CHAPTER TWELVE
June 15
Two years, six months, and six days to the zero date
Two years, six months, and six days to the zero date
Patience didn’t hear
the king coming. Walking soft-footed on the rope sandals many of
the male magi favored for at-home wear, he appeared around the
corner, headed full-steam along the hallway leading to the royal
quarters.
When he saw her, he
stopped. “Were you looking for me?” But although his words were
neutral enough, his expression was wary. He knew why she was there,
all right. But how could he blame her? She wasn’t just a mage. She
was a mother too.
“I need to see Harry
and Braden,” she said without preamble. “I’ll take whatever blood
vows you demand. I’ll make myself invisible; they won’t even know
I’m there. I just . . . I have to see them.”
The king didn’t
answer for a moment, just stared into her eyes, and she fleetingly
wondered whether he’d somehow gained the powers of a mind-bender,
because it was almost as if he were trying to see inside her, and
find . . . what? She would’ve given it to him if she knew what he
was looking for. She’d give anything to see her
babies.
“Why?” he finally
asked, then clarified, “I mean, I know why you want to see them:
You’re their mom, and it’s been more than a year, and the situation
sucks royal donkey dick. I get that. I mean why now, specifically?
Has something happened?”
For a half second,
she wondered whether he was asking her to give him an excuse to
ignore his better judgment and the council’s recommendation. He’d
gone against the thirteenth prophecy by taking Leah as his queen
rather than sacrificing her to the gods, based on having seen her
in his dreams. He believed in the power of visions, even when the
mage having them wasn’t a seer. If she told him she’d dreamed of
the boys, and sold it hard enough, he’d give her what she
wanted.
It would be a lie,
though. She’d dreamed of them—of course she had; she was their
mother, damn it. But the dreams were
always normal, garden- variety agglomerations of daily experiences,
vague fears, and the grind of a life that had seemed so exciting
when she’d first arrived at Skywatch, but over time had become
rote, routine, and so very lonely. She missed her boys, missed her
winikin, Hannah. And she missed the man
Brandt had been when his winikin,
Woody, had been around to keep him from taking himself too
seriously. Without the boys and winikin, she and Brandt had drifted, badly. But
none of that, she knew, would be enough to sway the
king.
“I’m miserable,” she
said simply. “I’m not sleeping, I’m not eating, and I feel like
crap. Worse, my magic is for shit. I can hardly boost Brandt past a
trickle anymore, and vice versa.” She paused hopefully, but
Strike’s face had gone neutral. She continued. “I tried
antidepressants, but they killed what was left of my powers, which
is no good. I’ve talked to Jade in therapist mode; I changed my
diet, worked out, used the shooting range, practiced a shit-ton of
hand-to-hand, had sex with my husband . . . all the tricks she
suggested to break out of depression. And maybe they helped for a
little bit, but not long. I want, I need, to see my boys. Please. I’m begging you. Just
tell me where they are, or have Hannah and Woody bring them
someplace random, where nobody would think to look. I just want to
see them. Then I’ll be okay. I’m sure of it.”
The king didn’t say
anything for a long moment. Then he said simply, “Is your own
happiness worth their lives?”
The oxygen vacated
Patience’s lungs, leaving her trying to breathe around an empty
space in her chest. She’d thought she’d braced herself for the
question. She’d been wrong. Somehow, hearing it in Brandt’s
too-reasonable, too-serious tones had just put her back up and made
her think, You’re wrong; it’s not like that.
It’s not an either/or question. But somehow, facing her
king, she couldn’t be so sure.
Still, she pushed
onward. “There’s been no sign of Iago in months; he’s either dead
or he’s trying to assimilate Moctezuma’s spirit. With him out of
commission, the Xibalbans haven’t done a damn thing. For all we
know, all of the red-robes died in Paxil Mountain when Michael
unleashed his death magic. If that’s the case, then it’s a good bet
the gray-robes have disbanded, or at the very least that they’re
disorganized and blind without their magic users. Given that, don’t
you think we could come up with a safe way for me to see the
twins?” Or, even better, bring them
home? She didn’t say that last part, though. One important
lesson she’d learned over the past two years was that in some wars
it was possible to fight only one battle at a time. Looking at the
whole thing at once was too damned daunting.
“Even if Iago and the
Xibalbans are out of the picture for the moment—and I’m not
convinced they are—then we still have the Banol Kax to consider,” Strike pointed
out.
Her pulse sped up a
notch. “I am considering them. That’s
why I need to do this now. The Banol
Kax haven’t been able to reach the earth plane recently
because Iago closed the hellroad and hid it in the barrier, right?
That should mean they can’t perceive us up here, that they don’t
know what’s going on. If Lucius manages to find the hellroad and we
get it open to rescue the sun god, there’s no guarantee we’ll be
able to close it again. So I need to do this now, before we make
any sort of move on the hellmouth.”
“Damn it, Patience.”
The angry words came not from the king, but from behind her. In her
husband’s voice. “I thought we agreed to wait on this . . . and to
put it in front of the royal council, officially, and together.”
She closed her eyes
on a spasm of the grinding, wrenching, nausea-inducing pain in her
stomach that made her want to cross her arms over herself and moan.
She didn’t, though, because that would accomplish exactly nothing.
Back during the early days of their marriage, Brandt had loved it
when she played girl and leaned on him, needed him. These days,
though, he took any sign of weakness as an excuse to take over and
start making unilateral decisions, pushing her aside.
She didn’t know if
his Borg- like assimilation into the Nightkeeper ways was what had
caused him to put his responsibilities to his family behind his
duties to the magi and the end-time war, as demanded by the writs.
Maybe the magic itself had changed him, making him harder and
uncompromising, or maybe he’d always been that way and she hadn’t
noticed because their needs had coincided rather than clashed.
Whatever the cause, the small disagreements had snowballed, then
avalanched, until she barely knew him anymore.
“You agreed to that. I just didn’t argue,” she said
softly, still facing away from him. Then, avoiding Strike’s eyes
because she didn’t want to see the sympathy she knew was in his
expression, she turned to face her husband. Her heart clutched a
little at the frustrated anger in his gorgeous brown eyes and
model-perfect face, the lines of tension in his big
body.
Despite everything
they’d been through lately, she still felt a gut-deep kick of
desire, and heard a faint, egotistical whisper of, The other girls can eat their hearts out. He’s
mine. That was pretty much the first thing she’d said to him
six years earlier, when she’d awakened beside him in a Cancún hotel
room in the midst of spring break. Her brain had been full of
disconnected images of the previous night’s hard partying, her bed
had been full of gorgeous guy, and both their forearms had been
marked with what they had thought at the time were tattoos of Mayan
glyphs, but had later proved to be so much more. It was that
more that was screwing them up now, she
thought. Or maybe they’d been doomed from the start, and it’d taken
them this long to figure it out.
She waited for his
eyes to soften, waited to see some of the old wonder in them, the
look that had made her believe he was just as awed as she was by
what they’d found. But he stayed annoyed. More than that, he looked
hurt, which was ridiculous. He’d been the first one to suggest
sending the twins away, after all. She’d initially believed it had
been Strike’s idea, but Brandt had later confessed that it had been
his. He might’ve thought knowing that would help her resign herself
to the separation. He’d been wrong.
Looking past her, he
said to Strike, “Sorry. I thought we’d settled this.”
“Don’t apologize for
me,” she snapped, anger rising. “You don’t own me, and you don’t
speak for me.”
“Clearly.” He moved
up beside her, still looking at Strike. That forced her to turn, as
well, so she and Brandt wound up standing shoulder-to-shoulder,
facing their king. But although the shift created an illusion of
their joining forces against a common enemy, she knew that was far
from the case. She was on her own in this one, not part of a team
anymore.
“I want to hook you
up and let you visit,” Strike said. “And gods know I’d love to
bring them back here, not just for you guys, but so Hannah and
Woody could come back, too, and because we all enjoyed having the
kids around. But at the same time, I’m not willing to bet that the
Xibalbans are out of the equation, not the way you’re proposing.
Similarly, I can’t rule out the Banol
Kax. They don’t seem to be able to get through the barrier
right now . . . but is that a reality, or is that what they want us
to think? Not to mention that they may still be able to punch
through the barrier to create an ajaw-makol, even if they’re unable to pass through
themselves.”
Patience gave him
credit for talking to her rather than Brandt. She probably
shouldn’t have been mildly surprised—Strike was gender-blind when
it came to warrior stuff, assigning duties based on skill rather
than sex. And she had a feeling that Leah had likely cured him of
any residual chauvinism that might have come from his being raised
in the human environment, by a royal winikin who was firmly entrenched in the
Nightkeepers’ patriarchal, male-dominated society. The queen had
managed to maintain her individuality without losing her mate’s
regard. Patience envied that.
“I know it’s a risk,”
she said now, softly, “but aren’t we all taking calculated risks
these days? And let’s be honest—we may not have lost the war yet,
but we’re not winning it yet, either.” She took a deep breath, only
to find that the air carried a hint of the aftershave she’d bought
her husband for the wayeb festival—the
Nightkeepers’ nod at a Christmas-type holiday. Not letting herself
dwell on the scent, or the low churn it brought to her midsection,
she said, “I don’t know whether we’re going to win or lose this
war, but either way, I know for certain that I don’t want to spend
my next—maybe my last—two and a half years separated from my sons.
I’ve already lost a year with them. I’m asking you . . . I’m
begging you. Let me at least see them. Just a glimpse. That’s
all.”
She paused. To her
astonishment, Brandt reached over and took her hand, squeezing
tightly. She thought his fingers might even have trembled a little,
letting her know that he cared far more than she’d realized. Tears
stung her eyes, but she wouldn’t let them fall. She was a warrior,
after all.
Sighing heavily,
Strike shook his head. “I hope you both know how much I wish I
could authorize a visit. The council has brainstormed some options,
even, but we just can’t see a way to absolutely protect Harry and
Braden while giving you access. They don’t have their bloodline
marks and they’re not connected to the barrier. Which means that as
long as we don’t contact them, and vice versa, there’s no way for
the Xibalbans or Banol Kax to find
them. They’re absolutely safe.” The king paused, looking suddenly
far older than his thirtysomething years. “This is one of those
times when I have to be the bad guy. As much as I understand how
awful this is for you, I have to do what I think is
best.”
Patience’s mouth
dried to dust, and dull anger kindled in her chest, making it hard
to breathe. “You have no idea what I’m
going through. None of you do. Or have you lost track of the fact
that Brandt and I are the only ones here who are actually married,
not just jun tan mates, and we’re the
only ones who are parents?”
“The winikin—” Strike began.
“The winikin raised us, but they’re not our parents.
There’s a difference.”
“Not to some of them,
there isn’t.” But Strike didn’t meet her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m not
going to tell you where they are, and I’m not going to arrange a
meeting, or even an invisibility-cloaked look-see. I want you to
stay away from them. Let Hannah and Woody do their jobs while you
do yours.” He fixed her with a stern look and reached for his belt,
where he wore his father’s ceremonial knife. “I want you to swear
to me, on your—”
The normal-size door
inset into the heavily carved ceremonial panels guarding the royal
suite swung open and Leah stuck her head through, interrupting
with, “There you are! Hurry up, will you?”
Strike broke off and
swung around. “Did you get Anna on the line?”
“Yeah, but she’s
trying to escape. Better move your fine ass.” Leah’s attention
shifted from Strike to the others. “Unless you’re
busy?”
“We’re done here,”
Strike said, thoroughly distracted now. Brows furrowed, expression
suggesting he viewed the upcoming convo with his sister with both
anticipation and dread, he turned back, reached out, and gripped
Patience’s shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said for the second—or was it
the third?—time. “Be strong and do your best. That’s all any of us
can do.” Then, shooting Brandt what she strongly suspected was a
mated man’s look of commiseration, the king turned on his heel and
beat it for the royal suite. Moments later, the door swung shut at
his back, leaving Patience and Brandt out in the hall. Together.
Alone.
Before, what seemed
like an eternity ago but had been only a couple of years, they
might have taken the opportunity to sneak a few kisses, maybe more.
Now, although Brandt kept hold of her hand, he scowled down at her.
“What the hell was that?”
She bristled. “Excuse
me?”
“Please. You know
damn well you agreed to hold off on talking to the king.” But his
eyes softened and he caught her other hand, holding her still when
she would’ve shifted away. “We’re on the same side here,
sweetheart. I want what you want.”
I thought you did, once, but I feel like I don’t know you
anymore. I knew Brandt the man, not the White-Eagle mage.
The man had loved their sons to the exclusion of everything else
except her. The four of them had been a unit, a family. But he’d
changed since their arrival at Skywatch, which had been followed by
the revelation that they’d both been hiding their true natures,
pretending to be human when their respective godparents—aka
winikin—had raised them to be more. He
was harder now, and had lost the playfulness she’d loved about him.
And his sense of humor wasn’t the only thing that had disappeared;
so had her belief that he put his family first, no matter
what.
Even now, as he
looked at her, those damned gorgeous brown eyes were pleading with
her to play by the rules, to be part of the team. As far as she
could tell, that was the deal. If she behaved herself and bought
into the king’s paradigm, Brandt would be the guy he used to be.
She’d seen flashes of that man even recently, though he seemed
buried beneath the stifling weight of tradition, responsibility,
and Brandt’s unwavering belief that the king’s word was law . . .
to the point that she sometimes wondered whether he was using that
paradigm to hide something else. More secrets.
She thought she saw a
hint of those secrets now, as she looked into his eyes and tried to
find the frat rat she’d met on spring break, the architecture
student she’d married, or the man who’d been beside her as she’d
given birth to the twins. When she couldn’t find any of those safe,
familiar incarnations of her husband, she gently drew her hands
from his. “I’m sorry I disappointed you.” Rising up on her tiptoes,
she brushed her lips against his and felt tears sting as the
familiar heat rose at the touch, then subsided when she eased away.
“I’ve gotta go . . . you know. Do something.” She made a vague
gesture in the direction of the main mansion and fled, afraid that
if she said what was in her heart, she’d make things between them
far worse than they already were.
Jade pushed through
the keypadded archive door near midafternoon. Although she had
headed for the archive intending to run some additional searches on
the star bloodline, once she was there, she found that she wasn’t
in the mood for research. She was restless and churned up. Edgy.
Unsatisfied.
She prowled the outer
room of the three-room archive, which boasted book- filled shelves
on every available inch of wall space and a trio of computer
workstations on one side of the open space. On the other side was a
conference table where Jade—or, less frequently now, one of the
others—could spread out and work. The color scheme was neutral, and
the decor leaned heavily on functionality rather than beauty. The
general consensus among the Nightkeepers and winikin was that the archive was boring and could
use a face-lift. Jade, though, had refused to change things around.
What the others found boring, she found peaceful.
At least, she usually
did. Today she found it annoying.
There wasn’t even
anything particularly wrong to put her in a snippy mood, either; at
least, nothing new. That was the problem, though—she wanted to be somewhere new, wanted to do a
different job. But what? She didn’t want to be stuck in the
archive, didn’t want to be on the front lines. The work of a
spell-casting scribe would be ideal . . . if she could figure out
how the heck to use her talent. Sex magic apparently wasn’t the
answer. So what was?
Scowling, she picked
up the spell book she thought of as the Idiot’s Guide to Nightkeeper Magic: the one the
prepubescent mage children had used to learn their magic in the
years between their toddler-age bloodline ceremonies and their
pubertal talent ceremonies. This particular copy was worn and
smudged, and as she unfolded a dog-ear, her heart ached at the
thought of the mage child who had marked the page, which was at the
end of the last chapter, where the kids got their intro to the most
basic of talent-level spells.
Always before, she’d
focused her research farther back in time, trying to understand
what was happening now based on what had happened hundreds,
sometimes thousands of years ago. Now, though, her head filled with
thoughts of the generation before hers. Had her mother touched this
book? Her father? Had they been in class together, pretended not to
look at each other? She could even picture them playing eye tag
now, because that morning, when she had walk-of-shamed it—though
technically she supposed there was zero shame involved—back to her
suite from Lucius’s cottage, she had found an envelope slipped
beneath her door. She had guessed what it would contain, and had
opened it knowing it would only make some things harder than they
already were. Sure enough, Shandi had left photographs of her
mother and father, both separate and together.
Her father, Joshua,
had been tall and broad shouldered, though he hadn’t filled out yet
to the brawn of the typical full- blood. His face had been soft and
sweet, especially in the pictures where he and Vennie had posed
together. In those photos, though, he all but disappeared into the
background, eclipsed by Vennie’s bright, sharp effervescence. Jade
had suffered a pang at the thought of that shining, vivid teen
reduced to a desiccated corpse in the library, a nahwal in the barrier. A second pang had come when
she’d reached the bottom of the stack and found several pictures
that had included not just Joshua and Vennie, but also a
dark-haired, scowling baby who always seemed to be waving clenched
fists in the air. Oddly, Jade had felt the least connected to that
baby, who looked like she was ready to fight the
world.
Now, she traced a
finger over the glyph string of the fireball spell and its phonetic
translation below, and deliberately turned her mind away from her
parents. Instead, she imagined a rawboned, overlarge puppy of a
boy, poring over the spell book she held, looking for his first
taste of the loud, fiery destruction that fascinated men of all
ages. Or maybe it had been a girl of eleven or twelve, a little
rash, a little vain, daydreaming about becoming a warrior and
making a difference. The children wouldn’t have been able to
actually enact the spell, of course; fireball magic was reserved
for those with the warrior’s mark. But they would have practiced,
just in case. Talent sometimes broke through on its own schedule,
after all.
Telling herself she
was just practicing her translations, Jade ignored the phonetics
and read the simple spell straight from the glyph string, using the
techniques Anna had taught her at the university.
Nothing
happened.
It wasn’t until
disappointment spun through her that she admitted she’d been hoping
for . . . what? She wasn’t a warrior. She was a
scribe.
“At least, I’m
supposed to be,” she muttered, dropping the book on the conference
table and spinning to pace the suddenly small-feeling room. She
forced herself to bypass the keypadded door that led to the second
room of the archive, where the more valuable artifacts were tagged
and stored under ruthless climate control, and from there to the
inner archive, where the writs were displayed on the walls as a
tangible reminder of a Nightkeeper’s duties and responsibilities.
But it wasn’t the writs that drew her thoughts to the small sacred
room. “Damn it, Lucius.” It was his fault she was so edgy, his
fault she couldn’t settle to the work that usually soothed
her.
Okay, that wasn’t
strictly true either. He hadn’t done anything wrong; she had, or was in the process of doing so—getting
in over her head when she knew better,
damn it.
“You’re sleeping with
him.”
For half a second,
Jade thought that had come from her own subconscious, but her inner
monologue had never achieved a tone of such frosty disapproval.
Bracing herself against a fleeting wish that she’d locked the door,
she turned and nodded to Shandi. “Good morning to you
too.”
The winikin marched in, leaned back against the
conference table, folded her arms, and scowled. “Don’t change the
subject. You’re sleeping with him, as in, not just the once. You
stayed with him last night.”
Jade just stared at
her for a second. “Do you seriously want to do this?”
The winikin waited her out.
I don’t answer to you. You’re not my keeper. But
that was the human viewpoint, wasn’t it? The same wasn’t strictly
true within the Nightkeeper mores. The winikin didn’t just serve and protect their
Nightkeeper charges; they were also responsible for their morality
and service to their bloodline duties. Granted, there wasn’t any
sort of formal repercussion for a Nightkeeper who ignored,
disobeyed, or otherwise pissed off her winikin . . . but social pressure could be a real
bitch.
Breathing through her
nose to stem the knee-jerk irritation that came as much from her
own frustration as from Shandi, Jade said, “Last night was an
experiment. We needed to see whether the sex would trigger the
Prophet’s magic.” She paused. “Either that wasn’t the actual
trigger, which doesn’t make sense, given the sequence of events, or
the sex magic needed the boost of the new moon we had the other
night . . . which by extension would mean we can’t use sex magic to
put him into the library again until the solstice, which will be
too late to help Kinich Ahau.”
Shandi’s frown went
from a full- on scowl to a thoughtful expression. “If we’ve worked
out the time line correctly, which I think we have, then Vennie
made the transition into and out of the library at least twice over
the seventy-two hours leading up to the summer solstice of
’eighty-four. Those weren’t days of barrier activity, which means
there’s got to be another way to trigger the magic.”
“She used her mage
talent. He’s not a mage.”
Unfortunately, that
brought Shandi full circle and had her eyes narrowing. “No, he’s
not. Yet you’ve taken him as your lover again, despite what the
nahwal told you. Have you thought about
what this could do to your magic?”
What magic? Jade wanted to ask, but didn’t, because
it would disrespect both of them, not to mention the harvester
bloodline. It wasn’t anybody’s fault but her own that she couldn’t
figure out how to be a true scribe. And besides, that wasn’t what
this fight was about. “You mean because he’s human, and Vennie
found that her powers dropped to match those of a harvester after
she and Joshua were married.” Somehow it was easier to call them by
their first names. “But if you’re saying that my powers are going
to drop to those of a human—i.e., none—then you’re assuming that
Lucius and I will become a mated pair. Do you really believe that
was the gods’ intention?”
“I don’t believe your
parents were destined mates, yet they wound up wearing the
jun tan, and Vennie believed that her
magic had decreased to that of a harvester. Are you willing to risk
losing yours entirely?”
“Lucius can’t form
the jun tan; he wears the hellmark.”
Which was too easy an answer, given that Sasha and Michael were
clearly mates despite their lack of the formal mark. Jade exhaled,
shaking her head. “We’re not lovers. We’re just enjoying each
other.” But the words caught a little in her throat and she felt a
stir of the panic that had driven her to the archive and had her
pacing rather than working.
Last night might’ve
started hard and fast on the TV room floor, but after that first
time, when it had become clear that the sex magic wasn’t theirs to
invoke at will, they had transitioned to the bedroom without her
even realizing that the decision had been made and acted on. There,
the get off and get gone sex had
morphed to soft touches and sighs, and slow, easy lovemaking that
had gone way further than she’d meant to let it go. Then, this
morning, she’d woken up curled against him, her hand over his
heart, their legs twined together beneath the earth-toned quilt.
More, where she’d expected the morning-after conversation to be
uncomfortable, as both of them acknowledged they’d gotten in deeper
than they’d meant to, and needed to pull it back, he’d been pure
relaxed, satisfied male as he burned toast and made bad coffee
wearing nothing but jeans and a smile.
She’d kept waiting
for him to say something about how intense things had gotten. He
didn’t. He’d just given her a friendly kiss and a, “Later,” on her
way out the door, like they were just friends sharing damn good
sex.
It was what she had
wanted, what she had insisted on. So why did it make her want to
scream?
“I’ve never before
seen you ‘enjoy yourself’ with a man who didn’t make sense in the
context of your life,” Shandi pointed out. “This one doesn’t. He’s
different.”
That startled a
strangled laugh out of Jade. “Everything’s different. I’m different.”
“No, you’re not.
People don’t change, not that way. You’re just
confused.”
“You can say that
again.” Jade realized she was back to pacing , made herself stop.
Leaning back against the conference table beside her winikin, she scrubbed both hands across her face
and let out a sigh. “It’s like there are two different people
inside me. One wants to be a good girl, quiet and obedient, the
perfect harvester. The other just wants to make noise and blow shit
up.”
“It wasn’t arbitrary
that some bloodlines intermingled and some didn’t. There are traits
that just don’t mix well.”
“No kidding. I think
I’m starting to get an idea of what Rabbit’s going
through.”
“Don’t say that.” Shandi gripped Jade’s wrists and
yanked her hands down from where she’d been rubbing her eyes,
trying to massage the encroaching headache away. “You’re a full-
blood. Be proud of that if you’re proud of nothing else the
harvesters have to offer.”
Jade stared at the
raw, naked emotion on the face of a woman who didn’t do emotion,
and her inner counselor suddenly spoke up when it had gone silent
over the time away from her old world. Here’s
the way in, her instincts chimed. Follow it if you want to know her inner truth. She
hesitated fractionally, wondering whether she really wanted to
know, or if it would be better to let the winikin have her privacy. The Skywatch community
was too small for everyone to be tangled in one another’s business.
But then again, this wasn’t just business. It was her life. She and
Shandi were linked, despite whether either of them was happy with
the pairing.
Jade shifted within
the winikin’s grip, until they were
holding hands in a rare moment of physical contact. “Listen to me,
and please believe me. I’m proud of being a harvester. That’s one
of my biggest problems right now. I feel like I should be doing
more—my nahwal is telling me to be
more, for gods’ sake—but I know that’s not the harvester way. It’s
because of my respect for the bloodline, and for you, that I’m all
screwed up right now.” At least in part. Great sex, a guy who was
sticking to the friends-with-benefits arrangement she’d demanded,
and the threat of her inner Edda weren’t helping. But the
winikin’s stricken expression didn’t
ease, even with the reassurance. Confused, Jade gave their joined
hands a shake. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
The winikin’s voice broke. “Yesterday . . . all that
talk about the day of the massacre brought it back. Not that it’s
ever far away, but it was suddenly right there. They were there again, beside me, inside me.
They’re why I need . . . I need you to be perfect. I need to know
it was worth it.”
Jade nearly recoiled
from the pleading in the older woman’s face. I
can’t be perfect. Nobody can! But the counselor in her set
that aside, pushed it deep beneath the shell, and said, “You need
to know that what was worth
it?”
Shandi’s eyes were
wide and stark, not seeing the archive anymore. “Letting my husband
and son die.”
“Your—” Jade’s breath
left her in a rush. “Oh, Shandi.” Her heart twisted, shuddering in
her chest. “Oh, gods.” Oh,
shit.
The winikin chosen for binding to Nightkeeper children
typically didn’t marry or have children of their own, as their
first and foremost priority had to be their charges. There had been
exceptions, of course, but those families had, of necessity, been
loosely knit, with the children often raised crèche-style in
extended networks of relatives. The system had evolved over
generations and had been part of the fabric of Nightkeeper-
winikin life. The chosen winikin focused on their charges; the unchosen fell
in love, got married, and had families.
Unless an unchosen
winikin was somehow picked by the gods
to serve in a role she hadn’t planned for, hadn’t been prepared
for. Oh, Shandi.
“Denis and little
Samxel,” the winikin said, pronouncing
the “x” with the “sh” sound it took in the old language. “On the
night of the attack, Denny went with the king, along with all the
other unchosen adults, the fighting-age magi, and their chosen
winikin. I stayed behind with you.
Samxel was there too, dancing with the other children in the middle
of the rec room. He was ten, not old enough to fight, thank the
gods. Or so I thought. In the end, it didn’t make a difference.” A
tear tracked down her cheek. “They were playing a Michael Jackson
song and trying to moonwalk when the first boluntiku broke through the wards and attacked the
great hall. Dozens were dead within the first few seconds. There
was blood everywhere, children screaming. It was . . . it was
chaos. Hell on earth.”
You don’t have to tell me if it hurts too much,
Jade wanted to say, but what she would’ve really meant was,
I don’t want to hear this, so she said
nothing. She just held on to Shandi’s hands while the other woman
broke into harsh, ugly sobs that rattled in her chest. “You were in
one direction, Samxel in the other. I started to go after him; gods
help me, I did. But then my marks started burning. I looked down
and saw them disappearing, one after the other, doing this crazy
vanishing act right in front of my eyes. The harvesters were among
the last to die, of course, because they were in the rear guard.
But they died. All of them, except you.”
Back in the day, each
chosen winikin had worn, in addition to
the aj-winikin glyph of service, row
upon row of small bloodline marks denoting the individual members
of their bound bloodline. The night of the massacre, the loss of
those marks had warned the winikin that
the attack was a disaster, the Nightkeepers dying. That warning had
preceded the attack on Skywatch by mere seconds. Now, most of the
surviving winikin had only the single
bloodline glyph of his or her lone charge.
Shandi continued:
“When I saw that, I knew Denny was gone too. He would’ve been right
near the harvesters in the ranks with the other unbound
winikin. I looked for Samxel, but I
couldn’t see him anymore. The children were screaming, crying. Some
of the older boys were trying to get through the doors to fight,
and there were boluntiku everywhere. I
couldn’t see him. . . .” Her face shone now with tears. “I tried to
get down there, but my legs wouldn’t work. My arm was burning. I
only had one bloodline mark left, but it was flaring, throbbing,
not letting me go get my baby. It was the magic, you see. It
wouldn’t let me go to Samxel because you were my charge, my first
and only priority. It made me go get you first.” There was
bitterness now in her voice and her eyes. “So I went. You were in
the nursery zone, surrounded by a sound barrier that kept the music
from disturbing the youngest ones. I grabbed you and started
running for the dance floor, screaming Samxel’s name. Then the next
thing I knew, I was outside, headed for the garage. It was the
magic again. It made me get you out rather than go back for him.”
She stopped and pulled her hands from Jade’s, not in an angry
gesture, but so she could mop her face with her sleeves. Her words
were muffled behind the cloth as she said, “I would’ve tried to go
back in, but I knew. Somehow I knew he was gone.” She lifted a
shoulder. “A mother’s instincts, I guess. Or maybe I needed to
believe he was dead so I could do my duty by you.”
And that was what she
had always been to her winikin , Jade
realized. Duty, pure and simple. More than even she’d realized,
raising her had been Shandi’s job. The knowledge bit with sharp,
greedy teeth, but she said only, “I’m sorry, Shandi. I’m so
sorry.”
“We might have gotten
away,” the winikin said softly. “Only
the chosen were marked with the aj-winikin; the unchosen weren’t marked at all. If
I hadn’t been chosen, the boluntiku
wouldn’t have been able to track us through the magic. Maybe Denny
and I would’ve even taken Samxel and slipped away before the
attack; who knows?”
“Did other unchosen
do that?” Were there others out there, unmarked and
anonymous?
“Maybe. I don’t know.
I’m not sure I even care at this point—they’re gone, just like
everyone else.” Shandi shook her head, blinking tear- drenched
eyes. In their depths, though, Jade saw the winikin’s habitual hardness coming back into focus.
The starch—bitterness? resentment?—was back in her voice when she
said, “That’s why I’m not like the other winikin, why I couldn’t ever love you the way you
wanted me to. Loving you would’ve been giving in to the magic that
bound me to you and forced me to save you rather than Denny and
Samxel. So there you have it, the truth. Are you happy
now?”
It was one thing,
Jade found, to think that the woman who raised her had never loved
her. It was another to have it confirmed flat-out. Breathing
shallowly past the hurt, she said, “It explains some things. But
does it make me happy? Hell, no. There’s nothing good about that,
nothing fair.”
Shandi sniffed.
“Life’s not fair.”
Jade found the ghost
of a smile. “That was the first thing the Vennie nahwal said to me. ‘Life’s not fair, child,’ she
said.” And then everything had started to change for her. Or had
things been shifting around her for weeks before that? Months even?
Where did the old Jade end and the new one begin? Or, hell, was she
even changing at all? What had happened to the whole “people don’t
change” thing? What if she was just deluding herself into thinking
she’d begun to evolve? Gods. This was
at once too much for her to bear, and not enough for her to believe
in.
Wrenching her mind
back to the conversation, she said, “If life were fair, you
wouldn’t have been tagged with the aj-winikin glyph, and both our lives would’ve been
different.” This time, hers was the voice carrying a slash of
bitterness. Who would she have been, she wondered, if she’d grown
up with a loving, supportive winikin
like Jox or Izzy?
Shandi made a sour
face. “Don’t be so sure about that. I deliberately tanked the psych
profile.”
“You . . .” Jade
trailed off, gaping. “During the winikin testing? But why? What about the three
‘D’s?” Being chosen had been the ultimate honor in winikin society. She couldn’t picture Shandi
turning that down. She just couldn’t.
The winikin smiled with faint wistfulness, and her
voice was soft with memory when she said, “I’d only known Denny for
a couple of months when I went for testing, but I already knew he
was the one. I tanked my chance to become a winikin because I wanted to be with him instead. In
the end, though, the gods and destiny got their way.” She sniffed
again, and blotted at her now-dry face with jerky motions. “That
was far more than I meant to tell you, but maybe it’s good that you
know why I’ve pushed you to be the best harvester you can be.
That’s . . . It’s the only way I can justify what happened, the
only way I can see to make their deaths mean something on a
personal level. For you to be what you were meant to be, what you
were born to be.”
Jade sank back
against the conference table, staring at the walls of books. Her
thoughts coiled around another of those truisms she’d learned over
the years: Love could make a woman defy her own nature. More, the
loss of love was a terrible thing. But she said, “You can’t put
that on me.”
“I already did. I’ve
been putting it on you your entire life.”
“Okay, then let me
rephrase: I won’t let you put that on me, not anymore. I want to be
a good harvester, but I also want to be the best mage I can be, the
mage the Nightkeepers need me to be right now. If that means going
beyond the restrictions of a harvester, then so be
it.”
“But you are a harvester.”
Thinking of the
Vennie nahwal, Jade lifted her chin.
“I’m half star.”
“That’s not the way
it works.”
“Maybe not before.
But what if it’s time to change the rules?” Strike had said
something similar to her the night of the new moon, she remembered.
He’d said that the modern magi sometimes had to make their own
choices, their own rules.
So then why did it
suddenly seem like a revelation?
Shandi pushed away
from the table, her face setting once again in the fallback
expression of peaceful calm that hid so much. “The rules are the
rules. If you try to defy or avoid them, you’ll pay for it one way
or the other, just like I did.” She headed for the door
stiff-shouldered, turning back at the threshold to pin Jade with a
look. “I lost my entire world because I tried to have a love
outside my gods-determined destiny. Your mother lost her life doing
the same thing, and your father died thinking she’d abandoned him.
Who are you to think you can do better?”
“I don’t know who I
am,” Jade snapped. “All I know is that the person you want me to be
isn’t all there is.”
Shandi bared her
teeth. “That sounds like something she
would have said.”
“I—” Shit. Jade’s stomach roiled. Pressing her lips
together, she shook her head. “I don’t want to fight with
you.”
“But you don’t want
to follow my advice either.”
“Which is what,
exactly? What would it take to make you happy?”
The winikin took a long, hard look at her. Then she
just shook her head and walked away, pushing through the door
without another word. The message was clear, though: Nothing you could do would make me love you, because
you’ll always be second-best.