Demonkeepers

“It’s not out of the realm,” Strike allowed. “The jaguar nahwal wears Scarred- Jaguar’s earring and has some of his traits.” She noticed he didn’t say “my father,” and wondered why.

Lucius said slowly, “What if the bloodline nahwal are morphing as the end-time gets nearer? The dominant personalities could be moving to the forefront and taking over because they’re stronger, have the closest ties to the survivors, or have the most pressing need to speak with their descendants.”

Jade imagined more than a few of the others were thinking, Why her? Why not me? She didn’t have an answer for that one, except that maybe Vennie had urgently needed—wanted—to talk to her.

Why did that feel like too little, too late? She’d never met her mother, didn’t have a relationship with her beyond shared DNA. But then again, if she couldn’t judge Vennie, who could? Shandi? The king?

Suddenly Lucius sat up, his face reflecting a lightbulb moment. “What if the nahwal are gaining personal characteristics in preparation for the Triad spell?”

The room went dead silent.

Legend held that in times of the most acute need, the Nightkeepers would gain the ability to enact a spell that would call on the gods to choose three Nightkeeper magi: the Triad. Once chosen, the three would be given the ability to channel all of their ancestors, not just the wisdom contained within the nahwal, but also their personalities, and, most of all, their magical talents. In the space of a single spell, three of the Nightkeepers would become superbeings. But that was the good news. The bad news was that—historically, anyway—the Triad spell had an attrition rate of two-thirds.

Only one Triad had been called previously, back at the end of the first millennium A.D., when a rogue group of Nightkeepers had splintered off, allied themselves with the king of a Mayan city-state that controlled a potent ceremonial site, and called six Banol Kax through the barrier to the Earth. The dark magi, who later took to calling themselves the Order of Xibalba, had wanted to control the empire; instead, unable to rein in the creatures they had summoned, they changed civilization forever.

Modern archaeologists still puzzled over why the population of the Mayan empire had crashed abruptly in the late ninth century, with entire cities abandoned seemingly overnight. The theories usually touched on plague, drought, and warfare, with the artifactual evidence to back them up. But that told only a small part of the story; in the larger realm, each of those catastrophic breakdowns of civilization had been wrought by the six Banol Kax, which had run amok in Mesoamerica while the Nightkeepers fought to force them back to the underworld, where they belonged.

In the end, in the most extreme of exigencies, the gods had sent the Triad spell to King One-Boar, who had searched his soul . . . and enacted it. One-Boar was chosen, along with his brother, Boar Tusk, and One-Boar’s only child, a girl barely out of her teens. Boar Tusk died almost instantly; One-Boar went mad from the voices inside his head . . . and the girl survived. Wielding the talents and knowledge of her forebears, she rallied the Nightkeepers and used dire magic to drive the Banol Kax back to Xibalba. In the aftermath, with the males of the royal branch of the peccary bloodline gone, One-Boar’s daughter married into the jaguars, who became the Nightkeepers’ new ruling bloodline.

She ruled well, died an old woman, and time passed without a Triad . . . but a single fragmentary codex reference decreed that the Nightkeepers were supposed to call a Triad during the third year prior to the zero date. If they didn’t, the end-time was screwed.

They were almost halfway through the year in question. And they didn’t have the spell needed to call the Triad.

“Which means,” Lucius said, making it sound like he was answering a question, though nobody had spoken, “that we need the Triad spell.” He turned to Jade. “But there’s a problem.”

Only one? she thought, a bubble of half-hysterical laughter lodging in her throat. But she knew what he meant. “If I can reach my nahwal and Vennie can take over again, she could tell us how to get you back into the library, or at least where to look for information here on earth. But in order for me to reach my nahwal, you need to invoke the library magic so I can follow you into the barrier.” Maybe.

There were a lot of ifs there.

“We sure as hell can’t wait for the solstice,” Strike said bluntly. He wasn’t looking at Jade or Lucius, but the message was clear. What wasn’t nearly so clear was what Jade’s response should be.

Before, she’d volunteered for booty duty because it had seemed like her best chance of contributing, and because, well, it was Lucius they were talking about. But the sex magic had come with an unnerving level of intensity. Then there was the nahwal’s words, which too closely paralleled her own experiences. Vennie had urged her not to let emotion weaken her. Should she listen to the nahwal and focus on her own magic instead? She didn’t know. And because she didn’t know, she found herself far too aware of Lucius as the meeting continued. She was acutely sensitive to each of his breaths, to every shift of his body. Her peripheral vision showed the bunch and flow of muscles beneath his jeans and tee, and her mind replayed the sight of him naked against her, atop her, lit by the art of her ancestors. Although she told herself to concentrate on what was being said, she was far more aware of what was going on inside her as desire heated and built, and her body readied itself for something her mind told her she should walk away from.

But which part of her should she listen to? Did she even have a right to make a choice when so much was riding on her and Lucius’s getting back into the barrier before the solstice?

The meeting lasted well past afternoon, as the magi and winikin brainstormed various plans to get into Xibalba and rescue Kinich Ahau, all of which hinged on the magi finding a way to get into—and, more important, back out of—the underworld. The winikin—including Shandi, who reappeared quietly and shook off both questions and concern—dished out pasta and drinks, and the group worked through dinner and up to the late-summer dusk, which turned the sky bloodred. Finally, Strike called it a day and dismissed the meeting, which had covered a great deal and resolved almost nothing.

The story of our lives, Jade thought as the magi and winikin dispersed to their rooms and tasks, very carefully not making a big deal of leaving her and Lucius alone.

When they were gone, she braced herself for Lucius’s anger; she hadn’t missed his tension upon learning that she’d gone into the barrier alone, without sufficient magic to get back out on her own, and hadn’t told anyone. But that was her prerogative; it had been her nahwal , her message. And she’d revealed it the moment it became clear that it related to Vennie and the library.

Bracing herself, she turned to him. “I didn’t—” She didn’t get any further; her words were muffled by his hard, solid shoulder as he hauled her into his arms. For half a second she stiffened, thinking he was presuming far too much, far too publicly. But then she realized it wasn’t a sexual overture, not really.

He was, quite simply, holding her.

“I wish you’d woken me up last night and told me what was going on,” he said into her hair. “I don’t like thinking of you dealing with all that shit alone.”

“I—” She had to swallow against an unexpected and inexplicable sob. “I had Shandi.”

“Like I said. Dealing with it alone.”

Finding too much comfort in the embrace, she tried to push away. “I can handle myself.”

He wouldn’t let her push. “I know you can. But you shouldn’t always have to.” He paused. “If you don’t want to lean on me as your lover, lean on me as your friend. I’ve always been that, even when we weren’t really talking to each other.”

She sagged against him, defeated. “Shit. You played the friend card.”

“My mama never called me stupid.” He hugged her hard and eased away, so he was looking down at her when he said, “Granted, she babied me, told me I was fragile, and made me carry an inhaler I’m not sure I ever needed. Then, when my dad couldn’t figure out what to do with me, sitting inside with my nose in a book, she told him I was lucky I got her brains, because my body wasn’t ever going to amount to much.”

Jade frowned at him, trying not to notice how right it felt to be in his loose embrace, with her half on his lap as they cuddled together on the couch, the mansion gone conveniently empty and quiet around them. “Your point?”