Demonkeepers

taken too far, too fast with scant encouragement, hadn’t been the sort of bone-deep emotion that had spurred Vennie to sacrifice herself so her husband and child might live, or that had embittered Shandi so deeply that she’d carried the fear and resentment with her for decades. He’d never felt that way. More, he didn’t think he wanted to, because wasn’t it really another form of possession? He didn’t want to have to think of someone else; he was just starting to figure out how to think of himself.

That was why he’d ducked Jade’s almost-offer just now. Always before, she had guarded herself so carefully, protected herself so fiercely. The last thing he wanted was to peel those layers back to find the woman within . . . and realize he was incapable of letting himself be equally vulnerable to her.

He wanted her. But he didn’t want to be owned by her. And that was what love translated to, wasn’t it? Ownership.

They could be friends. They could be friends with benefits. They could even be lovers. But he wasn’t interested in falling in love, not anymore. And for a guy who had always thought he was someone who fell too easily, that was a hell of a thing to figure out. Especially when he and Jade were finally lovers. Things were changing too fast around him, inside him, for him to make any sort of commitment. At least, he hoped that was what had happened, because he hated to think he’d been chasing something half his life, only to figure out that once he had it, he didn’t really want it after all.

“In a different lifetime,” he murmured, but didn’t bother continuing, because in another lifetime he and Jade never would have met. And it was this lifetime that they needed to make matter, and not just for their own sakes. Which was why, instead of turning around and heading back to her room, as so much of him was tempted to do, he let himself into his cottage and locked the door behind him, not so much to keep anyone out, but as a symbol, to let himself know he was staying there.

Everything was just as he’d left it when the big boom from the mansion had interrupted him: a garbage- bag tarp was spread in front of the TV, waiting for him to man up and do what needed to be done. Sacrifice. There had to be magic inside him. He wouldn’t have gotten into the library without it, regardless of the sex or the new moon. It was in there somewhere. He just had to get it out. The magi needed Kinich Ahau. They needed the Triad. They needed more from him than he’d given them so far.

Flipping on the TV, he woke his laptop, which projected another of the images he’d been studying.

Similar to the one that had been on-screen the other night, this one showed a scene from the ritual ball game of the Maya, with masked, shielded players clustered around the ceremonial rubber ball that symbolized the sun. He hit the “back” arrow a couple of times, returning to the painting that had overseen his and Jade’s barrier transitions. He stared at the glyphs coming out of the musician’s conch-shell instrument, the ones that were supposed to be gibberish, but that Jade thought were something else.

“A blessing, huh?” He didn’t see it, but she’d certainly proven herself with the ice spell, so he’d give it a shot.

Seating himself cross-legged on the plastic, so he wouldn’t ruin the rug or upholstery, he palmed the butcher knife he’d lifted from the main kitchen. It was solid in his hand, and far sharper than the steak knife he’d used to offer himself to the makol almost exactly two years earlier. Turning his right hand palm up, he set the knife along the gnarled scar that followed his lifeline. Then he closed his fingers around the blade in a fist and yanked the knife free of it. Cool steel burned, then sang to pain as blood welled up, then dripped down. Taking a moment to review the questions he meant to ask if—

or rather when—he made it back in, he focused on the painting and began to chant the nonsensical words formed by the musician’s glyphs, trying different tones and variations, mixing up the order of the symbols, all while seeking the power that had to be inside him somewhere.

Nothing happened.

In fact, nothing happened for long, long into the night. Grimly, he kept going, letting blood from different ceremonial spots on his body and working every spell fragment he’d absorbed during his months at Skywatch, knowing that he had failed at many things in his life, but he couldn’t afford to fail now. Jade’s mother might have been right about love being a key to winning the war; gods knew the magi drew their powers from one another. But he knew damned well that in this case, it wasn’t about love. It was about the magic. All he had to do was find it.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

June 16 Two years, six months, and five days to the zero date Jade slept later than she’d intended, but woke more or less refreshed. Trying not to resent that she’d woken alone, in her own suite, when she would’ve rather been elsewhere, she pulled on jeans and a tight, dark T-shirt, and laced on the boots she’d taken to wearing in place of sandals. Anticipation thrummed low in her gut: She had been banished to the training hall to experiment with her magic.

And that felt damned good.

When she headed over to the main mansion to scrounge some breakfast—her appetite had skyrocketed— she found the place nearly empty. Which felt seriously weird. “Hello?” she called, and heard the word echo back to her.

Granted, the compound wasn’t actually deserted, but with half the magi out on assignment, it sure felt that way.

After a failed attempt to ’port Lucius himself out to Ecuador—something about Lucius, whether the hellmark, the library connection, or something else, had fouled the magic—Strike had ’ported several of the warriors to Ecuador to search for the hellmouth, in case the Banol Kax had somehow returned it to the earth plane in advance of the solstice. Patience and Brandt had gone to Egypt, to the site where Akhenaton’s capital city had stood. The city itself had been thoroughly defaced by Akhenaton’s successors, who had returned the empire to worshiping their familiar pantheon and done their best to wipe Akhenaton from the historical record. Lucius had put the Nightkeepers in contact with a curator he knew from the 2012 doomsday message boards, in the hopes that Patience and Brandt would get lucky and find an artifact or reference giving a clue as to how Akhenaton thought he might usurp the sun itself . . . and from there, how the magi could stop him.

Jade had been left behind, but not in a business-as-usual way. She had an assignment of her own, and it wasn’t in the archive. Which seriously rocked.

Over a breakfast of cold cereal, she wrote down the iceball spell for Strike and the others to try, in the hopes that it wouldn’t be specific just to her. Then, refusing to let herself hesitate at the place where the path split off and ran down to the cottages, she headed to the training hall—which was fire-, water-, and freezeproof—to practice her new magic.

She felt a quick, hard jolt of relief when she called up the spell in her mind and got a buzz of power in response. Grinning in solitary triumph, she held out her hands, shaped an invisible, intangible ball, and whispered the iceball spell. Magic detonated, blue-white light flared, and a shock wave exploded away from her, sending a lettuce-size iceball whizzing across the open hall to slam into the far wall.

When the light died down, exhilaration roared through her. “I did it!”

The wall was ice crazed and coated with thick frost. It had held, but just barely.

After giving herself a moment to do a booty-shaking solo dance that wasn’t the slightest bit dignified or decorous, she pulled herself back to the task at hand, namely figuring out whether she could manage the spell. It didn’t take her long to figure out how much energy to put behind the spell in order to create a manageable blast of cold magic that froze whatever it touched and went where she wanted it to. Remembering a scene from X-Men, she tried to make an ice-sculpture rose, but wound up with a blob instead, so she decided that wasn’t how the magic rolled. But that was okay, because at least it was rolling. Which meant it was time to try morphing another spell.

Jumpy with anticipation, she headed to the temporary archive—aka an unfurnished spare room where the winikin had set up laundry racks and hung the worst of the waterlogged books out to dry under fans. There, she hunted up the Idiot’s Guide , which was boxed up among the