Nightkeepers

It couldn’t have been someone easy to find, like Harts-horn or Cortes at the Institute of the Yucatan, or even Foohey up in Ottawa. They all had home bases and scheduled lectures, conferences, and tours. No, it had to be Ledbetter, who had all of those things and blithely ignored them to disappear into the highlands for months at a time, but got away with it because he was deranged enough—and brilliant enough—that everyone called him eccentric rather than unreliable. That had worked in her favor, though. She’d been able to bribe his senior grad student to give her Ledbetter’s approximate coordinates by dangling the promise of a job at UT.

It wasn’t so much that the program in Austin was better, but the head epigrapher at UT—namely Anna— had less of a rep for flaking out.

Between magic and GPS, she figured they were maybe two miles from Ledbetter’s camp. Within a half hour of hard hiking, her calves were burning, reminding her that the stair stepper was her friend, not just a place to hang dry cleaning. But she didn’t complain, because what would be the point? Red-Boar didn’t care if her feet hurt. He didn’t care about anything but the past. Never had.

But when she sighed, he paused, looked back, and said, ‘‘Need a break?’’

‘‘Several, but not of the kind you’re thinking,’’ she said drily, then motioned for him to keep going. ‘‘We don’t have time for a sit-down. I’m fine.’’ More or less.

He looked at her for a long moment, then turned away without comment.

Anna followed him, her eyes glued to his wide shoulders, trying not to envision the scars she knew crisscrossed his back beneath the long-sleeved shirt he wore tucked into camo pants and hitched with a stocked weapons belt. She wore the same, though her belt wasn’t loaded with nearly as much firepower. Her aim was notorious, and not in a good way.

Shrugging beneath her light pack, she tried to resettle the load, which suddenly seemed off-kilter. Faint nausea stirred, though she wasn’t sure if it was hunger or teleport sickness. Thinking to drown whatever it was, she reached for her bottle of purified water.

She had the bottle halfway to her lips when she realized it wasn’t nerves or hunger. It was power. Not the kind she was used to, but a deeper, darker kind that grabbed her by the gut and squeezed, making her want to run and hide.

Ahead of her, Red-Boar stepped through a curtain of hanging vines into the sunlight.

‘‘Wait!’’ she cried, but he’d already stopped dead.

He turned back, expression grim. ‘‘Stay here.’’

‘‘What is it?’’ Ignoring his order, she stepped up beside him.

They stood on the edge of a small clearing. Or not a clearing, she realized. At some time in the past, a sinkhole had broken through, allowing access to one of the subterranean rivers that formed the only source of freshwater in the Yucatan. Over time, the sinkhole—called a cenote—had filled with leaves and organics that eventually became soil, capping off the cenote and creating new ground within a perfectly circular depression.

The Maya had believed the cenotes were entrances to the underworld; they had probably thrown sacred offerings into the sinkhole. The magic of those now-buried sacrifices would have accounted for a normal power surge. But there was nothing normal about the darkness Anna sensed. Power hummed through her hiking boots, feeling purple and black and discordant. Drawn by the magic, simultaneously fascinated and repelled, she approached the cenote, testing each step before she put her weight down.

‘‘Don’t.’’ Red-Boar’s single word was less of a command than a plea, as though he already knew what she would find.

Then again, so did she. The air stank of death.

It wasn’t until she reached the center of the depression that she sank into the dirt beneath her feet, not because the cap sealing off access to the subterranean river was giving way, but because the ground itself had been disturbed. She didn’t need to see the churned-up earth beneath a scattering of leafy camouflage to know that she was standing atop a human grave. She could tell by the smell of death, of violence.

Her heart ached for a man she’d barely known.

‘‘It might not be Ledbetter,’’ she said, knowing it probably was. The makol had beaten them there, taking away a valuable resource.

Red-Boar didn’t argue, simply made a wide berth around her, knelt, and used the flat of his machete to scrape away the soft covering at one end. He didn’t have to go far. Only a few inches down, he uncovered fairly fresh human remains that started at the neck, with dark, raw flesh and a severed vertebral column.

The head was gone, no doubt taken elsewhere to add to the makol’s skull pile. His powers weren’t at full strength yet, but they were growing fast. She could feel it.

Red-Boar uncovered the torso and abdomen, and she felt an unreasonable wash of relief to find them intact. He hadn’t had his heart cut out. Somehow, beheading was so much less gruesome to contemplate than vivisection. And if that didn’t prove how screwed-up her priorities were these days, she didn’t know what would.

‘‘Wallet.’’ Red-Boar flipped the leather bifold. ‘‘Money’s here. Cards. License.’’ He cut a glance at Anna. ‘‘Ambrose Ledbetter.’’

‘‘Oh,’’ she said faintly. Just oh, as the world took a long, lazy spin around her and she dropped down onto a nearby log. ‘‘Damn.’’

They hadn’t exactly been pals—Ledbetter was prickly on a good day, downright bitchy the rest of the time— but they’d known each other in passing. And now he was dead because of what he’d known. Because of what the ajaw-makol didn’t want them to know.

Red-Boar stared down at the headless corpse but said nothing. Not that she should’ve expected anything more, but a pithy ‘‘Poor bastard’’ would’ve been nice.

Then again, the Nightkeeper didn’t waste sympathy on the living; why would he give it to the dead?

After a long, shuddering moment, she forced herself to focus on the practicalities rather than the raw stump where Ledbetter’s head should’ve been attached to his shoulders. ‘‘We should bury him properly. Animals will dig him up if we leave him like this.’’