Demonkeepers

seared his eyes, and the stones beneath his feet heaved like the deck of a fishing boat, with the same nausea- inducing consequences he’d suffered on his single lamented attempt at deep-sea fishing. “I’ve gotta get out of here.” He didn’t have the answers the Nightkeepers needed about the skyroad or the sun god, but his body was flat-out done. If he collapsed and passed out here, he would probably exhaust the last of his energy reserves while unconscious. And death in the barrier was death nonetheless, which meant it was time to go home.

The journal had talked about the “way-ya” spell, not the way spell, which was what he’d been assuming he should use. “Way- ya” meant “home,” but could also mean “spirit” or “portal.” Similar but different. Chanting the word over and over in his thick-feeling head, he dragged himself back to the study area, with its carved medallions. His feet seemed very far away when he plonked them on the way symbol of the snaggle- toothed dragon. Wetting his gone-dry mouth, he croaked, “Way-ya.”

Power instantly slammed into him, swept him up. Everything went dark, and the world around him spun hard and fast. He might’ve puked but wasn’t sure; he lost touch with his body, with his neurons —hell, with every part of himself. Terror slashed as he glimpsed a dusty, barren roadway that came from nowhere, led nowhere. The in- between. His own private hell. Adrenaline slashed, sweeping away the cobwebs. Screaming inwardly, he fought not to go there, fought to go anywhere but there, but how could he fight without power, without magic, without training?

As he slid toward that dry, dusty purgatory, he lashed out, reaching invisible thought hands to grab something, anything that might halt the slide. He caught a flash at the edge of his consciousness, a hint of power that wasn’t quite familiar, wasn’t entirely strange, but was wholly, utterly compelling. He grabbed for it, touched it for a second, then lost it. But at that brief touch, the in-between winked out and the world went gray-green.

Then that too winked out, and there was nothing but darkness and sick, aching pain.

Panic hammered through him as he sensed boundaries all around him, hemming him into a space that was so much smaller than the vastness he’d just traveled through. He was jailed by the pain, trapped within— Oh, he thought as the inner lightbulb went off and he recognized the sensation of being back in his physical self . . . which felt like unholy shit. His head hammered with the rhythm of his stumbling heart, and agony flared in each of his joints, making him feel like he’d been stretched out on a huge cosmic torture rack that had stopped short of actually killing him, but only barely. And who knew the body had so many damned joints? Even his pinkie toes were killing him.

“Ngh,” he said, wincing when the word—the grunt?—echoed too loudly, setting off cymbal clashes in his skull. He hadn’t felt hangover- crappy like this since the day after Cizin had first entered his soul. The thought brought a spurt of panic, but he beat it back. It feels like this because you’re a human trying to do magic, he told himself, forcing the logic through the pain. The library is not a makol ; it’s not trying to possess you. Though the ask-and-walk thing was borderline.

“Lucius!” Jade said, her voice seeming to come from far above him. “Can you hear me? Are you okay?”

Jesus Christ, don’t shout , he wanted to say, but he caught the worry in her voice and felt the grip of her hand on his. He hated that she was seeing him weak and helpless yet again, but that was his hang-

up, not hers, so he made an effort to be polite, even through the hammering inside his skull. “M’fine.

Food?”

Okay, so maybe that was still lacking in the polite-ness department. But he heard paper and then clothing rustle and sensed motion nearby. What was more, he didn’t sense a crowd nearby, which was a relief.

“Jox left a carb- and-fat bomb in case . . . for when you came around.” Her voice trembled on the words. She took a deep breath, and she sounded steadier when she said, “I’ll call the others. We’ve been watching you in shifts ever since Sasha said you were as stable as she could get you. We’ve been waiting for . . . well. I’ll call them.”

“ ’N a minute.” Lucius slitted his eyes, saw the familiar details of his cottage, and relaxed fractionally at finding that he was on his couch, not locked up in the basement in the main mansion, or worse. Craning his neck, he looked for Jade, and found her in the kitchen, leaning on the counter with her arms braced and her head hanging. She was wearing trim jeans and a soft button-down that clung to her skin as her body curved in a private moment of what might have been relief, but he found himself interpreting more as grief. Regret.

What the hell had he missed? He wanted to go to her, to hold her. Wanted to lean into her and let her lean on him. But that was the weakness talking, he knew. More, he knew that it was a private moment, and one she wouldn’t thank him for watching. So he forced himself to look away.

Focusing on the changes that had occurred in his main room while he’d been out of it, he saw that the TV was off, no longer showing the scene that had been so strangely mimicked by what they had seen in Xibalba. The coffee table held a notebook and a couple of volumes he recognized from the archive, primary texts on the legends of the sun god, clueing him in that Jade had caught the Kinich Ahau connection. Good girl. There was an IV stand beside the couch, a needle taped at the crook of his arm, and a clear line feeding him the nutrient mix the winikin had come up with to offset the postmagic crash experience by a mage—or in this case, a human wannabe—in the aftermath of big magic. Which made him wonder how long he’d been unconscious.

A look out the window showed him that sky was blue-black, but with dusk, not dawn. Had he lost an entire day? More? He cursed under his breath.

As he did, Jade came back into the main room carrying a bowl of pasta mixed with the heavy meat sauce he liked, liberally dosed with cheese. At his colorful language, she raised an eyebrow. “That sounded coherent, if physically impossible. I take it your head is clearing?”

“How many days did I lose?” He took the bowl and held out a hand for the fork she was still holding, just in case she had any idea of trying to feed him.

She passed it over. “About twenty hours. From your perspective, it’s tomorrow night.” She was wearing what he thought of as her counselor’s face, serene to the point of blandness. But he knew her well enough to see strain and nerves beneath, along with an unfamiliar edginess.

“I made it to the library,” he said before she asked.

“And?”

There was no simple answer to that, he realized as he tried to come up with something concise and vaguely coherent. He dug into the pasta, buying himself a moment. Finally, he went with: “It’s amazing. I wish you could’ve been there with me.”

And it was true, he realized. Of all of the magi, she was the one who would’ve appreciated the artifacts, the Ouija game, all of it. And he would’ve liked to have seen it all for the first time with her.

Whatever else was—or wasn’t—between them, they meshed on that level. Always had.

“I tried to find you,” she blurted, locking her fingers together until her knuckles whitened. “Last night we uplinked—Strike, me, everyone. I tried to find your ch’ul song for Sasha, tried to follow where you’d gone . . . but I couldn’t. Our connection, the sex magic, just wasn’t strong enough.I wasn’t strong enough.”

“Oh.” Suddenly, her sitting next to his bed, waiting for him to regain consciousness—or die, though neither of them had said it outright—seemed less like the vigil of a friend or lover, and more like self-

flagellation.

She continued, though he wasn’t sure whether she was talking to him or to herself. “I couldn’t find the sex link and pull you home. We thought . . . We weren’t sure you were going to make it out.”

“But I did,” he pointed out in between big bites of cheese-laden pasta, not mentioning that it had been a close call. “And for the record, I don’t think the library works the same way the rest of the barrier does. It’s possible—even likely—that you wouldn’t have been able to follow me even if I were a mage and we were jun tan mates.” He thought of the corpse’s mated mark, wondered if someone had gone looking for her. And if so, what had happened to them. He hated like hell that Jade felt like a failure because of him, but knew she wouldn’t thank him for saying it aloud. So instead, he said, “I’m guessing you gave the others a full report on Kinich Ahau and the companions?” She had twenty hours’ head start on him—it sure as hell hadn’t felt that long when he’d been inside the library, but the barrier was known to fold time oddly in some cases.