Skykeepers

charge?”

“Three of them. They all committed suicide rather than accept their targets.” Tomas paused. “The first was supposed to kill Akhenaton, the second Cortes.”

A chill reached up and grabbed Michael by the throat. “Fuck. Me.” His breath went thin in his lungs as he said, “And the third?”

“Your uncle. He was supposed to kill King Scarred-Jaguar. He killed himself instead. If he hadn’t . .

.” The winikin trailed off, but the message was clear.

If Scarred-Jaguar had been assassinated, so many things might be different. The Solstice Massacre wouldn’t have happened. The Nightkeepers would have the numbers they needed for the end-time war, and the magi would’ve had an extra twenty-four years of looking for answers and coming up with a solid, workable strategy for confronting the Xibalbans and Banol Kax. And each of the residents of Skywatch would’ve had that time with their families, instead of being scattered, in hiding. Waiting.

Nausea spiraled through Michael. If he knew it would prevent hundreds or thousands of other deaths, could he kill one of his own in cold blood? Maybe not. But the Other could.

What if Sasha’s the target? something whispered inside him.

“What if I refuse my target but don’t suicide?” Michael asked, not bothering to argue against his being a Mictlan. Hell, Iago had known it before he did. Once again, the bastard was ahead of them.

“The name Mictlan is not a misnomer. The moment your target is revealed, you have nine hours to complete the kill. At the end of the ninth hour, if you haven’t completed your assignment—whether because you suicided or simply ignored the call—your soul will be yanked directly to the lowest level of hell, where you will become a powerful ajaw-makol.”

T h e ajaw-makol were the most powerful of the demons capable of possessing a human—or Nightkeeper—host; they retained their mage powers and human knowledge, and were damnably difficult to kill. If Michael became one, the Nightkeepers were fucked.

“So let me get this straight,” Strike growled at Tomas. “You knew a talent like this runs in the stone bloodline and prevents its holder from discussing it openly, and you knew that large chunks of the normal information transfer hadn’t happened because of the Solstice Massacre . . . yet you never thought to mention this to me, or Jox, or, hell, Michael?”

The winikin shrank in on himself. “He’d become a salesman. And kind of a prick. How was I supposed to know it was all a front?”

Because you knew me, Michael wanted to say. You raised me. Couldn’t you see past the outside?

Strike transferred his attention to Michael. “Going forward, it looks like you’ve got two options.”

Michael nodded. “I can either use the scorpion spell to break my bond with the muk magic, and we take our chances with whatever comes from my not accepting the target . . . or I do the job I was born and trained for, and hope the kill doesn’t tip me to channeling hellmagic.” Which would be akin to having him become an ajaw-makol , except that he’d be allied to Iago rather than the Banol Kax. He held his king’s eyes, shaken by the thought that, in his uncle’s case, the king had been the target.

Frustration welled up. Talk about shitty options. It’s enough to drive a guy—Michael broke off the thought, both because sanity had become a major focus the moment he’d learned of Sasha’s upbringing . . . and because he saw a connection he didn’t like one bit. A bolt of understanding hit him in the gut, and he glanced at Tomas. “That’s why the Stone males are all bachelors, suicides, or lovers, isn’t it? The bachelors and suicides are the ones with the mind-set—i.e., borderline sociopath, dissociative personality, whatever—to accept the Mictlan talent. The lovers don’t inherit the disorder; they carry on the bloodline.”

Tomas nodded slowly. “I’m sorry.”

“Shit,” Michael said hollowly as whatever small hope he’d briefly had of finding a way to have Sasha for his own died a painful death. He was a Mictlan, and a head case. Even if his target turned out to be someone he could see his way to killing—like Iago—and he went through with it, he’d still be a head case, still be half a killer, if not more. Or he could undergo the scorpion spell, break the muk connection, and go back to a seminormal life, one that might include Sasha. Only look what had happened with the others. Akhenaton. Cortes. Scarred-Jaguar. Three different powerful men. Three catastrophic massacres. Given the timing of things, he had to believe that whatever the gods had in mind for him, it’d be big. Like end-of-the-world big.

Could he live with that?

Damn it, Michael thought, his chest echoing hollowly. It took him a moment to realize there was no dark anger inside him, that Rabbit’s work was holding. Thank the gods for that much, at least.

Correctly reading Michael’s overload level as reaching the critical point, Strike said, “How about we take a break. Jade and Anna can pull whatever else they can find on muk and the Mictlan, which probably won’t be much, given the level of secrecy surrounding the talent. We’ll keep working on the tomb translations, probably mount another trip out there in the next day or so. Michael . . . you can consider yourself off for the rest of the day. Take a walk. Play some vids. Blow off some steam.”

“Thanks. I’ll do that.” Michael was acutely aware of the moment Sasha stood and slipped out of the room. He wanted to follow, but then he realized he hadn’t told the others everything important, after all. Looking at Strike, he said, “During the battle, when Iago was trying to ’port me and Sasha away, I got the image of a mountain.”

The king narrowed his eyes. “Can you describe it?”

“Not well enough to ’port. Sorry. But a voice said, ‘Paxil Mountain.’ That ring a bell?”

“Paxil Mountain,” Jox said. “Yeah. That figures.” At Michael’s look, he elaborated, with a nod at Sasha: “It’s the source of cacao and maize. Legend has it that several of the greedier gods wanted to keep the plants for themselves, so they hid them in Paxil Mountain. When the other gods discovered this, they got angry and decided to give maize and cacao to mankind. The thunder god split open the mountain and the seeds sprayed across the empire, seeding the Mayan Empire with maize and cacao.”

“Is it a specific place?” Strike asked.

“I’m sure it is, or was.” The winikin tipped his palms up. “Not one we know about, though.”

“Well, that’s something.” Strike turned to Michael. Waved him off. “Go. You’re looking too ragged for my peace of mind.”

Michael nodded and left, but he didn’t head for the firing range or the ball court. He headed in the direction Sasha had taken when she’d slipped from the meeting a couple of minutes earlier, toward the residential wings. He was nearly there when Tomas stepped in front of him, scowling. “You should’ve told me, you young idiot.”

Michael felt the old, familiar tightness stiffen his neck and shoulders. “When you say it like that, I can’t imagine why I didn’t.”

“I could have—”

“You could have done lots of things,” Michael interrupted. He was suddenly sick and tired of the friction and random jabs. His priorities had shifted; he just couldn’t waste his energy fighting with Tomas anymore. “And so could I. How about we agree that we both screwed up, give each other a pass on the last six years or so, and move on already?”

That brought the winikin’s chin down a notch. “You’d do that?”

“Consider it done.”

They stood there for a moment, stuck somewhere between a standoff and reconciliation. When a hug—or even really a handshake—didn’t seem to make much sense, Michael gave a stiff nod, moved around his winikin, and headed for the residential wing.

He hesitated at the closed door to Sasha’s suite, but what could he possibly say to make things right at this point? He’d pushed her away twice, and even though the danger she brought out in him was blocked—for the time being, at least—the underlying issues remained. More, although his status as a Mictlan explained a shit-load of what he’d been going through, it gave him a pretty crappy choice of actions, that between bad and worse. What right did he have to go to her now?

Thing was, he couldn’t make himself give a shit. With the overt danger defused, he was through being