Nightkeepers

‘‘So you’re just thinking about him while you’re fucking me? That’s supposed to make it better? Jesus, Anna.’’

She wanted to stay and explain, to try to fix what might be unfixable, but she couldn’t get that image out of her head. She’d seen Lucius sitting in his apartment, reading the codex fragment aloud. Reading the lost spell she’d only half translated but already knew to be powerful magic.

She had to get over there, had to stop him. Heart pounding, she leaped out of bed and scrabbled for her bra and panties. ‘‘I’ve got to go.’’

‘‘What?’’ Dick stared at her, dumbfounded. ‘‘You’re fucking kidding me!’’

She knew there was hurt beneath the bluster. She also knew this was quite possibly the moment that would define the rest of their marriage—or end it. But the text was her responsibility, as was Lucius.

‘‘I’m sorry.’’ She turned away from Dick, though her heart twisted. ‘‘I have to go.’’

He was stone silent, watching as she pulled on jeans and a shirt, shoved her feet into a pair of sneakers, and headed for the bedroom door. She wanted to stay, wanted to explain everything, but he wouldn’t believe her. Hell, she’d lived the first nineteen years of her life in the Nightkeepers’ world, and she barely believed the things she knew to be true. Dick would never get it.

So she took off, leaving him alone in the bedroom, knowing he probably wouldn’t be there when she got back.

Sitting in the kitchen of his apartment, Lucius stared down at his left hand, which clutched a serrated steak knife. He didn’t dare look at his other hand, or he might pass out. Jesus, what have I done?

Pain radiated up his right arm, stemming from where he’d clenched his fingers around his cut-open palm. Blood leaked from between his knuckles, dripping faster than seemed natural. It wasn’t the blood or the pain that had him panicked, though—it was the codex fragment.

He’d bled all over the thing.

Anna was going to kill him.

He didn’t remember deciphering any of it, but there were words rocketing around inside his brain, syllables he couldn’t quite catch but knew he should understand. The translation eluded him, dancing just beyond the reaches of his spinning mind.

Letting go of the knife, hearing it clatter to the floor, Lucius pressed the fingers of his good hand to his eyes in an effort to stop the pounding pulse behind them.

He sort of remembered deciphering the first couple of glyphs, but then something had happened and things had gone fuzzy for a while until he’d snapped back in and found himself sitting at the kitchen table with a steak knife stuck in his palm and half a pint of A-positive splattered on the stolen text.

Thinking to clean it off or something, he rose from the kitchen table and shambled across the room to the sink. He wadded up a couple of paper towels and pressed them against his cut palm, then wet a couple more of the towels and turned back to the table.

By the time he got there, he wasn’t carrying paper towels. Instead, he held one of his roommate’s froufrou scented candles and a box of matches.

Don’t do it . . . just don’t! he shouted inside his own skull as he watched his hands strike a match and light the candle. Don’t, please, no!

Without volition—his own, at least—Lucius touched the candle to the edge of the blood-soaked codex fragment. The flame licked at the dried bark, turning the edges brown and then black. A chant rose in his mind, overwhelming him, overpowering him until he said the words aloud, giving them shape and substance as the codex burned. He leaned forward and breathed in the smoke of burned blood and paper.

A ripping, tearing noise blotted out everything else, and a void appeared inside him, a sudden emptiness inside his soul, his being.

‘‘Crap!’’ He reeled and fell to his hands and knees, retching as glowing green foulness oozed from the tear inside him and began to fill the empty spot. Pain sliced through him, crippling him and driving him to the kitchen floor, where he curled himself into a ball of agony, with his knees pulled up tight beneath his chin. He threw back his head and howled, but he couldn’t tell if any noise actually came out, because it was lost amid the screams that seemed to come from his soul, from all around him.

There was a loud boom, a thundering noise he felt as a vibration rather than hearing as a sound, and suddenly he knew he wasn’t alone anymore. Something else lived inside him. He turned blind eyes upward, squinting in an effort to see through the darkness.

A dark-haired man stood over him, heavily muscled, barefoot and bare chested, wearing loose black pants fastened at the ankles with intricate twists of red twine. His eyes were a bright, luminous green, one darker than the other, and he had a flying crocodile inked across his right pec. The air around him was shadowed a dark purple-black and radiated with hatred. Malice.

Lucius opened his mouth to beg for help, for mercy, but he wasn’t sure he even formed words through the taste of evil and the stink of despair. He was suddenly very afraid he was going to die.

Worse, he was afraid he might not.

Strike dropped back into his earthly body with a flash of pain that he welcomed because it meant he was still alive. He blinked and felt his eyelids grate, shifted and felt his joints pop, and didn’t care because the first thing he saw was Leah on the other side of the chac-mool, blinking her cornflower blue eyes in confusion, and then, when the memories caught up, making a little, ‘‘Oh,’’ of despair.

‘‘We’ll figure something out,’’ he said quickly. ‘‘I promise.’’

But they both knew he hadn’t promised to keep her safe, or even alive. Things had gotten seriously complicated way fast. The Nightkeepers couldn’t lose the skyroad or Kulkulkan. But at the same time, he couldn’t lose Leah.

Her expression went wistful. ‘‘Yeah,’’ she said, responding to what he hadn’t said, rather than what he had. ‘‘I know.’’