Demonkeepers

Anna made a face. “Again. Ew.”

Jade laughed, but the humor was strictly on the surface. Underneath it all, she wanted to press further— about whether Anna was having visions, about how Lucius had looked when she’d last seen him . . . and whether he’d asked about her. But, just as Jade had cut off Strike and Anna whenever they had tried to tell her about Lucius’s progress before, she didn’t ask now. In the end, what mattered most were the results. Besides, she’d given her word to her king, and according to the writs, a vow made to him was second only to a promise made to the gods. Since the gods were currently incommunicado, thanks to Iago’s destruction of the skyroad . . .

She had a booty call to answer.

CHAPTER TWO

Skywatch Near Chaco Canyon, New Mexico The strange orange sun was slipping toward the horizon as Strike and Jade materialized, not in the great room, where the teleporter king usually landed his homeward bounds, but out behind the big mansion that formed the heart of Skywatch. Jade appreciated his discretion; she wasn’t exactly jonesing to endure a round of “Hi, how are you?” pleasantries while everyone tried not to say anything about what she was there to do. Except Sven, who was perpetually seventeen, and would probably do a wink-wink-nudge-nudge routine.

Yeah, she’d skip that, thanks.

She and Strike had zapped in beneath the big ceiba tree that stretched over the picnic area out behind the mansion and pool. There, cacao saplings grew beneath the rain forest giant, the out-of-

place tropical plants flourishing in the arid New Mexican landscape thanks to Sasha’s lifegiving ch’ul magic and her affinity for plants. Nearby, the steel building that served as the Nightkeepers’ training hall was a dark silhouette of deepening shadows.

The scenery was all very familiar to Jade. The atmosphere, though, wasn’t.

Stepping away from the big, black-haired king, who was wearing his usual nonregalia of jeans, T-

shirt, and sandals, with his right sleeve just brushing across the hunab ku mark that denoted his gods-

validated kingship, Jade filled her lungs with moisture-laden air that seemed more appropriate to the lowlands of the Yucatan than a box canyon in New Mex. The air smelled faintly wrong, though she couldn’t immediately place the odor, which clung to her nasal passages and made her want to sneeze.

She glanced at Strike, who was a dark shadow in the rapidly dimming light. “Did you guys install a giant Glade air nonfreshener while I was gone?”

“I wish. At least then we’d know what we’re dealing with . . . and it’d presumably come with an

‘off’ button.” His deep voice was edged with frustration. “We seem to be going from desert to tropics, and it’s not just the ceiba tree growing out of place now, or even the cacao. There are patches of slimy green crap— like dry-land algae or something—growing all over the area, though it’s worse down here. Sasha says it’s only partly her talent that’s promoting the growth; mostly it’s the funky sun.”

Jade glanced at the horizon just as the last sliver of orange light disappeared. The gas giant had been off- color worldwide since the previous fall, when humanity had awakened one day to a sun that had turned from white light to blood-tinged orange overnight.

The amount of solar energy reaching the earth had dropped precipitously even though the earth’s atmosphere was its same ragged, ozone-depleted self. Scientists worldwide had various theories—no big surprise there—but the consensus seemed to be: Beats the living hell out of us. The astrophysicists were testing whether a cosmic dust cloud or something was blocking things between the earth and sun; the ecologists were freaking about issues of climate change, crop losses, and killer red tides; and the threat of mob stampede was growing as food prices skyrocketed and microclimates shifted over the course of weeks or even days. And all the while, people were asking, Why is this happening? How?

Unbeknownst to most of humanity, the answers that came the closest to reality were those of the supposed crackpots who blamed it on aliens . . . or, rather, demons and the approach of a doomsday predicted by the calendar of the ancient Maya. In depicting the end-date, the Dresden Codex, one of only four Mayan codices to survive the conquistadors’ book burnings of the fifteen hundreds, showed a terrible horned god standing in the sky, tipping a jug that poured fire onto the earth. Although most human scholars assumed that meant the Maya believed that the world would be demolished by a fiery apocalypse, Jade had dug up information from the archive suggesting that the solar fire would be part of the gods’ efforts to help the Nightkeepers during the final battle, which was good news. . . . Or it had been until the sun got sick.

Unfortunately, in the absence of a reliable oracle—aka the Prophet—there was no way for the Nightkeepers to ask what the hell was going on or how to fix it.

Shivering, Jade scrubbed at sudden gooseflesh. “Maybe there’ll be something in the library,” she said, voicing the sentiment that had grown to a refrain over the past six months. “Which is my cue to get down to business.”

But when she turned toward the mansion, which was a darkly solid, reassuring silhouette in the gathering dusk, Strike caught her arm and one-eightied her in the direction of a nearly invisible path leading away from the main house. “Lucius moved into one of the cottages a few months back. Said the mansion made him feel claustrophobic after being trapped inside his own head for so long.”

“Oh.” She tried not to let the change unsettle her, though when she’d pictured the pending booty duty, she and Lucius had always been in his suite, which was a few doors down from her own and nearly identical in floor plan and bland decor. Not a big deal, she told herself. It’s just a shift of scenery. Experience had taught her that people didn’t fundamentally change; only peripherals did.

Human, Nightkeeper, it didn’t matter. Some people were good, some bad, most a mixture of the two.

She trusted Lucius despite knowing that he harbored a deep darkness that had attracted the makol and allowed it to gain a foothold within his soul. But he also had a strong core of innate goodness; that was what had kept the demon from possessing him fully, setting up the internal tug-of-war he’d suffered through for more than a year.

“Is that a problem?” Strike asked. The deepening dusk made his voice seem to come from the humid air around her rather than from the man himself.

“Which cottage?” she said, ducking the question because she knew it would take far more than a change of scenery to scare off a warrior, and she was determined not to let herself be anything less.

“The one farthest from the mansion; you’ll see the lights. He sleeps with them on. Or else he doesn’t sleep at all; we’re not sure.” The king paused. “Nate and Alexis are spending the night in the main house rather than their cottage. With Rabbit and Myrinne at school, you’ll have privacy.”

Closing the distance between them, he pressed something into her hand. “Take this.”

Feeling the outlines of one of the earpiece-throat mike combos the warriors used to stay in contact during ops, she didn’t ask why. “Who’s going to be on the other end?” Even knowing that the mike would transmit only if she keyed it on, she couldn’t help picturing a voyeuristic tableau in the great room.

“Either me or Jox. Unless you’d prefer Leah.”

He was doing his best, she realized, to maintain the illusion of privacy while keeping her safe, letting her know the warriors stood ready to come to her defense if the sex magic went awry and Lucius once again drew the attention of the underworld lords of the Banol Kax. Which had been only one of the numerous daunting possibilities that had been thrown around over the past few weeks.

“Whatever you think is best,” Jade said, just barely managing not to tack on “sire” at the end, as her winikin ’s voice echoed in her head, reminding her of the three “D”s. I’m not following orders this time. This was my idea. My choice. Raising her chin, she said, “Lucius won’t hurt me.” No, she’d manage that part on her own. Always had.

“He’s not the guy you used to know. Becoming the Prophet has changed him.”

“He’s not the Prophet yet. If he were, you wouldn’t need me.”

Strike didn’t have anything to say to that, which pinched somewhere in the region of Jade’s heart.