Demonkeepers

meant she was going to have to find some sort of middle ground between shield bearer and warrior, a way to be involved without actually being on the front lines. The knowledge stung, as did the need to let go of that long-held goal.

But that led to her second conclusion, which was that she needed to focus on the talent the gods had given her. Problem was, it seemed to have died on her. Since the strange meeting with her nahwal, she’d tried over and over again to call up the magic that had so briefly let her see patterns in the power, but she hadn’t gotten squat. And when she’d stared at the painting on Lucuis’s laptop, she hadn’t been able to pick out the blessing she was sure she’d seen in there before. The glyphs had reverted to their original gibberish. Which meant . . . what? Had the magic come from the nahwal, lasting only long enough to get her out of the barrier? Or was something blocking her from using her scribe’s talent, something the nahwal had briefly unlocked so she could feel what it ought to feel like, see what it ought to look like? For the moment she was going with the second option, shifting her goal from becoming a warrior to becoming the magic user she was meant to be. Somehow.

The third and last conclusion was one she’d come to deep in the middle of the night, as she sat and stared at Lucius’s face, which had softened with the absence of his now-forceful personality, returning to the younger- looking lines she remembered from before. She didn’t prefer the old Lucius, necessarily, but he was far less intimidating. And in seeing her friend in the face of the man he’d grown into over such a short, tumultuous time, she had realized that just as she needed to find a middle ground between being a bookkeeper and a soldier, perhaps she could find a middle ground with him. Maybe their relationship didn’t have to be a choice between keeping it friends-only and losing herself to him. If she’d learned anything over the past two years—hell, the past few days—it was that things could change in a blink of magic or fate. Maybe it was time to try putting more of herself into her various relationships now, rather than waiting until it was too late and she was stuck sitting at a friend’s bedside, wishing she’d made more of an effort when she’d had the chance.

She’d long attributed her reserve to Shandi, sometimes in gratitude, sometimes in blame. The winikin wasn’t warm and fuzzy; she was efficient and effective. That upbringing had served Jade well in her career, allowing her to pick through the darkest parts of her patients’ lives and emerge relatively untouched. But that same defensive shell had kept her insulated from the outside world.

Lucius had called her on it, she remembered with a faint smile. Over and over again, when she’d tried to fob him off with something cool and distant, he’d told her to get out of therapist’s mode and feel.

She’d brushed him off, pretending to laugh, but the comments had stuck. The question was: How did she find that middle ground, the one between feeling nothing and feeling too much?

“Watching the stars again?” Shandi said from inside the suite. Jade tensed, but didn’t let the winikin see her startlement, or the bite of irritation brought on by the question. As a child, she’d often slipped out of bed and sneaked up onto the balcony or roof of wherever they were living at the time, to lie out and watch the stars. Shandi had invariably found her before too long, bringing her back inside with a few cool words about keeping her eyes on the path in front of her.

“There aren’t any stars tonight. There’s a storm coming.” Jade turned slowly and found her winikin framed in the sliders, silhouetted against the light coming from the room beyond. To Jade’s surprise, an uncanny calm descended over her, one that said she would say what needed to be said and deal with the consequences. Maybe that was going to be part of her new middle-ground theory. “I’m not going to apologize for sleeping with Lucius, or for trying to help the others find him. I may not be a warrior, but I’m sick of being in the background.”

Shandi didn’t argue the point. She simply said, “Come inside and sit down. We need to talk.”

Jade was tempted to tell her that she was too tired and bitchy to talk now, that they’d have to deal with whatever it was in the morning, but the shimmer of nerves—and were those tears?—in the winikin’s eyes stopped the words in her throat. She nodded instead. “Okay.”

She stepped inside, closed the sliders on the incoming storm, and headed for the couch. Shandi took the chair opposite, so the coffee table formed a wide space between them. Jade didn’t offer her anything and the winikin didn’t ask; they just sat there for a few moments, staring at each other. How could it be, Jade wondered, that she didn’t have anything to say to the woman who had saved her from the massacre, raised her, brought her to her birthright, and helped her adjust to being a mage? Why was it that for all they had in common, it sometimes seemed that they didn’t share anything?

Finally, Shandi broke the silence. “I think the woman Lucius saw in the library was your mother.”

On a scale of one to a million, that ranked pretty high on the things I didn’t expect to hear scale.

Shock hammered through Jade . . . but she didn’t jump or run, or shout an instinctive, What the fuck?

She just sat there, stunned.

The words spaced themselves out in her head: I . . . think . . . woman . . . library . . . your mother.

Still, though, the sentence refused to make any sort of cohesive sense within the scope of what she knew. “But I’m a harvester,” she said, because while that wasn’t the most important point, it was the one that defined her. “I’m not a star.”

“Your father, Joshua, was a harvester. But your mother, Vennie, was a member of the star bloodline.”

“But that’s—” Not how it works, Jade started to say, then broke off, reeling as the world downshifted around her, took a left-hand turn, and sped off in a new, unexpected direction. One with lots of bumps and potholes.

Among the Nightkeepers, certain bloodlines had tended to interbreed while others hadn’t, forming the basis for talent clusters. The bird bloodlines tended to intermingle, concentrating the genetic traits —assuming that was how the magic was inherited—that conferred the talents of flight and levitation; the four-legged-predator bloodlines carried teleportation and telekinesis, among other things; while the reptilian bloodlines tended toward the fire and weather talents, and invisibility. The omnivorous peccaries could have any of the other talents, along with mind-bending, while the talents of the nonanimal bloodlines fell into two camps: low power and high. On the low end of the spectrum was the harvester bloodline. On the high end was the star bloodline, which was the third most powerful bloodline among all the magi, behind only the royal jaguars and the peccaries.

And Jade was apparently fifty percent star.

How had she not known that? How could she not have asked about her mother’s bloodline before?

“It was a highly unlikely match,” Shandi said. “And, as it turned out, not a good one.” She paused as though weighing a decision, then said, “Your mother abandoned you and your father a few days before the Solstice Massacre. We thought she’d run off . . . and when I couldn’t find any sign of her afterward, I assumed the boluntiku had tracked and killed her as they had so many others.”

Shock layered atop shock within Jade. Again, the individual words made sense, but the sum of them seemed to represent a foreign language. “You told me my parents loved each other,” she whispered, suffering a spasm of betrayal that was far stronger than the information probably deserved. But these were her parents they were talking about: the tall, sleek- haired woman with the soft voice and her strong, sturdy-armed husband. And even as Shandi’s stories of their having died in a car crash had morphed into the reality of their dying in the Solstice Massacre, Shandi had always said that they had loved each other, that they had died together.

Apparently not so much, Jade thought as her stomach took a long, sick slide toward her toes.

“They did love each other . . . in the beginning.” Shandi held up a hand. “Let me tell it my way, start to finish. Okay?” After a moment, she continued: “Vennie was a good Nightkeeper. She was loyal to her king and her magic, and she was a strong soldier. She wore the warrior’s mark and excelled at fireball magic. She was . . .” The winikin paused, her expression clouding. “Vennie was like a comet.

She burned brightly, moved fast, and rarely looked behind herself to see what sort of mess she’d left trailing behind her. She’d been away from the compound for a few years with her parents, and when she showed back up for the solstice ritual of ’eighty-two, she was sixteen, gorgeous, talented, and reckless. It was easy to see