Demonkeepers

giving himself the luxury of keeping that small connection between them, despite whether he deserved to. “Come on. Let’s go see what Anna wants.”

Lucius led her in the direction of the art history building. As he did so, a funky shiver crawled down the back of his neck, bringing a serious case of deja vu. He didn’t think he’d ever before walked a date home from that particular parking lot, but he felt as though he’d played out this scene before, but with one major difference: He’d stopped being invisible. Back then he could’ve walked around the entire campus without getting hassled—which had been a welcome improvement over high school—but also without attracting much in the way of attention. He would’ve gotten a handful of waves and “hey”s from his few hangout buddies and a wider circle of nodding acquaintances, most of whom he would’ve met through one of the classes he TA’d. Some would’ve been girls. Most would’ve been guys. And the likelihood that he would’ve been walking beside a woman who looked anything like Jade would’ve been approximately a zillion to one.

Now, as they walked along, he got five times the nods and “hey”s he would’ve gotten before, and all from strangers. Women looked him in the eye, actually noticing him. And guys—even big ones with football-thick necks—sketched waves in his direction, gave way on the path, then turned to watch Jade’s rear view, glancing quickly away when they saw that he’d noticed. The unreality of it only increased when he finally saw someone he recognized—a friend of one of his former roommates—and the guy walked right past him with a nod, a hint of wariness, and zero recognition.

“Is it everything you thought it would be?” Jade murmured.

He didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “It is . . . and it isn’t. I can’t pretend I haven’t thought about what it would be like to come back here, looking the way I do now. And yeah, that part is pretty cool.

But at the same time, the campus itself is different. . . . Okay, it’s not, but I am.” He gestured around them. “This used to be my whole world. This and the ruins down south. Now . . .” He trailed off, not sure how to put it into words.

“Now the whole world is your world. And not just figuratively.”

He exhaled. “Yeah.” They walked a moment in silence. Then, as they hooked the last turn heading to the art history building, he said, “Back when I was growing up, I used to picture myself living the adventure, you know? I’d read Tolkein or Bujold or whatnot, and I’d imagine myself in the starring role.” He didn’t need a former therapist to point out that both authors had often focused on smaller, weaker protagonists who fought with their wits rather than their bodies. That was then; this was now.

“I’d think about what I would do if it were my job to save the world, and, of course, I always got everything right, always picked the right battles, fought the right enemies. The harder I fought, the better I did. But now . . . I don’t know. I’m doing my best, and I’m still not getting where I need to be.”

“Maybe you need to relax and stop trying so hard,” she said cryptically. “Besides, to paraphrase Strike, our best is all the gods can ask us to do.”

“And if that’s not enough?”

“Mankind is fucked.”

Her bluntly profane answer startled a laugh out of him. “Such language from a harvester,” he chided. He stopped in his tracks, just short of the moat leading to the office that had once been the focus of his life. Tugging on their joined hands, he spun her into his arms. The sparse foot traffic eddied around them, and the strange orange sun slipped behind an ocher cloud, but he was hardly aware of those peripherals. His entire attention was focused on the woman in his arms, the lover he never could’ve imagined having when he’d been a part of the UT world.

Their bodies brushed, then pressed together as she slid her arms around his neck and leaned in, her eyes and mouth laughing, but darker shadows lingering beneath. Suddenly wishing he could take those shadows away, that he could make it all go away, he leaned in and kissed her, not a friendly feel-good kiss, or one of the oh-yes- there-more kisses of their lovemaking, but a carnal kiss, a full-on public display of possession. Mine, he thought, wanting to snarl it at the other men he sensed watching them, wanting to say it to her. You’re mine . He spread his hands on either side of her waist, his fingers touching the outline of the nine-millimeter hidden beneath her shirt. If anything, the contrast between soft woman and hard-edged weapon made his blood burn hotter, made him want to wrap himself around her and protect the hell out of her, despite whether she could handle herself as a fighter, a mage, or both. More, he wanted to hear the same things from her, wanted to hear her say she wanted more than he was giving.

Heat flared through him, coiling hard and greedy inside him. His blood buzzed in his veins; colors sparked behind his closed eyelids. He wanted—

He wanted the hot girlfriend he’d dreamed of having on campus, he realized suddenly, the heat and buzz dying in the wake of the realization that he mostly wanted Jade as his arm candy for the next hour or so, wanted to know that the other guys envied the hell out of him. And that had nothing to do with him and Jade, and everything to do with his own stunted-ass psyche and a need to prove that he wasn’t still a scrawny, too-tall praying mantis of a dork with a history of Notting Hill-like public protestations of love that ended in monstrous flameouts rather than happily-ever-after.

Gods, could he be a bigger asshole?

Jade just stood there watching him, her expression making him wonder just what she saw in his face, what she took away from it. After a moment, she smiled softly and said, “It’s this place. It changes our perceptions, I think. Skywatch seems very far away. So does 2012. But at the same time, they both seem very important.”

Which totally wasn’t what he’d been thinking. It was a relief to know she was oblivious to the fact that he’d almost just imploded the good stuff they had going on, solely from a dorky need to prove a point that nobody but him gave a flying crap about. “Yeah,” he said, exhaling. “And we need to keep moving.”

Taking her hand once again, he led her across the moat and into the art history building. The heavy layers of reinforced concrete closed around them, swallowing him up. And for a moment, he was kicked back into the past.

The first time he’d visited Anna’s office, a little less than a decade earlier, he’d been a sophomore, tall and skinny, and practically quivering in his Reeboks as he’d made the trek, clutching a folder that contained his sacrificial offering: three crumpled pieces of paper that he’d picked up a week earlier, when Professor Catori had first announced that she was looking for an undergrad intern to put in some hours with her group, and she was leaving applications outside her office. The pages asked about the applicant’s basic stats . . . and included a glyph translation for them to take a crack at, if they wanted to.

And holy shit, did he ever want to.

He had snagged one of the first sets; they were all gone now. He knew, because he’d come back to get a fresh set when his originals started looking too sad for words. Without a spare, he was going to have to turn in the set he had, even though the last page had a big- ass coffee stain on it from where he’d upended the morning dregs in the process of reaching for a pen. Dumb ass. He’d tried to wipe it off, but that had just made things worse. His only hope was that he’d gotten close enough with the translation that she would overlook the fact that he was an almost complete disaster in all other facets of life. He was dying to work with her, to be around her, and maybe get a chance to work with some of the artifacts she’d shown them on PowerPoint slides projected up at the front of the stadium-seating lecture hall.

Those pictures had been too far away. He wanted the real thing. And the more he Web- surfed, soaking up pictures of Mayan ruins and the artifacts that had come from them, the more he wanted to know everything there was to know about a civilization that should have seemed strange and foreign to his modern viewpoint, but instead made sense to him. He’d understood their religion as if he were being reminded of it rather than learning it fresh. Human sacrifice might not be part of modern life, but he got where they’d been coming from: They’d been trying to protect themselves against the downfall portended by the stars, and the prophecies that said great white gods would arrive from the east, bringing the end of life as the Maya had known it. Hello, Cortes.

And the more he learned, the more he wanted to know.

He wanted to touch the pieces of that past culture, wanted to absorb all the information he could find on them. And when he’d been working on the glyph string she’d handed out, looking up each image in the seminal dictionary put together by Montgomery in the fifties, when archaeologists and linguists had finally cracked the Maya code, he’d gotten a glimmer of something bigger than himself, a kick of excitement when he realized it wasn’t just a translation. . . . It was a puzzle. There wasn’t much standardization among the glyphs, which had been as much