Skykeepers

wooden doors carved with the royal jaguar motif, and stepped into the main sitting room of the royal suite. Off to their right, a dining table had become a workstation, with laptops, printers, and piles of paper. The kitchen nook to their left was pretty bare, but then again, so were the kitchens in most of the Nightkeepers’ suites; the winikin did the majority of the cooking in the main kitchen. Hallways sprawled off to the left and right of the living room, leading to bedrooms and ritual areas.

Strike took a spot on the long, brown-upholstered couch, where Leah, Alexis, and Nate sat, forming the core of the royal council. Strike’s sister, Anna, sat in a love seat off to one side. She was a lovely woman in her late thirties, with red-highlighted brunette hair and the same piercing cobalt eyes as her brother. Wearing jeans and a soft blue sweater the same color as her eyes, along with an ancient crystal skull that hung from a chain around her neck, she looked tired. Strike must’ve ’ported her in first thing, maybe on the backside of the trip to return Rabbit to the university.

The final member of the day’s council meeting, the royal winikin Jox, lounged in a chair on the other side of a glyph-carved wooden chest that was probably more than a thousand years old, and served the jaguar royals as a coffee table. In his late fifties, with his gray-shot hair pulled back in a Deadhead ponytail, wearing jeans and a dark green button-down with its sleeves rolled up to reveal his forearm marks, Jox was the heart of Skywatch. These days, the royal winikin was spread thin, looking after not only his true bound charges, but also Leah, as Strike’s mate, and Rabbit, who had no winikin of his own, but had been partly Jox’s responsibility since toddlerhood. The royal winikin looked like he could use a serious vacation, but Michael didn’t figure it was his place to suggest it. Besides, it wasn’t like the rest of them weren’t run ragged. There was too much that needed doing, and not enough bodies in residence to do it.

Strike poured him a mug of coffee and handed it over black. “Ready to roll?”

Michael nodded his thanks and took a sip, needing the bite of caffeine. “What do you want to know?” Which was really his way of asking what they thought they already knew.

Leah smiled sweetly. “Nice try. How about you walk us through exactly what happened last night, step by step? And don’t skimp on the deets.”

So Michael went through the rescue minute by minute. He told them about Sasha’s dreams and copped to the power boost he’d gotten from kissing her, though he implied that kissing was as far as they’d gone. He then moved on to describe the red-robe’s arrival and Iago’s entrance, and was even able to tell them that the Xibalbans’ leader was searching for a specific Nightkeeper in addition to Sasha, and needed them both by the winter solstice. Then, for all that he’d vowed to be a better man, he started mixing lies with the truth, hiding the fact that Iago had later said he was the one—and that Sasha would be part of his transformation. He finished with, “Iago tried to grab Sasha and ’port her out, but I slapped the strongest shield I could manage around us both, and Iago’s magic misfired and killed the red-robe. I don’t know what the deal was with the corpse disintegrating like that—maybe it had something to do with using Xibalban magic in a Nightkeeper temple? Or maybe it was intrinsic to the red-robe? He was definitely a magic sniffer, one of the pilli, whatever that means.”

Michael made himself stop before he said too much, knowing that the best lies were the simplest.

Strike didn’t look like he was totally buying the story, but before he could get into it, Anna cut in, saying, “That’s why I’m here.” With a doctorate in Mayan studies and more than a decade in the field, she was their local expert on the historical stuff. “Pilli was a word used to represent a member of the elite nobility. In this case, it probably refers to the more powerful of the Xibalban magi, possibly those wearing the red robes.”

Jox frowned at Anna. “I’ve never heard the word before.”

“That’s because it’s not Mayan,” she said. “It’s Aztec. Which got me wondering . . . What if, rather than paralleling the Mayan system, like we are, the Xibalbans are patterned after the Aztec?” She paused. “Or, more accurately, what if the Aztec were patterned after the Xibalbans? It makes a twisted sort of sense; the Aztec arose right around the time the Xibalbans split off from the Nightkeepers, and were far more bloodthirsty than their neighboring cultures. Where the Maya largely practiced autosacrifice, the Aztec made huge human sacrifices, taking sometimes hundreds, even reportedly thousands of victims at a time by the mid-fifteen hundreds. Granted, those were terrible times, when the influx of the Spanish invaders brought war, famine, and disease. The Aztec were just doing what they believed would appease the gods . . . but what if it wasn’t the gods they were really praying to?”

Nate leaned forward, suddenly intent. “You think the Aztec were being coached by the Xibalbans, that they were actually trying to hook up with the Banol Kax to drive the Spaniards away?”

“The timing fits,” Anna said, “and it would help explain why the Aztec went so far down a path that most human beings wouldn’t consider an option.”

Michael’s inner tension had settled some as the convo evolved around him, veering away from the red- robe’s death. Now he asked, “How does knowing about the Aztec connection help us against the Xibalbans?”

He should’ve kept his mouth shut. He knew it the moment Strike zeroed back in on him as he answered,“We’re not sure yet. Anna is going to work with Jade to put together a rundown of Aztec myths, rituals, and other things that might be pertinent to the issue.” The king hit Jade’s name harder than he needed to, another challenge.

Normally, Michael let things like that roll off, on the theory that he and Jade had worked things out the best they could, and it wasn’t anybody else’s business. Now, though, he figured he owed the royal council an answer— on this, at any rate. Choosing his words judiciously, he said, “None of what happened yesterday changes the fact that Jade and I were lovers, but we weren’t a destined-mates match. Nor does it mean that Sasha and I are destined, either. Yes, I was drawn to her, and yes, kissing her amplified my shield magic, and yes, she seemed to recognize me. . . .” When he said it like that, it seemed like a no-brainer. And maybe under other circumstances it would have been. But he wasn’t the man he was supposed to have been. Just ask Tomas. “However, Sasha has just been through a terrible ordeal, and, mental filters or not, she’s going to need some room. So I’m asking, as a personal favor, if you’ll pass the word to lay off the destined-mates rhetoric with her.”

Leah, Jox, Nate and Alexis nodded as though that seemed reasonable. Strike, on the other hand, fixed him with a look. “Your winikin thinks you’ve got a commitment problem.”

“My winikin thinks I’ve got lots of problems.” Michael met the king’s eyes squarely, letting him see the determination and control, but not the things that churned beneath. “I swear to you that I’ll do my best by Sasha.” And that was the man talking. The one who was in control, and was going to stay in control, damn it.

After a moment, Strike nodded. “Okay. We’ll give you two some room.” He turned to Anna. “We need to figure out who Iago was looking for, and why. In addition, we need to know what happened with the red-robe. If that’s something new in the Xibalbans’ arsenal, we’ll have to figure out how to counteract it.”

Michael shifted uncomfortably at the list of questions, suspecting that the answers all circled back to him. “I don’t think it’s a new Xibalban weapon,” he said, sticking to his lies. “It seemed more like a misfire of the ’port magic.”

“Which is even more reason to figure it out,” Strike countered. “I’d hate like hell to do something like that to another human being.”

You won’t , Michael thought. It was me. All me. With the Other locked safely away, he felt the kill weigh sickly on his soul. “What about the word ‘mick,’ and the mountains the gray-robes mentioned?”

he asked, his voice rasping on the question.

Anna sent him a long, slow look before answering. “The prefix ‘mic’ was used for many things relating to the realm of the damned, which was called Mictlan.”

“I thought Xibalba was the Mayan equivalent of hell?” Nate asked.

“Yes and no,” Anna replied. “Although Xibalba is the underworld, it’s not necessarily a negative place, not hell as the Christians think of it. It’s more a realm of challenges that the dead must win through in order to reach their end reward in the barrier or the sky—or reincarnation, depending on which set of beliefs you go with.”

Michael frowned. “So there’s no punishment for bad behavior?” That didn’t fit with what the nahwal had told him.

“Wrongdoers get caught up in the challenges, looping endlessly until they learn the lessons they failed to