Lucius didn’t think, didn’t look back. He just started running toward the light that appeared in front of him, at the other end of the road of the damned.
Back to the land of the living.
It took most of the day for the members of the royal council to debrief Rabbit and Myrinne, alternating between them when Jox announced it was time for one of the exhausted, malnourished kids to eat or sleep, or both. By the end of the day, as Alexis headed to her rooms to change, shower, and generally take a big breath, she wasn’t convinced they knew much more than they had going in. Or rather, they knew more, but what they’d learned probably wouldn’t go very far toward helping them the next day, when they would ’port to the intersection beneath Chichen Itza and defend the barrier against Iago and Camazotz.
The plan was for the Nightkeepers to ’port to the safe house early in the morning and stake out the tunnel entrance. Problem was, they weren’t even sure Iago would be working his magic through the intersection. Rabbit didn’t know if the mage had found the actual hellmouth, the place where the Xibalbans had called the
If Iago didn’t show at the intersection—which Alexis strongly suspected would be the case—the Nightkeepers would do as they had done during the winter solstice and eclipse, uplinking and banding together to hold the barrier that separated Xibalba from the earth. Strike and Leah would call on the power of Kulkulkan, and Alexis would add Ixchel’s strength to the mix. The barrier was a psi-entity that stretched everywhere and nowhere at once, which meant that if they managed to fortify it with enough power at Chichen Itza, it should prove impenetrable at the hellmouth. In theory. In reality, they had no frigging clue. And that was the worry that had Alexis unable to settle in her rooms, and had her pacing from one to the next, touching a light fixture here, a book there, somehow needing the tactile reminders, the solidity of the earth plane.
She and Ixchel were supposed to counteract the first of the demon prophecies, but Alexis had no idea how. The others were acting as though the first prophecy were a moot point, given that Iago planned to bring through all seven of Camazotz’s sons simultaneously. But she wasn’t so sure. If there was no such thing as true coincidence, if everything that was happening was truly influenced by fate, or destiny, or the gods, then shouldn’t the gods have foreseen Iago’s threat? Assuming they had, then that meant Ixchel was supposed to serve a larger purpose, or else she and Alexis wouldn’t have formed the Godkeeper bond.
Right?
“I don’t know!” Alexis practically shouted. “I don’t know why she picked me, or how I’m supposed to use her powers.” Her stomach twisted on a gut-deep fear of failure, fear of death. Fear of losing the people she loved.
Frustrated and heartsore, she threw herself on the sofa, then bounced back up almost immediately when she couldn’t stand not to be moving. It wasn’t just the fears and worries that kept her going, either; the magic of the coming equinox rode her hard. She could close her eyes and tell where the stars were overhead just by feeling their pull and seeing the faint color shimmers they gave off in her soul. The barrier was thinning, and with it her self-control. She wanted to scream and throw things, wanted to drive off into the desert in one of the four- wheelers Jox kept in the garage, wanted to spin the tires and kick up sand and jump the vehicle from hill to hill, though she’d never actually driven one of the damn things.
Then she heard a knock on the door. She knew who it was without question, and in that instant all the crazy, jumbled needs inside her coalesced into a single emotion.
Desire.
She opened the door and saw Nate standing there, exactly as she’d expected, wearing jeans and a soft black pullover that did nothing to gentle the angles of his face and the edgy tension surrounding him. She arched a brow, but before she could work up a witty opener, he said simply, “I know you don’t owe me a damned thing, and you might not want to be around me right now, but I had to come. I need you to know that if I could’ve figured out how to love anyone, I would’ve loved you.”
The simplicity of that, the finality of it, drove the breath from her lungs and sent a spear of pain through her heart. It took her a second, but once her throat unlocked, she said, “Then why can’t you?”
“Nature, maybe, or nurture. Maybe both. Probably both.” He lifted a shoulder. “It took me a while to see it, but if you look at the pictures of my parents, my mother’s always the one surrounded by other people, while my father is always apart just a bit. And the paintings . . . they’re all of places seen from a distance. No people, no close-ups. If that’s not detachment, I don’t know what is. Add his DNA to my growing up in the system, and you’ve got a guy who likes people okay but does best alone.” He exhaled long and hard. “Look, I’ve tried to feel the things other people feel, and it . . . it just doesn’t work. It’s just not in me to love someone.” His eyes went very sad. “Not even you. I’m so sorry.”
Alexis bowed her head as all the restless energy drained into a moment of pure, profound emotion.
It wasn’t heartache; that would come later, she knew. It wasn’t failure, either, though she was due for a heaping pile of that too. No, this was a piercing regret that the things they’d already had together were the end of it, even if they survived the equinox. There would be no moving into Nate’s cottage and waking up next to him each morning, no trying to cook for each other and sneaking food from the main mansion when the stuff didn’t turn out, no hardwood floors and little smoke-motif knickknacks.
“Alexis, please say something,” he pressed when she’d been silent for too long. His lips twitched in a small, sad smile. “Either that or rack me a good one and slam the door. Whichever works for you.”
“Maybe it’s better this way,” she said slowly. “Maybe it’s better to go into tomorrow without this between us.” Better to go into battle with nothing she was looking forward to except more fighting, more training. More war.
Maybe that was what this had been about all along. Maybe the goddess had been trying to teach her to let go.
He exhaled a long breath. “Good. Okay . . . good.” He didn’t look as though he thought it was good, but she understood that too. “So . . .”
“So . . .” Now she did smile at him, letting him know it was really okay. “See you tomorrow.” She shut the door between them, not slamming it, but shutting it slowly and letting the latch engage with a final-sounding click.
Then, and only then, she finally collapsed onto the couch and put her face in her hands. Her hair, unbound and still moist from her shower, fell forward in long, ribbonlike strands.
And when she wept, her tears were rainbows.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Nightkeepers’ numbers were dwindling rather than building, Nate realized with a shimmer of unease.
They waited in the deep darkness that held on to the rain forest in the final hour before daybreak while Michael checked the surveillance system in the small house near the temple. When his all-clear signal came through Strike said, “Okay, gang, it’s more than twelve hours before the equinox and eleven or so before the tunnel inside the temple opens up. Let’s start with just a couple of people on watch outside the temple, and rotate through every two hours. Volunteers?”
Nate raised his hand, figuring that if he had to stay cooped up in the little house with the rest of them for very long, he was going to go batshit crazy. From the number of hands showing, he wasn’t the only one.
Strike snorted. “That’s about what I thought. Okay, it’s me and Nate on first shift. The rest of you duke it
