Demonkeepers

Then Snake-head leaned over him, hissing in satisfaction. Revulsion lent added force as Lucius lunged to his feet, kicking hard at the demon warrior’s kneecap. He hit his target, felt a hell of an impact, and heard the sick pop of bone and cartilage. Snake-head howled and went down. Lucius kicked him in the face, connecting with a watermelon crunch that was disgustingly satisfying.

Blood pounding, he scrambled up and spun—straight into the stubby end of Jaguar- head’s spear.

The weapon rattled and belched greasy brown smoke, which whipped around Lucius, immobilizing him in the same invisible coils as before. Then Wolf-head stepped up and smashed Lucius in the temple with his short club. The impact thudded through him and the world spun as he dropped with the grace of a corpse. Jade screamed, but her cry cut off midway, choking to silence. Lucius roared in answer, struggling against the unyielding bonds. “Jade. Jade! ”

As the world faded around him, he tried to fight his way back to full consciousness, all the while praying, Gods, don’t let it end like this!

It didn’t. When he came to a short time later, he was being carried head and foot between two of the animal-headed warriors. Beside him strode Jaguar-head, who carried Jade over his shoulder; she lay still, but her eyes were open and reflected her relief when Lucius sent her a wink. He didn’t dare do more, though. Not until he better understood what the hell was going on . . . and what they could do about it.

He couldn’t see who had shoulders, but Snake-head was at his feet, not even limping. The damn things have healing magic, he realized. But what the hell were they? Not Banol Kax or makol, he knew. The dark lords of the underworld were huge and inhuman, and the archive said the demon souls of the makol took on a shadowy, green- eyed form when they weren’t possessing human hosts. So what other classes of badasses existed within Xibalba, and how could they be taken down for good?

Unfortunately, that was yet another example of the Nightkeepers’ critical need to fill in the gaps.

Someone, at some point in the past, must’ve known what these things were, and how to kill them. But that knowledge, like so much else, had been lost.

So think it through, he told himself. There’s got to be something we can do here. But unfortunately, the whole “everything happens for a reason” religious tenet of the magi had a major flaw in this case: With the skyroad destroyed and the gods unable to communicate with the Nightkeepers or directly influence things on the earthly plane, logic said that it hadn’t been a god that had brought them to the canyon. More likely, one of the Banol Kax or a powerful demon underling had detected the sex magic and the stirring of the Prophet’s powers and usurped the energy flows somehow. Which would suggest that he and Jade didn’t have a destined role to play in the underworld; the dark lords were just looking to cut down on their enemies.

Okay, so maybe thinking it through hadn’t been such a great idea.

Try the homing spell, he mouthed to Jade, chancing the communication. When she got a mulish I’m not going without you look on her face, he added, If you can get back, you can bring help.

Maybe. Maybe not, but at least she’d be safe.

The small party passed through the stone pillars, clearly heading for the pyramid and whatever had made that terrible noise earlier. They were running out of time. “Do it!” he hissed.

Eyes bleak, Jade nodded. But when she whispered the ritual word, nothing happened. Not one freaking thing.

Lucius cursed inwardly as that brief hope guttered and died. He had no illusion that he could summon the power on his own, and he doubted sex magic would be an option anytime soon. So what the hell else could he do? There had to be something, damn it. Problem was, he knew that was a self-

serving lie. Sometimes life just wasn’t fucking fair.

The group came within view of the pyramid, which loomed ever larger in Lucius’s limited field of vision, bringing a mixture of awe and dread. Awe because he’d spent a third of his lifetime studying a dead culture suddenly coming alive in front of him. Dread because . . . well, he wasn’t an idiot. But that didn’t mean he was giving up, either.

The whistle-blower wasn’t on the ramparts anymore, and the dogs—and whatever else was inside—

had gone ominously quiet as the procession stopped short of the temple structure. Lucius’s captors unceremoniously dumped him facedown in the scuffed dirt. He landed cursing, and rolled onto his side as Jade thumped down on her butt next to him. She cried out when she hit, but then snapped her mouth shut and glared instead.

Good girl, Lucius thought. He didn’t get a chance to do more than lock eyes with her before Snake-

head and Pig-head moved in and dragged him to his feet. Still bound in the relentless yet invisible shield magic, he had zero choice in the matter. He hung between his captors, glaring when two of the others hauled Jade to her feet, so the captives and their animal- headed guards stood facing one of the low- linteled doorways that led into the pyramid’s lower tier.

Brain racing in search of a clue, explanation, or escape route, Lucius scanned the intricate Mayan glyphwork carved into the surrounding stones, automatically starting to arrange the phonemes into words and meanings. But before he’d gotten beyond, “On this cardinal day of . . .” there was movement within the temple and four newcomers emerged. They looked like men—in that they had all their flesh and normal human faces—and they wore elaborate cloaks over jewel-encrusted armor plates and armbands. But, incongruously, the armor wasn’t made of wood, leather, and stone, as were the traditional trappings worn by the animal-heads. Instead, it was made of burnished metal: copper, or maybe gold. Which didn’t make sense, because the Maya hadn’t been metalworkers, and the Mayan paradigm prevailed in Xibalba.

At least, he thought it did. But the more he looked at the metal-armored men, the more he became convinced that they were outfitted like pharaohs’ guards, pure Egyptian from their kohl- lined eyes to the rayed-sun symbols on their cloaks. Before he could do the necessary brain shift to figure out what the hell it meant, there was another stir of movement from within the temple, followed by a glint of luminous green that obliterated every other thought inside Lucius’s skull. Rage and revulsion surged to tunnel his vision as a smoky shadow emerged, becoming a dark, man-shaped ghost with glowing green eyes. Makol!

The demon soul drifted across the ground, moving toward him. The air went cold and Lucius’s bones ached with death and damnation, and the things he’d sworn he would never be, ever again.

Clamping his teeth against a stream of foul curses, he strained against the unyielding shield magic. As the makol drew nearer, the shifting shadow morphed and solidified, becoming almost a man, one that wore a tall diadem marked with the sun symbol that had been in use for only a single Egyptian dynasty, that of the pharaoh who had converted the empire to monotheistic sun worship, largely by killing off anyone who preferred the polytheistic religion that had been entrenched for thousands of years.

Gut tightening further with the ID, Lucius bared his teeth. “I thought you’d had yourself declared a god. Is this your idea of a deity’s fitting reward . . . Akhenaton?” Although the pharaoh’s animal-

headed minions—which he belatedly recognized as perverted versions of the Egyptian pantheon Akhenaton had outlawed—might still speak their native tongue, he had no doubt the makol understood him. The damn things could see straight inside a man.

“Akhenaton. ” Jade spat the name of one of the Nightkeepers’ most ancient enemies: the pharaoh who had been responsible for the first of the three massacres that had driven the Nightkeepers nearly to extinction.

At her gasp, the demon spirit turned. Started drifting toward her.

“Stay the hell away from her,” Lucius snarled. The demon’s dark presence scraped along his nerve endings; worse, he could feel its interest in Jade, its dismissal of him. What makol would want a human when a Nightkeeper was available? The thought of Jade going through the transition sickened him beyond reason, past caution. “I said, hands off!” Deep within, the rage spun higher, becoming a strange, edgy energy that buzzed through him, coalescing at the places where the shield magic held him fast.

From within the temple, the dogs suddenly started barking again, their cries sharp and frenzied.

Excited.