Nightkeepers

The bus arrived, and he climbed aboard. As he lifted his hand to grab an overhead anchor, he caught a glimpse of the slice on his palm and frowned. ‘‘Weird.’’

The cut was almost completely healed.

Leah woke slowly, her consciousness dragging itself out of a warm cocoon of sleep back to reality, where it way didn’t want to be. Her head felt hollow and empty, and her heart hurt with grief, with guilt. For the first few seconds she couldn’t remember why.

Then it all came rushing back; she remembered the nahwal’s dire predictions, remembered that Vince and Zipacna were one and the same . . . and she remembered what the ajaw-makol had said about her being the gods’ chosen.

Making a small sound of pain, she rolled onto her side and curled up, pressing her hands to her face in a pointless effort to shut it all out.

But the mattress dipped beside her and gentle hands touched her, rolling her over. Strong arms drew her against a warm, solid chest. ‘‘Come here,’’ Strike said, his voice rumbling beneath the softness of his T-shirt. ‘‘Hold on to me. You’re not alone, Blondie. You’re not going through this alone.’’

Shock rattled her, and she opened her eyes to find herself nestled in the crook of his arm, lying on the mattress she’d schlepped out to the solarium so she could sleep beneath the stars.

He was fully clothed and resting on top of the comforter while she’d slept beneath in a T-shirt and underwear, as though he’d kept watch over her, not wanting her to wake up scared. His eyes were very blue, his face haggard with emotion and exhaustion as he pressed her head back to his shoulder. ‘‘Just one more minute. Then we’ll talk.’’

She resisted for a heartbeat, then gave in and clung, because the fact that they were alone together—in her bed, no less—meant she hadn’t imagined any of it, that it’d all really happened.

Stifling a sob, she pressed against him full-length and looped an arm around his waist, holding him close, anchoring herself. Heat rose, and she was tempted to kiss him, tempted to lose herself in the madness. But that would’ve been an evasion, and she knew it. So she shifted to look at the scar she’d gotten as a child, high on her inner right wrist. He’d asked about it twice before, and each time she’d avoided the question. Now she had to wonder—if she’d told him from the very beginning, would anything have happened differently?

‘‘We were on vacation,’’ she began. ‘‘In Mexico. The Yucatan.’’

The time-share had been billed as a ‘‘rain forest retreat on the beautiful Yucatan peninsula only minutes away from the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza.’’ The house itself had been okay, but it had been the small, unrestored stone ruins tucked into the rain forest nearby that’d grabbed Leah’s attention. She’d been eight years old, Matty six, and she’d had no business sneaking out that night, even less business making her younger brother go with her. But even knowing she’d catch hell if her parents found out, she’d snagged a flashlight and headed out into the warm, humid night, far too brave for her own good, but not brave enough to go alone.

‘‘Don’t be a baby,’’ she’d said to Matty with all the lofty scorn of a two-year age gap. ‘‘I dare you.’’ And he’d gone along with her, not because of the dare, but because even back then he’d been too willing to follow the leader.

‘‘We went inside,’’ she said, remembering the damp chill of the stones, even though so much time had passed. ‘‘It wasn’t big, just a stone rectangle the size of a school bus or something. We’d checked it out that afternoon, the whole family, so I knew there wasn’t anything scary. Except when we got inside, there was a door that hadn’t been there before.’’ She paused. ‘‘School had just gotten out when we left. I don’t remember the date, but it could’ve been the summer solstice.’’

Strike nodded, and didn’t seem all that surprised. Which she supposed made sense. The phrase ‘‘twenty-four years ago at the summer solstice’’ was burned into the Nightkeepers’ collective consciousness as the night their lives had changed irrevocably.

Hers too, apparently. And her brother’s.

‘‘Go on.’’

‘‘The door led to a long tunnel that sloped down. Matty didn’t want to go in. I didn’t either, really, but there was something calling me. Like a child’s voice, only in my head, telling me it was okay, that I needed to go in there. So I did, and I made Matty come with me.’’ He’d been crying, she remembered. And she’d dragged him along anyway.

She continued, ‘‘I don’t know how far down we were, but there was this explosion, first orange, then yellow. I remember screaming and turning to run, but something hit me on the back of the head. I fell and lost hold of Matty, and then . . .’’ She trailed off. ‘‘My parents found us the next morning outside the little ruin, unconscious, and rushed us to the nearest hospital. When I woke up, my mother was crying. She stopped when Matty woke up, too. We both had burns on our arms, and . . . that was it.’’ She stared at the scar. ‘‘We went home the next day, and I spent the entire summer grounded.’’

‘‘Did you and he ever talk about what happened?’’ Strike asked, his words rumbling beneath her cheek.

‘‘Not then. But we got into a fight a few months before he died, when I found out how much time he was spending with the 2012ers. He said there was something about Zipacna that called to him, that I ought to understand what he was going through.’’ She broke off, swallowing hard. ‘‘He was so angry . . .’’ She closed her eyes, making a connection she hadn’t seen before because she hadn’t wanted to look too closely. ‘‘He’d always been a little borderline.’’

It was starting to make an awful sort of sense. The temple must’ve been some ancient place of power, maybe even one of the hidden entrances to the underground river system beneath Chichen Itza. She’d wandered in there —or been called?—at the same time that Strike’s father and the other Nightkeepers were fighting to seal the intersection. After the Nightkeepers died the barrier started to close off, and Kulkulkan must’ve reached out to the two nearest—and possibly, because of their ages, most open-minded—humans: her and Matty. The dual god had touched them somehow, making them his. Matty had gotten the darker aspects, leading to his later troubles—or maybe he’d been predisposed to trouble, and that had attracted the darker aspects of the god; who knew? She’d gotten the lighter aspects, which included justice. Police work. It fit.

Unfortunately, it also fit that the Banol Kax had somehow known about the two of them, or sensed their connection to the god and had sent Zipacna after them.

Matty’s blood had held enough power to reactivate the barrier, Zipacna had said. Hers held enough to bring the Banol Kax through.