Dawnkeepers

itself?”

He hesitated so long that Anna thought he was going to play it smart. Then he sat up straight and squared his shoulders, suddenly looking less like a praying mantis and more like a taller-than-average guy who’d broadened out through the shoulders and gained twenty pounds or so of muscle while she hadn’t been paying attention. Before she could process that realization, he said to Desiree, “I believe in the Nightkeeper myth. So what?”

Anna winced, even though she’d warned him. Not that having an out-there opinion was a crime, but with Desiree gunning for the entire Mayan studies department and not being real picky about the actual legalities of the matter, he was effectively throwing himself on the academic sword.

Desiree tapped her manicured fingernails—which were pale mauve, rather than the more appropriate bloodred—against her lips. “You actually believe that ancient magicians from Atlantis — Atlantis, mind you—survived the flooding that came the last time this so-called Great Conjunction rolled through, twenty-six thousand years ago, and went on to shape, not just the Mayan Empire, but the Egyptians before them?”

“There are demonstrable parallels,” Lucius said before Anna could intervene. “For example, the dating of the Maya Long Count calendar begins circa 3114 B.C., which is well before the Maya were a people, before even their predecessors, the Olmec, started thinking about being more than scattered pastoralists and hunter-gatherers. It was, however, right about the time the first ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs started popping up, which many people consider the beginning of legitimate human civilization.”

Thor perked up a little. “You’re talking about von Daniken?”

Anna cringed. The Dutch pseudoscientist’s publication of Chariots of the Gods? in the sixties had been good in that it’d popularized the idea of connections and parallels amongst a number of ancient civilizations, prompting “real” researchers to investigate the possibility of trans-oceanic voyages long before the time of the Vikings. On the downside, it’d also popularized what Lucius often called the Stargate effect, i.e., the notion that most of early human civilization had been shaped by aliens.

Welcome to the tinfoil-hat zone.

“Not von Daniken per se, though he wasn’t entirely wrong,” Lucius told Thor. “The Nightkeepers were— maybe even are—far more than that. They were mentors, magi who lived in parallel with several of the most successful early civilizations, teaching them math and science, especially astronomy.” There was a subtle shift in Lucius’s face, making his features sharper, more mature as he said, “The commonalities between the Egyptians and Maya are too close to be coincidental—both religions were based on the sun and sky, and on the movement of the stars.”

Thor frowned. “I thought the Egyptians worshiped a single sun god. The Maya were polytheistic.”

“Exactly.” Lucius thumped the table, making his laptop jump. “The Cult of the Sun God was conceived by the pharaoh Akhenaton, who forcibly converted all of ancient Egypt from their long-held pantheistic religion to his new god, Aten. His guards slaughtered the priests of the old religion and defaced all of their temples and effigies, destroying millennia of worship in the space of a few years.”

Leaning forward in his enthusiasm, he said, “That was when the Nightkeepers fled Egypt—the survivors, anyway. Most of them were killed in Akhenaton’s religious ‘cleansing,’ but a few survived.

Those survivors eventually made their way to Central America, where they stumbled on the Olmec, who were just beginning to centralize, and were ripe for the teachings the Nightkeepers brought. Over time the Olmec, with the Nightkeepers’ help, eventually bloomed into the Mayan Empire. It’s . . .” He paused, then said, “It’s perfect. It all fits. Just look at the time line.”

Dead silence greeted that pronouncement.

For a second, Anna thought she caught a glint of satisfaction in Desiree’s eyes, but the dragon actually sounded sympathetic when she said, “That was what we were afraid of, Lucius. Given that, along with the disciplinary problems you’ve had in the past, your mediocre GPA, and the general lack of substantiated evidence underpinning your thesis, it is the opinion of this committee that you should not be granted the degree of doctor of philosophy in art history at this time.”

Anna wasn’t altogether surprised, but the punch of it still drove the breath from her lungs. When she got her wind back, she said, “I wish to formally appeal this decision.”

“Of course you do,” Desiree said, sounding as if she couldn’t care less. “The request is noted.”

Shuffling her papers into a pile, she rose, indicating that the meeting was over.

She and the others filed out, leaving Anna and Lucius alone in the conference room. He hadn’t said anything since Desiree had made her decision. Anna would’ve thought it was shock and denial, except that neither of those things was in his face. Instead he looked . . . pissed. Resentful. Like this was somehow her fault.

“What’s that glare for?” she snapped, annoyed.

“Please. Like you don’t know.” He stood, towering over her, and for the first time she was aware of him not just as a man, but as someone significantly bigger than she. “I just got mowed down in the cross fire of the art history department pissing contest you and the Dragon Lady have going. You think I should be happy about that? Spare me.”

He gathered up his papers and the handouts the others had left behind, shoving them into his knapsack with jerky, angry motions.

Anna stood. She wanted to go to him, wanted to touch his arm, hug him, something to bridge the gap that’d grown between them. What happened to us? she wanted to say. What happened to you? But it didn’t take an itza’at seer or a mind-bender to know he wouldn’t welcome the contact or the questions. There was something seriously bad going on with him, far worse than she’d suspected.

“Lucius, what’s wrong? You can talk to me.” She reached out but didn’t touch him, just made the gesture and left it up to him whether to step toward her or away.

Something flashed in his eyes: guilt, maybe, or sadness. But it was quickly swept away by disbelief, then mirth. “Do you actually not know? Is it possible you’re really that dense?” He moved toward her, but didn’t take her proffered hand. Instead he leaned in and said in a low, angry voice, “Think about it, Anna. The crap with Desiree started right about the time you came back from your little mental-health break in New Mexico, and your not-so- saintly husband swore off other women, right? You do the math.”

He straightened and jerked the knapsack over his shoulder. Tucking his laptop under one arm, he strode away, not looking back.

Oh, hell.

Anna didn’t move; she couldn’t. She was trapped, not in the soul-searching that should’ve followed Lucius’s revelation, but in something that was a thousand times worse because it came with pictures and a sound track.

The vision caught her unawares, slamming through her subconscious blocks as if they were nothing, hammering her with the sounds of lovemaking, and the sight of her husband and Desiree twined together in the sort of raw, unabashed sex that Anna didn’t remember having had with him in years.

Shock blasted through her. Heart-break. She’d known he’d had a lover, had dealt with it as best she could when they’d reconciled after the fall equinox. But seeing it, seeing the look on his face as he . . .

She couldn’t bear it.

“No!” She clawed the air, slapping at the images that were buried deep in her soul, in the seat of her magic. “Gods, no!”

Pain seared the skin between her breasts, where the skull-shaped effigy rested. Inert in the months since Strike had returned it to her, the pendant’s power flared now, hot and hard. More images crashed through her, snippets of them together, sometimes naked, sometimes not. To her surprise she realized it was worse seeing them together clothed, strolling arm in arm along streets she didn’t recognize, telling her that they’d traveled together, that his frequent business trips hadn’t been all business.

On some level she’d known that, accepted it. But she hadn’t known—and damn well couldn’t accept —that it’d been Desiree. Her boss. Her nemesis. Worse, Anna’s gut—or maybe the magic?—told her that Desiree’s undeclared war on her was more than jealousy or jilted love. The bitch thought she was still in the running . . . which meant she had some reason to think it. Dick had left the door open, damn him.