Demonkeepers

young parents with a loud, colicky baby, and things got nasty.”

Shandi paused. “She took off three days before the attack, and she didn’t come back. We assumed she ran off, not wanting to be part of a battle she didn’t believe in. Based on Lucius’s description, though, I think it’s possible she somehow found and enacted the Prophet’s spell instead, hoping to find something within the library that would help her convince Scarred-Jaguar not to lead the attack . . . or something that would help him win it. Knowing her, she wouldn’t have cared which, as long as she got the credit. Instead, she somehow got caught up inside the library instead of forming the proper conduit. And she died there.”

Jade closed her eyes on a wash of emotion. She told herself it didn’t matter that her parents hadn’t died together, that their love hadn’t been the deep, abiding joy Shandi had let her believe. That was twenty-some years ago, and had little influence on her life now. She could only control her own thoughts and actions, not those of others . . . and certainly not the past. The sentiments rang badly hollow, though, and her chest ached. “You said she took off three days before the massacre. Didn’t the king and the others go looking for her? Surely, if she’d been lying around somewhere, half jacked into the library, someone could have found her.”

But Shandi shook her head. “There wasn’t an extensive search because nobody in the council knew she was gone. Neither the harvesters nor the stars wanted to draw attention to her disappearance. Back then, the political situation was volatile. There were . . . I wouldn’t call them factions, exactly, but there was definitely dissent within the Nightkeepers. Parents held their teenagers back from their talent ceremonies so they wouldn’t have to fight, and a few of the magi even spoke openly about leaving. In the end the king, with the queen at his side, declared that anyone involved in desertion, whether by act or knowledge, was guilty of treason . . . which was—and still is—punishable by death.”

“You all thought you were protecting her by covering up her disappearance.”

The winikin nodded. “Your father was heartbroken that she’d taken off, but he didn’t want her being charged with treason.”

Love strikes again, Jade thought, knowing that she should feel something but not sure what anymore. She was growing numb to the surprises, to the anguish. “He died thinking she had abandoned him. That she had abandoned both of us.” She paused as grief echoed through her. “Didn’t anyone stop to think that a woman who was all bent out of shape about being kept out of the action wasn’t going to just walk away from a fight?”

“Sure, there were questions, but like I said, she was impulsive . . . and I can’t say that motherhood had settled her down. She loved you fiercely when she was in the mood, but then, other times, she wanted to pretend she was the same girl she’d been before—the party girl who was always the center of attention.”

My mother, the head cheerleader , Jade thought sourly. But at the same time, the logic didn’t totally play. She frowned, trying to think it through in her tired, overloaded brain, knowing that if she stopped thinking, she ran the risk of feeling too much. “The Prophet’s spell requires a soul sacrifice. By enacting it, she would have been offering her own life in exchange for the information.”

Shandi turned her palms to the sky. “Like I said, she was a comet. That was exactly the sort of ‘act first, regret later’ move she specialized in. Though it doesn’t explain how she wound up in the same situation the human is in now. There’s no way she was harboring a makol or any other sort of soul link.”

“The human’s name is Lucius,” Jade snapped, annoyance flashing a quick burn through her system.

“Yes, it is, and he’s bright and shiny now, and you’re hot for him. What do you think is going to happen when all that wears off? Your mother was miserable as a harvester. She hated being on the sidelines. She was a warrior, and she was used to having power—not just magic, but a voice among others her age. When she married your father, whether from love or impulse, or a bit of both, she gave up more than she anticipated. She blamed him for that. And she blamed herself for following her heart, because in doing so, she’d lost the right to fight.”

The words tugged at a connection in Jade’s brain, but she couldn’t make it take shape. She shook her head. “I don’t know what to say anymore. What to think.”

“That’s understandable. You’re tired, and that was a lot to take in.” Rising, Shandi brushed at her tailored pants, which fell in neat creases as though they didn’t dare wrinkle. “Just keep breathing,” the winikin said pragmatically, “and keep yourself steady. Sometimes, that’s all we can do.”

Jade wanted to argue, wanted to scream that she was tired of only breathing, tired of being steady.

She wanted to be unsteady, irrational; she wanted to do something, godsdamn it! But she didn’t want to prolong the conversation further; she wanted some time alone to process, or maybe just pull the covers over her head.

“I’ll be in my room,” Shandi said. “Call if you need me.”

“Of course,” Jade answered numbly. “I will.” But they both knew she wouldn’t.

She saw the winikin to the door and locked it behind her. Then, drawn by the faintest rumble of thunder, barely detectable as a vibration on the air and in the floor beneath her feet, she moved to the sliders and pushed through to the balcony. Lightning flickered on the horizon and a deep-throated, thrumming thunder boom ran through the soles of her feet and up to her body, where it pressed on her heart.

Closing the sliders behind her, she leaned back against the side of the mansion and slid down to sit balled up on the patio floor, with her chin on her knees and her arms wrapped around her shins, feeling the storm approach . . . and waiting for the rain to come and wash away her tears.

PART II MIDDAY

The sun reaches apogee

CHAPTER TEN

June 14 Two years, six months, and seven days to the zero date University of Texas, Austin

“Hey, Pyro. You lost?”

The hail startled Rabbit, who’d been head-down, lost in his thoughts as he’d hiked across campus.

Pausing just shy of the cement bridge that led to the front entrance of the squat, bunkerlike structure that ironically housed the art history department, he did a mental eye roll and glanced back over his shoulder at the lanky, brown-haired guy who was waving at him. “Not lost, Smitty. Just slumming.”

“Ha! Good one.” Anna’s newest grad student loped a few strides to catch up, made like he was going to punch Rabbit in the arm, then aborted the motion in a fake-out designed to show anyone watching that the two of them were buds, without actually making contact. Everyone who was anyone in the student social structure knew that Rabbit didn’t like to be touched, except by Myrinne. “Ready to come to your senses and give up on that science shit?”

It was a running semijoke among the younger members of the Mayan studies department, who, after seeing Rabbit ace a few grad- level courses, had decided that he was the best naturally intuitive Mayanist the university had seen in forever, and ought to be majoring in their department rather than physics.

What they didn’t get, and what he never intended to tell them, was that the whole Mayan thing wasn’t intuitive at all. It was the way he’d been raised. Rabbit’s old man might not have given much of a crap about his upbringing—Red-Boar had been far more concerned about the memory movies playing inside his own skull—but