Dawnkeepers

Strike narrowed his eyes, considering. “You’re thinking there’s a hidden library somewhere down south.”

Nate nodded. “Our ancestors cached artifacts. Why not knowledge?”

“Which would be great if we knew where to start looking.” Alexis turned her palms up, indicating that she didn’t have a clue.

“I know.” Nate dragged his fingers through his hair, thinking. He turned to Lucius, grateful to see that one of the others had snagged the MAC from the shaken bond-servant, who was on his feet now, pale but resolute. Nate asked him, “You ever hear something that might’ve hinted at there being a hidden library?”

But Lucius shook his head. “Can’t think of anything, but Jade and I can certainly check through the books and—” He broke off, scrubbing his hands across his face. “Or we could’ve if I hadn’t just shot them to pieces. I can’t believe I did that. I don’t know what the hell came over me.”

Strike and Anna exchanged a telling look.

“Wait,” Alexis said, her voice excited. She turned to Nate. “You said it yourself when we were in the ATM caves: Why were our parents there before us?”

He furrowed his brow. “Because they were trying to find out—” He broke off as it connected. To Carlos, he said “When Gray-Smoke and Two-Hawk left, right before the massacre, are you sure they were casting an actual question spell?”

The winikin thought for a second, then spread his hands. “It was a long time ago.” He looked behind him at the other winikin, then over at Jox. “Anyone?”

He got a round of head shakes.

Nate said, “What if they were trying to investigate the king’s vision, not through magic, but by finding a cache of information, codices and such, that our ancestors had collected before the conquistadors started burning texts? We know they warned the kings against letting the galleons lay anchor, and we know they had prophecies warning of dark times ahead. Seems like a good time to stockpile.” He paused, remembering the artifacts in the ATM cave system. “Or maybe they cached their books even earlier than that, back in the nine fifties, when the Xibalbans released the Banol Kax and the empire fell. That was when they cached the artifacts; why not a library too?”

Anna shook her head. “It’s a good story, but you’ve got no proof.”

“Actually . . .” Lucius said, “I may have seen something the other day, on that old map of the cave system.” He cast around for a few seconds, then plucked a splayed-out book from the floor where it had fallen in the melee. He righted one of the chairs and used it as a desk, because the table was leaning on three legs, with the fourth broken off midway. After flipping through several battered pages, he stopped, tapping Painted-Jaguar’s map. “Here. There’s a glyph hidden in the drawing of the dead-end waterway beyond the temple. It could be the jun glyph, which stands for ‘book’ or ‘folded codex’. ”

Jade leaned close. “I didn’t see that before.”

The others crowded close to look. Nate didn’t know the glyph, but he knew where Lucius was pointing, all right. He muttered an oath. “Don’t tell me.”

“It makes sense,” Alexis murmured in return. “Why set booby traps if you’ve got nothing to protect?”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

After Strike finished the postattack debriefing, Lucius headed back to his rooms, dogged by a nagging darkness the likes of which he hadn’t felt in weeks. He’d shot the shit out of the archive. How the fuck could he rationalize that?

He and Jade had been sitting together, dragging through the laborious chore of cross-checking the information from a set of scanned-in pages. A weird rattling sound had cut through the air, and seconds later a blond woman had popped into existence in the middle of the room, wearing combat gear and a soldier’s stone- faced expression, and toting a nasty-looking machine gun. She’d taken one look at Jade and Lucius and opened fire.

He didn’t know how he’d done what he’d done. He just knew that the moment he’d seen sweet, soft-

voiced Jade in the path of fire, a strange, luminous green had hazed his vision, and his body had gone into hyperdrive. Or maybe the world had slowed down; he didn’t know which. All he knew was that one second a line of automatic weapons fire had been walking its way across the archive toward Jade, and the next he somehow had the gun in his hands and was blasting away at the blond bitch. When the bullets finally ran out and the green haze cleared—he was a little iffy on the time line there, because he hadn’t exactly passed out, but things had sort of shifted suddenly—the room had been full of people, the door to the second archive room was open, and the Ixchel statuette was gone.

And according to Jade, he’d shot the shit out of hundreds, maybe even thousands of years of texts, which might’ve been scanned already, but had been irreplaceable nonetheless. “How could I have done that?”

“You know how,” Anna’s voice said from behind him.

He squeezed his eyes shut and fisted his fingers around the raised scar on his palm. “You said the makol couldn’t get to me through the wards.”

After the slave-bonding ceremony, she’d told him exactly what had happened the previous fall, how he’d learned that she was hiding a codex fragment in her office, and had broken in and stolen it, influenced somehow by the Banol Kax even before he’d begun to read the transition spell. She’d described how she’d had a vision of him cutting himself and invoking the spell, and had contacted Strike and a senior mage named Red-Boar to help him. They had teleported to Lucius’s apartment and found him most of the way turned makol.

As she’d spoken, he’d known he should’ve been shocked and horrified. But his only real thought had been, Of course, how could I have forgotten all that? He didn’t remember any of it, not really. But everything she said had clicked at a gut-deep level, with a sort of cosmic “aha!” that labeled it as the truth. It explained why he sometimes saw things through a luminous green sheen, why he’d been out of sorts since last summer, and why he’d felt more like himself inside the compound, which was warded against makol magic.

At least, it was supposed to be.

“The wards went down during the parley,” Anna said. “That’s how Iago ’ported the third Xibalban, the blonde, into the archive, and how the makol got through to you just now.”

He stared down at the raised scar ridge on his palm. “Fuck me.” He closed his fingers over the scar, hiding it.

“At least I didn’t kill Jade.” That would’ve been beyond unthinkable. Of all the surprises he’d found at Skywatch, his almost instant friendship with the shy archivist was by far the nicest. If he’d hurt her

. . . “Does Strike think it’s too dangerous to keep me in the compound now?”

“He’s not sure,” she said, both of them avoiding the point that if he was too dangerous to keep in the compound then he was too dangerous to be let free and there was really only one other choice.

“What do you think?” he pressed.

She looked at him long and hard before answering. “I think we can’t afford to sacrifice any valuable allies at this point.”

He knew her use of the word “sacrifice” was no accident. Horror mixed with anger within him, yielding a deep-seated resentment much like what he’d been feeling for months now. But the wards were back in place, which meant . . . what? Were these really his feelings, or had something taken root inside him in defiance of the Nightkeepers’ shielding magic?

Oddly, the latter thought didn’t bother him nearly as much as it probably should have.

“So what now?” he asked her.

“We’re not making any hasty decisions,” she said firmly, though that wasn’t really an answer. “I’m flying back tonight, but call me if you need to. And if you start having flashes or whatnot, tell someone. Promise me you won’t try to fight dark magic on your own.”

“I won’t,” he said. But he didn’t promise.