CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Joy exploded through
Jade. Hardly daring to hope, to believe, she lunged up and ran to
Lucius, choking on her sobs. He groaned and rolled toward her, then
sat partway up and reached for her. She dropped to her knees, her
tears finally breaking free as his arms closed around her, strong
and sure. “I love you,” she said, the words muffled against the
side of his face. “Gods, I love you.” Then he was kissing her, and
she was kissing him back, and the world settled into a new, better
shape around her.
When they parted,
Lucius looked past her, and his eyes went wide. And it was his turn
to say, “Ho- ly shit.”
The firebird was
bowing down in front of Sasha. Michael stood at her
side.
Another hot wave
flashed through Jade, this time one of relief. She hadn’t cost the
magi a Godkeeper, after all. “She was meant to be Godkeeper to
Kinich Ahau all along,” she said softly, although she suspected
that when she and Sasha had jointly fulfilled the triad prophecy,
they had both become equal candidates for the honor.
Lucius seemed to
follow her thoughts, because he lined up his forearm next to hers.
On his inner wrist he wore a jun tan to
match hers . . . and the quatrefoil hellmark had turned black.
“Thank you,” he rasped, in a voice that had started out that of a
stranger and become that of her mate.
She looked at their
marks. Despite the hot, hard joy that raced through her at the
sight of the jun tan, she shook her
head in pretend rue. “Shandi is going to kick my ass.”
“First she’ll thank
the gods that you made it home safely. Then, yeah, she might kick
your ass.” They grinned at each other. He stood, his strength
returning quickly, and helped her up. As they headed toward the
others, hand in hand, power flashed red-gold, there was a
thunder-loud clap, and the firebird sprang aloft as Sasha and
Michael embraced, leaning into each other.
Kinich Ahau gained
altitude, winging into the sky. As the god rose higher and higher,
flames limned the red feathers and trailed from the beat of its
wings. Then, suddenly, white-hot light flashed. And the god was
gone.
“We did it,” Jade
said, not quite ready to believe, though Lucius’s fingers were
tightly threaded through hers. But then she stared up at the sky in
dismay. “I thought winning the game would send us home. Why are we
still here?”
“Because it’s my job
to get us home,” Lucius said. “The magic inside me originally
belonged to Cizin. When its soul was torn away from mine, I somehow
kept hold of that one piece of the demon’s power. You know how
we’ve theorized that different makol
have different skill sets? Well, I think Cizin was capable of
forming temporary roads through the barrier. But you were right
that I couldn’t touch the power until I got to the point where
nothing else mattered . . . which happened when Akhenaton tried to
possess you.” He caressed her cheek. “I’d rather live forever in
the in-between than have you go through that.”
She wanted to close
her eyes and lean into his touch. Instead, she poked him in the
stomach. He let out a surprised “oof” as she got in his face.
“You’d better consider yourself lucky you fought off Akhenaton. If
you hadn’t, I would’ve had to find a way to get to the in-between
myself, because, starting now, I don’t intend to live without
you.”
His lips tipped up.
“Yeah. I got that.” He turned to Strike. “I think this is going to
take both of us. That first night, I think I called the road magic
without really specifying a destination; at first Kinich Ahau’s
need drew us to Xibalba. Then I called the magic a second time to
get us out of there, but I still didn’t have a real destination in
mind. In the absence of Cizin’s magic, I suspect the library magic
would have drawn me straight to the library. As it is”—he turned
his palms up—“if we can combine your ’port targeting with my
ability to form a conduit through the barrier, we may have gained
more than just a new Godkeeper and two new mated pairs just
now.”
Startled, Jade looked
at Sasha’s wrist, where she too wore a new jun
tan. Curious, Jade craned to pick out Rabbit in the crowd.
Face set and angry, he deliberately looked away, but turned his
forearm toward her. He wore no jun tan,
and his hellmark remained bloodred. Her heart ached for
him.
“When I used the road
magic previously,” Lucius said, “Jade’s and my bodies stayed safely
back at Skywatch. This time we all came down here body and soul,
via the hellroad. Problem is, the solstice is past and the hellroad
is sealed, or close to it.”
Sven glanced at his
heavy-duty diver’s watch. “Shit. He’s right.”
Lucius held out his
still-bleeding palm to Strike. “You can move bodies on earth. I can
move spirits between planes. You want to see if between the two of
us we can get our collective asses home?”
“Fuck,
yeah.”
The men linked hands
as the others nicked their palms and joined up in a circle, linked
by blood and magic. Jade kept hold of Lucius’s hand, with Michael
on her other side, which seemed fitting somehow.
“Everyone think about
Skywatch,” Lucius said. “The magic needs a
destination.”
“We
should”—all think of the same spot,
Jade started to say, but she was cut off midword when the magic
triggered unexpectedly, the power leaping from zero to ninety in no
time flat. She heard Lucius yell something but missed what he said;
his magic roared in her head, masculine and commanding, blending
now with Strike’s red-gold teleporter’s talent. The power grabbed
them, snatching them out of the canyon in an instant. She saw a
flash of dark, ominous shadows moving toward the “I”-shaped ball
court; then it was gone. Xibalba was gone. And still they moved up,
accelerating, the universe moving past them in a blur that wasn’t
gray-green, wasn’t black, wasn’t any real color at all. Then, in
the blur, she saw an image: a teenager’s face, smiling at her.
“You’re so much smarter than I was,”
the nahwal’s voice said. “So much braver than I. You fought for
him.”
Jade gaped even as
truth and joy sang through her. “You died trying to save us. That’s
as brave as it gets.”
“If I had truly been brave, I wouldn’t have gone into the
library that last time. I would have stayed. I would have found you
. . . somehow.”
Jade’s heart took a
long, slow roll in her chest. What would it have been like to have
her mother with her growing up? To have another senior mage alive
when they returned to Skywatch? But she shook her head. “I don’t
blame you.”
“Maybe you should.”
“I don’t,” Jade said
firmly. “I forgive you. I hope you’ll forgive yourself.” She
paused. “I’m okay now . . . Mom.”
As if that had been
what the nahwal—ghost?—had been waiting
for, despite whether she knew it herself, Vennie’s lips turned up
in a smile that Jade knew from seeing her own face in the mirror.
Then the vision wavered and went thin. In the instant before it
disappeared, though, Jade saw another shadow: that of a tall,
broad-shouldered young man waiting for Vennie in the
mist.
Tears blinded Jade
alongside a thought of, Thank you,
gods. Then the air detonated around her and the magi
materialized, their feet firmly planted on the floor for a change.
Only they weren’t at Skywatch.
They were in the
library.
Lucius’s hand
tightened on hers and his face drained of color. “Oh, gods. Oh,
shit!”
Jade’s heart
stuttered in her chest. They stood in the study area Lucius had
described: There were the racks and robes, the tables, the yes/no
stones, and the way glyph. Beyond,
shelves stretched into the distance. The fountain was just as he
had described it, with one difference: It was working now. Water
spilled from the wall spigot, filled the bowl, and trickled down
the back of the stone jaguar’s gaping throat. Between its paws, the
bowl was filled with flat, irregular rounds of corn
bread.
A disbelieving laugh
caught in her throat and emerged sounding like a moan. “At least we
won’t starve right away.” But could they get out again? Had she
found love, inner strength, and a new sort of peace, only to lose
it too quickly? More, had they just doomed the earth
to—
“That’s new.” Lucius’s eyes were locked on a plain
wooden door that was inset beside the jaguar. Tugging on their
joined hands to bring her with him, he crossed to the door. Seeing
no latch, he pushed on it.
The panel opened
easily. Sunlight spilled in, blinding Jade. She squinted into the
light, which was too bright, too white, too hot. . . . Her eyes
were slow to adjust. When they did, she found herself blinking at
canyon walls and a worn pathway leading to a small cluster of
buildings in the middle distance.
Skywatch. Oh, holy
shit.
“We’re home,” Lucius
said. “And I think we brought the whole fucking library with us.”
He let out a long, shuddering breath as the others clustered behind
them, and they poured through the door as a team. The sky was very
blue, the sun very white. The air felt drier than it had the day
before, and the encroaching algae slime was already turning black
and dying beneath the might of Kinich Ahau.
Turning back to look
at where they had come from, Jade let out a long breath of her own.
“No,” she said softly. “We didn’t bring
the library home. You
did.”
The plain wooden
doorway had appeared in the spot where the hidden tunnel mouth had
been, flanked by the flame-shaped stones on one side, the staring
eyes on the other. She imagined that when they went back inside,
all the way to the rear of the chamber, they would find that the
place where Vennie’s skeleton had sat in the star bloodline’s
secret room would match up precisely with the metaphysical version
of her corpse Lucius had seen within the barrier. Or maybe they
would both be gone, vanished now that her soul was where it
belonged. Either one would be fine, Jade thought. She knew her
parents now.
Above the door,
blazoned into the canyon wall in glyph writing, was the prophecy
Lucius had translated from the carved wooden box.
“Fuck me,” he said on
a sharp bark of disbelief. “It was a true prophecy after all, but
Sasha guessed right. It was a damned fragment.” He read aloud,
translating: “ ‘In the triad years, a mage-born Prophet can wield
the library’s might, but it will take a human’s love to bring it
back to Earth.’ ” He turned to Jade,
pulled her into his arms, and kissed her deeply. When they came up
for air, he finished the translation: “ ‘Magic isn’t the answer.
Love is.’ ”