CHAPTER FOURTEEN
June 16
Two years, six months, and five days to the zero date
Two years, six months, and five days to the zero date
Jade slept later than
she’d intended, but woke more or less refreshed. Trying not to
resent that she’d woken alone, in her own suite, when she would’ve
rather been elsewhere, she pulled on jeans and a tight, dark
T-shirt, and laced on the boots she’d taken to wearing in place of
sandals. Anticipation thrummed low in her gut: She had been
banished to the training hall to experiment with her magic. And
that felt damned good.
When she headed over
to the main mansion to scrounge some breakfast—her appetite had
skyrocketed—she found the place nearly empty. Which felt seriously
weird. “Hello?” she called, and heard the word echo back to
her.
Granted, the compound
wasn’t actually deserted, but with half the magi out on assignment,
it sure felt that way.
After a failed
attempt to ’port Lucius himself out to Ecuador—something about
Lucius, whether the hellmark, the library connection, or something
else, had fouled the magic—Strike had ’ported several of the
warriors to Ecuador to search for the hellmouth, in case the
Banol Kax had somehow returned it to
the earth plane in advance of the solstice. Patience and Brandt had
gone to Egypt, to the site where Akhenaton’s capital city had
stood. The city itself had been thoroughly defaced by Akhenaton’s
successors, who had returned the empire to worshiping their
familiar pantheon and done their best to wipe Akhenaton from the
historical record. Lucius had put the Nightkeepers in contact with
a curator he knew from the 2012 doomsday message boards, in the
hopes that Patience and Brandt would get lucky and find an artifact
or reference giving a clue as to how Akhenaton thought he might
usurp the sun itself . . . and from there, how the magi could stop
him.
Jade had been left
behind, but not in a business-as-usual way. She had an assignment
of her own, and it wasn’t in the archive. Which seriously
rocked.
Over a breakfast of
cold cereal, she wrote down the iceball spell for Strike and the
others to try, in the hopes that it wouldn’t be specific just to
her. Then, refusing to let herself hesitate at the place where the
path split off and ran down to the cottages, she headed to the
training hall—which was fire-, water-, and freezeproof—to practice
her new magic.
She felt a quick,
hard jolt of relief when she called up the spell in her mind and
got a buzz of power in response. Grinning in solitary triumph, she
held out her hands, shaped an invisible, intangible ball, and
whispered the iceball spell. Magic detonated, blue-white light
flared, and a shock wave exploded away from her, sending a
lettuce-size iceball whizzing across the open hall to slam into the
far wall. When the light died down, exhilaration roared through
her. “I did it!”
The wall was ice
crazed and coated with thick frost. It had held, but just
barely.
After giving herself
a moment to do a booty-shaking solo dance that wasn’t the slightest
bit dignified or decorous, she pulled herself back to the task at
hand, namely figuring out whether she could manage the spell. It
didn’t take her long to figure out how much energy to put behind
the spell in order to create a manageable blast of cold magic that
froze whatever it touched and went where she wanted it to.
Remembering a scene from X-Men, she
tried to make an ice-sculpture rose, but wound up with a blob
instead, so she decided that wasn’t how the magic rolled. But that
was okay, because at least it was rolling. Which meant it was time
to try morphing another spell.
Jumpy with
anticipation, she headed to the temporary archive—aka an
unfurnished spare room where the winikin had set up laundry racks and hung the worst
of the waterlogged books out to dry under fans. There, she hunted
up the Idiot’s Guide, which was boxed
up among the other books, the ones that had survived relatively
unscathed, with just a little frost damage. Flipping to the last
chapter, she paged past the fireball spell to the next standard in
the warrior’s arsenal: shield magic. Okay, she thought, let’s do
this! She focused on the page and opened herself to the
magic.
Nothing
happened.
The glyphs were
there; the translation was there . . . but the shimmer of power
wasn’t. She stared at the page for a full minute before she was
finally forced to admit that whatever magic she’d been jacked into
the day before had deserted her. Again.
“Oh, come
on!” she snapped, disgusted. “This
isn’t”—fair, she didn’t say, because it
was probably past time to man up and accept it. Life wasn’t fair,
which sucked, but wasn’t something she could change. The magic
worked on its own schedule and by its own rules. And more often
than not, apparently, it didn’t work for her. Resisting the urge to
bang her forearm against the table, to see if the same brute- force
approach that worked for her TV remote might apply to her talent
mark, she flipped back a couple of pages and tried another spell.
Still no dice.
Frustration welled up
inside her along with the aching drag of imminent failure.
No, she told herself. You’re not giving up. Not this time. She was better
than that, stronger than that.
“Okay,” she said,
dropping down cross-legged on the floor. “You’re smart; you can
think it through. Yesterday you looked at the spell the first time
and there wasn’t any magic. Then, later, there it was. What
changed?” When she put it that way, the answer was obvious: The
difference had been her. The first time
she’d been relatively calm. Then Shandi had shown up and dropped an
emotional shitstorm on her, and in the aftermath, she’d had her
magic. “So . . . what?” she asked the empty room. “I’ve got to be
pissed off to access my talent?”
Predictably, the damp
books didn’t have an answer for her. But she had a feeling she
already knew at least part of the answer; she just didn’t want to
go there. Honesty, though, and a certain degree of self-awareness,
compelled her to admit that it probably wasn’t about being angry,
per se. . . . It was about being open to the emotion. Any emotion.
Problem was, emotional openness wasn’t her forte, not by a long
shot. Just the opposite, in fact—she had built a career on teaching
others how to distance themselves from drama and guard against
upheaval. She had Shandi to thank for that. The winikin had closed herself off to affection and
emotion in the wake of the massacre, and had taught her charge the
value of control for control’s sake, making it Jade’s automatic
fallback when it might not have been her natural
inclination.
The more she thought
about her mother, the more she realized that her first, wholly
negative reaction to Shandi’s description of Vennie had come from
the fact that Jade had been exactly the same sort of strongwilled,
brash, egotistical teenager—or she would have been if it hadn’t
been for Shandi’s iron discipline. Having been told, over and over
again, that impulsiveness was a sin against her bloodline and the
gods, that she had to control herself or terrible things would
happen, how could she not paint her mother with that same brush?
But that brought up the question of nature versus nurture. How much
of the person she was today was because of her bloodlines and
genetics, and how much of it had been created by her upbringing?
Gods knew most of her career was based on a single sentence:
Tell me about your
childhood.
What did the gods
want from her, really? They had sanctified her parents’ marriage,
but not until after her conception. Was she, then, a child of the
gods? The thought brought a shiver, because that was what the triad
prophecy—the one that spoke of finding the lost sun—had called for.
But if her parents had been meant on some level to unite the
harvester and star bloodlines to create her, why had the gods
chosen Shandi as her winikin?
“That one’s easy,”
she said aloud. “To teach me to control the impulsiveness that got
Vennie killed.” Or rather, the impulsiveness that had led her
mother to sacrifice herself in vain. If Vennie had been a
different, steadier mage, still allied with the star bloodline,
maybe they would have listened to her. Maybe they would have tried
to make her a true Prophet. And maybe, just maybe, she could have
averted the massacre. And oh, holy gods, how different things would
have been then.
Which meant . . .
what? Was she supposed to be open to her emotions or was she
supposed to control them, or was there some ineffable balance she
was supposed to find between the two?
“Shit. I don’t know.”
She knew it was ironic that she was a therapist who didn’t know how
to deal with emotions, but there it was. Or rather, she knew how
not to deal with them, because Shandi
had taught her well: Turn the emotions off. If
you’re not having them, they can’t hurt you. You’re not
vulnerable. Now that she understood the reason for those
lessons, though, she wasn’t sure they played.
Magic isn’t the answer. Love is. The words drifted
through her brain, bringing a complicated mix of reactions. A warm
fuzziness came from Lucius’s having brought her the message,
keeping it private between the two of them. But countering that
warmth was a kick of self-directed anger that she had
wanted—needed—to believe he’d meant more than he had, only to have
him withdraw when she reached out to him. More, there was the layer
of guilt she suspected he’d meant to in-still with the message, one
that said her winikin wasn’t the only
one to blame for the lack of real friendship between them. As a
winikin, even a reluctant one, Shandi
would have been fully interwoven with the harvester way of life,
culturally programmed to support the bloodline’s doctrines. It
couldn’t have been easy for her to see the rebelliousness of the
star bloodline surfacing within Jade, when such personality traits
had led to heartache and loss of face for the harvesters before.
She should’ve said something, Jade
thought as anger stirred. How was I supposed
to know? I—
She broke off the
thought train, partly because it wasn’t going to get her anywhere,
and partly because there had been no change in the spell book she
held open on her lap. The glyphs hadn’t risen up into the air and
danced in front of her, shifting to become something else. The page
was just a page, the book just a book. Which suggested that the
magic didn’t come from anger, and further indicated that the key
had to be some sort of emotional openness. Of
course it couldn’t be easy, Jade thought morosely. Pissed
off she could have managed these days. It was the other stuff she
was going to have trouble with.
Magic. Love.
Shit.
Annoyed, she climbed
to her feet and returned the Idiot’s
Guide to its drying rack. Not sure where she was going, just
that she needed to be up and moving, she stalked out into the
hallway—and nearly slammed into Shandi.
The winikin stumbled back, putting up both hands as
though warding off an attack. “Whoa, slow down!”
I don’t want to slow
down, Jade wanted to snap at her. I’ve never wanted to slow
down! But, knowing that her mood was as much about the magic
and Lucius as it was the winikin, she
held in the knee-jerk snarl and tried to smooth herself out. As she
did so, she realized that her previously slow- to-boil temper was
heading toward becoming vapor-fast. What had happened to peace,
serenity, and her counselor’s cool? She was off balance and
reactive, borderlining on the drama she had so pitied in her
patients, keeping herself above and apart from it all.
Which way of dealing
was right? Was there even a right or wrong? Gods, this was
exhausting.
Consciously exhaling,
both her mood and a sigh, Jade said, “I’m sorry. I should’ve looked
where I was going.” Shandi hesitated with her mouth partway open,
as though she’d planned one response, but Jade’s apology called for
another. Into that gap, Jade said, “I’m also sorry for how we left
things last night. You shared something painful and I made it about
me, not you.”
The other woman
narrowed her eyes. “I don’t need therapy.”
That’s debatable, Jade thought but didn’t say, not
the least because her own winikin was
one of the last people she would’ve taken on as a patient. She
might be going a little crazy—to use the woefully unprofessional
term—with everything she was dealing with right then, but she
wasn’t that crazy. “I’m not being a
therapist right now. I’m apologizing for being insensitive last
night, and for not always understanding what you need from me. I’m
going to try harder from now on.” That much she could promise. And,
as she said it, she imagined she felt a faint tingle of
magic.
“I—” Shandi broke off
and shook her head. “Never mind. We’ll talk about it later. You’re
wanted in the kitchen.”
The star inside Jade
wanted to ask who wanted her, for what, whether it had to be that
exact moment, and what the “never mind” meant. The woman inside
her, the one who thought she was starting to understand that the
three “D”s were less about never rebelling than they were about
carefully picking her rebellions for maximum effect, said only,
“Okay, I’m on it. Thanks.”
She moved past the
winikin and headed for the kitchen, but
turned back after only a few steps when she realized that the other
woman hadn’t moved. “I’m sorry. Was there something
else?”
“No. I . . . No.”
Shandi’s expression showed a flicker of surprise, there and gone
quickly. “Go on,” she said briskly. “The king’s
waiting.”
Jade went. She didn’t
feel the magic now, didn’t see glyphs morphing in her mind’s eye,
but as she headed down to the main kitchen, she thought the magic
might be a little closer than it had been before. Unfortunately,
any progress she might’ve made in that direction was lost the
moment she came through the archway and saw Lucius at the breakfast
bar, along with Leah, Strike, Michael, Sasha, and Jox.
Her defenses slammed
up to buffer the jolt of body memory that came at the sight of how
Lucius’s faded green T-shirt stretched over his wide shoulders and
the strong lines of muscle on either side of his spine, and bared
his buffed-out arms. His shirt was untucked at the back of his
jeans, slopping out casually, as if to say, I
have more interesting things to think about than the way I’m
dressed. That was purely Lucius, both the old and the new,
she thought. And with that thought, she realized that she’d almost
stopped thinking about which pieces of him she remembered from
before and which were new. He was just . . . himself now. And he
was taking up far too much of her attention.
Jerking her eyes away
from him, she took a quick look beyond the kitchen to the great
room—or what was left of it. She hadn’t been in there since the
previous day, and to her relief, changes were already evident. The
wrecked furniture had been cleared out, the glass sliders had been
replaced with their screen counterparts, the couch didn’t appear to
be lurking in the pool anymore, and tarps were stretched across the
conversation pit, where most of the damage had occurred. The
atmosphere was damp with a combination of leftover meltwater and
the humidity spilling in from the outside. Overall, she thought it
looked better than it had right after the iceball incident . . .
but not by much.
The odd thing was,
though, that she didn’t feel all that bad about the destruction.
Instead, a bubble of joy tried to push its way into her throat,
making her want to do another little victory dance and say,
I did that. I’ve got
magic!
She channeled her
inner harvester and didn’t act on the impulse. But she sure as heck
thought about it, and did a little inner dance as she turned to the
group at the breakfast bar. “Shandi said you wanted to see
me?”
Strike nodded. “Grab
a seat.”
The only empty bar
stool was one next to Lucius. She took it without comment and
returned his nod of greeting with one of her own.
“Anna called me this
morning,” Strike began. “She wants to talk to you and Lucius about
your encounter with Kinich Ahau. She thinks she might have some
ideas.”
When he paused,
seeming to invite a response, she said carefully, “That’s good
news, right? I mean, she’s the expert.” She glanced at Lucius. “No
offense.”
“Trust me, none
taken. She’s got almost a decade on me in official fieldwork, and
combines her training with knowing the legends backward and
forward, thanks to Jox’s teachings.”
But Jox shook his
head. “I can only take part of the credit. She was good with the
stories even before . . . you know. Before.” He paused, his voice
softening. “She was in the nursery when the boluntiku attacked. She’d been telling the little
ones about the hero twins traveling to Xibalba to rescue their
father from the Banol Kax. She was
always telling them the stories.”
The massacre was very
close to the surface for those old enough to remember it, Jade
realized, with fragments coming from many different perspectives.
Jox’s focus had been getting Strike and Anna to the safe room below
the mansion. Shandi had been struggling between her two callings.
Vennie had arrived in the aftermath. Flames.
Dead, staring eyes. She shivered as a chill touched the back
of her neck, but resisted the urge to shift closer to the warmth
beside her. “When is Anna getting here?” she asked
instead.
“She wants us to come
to UT,” Lucius answered.
“More accurately,”
Leah put in dryly, “she’s refusing to return to Skywatch or have
the convo by phone or Web conference. She’s insisting that you two
come to her.”
Strike sighed. “As
much I’m sorely tempted to ’port out there and drag her home, we
don’t need just her; we need her talent too. And that’s not
something I can control by brute force.” He turned his scarred
palms upward, to the sky and the gods. “She’s asked me to give her
room. I told her I’d give her as long as I could . . . which means
the two of you going out to UT and having a sit-down with her.” He
paused. “While you’re there, I’d like you to check up on Rabbit and
Myrinne. Anna swears that they’re doing fine, no problems, but the
ki—Rabbit’s been ducking my calls. I’d appreciate it if you could
put eyeballs on him, maybe ask around a little and make sure he’s
not into something . . . well, something Rabbit-like.”
Which could be
anything from vandalism to torching half of the French Quarter,
Jade knew. But beneath the wry amusement, adrenaline buzzed. She
had tried not to be disappointed when the others were sent off on
assignment and she was left behind. Her talents were fledgling at
best, and the others were better trained and had field experience.
But a trip to the university . . . it seemed like a nice middle
ground. It was a few hours at most, in familiar territory. “I’m in.
When do we leave?”
“Not so fast,” Strike
cautioned. “I can’t teleport you there. Or rather, I can’t ’port
Lucius. So you two are going to have to get there the old-fashioned
way . . . which is going to exponentially increase your exposure
level.”
“It . . . Oh.” She’d
spent so long at the university that it hadn’t occurred to her that
their being outside the warded confines of the compound would carry
additional risk. But Lucius wore the hellmark, which meant that
once he was outside Skywatch, he could be tracked through dark
magic. More, with the solstice only five days away, all of the magi
had to be on guard against early moves by the Banol Kax. “So, what’s the plan?
Airplane?”
“No way,” Lucius said
immediately. “Bad enough to stick me inside a small space crammed
with bodies . . . worse if the Banol
Kax or Xibalbans come after me and take out a planeful in
the process.” He shook his head. “No plane. I’ll take one of the
Jeeps, load up with jade-tips, carry a panic button, and take my
chances.” For the first time since she had sat down beside him, he
looked at her fully. “I was outvoted on the idea of going alone.”
His tone suggested that had been less a case of keeping him safe
from dark magic, and more a case of the Nightkeepers not wanting to
let him loose with the hellmark, a history of debatable loyalty, a
vehicle full of antimagic ammo, and intricate knowledge of
Skywatch. “One option is to have Michael and me do the road trip,
while Strike ’ports you straight to the university for the meeting,
then back when it’s over.” In other words, Michael and his death
magic could keep a careful eye on Lucius, while she took the easy
way out.
It made logical sense
. . . and the rebel inside Jade thought it sucked. More, she could
practically feel Lucius withdrawing from her, even as they sat
there only a few inches apart. If she was right about the emotional
context needed for her magic—and potentially his—then withdrawing
from her wasn’t going to help him get back into the library.
Exactly the opposite, in fact. “What’s the other
option?”
“For you and Lucius
to make the trip together,” Michael answered. “Obviously, you’d be
armed to the teeth and have all the necessary gadgets, including
panic buttons.” More than simple buttons, the advanced
communication devices not only transmitted a signal calling
Skywatch for help; they also photographed their immediate vicinity
and transmitted the images so Strike could teleport backup or
otherwise decide on a response. “But keep in mind that neither of
you has reliable fighting magic, so if it comes down to a fight,
you could be badly outgunned until help arrives.”
Jade thought about
the shield spell she’d tried—and failed—to morph earlier, and
couldn’t argue the point. Still, though, her instincts said that
she and Lucius should travel together. Question was, did that
instinct come from actual logic and the slim chance that she might
be able to help him regain the Prophet’s magic, or was her star DNA
urging her to rash action, just for the sake of some
excitement?
Knowing she could
trust Michael’s opinion on any and all strategy, she glanced at
him. “What do you think?”
Lucius started to say
something, but Michael held up a hand, forestalling him. “We know
what you’d prefer. You want her hanging back, safe. And believe me,
I can sympathize. But that’s not how it’s going to work, and you
know it.” To Jade, he said, “We’ve talked it over”—by “we” he meant
the skeleton royal council gathered there, she knew—“and the
decision is that we’re not making the decision. It’s up to you.
There’s zero shame in your staying here and continuing to refine
your command of the iceball spell and see what other spells you can
tweak. Or, hell, even if you can put together one from scratch.
That’d be huge.” He paused. “But we all know that you’ve been
frustrated with your role here. Before, it didn’t seem like a
viable option to send you out into the field. Now, though . . .
well, it’s not unheard of for a mage to take a little while to grow
into his—or her—true talents, which is what you seem to be doing.
Add to that the new info that you’re half-blood star, which might
incline you to more power than if your mother had come from one of
the bloodlines that usually intermixed with the harvesters, and
it’s tempting to think you’re on your way to becoming a warrior,
with or without the mark. Obviously, we want to encourage that.
Under the old training system, your skills would’ve been developed
step by step under the protection of a senior warrior. But those
days are gone. Most of us have achieved our full powers by being
thrown into situations that were way larger than anything we wanted
or expected them to be.” He spread his hands. “Here, we’re trying
to hit a middle ground between the two by putting you into a
moderate-risk scenario with a shit-ton of available backup, and a
partner who would cut off his left nut before he let anything
happen to you.”
Lucius looked away at
that. Jade nearly corrected the misconception that the two of them
were anywhere near that tightly bonded, but she didn’t, because
what was the point? The others would believe what they believed,
regardless of what she said. In a culture that orbited around the
concept of destined mates, even the most alpha of males were
matchmakers at heart.
“There’s a third
option,” Michael added. “I could go along on the road trip, if
you’d prefer. And for the record, if you stay behind, that doesn’t
mean you won’t be allowed out on ops later. Once you’ve figured out
your new limits, done some additional weapons training and
hand-to-hand, that sort of thing, we can introduce you to the field
in more controlled situations. This isn’t a one-shot deal,
understand?”
She tipped her hand
in a yes/no gesture. “For me, perhaps. But we’re getting down to
the wire on figuring out how to save Kinich Ahau. Lucius and I were
together when he opened the hellroad and then sent himself into the
library. Although he hasn’t had any luck reproducing that magic so
far, his odds are going to be far better if I’m there.” She glanced
at Michael. “Without a chaperone.”
He nodded. “Good
point.”
“No, it’s
not a good point,” Lucius growled. “I—”
He broke off. “Shit. It’s a good point.”
Triumph kicked
through Jade, though buffered by nerves and a serious case of
what the hell are you thinking? “Then
it’s just me, Lucius, and a tricked-out Jeep. When do we
leave?”