Skykeepers

“You’re someone,” Michael said in a tone that brooked no argument. “That’s not in question. What we need to figure out is what the prophecy means.” He paused, then said reflectively, “We have a few key phrases to work with. First, we’ve got ‘daughter of the sky,’ but the sky means the gods, and all humans are the children of the gods, right? So that probably means there’s a closer connection.” He eyed Sasha, then glanced at Jox. “Were any of the gods supposed to have children on earth?”

“Not as such,” he said.

Wanting to derail that hypothesis as quickly as possible, and preferring to avoid any discussion of how she might “defy love,” especially in the aftermath of the oddest dumping she’d ever experienced, Sasha said quickly, “Ambrose thought the part about conquering death meant I was to be a healer. He tried to steer me toward med school.” Understatement of the year. “He didn’t know who the lost son might be.”

Patience made a low sound of distress. “What if it’s one of the twins?”

“I’ll get a message to Woody and Hannah, telling them to watch their backs,” Strike said, referring to the winikin who had taken Patience and Brandt’s twin boys into hiding, for their own protection during such unsettled times. “But if I had to guess, I’d say the prophecy probably relates to someone old enough to make a difference when the zero date comes. Snake Mendez is a possibility—he’s the last of the magi, and he’d qualify in the ‘lost’ category, at least in terms of his soul.”

Michael leaned in and said in a low voice, “Mendez is the last of the known Nightkeepers. He’s doing an extra six months for aggravated assault, which is a bonus. That way we know where he is, without actually having to figure out what the hell to do with him.”

Jox said slowly, “We thought Mendez was the last of the magi, until we found out about Sasha. If she survived outside the formal system, maybe there’s a chance others did, as well.”

There was a moment of wistful silence before Strike said, “I don’t think we can put too much hope in that. There’s nobody else out there like Ambrose, at least that we’re aware of.”

Leah nodded. “I think we should focus on the things we can control.” She looked at Sasha and said, “I know you’ve been over this a thousand times, but I’m sorry, I have to ask: Do you have any idea where to look for the scroll your father mentioned in his journal?”

Which was essentially a backhanded way of asking, Where is the library? Sasha made a face. “I don’t. I’m sorry.” She paused. “I’m assuming you’ve searched Ambrose’s temple?”

Now it was Strike’s turn to grimace. “To the best of our ability. It’s guarded by an entity of some sort that’s able to both take corporeal form and mind-bend full magi. The thing nearly killed Anna, and it’s gone after us a couple of other times when we were in there, searching. We didn’t find anything.” He paused. “We did recover your father’s skull while we were in there. It seemed wrong to just leave it. The next time we’re out there, we’ll exhume the rest of him, and bring him back for a proper funeral.”

Sasha’s throat closed on a surge of emotion. “Thank you. He’d . . . Thank you.”

The king nodded. Then his expression softened, making him suddenly seem far less imposing, far more human. “You look exhausted—you’re probably ready to turn it off for a little while, huh?”

“Beyond ready,” she said.

Strike nodded. “Jox will show you a couple of suites; choose one and crash. When you’re ready to start moving in for real, tap him for decorating and clothing money out of the Nightkeeper Fund. Get what you want, no limits, though be advised that he starts wincing after a while.”

“I . . .” Sasha trailed off, sort of guppy-gaping at how things had done yet another quick one-eighty on her.

“What?”

“You’re one of us,” he said implacably. “If you’re going to be hit with the responsibilities and dangers, you should get the perks, too.”

Her mouth went dry. “You don’t know for certain that I’m a Nightkeeper.” And for the first time, she felt a tug of longing, a desire to belong to these people, to live the adventures she’d dreamed of as a child.

The king tapped the geometric hunab ku on his upper arm. “I have faith. The gods may not be able to reach us directly anymore, but the plans they helped put in place long ago are still coming to fruition. You’re a child of prophecy, Sasha, just like I was.” His expression reflected an odd mix of regret and satisfaction. “I would wish for you to have an easier time of it than I did, but I have a feeling it’s one of those doctrine-of-balance things, that the greater the challenge, the greater the reward.” He looked over at Leah, and his face lit with love.

“Thanks, I think,” Sasha said, carefully not looking over her shoulder, where Michael still stood guard.

He growled, “Don’t thank him yet. He hasn’t gotten to the catch.”

But Sasha shook her head. “I already know. I’m my father’s daughter, after all.” She paused. “You want me to undergo the bloodline ceremony,” she said, and saw the confirmation in their faces. Oddly, she wasn’t as upset as she would’ve thought. “When?”

“The full moon,” Strike answered immediately. “On December second, thirteen days from now.”

She nodded, because what else was there to say, really? She’d woken up a prisoner, and would go to sleep that night a potential mage. So much had changed, yet plenty was still the same. She was still at odds with her father, even though he was more than a year in the grave. And once again, she’d set her sights on a hunter, and imagined he felt more than he really did. At the thought, she glanced over at Michael and saw him deep in convo with the pretty brunette archivist, Jade, their heads bent together with intimate familiarity. When Strike cleared his throat, her gut-check was confirmed. Well, hell, she thought, just what I don’t need . Best-case scenario, she was an ex. Worst-case, she was a current. And Sasha so couldn’t deal with that level of drama right now, so she focused on Strike. Her king. And how weird was that? “You said something about assigning me a real room?” she asked.

Strike watched as Michael and Jade disappeared down a hallway beside the kitchen. “What the—” He caught himself with a glance at Sasha. “Sorry. Right. Check with Jox. He’s . . .” A quick check showed that the winikin was gone. “Try the greenhouse,” Strike suggested. “He goes there when things get hectic.”

“Then I think he and I will get along just fine,” Sasha said, and dredged up a smile that felt only a little thin around the edges. She headed for the sliders leading out. And she damn well didn’t let herself look back, down the hallway where Michael and Jade had gone.

Twenty minutes after the meeting broke up, almost exactly twenty hours after he’d lost himself in Sasha’s body and let the Other escape, Michael stared at the reference Jade had dug up for him, and cursed hollowly.

He’d asked her to search for references to silver magic and rage. Because he’d claimed to have seen it coming from Iago, she hadn’t thought twice about the request—aside from a grimace of disgust at his description of the corpse. Using the computerized database she and Lucius had put together, she’d searched all the scanned, translated pages they had on file, and had come up with a likely reference.

Michael stared at the computer screen, which was split between the scanned page and Lucius’s translation. The reference had come from the journal of a missionary who’d worked in the Mayan highlands in the mid- sixteenth century. Lucius had done a very rough, vernacular translation from old-

style Spanish: The village elders speak of great white-gold magicians who used to live with their ancestors in the sky pyramids. These great magi fought against the devil himself, wielding a silver-

gray magic called muk. But the muk held too much evil, it was too easily corrupted, and the magicians split it in half, taking the red-gold half for themselves and banishing the darkness to Xibalba.

From there, the passage devolved to proselytizing, but in the margin was a red-lined note tagged with Lucius’s user name. Don’t know what the hell this muk is—I’ve never heard of it before, and I can’t cross-ref it anywhere, but I think we can assume Nightkeeper magic was the “good” side of it, hellmagic the bad. Not sure if the ancestral joined magic is even still around, though it’s probably worth looking into, as it’d make a hell of a weapon . . . if we could find a way to control the stuff and keep it from turning to the dark side.

“Weapon, yes,” Michael muttered under his breath. “Control, maybe.” Was that what was going on with him? Were the lies and rationalizations evidence that the silver magic was corrupting him? Or had he come precorrupted, thanks to the Other? And how the hell did a government-created alternate personality relate to the