She toyed with her brownie. “You’re saying I stayed because of inertia, just like some of the Nightkeepers and winikin—maybe a lot of them—are going to want to stick with the sky gods because they’re familiar.”
“What if they’re right?”
“Was I better off letting the Witch use me as a punching bag?”
“Ah, baby. Don’t do that to yourself.” He wrapped an arm around her.
“I won’t. I’m not. I’ve moved on, damn it.” But she let herself lean into him for a few seconds. And, when she felt his breath on her cheek, his lips on her ear, she tipped her head to accept the kiss, then sought his mouth with her own.
The churn of unease in her belly warmed quickly to desire, and she slid her hand up his chest to press over the steady thud of his heart. This was what she needed; it was why she had gone walking with him, why she couldn’t stay away from him.
He made her feel important.
He broke the kiss, to press his forehead to hers, so their breaths mingled when he said, “Will you come home with me tonight?”
She nodded but said nothing, not sure she trusted what would come out of her mouth right now, with her emotions too damn close to the surface.
They climbed down from the pueblo, pausing at the flat spots to kiss. And as they headed back toward the cottage, hand in hand, with her head on his shoulder, she didn’t let herself think about tomorrow. It would be enough to go home with him, make love to him. She wouldn’t let herself give in all the way like she had last night, though, and she wouldn’t stay the night.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
December 19
Two days to the zero date
With fewer than forty-eight hours on the clock, the Nightkeepers sat in the great room while Lucius used his laptop to flash pictures of Egyptian paintings and carvings on the big screen. He’d already gone over Bastet; the ram-headed creator god, Khnum, who made the bodies of men from mud and then breathed life into them; and the sun god, Amon-Ra, who had the head of a hawk and ruled the lands of the living. All the good guys Bastet had mentioned.
“Now for the not-so-good guys,” he said. “This is Anubis.” He clicked to a statue of a pointy-eared, pointy- nosed dog cast in gold and painted black. Lying on its belly with its front paws outstretched, it was positioned like the Sphinx and had gleaming gem eyes that seemed to scan the room even in 2-D. “And so is this.” The next slide showed a tomb painting with the same foxy head, but this time on the body of a bulky, muscular man. “Since jackals were often seen scavenging near the dead and their tombs, the ancient Egyptians worshipped them as the guardians of the dead. Anubis here is the god of death and the dying.” He hit the button again, skipping a slide and stopping on another animal-headed man. This one, though, had a strangely elongated nose, almost a beak, along with square-tipped ears, and what looked like scales. “And this is Seth.”
As Rabbit frowned, trying to figure out what the hell it was, Myrinne leaned over and said in an undertone, “They had armadillos in ancient Egypt?”
He exhaled a soft snort. “That’s good news for us—if we poke it with a stick, it’ll roll into a ball and wait until we go away.”
Her grin warmed him, as did the press of her thigh against his where they sat together at one end of the big sofa. Quarters were tight with the full seventy-seven-person team crammed into the mansion’s great room, but he wasn’t complaining. Ever since that afternoon up at the pueblo, he and Myr had been hanging out pretty much every day, and things had been going well. The sex was incredible and having her back in his life was even better, though she still wouldn’t spend the night.
Even that was probably for the best, though, because it meant he didn’t have to explain why he spent almost an hour each morning sitting cross-legged in front of the altar in the spare bedroom, burning incense and staring down at the carved stone surface while he made sure the dark magic stayed contained. And it meant he didn’t have to let on that it was getting harder each day.
“It’s called the Seth beast,” Lucius said with a “shut it” look in their direction. “Seth is the lord of chaos, thunder and the desert. He’s roughly equivalent to the Christian’s devil, though he does his damage on earth. And this is Osiris.” He clicked to a tomb painting of a sharp-featured pharaoh-type guy wearing a tall white hat and the outer wrappings of a mummy. “He rules the underworld and resurrection.” He didn’t quite glance to where Red- Boar leaned against the back wall, doing his arms-folded-scowl thing.
The resurrected mage had spent the past week lobbying on behalf of the old gods, making it damn clear he thought the Nightkeepers were headed for disaster.
Lucius kept going, sketching out the Egyptian’s upper-and underworlds, and finishing with, “I think it’s worth mentioning that the Mayan religion didn’t have a good-versus-bad afterlife the way that we’ve been treating it. In fact, the Mayans believed that the sky and Xibalba were two planes that were equally populated with both good and evil gods, just like there are both good and evil people on earth.”
“Hold on,” Nate said. “You’re saying that they had it right and the Nightkeepers had it wrong? The Maya learned the religion from us in the first place!”
“Not from us,” Lucius countered. “They learned from our many-times ancestors, long before things started evolving and the Xibalbans split from the Nightkeepers, separating the light and dark magic.”
“So you believe Bastet.”
Lucius spread his hands. “Experience tells me that the Banol Kax are evil and that the sky gods oppose them. But that doesn’t rule out what Bastet told us.” He paused. “Not to mention that we found a new treatment for the xombi virus . . . in an Egyptian pharmacopeia.”
There was a restless shifting of bodies in the jam-packed room.
Anna said, “I passed it along to my contact inside the quarantine zone a couple of days ago, and as of this morning, most of the existing cases have stabilized. In addition, there haven’t been any new infections reported in the past five days.”
“Which suggests it has nothing to do with a treatment that started two days ago,” Red-Boar interjected. “For all we know, the demons just put the poor bastards in a holding pattern so they’ll be ready to use as a standing army when the calendar hits zero.”
Rabbit wanted to roll his eyes, but couldn’t. Because even though Red-Boar was looking seriously strung out these days, he was still making sense. That was the problem, in fact: the arguments were almost perfectly weighted between “it’s a trap” and “it’s for real.” Which meant that somebody needed to be the one to make the call, flip the coin, or what-the-fuck-ever.
“I guess that’s my cue.” Dez stood.
This time the rustling was louder, lasted longer. Rabbit found himself edging forward in his seat, and Myr’s nails dug into his palm. This was what they were all there for, not Lucius’s info or Anna’s report, but to hear what Dez had decided to do about Bastet’s command that the Nightkeepers reject the sky gods.
The king met Red-Boar’s narrow-eyed glare. “Don’t worry. We all know how you’d vote if this was a democracy.” To the rest of them, he said, “The thing is, it’s not a democracy. Our ancestors set things up with a king and a fealty oath . . . maybe because they knew it would come down to this. I don’t know. It’s a hell of a decision to put on one guy, king or not.”
“Shades of ’eighty-four,” somebody muttered from up near the kitchen, where most of the winikin were gathered.
A shiver crawled down Rabbit’s spine. He’d had another of the dreams last night, where he was inside Scarred-Jaguar’s head in the minutes leading up to the Solstice Massacre. He was pretty sure it was a warning, a pointed reminder that one wrong decision by a powerful mage could make the whole fucking world go boom. It wasn’t as if he needed the reminder, though. The knowledge haunted him, gnawed at him, and had him staring at the ceiling each night while Myr’s pillow cooled beside him. And when the dawn broke, it drove him into the spare room, determined to lock his brain down tight.
