Demonkeepers

solid weight pressing into her, grounding her. Pounding into her.

Caught in a spell of heat and sensation, she levered herself up as he leaned down. Her heart raced; her eyelids eased shut even as her lips parted on a low moan of anticipation.

The sound emerged very loud in the strange silence around them, shattering the moment. Jade froze, and felt Lucius’s neck go tense and tight beneath her caressing hand. When she opened her eyes, she found him staring back at her, his expression mirroring her own inner shout of, What the hell are we doing?

They were in a completely unknown situation, brought there by a type of barrier magic she’d never experienced before. Gods, she hadn’t even looked around. One glance at Lucius, one touch, and she’d lost all sense of rationality and self- protection. Love isn’t a miracle , she remembered writing once in a patient’s notes; it’s a damned mental illness . Here was her proof, and this wasn’t even love. It was just good sex.

Okay, really, really good sex. But still.

Lucius’s face went shuttered, but one corner of his mouth kicked up. “I think I’m starting to understand why sex magic is such a driving force for you Nightkeepers. If that’s what this is, it’s powerful stuff.” He eased away from her, shaking his head. “Somebody should’ve warned me it’s like hammering a double Red Bull with a Viagra chaser.” He cut her a look. “Not that I’ve ever tried that, mind you. I’m just saying.”

Jade didn’t say anything; she wasn’t sure she could’ve managed to meet his wit, given the sudden hollowness that had opened up inside her. It wasn’t that she minded his attributing the intensity of what had happened between them to sex magic—she was relieved by the explanation, though a little embarrassed that she hadn’t figured it out first. No, what had her breathing deeply to fill the emptiness was the knowledge that she’d bought into it so quickly, so thoroughly. And that she’d been helpless in its throes, vulnerable in his arms, without the slightest thought for safety or the job at hand. For all that she had bragged inwardly about not losing herself to the sex magic before, she had come damned close this time.

You’re a mage, she reminded herself. Use the magic. Don’t let it use you . But deep down inside, she couldn’t escape the fact that she wasn’t much of a mage, and didn’t know bupkes about using the magic, not really. Shit.

“Well,” she said, blowing out a breath that did little to settle the churning in her stomach, “the magic got us here. Let’s see where ‘here’ is.” Though even as she straightened to look around, she remembered the strange downward lurch of the magic. Had it been her imagination, or had someone really whispered, “Beware”? And if so, who? The only true occupants of the barrier were the nahwal, a group of strangely withered ancestral ghosts that spoke with many voices all in synchrony. This had been a single female voice. At least, she thought it had.

Then she got a look around herself, and she stopped thinking about the voice, about the magic, and even about the man beside her, because all she could do was stare as her mouth fell open.

They were . . . Dear gods, she didn’t know where they were. They had materialized roughly in the center of a long, perfectly rectangular canyon—or maybe a pit? an enclosure?—that was a mile or so long, a quarter mile wide, and open to the mauve sky. Red rock walls rose up around them, sheer and unbroken, stretching several stories high before ending in perfectly straight lines. The sand underfoot was a gritty version of the same reddish stone, with something else that sparkled faintly in the unchanging light. Huge, unadorned columns sprouted from the sand, one right beside where Jade and Lucius had landed. More important, several hundred yards away from where she and Lucius crouched, in what looked like the exact center of the enclosure, sat a huge four-sided pyramid made of three tiers that descended in size from bottom to top, forming god-size steps leading upward. At each corner was carved a humanoid head, easily ten feet tall, with a fiercely scowling face that was surrounded by a halo of radiating lines. She couldn’t immediately place the image, but thought it was familiar. Each tier was painted a different color: red at the bottom, black in the middle, white at the top. As was the case with many Mayan pyramids, human-size staircases ran down the center of each of the four sides, with rectangular doorways set on either side of the staircases on the upper and lower tiers. Practically every available surface was worked with intricate glyph carvings that were the traditional blend of art and language. Unlike the other pyramids she’d seen in person or studied at UT, though, this one didn’t culminate in a ceremonial platform, or with a boxy temple built at the top. Instead, the center of the pyramid was an open, empty space crowned by a series of stone archways running parallel to one another, looking like some ancient creature had died atop the temple and gone to fossil with its rib bones bared to the bright, sunless sky.

Wonder shimmered through Jade. Though vaguely bunkerlike, it was elegant in its own way. More, it wasn’t a restored ruin of a bygone era or a computer-generated rendering of what an ancient Mayan temple might have looked like. This was the real thing. Somehow.

“Do you think that’s the library?” she asked softly. During its tenure on earth, the library had been hidden in a subterranean cavern that could be accessed only by a series of water-filled, booby-trapped tunnels. The natural cavern, embellished with carved scenes and ancient spells, had been empty when Nate and Alexis discovered it. Since then, the Nightkeepers had assumed—or at least Jade had—that when their ancestors had cast the powerful magic needed to hide the library within the barrier and create the Prophet’s spell to retrieve the information it contained, they would have replicated the stone-carved cavern within the barrier’s gray-green, foggy milieu. But this was no stone cavern, and that hadn’t been any ordinary barrier transition. Not to mention that the Prophet’s spell hadn’t said anything about the Prophet entering the barrier or traveling to the library itself; the magic was supposed to connect Lucius with the information, allowing him to channel it while he stayed on the earthly plane.

Instead, he—a human who wasn’t quite a Prophet—and she—a mage who barely rated the title—

had somehow been sucked . . . where?

When he didn’t answer her question, it was an answer nonetheless. She blew out a breath. “You saw the hellmouth too.” The image of the cave mouth overlain with a carving of a screaming skull was burned into her retinas. Iago might’ve locked and hidden the earthly entrance to Xibalba, but somehow they had gotten through.

Lucius nodded. “Yeah. I saw it.” He glanced upward. “And damned if that doesn’t look like the sky from the in-between, only way brighter.” The in-between was the limbo plane where his consciousness had been trapped while the makol demon had been in full control of his body. In it was the dusty road leading to the river-crossing entrance to Xibalba.

“The library is hidden in the barrier,” Jade pointed out. “If it had been in the underworld already, the Banol Kax wouldn’t have needed to infiltrate Iago’s camp to ensure that his people didn’t gain access.” Yet they had, through Lucius’s makol. Which suggested the library wasn’t in Xibalba. But if that was the case, why were they there? “Do you think someone—or some thing—pulled us here?”

“More things are possible in heaven and earth,” he misquoted, expression grim, but she also heard an undertone of suppressed excitement. He caught her hands and pulled her to her feet, so they stood facing each other in the lee of the big stone column, hands linked. “But given where we’ve ended up, I don’t like the idea of who might’ve been doing the pulling.” He glanced past the concealing pillar toward the pyramid, then looked sidelong at her. “We should go back and get weapons, maybe reinforcements.”

“You’re assuming the way spell is going to work.” The homing spell that was supposed to return an out-of-body mage to his or her body was notoriously fickle. “And that we’ll be able to get back here afterward.” What was more, the same skitter of excitement she saw on his face was running through her veins, urging her onward. “Let’s check out the pyramid.” The suggestion came partly from duty, partly from her growing need to do something . . . and also from her growing suspicion that whoever had brought them there would have to be the one to send them back. The day of the new moon wasn’t one of barrier flux, which meant she and Lucius shouldn’t have been able to enter the barrier, never mind get all the way through the hellmouth.

Beware.

“We’re unarmed. Shit, we don’t even have a pocketknife to blood our palms.” But he wanted to do it. She saw the building excitement in his face, felt it race in her own system, as though they were daring each other without saying the words.

“We’re just going to go look around.” But he had a point; stupidity didn’t favor survival of the fittest. So she