Demonkeepers

Even now, as he looked at her, those damned gorgeous brown eyes were pleading with her to play by the rules, to be part of the team. As far as she could tell, that was the deal. If she behaved herself and bought into the king’s paradigm, Brandt would be the guy he used to be. She’d seen flashes of that man even recently, though he seemed buried beneath the stifling weight of tradition, responsibility, and Brandt’s unwavering belief that the king’s word was law . . . to the point that she sometimes wondered whether he was using that paradigm to hide something else. More secrets.

She thought she saw a hint of those secrets now, as she looked into his eyes and tried to find the frat rat she’d met on spring break, the architecture student she’d married, or the man who’d been beside her as she’d given birth to the twins. When she couldn’t find any of those safe, familiar incarnations of her husband, she gently drew her hands from his. “I’m sorry I disappointed you.” Rising up on her tiptoes, she brushed her lips against his and felt tears sting as the familiar heat rose at the touch, then subsided when she eased away. “I’ve gotta go . . . you know. Do something.” She made a vague gesture in the direction of the main mansion and fled, afraid that if she said what was in her heart, she’d make things between them far worse than they already were.

Jade pushed through the keypadded archive door near midafternoon. Although she had headed for the archive intending to run some additional searches on the star bloodline, once she was there, she found that she wasn’t in the mood for research. She was restless and churned up. Edgy. Unsatisfied.

She prowled the outer room of the three-room archive, which boasted book- filled shelves on every available inch of wall space and a trio of computer workstations on one side of the open space. On the other side was a conference table where Jade—or, less frequently now, one of the others—could spread out and work. The color scheme was neutral, and the decor leaned heavily on functionality rather than beauty. The general consensus among the Nightkeepers and winikin was that the archive was boring and could use a face-lift. Jade, though, had refused to change things around. What the others found boring, she found peaceful.

At least, she usually did. Today she found it annoying.

There wasn’t even anything particularly wrong to put her in a snippy mood, either; at least, nothing new. That was the problem, though—she wanted to be somewhere new, wanted to do a different job.

But what? She didn’t want to be stuck in the archive, didn’t want to be on the front lines. The work of a spell-casting scribe would be ideal . . . if she could figure out how the heck to use her talent. Sex magic apparently wasn’t the answer. So what was?

Scowling, she picked up the spell book she thought of as the Idiot’s Guide to Nightkeeper Magic: the one the prepubescent mage children had used to learn their magic in the years between their toddler-age bloodline ceremonies and their pubertal talent ceremonies. This particular copy was worn and smudged, and as she unfolded a dog-ear, her heart ached at the thought of the mage child who had marked the page, which was at the end of the last chapter, where the kids got their intro to the most basic of talent-level spells.

Always before, she’d focused her research farther back in time, trying to understand what was happening now based on what had happened hundreds, sometimes thousands of years ago. Now, though, her head filled with thoughts of the generation before hers. Had her mother touched this book?

Her father? Had they been in class together, pretended not to look at each other? She could even picture them playing eye tag now, because that morning, when she had walk-of-shamed it—though technically she supposed there was zero shame involved—back to her suite from Lucius’s cottage, she had found an envelope slipped beneath her door. She had guessed what it would contain, and had opened it knowing it would only make some things harder than they already were. Sure enough, Shandi had left photographs of her mother and father, both separate and together.

Her father, Joshua, had been tall and broad shouldered, though he hadn’t filled out yet to the brawn of the typical full- blood. His face had been soft and sweet, especially in the pictures where he and Vennie had posed together. In those photos, though, he all but disappeared into the background, eclipsed by Vennie’s bright, sharp effervescence. Jade had suffered a pang at the thought of that shining, vivid teen reduced to a desiccated corpse in the library, a nahwal in the barrier. A second pang had come when she’d reached the bottom of the stack and found several pictures that had included not just Joshua and Vennie, but also a dark- haired, scowling baby who always seemed to be waving clenched fists in the air. Oddly, Jade had felt the least connected to that baby, who looked like she was ready to fight the world.

Now, she traced a finger over the glyph string of the fireball spell and its phonetic translation below, and deliberately turned her mind away from her parents. Instead, she imagined a rawboned, overlarge puppy of a boy, poring over the spell book she held, looking for his first taste of the loud, fiery destruction that fascinated men of all ages. Or maybe it had been a girl of eleven or twelve, a little rash, a little vain, daydreaming about becoming a warrior and making a difference. The children wouldn’t have been able to actually enact the spell, of course; fireball magic was reserved for those with the warrior’s mark. But they would have practiced, just in case. Talent sometimes broke through on its own schedule, after all.

Telling herself she was just practicing her translations, Jade ignored the phonetics and read the simple spell straight from the glyph string, using the techniques Anna had taught her at the university.

Nothing happened.

It wasn’t until disappointment spun through her that she admitted she’d been hoping for . . . what?

She wasn’t a warrior. She was a scribe.

“At least, I’m supposed to be,” she muttered, dropping the book on the conference table and spinning to pace the suddenly small-feeling room. She forced herself to bypass the keypadded door that led to the second room of the archive, where the more valuable artifacts were tagged and stored under ruthless climate control, and from there to the inner archive, where the writs were displayed on the walls as a tangible reminder of a Nightkeeper’s duties and responsibilities. But it wasn’t the writs that drew her thoughts to the small sacred room. “Damn it, Lucius.” It was his fault she was so edgy, his fault she couldn’t settle to the work that usually soothed her.

Okay, that wasn’t strictly true either. He hadn’t done anything wrong; she had, or was in the process of doing so—getting in over her head when she knew better, damn it.

“You’re sleeping with him.”

For half a second, Jade thought that had come from her own subconscious, but her inner monologue had never achieved a tone of such frosty disapproval. Bracing herself against a fleeting wish that she’d locked the door, she turned and nodded to Shandi. “Good morning to you too.”

The winikin marched in, leaned back against the conference table, folded her arms, and scowled.

“Don’t change the subject. You’re sleeping with him, as in, not just the once. You stayed with him last night.”

Jade just stared at her for a second. “Do you seriously want to do this?”

The winikin waited her out.

I don’t answer to you. You’re not my keeper. But that was the human viewpoint, wasn’t it? The same wasn’t strictly true within the Nightkeeper mores. The winikin didn’t just serve and protect their Nightkeeper charges; they were also responsible for their morality and service to their bloodline duties. Granted, there wasn’t any sort of formal repercussion for a Nightkeeper who ignored, disobeyed, or otherwise pissed off her winikin . . . but social pressure could be a real bitch.

Breathing through her nose to stem the knee-jerk irritation that came as much from her own frustration as from Shandi, Jade said, “Last night was an experiment. We needed to see whether the sex would trigger the Prophet’s magic.” She paused. “Either that wasn’t the actual trigger, which doesn’t make sense, given the sequence of events, or the sex magic needed the boost of the new moon we had the other night . . . which by extension would mean we can’t use sex magic to put him into the library again until the solstice, which will be too late to help Kinich Ahau.”

Shandi’s frown went from a full- on scowl to a thoughtful expression. “If we’ve worked out the time line correctly, which I think we have, then Vennie made the transition into and out of the library at least twice over the seventy-two hours leading up to the summer solstice of ’eighty-four. Those weren’t days of barrier activity, which