CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
June 20
Two years, six months, and one day to the zero date
Two years, six months, and one day to the zero date
Jox’s idea of
practice turned out to be two days of sweaty, hard-hitting, brutal
play, without the benefit of helmets or arm and wrist guards, which
he claimed were only for ceremonial use anyway. By the time the
winikin declared them competent enough
not to embarrass themselves in front of the gods, Rabbit’s nose was
sore and swollen, and his knees and elbows were skinned to shit.
They hurt badly enough to remind him of when he and his old man had
lived briefly in a cheap apartment that would’ve been more of the
same old, except that there had been a half-pipe down the street,
and a couple of kids who’d taught him a few tricks on their boards.
That had lasted until his old man had shown up in his penitent’s
robes, with his head shaved and his eyes crazy-wild; that had been
the end of Rabbit’s half-pipe friends, and they’d moved on soon
after.
This isn’t about the old man, Rabbit reminded
himself as he trailed after Jox, heading out of the ball court.
Not directly, anyway.
He and Myrinne had
done some digging on their own, but hadn’t come up with much info
on the Order of Xibalba that wasn’t already common knowledge.
Rabbit had negged the idea of hiring a PI, first because he’d
thrown money in that direction once before with minimal results,
and second because he might not agree with all of Strike’s tenets,
but he had to believe it was better for the magi to stay well under
the human radar. With his luck, he’d hire a PI, the guy would find
something on the Xibalbans, and the next thing he knew, the
Enquirer would have a headline like:
Mayan Doomsday Cult Implicated in Black Magic
Slaying! or some such shit. No freaking way. He was trying
to be smart these days.
It seemed to be
paying off too. Despite the knee-jerk piss-off of having Jade and
Lucius break into his place and sniff around—hello, personal space—when he’d called Strike to
bitch, the king had actually been pretty conciliatory about it.
He’d even gone back on his keep Rabbit and
Myrinne at UT through the solstice decree, and zapped out to
get them. Then, when Jade’s panic button went off, Rabbit hadn’t
just gotten to come along for the ride; he’d been front and center
of the rescue when he’d said he thought he could crisp the
makol without doing the head-and-heart
thing. Strike hadn’t been too keen on his doing so much killing,
but it wasn’t like they were people anymore. Once a makol was fully bound, the human host was dead one
way or the other. Rabbit had just sped things up.
In the aftermath of
the op he’d been pumped, even after the drag of twelve hours in the
Jeep with Michael and Lucius, who weren’t bad guys, but had both
been in pissy moods and had argued about every stop. Didn’t matter,
though, because when he’d gotten back to Skywatch, Myrinne had been
there, waiting for him with a smile and the bright idea to ask Jox
about his mother. Not in so many words, of course, but that was the
basic plan. If anyone living knew anything, it would be the
winikin.
Subtle, Rabbit reminded himself as he lengthened
his strides to catch up. You’re going for
subtle.
Doing the
eyes-in-the-back-of-his-head thing he’d perfected over more than
four decades of in loco parenthood, Jox stopped at the edge of the
narrow, rectangular playing field, right on the out-of-bounds line.
He raised an eyebrow. “Did you need something, or are we just
headed in the same direction?” There was no asperity in the
question; it was just a question. Jox was like that—a straight
shooter who tried to do his best by everyone and, as far as Rabbit
was concerned, didn’t take nearly enough for himself.
“I thought you might
want some help digging the stuff out of storage for tomorrow.”
Rabbit didn’t quite stick his hands in his pockets and whistle
innocently, but he sure imagined it.
A year ago, Jox
probably would’ve busted out laughing. Now he nodded, looking
pleased. “Sure. Come on. These days, a winikin can’t afford to turn down free labor under
the age of fifty.”
They headed for the
mansion, bypassed the construction crews by going in through the
garage, and turned down a seldom-used hallway that had doorways
marching down it on either side, numbered in sequence starting with
one hundred. “These are more residences, right?”
“They used to be,”
Jox answered grimly. “Three floors of one-room studios for the
unchosen winikin, single nonranking
magi, out-of-town visitors, that sort of thing. Now it’s fucking
storage space.”
Rabbit held his hands
up. “Sor-ry.”
“Damn it.” Jox shook
his head. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I really, really hate this
part.” Stopping in front of door 121, he checked the number against
a spreadsheet on his iPhone screen, muttering, “And I really don’t
want to have to paw through any more boxes than absolutely
necessary.” Pushing open the door, he flipped on the lights and
waved Rabbit through.
Jox had been in
charge of the massive renovation and updating of Skywatch almost
exactly two years earlier, when the barrier reactivated and the
magi returned to their abandoned home. At the time, Rabbit had been
sulking up in the pueblo, listening to tunes and hating the world.
When his old man had bothered to hunt him down and nag about him
pitching in and helping Jox with the cleanup, he’d sneered and done
a fast fade.
Now, looking at row
upon row of moving boxes, stacked on floor-to-ceiling racks set
with minimal aisles between, like something out of the closing
credits of Cold Case, for the first
time, Rabbit thought, really thought
about what the winikin had been facing.
Some boxes were marked with content lists, some with bloodlines,
others with names. They were all carefully stored, cataloged, and
cross-reffed in Jox’s database. And he’d done most of the work
himself. He’d sorted through the residences of dead men, women, and
children—family members, teammates, friends—and although he’d had a
hired cleanup crew come in and strip the place of nearly a thousand
people’s worth of daily living crap, he’d had to pull out the
Nightkeeper-specific stuff first so it wouldn’t hit the mainstream
via Goodwill. He’d done it mostly alone too, wanting the rooms
pristine, with no sign of their former inhabitants or their
slaughter, before the other Nightkeepers and winikin arrived.
Diverted from his
stealth mission, Rabbit swallowed. “Shit. I’m sorry. I should’ve
helped with this.”
“You were too busy
planting your head up your own ass at the time.”
“No
kidding.”
The mild response
earned him a longer look from the winikin, and a faint, approving nod. “So the rumors
are true. You’re growing up.”
“Doing my
best.”
“Glad to have you.”
The winikin turned away before shit
could get mushy, consulting his phone once again. “Back corner, six
boxes here, another ten a couple of rooms down. We won’t need
everything, but we’ll pull them all out and pick and choose.” He
paused with a sidelong grin. “You get to carry the ones with all
the five-pound hand stones.”
“Screw you,” Rabbit
agreed good-naturedly.
They found the boxes.
Jox tensed up when Rabbit popped the first one, then relaxed when
it proved to be full of the promised shin guards and a couple of
crazy-looking headpieces adorned with brittle parrot feathers. At
Rabbit’s look, the winikin lifted a
shoulder. “Let’s just say I was working fast back then, and was
more than a little stressed. When I came looking for Gray-Smoke’s
battle gear, to give to Alexis, I opened up what I thought was the
right box and saw—” He broke off, jerked his shoulders irritably.
“Ghosts. Not important now; let’s get these boxes back out into the
light of day.”
After that, Rabbit
almost didn’t ask him about Red-Boar. The winikin was already dealing with massacre
flashbacks. Didn’t seem fair to pile on another set of memories.
But as they schlepped the boxes out of the first room and moved on
to the next, and the boxes didn’t yield any surprises, the
winikin unwound by degrees. What was
more, Rabbit started hearing Myrinne’s voice in his head, telling
him he had to look out for himself and not worry so much about
other people’s opinions. Eventually, he said, “I’ve been thinking
about my old man lately.”
The winikin didn’t look up from his iPhone. “What sort
of thinking?” He seemed okay with the question.
Rabbit shrugged.
“Trying to figure him out, I guess. The more distance I get, the
more I realize that not everything he did or said was bullshit.
It’s just tough deciding which is which.” And that was the gods’
honest truth. The more he and Myrinne had tried to figure out where
Red-Boar had been during the years after the massacre, when he’d
disappeared into the jungle and eventually came back out with a
tagalong half-blood toddler he’d refused to give a proper name, the
more Rabbit had started remembering his old man without the anger
those memories usually brought. Granted, the useful shit Red-Boar
had taught him had been pretty sparse when weighed against the
me-me-me shit, but still.
“Good luck,” Jox said
dryly. “I couldn’t always tell the difference, and I knew him his
entire life.” But after a minute of silent schlepping, he said,
“Anything you want to know in particular?”
“Well . . . Anna’s
told me a bit about what he was like, you know, before.” He almost
hadn’t bothered asking her, but had figured, What the hell? To his surprise, she’d talked for
nearly an hour, making Red- Boar sound like the local big man on
campus, his first wife the homecoming queen. Rabbit hadn’t known
what to make of the picture she painted, couldn’t reconcile it with
the stubborn, zonked- out asshole he’d grown up with. When Jade
turned up with the skull effigy a few days later, though, he’d
thought he understood. Anna had been saying good- bye to the
memories. No wonder she’d made them sound better than they probably
were. He continued. “And Strike’s filled in most of what I was too
young to remember about growing up. So I was hoping maybe you could
tell me about when the old man went missing . . . and what happened
when he came back.” Even as he said it he felt like a total shit.
Nothing like putting the guy right back where he didn’t want to
go.
At first he thought
Jox was going to give him a well-deserved, Ask
me that some other time . . . like never. But after a
moment, the winikin said, “It happened
a few years after the massacre. Every cardinal day, your father and
I would hop a plane down to the Yucatán and sneak into Chichén
Itzá, and he would try to jack in, to see if the barrier was still
blocked. This one time, as we came out of the tunnel, he just . . .
I don’t know. Snapped. I knew he was having trouble dealing—we all
were. But this . . . It came out of nowhere. One minute he was
treating me like furniture, like usual, and the next he was coming
after me.” The winikin’s voice dropped.
“Three times in my life now, I’ve thought I was going to die. Once
was during the massacre. Once was when the makol took over Lucius and got loose inside the
compound. And once was when Red-Boar came after me that
day.”
A shiver crawled down
the back of Rabbit’s neck. “I thought he just up and
disappeared.”
“He did. But he beat
the shit out of me first.” Jox clenched and unclenched one fist,
staring at it as if remembering pain, or perhaps broken bones. “I
don’t know what was going on inside his head, or what specifically
triggered it. All I know is that I was surprised as hell when I
woke up and found myself alive—more or less—and him long gone. I
dragged myself to our bolt-hole in the village—remember that
place?—doctored myself up, and managed to make my flight home,
barely. I remember sitting there with his spot empty beside me,
hoping to hell he wouldn’t show up.”
“He . . . Fuck.”
Rabbit gave up any pretense of hauling the next-to-last box and
just stared at the winikin. “I’m so
fucking sorry.”
“Don’t be. Those were
his fists, not yours. I consider it damned lucky he didn’t use his
knife on me. If he had, we’d all be living very different lives
right now.”
“Whoa.” Rabbit’s
brain tripped over the sequence of what-ifs. If Jox had died back
then, Strike and Anna would’ve gone into the foster system. Anna
had blocked out most of her memories from before the massacre, and
Strike’s had been those of an average, if doted-on, nine-year-old
boy. What would they have done when the barrier reactivated? Where
would they have gone? They wouldn’t have known about Skywatch,
wouldn’t have known there were other survivors. More, Rabbit didn’t
even want to think what his own childhood would have been like
without Jox in it, and Strike and Anna as his unofficial siblings.
Granted, Jox had been able to buffer his old man only to a point,
but without that leveling influence . . . Hell, he probably
would’ve ended up in the system too. If he’d been
lucky.
“Your father came
back three years later. I had taken Strike and Anna down to Chichén
Itzá for the cardinal day—with Red-Boar gone, it was up to them to
try the magic. We were just coming out of the tunnel when he
stepped out of the rain forest. I pulled a gun on him,” Jox said
matter-of-factly. “I’d been carrying a piece the whole time he was
gone, afraid that he’d show up and go after one of the kids instead
of just me. But he didn’t try to hurt us. He put his hands in the
air. A few seconds later, you came out of the underbrush and stood
beside him. I looked at you for a moment and you looked back, and I
put the gun away.” The winikin paused.
“He never apologized, and I never asked him to, just like I never
asked him where he’d been or what he’d been doing.”
Rabbit’s throat had
gone dry. “You let him come back because of me?”
“Because of you . . .
and because it was bad enough living through what happened at
Skywatch. He was the only one who survived being ambushed by the
Banol Kax at the intersection. I had to
believe the gods kept him alive for a reason.”
“Do you still believe
that?”
Jox sent Rabbit a
long look. “I do. I hope you’ll do your best to prove me
right.”
“I . . . Shit.” When
his chest got tight and funny at the idea that his old man might
have lived solely so he could be born, and the pressure that idea
put on him, Rabbit grabbed his box. “Weren’t we supposed to be
schlepping this crap somewhere?”
“That was the general
theory.” Jox seemed willing to let the topic drop. But as they were
heading along what Rabbit had started to think of as the Hall of
Ghosts, the winikin said, “The only
time he ever mentioned those missing years, he said something about
a village called Ox Ajal, up in the highlands.” Jox looked sidelong
at Rabbit. “But keep in mind that sometimes when you go looking for
answers, you don’t get the ones you’re expecting, or particularly
want.”
Rabbit lifted a
shoulder. “Nah. I appreciate your telling me about the old man. It
. . . it helps to know it wasn’t just me, you know?” It wasn’t an
evasion, precisely. But he still felt like shit, given how cool Jox
had been to him just now, and what he’d revealed about the
past.
“After what’s been
going on with Jade’s mother and the nahwal, I think most of us are thinking about our
families, particularly our mothers. But do me a favor and keep it
in perspective, okay? You’re doing a good job building your own
life. Don’t fuck it up trying to prove something to a dead
man.”
Rabbit didn’t know
what to say to that, so he said nothing. Part of him knew Jox was
right, that he should let it go and concentrate on his role within
the magi. He was making headway finally, and it felt good. But he
already knew what Myrinne was going to say, because he was thinking
it: The name of the village—his mother’s village?—couldn’t be a
coincidence.
In the old tongue,
ox ajal meant “thrice manifested,” and
its strange, double-skull glyph was used to represent the
Triad.
June 21
Summer solstice
Two years and six months to the zero date
Summer solstice
Two years and six months to the zero date
After the grueling
winikin-led practice finally ended at
midafternoon the day before the solstice, Jade had dragged herself
to her suite, curled up in her bed, and pulled the covers over her
head to shut out the rest of the world. She had slept a solid ten
hours and awoke well past midnight; the sky was dark and lovely
beyond the balcony, with a sliver of moon providing pale blue
light. She felt good; heck, she felt better than good, riding on
the early buzz of barrier magic that would build exponentially in
the hours leading up to the solstice. Driven by the magic-wrought
urgency, she showered and dressed in jeans, a tight black tee, and
her boots. It wasn’t until she was pulling on a long-sleeved shirt
against the cool night air that she acknowledged she was headed
outside. To Lucius. They hadn’t spoken more than a few words to
each other in the past three days, but although the whirlwind of
game practice, rescue plans, and magical preparations had left her
with little in the way of time or energy, she’d never stopped being
aware of him on an intimate, visceral level.
Don’t be an Edda, she told herself, but the warning
fell flat because she might be a mage, but on another level she was
only human. And having spent the past two days watching Lucius
practice the gracefully violent moves of the ancient ball game . .
. wow. Just wow.
After the first few
times one of the winikin had
demonstrated a move to have Lucius not only pick it up immediately,
but sometimes even improve upon it with his greater mass and
strength, his ability to instinctively shift his center of gravity
lower to get a knee or a hip under the heavy ball to keep it aloft
or in play, Jox had called him on it, and he’d admitted to having
played some pickup games while out in the field, albeit with the
smaller, lighter balls used in the modern era. It had startled
Jade—and, she suspected, some of the others—to realize that the
game was still played as pure entertainment among the Mayan
villages, and not just as the tourist-focused reenactments they had
found on YouTube. Indeed, it seemed to Jade like an unfortunate
statement on humanity that the ball game, which had religion at its
center, had survived the conquistadors while the Mayan writing
system and codices were systematically destroyed as heathen tools.
The game itself had evolved over time, but its core was largely
unchanged, and Lucius’s experience with the moves put him at a
substantial advantage.
Watching him move
lightly over the ground, completely at home in his body, entirely
in control of his movements and reflexes, Jade had found herself
brutally aroused despite her fatigue. Now, with the fatigue gone,
the arousal remained, a sharp ache that drove her out of the
mansion in search of Lucius.
She found him sitting
atop one of the ball court walls, staring into the
night.
She climbed up the
steep stone staircase and sat beside him, so their arms brushed
lightly as their legs dangled over the sheer twenty- foot drop of
one of two parallel stone walls. To her right, she could just make
out the moon shadow of the high-set stone ring that was the game’s
ultimate goal. From down below, it had looked impossibly small in
relation to the size of the game ball. From up atop the wall, it
still looked damn tiny. No wonder there was also a point system of
body hits and out-of-bounds penalties; the hoop seemed an
impossible target.
Without preamble, he
held out his right hand and flipped his palm up to reveal the
quatrefoil hellmark, which looked black in the moonlight, though
she knew it was the bloodred of dark magic. “Do you think it’s
possible that I’m part Xibalban?”
“You—Oh.” She rocked
back in startlement and fumbled for a few seconds, trying to
redirect her brain from the sex buzz in the air to his
question.
“Is that an ‘oh’ as
in, ‘I’m thinking,’ or as in, ‘Where the fuck are my jade-tips’ ?
”
“That was ‘oh’ as in,
‘I’d like to say you’re crazy, but it would explain a few things.’
More than a few.” She paused, thinking that, unfortunately, it
wasn’t the dumbest thing she’d heard lately. “One of the questions
we’ve had about you from the beginning is: Why you? Why did the
makol reach through the barrier to you,
when you’re a fundamentally decent guy? Impulsive, maybe. Stubborn,
definitely. Occasionally self-serving, check. But on balance, there
never seemed a compelling reason why a demon would go after you,
and more, why you’d be susceptible to it. What if the connection
and susceptibility come from a few drops of Xibalban blood, but
your makeup, your essential youness,
runs counter to the darkness? That could explain why the
makol was able to come through the
barrier into you, but couldn’t integrate your soul with its own . .
. thus making it possible for you to survive the Prophet’s
spell.”
Instead of looking
appeased by the thought that his inner good guy had saved his life,
he seemed pensive. “That would imply that I’ve got a part in the
gods’ plan. That they intended for me to go through everything I’ve
been through. For me to do the things I’ve done.” He scrubbed both
hands over his face. “Hell, I just don’t know. I can’t think about
it anymore or I’ll drive myself up a wall.”
“Newsflash: You’ve
already done that.” What was more, his vibe had gone dark and sad,
his expression closed. Which was high on the not good scale if openness was the key to his
magic. Leave it alone, her cautious
self said. You came looking for him, not the
other way around. But there was another voice now, a
stronger, more adventurous one that said, Do
it. I dare you. Her heart hammered against her ribs as the
moment gained meaning and importance. Then, taking the risk, the
leap of faith, she shifted to straddle him suddenly, so they were
aligned center-to-center in an instant. Heat fired in her blood.
Magic. Desire. He went stiff and still and his hands came up to
grip her hips. Before he could pull her close or push her away, she
leaned in so her face was very close to his and their breath
mingled as she asked, “Question is: Now that you’re up the wall,
what are you going to do there?”