CHAPTER FIFTEEN
June 17
Two years, six months, and four days to the zero date
UT Austin
Two years, six months, and four days to the zero date
UT Austin
Lucius and Jade left
Skywatch midafternoon, spent the night at a chain hotel near the
Texas border, had some very satisfying but frustratingly
non-magic-summoning “later” in their shared hotel room, and reached
the campus around noon the following day.
There had been no
sign of pursuit or dark magic, and they had kept the conversation
to relatively safe topics like the passing scenery, the sun going
supernova, and the end of the world. Jade had floated the idea of
them uplinking prior to sex, thinking that the blood link might
allow him to lean on her magic to transport himself to the library.
When he’d said he’d think about it, she didn’t push. And she hadn’t
even hinted at whatever she’d been about to say the other night,
when he’d been pretty sure she was headed in the what if we decided to be more than friends?
direction before he’d interrupted her.
The fact that she
hadn’t gone there should’ve been a relief. Instead, it was pissing
him off. Admittedly, that put him straight in the
inconsistent-asshole category, at least in his own mind. He
shouldn’t want her to push him on their relationship when he had no
intention of letting things go further than they already had. But
still, it chapped him big-time that she seemed to have reached the
same conclusion, to the point that he was down to monosyllabic
growls by the time they passed the signs indicating they were
inside the campus proper.
“We made good time,”
she commented as he navigated them through light summer on-campus
traffic, headed for the visitors’ lot closest to the art history
building.
He more or less
grunted in her direction.
She wore jeans and a
cheerful yellow short-sleeved polo shirt that clung to the curves
of her breasts and the dip of her waist. Open at the throat, it
offered occasional glimpses of the hollow between her collarbones
and the soft skin beneath, making him want to touch. And that
ticked him off, which didn’t make any sense. They were bed buddies,
right? He could look; he could even touch. He didn’t need to get
all weird about it.
He turned into the
lot and aimed the Jeep at a decent spot, parking legally because he
didn’t want to draw attention from the campus security guards, who
would have a collective cow if they found the lockbox in the back,
which was loaded with weapons, jade-tipped ammo, jade-filled
grenades, and a decent array of assorted techware, some of which
wasn’t exactly legal for civilian use. He and Jade were both
wearing semiautomatics inside their waistbands and small-caliber
drop pieces in ankle holsters, which worked only because UT hadn’t
yet installed metal detectors.
Figuring that they
were as prepared as they were going to get, he keyed off the Jeep
and got out. He hadn’t gone more than a step when the air hit
him—dry and hot even under the funky sun, and smelling so damned
familiar as it brought the sudden gut-punching realization that his
pissy mood had nothing really to do with Jade.
He froze in place as
memories unfolded around him.
From the moment he’d
finally escaped his home-town and come to UT to stay, he’d rarely
left campus. He’d found his place at the university, had finally
felt like he’d fit somewhere. Granted, he hadn’t fit everywhere;
he’d still been scrawny and geeky, obsessed with science fiction
and adventure role-playing. But he’d found friends. And then, in
taking Intro to Maya Studies, he’d found his passion. He’d worked
his ass off so he could afford to stay through the summers rather
than going home, where, when he did return for the odd holiday,
he’d felt even weaker than before, felt himself backsliding into
the victim he was damn tired of being. So he’d stayed at the
university through four years of undergrad, then slid seamlessly
into the grad program, with Anna as his adviser. And, for nearly a
decade, he’d immersed himself in the university, in the pieces of
it that accepted him as he was, rather than wanting him to be
bigger and stronger, more charismatic.
Sure, he’d gone out
into the field with Anna, sometimes with colleagues of hers, or
even a few times as a team leader in his own right. But those trips
had been part of his university life, allowing him to transplant a
subset of his stuff, George Carlin-style. And because of that, it
hadn’t felt as though he’d truly left UT . . . until the demon
within him had driven him in search of the Nightkeepers. And oh,
holy shit, it felt strange being back.
“How long has it
been?” Jade asked softly.
She understood, he
realized. She got it. Automatically, he reached for her hand, drew
her to his side, and let their fingers twine together as he stared
at the students walking from one place to the next, or lying
sprawled in the weird sunlight. The faces might change from year to
year, but everything else was the same. “Since last spring. Fifteen
months or so.”
“A very busy fifteen
months.”
“Except for the part
where I was sitting on my ass in the in-between.” He tugged on
their joined hands, giving himself the luxury of keeping that small
connection between them, despite whether he deserved to. “Come on.
Let’s go see what Anna wants.”
Lucius led her in the
direction of the art history building. As he did so, a funky shiver
crawled down the back of his neck, bringing a serious case of déjà
vu. He didn’t think he’d ever before walked a date home from that
particular parking lot, but he felt as though he’d played out this
scene before, but with one major difference: He’d stopped being
invisible. Back then he could’ve walked around the entire campus
without getting hassled—which had been a welcome improvement over
high school—but also without attracting much in the way of
attention. He would’ve gotten a handful of waves and “hey”s from
his few hangout buddies and a wider circle of nodding
acquaintances, most of whom he would’ve met through one of the
classes he TA’d. Some would’ve been girls. Most would’ve been guys.
And the likelihood that he would’ve been walking beside a woman who
looked anything like Jade would’ve been approximately a zillion to
one.
Now, as they walked
along, he got five times the nods and “hey”s he would’ve gotten
before, and all from strangers. Women looked him in the eye,
actually noticing him. And guys—even big ones with football-thick
necks—sketched waves in his direction, gave way on the path, then
turned to watch Jade’s rear view, glancing quickly away when they
saw that he’d noticed. The unreality of it only increased when he
finally saw someone he recognized—a friend of one of his former
roommates—and the guy walked right past him with a nod, a hint of
wariness, and zero recognition.
“Is it everything you
thought it would be?” Jade murmured.
He didn’t pretend to
misunderstand. “It is . . . and it isn’t. I can’t pretend I haven’t
thought about what it would be like to come back here, looking the
way I do now. And yeah, that part is pretty cool. But at the same
time, the campus itself is different. . . . Okay, it’s not, but
I am.” He gestured around them. “This
used to be my whole world. This and the ruins down south. Now . .
.” He trailed off, not sure how to put it into words.
“Now the whole world
is your world. And not just
figuratively.”
He exhaled. “Yeah.”
They walked a moment in silence. Then, as they hooked the last turn
heading to the art history building, he said, “Back when I was
growing up, I used to picture myself living the adventure, you
know? I’d read Tolkein or Bujold or whatnot, and I’d imagine myself
in the starring role.” He didn’t need a former therapist to point
out that both authors had often focused on smaller, weaker
protagonists who fought with their wits rather than their bodies.
That was then; this was now. “I’d think about what I would do if it
were my job to save the world, and, of course, I always got
everything right, always picked the right battles, fought the right
enemies. The harder I fought, the better I did. But now . . . I
don’t know. I’m doing my best, and I’m still not getting where I
need to be.”
“Maybe you need to
relax and stop trying so hard,” she said cryptically. “Besides, to
paraphrase Strike, our best is all the gods can ask us to
do.”
“And if that’s not
enough?”
“Mankind is
fucked.”
Her bluntly profane
answer startled a laugh out of him. “Such language from a
harvester,” he chided. He stopped in his tracks, just short of the
moat leading to the office that had once been the focus of his
life. Tugging on their joined hands, he spun her into his arms. The
sparse foot traffic eddied around them, and the strange orange sun
slipped behind an ocher cloud, but he was hardly aware of those
peripherals. His entire attention was focused on the woman in his
arms, the lover he never could’ve imagined having when he’d been a
part of the UT world.
Their bodies brushed,
then pressed together as she slid her arms around his neck and
leaned in, her eyes and mouth laughing, but darker shadows
lingering beneath. Suddenly wishing he could take those shadows
away, that he could make it all go away, he leaned in and kissed
her, not a friendly feel-good kiss, or one of the oh-yes-there-more
kisses of their lovemaking, but a carnal kiss, a full-on public
display of possession. Mine, he
thought, wanting to snarl it at the other men he sensed watching
them, wanting to say it to her. You’re
mine. He spread his hands on either side of her waist, his
fingers touching the outline of the nine-millimeter hidden beneath
her shirt. If anything, the contrast between soft woman and
hard-edged weapon made his blood burn hotter, made him want to wrap
himself around her and protect the hell out of her, despite whether
she could handle herself as a fighter, a mage, or both. More, he
wanted to hear the same things from her, wanted to hear her say she
wanted more than he was giving.
Heat flared through
him, coiling hard and greedy inside him. His blood buzzed in his
veins; colors sparked behind his closed eyelids. He
wanted—
He wanted the hot
girlfriend he’d dreamed of having on campus, he realized suddenly,
the heat and buzz dying in the wake of the realization that he
mostly wanted Jade as his arm candy for the next hour or so, wanted
to know that the other guys envied the hell out of him. And that
had nothing to do with him and Jade, and everything to do with his
own stunted-ass psyche and a need to prove that he wasn’t still a
scrawny, too-tall praying mantis of a dork with a history of
Notting Hill-like public protestations
of love that ended in monstrous flameouts rather than
happily-ever-after.
Gods, could he be a
bigger asshole?
Jade just stood there
watching him, her expression making him wonder just what she saw in
his face, what she took away from it. After a moment, she smiled
softly and said, “It’s this place. It changes our perceptions, I
think. Skywatch seems very far away. So does 2012. But at the same
time, they both seem very important.”
Which totally wasn’t
what he’d been thinking. It was a relief to know she was oblivious
to the fact that he’d almost just imploded the good stuff they had
going on, solely from a dorky need to prove a point that nobody but
him gave a flying crap about. “Yeah,” he said, exhaling. “And we
need to keep moving.”
Taking her hand once
again, he led her across the moat and into the art history
building. The heavy layers of reinforced concrete closed around
them, swallowing him up. And for a moment, he was kicked back into
the past.
The first time he’d
visited Anna’s office, a little less than a decade earlier, he’d
been a sophomore, tall and skinny, and practically quivering in his
Reeboks as he’d made the trek, clutching a folder that contained
his sacrificial offering: three crumpled pieces of paper that he’d
picked up a week earlier, when Professor Catori had first announced
that she was looking for an undergrad intern to put in some hours
with her group, and she was leaving applications outside her
office. The pages asked about the applicant’s basic stats . . . and
included a glyph translation for them to take a crack at, if they
wanted to.
And holy shit, did he
ever want to.
He had snagged one of
the first sets; they were all gone now. He knew, because he’d come
back to get a fresh set when his originals started looking too sad
for words. Without a spare, he was going to have to turn in the set
he had, even though the last page had a big- ass coffee stain on it
from where he’d upended the morning dregs in the process of
reaching for a pen. Dumb ass. He’d
tried to wipe it off, but that had just made things worse. His only
hope was that he’d gotten close enough with the translation that
she would overlook the fact that he was an almost complete disaster
in all other facets of life. He was dying to work with her, to be
around her, and maybe get a chance to work with some of the
artifacts she’d shown them on PowerPoint slides projected up at the
front of the stadium-seating lecture hall.
Those pictures had
been too far away. He wanted the real thing. And the more he Web-
surfed, soaking up pictures of Mayan ruins and the artifacts that
had come from them, the more he wanted to know everything there was
to know about a civilization that should have seemed strange and
foreign to his modern viewpoint, but instead made sense to him. He’d understood their religion as if
he were being reminded of it rather than learning it fresh. Human
sacrifice might not be part of modern life, but he got where they’d
been coming from: They’d been trying to protect themselves against
the downfall portended by the stars, and the prophecies that said
great white gods would arrive from the east, bringing the end of
life as the Maya had known it. Hello,
Cortes.
And the more he
learned, the more he wanted to know.
He wanted to touch
the pieces of that past culture, wanted to absorb all the
information he could find on them. And when he’d been working on
the glyph string she’d handed out, looking up each image in the
seminal dictionary put together by Montgomery in the fifties, when
archaeologists and linguists had finally cracked the Maya code,
he’d gotten a glimmer of something bigger than himself, a kick of
excitement when he realized it wasn’t just a translation. . . . It
was a puzzle. There wasn’t much standardization among the glyphs,
which had been as much an art form as a language. A given word
could be represented by a pictograph or a string of syllables
making up the word, or sometimes both. Then the syllables
themselves could be represented by many different glyphs, or the
same glyphs could look entirely different, depending on the artist
who’d rendered them. That very fact had slowed his shit down when
he’d gotten to the translation. He still wasn’t sure if the third
glyph was a hook-nosed god’s face with suns where its eyes should
be, or a really whacked version of a jaguar’s head, but he’d gotten
up against deadline day and had to go with what he
had.
Walking the halls
now, with Jade at his side, Lucius remembered how badly he’d worked
himself up by the time he’d headed over to turn in the application,
how he’d been practically puking with nerves. Back then, Anna had
been less senior, so she’d had an upper- floor office. These days
she had a primo ground-floor spot. But despite the difference in
location, the clutter stuck to the corkboard hung on her door was
much the same. Clippings of journal articles, some hers, some
written by colleagues, offered the current state of the art in
Mayan epigraphy. They bumped up against a scattering of cartoons
and silly slogans, some hung by Anna, others by her coworkers and
students. Slapped atop it all was a laminated page printed with her
office hours and phone numbers, with a boldfaced note at the
bottom: Knock. What have you got to
lose?
The laminate looked
new; the sentiment was an old, familiar friend. One that had been a
mantra during certain parts of his life.
That first day, it
had taken him nearly two full minutes to work up the courage. Now
he just knocked, knowing that wasn’t the hard part.
“Come on in,” Anna’s
voice called from within.
He pushed the door
open, stuck his head through, and grinned past a sudden spike of
nerves. “Damn. And here I was looking forward to climbing in the
window again.”
Anna looked up, her
face reflecting pretty much what he was feeling: a new awkwardness
to an old friendship. Sitting behind her big, messy desk, she was
dressed informally even for her, in a navy blue UT sweatshirt and
collared shirt. He couldn’t see her lower half, but was betting on
jeans, based on the fact that she had her red- highlighted hair up
in a ponytail and was wearing little, if any, makeup. The lack of
makeup wasn’t why she looked tired, though; the fatigue was real.
He knew that because he knew her, and knew she dressed down at the
university only when she was feeling crappy. Summer session or no
summer session, she liked being put together.
Then again, things
changed. People changed. Just look at him.
As if paralleling his
thoughts, she glanced at the window he had B and E’d under Cizin’s
influence. “Ten bucks says you couldn’t even fit through it anymore.” She waved him all the way
in. “Come on. Hey, Jade. Glad you could both make it. Any problems
getting here?”
Jade shook her head.
“None.”
“How are you?” Anna asked her, the question clearly a
woman to woman, we’ve got our secrets
deal.
Lucius turned away,
giving them a moment to catch up, and to remind himself it was
largely his fault that his and Anna’s relationship had suffered.
He’d stolen from her; he’d betrayed her—albeit inadvertently—with a
Xibalban. Because of him, she’d been forced back into her brother’s
sphere. Because of him, she wore a fourth mark, that of the slave-
master, in addition to the jaguar, the royal ju, and the seer’s mark. He couldn’t blame her for
not being excited to see him, after all they’d been through
together and apart. Nor could he blame her for turning to Jade as a
friend. Jade was warm and honest, analytical and near genius-smart.
She was, he realized, a little bit like Anna in those ways. But
where Anna tended to get caught up in her own emotions and had some
drama-queen tendencies, Jade’s waters ran still and
deep.
As the women did a
brief what’s-up-how’s-it-going, he stuck his hands in his pockets
and took a tour of Anna’s office, looking for new additions to her
rogues’ gallery of fakes. She used the hobby as a teaching tool,
showing her students—Lucius included—not just how to spot the fakes
and haggle in fine old open-market style, but also how to get the
so-called antiquities dealers to show them the real stuff they
tended to keep under wraps. Her goals were twofold: first, to
cooperate with local authorities in blocking the export of national
treasures when possible, and second, to potentially track exciting
finds back to their sources. Each year, particularly in the less
developed areas of the former Mayan empire, new caches of
antiquities were discovered and sold off, to the great loss of the
archaeologists and the still-scattered knowledge of the
two-millennium history of the Maya. At times during his graduate
career, Lucius had pictured himself eventually working against the
black-market trade in the low country, acting as sort of a reverse
treasure hunter, trying to keep the finds in place rather than in
museums—or at least making sure that the sites were rigorously
documented before the artifacts were split up. He’d cast himself as
sort of a geeky Indiana Jones without the fedora, working with some
heavily armed locals, maybe even armed himself. In those dreams,
he’d been doing his part to save the small corner of the world that
he’d claimed as his own.
Now, eyeing the
window, which seemed to have shrunk over the past two years, he
admitted inwardly that there was no way he’d fit through there now,
as he had when he broke in to steal the transition ritual that
Cizin had needed to come through the barrier. Lucius’s body, like
his world, had gotten a whole hell of a lot bigger since he’d left
campus.
Anna’s voice
interrupted his prowl. “Stop pacing and sit, Lucius.”
Jade had taken a
folding chair off to one side, so he dropped into the visitor’s
chair, which was an old friend. He’d spent many, many hours working
with Anna, their heads bent together as they argued over
interpretations. The good old days, he
thought with a trace of nostalgia and a hint of bitterness. He
focused on Anna, realized she was fiddling with her chain, a sure
sign of nerves. “Why are we here?” he asked without
preamble.
In answer, she lifted
the chain from around her neck, pulling the skull effigy from
beneath her shirt in the process. In the stark white light coming
from the overhead fluorescents, the sacred yellow quartz glittered
dully, and the shadowed eye sockets seemed to stare at him. Lucius
wasn’t sure whether the jolt he felt was magic or awe at the sight
of the ancient carving, which had been passed down, mother to
daughter, through untold generations of itza’at seers.
The legendary crystal
skulls were inextricably intertwined with the mythos of the 2012
doomsday, and had hit the mainstream with the last Indiana Jones
movie—unfortunately so, in his opinion, but it wasn’t like
Spielberg had asked him. And yeah, there were plenty of von
Dänikenites who thought the delicately carved skulls that had been
found at various Mesoamerican sites were proof of a higher—aka
alien—intelligence. But they weren’t. They were pure Nightkeeper;
always had been . . . going back to the last Great Conjunction,
when cataclysmic upheavals had loosed the demons from the
underworld and destroyed the crystal cities of the magi, sinking
them into the sea. Only a few hundred survivors had been left to
drive the Banol Kax back to Xibalba and
erect the barrier that would contain them for the next twenty-six
thousand years. Turning nomadic, the magi had brought with them the
few remaining artifacts they had retained from their once-great
civilization . . . including thirteen life-size crystal
skulls.
The humans had found
four of the skulls, all in clear quartz; three were in various
museums, the fourth in a private collection. Rigorous science had
concluded all four to be nineteenth-century fakes, based on their
stone compositions and marks from tools that hadn’t been available
to the Maya or Aztec to whom they were supposedly ascribed. Which
wasn’t entirely wrong . . . The timing was just off by two dozen
millennia or so. Of the remaining nine skulls, some of yellow
quartz, some of pink, six were safely locked in the middle archive
at Skywatch, two were missing in action . . . and one had been
broken up into thirteen smaller skull effigies that had been given
to the itza’at seers of the
Nightkeepers. Twelve had disappeared the night of the massacre.
Only Anna’s remained.
Lucius didn’t
remember reaching out to touch it, but he was suddenly holding it
in his hand, feeling the echoed warmth of Anna’s body and the
unexpected weight of the skull, which looked far lighter than it
actually was. Startled, he held it back out to her. “Sorry. Didn’t
mean to grab. I just . . .” He shrugged. “This is what it’s all
about, you know? It’s one of the skulls. I mean, holy
shit!”
“Yeah. I know.” She
didn’t reach for it, instead nodding to Jade.
He passed it over.
“Watch out. It’s heavier than it looks.” When she took it solemnly,
he looked back over at Anna, catching on that the effigy was why
they had been summoned. “You think the skull might help Jade
channel the scribe’s talent more reliably?” He tried to remember
whether there had been itza’ats
mentioned in the history he’d read on the star bloodline. He didn’t
think so.
“No, the effigies are
bloodline specific. It’d only work for a jaguar.” Anna paused,
carefully folding her hands atop her desk blotter. “I need you to
take the skull back to Skywatch and give it to
Strike.”
Jade’s soft, “Are you
sure?” was quickly drowned out when Lucius held up his hands in
protest. “You—” Oh, no. Hell, no.
“You’re kidding.”
“Not about this.”
There was deep regret in her eyes, but behind that was a strange
sort of peace. “Never about this.”
“But you’re our—their
only seer!”
“I should have been,”
she corrected. “Maybe I would have been, if I’d gone through my
talent ceremony when I should have. But she said we should wait
until after the attack on the intersection, so we could focus on my
training.”
She was the queen, Lucius knew. Anna’s mother. She
had been a powerful seer, but loyal to her husband and king. Nobody
knew what she had seen, exactly, but her visions had led her to
fake a stillbirth and send baby Sasha to be raised in seclusion.
More, she had leaned on Anna to pretend she hadn’t yet reached
menarche, thus ruling her out of her talent ceremony prior to the
king’s attack on the intersection. Then, the night before the queen
marched to battle at her husband’s side, she’d given the effigy to
fourteen- year-old Anna, even though the teen hadn’t known how to
use the pendant properly. Lucius had long suspected that some of
the itza’at’s powers had reached out to
young Anna that night, through the effigy’s connection to the
queen. He had a feeling Anna had seen the massacre firsthand
through that uplink . . . and that she’d been running from those
memories ever since.
Jade set the pendant
carefully on her desk; it made a hollow, echoing noise that seemed
to reverberate on more planes than just the audible level. “Don’t
give up on us. Please.”
Anna avoided her
eyes. “I’m not. I’m making a choice. I respect what Strike, you,
and the others are doing, but I don’t believe in it
anymore.”
“You don’t believe
there’s going to be a war?” Lucius demanded. The question echoed
back to their many debates on the subject of the Nightkeepers and
the 2012 doomsday, which Anna had pretended to mock in an effort to
keep him from looking too closely at the legends. Had she become
convinced by her own arguments? Impossible.
She shook her head.
“There’s going to be a war, no question about it. But I don’t
believe that we can stop it. If we had the numbers and the skills .
. . maybe. But a dozen magi? No. I’m sorry, but no. So I’ve decided
that if I’ve only got another two and a half years to live, and
there’s nothing I can do to change that fact, then I’d far rather
spend the next thirty months living my life rather than chasing
futile hope.”
Dull shock pounded
through Lucius, alongside disillusionment. How
could you? he wanted to demand. Anna had been his superior
for the past decade-plus. She’d been his teacher, his mentor, his
thesis adviser, his boss, and finally his slave- master. He had
looked up to her. He’d harmlessly lusted after her, worried about
her, and once he’d learned that she was one of the magi he’d spent
a third of his life searching for, he’d practically worshiped her.
But now . . . gods, now. How could he respect, never mind revere,
someone who would willingly jettison the chance to make a
difference?
But he knew her well
enough to realize her emotions were already locked into her
decision. So he went with logic. “According to the Dresden Codex,
the Nightkeepers will need a seer during the final
battle.”
“According to the
codex, they’ll need Godkeepers and the Triad too. I don’t see
either of those things happening.”
“They
might.”
“They won’t.” Her
eyes had gone hollow. “I wouldn’t do this if I had the faintest
hope that we could change what’s going to happen. But do the math.
There are too few of us. We’re cut off from the gods. We don’t have
the prophecies or the spells we would need to defend the barrier,
if we could even muster enough strength in numbers or magic.” She
shook her head. “No. We can’t do it, and we’re making ourselves
miserable trying.”
Low anger kindled in
his gut. “You’re giving up on yourself.”
Her eyes flashed.
“I’m making a choice.”
“A selfish one. You’d
rather be playing house with the Dick than working your ass off
like the rest of us.” She opened her mouth to fire something back,
probably a reaction to his old nickname for her unlikable husband,
or an accusation that he was just jealous. But that wasn’t why he
was pissed. It was that she had the opportunity to be the sort of
savior he’d always wanted to be, the mage he was trying to be . . .
and she was just walking away from it. So he steamrolled over her
response, saying, “Look, I don’t know exactly what happened to you
the night of the massacre, what you saw in your visions. But think
about it. . . . That night, the Banol
Kax and their boluntiku
killed—what—a thousand people? Try multiplying it by a million. Ten
million. A hundred million. What do you think that’s going to look like?”
They didn’t know
exactly what form the end-time would take. The Dresden Codex
suggested a flood, while Aztec mythology called for fire. And what
about the aftermath? Would there be one? The sixth-century Prophet
Chilam Balam had talked about mankind turning away from machines,
which suggested a massive technology loss. But would humanity
survive or be destroyed entirely? Would the earth itself exist in
the aftermath? The Xibalbans seemed to be banking on a shift in
world order, with Iago intending to be at the top of the proverbial
shitheap when everything settled out. The Banol Kax, on the other hand . . . who the hell
knew what they were thinking? For all the Nightkeepers could guess,
the end-time war would be akin to the Solstice Massacre, only on a
global scale.
Anna blanched, but
her eyes stayed steady on his. “Screw you.”
“Lucius,” Jade said
in warning.
He ignored her,
pressing, “How are you going to feel on that last day, when
everything starts to go to shit, and you realize that maybe, just
maybe, you could’ve helped stop it?”
“Then you believe the
Nightkeepers are going to fail too.”
He bared his teeth.
“Don’t put words in my mouth. And no, I don’t believe we’re going
to fail.” He deliberately included himself in that “we.” “I do,
however, believe that we’ve got a far better chance of success with
you than without you.”
“Bullshit,” she said
scornfully, choking on a derisive laugh. “How have I helped so far?
I’ve had a couple of visions that have confused things more than
they’ve clarified them, and at that, I haven’t had a vision in
months.”
“Because you’re
blocking them,” he pointed out, taking a guess and seeing the
confirmation in her eyes.
She glared. “I forced
Strike to let you live, even after you violated my space, stole my
property, and generally acted like an asshole. Remember that the
next time you want to poke me about my duty to the Nightkeepers and
the end-time war. If I’d been adhering to the writs, I would’ve let
them sacrifice you two years ago when you conjured a godsdamned
makol!”
“Maybe you should
have,” he said bluntly. “So far I’ve done more harm than good. But
you know what? That just makes me more determined to get it right
from here on out.”
Anna shook her head.
“You’ve always wanted to be more; both of you have. Can’t you
understand that I’ve always wanted to be less?” She addressed the
question to Jade, seeking an ally.
Lucius started to
answer, but Jade held up a hand. To Anna, she said, “Is that what
you’re going to tell the gods? How about your ancestors?” When Anna
sucked in a breath, Jade pushed harder. “What will you tell your
father when you meet him in the spirit world?”
Anna’s expression
darkened. “Given that I’m the only one of the three royal kids who
hasn’t had a conversation with the old man’s nahwal, I’m not sure we’ll have much to talk
about.”
“Your old man,”
Lucius repeated softly. “Where have I heard that
before?”
Her flinch was almost
imperceptible, but it was there. And her voice was sharply
defensive when she said, “That’s not the point. The point is that
we can’t live for our parents’ goals. Sometimes we have to define
our own. You guys understand that; I know you do.”
Jade nodded. “Sure.
But this isn’t about your father. It’s about you being able to help
save the world.”
Anna lifted her chin
in a gesture he recognized as a member of the jaguar bloodline
getting her stubborn on. “Not anymore it’s not.”
Lucius could see he
wasn’t going to win this one. But who among them could?
Strike, he thought. Maybe Jox. “We’re not going to tell the others that
you’re quitting.” He indicated the polished crystal skull, gleaming
softly amber on the desktop. “That’s what you’re saying by
returning this, isn’t it? That you’re not coming back to Skywatch.
Not ever.” Leaning in, he dropped his voice. “Think about it for a
moment; really think about it. And trust me: From someone who’s
been on the outside most of his life, it’s not a comfortable place
to live.”
“It is if you’ve
chosen it,” she fired back.
“Fine, then. Come
back with us and tell them yourself.”
Her lips turned up at
the corners in an utterly humorless smile, as though they’d finally
gotten to the meat of things. Nudging the pendant a few centimeters
closer to him on the desk, she said, “You owe me,
Lucius.”
There it was, he
realized. And the bitch of it was that he couldn’t say she was
wrong. He owed her. Big-time. “You’re calling it all in . . . on
this?”
“I am. I won’t be
square with Strike and the others, I know. But I can at least leave
things even between the two of us.” She rose and moved out from
behind the desk, then reached down, grabbed his hands, and hauled
him to his feet as she might have done before, in order to kick him
back to his own office or out to the lab. Now, though, he towered
over her, dwarfed her. And she kept hold of one of his hands once
he was up, and stayed standing inside his personal space. Jade
remained seated, watching with her counselor’s calm wrapped around
her and faint panic at the back of her eyes.
Anna palmed a Swiss
army knife, seemingly from nowhere. Lucius didn’t move, didn’t
flinch as she scored a sharp stripe across his palm. Pain pinched
and blood welled, but he didn’t feel any magic. All he felt was
failure—his and hers.
“We don’t have to
swear on blood,” he said. The ache spread through him as she
blooded her own palm and he got that she really meant it. She
wanted to leave the Nightkeepers behind. Or she wanted them to
leave her behind; he wasn’t sure which was more
accurate.
“We’re not swearing.
I’m doing something I should’ve done a long time ago.” Clasping his
bleeding hand in hers, she recited a string of words.
He caught a few,
missed a few; he was far more used to working with glyphs than with
speaking a language that had been dead for centuries. More, as she
spoke, his head started spinning: a mad whirl of thoughts and
blurred sight. He heard the words, glimpsed the fake antiquities,
but they glommed together, tumbling around one another in a major
Auntie Em moment. Pain slashed in his forearm—a wrenching sizzle
that started at his marks and zigzagged up to his chest with a
ripping, tearing sensation that left him hollow when it
ended.
Jade lunged to her
feet, reaching for him, but he held her off with an upraised palm,
suddenly grokking what was going on. He yanked his hand away from
Anna’s. “No,” he started. “Don’t—” But then he stopped, because he
knew it was already done. “Fuck.” The
world settled down around him, his vision coming clear as he
flipped his arm and confirmed that the black slave mark was gone.
He wasn’t bound to her anymore. Technically, he wasn’t bound to the
Nightkeepers anymore, either. “You didn’t have to do
that.”
“Yes, I
did.”
His forearm now bore
only the red hellmark, startling in its geometry, deadly in its
coloration. “The quatrefoil’s not balanced anymore.” His heart
thudded in his chest; his thoughts played demolition derby inside
his head. What was this going to mean for his ability to tap the
library? Something? Nothing? Was it an entirely moot
point?
Jade moved up beside
him, so they were facing Anna as a couple. No, he thought, not a
couple. As partners. A team. She snapped, “That was a rotten thing
to do without talking it through. For all we know, that was his
only link to the magic. And you just took it.” She was so angry she was practically
vibrating.
“It was mine to
take.” Anna turned her palms up, not to indicate the gods, but
rather saying, Not my problem . In
doing that, she bared her right palm, where the sacrificial slice
had already closed to a thin scab. Lucius’s palm, in contrast,
still bled sluggishly.
“That sucks,” Jade
snapped.
“That’s
life.”
Lucius followed the
exchange as if from a distance, through a cool numbness that began
where the slave mark had been and spread throughout his body. Anna
was a Nightkeeper who didn’t want the magic. He was a human who
did. “The gods have a strange sense of balance,” he
muttered.
“The gods are gone.”
Anna held out her hand to shake, human-style. “And as of today, so
am I.”
Knowing it was futile
to argue further, that he didn’t have the strength to shift an
entrenched jaguar on his own, he finally nodded. “Okay. Fine.
Whatever. Have it your way.” He moved to scoop up the
effigy.
“No, wait,” Anna
said. He paused, hopeful. But she gestured to Jade. “That’s why I
asked you to be here. I want you to wear it back to Skywatch. If
it’s not being carried by a member of the jaguar bloodline, it’s
enough that it’s being worn by a mage I consider a friend.” Her
voice caught on the last word.
Lips pressed tightly
together, Jade merely scooped up the effigy, draped the chain over
her head, and tucked the sacred skull beneath her yellow polo,
doing up the lower two buttons to conceal the priceless artifact.
Taking her hand, Lucius headed for the door, aching with the
knowledge that, unless Strike and Jox worked some major magic, it
would probably be the last time he’d see Anna, who’d been a big
part of his life for so long. When he had the panel open, his eye
caught the laminated sign. What have you got
to lose? When had the answer become
“Everything”?
“Lucius,” Anna
said.
He glanced back.
“Yeah?”
“Good luck.” Her eyes
shifted to Jade. “And to you. I wish . . . I wish I could be as
brave and strong as you’re learning to be. Gods keep you
both.”
Jade didn’t answer,
but her eyes glittered with unshed tears. Lucius tipped his head.
“Good-bye, Professor Catori.”
Out in the hallway,
he tried to breathe through the numbness and the sense that the
squat, dark building was collapsing inward around him. Jade’s eyes
were stark, her face pale, but she said only, “Do you want to grab
any of the stuff from your old office? She boxed most of the things
you left behind.”
“Leave it,” he said
curtly. “There’s nothing here I need.”
“You up for tracking
down Rabbit?”
He nodded. “Yeah.
Let’s do it.” In a way, he hoped the kid was up to something.
Knowing Rabbit, it’d be guaranteed to take his mind off Anna’s
defection, and the fact that Jade was wearing the crystal
skull.