done with me.” She held up a hand when Lucius
drew breath to interject. “I know, I should’ve said something
sooner. And I would have if I thought it had anything to do with
Kinich Ahau or the library. But I didn’t. Not until just now, when
Brandt mentioned the nahwal . . . and I
realized what had been bothering me since last night.” She paused,
shaking her head as the impossible began to seem frighteningly
possible. “The nahwal was acting very
strangely. I didn’t understand it at the time. Now, though, I think
I do.” She looked over at Strike. “It was acting like my
mother.”
Her thoughts raced as
she tried to remember the exchange, word for word, gesture for
gesture. She described how the nahwal
had alternated from a normal form that had transmitted the “duty
and diligence” tenets of the harvesters, to a more feminized
version that had talked about Jade finding her own path and
maximizing her strengths, even if they led her away from the
harvesters’ paradigm. “It was just what I would expect Vennie to
have said, based on what Shandi told me about her resenting the
harvesters’ limitations. If I’d seen that sort of behavior in a
patient, I would’ve taken a serious look at schizophrenia. But in a
nahwal?” She turned her palms up. “I
know that technically she shouldn’t play much of a part in the
collective of the harvester nahwal,
given that she’s a married-in, and her priorities weren’t aligned
with theirs. She should be . . . outvoted, I guess you should say.
Except she wasn’t. She was there.”
The more she thought
about it, the more convinced she became. And the more confused, not
by the logic, but by her own response. She felt . . .
numb.
“It’s not out of the
realm,” Strike allowed. “The jaguar nahwal wears Scarred-Jaguar’s earring and has some
of his traits.” She noticed he didn’t say “my father,” and wondered
why.
Lucius said slowly,
“What if the bloodline nahwal are
morphing as the end-time gets nearer? The dominant personalities
could be moving to the forefront and taking over because they’re
stronger, have the closest ties to the survivors, or have the most
pressing need to speak with their descendants.”
Jade imagined more
than a few of the others were thinking, Why
her? Why not me? She didn’t have an answer for that one,
except that maybe Vennie had urgently needed—wanted—to talk to
her.
Why did that feel
like too little, too late? She’d never met her mother, didn’t have
a relationship with her beyond shared DNA. But then again, if she
couldn’t judge Vennie, who could? Shandi? The king?
Suddenly Lucius sat
up, his face reflecting a lightbulb moment. “What if the
nahwal are gaining personal
characteristics in preparation for the Triad spell?”
The room went dead
silent.
Legend held that in
times of the most acute need, the Nightkeepers would gain the
ability to enact a spell that would call on the gods to choose
three Nightkeeper magi: the Triad. Once chosen, the three would be
given the ability to channel all of their ancestors, not just the
wisdom contained within the nahwal, but
also their personalities, and, most of all, their magical talents.
In the space of a single spell, three of the Nightkeepers would
become superbeings. But that was the good news. The bad news was
that—historically, anyway—the Triad spell had an attrition rate of
two-thirds.
Only one Triad had
been called previously, back at the end of the first millennium
A.D., when a rogue group of Nightkeepers had splintered off, allied
themselves with the king of a Mayan city-state that controlled a
potent ceremonial site, and called six Banol
Kax through the barrier to the Earth. The dark magi, who
later took to calling themselves the Order of Xibalba, had wanted
to control the empire; instead, unable to rein in the creatures
they had summoned, they changed civilization forever. Modern
archaeologists still puzzled over why the population of the Mayan
empire had crashed abruptly in the late ninth century, with entire
cities abandoned seemingly overnight. The theories usually touched
on plague, drought, and warfare, with the artifactual evidence to
back them up. But that told only a small part of the story; in the
larger realm, each of those catastrophic breakdowns of civilization
had been wrought by the six Banol Kax,
which had run amok in Mesoamerica while the Nightkeepers fought to
force them back to the underworld, where they
belonged.
In the end, in the
most extreme of exigencies, the gods had sent the Triad spell to
King One-Boar, who had searched his soul . . . and enacted it.
One-Boar was chosen, along with his brother, Boar Tusk, and
One-Boar’s only child, a girl barely out of her teens. Boar Tusk
died almost instantly; One-Boar went mad from the voices inside his
head . . . and the girl survived. Wielding the talents and
knowledge of her forebears, she rallied the Nightkeepers and used
dire magic to drive the Banol Kax back
to Xibalba. In the aftermath, with the males of the royal branch of
the peccary bloodline gone, One-Boar’s daughter married into the
jaguars, who became the Nightkeepers’ new ruling bloodline. She
ruled well, died an old woman, and time passed without a Triad . .
. but a single fragmentary codex reference decreed that the
Nightkeepers were supposed to call a Triad during the third year
prior to the zero date. If they didn’t, the end-time was
screwed.
They were almost
halfway through the year in question. And they didn’t have the
spell needed to call the Triad.
“Which means,” Lucius
said, making it sound like he was answering a question, though
nobody had spoken, “that we need the Triad spell.” He turned to
Jade. “But there’s a problem.”
Only one? she thought, a bubble of half-hysterical
laughter lodging in her throat. But she knew what he meant. “If I
can reach my nahwal and Vennie can take
over again, she could tell us how to get you back into the library,
or at least where to look for information here on earth. But in
order for me to reach my nahwal, you
need to invoke the library magic so I can follow you into the
barrier.” Maybe. There were a lot of ifs there.
“We sure as hell
can’t wait for the solstice,” Strike said bluntly. He wasn’t
looking at Jade or Lucius, but the message was clear. What wasn’t
nearly so clear was what Jade’s response should be.
Before, she’d
volunteered for booty duty because it had seemed like her best
chance of contributing, and because, well, it was Lucius they were
talking about. But the sex magic had come with an unnerving level
of intensity. Then there was the nahwal’s words, which too closely paralleled her
own experiences. Vennie had urged her not to let emotion weaken
her. Should she listen to the nahwal
and focus on her own magic instead? She didn’t know. And because
she didn’t know, she found herself far too aware of Lucius as the
meeting continued. She was acutely sensitive to each of his
breaths, to every shift of his body. Her peripheral vision showed
the bunch and flow of muscles beneath his jeans and tee, and her
mind replayed the sight of him naked against her, atop her, lit by
the art of her ancestors. Although she told herself to concentrate
on what was being said, she was far more aware of what was going on
inside her as desire heated and built, and her body readied itself
for something her mind told her she should walk away
from.
But which part of her
should she listen to? Did she even have a right to make a choice
when so much was riding on her and Lucius’s getting back into the
barrier before the solstice?
The meeting lasted
well past afternoon, as the magi and winikin brainstormed various plans to get into
Xibalba and rescue Kinich Ahau, all of which hinged on the magi
finding a way to get into—and, more important, back out of—the
underworld. The winikin—including
Shandi, who reappeared quietly and shook off both questions and
concern—dished out pasta and drinks, and the group worked through
dinner and up to the late-summer dusk, which turned the sky
bloodred. Finally, Strike called it a day and dismissed the
meeting, which had covered a great deal and resolved almost
nothing.
The story of our lives, Jade thought as the magi
and winikin dispersed to their rooms
and tasks, very carefully not making a big deal of leaving her and
Lucius alone.
When they were gone,
she braced herself for Lucius’s anger; she hadn’t missed his
tension upon learning that she’d gone into the barrier alone,
without sufficient magic to get back out on her own, and hadn’t
told anyone. But that was her prerogative; it had been her
nahwal , her message. And she’d
revealed it the moment it became clear that it related to Vennie
and the library.
Bracing herself, she
turned to him. “I didn’t—” She didn’t get any further; her words
were muffled by his hard, solid shoulder as he hauled her into his
arms. For half a second she stiffened, thinking he was presuming
far too much, far too publicly. But then she realized it wasn’t a
sexual overture, not really.
He was, quite simply,
holding her.
“I wish you’d woken
me up last night and told me what was going on,” he said into her
hair. “I don’t like thinking of you dealing with all that shit
alone.”
“I—” She had to
swallow against an unexpected and inexplicable sob. “I had
Shandi.”
“Like I said. Dealing
with it alone.”
Finding too much
comfort in the embrace, she tried to push away. “I can handle
myself.”
He wouldn’t let her
push. “I know you can. But you shouldn’t always have to.” He
paused. “If you don’t want to lean on me as your lover, lean on me
as your friend. I’ve always been that, even when we weren’t really
talking to each other.”
She sagged against
him, defeated. “Shit. You played the friend card.”
“My mama never called
me stupid.” He hugged her hard and eased away, so he was looking
down at her when he said, “Granted, she babied me, told me I was
fragile, and made me carry an inhaler I’m not sure I ever needed.
Then, when my dad couldn’t figure out what to do with me, sitting
inside with my nose in a book, she told him I was lucky I got her
brains, because my body wasn’t ever going to amount to
much.”
Jade frowned at him,
trying not to notice how right it felt to be in his loose embrace,
with her half on his lap as they cuddled together on the couch, the
mansion gone conveniently empty and quiet around them. “Your
point?”
“Family is the luck
of the draw. It might not seem fair that your winikin is less than warm and fuzzy, or that after
all this time you find out that your parents were younger than you
thought, and your mother made some decisions that don’t seem
compatible with the responsibilities of a mother, though that might
depend on your interpretation of the writs. But fair or not, that’s
the family—or at least the family history—that you’ve got. Question
is, what are you going to do about it?”
She broke eye
contact. “I don’t know. Do I have to do anything? I am who I am,
you know? Learning all that stuff about my mother doesn’t change
the fact that I’m a harvester who wears the scribe’s mark but
doesn’t have the talent to go with it. Except . . .” She brought
her eyes back up to his. “As I came out of the barrier, it was like
I could see the magic, the layers of it, and the inner structure of
the spell. But I haven’t been able to access the power since then.
I’m sure the nahwal did something to
help me find a piece of my talent . . . but what if the sex magic
was part of it too?”
His eyes darkened. “I
hate knowing that you got pulled into the barrier like
that.”
“If we can make it
happen again, I can ask her about the library.” Though the prospect
was more than a little unnerving. Like meeting her mother again for
the first time. What should she say? What would the nahwal do? Could she even find her way back there?
Would it be worth it?
For the ability to do
magic like the glimpse she’d been shown . . . yes.
“I don’t want any of
it to happen again,” Lucius rasped, but they both knew that wasn’t
the right and proper answer. “Damn it,” he muttered. “This should
be easier.”
“We can make it be,”
she said firmly, though she wasn’t quite so sure about that
anymore.
His expression
flattened for a moment, but then he nodded and rose to his feet,
drawing her up with him and then stepping away. When they were
standing facing each other, he held out his hand, turning it so his
palm was painted bloodred by the dusk, slashed through with a
shadow-scar. “Come home with me tonight?” he asked
softly.
On one level, she
wanted him to say something about wanting her outside of the magic
and the greater good, that what was between them was real and not a
by-product of the situation and the need. On another level, she was
relieved that he didn’t, because she wanted it too
much.
She took his hand and
said simply, “Yes.”
Her blood burned as
he led her out into the night, went to flame as they undressed each
other in his cottage, staying out in the main room because bedrooms
were too intimate. They left the lights off and came together in
the red darkness, in a clash of lips and tongues, inciting caresses
and hard, hot bodies slicked with sweat.
The sex was fast and
greedy, almost animalistic. It left her limp and wrung-out, and
filled with inner fire as she clung to him and tried not to need.
It was amazing, staggering, mind-blowing . . . but it wasn’t
magic.