Dawnkeepers

He took a long, deep breath. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

She hesitated. “In the interest of full disclosure—”

“Will any of it change what has to happen?” he interrupted.

“No.”

“Then tell me later.” He nodded to the knife, his gut tightening in anticipation of pain, his brain blocking out the concept of servitude. “Do it.” But when she lifted the obsidian blade, he said, “Wait.

What about Sasha?”

She gave him a long look, but said, “We’ve reopened the search already. There’s a chance her father was one of us, probably a better chance that he was Xibalban. Either way, we need to know where she is. Strike has his PI, Carter, looking for her, and also for the Xibalbans, on the theory that they probably know where she is.”

“You won’t give up on her this time?” Lucius pressed as something tightened in his chest, making him feel that finding Sasha was somehow more important than the question of his own servitude.

“You promise?”

“I promise.” Without another word she slashed her own palm, then his. Pain slapped at him, wringing a hiss, but he didn’t pull away, couldn’t move. His body was locked in place, frozen by the sight of the blood that welled up and spilled over.

Gripping his bloodied hand in hers, she closed her eyes and rapped out a string of words he couldn’t parse, coming so quickly, when his brain was more used to sounding out the syllables from glyph strings.

Something stirred beyond his being, a sense that there were things going on at a level he couldn’t perceive. A sudden gust of wind slapped through the room, though the windows were closed. The disembodied gust blew his hair in his eyes and whipped around the two of them, forming a sharp funnel cloud with them in the center. Above the wind roar, a buzzing noise sang a high, discordant note.

Then Anna said a final word, and the world shifted sideways, tilting and swerving around him. He slid off the sofa, landing hard on his knees while Anna hung on to his hand. The note racheted up to a scream, and pain lanced through him, centered not on his bleeding palm but on his forearm. He cried out and bowed his head as something snapped into place around him, an invisible force that vised his body, then inside to grip his heart, which went still. The wind quit abruptly, leaving only silence inside his skull.

He couldn’t even hear his heartbeat.

Panic gripped him, but he couldn’t struggle, couldn’t scream. He could only wait in the silence.

Finally he heard it. Lub. Then lub-dub. Another, lub-dub. The beats stuttered and then sped, finally dropping into normal sinus rhythm. The moment they did, the force field disappeared, leaving him to sag back against the sofa.

He sucked in a shuddering breath. “Jesus Christ.”

“Wrong pantheon,” she said, voice wry. Shifting her grip, she lifted his arm and turned his hand palm up. He saw blood but no cut, only the scar he’d gotten last fall, ostensibly in a drunken kitchen accident that he now realized had been far more than that.

Awe gathered in Lucius’s chest at the sight of the healed wound. “Magic,” he breathed.

“Yep.” She pushed his shirtsleeve up across his forearm, revealing something else, something that made his heart stutter in his chest when she said, “Welcome to the family.”

His forearm was marked like hers, with two glyphs. One was the same jaguar she wore, only smaller. The other was the k’alaj glyph representing the back of a human hand and a length of rope or sinew: the “was bound” mark, used for slaves and captured enemies . . . and sacrifices.

He took a deep breath. Let it out. Looked at Anna, the woman of his dreams, who was now his mistress, and not in the way he’d wished. “Okay, boss,” he said, doing his best to act like everything was okay when he wasn’t yet sure that was the case, “take me to your library and tell me what I’m looking for.”

“That’s easy,” she said. “We want everything you can find on the Order of Xibalba.”

His heart, so recently knocked off-kilter, took another stutter step. “You’re kidding me.”

“Wish I were.”

“The order’s real too?” It was a little like learning that not only was the Loch Ness monster real, so was Godzilla.

Anna nodded. “Worse, we’re pretty sure Desiree is a member.”

“Desiree is—” He broke off, slamming his eyes shut as an awful gulf of guilt opened up inside him.

“Please tell me you’re kidding.”

“Still not.”

“Shit.” He opened his eyes and looked at her. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

“We’re dealing with it.”

“I’m surprised your brother didn’t have me thrown into the Cenote Sagrado,” he said, naming the huge sacrificial well at Chichen Itza.

“I promised him you’d behave.”

“I will,” he said fervently. “You have my word.”

“I don’t need your word. I have your blood oath.” She bared her forearm, where she too had gained a new mark, a closed fist. His heart shuddered as he recognized ajawlel . . . the slave-master’s mark.

Once Anna had handed Lucius over to Jade in the archive, she went in search of her brother. She found him in his and Leah’s quarters, the expansive royal suite once shared by their parents.

Anna hesitated at the double entry doors, assailed by memory.

She’d been fourteen on the night of the Solstice Massacre, which meant she had fourteen years’ worth of childhood memories from Skywatch. Strike had been only nine, and his mind had blocked off the bulk of his early years as a defense. Unfortunately, she hadn’t been so lucky. Maybe it was because she carried the seer’s mark, maybe because of the five-year difference in age. Whatever the cause, she’d been unable to outrun the memories, her brain choosing to block her power rather than the past.

Ever since her partial return to the Nightkeepers, she’d dealt with the memories by staying at Skywatch as little as possible, and avoiding the spaces with the most ghosts . . . like the royal suite.

Now she forced herself to knock on what she still thought of as her parents’ door, and made herself push through when her brother’s voice invited her in.

“It’s me,” she called, standing just inside the royal suite and trying to concentrate not on the memories but on the differences, the new decor and the way the walls had been painted, the floors stripped and redone, all part of Jox’s efforts to exorcise the ghosts.

“I’m in the altar room,” Strike said, his voice echoing from a door off to her right. “Come on back.”

Although the royal couple’s shrine of private worship was pretty much the last place on earth Anna wanted to be, she forced herself down the short hallway leading to the ceremonial chamber. She couldn’t make herself step inside the tiny room, which was little more than a closet with stone-

veneered walls and a gas-powered torch in each corner, with a chac-mool altar against the back and a highly polished obsidian mirror on the wall.

Strike stood in the center of the small space, on a woven mat marked with bloodred footprints facing the altar. In ancient times the mats had symbolized a position of power or leadership; to stand on the mat was to claim the right to speak and be heard. Since then, among the Nightkeepers those mats had come to represent the king’s right to speak to—and for—the gods.

Just then, though, Strike looked less like a god-king and more like a tired man, a former landscaper with a business degree and teleporting skills, who was in way over his head. He and Leah had made a try for Kulkulkan’s altar stone in Germany, only to find that it wasn’t where it was supposed to have been. Leah had stayed behind, following where the trail led, while Strike had come home alone to deal with the business of securing Skywatch against the Xibalbans. Anna knew that Leah could reach him instantly through the blood-link of their love, knew that he could ’port to her in a flash. He knew it too, but the separation was wearing on him, worrying him. His eyes were tired, his expression drawn.

Anna could relate.