Demonkeepers

Strike said, “Before we talk about the possible scenarios for rescuing Kinich Ahau, Jade has some new info for us.” He gestured in her direction. “Go ahead. You’ve got the floor.”

If she’d been a different person, she might have found a way to soften the delivery. Since she was who she was, though, she went with the naked truth. “We have good reason to believe that the dead woman in the library was my mother.”

A ripple of shock ran through the room. Beside her, Lucius sucked in a breath. She could guess the questions that must be racing through his overactive brain. Are you sure? Why was she in there? What does it mean?

“Shandi came to me last night . . .” she began, and repeated what she’d told Strike earlier. Shandi herself wasn’t available for questions, or even to nod encouragement; she had locked herself in her suite, pleading a headache. Wish I could’ve done that, Jade thought wistfully, as she finished, “So, for better or worse, it all fits. She would’ve had access to the Prophet’s spell via her bloodline. Thinking that she was supposed to be the last of the Prophets, she enacted the spell. But it misfired somehow, putting her in the same sort of position Lucius is in now.” She spread her hands. “I don’t know how this will help us, or even if it will. But I thought everyone should know.”

There was a long moment of stunned—or perhaps merely thoughtful?—silence. Then Strike said, “Since she wrote about being able to enter the library twice, with the third time being the trap, she must’ve come back to this plane.” He glanced up to the breakfast bar to ask Jox, “You said you don’t remember seeing her in those last three days?”

The royal winikin shook his head. “None of us did—at least, not that we can remember.” The other winikin made various apologetic motions as Jox continued. “Not to mention that Vennie wasn’t exactly subtle. If she was around, you knew it. And if she had discovered something that would’ve impacted the attack, she would’ve made sure everyone heard about it, and knew where it’d come from.” He tipped his head in Jade’s direction. “No offense.”

“None taken,” Jade said with absolute sincerity. “I am not my mother, and vice versa. Despite what the writs say about ‘what has happened before will happen again,’ I’m not the sort of person who acts on impulse. You can count on that.”

“Flames and dead, staring eyes,” Lucius said abruptly, in a total non sequitur.

A chill touched the back of Jade’s neck. She turned to him and found him gaunt faced, his expression turned inward. “What?”

“It was in the middle of the journal, where the handwriting was really tough to read, and what I could read was all jumbled up; she kept talking about flames and dead, staring eyes. She used those same words over and over again. I was assuming she was dazed when she wrote it, maybe confused from the transition.” He paused, locking his eyes with hers. “What if she wasn’t confused? What if she saw exactly what she described?”

Jade’s stomach headed for her toes. “Oh, gods.”

Lucius continued. “I felt like I was only in the library for a couple of hours, but I lost most of a day out here. She was a full mage, so she was probably able to stay in there longer than me. Maybe she came out once to rest someplace safe, like you were saying, then went back in, maybe because she hadn’t found what she was looking for. By the time she found what she was looking for, came back out of the library, and headed for the mansion . . . What if she was already too late? What if Scarred-

Jaguar’s attack—and the Solstice Massacre—was already over?”

Flames and dead, staring eyes, Jade thought, and shuddered, her heart twisting in her chest.

When Scarred-Jaguar led the magi to war, hundreds of children and their winikin had gathered in the big rec hall. That was where the Banol Kax had found them. And killed them. The next day, when Jox had emerged from hiding with Strike and Anna, he had found bodies everywhere: stacked in the rec hall, cut down mid-flight, some even dead in Jeeps headed away from the compound. Every Nightkeeper child over the age of three, and their attending winikin, had been killed, as had all the adults involved in the attack. Only the babies and their winikin had survived, a scant two dozen left to fight against the end-time war.

“If she saw the bodies, she must have come back that night,” Jox said, his voice ragged, his eyes dark and hollow. “I burned the bodies the next day. I didn’t see Vennie.” He looked at Jade, stricken.

“I would have seen her if she’d still been there. I would’ve stopped her from going back into the library.”

Up at the breakfast bar, silent tears trickled down the cheeks of several of the winikin. They had survived because they had fled the scene with infant charges who had been too young to have forged their first connections to the magic, thus rendering them invisible to the minions of the Banol Kax.

But whereas those children had all—with the exception of Strike and Anna—been too young to remember the carnage, the winikin didn’t have that luxury.

It struck Jade suddenly that they were a week away from the massacre’s twenty-sixth anniversary.

“She must’ve panicked,” Lucius said. “Maybe she ran back to wherever she’d been hiding and put herself into the library because it seemed safer there. Then, once she’d pulled herself together and tried to get out, she realized that she couldn’t.” He swallowed hard. It was one of the few outward signs of the revulsion Jade knew he had to be feeling. He’d been trapped in his own skull, and in the in-between. She could only imagine what he would do to avoid being trapped permanently in the barrier, library or no library. His voice rasped as he said, “Question is, if she came out of the library to rest, but nobody saw her, where was she?”

Strike’s head came up. “You’re thinking she may have left some clues wherever she was hiding?

Maybe something that could help you get back into the library?”

“I’m not usually that lucky,” Lucius observed dryly, “but it’s a possibility.”

“Too bad Rabbit offed the three-question nahwal ,” Brandt put in, earning him a sharp look from Patience.

“I’ll ask Shandi,” Jade said. “Of all of us, she knew Vennie best. Maybe she’ll be able to guess where . . .” She trailed off as Brandt’s comment struck a chord, resonating against a connection that had almost, but not quite, formed in her brain the previous night. Something about the . . . “Oh,” she said dully. “Oh, gods. It was her. Vennie.”

Beside her, Lucius stiffened. “Who? Where?”

She closed her eyes, feeling idiotic as the pieces clicked together. She should have figured it out sooner, probably would have if she hadn’t been so focused on so many other things. “The other night, as you were being transported into the library, I was pulled along too, only I wound up in the barrier itself. I think the library magic must’ve weakened the barrier enough that my nahwal could call me through, and then boot me again when it was done with me.” She held up a hand when Lucius drew breath to interject. “I know, I should’ve said something sooner. And I would have if I thought it had anything to do with Kinich Ahau or the library. But I didn’t. Not until just now, when Brandt mentioned the nahwal . . . and I realized what had been bothering me since last night.” She paused, shaking her head as the impossible began to seem frighteningly possible. “The nahwal was acting very strangely. I didn’t understand it at the time. Now, though, I think I do.” She looked over at Strike. “It was acting like my mother.”

Her thoughts raced as she tried to remember the exchange, word for word, gesture for gesture. She described how the nahwal had alternated from a normal form that had transmitted the “duty and diligence” tenets of the harvesters, to a more feminized version that had talked about Jade finding her own path and maximizing her strengths, even if they led her away from the harvesters’ paradigm. “It was just what I would expect Vennie to have said, based on what Shandi told me about her resenting the harvesters’ limitations. If I’d seen that sort of behavior in a patient, I would’ve taken a serious look at schizophrenia. But in a nahwal?” She turned her palms up. “I know that technically she shouldn’t play much of a part in the collective of the harvester nahwal, given that she’s a married-in, and her priorities weren’t aligned with theirs. She should be . . . outvoted, I guess you should say.

Except she wasn’t. She was there.”

The more she thought about it, the more convinced she became. And the more confused, not by the logic, but by her own response. She felt . . . numb.