Nightkeepers

small, innocuous thing—an oblong rectangle wrapped in brown paper and secured with packing tape. Inside, though, was something beautiful. Something terrible. She could feel it hum up her arms, begging to be unwrapped. To be seen. To be used.

It was one of the lost spells. It had to be. But where had Strike found it? Where had it been all these years?

Jox had told her the stories, of course. He’d told both her and Strike as part of their training, and then repeated them over again when Red-Boar’s young son, Rabbit, had been old enough to understand. The winikin had told them how the Maya had welcomed Cortes’s ships, ignoring the Nightkeepers who said they should be wary, pointing to the third prophecy: When the solstice sun rises, a fair-skinned man arrives from the east, bringing destruction.

The Mayan hosts, believing the lies of the demon-worshiping Order of Xibalba, had welcomed the conquistador’s ships as heralding the return of the winged serpent god, Kulkulkan. Instead, the galleons had brought utter destruction. What happened before will happen again, said the writs, referring back to the massacre that had driven the Nightkeepers out of Egypt when Akhenaten decreed there was only one true God. And history had indeed repeated itself, with the conquistadors slaughtering all but a handful of the magic users and burning their books, forcing the Maya to convert to Christianity. The accumulated wisdom of thousands of lifetimes had perished in the second massacre, with only scraps surfacing from time to time. What were the chances of one surfacing now, as the portal was wakening, as power was building and the end-time approached?

There are no coincidences, Jox had always said, his voice suddenly fresh in Anna’s mind even after all these years. There is only destiny. It was that destiny that had driven her away. Now it was looking to suck her back in, looking to make her into something she didn’t want to be, to take her away from the things she did want to be. A wife. A teacher. Hell, a soccer mom.

She ripped the package open more violently than necessary, because it was hard to be a soccer mom without kids.

Beneath the outer layer of packing, there was a layer of acid-free paper, a layer of cardboard, and another of acid-free paper. Inside that was a flat packet of oilcloth, tied shut with a boot lace. Within that was a scrap of power.

The codex fragment bore lines of glyphwork so ornate that it was difficult to make out the symbols themselves. Soon, though, the lines and shapes began to resolve into flattened faces with heavy, hooked noses and elaborate headdresses, stylized caricatures of animals and plants interspersed with the dots and slashes. And the skulls. So many skulls, all tipped back, mouths opened as they screamed agony into the darkness.

Gods, she thought, feeling awe shimmer over her, through her. It’s gorgeous. Hideous, but gorgeous, and giving off so much power just sitting there that her skin grew warm in the center of her collarbone, where her quartz crystal used to rest. She even reached up to touch her pendant before she remembered it was gone. Then she let her hand fall and shoved the damned packet in a drawer, locking it tight, as though that would make it all go away.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

In the weeks following Strike’s revelation of the thirteenth prophecy, Leah channeled her excess energy into finding the bastard who’d killed her brother and friends . . . and learning how to kill the creature Zipacna had become. Logic—and rationality—said she should go home and work the case from there. But home wasn’t safe, and besides, the things she’d seen and done recently had separated her from that life somehow. She didn’t feel like that world fit anymore.

Which was unfortunate, because she sure didn’t fit into the Nightkeepers’ world, either.

As agreed, she and Strike avoided the hell out of each other. It wasn’t easy, considering that they crossed paths just often enough to keep the sizzle at a maddening background hum. But because he’d been right, damn it, the sex hadn’t been just sex, and because she didn’t want to be anybody’s sacrifice, she ignored the hum as best she could and threw herself into her work.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have much more in the success department there, either.

She was a bust in Magic 101, showing zero power, which was both a relief and a disappointment—a relief because she wasn’t sure she wanted to play the magic game when it seemed like a good way of getting dead, but a disappointment because she really, really wanted to fry Zipacna’s ass. Then she found out the deal with the MAC- 10s: The bullets were tipped with jade, which was apparently anathema to the denizens of the nine-layered hell called Xibalba. They were the Nightkeepers’ silver bullets.

And they were a way for her to fight Zipacna.

According to Jox—who had no use for her but proved to be a bit of a weapons junkie—the jade-tips wouldn’t kill a makol because its human aspect would protect it from the jade while its magic protected it from getting dead right away. But the jade-tips would sure as hell slow it down long enough for her to do the head-and-heart thing and recite a simple banishment spell. Jox said he wasn’t sure whether the banishment spell would work for a human—and of course he said the ‘‘human’’ part with a superior lip curl. That meant maybe the makol would vaporize . . . and maybe it’d sit its headless ass up and make a grab for her.

She had a feeling the winikin was hoping for the latter. But who the hell cared? At least she had a weapon with some hope of success. All she had to do was track down Zipacna, who might or might not be traveling with a hundred or so of his freak-show disciples.

That turned out to be easier said than done.

She leaned on the Nightkeeper’s private eye, Carter, and called in all her markers and then some. She tracked the 2012ers from Miami to the Keys and lost them when they hit the water, headed south. A week later, she picked them back up in south Texas, near the border. Once she had the location, she forced Strike and Red-Boar to take her along on the teleport recon by refusing to give up the location—and the relevant photographs— until they agreed.

They got there half a day too late. Zipacna and his freaks were gone.

Then the same thing happened in Fort Worth, and again in Philly, of all places. Then LA. Each time they were a fraction too late, sometimes a day, sometimes just a few hours, as if the bastard had known they were coming.

‘‘He’s got a seer,’’ Strike said at one point. ‘‘It’s the only explanation.’’

The knowledge hurt him doubly, she knew—once because they couldn’t catch the ajaw-